The Shotgun Arcana (50 page)

“Damnation,” a man in the crowd shouted. “That’s Saw-Tooth McCredie!”

“Lord, let me kill him for you,” McCredie said to Zeal. The gunfighter’s teeth were filed to uneven, sharp points. “I’ve wanted to slap leather with this bastard for a long time.”

“Take him,” Zeal said. “For my glory.”

“Step off a bit, Malachi,” Highfather said. Bick stepped away, eying Zeal, who was grinning and slapping his champion on the back.

The two men walked toward each other down the middle of Main Street. The crowd grew silent.

“You know who I am?” McCredie said.

“I don’t really care,” Highfather said.

“I’ve killed eighteen men in four states and three territories,” McCredie said.

“Eighteen? You are a salty dog, indeed,” Highfather said, his eyes never leaving McCredie’s, the humor drained from his voice and his eyes. “You keep count and everything. Go on, salty dog, bark.”

Bick realized he had never been this close to Jon Highfather when he was in a gunfight. Bick tried to focus on Zeal, but he was fascinated by how calm, how aware Highfather was. The man seemed completely focused, yet at ease, perhaps more at ease than Bick had ever known the sheriff to be.

McCredie drew his gun, faster than the flutter of any eyelash, faster than an impure thought. He cleared his holster and began to level his pistol at Highfather, not really aiming, so much as shooting from instinct and experience: .44 caliber thunder rolled across Main Street. McCredie was lifted off his feet by the force of the bullet. The round shattered his sternum and then pulped the gunslinger’s heart. McCredie was dead before his body hit the muck and dirt of the street, his unfired gun still clutched in his hand.

Highfather, his pistol smoking, scanned the crowd, Zeal and the other invaders. A cheer came up from the cowed townsfolk. He silenced them again with his next words.

“Clear this street and Zeal, you and your people get the hell out of Golgotha now.”

“Or what, Sheriff?” Zeal said. “You intend to shoot all of us?”

There was a crack of gunfire, then another and another. Three of Zeal’s men fell from their horses, dead.

“Something like that,” Highfather said.

“You took out my shooters on the roof,” Zeal said, nodding. “Very good, Malachi, sheriff, but you didn’t think I might consider you would try something like that. Your shooters may want to hold their fire, unless you are eager to get people killed. I have something you’ll want to see.”

“Hold your fire!” Highfather shouted out.

On three different rooftops, Mutt, Kate and Maude waited. The dead or unconscious bodies of Zeal’s snipers lay at their feet, the killers’ rifles in their hands.

Zeal snapped his fingers and one of Cook’s soldiers pulled out a cavalry bugle and blew it loudly. “Now wait a moment,” Zeal said.

About ten minutes passed while Highfather and Bick stood alone in the street and the mob remained relatively mute, waiting to see what happened next. A lone rider, one of Cook’s Praetorians, appeared, galloping off Prosperity and onto the northern side of Main, opposite Highfather and Bick. His horse halted beside Zeal and he saluted Cook. The rider held a burlap bag. He said something to Zeal, who nodded and took it from the rider. He walked alone toward Highfather and Bick. He tossed it at Bick’s feet.

“Open it,” Zeal said. Bick and Highfather looked at each other. Bick knelt and opened the sack. He lifted something small out of the bag by its long tangled black hair; a few tiny blue ribbons fell from the hair and dropped onto the dark cold sod of Main Street. Bick cradled the object carefully and with his other hand picked up one of the tiny ribbons. Highfather knelt as well to examine what Bick held.

“Her name was Sadie Colton,” Zeal said. “At least that’s what my man told me. She was eight years old. Pretty little thing, isn’t she, Malachi? Suffer the little children and all that.”

Highfather was up, the pistol in Zeal’s smiling face. He cocked it, still as smooth and emotionless as he had been when shooting down McCredie. But Bick saw the storm burning, crashing, hidden behind his gray eyes.

“Sheriff … Jonathan,” Bick said softly.

“Pull that trigger and they all die, the whole schoolhouse full of them,” Zeal said, “and not quick like little Sadie. No, the rest will die slowly and in confused agony, like their dear schoolmaster, Mr. Worley, did. We also have the town elders. I can send you something from one of them, too, if you need proof.”

“No,” Highfather said; his voice was cold slate.

“That won’t be necessary,” Bick said. “We surrender, Ray.”

