by Sean Platt
“Are you Clint Gulliver?”
Clint took a bite of the pie sitting beside him on the deck. He chewed slowly, then swallowed. “Yar.”
“Like I said, you don’t look like no cold-blooded killer.”
“Shoot my lantern, and you’ll find out whether or not I am.”
“What if I hit you, and you’re wrong?”
Chew. Swallow.
“Meh.”
Clint could make out every noise the kid made while fumbling with the gun. He was an idiot. Clint could hear the quaver in his voice just as he’d heard him drawing his weapon. The kid had almost certainly never pointed a gun at a man. He’d probably shot cans from fenceposts, and he probably thought he could shoot straight. But ending a life was something different, and the kid was nervous enough about it to twitch. He thought he could squeeze the trigger instead of jerking it, but Clint knew he couldn’t. He’d jounce and miss.
Clint heard the kid lower the gun’s hammer and holster his iron. Then he heard footsteps — not approaching, but going around, down the porch’s other steps. While Clint looked out on Meadowlands and chewed his pie, the kid stepped into his peripheral vision. He seemed about seventeen and had the look of someone who couldn’t grow facial hair if he tried, yet had tried anyway. He had a scrubby little mustache and cheeks that were smooth and water-fat, as if he’d never seen sand. He seemed fit but untested, shorter than Clint but broader. Clint thought he might be able to out-draw the kid as they stood, even with his own guns still inside the house.
“I didn’t mean nothin’ by it,” said the kid, staring into Clint’s steely, appraising gaze. “I just wanted to see if you was who they say you are.”
“Who I once was, kid,” Clint corrected.
“I came about your unicorn. About Edward.”
The retired gunslinger swore inside his head. What, was he Edward’s social secretary? The unicorn had grown too comfortable for his own good.
“He’s not my unicorn. If you’d said that to him years ago, he would have run you through with his horn. We were equals, if that.”
The kid stared at Clint, waiting for him to continue. Clint didn’t. He didn’t want the kid here, and wanted to make it obvious. If the kid had business, Clint didn’t want to have to ask on it. Nor did he care.
“I’m Billy. Billy Bristow. You fought with my grappy around the time Baron Diamante — I know his real name is Kold — first came to Solace. Grappy lived in Solace all his life and said they still tell legends there about you. Is it true you once took out a team of fifty bandits alone? That your uni… that Edward didn’t even help? They say you walked through like a gauntlet, not even bothering to duck or hide since they could only come at you from three directions and you knew you were too fast? That it was like one of those popup shooting galleries where none of the targets shoot back?”
“That was a long time ago, kid. I’m not like that anymore.”
“They say your holsters aren’t made of leather — that they couldn’t be, because your draw is so fast, it’d burn the hide.”
“My holsters are leather.”
“Can I see them?”
Clint chewed. “What the sands do you want?”
The kid seemed to resettle, too awed for rebuking. “Oh. Well, I live in Meadowlands. Not in the city, you see. Out on a ranch, like you. My grappy taught me to shoot. We don’t have spark, just a few steam machines.” Clint rolled his eyes up toward the kid, feigning the sort of interest that speaks loudly of indifference. The kid was trying to show him that he wasn’t like the others and that he was a hard man. Like the marshal.
“Well like I said, I live in Meadowlands, see, and, well, there are rumors. About the magic. I live on that main road there —” He pointed. “— where the rails were laid. The old rails. By the main road into town, see? And people have been coming into town, by us, lately. They stand out because… well, you know how it’s been since the new fractures, even before the big fractures a few years back. Not as many people on the road these days. Realm, Meadowlands, then everything else, like we’re reaching for three tiers. I haven’t ridden out to see for myself, but people say you can’t mostly pass the Rio Verde no more, that soon we’ll be as broken off as The Realm. They say that soon we’ll need a shimmer to reach Baracho Gulch. It’s happening all back through Baracho, San Mateo Flats, Aurora Solstice, um…
“Nazareth Shiloh,” said Clint.
