Unicorn Western

by Sean Platt

  In front of them were two guard houses, one on each side of the gates. Each guard house was staffed by two giants. The giants wore armor — something which to Clint seemed patently unnecessary. One giant on each side had his hammer out. The other carried a spear that looked large enough to be most of a tree. One of the spear-bearers also held something that seemed out of place: a board with an alloy clip at the top, with a stack of papers between the clip and the pressboard.

  As the unicorn and the two riders approached, the giant with the board held out his palm. It was larger than Edward.

  “Halt,” he said.

  “Surely you recognize me,” said Edward.

  “Yar, Mister Edward,” the giant said. “But Silas knows nar the old man.”

  “We have a pass for him,” said Edward, magicking the paper Little Bill had given him toward the giant. Clint wondered how a slip of paper could possibly prove his permission to enter, but he also didn’t understand the new insistence on paper in general. How could the giants be sure that Edward hadn’t forged the paper, or that they hadn’t coerced Little Bill into giving it to them, or that Little Bill himself wasn’t part of a conspiracy true? But then Clint remembered the stamp Little Bill had used to put a mark on the paper and wondered if it was a kind of magic bond. Everything in Meadowlands these days was powered by magic or spark or steam. It was just one of the many reasons the gunslinger stayed away.

  Clint watched the giant study the paper, knowing he couldn’t possibly be reading it. Many advances had been made over the years, but an increase in giant intelligence wasn’t among them. Regardless, the giant must have been satisfied because he clipped the paper to the board and made a large X on it with a sort of glowing stick. So that meant Clint was fine, but he wondered how they’d explain Mai’s presence. He also still wasn’t sure why they were here. Were they going to help Kold? Or had Edward’s years of working with Kold been his way of setting the baron up for a coup?

  Clint looked down at Mai’s semi-transparent hands, still clasped around his waist. He looked back at her. She smiled with excitement, as if they were headed on a family adventure that promised to be nothing but fun.

  “The old man is okay,” said the giant. He turned and gestured toward the others, and the giants on both sides of the door pushed their hammers into large indentations in the wall behind them. The enormous stone doors started to open. Clint looked down at the ghostly hands around his waist, then at the swinging doors. Apparently Mai was A-OK.

  “They can’t see her, can they?” Clint asked Edward.

  “In a way,” said Edward.

  “Why are we here?”

  Mai gave him a playful punch to the kidney and answered first. “You always want to ruin the surprise.”

  The doors weren’t moving particularly slowly, but they were so thick that scant light had yet to appear between them. Clint looked up. The air was hazy beyond the patrolling giants’ torsos, meaning there was some sort of magical protection above the wall. While Clint watched, the giants moved themselves to a state of heightened alertness and looked down toward the gate. Below them, the elf archers in the windows could be seen pulling back their bows. The place certainly didn’t look to be abandoned, as the rumors claimed. What, exactly, had Kold been up to all these years?

  “Tell me this, at least,” the gunslinger said. “Do I ever get to do anything that isn’t totally and completely expected by one of you?”

  “You constantly surprise me,” Edward said. “You know, with your spontaneous hilarity.”

  Mai whispered in his ear, “If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you.”

  “The more confusing but honest answer,” said Edward, “is that your choices matter a great deal, despite the feeling of predestination. Up until now, there were things I knew had to happen — though I seldom knew exactly how or when or where — but there are only two such things left. Then I’m out, and I’ll be as clueless as you’ve been all these years.”

  “What are those two things?” said Clint.

  Mai punched him again in the kidney.

  When the doors were open far enough for them to pass, the guards motioned them forward. Clint looked at the doors as he passed. It would take five Edwards end-to-end to span their thickness.

  They stepped into a courtyard. The doors started to close behind them. Ahead was a set of large open stone doors that seemed to lead into the center of the mountain itself. After passing through the enormous gates, the stone doors in the mountain looked like toys.

