Last Plane to Heaven (23 page)

“As is mine.”

Still they stare at me, glittering and feral. No one turns away. No one seeks to shout me down.

“I have a plan as well.
Entwhistle
will sail antispinward. I want to face the Shadow as it comes, and press my blades into the faces of the rat bastards. We will not drive them back. We will not stay the coming of darkness. But we will meet it with eyes open and arms raised.

“Will you come with me?”

There is no great shout, as a crowd of Meat might have done. Neither is there a rippling tide of those slipping away. Everyone just stands and stares. Bosun Shimwater. Leftscrew the junior pilot. The Leyden Twins, connected by spark and cable as they were. All twenty-three of my surviving crew. No one answers, no one steps back.

They just await orders.

In that moment, I love Tock all over again as I never have before in all the centuries since my Maker first unbound me from my birthing bench.

“Captain Jakesia.”

I turn to see the Skymistress on the gangplank. She has presented herself without the foolish, important Meat who follows her around. Only with a servant bent and palsied with the age that afflicts all Meat after a few years.

To my surprise, her name comes to me. “Sarita,” I say, forgetting the honorific.

I realize she has left behind her blood-colored robes. This Meat woman is clad in stout leather with wisps of wool peeking from her collar and cuffs.

“May I have your permission to come aboard?”

With a bow, I welcome her to
Entwhistle
. In setting foot on my deck, she comes under my rules. “Welcome.”

She glances up as the old man crowds behind her. The important Meat stands on the tower, glaring down at us. Though even I cannot see his eyes from this distance, I can read the set of his body in his blood-colored robes.

“Your rank is no more?” I ask politely.

“I am just Palacio Sarita bat Mardia.” She bows slightly in return to me. “I would work my passage wherever you are bound.”

“Toward Shadow,” I tell her, “and the dying of the light, amid the swords and spears of the rat bastards.”

“We all sail into Shadow,” she says. “And every woman's light dies someday. I would face it in good company.”

The servant cackles. “Not with Panjit back there. Peacocked fool.”

“The winds of time are turning foul,” I warn her. “They will not turn fair again in our lives.”

“We are all grain,” she says. “The world is our grindstone.”

“Can you haul a line on command?” I ask.

Sarita, once Skymistress of the Lesser Port of Grand Reserve, smiles.

Very much despite myself, I smile back.

I check the springs of my hand one last time, then I give the orders to cast off.

 

The Temptation of Eustace Prudence McAllen

Editor Kerrie Lynn Hughes asked me one day for a story. Which she needed by the end of the week. About supernatural weirdness in the Old West. But it couldn't be zombies or vampires. And would I mind setting it in Hell's Half Acre, Wyoming? “Sure,” I said. There's nothing like a focused market requirement. Then I went out for excellent barbecue at the Salt Lick outside of Austin. The rest is history, and a few burps.

You know that place out west of Casper? Wild badlands like you've never seen, all rocks and salt and twisty dead-end ravines'd swallow up a man and his horse both like they was watermelon seeds. Hell's Half Acre is its name these days, but folks used to call that the Devil's Kitchen.

What do you think, biscuit-head? On account of him cooking up sin there. What else'd the devil his own self set to boiling over a fire?

Now this fellow name of Eustace Prudence McAllen rode for Hotchkiss Williamson what had the Broken Bow Ranch out that way. Williamson held a good spread, with two different springs and a box canyon full of cottonwoods running down through his grasslands. Drought didn't bother him nearly so much as it troubled his neighbors, though he did have a problem with range fires there through the summers of 1864 and 1865.

McAllen, he might of been a Southern man, ain't no telling now. But he'd showed up the autumn of 1863 and signed on. Working over the winters on the range here always has called for a special kind of cuss, so Williamson and his brother ranchers didn't ask a lot of questions of a man what rode strong and didn't backtalk and kept the cattle out of trouble. Anyone who came west in those war years was avoiding something, somewhere. So long as they didn't bring their troubles in their saddlebags, that was generally good enough.

