by Sean Platt
Without hesitation, the paladin smacked Clint hard across the face and the gunslinger’s head struck the wall behind him.
“You’re probably seeing us as pink fluffy bunnies or friendly pixies right now,” said the man, “but you’ll do yourself a favor to snap out of it and see us true: six knights who have come to escort you to the Wheel of Fortune.”
Clint decided that he wouldn’t walk to his own execution as a mopey, subservient lump. He was a marshal, and marshals were better than mere paladins. So Clint looked up at the square-jawed man and said, “Hello, kitty.”
The man hit him again.
One of the other knights removed his helmet. This one looked like he’d just woken up. Standing beside the perfect-looking man who’d raised his hand to Clint, the new man was a mess. His hair was askew, his features homely. His voice, when he spoke, sounded as if were made of gravel.
“Do’n h’tm, Morph,” he gurgled. “Hesjuss messin’ wid you.”
“He’s not messing with me, Brooce. He’s bewitched.”
“Yar, Morph,” agreed Clint. “I’m bewitched. Look out! There’s a spider on you!” Clint’s old but still lightning-fast fist shot out and punched the square-jawed man in the groin, sending him to his knees.
“Don’t worry; I got it,” he added.
Two of the other paladins removed their helmets. One was good-looking and held himself as if he knew it. He had broad shoulders and a careless mop of dark hair above mischievous eyes and a confident smile. The other, shockingly, was a thinking machine. It had silver skin instead of Buckaroo’s gold, and it looked like a bullet. Clint had never heard of a thinking machine being a paladin.
“Churchill!” snapped the man with the mop of hair. “Hickory dickory dock, put your dagged helmet back on. Anyone sees a machine in that uniform and we’ll be hearing a hundred hens howling at a high-noon hee-haw!”
Although the man’s words made no sense, the thinking machine complied. Before it did, Clint saw that its every surface was so bright that it looked shiny with oil. The machine also had a fussy little mustache like a circus conductor’s.
“He’s not bewitched,” said the man in the hood. He was taller than the others and was not wearing a paladin uniform. Instead, he wore black pants and a matching leather vest. His arms were exposed from the shoulder, large and bulging with muscle. “Get up, Morph. And you, Marshal, get up too. We’re going on a little trip.”
“I don’t want any fortune. I’m good. You can keep your wheel.”
“You can walk with dignity, or we can carry you,” the hooded man said. “But you’re going. There are six of us and one of you, and you’re old and unarmed.”
Beside the executioner, the paladin who hadn’t removed his helmet looked up, then turned his visor toward Clint. His features weren’t visible through the face shield’s tinted glass, but Clint imagined the eyes behind it assessing him, sizing him up for a fight.
The gunslinger tried to feel the Triangulum’s power inside him again. Mayhap he could blast the paladins like Kold had blasted the king and queen. But he felt nothing. Either the Triangulum was no longer flowing through him, or The Realm had somehow blocked its power as he’d feared earlier. Either way, he couldn’t fight without a weapon, and the paladins knew enough to keep their hands on their own weapons lest the trained marshal try to grab them.
“Tell me,” said Clint as they left the cell with his wrists bound, with three of the party to his front and three behind, “what kind of a paradise executes people on a ‘Wheel of Fortune’ — without trial and through torture?”
The dark-haired man who seemed to enjoy speaking in nonsense said, “The kind that’s a crockpot full of rich and creamy crap.”
“You don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into, Marshal,” Morph said. “You might want to keep your mouth shut. You’re just one man, and Kold can’t send you anything to fight with until we open another door. So just go with the flow, okay? Believe me, we’re on your side.”
“I see,” said Clint, unconvinced.
But despite his jaded exterior, Clint couldn’t help but feel that Morph was speaking true. The group knew what had happened in the castle, but it also seemed to know about Dharma Kold and maybe even the Triangulum Enchantem’s power being funneled through Clint. Yet nobody had been near enough to see or hear what had transpired in the castle firsthand, and Clint had been too shocked to speak when he’d first been hauled to his cell. These paladins were the first people (and, apparently, one machine) that the gunslinger had seen or spoken to since his arrest. And yet somehow, they knew. They knew it all.