  Clint looked around. He’d seen this place before — once at a sprint as they’d chased Dharma Kold and once as he’d plodded out with the weight of many worlds on his shoulders. He thought he’d recognize the room in the mountain if that’s where they were going, but he barely remembered the courtyard at all. He didn’t recall it wearing a carpet of grass as it did now, for instance, but he’d nar been at his most observant at the time.

  Once inside, they seemed to be on their own. Clint was still surprised they weren’t being escorted by guards, but nobody seemed to care that they were there once they’d passed the gates.

  Edward started to walk.

  “We’ll go through the mountain here,” he said, indicating the doors. “This part will be familiar to you. But what Kold didn’t have when last you were here was the tunnel that now leads out of this chamber and into the mountain’s cone.”

  “Cone?”

  “It’s a dormant volcano, with a crater in the center. You’ll see.”

  They passed through the stone doors and Clint looked around, waiting for it all to seem familiar. It didn’t. The chamber had to be the one where he and Edward had battled Kold and Cerberus, but Clint’s memory of the place was either entirely gone or the place had totally changed.

  The chamber was enormous, with massive white stone pillars scattered across it like men on a Risk board. Their tops were high and buttressed against the ceiling. The walls weren’t hewed stone, but flat and painted a bright white like the pillars. Clint watched as the bandit Teedawge walked by in some sort of a blue uniform, then watched a second later as the bandit Teedawge walked by wearing a fancy man’s clothing and shoes, like Alan Whitney’s fabrics back in San Mateo. Then he saw several Teedawges holding palaver in a corner.

  “It’s hard for me not to kill these things,” Clint said as he watched the identical archetypes, his hands itching for pistols. He held them in hooks above his holsters.

  “Yar, but they don’t hold grudges and neither should you. We’re on the same side now.”

  It was a strange thing for Edward to say. What “sides” were there? And why would Clint want to be on a side of any kind with the man who had stolen and tortured his bride? Clint thought of the Teedawges that had killt Sly Stone. He put his hand on his right pistol.

  “Don’t,” said Edward. “The archetypes we fought in Aurora Solstice and Baracho Gulch have long since expired. These are new. They make them here.”

  “They make them here?”

  “It’s fascinating,” said Edward. “Officially, of course, I loathe it. It’s an abomination. But once I get past my supposed loathing, the process is fascinating. They now share collective memory. Dispatch one and the others keep coming, fully aware of what you just did from the viewpoint of the other. Imagine an enemy that can see all sides of you at once.”

  Clint did. He shivered, despite Mai’s sun at his back.

  “Why is he making Teedawges?” Clint asked.

  But Edward forged on. “You should see what the ropers can do now. They’re an elite squad, trained practically from birth. Competition is fierce to get in. There are scimitar squads and gunmen. And men who might be able to outdraw even you.” He smirked, a small tweak of the new, chipper Edward sneaking past his serious demeanor of the past few hours. “Might.”

  They passed through the foyer and into a smaller but still-cavernous passageway that was far larger than what seemed warranted. But of course, giants would use this corridor, and uni
corns, and Providence knew what else.

  After a long walk, they emerged into the open, and Clint’s jaw fell open.

  They stood at the edge of an enormous crater centered in the mountain, just as Edward had described. The place was so mammoth that Clint could barely see its other side, where the mountain again rose toward the sky. Kold had flattened the floor so it resembled a vast plane of flat stone, stubbled with a knobby surface for traction. It was truly impressive, but the crater itself wasn’t what had shocked Clint. What had shocked him were the things that filled it.