No, I can't rightly say exactly what he looked like. You talk to people who rode for Williamson in them years, you get different tellings. Time plays tricks on memory, don't you know. There was a lot of panics, from Indian attacks and the range fires and what all. Can't even say if'n he was a colored fellow, some kind of quadroon, or just white, like a black Irishman. Taller than most, maybe. Carried an ivory-handled double-barreled LeMat revolver what had been engraved real tiny, some folks said it was the book of Jeremiah writ real small, always close to his hand.

Why anyone would carry that particular book of the Holy Bible so I can't rightly say.

So here's McAllen working the cattle for Williamson and minding his own business. Don't drink too much, don't fight hardly none at all, don't cuss in front of Williamson's wife and daughters, lends a hand even when he ain't been asked. Everything's fine until the second summer of range fires and somehow word gets around that McAllen has been setting 'em.

Firestarting is worse than rustling, in its way. You don't just lose the cattle, you lose the land. And fighting a range fire is somewhere between suicide and hopeless. Best you can do is get livestock and people out of harm's way and pray the wind don't shift wrong.

Mostly you know what done it. Dry thunderstorm, often as not. But sometimes they got a pattern. Summer of 1864, and again 1865, it was like that. Visitations, almost.

And they was talking, people. Cooks and runners and the feedlot boys and the fancy women and whatnot. McAllen's name was on a lot of lips. For a fellow ain't made no enemies, he sure didn't have a lot of friends. It was all-around peculiar.

So Williamson, he got the wind put up his own self and went and had a quiet talk with McAllen. I can't reckon the old man had pegged his hand for a firebug. More like he wanted McAllen gone a bit, out of the way to let rumor run its course. So he sent the poor bastard out riding trail west of Fort Caspar, what the city was called back then afore it was really a city. Said McAllen was checking springs and shelter in case they needed to drive the herds through the Powder River country.

Which was so much horse puck and everybody knew it, but it did serve to calm the hard words down some.

McAllen, he got himself out toward the Devil's Kitchen. That's a wild, wild land, looks like God dropped some old mountains into a thresher the size of Kansas, then let Leviathan vomit all over what fell out the ass end. All gray and brown and furze, covered with sand and ash and alkali and salt, nothing a fellow with any sense would ride into.

But he saw smoke, you understand. And fire was on his mind more than anyone's. Range fires could take his life in a hanging, if those hard words stuck around and took root in people's thoughts. So McAllen probably figured on picking his way on in there and finding some camp of layabouts or Indians or deserters, or something he could lay them fires at the feet of.

Off he went, leading his horse down a slope of scree and into one of them little, twisted canyons, following the smoke and his own sense of what was right and what was not.

*   *   *

Now the Devil, he's one crafty son of a bitch.

Yeah, I said that. You just mind your piehole or I'll mind it for you, and you won't like that one tiny bit.

Crafty on account of that's how the Creator made him. Lucifer, he's practically the first of God's children. Old Adam, more or less an afterthought he was. A gardener, really, set to watch the fruit trees and keep the snakes off the lawn. No, all the pride and power and glory went into the Prince of Light. When he done fell from Heaven, he took a piece of the Old Man's heart with him. The meek might could inherit the Earth, but it was the prideful for whom the beauty of the day was first forged.

After the Fall, though, the Devil he had to slink around in the dark patches and hide in the shadows and walk with the rotten side of a man's soul in his hand. That's why he hangs around even to this day in places like Hell's Half Acre, what was the Devil's Kitchen back then. Ain't no place for him among the shaded cottonwoods or along a quiet bend in the river with a fishing pole.

Still, a fellow's got to eat. That's part of our earthly estate, don't you know? And the Devil likes him some barbacoa as much as the next man.

Yeah, what they call barbecue now days.

A good loin of pork or brisket of beef, dry rubbed with salt and some spices, then cooked long and slow over a bed of coals afore you slather on a compounded ferment of vinegar and tomato sauce—that's a ticket to Heaven through the gates of the mouth. Food as righteous as any toe-curling sin.