They marched quickly down a long hall lined with small cells until they reached another heavy door. Morph stepped to the head of the group and Clint heard the rattle of a key in a lock. Again it took Morph a surprisingly long time to open the door, but finally it swung wide and then they moved on. The whole time, Morph’s hands never approached his belt or pockets.
“What are you, a lock-picker?” said Clint.
“Of a sort. Keep moving.”
They crossed an empty space lined with devices that Clint didn’t understand or recognize. There were large machines that had screens lit with green lines, pocket-sized devices set on a counter and beeping, and a sort of sparking generator. The area looked like it was partly meant for staging and partly meant for storage. Clint saw stacks of chairs and tables against one wall, the tables halved with their legs collapsed.
The entire route they were taking seemed unofficial and undignified. Clint had killed the king and queen. Surely he’d be punished publicly. Shouldn’t he be dragged to his execution in front of jeering crowds so that he could be pelted with rotten food and debris? Or was his logic wrong? Was it better, in a paradise such as The Realm, to do the dirtiest deeds behind closed doors, hidden from the eyes of the populous?
They approached a set of large ash-colored doors that were recessed into a high wall. The hooded paladin pressed a button, which lit with a white light from within. The doors slowly parted. Behind the doors was a tiny room. Morph, the funny talking man, the two masked paladins (were they both thinking machines, or just the one?), and the scraggly-haired one — Brooce — stepped inside, dragging Clint.
“This room looks less comfortable than my cell,” said Clint.
The big sleeveless man with the black hood stepped into the box behind the gunslinger, squishing him into the middle of the group. Shockingly, Clint felt the press of the bodies and realized he was smelling lilacs. All six paladins smelled fresh and fantastic.
The doors closed and the box began to inch upward, but nobody in the box was yanking a pulley. It seemed to be a liftbox, powered by spark or magic. Behind Brooce was an orderly row of buttons like the one the hooded man had pressed to open the doors. The one at the bottom had a K on it. The one at the top, which was lit, read OWLS.
The man in black reached up and removed his hood, revealing an accountant’s face and a shock of bright red hair. His eyebrows were large and fuzzy, like caterpillars. Without the hood, his hair stood in a sloppy mess, wetted with sweat.
“Okay, Churchill,” he said. “If we’re caught now, it’ll hardly matter. Nobody sees the G’s without the Senator’s permission. So if you wish to take off your helmet, go ahead.”
Clint turned, curiosity getting the best of him. Inside the packed liftbox, one of the paladins removed his helmet to reveal the same shiny silver head Clint had seen before — round like the business end of a bullet, slick and too shiny. Clint wanted to touch it, to see if the machine’s skin was actually oiled or if it just looked that way. He stared at the fussy pencil-thin mustache. It seemed to be made of real hair. The gunslinger wondered if the makers had pasted it on, or if they’d found a way to cause hair to sprout from the machine’s lip.
“Bad enough to have to wear something like this outfit,” the silver machine said, glaring at the helmet as if it had insulted him, “but if I’m caught, I’ll get deactivated. That’s just plain unnecessary. Having to dress like
this should be punishment enough.”
“Hush little baby,” the dark-haired man said, turning to Churchill. “Don’t say a word. It took cracker jacks and kung-fu to collect these uniforms for us.”
Clint wanted to ask what was happening, but he refrained. Based on the conversations the others were having, he wasn’t sure whether he was in custody or not. They had removed his shackles, but the square-jawed man had hit him back in his cell. They were forcing him to go somewhere, but they were concerned about getting caught. Because Clint had precisely zero guidance (from Mai, from Kold, from Edward, from anyone at all) and could do nothing to change his situation, he opted to wait. Things would, hopefully, resolve themselves.
