Unicorn Western

by Sean Platt

  “Meaning that she was like Edward,” said Cerberus. “But that’s not a comment on her magic. It’s actually because Edward is so much like a human woman.”

  Beneath Clint, Edward held his calm, not rising to the dark unicorn’s taunt. His quiet was no longer simple silence. It now felt deliberate. If he fought with Cerberus, whatever was about to happen might crumble. Which, Clint thought, might actually be what Cerberus wanted to happen.

  “Of course, she wasn’t a unicorn,” said Kold. “I could tell by the lack of a giant horn on her head and her number of legs. But have you heard the Genesis legends? About how there were original lines of seven humans, each cultivated with a purpose in mind for the worlds’ requirement later?”

  Clint thought of Sly Stone and what Edward had told him about Stone being a savant — a walking, talking human archive of knowledge. That knowledge had been buried in every member of the Stone line since the first.

  “Nar,” he lied.

  “Apparently there was an intuitive line. One that possessed the unicorns’ ability to determine worthy souls and pair with them. You’ve heard that intention matters to magic? Well, they say that the intuitive ones, called Benevolents, were the embodiments of that intention. They carried magic, but they would use their human minds to decide when to allow that magic to blossom — ‘when the time was right’ is how the texts are written, which makes sense since magic never makes things straightforward.”

  Clint looked down at Edward, trying to read his response. Finally Edward said to Cerberus, “I’m not sure what’s wrong with you to tell him all of that, but I’m sure it’s hard to pronounce.”

  “I didn’t tell him about Benevolents,” Cerberus countered. “He’s big on research. He found the texts himself.”

  Edward’s eyes narrowed at the black unicorn. “Lies. It’s nar written down.”

  Cerberus’s horn glowed, but instead of glowing pink or red or yellow like Edward’s, his magic shimmered with black on black, like smoke from an oil fire.

  “There are ways of uncovering information that those of us who aren’t burdened by your… moral qualms… have access to,” said Cerberus. “If you’d loosen up a bit, you wouldn’t be so ignorant yourself.”

  Watching Edward and Cerberus dicker, Kold smirked.

  “I’ve had over sixty years to ponder my failure with you and Mai,” he said. “And something deep inside of me said to keep building, to keep preparing to wage war once we got into The Realm — because one day, we would. I listened to it like a compulsion. I pondered, I built, and I pondered more. There was much power in the Triangulum — even as underpowered as it was with only an inkling of Mai’s full Orb — and in six decades ruling a city, there’s only so much power you can stand to funnel into turning lights on and off, healing people, building infrastructure, and making business boom. The world was ending, Clint, and these people refused to see it. So I pondered, and I weighed my power, and eventually, I used some of that power in ways you wouldn’t approve of — upstanding and righteous as you are. But it was right of me to do, because my compulsion to build the army you see here grew stronger and stronger as I did it, and then one day, it all came together. I learned of the Benevolents, and then I knew why Mai ran to you. It wasn’t just because you were a marshal, and a marshal is bound to ‘protect and serve’ and to lay killt those who oppose him and those he shepherds. It wasn’t because you rode with a unicorn. Nar. It was because she could sense who you were at your core in the same way that Edward first sensed it.”

  Clint leaned forward, keeping an eye on Kold, and whispered to Edward, “What the sands is he talking about?”

  “He speaks of the Union.”

  “Meaning?”

  “When we paired, we swapped a bit of each other. It’s why pairings between unicorns and gunslingers are permanent. Permanent meaning permanent, meaning until one of us is dead — and then, even beyond that in ways you can’t yet understand. Forever is forever. You will always carry a part of me in you, and I will always carry a part of you. I read you the rites before you first climbed atop my back. You remember, yar?”

  “The memory is gone. Along with the rest.”

  Mai’s hands tightened around Clint’s waist. Her voice whispered in his ear, soft, her words carried on warm breath: “My mother was the Orb.”

  Kold said, “The reason I said she was like a unicorn was because she could sense me like a unicorn, just as she could sense you… as your own unicorn had done.”

