The Shotgun Arcana (40 page)

Between Mutt and the skull was a man, an Indian. Northern Paiute by the look of his clothing, jewelry and the cast of his features. He was taller than Mutt, and thinner, but he seemed more comfortable crouched in the tiny rock chamber. He wore only a square of long black hair along the back of the crown of his head; the rest of his head was smooth. It gave him an almost bird-like plumage effect. Mutt had never seen the style on a Paiute, but knew it was the way several tribes wore their hair—the Mohawk, the Seneca and the Pawnee, to name a few. It involved a ritual of tearing out the rest of the hair in ragged tufts, enduring the pain of it to protest the mass scalping of Indians by the white man. It was a banner of defiance, an open declaration of war and a warning that the bearer could endure great discomfort, great self-inflicted pain.

He wore a simple leather vest and pants. His feet were bare and his chest, arms and face were covered in war paint, brilliant colors and patterns of red, black, yellow and blue. A gun belt was strapped to his waist and a six-gun holstered and strapped to his side. A pair of tomahawks was also sheathed in his belt. He regarded Mutt with handsome, noble features and cold black eyes.

“And my shadow arrives,” he said in a cool, measured tone. “Just in the nick of time. Now the show can begin.”

“Show’s over, pretty face,” Mutt said from the ledge above and drew his pistol with his now free hand. He still clutched the blood knife in the other. “You are coming with me, Snake-Man. Or I can jist shoot you. Don’t make me no nevermind.”

“Exactly the behavior I’d expect from the son of a coward and a fool,” Snake-Man said. He reached back without taking his eyes off Mutt and wrapped his long, bony fingers around the skull.

“I can smash it before you can kill me,” Snake-Man said. “Anger the Manitou, let it rage across the world. Even the cave’s medicine can’t contain such power. You and I can watch everyone go insane, murder and eventually be murdered. Won’t that be fun? It’s very brittle old bone and you know how strong we can be.”

Mutt slid the gun back into his holster. The Snake-Man moved his hand away from the skull.

“Exactly the behavior I’d expect from the son of a shifty, gutless belly-crawler,” Mutt said, grinning. “You this Ray Zeal’s pet now? He send you out here to fetch him a bone? Seems pretty lowly for such a mighty warrior, after killin’ all those women and children and such.”

Snake-Man smiled; it was a long, slow thing that crawled across his narrow face. His face was not well suited to expressions of joy. “Zeal needs me. He is a being of spirit. He cannot enter this cave. The medicine placed on the walls here is designed to hold the influence of the skull within and it keeps beings like Zeal out. It is painful even for you and I due to the divine blood burning in our veins. I’m surprised you made it this far without running off with your tail between your legs.”

“I like digging things out of their holes,” Mutt said. “Dragging them into the light. You can come peaceable, or we can scrap. Choice is yours.”

“Yes,” Snake-Man said. “It is. You’re at a complete disadvantage here, dog-son. This is my father’s home, his domain, and his power is strong here. Tell me, did you ever hear the story of the day Coyote and Snake fought?”

Mutt dropped down from the ledge into the circular pit of the room. He was still crouched and he held his knife before him.

“Trust me, if it’s a Coyote story, I’ve heard it.”

“‘Come, step over me. Do it in spite of me,’” the Snake-Man said, quoting the old story. He made a flourish with his hands and two curved, hook-like gutting blades appeared, attached to rings on both his index fingers. They were about four inches long. “These are my fangs.”

There was a dry rattle as he presented them and Mutt realized that Snake-Man had armbands with numerous rattlesnake rattles hanging from them. As the slender man stretched his legs and bent his knees in the cramped space between them, Mutt heard the rattle again and saw he had dried rattles on bands about his ankles too. His eyes were flat and empty as a starless night in the torchlight.

“Coyote was foolish and he tasted my father’s venom. He fell from it.”

Mutt showed his unusually long and straight incisors.

“Yep,” he said. “I seem to recall another version of that story where Coyote tore Snake apart, then he died from the bite.”

“He still died,” Snake-Man said.

“Yeah,” Mutt said, twirling and spinning the blood knife in his hand, faster and faster. “But he got to follow an arrogant asshole into Hell. I ain’t afraid of dying, pretty face, and trust me I will take you with me.”

Snake-Man crossed his arms across his chest, his finger blades flashing in the guttering torchlight. “Let us dance as our fathers did, Coyote-son,” he said.

