Unicorn Western

by Sean Platt

  “Well, regardless of whether you like it or not, magic has been good to you. I would have guessed you were sixty-five if I didn’t know better. And a strong, lean sixty-five at that.”

  “Better and faster than certain lawmen,” Clint said.

  “I didn’t want to kill them. You understand that, right? Dead bandits are more trouble than they’re worth. Dead bandits become legends. But letting them rot in jail so people can see that their tormentors are mortal? Well sir, that’s priceless. This isn’t the old Sands anymore, Clint. Your kind is a dying breed, as are folks like the Troika. It changes out in the deeper Sands near the Sprawl and the Edge, of course, but here near Meadowlands, the Whitney Doctrine has made significant improvements in law and order. How often do you hear gunshots up at your place these days?”

  Clint thought. It was difficult to notice the absence of a thing, but now that he pondered on it, he realized he didn’t hear gunshots much anymore, though he’d heard them plenty when he and Mai had first built the place.

  “In the old days — and by ‘old days,’ I mean twenty years ago, being a mere babe of forty-two myself — I would have killt them all. Don’t think I didn’t see it, Marshal. The way they led with their dominant shoulders, the flicker of distraction when Doc looked over at Kid Richard. But I could never do what you did, disarming them with lead. It was a significantly harder task.”

  “So if I hadn’t come along, what would you have done?”

  Bill shrugged.

  “They would have killt you if they could, you know,” Clint told him.

  “Of course.”

  “But you refused to kill them.”

  Bill shrugged again. “Such is law. But it works.”

  “Soft,” said Clint with disgust. “Everyone has gone soft. The leaking and fracture have become critical, and the worlds are about to blow apart right next door, down at the Rio Verde. But the people here, they’re concerned with the Whitney Doctrine and making sure their steam and spark service is nar interrupted. What does the apocalypse matter if a man can still get flicker talkies in his home and a roast cooked true in an hour?”

  “The apocalypse is abstract, Clint. Comforts are concrete and true. I see what you’re saying, but your average Meadowlands citizen can’t stop the fractures. So what should he do? Panic? Nar, he watches his flickers and tries to be nice to his neighbor and runs his business with a smile. The law has a responsibility to reflect that reality. Yar, the world may be ending, but at least a lawman can keep life orderly while it does.”

  “Like making a dying man comfortable while he rots, rather than trying to fight the disease,” Clint muttered, shaking his head. He meant it as an absurd insult, but Bill nodded, saying he was precisely right.

  “Speaking of orderliness,” Edward said, “we need a citadel pass. The living legend here wants to see Diamante.”

  Little Bill opened a drawer in his desk. “Oh, of course.” He withdrew a paper, scrawled on it, signed it with a flourish, stamped it with a seal, then handed it to Clint. Clint looked it over and nodded. More paperwork. More laws. More shuffling of useless documents. Time was, he’d walk to the citadel and demand to be let in. Denial would make his guns start talking.

  “Out of curiosity, Edward,” said Little Bill, “what are you going to do up there? Nobody really knows what Diamante’s up to. We hear rumors, but the place is full of secrets. I wouldn’t even bother to give you this pass if Diamante hadn’t made a point to tell me that the minute you showed interest, I was to hustle you on up there pronto.”

  “Save the worlds, mayhap,” said Clint. It was meant to be sarcastic, but it fell serious from his lips, and Bill seemed to take it as such.

  “Or end them,” said Edward.

  “For the record, I prefer the former,” said Little Bill, leaning back and crossing his hands behind his head.

  They left the station. Clint felt his feet sink into something as he stepped into the street and looked down to see that it was grass. He wondered at that, since he hadn’t remembered crossing a swath of grass as they’d led the bandits inside, but he stopped wondering once he looked around and saw that the entire area was green. There was grass in the center of the square, where the Troika had faced Little Bill. There was grass in horseshoe courts along a side street. Grass grew in the tops of rain barrels, floating on debris like islands. There was grass on mud walls and suffocating the plants already in streetside planters. All of it was greener than green, as if colored bright by gods.