  Behind Clint, Mai whispered, “My grandmother was the Orb.”

  “Mai didn’t just find you, Clint. She chose you.”

  Still whispering, Mai said, “All the way back to the beginning, all of the women in my family were the Orb.”

  “She paired with you, gunslinger.”

  “But the Orb in me had to flower,” Mai whispered, her chin brushing Clint’s cheek. “It only reached maturity after I was taken by a man and a unicorn who were dark and evil enough to kill my soul so that it could rise again — finally exposing it, like a seed that requires a great fire in order to crack.”

  “You had to be there for her to find, Clint,” Kold said. “For all of this to work, you had to be there when she ran to find you.”

  “Forever,” Mai whispered, touching his chest.

  Clint ignored Kold, leaning forward against Mai’s embrace. He could feel her fading, becoming less solid. He wanted her to stay, but most of him knew it didn’t matter.

  “He knows, doesn’t he?” Clint asked Edward. “About Mai being here with us.”

  “He knows,” Edward agreed.

  “He can see her. Or Cerberus can sense her.”

  “Close,” said Edward. “Except that she’s not actually here.”

  “Or perhaps more accurately,” said Kold, “she’s always been there.”

  In one massive gestalt leap, everything stitched together in Clint’s mind. Everything made sense. Mysteries that had been sprawling since Solace suddenly fit together like pieces of a puzzle. Countless moments of frustration suddenly healed like old wounds and lost their scars. And finally, for the first time, Clint found that he didn’t have to tell Edward he didn’t understand.

  “You and I paired, meaning that you are in me for always,” he said, speaking to Edward.

  “Yar.”

  “And Mai and I paired, meaning that Mai is in me for always.”

  “Yar.”

  “So when she died… and then when her magic grew strong enough to flower today… I… I…”

  “Correct,” said Edward. “You are the Orb now.”

  CHAPTER NINE:

  THE ORB OF SYNTHESIS

  “You understand,” Kold said as they walked into the mountain’s beating heart, down a winding stone passage with the unicorns’ hooves clicking on the stone underfoot, “that I don’t know how this will work. It may open a door up top, allowing the armies to pass into The Realm. It may simply create a new sense of power for us to command later and to open a door at will. Or it mayhap be no door at all, and be more like a bridge. You understand there is no wall, exactly, just an obstacle. Something that stops us from going in.”

  “And you understand,” Clint answered, “that I hate you true — more than anyone ever.”

  “Of course,” said Kold.

  “Then yar, I understand.”

  The passage wound down further and further. They reached a corner, cut back, and turned to head deeper in the opposite direction. There were no lights in the tunnel, but there was light in the tunnel. It seemed to breathe from the air itself. Clint could feel it brushing his skin like sunlight. Edward said that what he was seeing and feeling was the Triangulum’s magic. He said that they were experiencing but a sliver of its power now, and that it would grow much, much more intense. Clint asked if it was dangerous, recalling the way in which Edward, when exposed to overly intense and pure magic, had lost his identity. Edward’s reply to the last question was strange. He didn’t answer directly and instead said,
“It’s waiting for us.”

  The walls were dark gray and ribbed with sharp, facet-like angles as if sheared from the surrounding stone by a massive chisel. The passage was square, with perfect corners. Clint assumed it was fashioned by giants when Kold first arrived in Meadowlands and took the name of Diego Diamante, the wealthy land baron. He could imagine the giants working tirelessly with their massive, magical hammers, carting stone from the mountain’s center to uncover the ancient third Orb.

  “Edward hates me too,” said Kold. “We’ve been working together for sixty years, and he hates me every day.”

  “And I hate Edward,” Cerberus added.

  “But we continue to work together because as much as Edward hates us, he knows that our teams are two halves of a whole. He knows that none of us can accomplish our mutual goal alone.”

  To Clint, Edward explained: “You and I aren’t vile enough.”

  “And Dharma and I aren’t soft and pathetic enough,” Cerberus snarled.