“Yar. And beyond. But the travelers, see, there ain’t many no more most of the time. But there have been in the past days and weeks, and so my appy, he asked them, and all they’d say is that they felt called. They don’t know why they’re coming. But Appy, he says he seen The Realm shimmer brighter and brighter, and the rumor is maybe the baron’s gonna open the Realm and the railroad.”
Clint laughed a dry laugh, still sitting, then looked up at the kid.
“I’ve been hearing that for a long time, kid. Go home.”
“But anyway,” said the kid, barging on, “Appy said to go see Mister Edward, since he’s the shaman, and so I said that were turkey stupid since the unicorns don’t palaver with humans unless they call to us, and that the last man what went to the unicorns unannounced got himself turned different colors for his trouble, and had to walk around like that forever. But Appy said that Grappy palavered with Edward back in the olden days, and then he said the baron keeps company with all of the unicorns. Is that true?”
“That’s a rumor, nothing more,” said Clint. It wasn’t a rumor, of course. Kold not only kept company with the unicorns; he’d once plotted alongside them, strategized with them, and asked them to stand ready to help in a conflict that had been brewing — but never boiling over — for decades. Kold had called the unicorns together and then, adding a few forces of his own, referred to the works as The Army of the Triangulum. Clint, however, thought of them as the Army of Frustration. The once-enthusiastic cooperation between Kold and the unicorns had soured when the futility of marching anywhere with the so-called “army” had become painfully obvious. After it became apparent that Kold’s supposed “plan B” to breach his way into The Realm was beyond useless, the unicorns had more or less gone back to doing their own thing and Kold had gone back to trying to figure out how to breach the wall. He’d made no progress and practiced mostly politics these days. That’s what Clint had heard, anyway, though he didn’t care to ask further.
“Anyway, Appy is all superstitious about the fractures like most older folks, saying that it weren’t this way when he married Ammy and they had me. So he got all a-jitter enough that I finally said okay, okay, I’d try to gather some answers, but that I couldn’t go to the unicorns. And that’s when I remembered you and Grappy.”
“I don’t remember your grappy,” said Clint. And at that, the kid started to open his mouth to explain, so Clint barged on. “Nor do I care,” he added. “But the magic? Kid, the magic has been getting worse for years. If you feel something out there, it’s because it’s finally all starting.”
“Starting?”
“The end,” said Clint. “The beginning of the end. The leaking is getting worse.”
“But if it’s just that magic from the cracks is coming out, then that’s no big…”
“Magic isn’t always good, kid. Even white magic.”
“I don’t understand.”
“And I don’t want to explain,” Clint said, feeling deja vu. He had an odd sense of role-reversal. In the past, it was always Clint who didn’t understand and stodgy Edward who didn’t want to explain. He knew what the kid felt like, but now he also knew what Edward must have felt like, too: he simply didn’t care.
“You’ve got to explain, though, if you know something. The magic…”
“Sands to the magic,” said Clint.
“You were once a marshal! Isn’t that still in you? Your duty…”
“Sands to duty!”
“But the stories about you and Mister Edward — the legends, pleasem and thankoo, about all you did aft
er you and the baron became a team again…”
“We did not become a team again.”
“… all those stories! In the land outside of OldTown, we tell them around the fires! They’ll tell your stories for generations — about your quest to save the worlds and heal the fractures, to stop the leaking and open The Realm, how you were bound by duty and honor and…”
Clint jabbed two long fingers at the gray whiskers on his chin. “Kid, don’t you see this beard? This beard says that I’m full of regret and that I don’t care!”
The kid stopped speaking, his body drooping. “I see. Well, sir, it was nice to meet you, anyhow.”
“Thanks for not shooting my lantern. Now go away.”
The kid mounted his horse — a pathetic, snaggletoothed thing that looked approximately one billion years old — and plodded down the hill. His body language was so pathetic that Clint and his beard wanted to mock it. He wanted to call after the kid, shouting at him, Yar, sulk like a baby; now you’d better go off and cry in your apple brew, wah, wah, wah.