  “What does this mean?” Clint asked the unicorn.

  Edward smashed the door again to exit the station, then magicked it whole and walked unheeding through the grass. He stood beside Clint, waiting, and said, “It means we need to keep going.”

  Clint climbed onto Edward’s back, slowly finding the old fit of his bones to Edward’s, feeling the unicorn’s mane familiar through his fingers. As they marched up the main street and into the winding mountain path toward the citadel, years seemed to slip away. Clint found himself feeling their old time-arrested set point. What Bill had said seemed right: Clint felt like a strong and lean sixty-five, like a warrior’s battle-hardened grappy. And owing to constant practice, his hands — his most important part — were even faster than they’d been when he and Edward had stopped riding together. The Triangulum magic in his body had even been particularly kind to his eyes. While his skin had wrinkled, his eyes, like his hands, felt sharper than ever. He could see into a bird’s winking eye as it crossed the sky.

  “Tell me again about Mai,” Edward said as they traversed the winding mountain road.

  The unicorn’s question seemed random yet clearly wasn’t, but Clint was tired of playing the information game with Edward. He was tired of pretending that his heart was stone, and that he didn’t care. He was tired of subterfuge and lies. So while he watched the trail ahead, wondering what the citadel would hold and why they were headed there, Clint did something that was rare between them: he answered the question without evasion, without scorn, without resentment, and without rancor.

  “She was my wife. She was the Orb.”

  “I mean, tell me about her now.”

  “Now she is under the tree in my yard.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “What do you want, Edward? I’m human. Fine. I’m not all grit and stone and alloy. It hurts.”

  “Also not what I mean. You’re talking from your head. Think about what you told me earlier. About feeling her near you.”

  “It’s just a feeling. She’s gone.”

  “She’s in a better place,” said Edward.

  “Yar, yar.”

  “Come on. Clear your head. Just let everything go. And tell me, forgetting ration and logic and the rest — tell me how you feel her now.”

  Sitting atop the unicorn’s back, Clint closed his eyes and tried to do as Edward instructed. It was impossible. Despite what he’d just said, his middle felt like grit and stone and alloy — and for good reason, since he’d built those walls himself. A man’s heart had to be hard to do what he did. Gunslingers didn’t cotton to whims of emotion or to soft sheets and flowers. They responded to gunsmoke and bullets. To fists and harsh sun and tough jerky.

  But little by little, as he kept his eyes closed, as he heard himself saying this was stupid but keeping on anyway, Clint felt a softening. He felt a sense of intuition run through his mind. He felt a presence like a quiet voice inside his brain. He felt his skin crawl and prickle. Something was there… if he’d let himself see it.

  “How do you feel her?” said Edward. His voice was low, almost meditative. He was still walking, and the rhythm of the unicorn’s steps beneath Clint was like a metronome, soothing him into a trance. “Don’t think. Just answer with the first thing you think of.”

  “Like a rainbow over Main Street,” Clint blurted.

  Then he heard himself say it, and the absurdity of the sentence snapped him fully awake, fully back to grit, and stone, and alloy. He wanted to tak
e it back, because he didn’t like to feel or act ridiculous. He’d ridden with a unicorn whose every magic trick was adorned with fairies and sparkles. He fired pink smoke from his guns, but he’d also laid graves along his path and suffered more pain himself than any of the men laying inside them.

  He started to object, to make the silly sentiment go missing, but when his mouth opened, he stopped as he found himself staring into a rainbow. He felt a warm hand on his newly-shorn cheek. Then he saw her face, and her hand, and her body, and she was like a ghost beneath the rainbow and still paradoxically right before him. She whispered his name with affection, and whatever it was — whatever she was — leaned in and gave Clint a soft kiss.

  She was there. Somehow, Mai was with him as she had been all along. She’d simply gone elsewhere for a while. To a different place. A better place.

  “Told you,” said Edward.