  “Both qualities are needed,” said Kold. He turned his eye from one unicorn to the other in a way that suggested this sort of bickering happened every time the two were in the same place at the same time. “Without you two, we wouldn’t have the support of the white magic.”

  “And without us,” said Cerberus, “you’d fight The Realm’s death machines with bubbles of glee and party streamers.”

  Edward snorted, whipping his head toward the black unicorn. Down in the tunnels, Cerberus was like a negative mote of presence. Because light bled from every direction, the unicorns and riders cast no shadows. So as he walked beside Edward, it was as if Cerberus was Edward’s shadow, his negative true.

  “I could make you scream with a bubble of glee,” said Edward, his horn starting to glow.

  Before Cerberus could offer his witty retort, they reached a rusty-looking alloy contraption that reminded Clint of Rank’s liftbox out in the desert near the shifting Edge. Cerberus, with Kold on his back, stepped inside. Edward, on the other hand, stopped.

  “Step inside, Edward,” said Kold, gesturing toward the box. “It’s plenty strong.”

  Edward hesitated. He’d already whispered to Clint that he hadn’t seen the Triangulum Enchantem during his time training unicorns for Kold’s army despite sixty years’ worth of visits to the citadel. For one, Kold didn’t permit anyone to see the Triangulum, but a second reason was that Edward seemed to be afraid of the powerful object. He’d told Clint that it could be used for light or dark depending on who commanded it, and to what end. Kold’s motives — light or dark? — seemed ambiguous at best. Edward was helping him, but only because they were marching in the same direction… for now. The Triangulum sounded downright terrifying in Kold’s hands no matter whose side Edward and Clint were tentatively on, and Edward seemed to be nothing if not conflicted.

  The white unicorn stepped into the box. Alloy clanged underfoot as the lift settled an inch.

  “This was used by groups of giants every day during construction of this tunnel,” Kold said, pushing a giant red button on the wall. A humming started above them, and Clint looked up to see some sort of a spark engine running above the box’s frame, feeding out a sort of thick alloy cable. “It can hold much more weight than two unicorns and two men.”

  The vibrating, descending box made Clint feel nervous and confined. His hands could still easily reach and fire his guns, but the deeper they went down Kold’s rabbit hole of armies and Orbs, the more his guns felt like useless relics. In the Sands, a marshal’s guns were an unstoppable force feared by any man who had sense enough to be afraid. Against Kold’s army, against Kold, and against Cerberus, however, they seemed ridiculous. Clint felt embarrassed just wearing them, as if he were attempting to project menace that he couldn’t come close to delivering.

  An impossible time later, the box clanged against another floor of stone. Cerberus and Kold walked out, with Edward and Clint a step behind. It felt beyond strange to be riding a unicorn through mountain tunnels, but he was simply following Kold’s lead. The tunnels, having been made by and for giants, were plenty tall enough for clearance.

  As they crossed another corridor (this one horizontal), Clint felt his ears pop. The sensation was odd — something he’d never experienced. The air felt like it was trying to squeeze into his head, as if the weight of the mountain was pressing onto him.

  “The air is funny,” said Clint.

  “It’s flat-out hilarious,” Cerberus countered.

  “We’ve very, very deep,” said Kold, turning to Clint. “They really wanted the final Orb to be hard to find. It couldn’t be magicked out. Before the giants reached the chamber that’s ahead, they couldn’t keep their lanterns or spark lights lit and were were forced to work in the dark. Once we found the chamber, though, things started working again, but lanterns weren’t necessary once it lit up like this. The air also wouldn’t be breathable if the Triangulum weren’t making it fit for our lungs. Giants, as it turns out, can hold their breath for hours, so that’s how they worked — in the dark and air-deprived, running to the surface every so often to breathe. But the fact that the Orb cleansed the air and the dark once we reached it carries a very important message…”

  “We’re only here because it’s allowing us to be,” said Edward.

  “Here and alive, anyway,” said Kold, nodding.