“Just like the decent, honorable men I counted on you being,” Zeal said.

“You are going to burn in Hell, Zeal,” Highfather said as he uncocked the gun and lowered it. “You got us for now. I’ll call off the shooters on the roofs.”

“No need,” Zeal said. “My men are killing your friends as we speak.”

*   *   *

Maude cocked the Winchester. The smoking shell flipped free and she took aim on another of Zeal’s killers.

Mutt had caught up to her and Kate yesterday after the shootout at Hauk’s restaurant. He’d told them Highfather’s plan to ambush Zeal’s snipers. Mutt had managed to separate Maude and Kate long enough so that Maude could rush home and change into her “working clothes.” Now, wearing her bandana mask over her mouth and nose and disguised as a man, Maude had silently climbed the roof and taken out one of Zeal’s snipers. She knew Mutt and Kate were on other roofs, having done the same.

Now she watched as Zeal dropped the bag at Bick’s feet. There was a blur before her eyes for less than a second as a pale yellow cloth slipped over her head at inhuman speed and tightened about her neck. The act had been so fast that she hadn’t even had time to raise her hand to block the strangle cord. She had not heard a sound from her attacker, who even now drove his knees into her back as he tightened the cord, the coin slipped into the cloth cutting off her air and attempting to crush her windpipe. Only pure trained instinct, acting faster than her mind could comprehend, had made her lower her head and angle herself slightly to protect her larynx from being cracked like a peanut shell.

Batra muttered his prayers to Kali, begging her to accept his offering. His mind, however, drifted to his next victims, the half-breed deputy and the other woman. Once he had killed this masked man, he would move on to the next rooftop. The anticipation thrilled him and it also distracted him, so that when the masked man raised both arms straight up and spun to attempt to face him with great force, Batra flew across the flimsy roof, the hold broken by the simple leverage, speed and strength of the act.

Maude drew in air in ragged, greedy gasps. She had dropped the rifle, she didn’t want it now. She sprinted, silent as thought, toward the fallen man, who she now recognized was a Thuggee assassin trained in India.

Anne Bonny’s insistence on her reading about the various schools of killers and assassins had been one of Maude’s favorite parts of the training as a girl. Gran said she had met and studied the Thuggee at a safe distance. She also told Maude a tale of how the ritual assassins had almost summoned their goddess, Kali, back to the world to begin an age of horrors. Gran Bonny had, of course, been instrumental in stopping them and claimed she even crossed blades with the Dark Mother herself before sending her back to Hell and saving the world. Maude always loved Gran Bonny’s bedtime stories.

Maude drove a knife-hand blow down into Batra’s collarbone; he tumbled and was back on his feet, but Maude’s blow still cracked the bone—the full force of it would have shattered it. Batra’s face was expressionless as he let his uninjured arm drop to his belt and freed his curved kukri knife.

Maude moved in again, like lightning flashing. She knew better than to assume any superiority to this man; such pride would get her killed. He had been trained as she had, for most likely as long as she had, and the Mother he swore allegiance to was one of the dark, angry faces of the Mother Maude served. Batra’s blade made a soft zipping sound as it cut the air and nearly opened up Maude’s midsection. Maude bent like a branch in the wind and the blade passed her.

She drove two fingers to the nerve bundle in the pectoral region of Batra’s chest. The Thuggee leaned back and the blow that should have frozen his arm grazed him, doing nothing. He responded with a low, sharp kick to Maude’s shin, designed to break her leg and floor her. Maude did a standing jump and the kick whooshed by under her tucked legs. She took the opportunity to drive a snap-kick to Batra’s face, which connected with and shattered his nose as it drove him back, giving Maude some breathing room and the luxury of a few seconds to land, take in more air and then advance.

The only sound of the two combatants on the roof was an occasional creaking board; otherwise the battle for survival was noiseless. Batra began to dance, to spin like a top, wobbling. The fifteen-inch blade of the kukri seemed to be everywhere. Maude had been instructed in the fighting style of the dervish and this was similar, but not exactly the same. Batra’s dance intensified and he pressed forward, a wall of flashing death moving Maude closer to the edge of the roof, limiting her options to move, to counterattack, breaking her cover to the streets below.

She intently studied the pattern of the dance and, to her dismay, couldn’t find one. Batra was chanting now, low but audibly.