Once his porch and land were deserted, Clint sat for a moment longer, watching The Realm. It had, indeed, seemed brighter and more present of late. The leaking and fractures were getting worse, of course. But what was to be done? Nothing. Nothing at all. He looked at The Realm and wondered if, when the bonds finally broke, the moments before the apocalypse would actually bring The Realm closer to Meadowlands, curling the worlds into a tight ball before the entire works dropped into a bottomless abyss.
The magic. He heard it in his mind as if said by a whiny, annoying voice. Of course the kid and his family could feel the magic. The all-powerful, all-amazing magic. The magic to which all beings must bend, because it was so dagged important. The magic, to which Clint had subjugated his life. For which he’d thrown away his life, in fact. And it had all been for nothing. Meadowlands was growing and prospering under a wise and paradoxically benevolent leader while the world continued to end. And as to the other thing the kid had said? Well, it was true. Clint had been a cold-blooded killer. But the good guys and bad guys had grown confused over time. He’d served The Realm early in his life and had later killt its officers; he’d freed a terrorist murderer from a Realm knight and had become the terrorist murderer’s friend. So really, how was Clint any different from Kold in the end? How exactly was Kold not the good guy now, in these strange new days?
Clint hadn’t thought about Sly Stone for years.
Or Buckaroo.
Or Pompi Bobo, who at last rumor had returned to Baracho Gulch to marry his love, Paloma, after the railroad project had stalled.
The former marshal looked out across the city with all its alloy and glass, sensing Kold in the mountains beyond, fighting his futile fight and trying to breach the unbreachable wall. The kid had said that there was new magic in the air. And no matter how Clint felt about the kid and his fool errand, things had changed lately. He’d been feeling a kind of magic aura all around him for weeks.
Mayhap this was the end. Mayhap Kold had found a way to power the machine after all, and this was the beginning.
Clint stood, suddenly feeling every year of his age. He took his plate and teacup inside, set them by the sink, then mounted his brown horse for a ride down into the valley.
CHAPTER THREE:
BLOOD AND TEARS
Edward lived in a unicorn house, which was very different from a barn. It was like a human house but much larger, with extra headroom and no low-hanging overhead lights. There were no steam or spark lines coming in, because neither steam nor spark was needed in a house that was rich with magic. There were all sorts of appliances in the kitchen (which had wide counters and floors made of a gritty, friction-rich stone) that simply worked when their owners wanted them to. The lights throughout the building lit as needed, powered by the unicorns themselves.
It had been weeks since Clint had seen his old partner, and when he arrived, he went through the same two-phase experience as always. At first, he sat down with the great white unicorn, felt comfortable, and wondered why they didn’t palaver more often. Then Edward’s unicorn wife Cameron walked in (they were hard to tell apart, though Edward had a stronger jaw), and Clint remembered the reason.
“You don’t like her,” Edward said after Cameron left them alone on the wide patio. The house was picturesque and lavish, but that could be said of any unicorn house. Unicorns didn’t need to save money in order to buy fancy homes. They could simply magick them up.
“Nar, I don’t,” said Clint. It was an overly-direct answer, but Clint was old and was therefore allowed to be cranky.
“Why not?”
“Well, just look what she’s done to you. What have you become, anyway?”
“Head shaman, like my father before me. Unicorn ambassador to the Army of the Triangulum.” He said both with gentle self-effacement, as if he didn’t believe in his own titles.
“You forgot ‘Jerk’,” Clint added.
“I’m less of a jerk now.”
“That’s the problem,” Clint said, sipping his tall glass of Fanta, feeling it sparkle into his head. He loathed Fanta. Once upon a time, he’d liked it, but times changed. Cameron always brought it to him because he was human, and Fanta was the premier, most elegant drink a human could sip. It was an annoying assumption. She would, of course, immediately stop bringing Clint Fanta the minute he asked her to, which was exactly why he didn’t ask. It was more satisfying to hate her.