Some time later, the doors parted and Clint found himself shoved into an enormous chamber of stone that looked both timeworn and well-preserved. It had the feel of an ancient, holy place that someone had restored over the years to keep the elements at bay. There were huge windows built into recessed arches, and there seemed to be no glass in the windows. For a moment, Clint considered rushing toward one and leaping out, but moments before doing so, it dawned on him that he was very, very high above the ground. He could make out the tops of the tall buildings of The Realm below. They were practically in the clouds — strange, seeing as the liftbox ride hadn’t seemed long enough to raise them so high.
“Don’t jump,” said Churchill, seeming to read Clint’s mind. “If you were on the ground and looked up, you wouldn’t see this room because it’s not really here, but that don’t mean you wouldn’t have a long drop ending with a splat if you went out that window. Perception matters with magic.”
“Like intention?” Clint could hear Edward in his head, laying the loathed rules like stones on a path. Even after all these years, with the gunslinger so old, the unicorn would mock him until he was salivating for answers.
“Like: whatever you think this room is, it is. But in its natural state — whatever that means — the room isn’t actually the way that we, as a group, perceive it right now. This time, our collective expectation put it way up in the sky, but I’ve seen it underground before. Sometimes it’s covered in vines; sometimes the floor is dirt or carpet. It all just depends on what it wants to be and what we expect it to be. Like this guy.” The thinking machine gestured at Morph. “Wait until you see his natural state.”
The tall, broad-shouldered paladin with the square chin turned to Churchill. “Stop mouthing off, Churchill. Wait’ll we talk to the G’s. We don’t know that we can trust him yet.”
“Jack sprat could eat no fat,” said the dark-haired man. “He’s seen our faces, so they’re a fricassee of familiar, no matter.”
“What?” said Clint
The man in black answered. “Boricio is saying that if it turns out you can’t be trusted, you’ll need to be disposed of since you’ve seen our faces.” He turned back to the other, who was apparently named Boricio. “I’ll let you handle him if that happens.”
“Well, hot cross buns,” Boricio said, smiling.
They kept walking. The chamber was very long and very clean and echoed with every step. The party mumbled about the chamber’s current size and wondered aloud where “they” were, referring to “the G’s” and cursing “the G’s” for placing themselves in a room so large when time was short. Boricio declared loudly that they were “a couple of crystal-farting cooked chickens,” which was probably supposed to earn a laugh but didn’t. He tried again with something about “pat-a-cake” and a “baker’s man” to continued silence. It seemed like Boricio probably said things like this often, exhausting the others.
Finally they saw a pair of flat, vertical stones, each nearly the size of a man’s chest, mounted atop thin pillars. The group shuffled over, stopped in front of the stones, and waited. There was a sort of squeaking noise and the stone blocks atop the pillars turned slowly around. When they’d fully turned, Clint realized the stones had been the backs of chair-shaped pedestals that had a set of matching owls sitting atop them. Each owl had what looked like feathery horns at the corners of its head, and each had bright yellow eyes that were visible through a bejeweled cat’s-eye mask.
“Well, this is nice,” said Clint. “Thank you all for bringing me here. I’ve always wanted to feed fancy birds.”
The owl on the left jerked its head forward and bit his finger. “We don’t have to give you advice, you know,” it said. The owl had an impossibly deep, resonant voice. Clint could tell the voice was coming from the bird, but it also filled the room, as if broadcast for drama.
“Yes we do,” said the other owl. This one was identical to the first, with the same exact voice.
“We don’t have to give good advice, then,” the first owl said.
The big man in leather cleared his throat. “These are the prophetic owls, Garrett and Gareth,” he said, waving a hand at the birds. “But nobody knows which is which.”
“I’m Gareth,” said the first owl.
“No, I am,” argued the second.
“Then I’m Garrett,” the first amended.
“Shut up,” the second squawked. “Garrett is my name.”
The first owl looked over, annoyed, and then said, “One of us always lies, the other always tells the truth.”
The second owl shook its head. “That’s a lie.”
“Okay, it’s a lie,” agreed the first.