  When they reached the chamber, Clint felt a shiver run up his spine and found himself missing Mai’s presence at his back. She’d begun to wisp away with his dawning realization that she’d never actually been there, and had been completely gone by the time they’d left the surface to head toward the Triangulum. Clint decided that if Mai had never actually wrapped her arms around him or physically appeared before him — and if she’d always just been a mental projection of whatever spark of Mai was deep inside him, speaking to her larger energy as it blossomed recently out in the aether — then he might be able to make her reappear. So he told himself: She’s in me. Her spirit was always there. If that magic, lately, could become strong enough to fool me into seeing her, then I can fool myself again.

  Clint closed his eyes and tried to imagine her very real hands at his waist, but nothing happened… except that he did hear a voice deep down in his head, giggling with amusement. He could almost imagine that voice mocking his intense, spiritual concentration.

  The Orb of Synergy was a massive machine that filled a hollowed chamber in the mountain’s core, easily thirty feet high, thirty feet across, and covered in grease-clotted gears, motors, and chains. As he watched, cogs meshed and ticked forward against each other like clockwork. Chains clattered across toothed wheels, turning unfathomable machinery. Clint hopped down from Edward’s back, fascinated, and approached the apparatus, leaning forward to look inside it. The immense machine had no casing; Clint could stare into its middle and see more chains, more wheels, more intermeshed cogs, all of it ticking minutely forward. In its heart was something that looked like a great flywheel, spinning fast enough to create a breeze. On one side were two cams that were wound with chains, rocking in semicircles. Something ascended the machine’s side on a pulley, like a counterweight. As Clint looked into the machine, he held a respectful distance and kept both hands behind his back. It looked like the kind of thing that might tear a man’s arm from its socket if he got too close.

  Kold dismounted and began circling the giant machine. The chamber was large, but the Orb — which had become the Triangulum when Kold had fueled it with the other Orbs, incomplete though Mai’s may have been — dominated most of the space. Past it, there were a mere ten feet on all sides. The unicorns stayed near the walls, watching the thing motor and clang.

  “It doesn’t run on steam or spark or anything else that I can tell,” said Kold, his hands also behind his back and his voice elevated to be heard over the machine’s ticks and clanks. “We also didn’t turn it on. When they broke through, the air lit and became breathable, but the Orb itself was still. Then I came down and added the other Or
bs here —” He pointed to a huge, rusted funnel protruding from one side. “— and over there. Cerberus didn’t tell me what to do, if he even knew. It was just obvious. I felt, if anything, inspired to do what was required. And when I did, it started up. Everything began to wind up and move. This power you feel thrumming through the rocks behind and beneath you began. And at the same time, up top, throughout the city, old machines started to light up and run. Everything we built after that simply worked how we wanted it to. It was as if we’d been given magic clay. But the Triangulum responded to my will above anyone else’s, and it felt like I could talk to it.” Kold closed his eyes, inhaled deeply through his nose. “Oh, but I can feel it now! I can hear it, too, inside my head, like a presence.”

  Clint could feel the power Kold described, and then he realized that he was beginning to hear a second voice inside his head as well — or possibly a third, if he counted his own. The Triangulum gave him no actual words, but he could feel its sense. It was as if the Mai inside him was speaking to the Triangulum without the need for words. He simultaneously understood their conversation and didn’t understand it at all. He looked at Edward, who was looking at him. No meaning was exchanged in that glance; the great Edward was finally as much at a loss as he was. Mayhap even more.

  “I’ve never felt it,” Cerberus said, staring at the ancient, clanking machine.

  “You wouldn’t.” Edward glared at the dark unicorn. “Your magic has been surrendered.”

  Cerberus turned to Edward, his eyes full of hate. Cerberus’s arrogant shell had thus far been imperturbable, but that jibe had gotten to him.

  “We could find out if I still have magic enough,” said the black unicorn, his horn starting to glow like a black cloud.

  Edward shook his head. “Triangulum magic doesn’t count.”

  Cerberus’s horn continued to glow, but Edward’s interest was already elsewhere. He looked at the great dirty thing as it worked, grease clinging to cogs and dripping into its works. It sped up as the cogs moved faster.