  The space was packed with all manner of machines and instruments of battle. Clint spotted a regiment’s worth of zeppelins far across the field. Rows of battle-adapted thinking machines sparred to one side, their alloy skin a bright pink. A group of unicorns on the other side cast multicolored, sparking spells as foot soldiers (all Teedawges, from what Clint could tell) marched past in formation. Clint heard gunshots and explosions that had to be artillery. He saw two-legged, loud vehicles on fat black wheels that seemed to run on steam. He watched a team of balloons lift off from in front of the zeppelins, and beyond the zeppelins were a team of enormous three-legged machines, jet black, that towered above the other gear on three long, spindly legs. The bodies of the strange things were sleek and swept back, making them look like venomous spiders. One machine turned, and Clint’s eye picked out a round spot of white light on its front that seemed to stare at him like an eye. Clint met its gaze and then — surely by coincidence — the thing made a hollow, frightening bellow that turned the eyes of all in the crater. Then the machine turned back and a powerful beam shot from it, annihilating some sort of practice fodder. Clint couldn’t see what the machine had obliterated because his line of sight was suddenly blocked by a team of beasts that Clint had never seen, but believed to be a fearsome subterranean species known as morlocks.

  Looking into the crater gave Clint a queer melding sensation, as if past and present and fantasy and reality had blended together into one enormous joke. But because the joke’s teller didn’t know when to stop, he’d beaten the joke like a rented mule, taking it to ridiculous lengths. The combinations facing him were more than absurd. Clint saw unicorns walking by machines that were like huge alloy birds — things that, based on the lights lining their bodies, probably ran on spark. He watched a party of elves (all of them the height of one of Edward’s legs, dressed in green, holding bows — and, he knew from experience, notoriously ill-tempered) rush past a darker green device with what had to be an enormous canon at its top. The machine’s locomotive parts were long and made of interlocking alloy slats that rolled around a set of smaller wheels. As Clint stared, the thing belched steam from its top.

  The gunslinger had lived a perilous, tough, sorrow-filled life that he’d nar wish on anyone, but he’d at least felt like he fit when riding the dusty Sands, as a lone gunman atop his mount’s back. But here? He was a cowboy thrust into the future, worthless and useless or worse. Older than ancient. In the six decades since Clint had last been at the mountain, the world had rolled frighteningly forward while he’d been out in the Sands or inside his shack, growing whiskers and doing pushups.

  “Edward,” the gunslinger whispered, “what is all of this for?”

  Behind them, a deep, seductive voice said, “War.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT:

  BENEVOLENTS

  Clint turned, looking around Mai, and saw Dharma Kold standing behind Edward with Cerberus beneath him.

  Kold hadn’t changed since Clint had last see him. At all. He looked as if he might have stepped directly out of Clint’s memory. He appeared to be in his early forties, and his deceptively kind face had a few small wrinkles at the edges of his mouth. His hair was still a near perfect chestnut — unlike Clint’s, which had gone mostly gray. Kold’s hands, which were just as large as Clint’s, didn’t have the prominent veins and loose spots that the gunslinger had started to see on his own. Kold had traded his black trail shirt and denims for a slightly different version of the uniform Clint saw on a few of the Teedawges, but otherwise he was the same man Clint had faced so long ago.

  Cerberus also hadn’t changed. He was still darker than black, his coat so bleak that he seemed like a hole in the fabric of reality. Clint knew what that blackness meant, and it filled him with chills. Cerberus hadn’t used the past sixty years to gain humility, or compassion, or an iota of white magic. His color also meant that his magic was still surrendered to his rider — something that Edward had, once upon a time, found repugnant. It dawned on the gunslinger that Edward had never severed relations with Kold, but had instead been helping him to build his army in secret. That meant that Edward had now been working with Cerberus for longer than he’d fought against him. Clint felt his respect for the white unicorn wanting to ratchet down a notch. Why had Edward dropped his standards? He was once so proud and principled, despite his rankling nature.

  “Well,” said Kold, eyeing Clint from head to toe, “you look old.”

  “Well,” said Cerberus below him, speaking to Edward, “you look white.”

  This latter seemed to be an insult for reasons Clint didn’t understand (if he had to guess, he’d say Cerberus was calling Edward a weak do-gooder), because Edward took a step forward. Clint hadn’t anticipated the movement and rocked backward. Mai’s weight wasn’t making it easier, but he managed to hang on and stay upright.