“I know what you’re thinking,” the big man said, talking to Clint and gesturing at the birds, “but this isn’t a riddle you’re suppose to solve. These owls aren’t riddlers. They’re idiots.”
“No we’re not,” said the first owl.
“That’s a lie,” said the second.
The first nodded. “Okay, we are.”
“The Ministry consults them on every decision of consequence, so they’re both important and idiotic,” the big man continued. “They arrived at the Ministry one day and announced that one represented dark magic and the other light. For a long time, the Ministry believed them, until they eventually decided that they were just jerky talking owls.” He said this last as if jerky talking owls were commonplace. “But our water readers were, after a lot of reading, able to determine that they flew into a fissure as one bird, then flew out like this. Their psyches are split down the middle, but the division that turned one owl into two mimicked perfectly the split in magic that made them this way.”
Clint shook his head.
“The upshot is that they tell prophecies,” said the big man.
“One of us tells prophecies that always come true,” said the first owl, “and the other tells prophecies that never do.”
“I’m the true one,” announced the second owl.
“No, I am,” said the first.
“Technically, their prophecies are both always true,” the big man interjected, “but because they’re essentially two half-birds, each bird only gives half of the prophecy. You need both halves to get the full truth. If you only hear what one of the owls has to say, you’ll end up with a half truth. Until this was understood, their prophecies were considered highly unreliable. Once a contractor asked them how long a staff needed to be in order to pole for a magic vein. You can do that in The Realm, but you have to nail the vein perfectly the first time. In vein repair work, missing a vein can result in months of lost time. But the contractor who came to the owls didn’t know that he had to listen to both owls and so only listened to the first, which told him that his staff needed to be sixty-two inches long. The other owl added that the staff must be six inches shorter than that, but the contractor had already gone, without hearing the rest. He went on to the poling job and missed the vein.”
“His staff was too long,” said the first owl.
“He was digging in the wrong place!” said the second.
“Anyway,” the big man said, waving his hand dismissively, “the contractor was executed.”
Churchill rolled his alloy eyes. The thinking machine had an entirely different set of mannerisms than Buckaroo had.
Buckaroo never rolled his eyes. He was also servile and would do pretty much whatever any human told him to. Churchill, however, seemed to enjoy condescension.
“So. Garrett. Gareth,” said the big man, speaking to the owls and gesturing at Clint. “Who is this?”
“The answer to that question is not a prophecy,” said the first owl. (To make things simpler, Clint mentally named him Garrett.)
“It’s a prophecy if he remains who he is tomorrow,” said the other owl, who Clint mentally named Gareth.
“Well then,” said Garrett. “This man is not who you think he is.”
Boricio reacted immediately, reaching for a knife on his belt.
“… if you think he’s the king,” Gareth added.
Boricio stayed his hand.
“But if, on the other hand, you think he’s Marshal Clint Gulliver, then you’re correct,” said Garrett.
The other owl started cleaning his feathers. Eventually he looked up and saw the humans watching him, waiting.
“Period,” he said.
The party relaxed. Morph turned back to face Clint. The executioner’s shoulders fell. Only Boricio looked disappointed as his hand dropped away from his knife.
The big man turned to Clint, still holding the hood in his hand. He touched his own chest, his fingers tented. “I’m Oliver,” he said. “I apologize for not explaining things earlier, but it was necessary to take certain precautions while in the Keep and to maintain those precautions until we were certain you were who we believed you to be. There was always the chance that this was a conspiracy, like the conspiracy that covered up the killing of the old Senator. Most people think the old Senator’s assassination was straightforward, but I know better. See, there’s a flicker talkie that clearly shows a puff of pink smoke coming from behind a grassy knoll…”
“What he’s saying,” Morph interrupted, “is that there was a chance you were a shape-shifter. We didn’t think so, because these two told us you would be returning. But the killing of the king and queen? Well, we didn’t see that coming. These two might have known, but they won’t volunteer information unless they’re asked directly. So we had to bring you here to make sure you were… well… you. But now we have official word: You’re not a shape-shifter.”