  CHAPTER SEVEN:

  MACHINES AND CREATURES

  In the middle of Main Street leading out of town, with the buildings behind him and the road turning from paved rock to packed stone, Clint felt himself weaken. His fingers fell from Edward’s mane. He started to spill from the unicorn and there was nothing to be done, but a hand cushioned him as he came to the ground — Mai’s, not Edward’s. Clint landed mostly on his knees, some on his hands, and for a moment he couldn’t look up because he couldn’t take seeing the street empty. But then he did, and she was still there.

  “I’m dreaming,” he said.

  Edward kicked him. “You’re not dreaming.”

  “I’m dreaming, Mai. You’re dead. Almost sixty years dead.”

  Mai’s spirit (or whatever it was that Clint saw in front of him) had maintained Mai’s biting humor and her ability to mock the gunslinger’s stern voice. “ ‘You’re sixty years dead,’ “ she said, putting a sourpuss expression on her shimmering face. “What a cliche. You’ve nar changed, Clint Gulliver.”

  “I missed you.”

  Her expression softened and her ghostly body knelt before him, taking his large hand in hers. The hand looked transparent, but felt real. He could see his own wrinkled, weathered, ugly hand through hers. “I missed you too,” she said. “But I was always here.”

  “Why didn’t you show yourself?”

  “But I did,” she said. “The days you struggled to face the world, I helped you to rise. The three times you turned your weapon on yourself, I turned it away. The day a bullet pierced your heart because you wouldn’t let Edward protect you, I pulled the bullet back so he could heal you — not that you didn’t struggle when he tried.”

  “I would only let him keep me from dying,” Clint recalled.

  “But not from suffering,” Mai agreed. She touched his cheek. “You shouldn’t have tried so hard to pay your due. It wasn’t your due. This all happened for a reason. Same reason you couldn’t die by that bullet. You could suffer, if you insisted on it, but you couldn’t die. It couldn’t be allowed. Because there was work yet to be done.”

  “I’m tired, Mai. I missed you. I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t want any more magic. I want to be with you.”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” she said, sounding less tender and more direct, as she’d been in life.

  “You need a body,” Edward said.

  “Yar,” she said. “For long enough to do a job.”

  “But you had a body,” Clint said, now looking up at her. “It failed you.”

  She nodded. “Any body would fail. Like trying to fill a single mug with ten mugs’ worth of brew. I can’t inhabit a corporeal body for long, and I can’t stay like this. So enjoy me while you can, strong marshal, swollen with pride as you are.”

  Clint felt like subverting his every drop of dignity and pleading. Here she was, real and alive — in a way, anyway — and now she was saying that she couldn’t stay. He wanted to get on his knees and turn her words untrue. So why not beg?

  “But you just said you needed a body.”

  Mai smiled. “You’ll see.”

  The rainbow seemed to collapse as if slurped from the sky and into Mai’s ghostly body. She became slightly more corporeal, but remained transparent and indistinct. She was, Clint noticed for the first time, wearing the pink hitching dress she’d worn when they’d first tried hitching back in Solace, before Kold had taken her. It was how he thought of her most often. That dress, he realized, bookended the hardest years of his life prior to her death. First, she’d worn it in Solace. The next time he’d seen her over four long years later, she’d still been wearing it — in that shack north of Aurora Solstice, after Kold had drained her. Or killed her soul so that she could rise again, or whatever he’d done.

  The hitching dress she’d worn when they’d finally managed to hitch for real had been a powder blue. Nar traditional, but by then Clint had had enough of ritual and rules. He’d seen the scribbles on the wall; after recovering and growing powerful, she’d worn her mortal body like an old shoe dragged through the Sands. Mai had been sick even on the day she’d worn that powder blue dress, and Clint had felt the clock ticking, his own mind as brimming with anger as it was with joy.

  Now, as he watched her, she seemed to climb onto Edward’s back behind him. He felt her against him for real, the same as he’d felt her presence before. Her ghostly but somehow substantial arms circled his waist. Edward began to move. But where to, Clint couldn’t imagine.

  “You’ve been angry,” she said, whispering into his ear.

  Clint turned, so he could see her face. Somehow, her eyes were as real as they’d ever been.