So here's the Devil got him a roasting spit down in a dry ravine in the Devil's Kitchen, and he's got a dozen lesser dark angels to tend the fire and turn the spit, and a whole heifer off of Mr. Williamson's land stuck up there roasting to feed his own hungers and keep his myrmidons at their labors. It was a good place for Lucifer, on account of no one ever goes there, and he could rest in peace until time called for more of his mischief to be spread upon this Earth or down in the dominions of Hell.

Yeah, like that, kid. And you wouldn't be the first one ready to sell their granny down to darkness for a mouthful of that hot, sweet meat fresh off the fire. No, sir.

Devil was resting his spurred heels on a shattered knob of gray-white rock, a jug of white lightning in one clawed hand, a corncob pipe in the other, when Eustace Prudence McAllen led his old bay mare into the mouth of the ravine.

Them demons, they giggled and cackled and sizzled as demons is wont to do. Old Scratch looked up to see what the fuss was and saw a beanpole of a man with a week's beard looking back at him. Dark fellow, for a white man, in a pale canvas duster and a busted-down slouch hat pulled low over his eyes.

“Boys,” the Devil announced in a voice like a flash flood down a canyon, “we got us a visitor.”

You got to understand the Devil speaks all languages and none. Adamic, what everyone talked before the Tower of Babel, that's the tongue of Heaven. Any man born of woman will understand it, on account of it's the language God made us all to know and be known by.

So while his vowels sizzled with lightning and bedded coals, and his consonants were the fall of hammers and the snap of bones, the cowboy McAllen heard this in English as plain as any what got spoke in the bunkhouse back at the Broken Bow Ranch, and in an accent as melodious as General Nathan Bedford Forrest himself.

Which is to say, McAllen, he wasn't fooled one tiny bit. The Devil can make himself fine and fair as any Philadelphia dandy, or he can be small and slick and mean as a scorched badger, or anything in between. But this day Old Scratch was taking a rest, so his tattered wings spread black and lonely behind him while the horns on his head showed their chips and cracks and stains.

The only characteristic that marked him out from the chiefest among his lesser demons was the blue of his eyes, which were as deep and quiet as the lakes of Heaven. No creature born of Hell could ever have possessed such a gaze, and it was them orbs of light that marked the Devil still as being directly the work of God's hand.

McAllen saw the wings and the flickering, scaled tail and the great clawed feet and corncob pipe and the jug of shine, but most of all he saw those blue eyes, and he knew his time had come, and probably already gone past.

He also knew from the barbacoa spit who'd been setting those range fires.

“How do, neighbor?” he asked pleasantly, careful not to let his hand stray to the gun butt at his right hip. McAllen knew perfectly well that the six or seven wiry, bright red bastards tending that cow a-roasting could take him down before his second shot got off, and he knew perfectly well his first round wouldn't do no more than irritate Old Scratch.

“Smartly enough, I reckon.” The Devil sat up straight and set down his jug. “Strange place you picked to be riding fences, son of Adam.”

McAllen touched the brim of his slouch hat. He dropped the bay mare's reins, on account of she'd been pulling hard. “It's rightly son of Allen, your worship,” he said calm as a millpond. Behind him, the horse bolted with a scream of fear to melt a man's heart.

Go,
he thought,
and carry the news of my death if not the tale of the manner of my passing.
For it is given to some of us to know the manner and hour of our passing.

Well, yes, you're right. Even a deaf-mute idiot Frenchman would have known this was the manner and hour of his passing. And Eustace Prudence McAllen was none of those things.

The Devil smiled, which was not a sight for the faint of heart. “Still no fences down in these lands, son of Allen.”

“Just a fire down below.” McAllen summoned the courage that had stood him up against Yankee bullets and Oglala Sioux arrows and Wyoming winter blizzards and Texas summer droughts—that courage was needful now for him to walk slowly toward the Devil, measuring his steps with every care a man could bring.

“My cooking could bring a circuit preacher to his knees,” the Devil said proudly. Pride was, after all, his overweening sin and greatest accomplishment.

McAllen touched the brim of his hat again. “But your worship, the sparks from your fire keep setting the grasslands east of here to flame.”

With a shrug, the Devil smiled again. “Fire is my servant and my only friend. What does it matter to me that the prairie burns?”