And sprung out to strike.

Mutt twisted to the left, avoiding one hook blade, as his knife caught the other and blue sparks erupted from the force and speed of the blow. Mutt shuffled, still squatting, and drove a hard right hook toward Snake-Man’s exposed jaw. The gaunt man seemed to fold in half, bending his knees backward to avoid the punch and then snapped back, lashing out with a sharp kick that connected with Mutt’s face and drove the deputy backward into the wall and the searing pain of the glyphs.

Pressing his advantage, Snake-Man righted himself and lunged again at the off-balance Mutt, both finger blades arcing in and down to tear Mutt’s throat. Mutt braced his charring hands against the wall, ignoring the pain and the nausea, bent a knee and snap-kicked Snake-Man full in the face with his boot. The force of the kick knocked the renegade Black Feather back into the walls as well and he gasped at the pain of the burning glyphs through a bloody and pulped nose and lips.

Both men gasped and righted themselves as best they could in the cramped, low cave, moving away from the walls and slowly circling each other.

“Stings a bit,” Mutt said, grinning though crimson teeth. He spit blood. “Don’t it?”

Snake-Man’s hand dropped like the hammer of a gun to his belt and a tomahawk flashed across the narrow space, sinking into Mutt’s left shoulder—his knife arm—with a hollow
thunk
. Snake-Man was already moving before the hatchet even struck home. He scrambled forward, using one hand to balance and support his weight, the other hand flashed out, the gutting hook aimed at Mutt’s left eye.

“You tell me,” Snake-Man said coolly as he struck.

Mutt lowered his face and turned it, so the hook missed his eye, but tore the skin above it and ripped an ugly crescent of crimson down his face from his forehead almost to his mouth. Mutt drove his knife with all the force his injured arm could muster into the hand that Snake-Man was using to balance himself on. The blood knife sunk through the flesh and bones of Snake-Man’s bracing left hand and flashed sparks against the stone of the cave floor, chipping the rock. Snake-Man roared in pain and fell face forward onto the floor. Mutt kicked him savagely again in the side of the head, but Snake–Man was ready for this and drove his right-hand gutting knife deep into the deputy’s right calf. Mutt howled in pain and both men staggered back to opposite corners again. The cave was beginning to fill with the coppery scent of blood.

Neither man spoke. They both stared, unblinking, into the other’s eyes, waiting for the next pass, the next response. Mutt wanted to pull the tomahawk out of his shoulder, but he knew Snake-Man would take advantage of the distraction. An idea flashed in Mutt’s mind and he performed the calculations as best he could as his lifeblood seeped out of him. If the deception didn’t work, he would be a dead man. For a moment, Maude was in his mind: her dress from the other night; her soft, beautiful face; her strong eyes. Her lips. He pushed Maude out, pushed her away. She couldn’t help him in this, only get him killed. He kissed her memory quickly and then chased it away, replacing it with madness and bravado and blood: the crazy urgency of the now. No future, no tomorrow. All that slowed you down.

No more thinking. He chuckled dryly and just did it. This should be fun.

It happened fast: Mutt reached up with his right arm and pulled the hatchet out of his shoulder. As he began to do it, Snake-Man launched himself again, leading with his uninjured right hand, as Mutt had expected, going for Mutt’s right hand. Mutt slid straight down to the floor, putting himself in a completely vulnerable position, on his back, his belly exposed. As he slid down he used the extra distance the maneuver gave him to stomp out the light of the torch on the cave floor, so that the whole chamber fell into complete darkness.

Snake-Man missed his target but fell on top of the prone Mutt. He began to respond with a series of terrible blows to the helpless deputy when he felt the cold, hard barrel of Mutt’s revolver jammed against his heart and heard the pistol’s hammer cock. His own hatchet rested against the thudding artery in his throat. Instinctively, Snake-Man froze.

“You move, you twitch, I blow a hole through your chest,” Mutt said through swelling lips. “I want to hear the hooks hit the floor. I’ll know if it’s a trick and I’ll kill you.”

There was a faint tinkling sound of metal hitting stone. It was repeated.

“The trickster,” Snake-Man muttered. “Very good. You are worthy. We will have many glorious, bloody battles across eternity, Mutt, before I kill you. I will initiate you in true pain, true hatred.”