  “I grew a beard.”

  “You were angry with me,” she said, as if he hadn’t understood.

  “I mourned you.”

  “But you were angry. When you came back from facing Kold that first time, I could see it in your eyes. I was at Doc Barlowe’s, in the comfortable chair, sitting and doing nothing because I’d drank Barlowe’s elixir and because my power might have alerted Kold to our presence. I was sitting in that chair while you fought for me. The irony is, Kold knew I was there all along. It’s why he allowed you to find him. It’s why he gave us a trail. He left me in the desert because I wouldn’t give him what he needed. I wouldn’t give it to him. Me, not you. Yet you had to fight while I rested in that comfortable chair.”

  “You couldn’t have given him the Orb even if you’d wanted to. You had to be scooped out first, and left for us to find.”

  “But later, at the citadel, I could have. I stayed at Barlowe’s. But if I’d gone with you, if I’d spit out my elixir and trailed you, I would have been there. You wouldn’t have needed to coerce me to surrender. I’d have simply done it, and you wouldn’t have had to decide.”

  Clint turned to reply, but when he looked at Mai again, a small smile lit the edge of her mouth. He turned forward, seeing motion, and saw Edward give him his equine version of the same smile.

  Clint looked back at Mai. “That’s why you weren’t there. Because you would have surrendered yourself, and I wouldn’t have had to decide.”

  Mai raised her eyebrows and said nothing. Edward faced forward. They rode in silence, plodding along as if the world’s time was theirs. Which, as far as Clint was concerned, it was. They’d continued up the packed stone road to Kold’s citadel, and both Edward and Mai seemed to intend for them to end up there just as he and Edward had originally planned once leaving the station. The faster they went, the sooner they’d reach the gates. The slower they went, the longer he would be allowed to linger in discussion with his long-deceased beloved.

  After a few minutes filled with nothing but hoofbeats, Mai said, “You never confronted me.”

  Clint blinked, again looking back. He’d been woolgathering, enjoying the feeling of her arms around him.

  “I never told you that I’d met him before. I knew who you were when I came to Solace, same as everyone else. But I also knew the rest. Things you yourself didn’t know. I knew who you’d ridden with. I knew what he wanted. I knew the mission
he’d set, and I was afraid. I only knew I had something in me he wanted, and so I ran. But you must understand, gunslinger, I’ve always loved you, regardless of how it started.”

  Clint didn’t answer. Edward’s hooves made dull noises on the dirty stone-packed path. It was something they’d never discussed, but it had been a constant presence between them. He knew she’d sought him for protection from Kold, but never said it true. She always seemed to suspect his knowing, that Kold had told him. But Clint said nothing, shoving his resentment into his boots with the other useless, non-gunslinger emotions. There were three things he knew about Mai, and six months after he’d spoken to Kold, only two of them still mattered: that he continued to love her, and that she was slowly dying.

  “I didn’t care,” he said. After the moments of quiet, his response seemed jarring and out of place. She twitched, and Clint found it comforting to see that even all-knowing spirits could still be surprised. “A marshal doesn’t have much use for a past. The past creates attachment. We were what we were. It nar mattered how it started.”

  “I see,” Mai said. “Yet today, you’re more attached than ever.”

  Clint grunted. But true to Mai as she’d always been, she didn’t rub it in. Mai had always loved making her points and usually insisted on being right, but she always let things go once her battle was won.

  Ten minutes later, they arrived at the citadel’s entrance. The place had been heavily, heavily reinforced since Clint had last seen it. The large alloy gates had been replaced by absolutely massive stone ones. At either end of the new stone gates, a tall wall ran down from the side of the raised path and around the mountain’s slope. He could see giants patrolling the top of the wall, walking the perimeter while slapping their giant hammers into their massive palms. There were a series of holes in the wall near the top, and from the holes, Clint’s sharp eyes could pick out the occasional face. Those would be elves, standing on the wall’s top near the giants’ feet, completely obscured by a half-wall. They’d be sitting with bows at the ready, likely nocked with their deadly arrows.