Edward said, “Well, it’s easier to be less of a jerk when you’re happy.”
Clint looked up at the unicorn, then rolled his eyes.
Edward looked exactly the same as he had throughout the entire time Clint had known him. He didn’t know how old the unicorn was and had never cared enough to ask, but he knew that unicorns were nearly (if not literally) immortal. Edward, it seemed, would never have to get old and bitter because he’d never have to get old. He’d already done his ‘bitter’ time with Clint, so now he was going to be happy. It was obnoxious. Clint knew he shouldn’t be rude, but he couldn’t help himself. He found Cameron annoying. But what was even worse, Edward said that they were thinking of having foals. And so rather than congratulating Edward on his fabulous new life, Clint had made a biting remark about how painful unicorn births must be. Edward, who was farting too many rainbows to notice the gunslinger’s apathy, simply replied that unicorns only grew their horns after they were born.
“Mmm,” Clint grunted, remembering the day in Solace that he’d worn a strange outfit and had nearly surrendered his pistols, thinking how strange it was to feel happy. He’d worn that happiness like another man’s hat. Now Edward was wearing that hat, and it was every bit as strange.
“Try,” said Edward. “Try to like her.”
“Mmm.”
“I liked Mai. The least you could do would be to try and do the same for me.” Then the unicorn stopped, seemed flustered, and turned away.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Clint grunted. “Mmm.”
“I just meant that…”
“Don’t worry about it. It was a long time ago.”
“But I know how…”
“I said forget about it.” Clint crossed his arms, looking out into the valley. Edward’s porch was open and oversaw a small, non-magical river. Clint watched the water. A stick floated down the river, caught on a rock, turned, and continued in the same direction backward.
The unicorn sighed. “You never understood. About any of it.”
“I understand fine. She died. I buried her under my tree. I pursued Kold for five years to rescue her, then was hitched to her for three. That seems fair.”
“It’s not about fair. It’s about…”
“Yar, yar. The magic. The precious magic. Why has everything in my life revolved around magic, Edward the Shaman? Edward the Brave? Edward the Ambassador? Tell me. I never asked for a life of magic, other than riding a unicorn. And yet everything has been about rules and rituals and restrictions and… and
SANDS TO THE STUPID MAGIC!”
“Your life was enmeshed with magic the minute I chose you. It’s true for all marshals. I am the light. You are the dark. Together we are whole, just like the elements of the Triangulum.”
“Oh, yar. The Triangulum. Because that mattered. Five long years in the sand, chasing something that, once assembled, powered a city and made life better for its citizens. It’s too bad we failed to prevent that. The Triangulum, for which Mai gave her life. Only that’s not true either, is it? She gave her life to become what would power the Triangulum and mayhap seal the breach across the worlds by opening a door in The Realm’s wall, but then she never deposited her ‘Orb soul’ or whatever it was into it. And why, Edward? Because of ‘the rules’? Who makes these rules?”
“There are things you don’t understand.”
Clint stood and slammed his Fanta onto the table. The glass cracked at the base, and the orange liquid seeped onto the tabletop.
“Oh, that’s an understatement!” he spat. “ ‘Things I don’t understand.’ As if there were only a few! How much truth did you tell me over the years, Edward? Do you remember back in San Mateo, in that barn, with those crows outside waiting to kill us? You told me you knew what was happening, then said you wouldn’t explain it to me because I’m a poor dumb mortal. Well, I gave my life to the service of your stupid magic, and I gave it my wife, and I rode with you in ignorance as your lackey because I was just too dumb to understand. Why did you choose me, if I’m so stupid? I’m ugly, I’m dumb, I never understand…”
Edward rose briefly onto his rear legs, flailed with a foreleg, and struck Clint in the chest. The gunslinger stumbled backward, tripping over his feet before smashing through the sliding glass door that opened into Edward’s house. Clint felt the glass shards slice his skin as he struck the ground. When he looked up, the unicorn was standing over him. His cheery demeanor had departed, and he was the old Edward again.