  Clint looked back at his old foe. “I have nothing witty to say. This is all too much.”

  Kold shrugged. “You were exposed to the Triangulum and it’s slowed your aging, but I’ve been living here with it. Cerberus keeps telling me it can’t actually make me grow younger, though, which is a shame.”

  “Mayhap being a terrible person keeps you from going younger,” said Clint.

  Kold’s eyebrows went up. “Apparently it’s not too much. Sixty years gone, and still you have your strength and sharp wit. Bravo.”

  Clint stared. He had nothing to say.

  Behind him, Mai stirred, but Kold didn’t flick his eyes toward the movement. He’d said nar about the ghostly woman behind him, so the gunslinger figured the dark rider must not be able to see her. Even stranger, Cerberus gave no indication of being able to see or sense her either. Clint assumed he could see Mai because she and he had been close and that Edward could see her because he was a unicorn.

  “War,” Kold repeated to fill the silence, gesturing toward the machines. “Glorious war. You’ve seen how The Realm shimmers in the sky these days? Most people assume it’s because we’re powering the city with our ‘mysterious magic’ and that our power is chipping away at the wall like water plinking onto a stone for millennia. But it doesn’t work like that. We aren’t building an army to storm the gates. We’re building an army to wage war once we get inside.”

  “But you can’t get inside,” said Clint.

  Kold gave him a small smile. “We’ll see.”

  “And what about the train project?”

  Kold waved the thought away. “The train doesn’t exist and never did. Well, a train exists. But not the train that everyone expects. The black engine you’ve seen on the tracks is just that — a black engine. The tracks are just tracks. We had to explain the new magic in the air somehow, especially once The Realm started growing more visible. But that’s just the Triangulum at work.” He sighed theatrically. “The partial, ineffectual Triangulum.”

  Kold hopped off of Cerberus and began to pace.

  “See, I know it might look like I’m a dog with a bone about this whole ‘getting into The Realm’ thing, but I just can’t give up on my dream… despite my past failures. You’ve seen how close The Realm is these days. You can almost reach out and touch it! It has presence now, too. Try to walk toward it and you will now get nearer. At some point you’ll seem to go under it, and then it will be behind you. Not like the old days, when it was forever in retreat and always leaping off to somewhere else. Not that we can reach it, still, you understand — believe me, my flying
machines have tried — but it’s… it’s so close!”

  “It doesn’t matter how close it is,” said Clint. “Closeness is just an illusion.”

  “Exactly.” Kold pointed at Clint like a student who’d just given the perfect answer. “And that’s why the main source of my continued faith that one day I will enter is Reason Number Two, given to me by my good friend here.” He slapped Cerberus’s black neck. “And that’s a belief that one day, you would bring me what I needed to make it all happen.”

  “Me?” said Clint.

  “Us,” said Edward.

  At this, Cerberus gave a snort of disgust. “I can’t take this,” he said to Kold. “He smells. Don’t tell me you can’t smell that.” He turned so his profile was facing Clint, and it was as if the big, ominous sphere of the dark unicorn’s eye bored into the gunslinger’s soul.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Clint.

  “Lollipops and fairies,” said Cerberus, indicating Edward. “He positively reeks of sparkly goodness.”

  Clint exhaled. “I meant that I didn’t know about the other thing.”

  “I always wondered why she’d run to you, Clint,” said Kold, still pacing. “I was the same as you, you know. We were both men from The Realm, full of pride and adventure and duty. We were both tall…” He rubbed a hand across his smooth chin, then looked meaningfully at Clint. “… and handsome. Cerberus was still ashy when we first found her, not yet totally black. But still, despite our innocuousness, she was afraid of us. I didn’t even have time to explain everything to her before she fled. It wasn’t like I held my hand out to her in a claw and said, ‘Give me your soul!’ ” Kold spoke theatrically, making his voice warble as he laughed. “But she still ran as if she could sense my intention. It was like —” This time, he gave a dramatic gasp, mimicking shock. “— like she was a unicorn!”