White-hot agony pushed through Maude’s upper chest, a nail of sharp heat driven into her by a sledgehammer of force and sound. A bullet, fired by one of Zeal’s men below, ripped through her back and out her chest. She gasped at the immediacy and scope of the pain and then her training took over and she pushed it away.

Even as the bullet was tunneling through her body, Maude shifted and spun. The exiting bullet was redirected to Batra’s path and the same distorted round, steaming with her blood, caught the Thuggee in his already injured arm, knocking him to the ground. Blood gushed from his shoulder. Maude moved quickly away from the roof’s edge, but not quickly enough to avoid a second bullet that bored into her upper back and departed in a spray of blood and some bone. She winced and addressed the pain. There was no time for it now. Parts of her body were numb and not responding to her demands.

She stood over the wounded Thuggee for the few seconds she could afford. The pain made her own voice, not that of a man, slip out. “We’re not finished with this,” she said.

Maude sprinted for the opposite side of the rooftop even as she heard the shouts of men and the thuds of boots approaching from the Main Street side. She jumped onto the roof of Gillian Proctor’s boardinghouse and landed in the middle of a storm of bullets. More pain, harder now to ignore and suppress. She was getting dizzy and feeling the cold creep inside her. It was the trauma of the injuries, she told herself. She took a breath as she leapt toward the flat roof of the jail. She thought behind her she heard Mutt shouting, cursing, and more gunfire, the screams of dying men, ripped apart by lead. She calmed her mind and began the work of redirecting the blood flow. Her body responded loyally, as it was trained to, but it was sluggish. Between the struggle with Tumblety the night before, the battle with the Thuggee and now this, she was exhausted and injured and it was taking a toll on her.

She glanced to the left, down Dry Well Road. Soldiers on horseback were keeping up with her and firing at her as she ran. She hit the edge of the jail, launched upward as another bullet hit her leg and landed on the next roof . She collapsed from the injured leg, rolled and came up, moving in, away from the withering fire, only to have more bullets zing about her from shooters behind her on other roofs. Another blossom of hot pain.

She lived in her mind now, not her body. She moved by will, not muscle or sinew. Constance was out there and needed her, maybe more than she ever had;
move, move, keep moving.
There was a gunshot off to her right, several rooftops away, and she heard a man’s cry of pain from behind her. She glanced over to see Kate Warne cocking her Winchester and taking bead on another of her attackers.

“Go!” Kate shouted to her. “Run!”

Maude took a moment to look down. She had run out of buildings. Below was the small circle of worn benches and the crumbling stone ring of the old dry well. She remembered sitting there with Mutt, how good and right it all felt and how much she wanted to get to do that again. The ache in her chest at the thought that she never would get to do that, to see him again, was worse than any wound, any pain could ever be.

The bullets exploded around her again. There were enemies everywhere. She breathed a good, clean breath, savored it like a wine.

“I love you,” she said softly.

Maude charged, sprinting to the edge of the roof and launching herself off the building, arcing downward like a diver knifing into water. She flew down the old stone well, angry lead buzzing about her, and then was lost underground into the darkness.

Zeal’s men rushed to the old well and pointed their guns down into it. They fired again, and again and again, their rounds echoing off the shadowed narrow walls. They fired until their guns were all empty, until gun smoke rose from the dark hole like a spirit seeking to escape skyward.

“Whoever that was,” one of the shooters said, “they’re gone.”

The Five of Cups

Thanksgiving Day came to Golgotha. It was twenty-four hours since Zeal and his cult had arrived and the town was strangely silent, even for a holiday. The streets were empty, the churches and the saloons all still. The weather had turned colder and an icy rain was falling. It had started shortly after Zeal’s arrival and the sky continued to weep throughout the holiday.

Word of Zeal’s arrival, the proclamation, the capture of Malachi Bick and Jon Highfather, and his holding of the children and town elders spread through the town in hushed, frightened whispers. Citizens were ordered to stay home and keep off the streets. Each house was given a bottle of whiskey courtesy of Mr. Zeal in celebration of the holiday. Bands of armed soldiers—Cook’s Praetorians—patrolled the streets. Those who violated Zeal’s new laws were beaten and ordered home, and those who resisted were shot dead, their bodies hung from the balcony at town hall as a warning to others. Anger simmered with the fear and it was anyone’s guess which would win out in the hearts of the townsfolk.