“Yeah, right,” Mutt said as he dropped the tomahawk and found Snake-Man’s gun belt. He removed the revolver and the remaining tomahawk and tossed them into the darkness. “Now you are going to slowly get up and I am going to keep this gun on you. Any sudden movement, any movement I am unsure of, and I will initiate you into a .44 bullet, and trust me—that is true enough pain. Now, move.”

Mutt fumbled about until he found the skull in the alcove. He gathered it up and dropped it in his battered hat and held it close to his chest. Using the alcove as a landmark he and Snake-Man made it across the chamber and struggled and groaned back up onto the ledge. They began the staggering shuffling trek back to the daylight, Mutt’s gun resting at the base of Snake-Man’s skull.

*   *   *

The sun was a ribbon of burning ochre light at the edge of the world when the two injured men climbed out of the cave. Mutt prodded Snake-Man up the ridge to where Muha waited for him.

“He’s coming,” Snake-Man said. “Can’t you feel it? Like a fever burning hotter across the world. He is sickness and delirium-dream madness. He’s coming for it and he will set it free.”

“Zeal,” Mutt said. As much as he hated to admit it, he could feel it. His instincts screamed to run, to hide, get away from Golgotha. But he couldn’t do that.

“Soon,” Snake-Man said, turning to smile at the deputy through torn and bloodied lips. “He arrives soon and you were kind enough to carry the skull out of the cave for him and for me. Thank you, Deputy.”

Mutt struck Snake-Man hard with the barrel of the gun at the temple. The bleeding, injured renegade tumbled to the ground and lay still, unconscious.

The skull, cradled in his arm, was singing. Singing, but not in a voice any but the monsters of the night could hear. Mutt heard it clearly. It yearned to be free and to drag this world, all the worlds, into blood-soaked chaos.

Mutt saw the last dying threads of the sun slip away. The darkness waiting to claim the sky, to claim the world.

“Soon,” Mutt said.

The Devil (Reversed)

Maude drifted through the raucous mining camp, on the eastern side of Argent Mountain, like a half-remembered dream. Her training granted her the ability to walk past others and leave only the faintest memory in their mind, and she did not want to be noticed.

It was pitch black beyond the warm glow of torches whipping in the mountain wind, beyond lanterns and campfires. The darkest soul of the night.

Word of Malachi Bick’s thrashing today on Main Street at the hands of Ray Zeal had made its way up to the camp. Many here were celebrating, drinking and singing songs as if Zeal’s promised return in a few days to finish Bick off was a greater holiday than the rapidly approaching Thanksgiving. It was clear there was no love lost for Bick anywhere in Golgotha.

Maude had to admit, she loved the miners’ camp—it was a little universe of its own, looking down on Golgotha, full of laughter and shouting and music composed of voices, squeezeboxes, jaw harps, spoons, harmonicas and guitars; the soft murmurs and boisterous calls of love making, gossip and arguments. Random gunfire in anger or joy, the smells of cooking meats, stews and fresh-baked ashcakes, unwashed miners, and whores wearing too much scent. The laughter and cries of children, the coughs of the sick and the dying. The camp was life, in all its beauty and horror—alive, vital and uncontained.

The camp had grown nearly fourfold since the new boom began, going from about fifty miners and prospectors to over two hundred. It was now a small city all its own, with less order but fewer rules than Golgotha. It was cheaper to build a home out of canvas and a few planks of wood up here, than down below or across the gulf to the ivory homes on the green slopes of Rose Hill. Some who came to the camp came west to seek out a dream, a new life, a fortune. Others were here to take advantage of the dreamers and tenderfoots. And some were hiding from the law or working hard to make a dishonest living at the edges of civilization. There was danger here as well as joy. Life dancing side by side with death. This was the human soul laid out, living under the bright stars, in the mud.

Numerous new businesses had sprung up here. New saloons challenged the filthy dirt-floored tent that was the Mother Lode. Quacks and old army sawbones with shaky hands and rheumy eyes offered to remove bullets and babies for a little coin. A few ramshackle churches had sprung up to minister to the weary souls here.

Malachi Bick had opened the Argent Company Store in the camp, offering credit and advances on miners’ wages. Part of the hatred for Bick here among the miners was the fact that once you began to buy from the store on credit, it was virtually impossible to ever get out from under your obligation. Bick owned you. News that a man was coming to shoot Bick dead for thievery, to make him suffer first, seemed poetic justice to most.