The Shotgun Arcana (56 page)

He redirected part of the electricity and turned it back on Zenith, who “caught” much of it with the focusing fork on his device. The professor’s wild mane of hair singed and smoked from the portion of Clay’s assault that got through.

The electrical duel raged on. The sky swirled with dark clouds and alien energies while the other forces fighting along the streets recovered from the electrical barrages and began to battle once again.

*   *   *

Maude and Batra danced along the railing of the second floor of the saloon, trading kicks and strikes, blocking, jumping and tumbling on the four-inch wooden handrail, defying gravity with each impossible act.

“Your training is excellent,” Batra said. “It is a pity you are a woman. I would enjoy facing a man as skilled as you.”

“Really, now?” Maude said. “What would your Dark Mother say about that?”

Batra’s cheeks darkened. “Do not mock the Dark Mother.” He advanced, hurling knife strikes and sweeping kicks at Maude, angrily.

“Anger is your enemy,” she said, and spun, avoiding his punch and sweeping his leg just as he began a wide kick.

Batra plummeted and smashed into the faro table. He recovered quickly and tumbled off it. He hurled a throwing iron at Maude and it struck her squarely in the chest as she flipped down onto the table. The force of it knocked her to the floor, but she backflipped and came up on her feet, hurling the odd branching weapon back at Batra. He dived toward the kitchen entrance, dodging the iron as it imbedded itself into the wall. Maude rubbed her bruised and cut chest, coughed up a little blood, raised her kerchief to spit it out and then followed the Thuggee into the Paradise Falls kitchen.

Batra had vanished. As Maude moved carefully between the wooden counters and cabinets, she took a deep breath, adjusted her perceptions and blood, and listened. He was to her left; his breathing was still, almost non-existent, but his slowed heart still thudded. She moved closer, giving him an opening to take, but he didn’t.

Her hands dropped to a butcher’s blade on the stained wooden table to her right. She took a step, another. Her timing would have to be perfect or he would kill her this time, but to get her shot she had to get closer, closer. Batra’s muted heartbeat fluttered just a tiny bit and that was all the warning Maude needed. She hurled the knife from the table into the shadow with one fluid motion. Batra materialized, as if the darkness had vomited him forth, kukri at the ready. The blade thudded deep in his shoulder, blood blossoming from his tunic. He stepped toward her, staggered and then took another step. He blinked and then dropped to his knees only a few feet from her. He looked up at Maude with dimming eyes and muttered.

“Poison?” he said. “How did you?” He looked at his wrist where her nail had torn his flesh. “Very good.”

“Better than you,” Maude said.

“My apology,” Batra said, his words slurring. “May Kali allow us to fight again in Hell. It would be a pleasure.”

Batra fell to the floor, unmoving. His chest began to rise and fall, deeply, as the narcotic wrapped itself tightly about his blood.

“Not that kind of poison,” Maude said. “You don’t get to die a martyr. You get to live in disgrace.” She remembered something from the fever dream when she had fallen into the well and she thought that, for a moment at least, she knew what the voice had meant about the warrior’s peace.

*   *   *

Emily hurried to the door of her father’s office and opened it. She could hear the screams and shooting going on outside through the open balcony doors. She stepped behind her father’s desk and opened the top drawer. She took out the item her father had told her about and clutched it like a drowning man grabbing at a rope. She hurried out into the hallway and down the stairs. Emily stopped when she found herself face-to-face with Zeal himself, advancing up the stairs.

“Well, well,” Zeal said, smiling at her. “Look what sneaked in the kitchen door while I was on the front porch. Hello, Emily. I’ve been looking all over for you.”

*   *   *

Professor Zenith snarled in frustration. This hick was thwarting his every action. His organic voltic piles had mercifully, for them anyway, perished in the exchanges of energies. He was forced to rely on his backup etheric condenser to power his weapon. Suddenly the professor noticed a stabilizing of the magnetic field in regards to the orgone flow and he saw his opportunity to fry the fool’s machinery and then get back to killing the other simpletons of this town.

He began to slowly increase the degree of electrical fluid through the regulator panel on the back of the cart when he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Clay, holding a large wrench.

“You ever hear of Occam’s Razor, jackass?” Clay swung the wrench with both hands and landed it successfully alongside the good professor’s skull. Zenith dropped to the ground and lay still.

Clay hopped up on the cart. “I swear,” he muttered to himself as he shut down Zenith’s contraption, “anyone with a little copper tubing and a dynamo thinks they’re a scientist these days.”

The Chariot

Emily raised the white feather she clutched in her hand. “Stop,” she said. “Don’t move.”

Zeal didn’t. The smile left his face. “Now where did you get that?” he said, frozen almost like a statue.

“My father got it from the sheriff,” she said. “It was from your son, Vellas. It’s like the one my father gave me. It lets me command you. It can let me kill you.”

“Yes,” Zeal said. “It can. It is our highest expression of trust, to give a part of ourselves to another. To give them power over us. The question is, Emily, do you have it in you to kill me?”

“I … I don’t want to,” Emily said. “I don’t want to kill anyone.”

“Well then,” Zeal said, smiling again. “That is a shame.”

Charles Cook shot Emily in the back with his derringer from the top of the stairs. The girl fell forward, tumbling down the stairs, a dark flower spreading across her back. The feather, now flecked with her blood, floated down to the ground floor. It fell at Malachi Bick’s feet.

“Children,” Zeal said, laughing. “Gone so soon, eh, Biqa?”

“Enough,” Bick said.

The Paradise Falls buckled and exploded as if a bomb had gone off within it. Every window shattered, the wall of the saloon splintered as if struck by a tornado. The carbonized remains of Charles Cook, the wealthiest man in California, floated down as hot, black ash across collapsing three-story ruins. No piece of furniture, no stick of wood, was spared being shattered to near-dust by the force that men called Malachi Bick. The form of Emily Bright lay amid the debris, untouched by the destruction. No living thing, save Cook and his master, were harmed by the town-shaking blast.

Raziel, stunned and battered by the full force of the destruction, smashed into the Dove’s Roost, over a hundred yards away. Zeal crashed through the front wall of the empty house of ill repute and came to rest in the demolished parlor. He struggled to stand, the whole house creaking and groaning, threatening to collapse.

Zeal rubbed his head and turned. Biqa was there, upon him before he could even fully comprehend what had happened, looping space-time to punch Zeal a million infinites in the space of a nanosecond, converting the mass of his hand to nearly light-speed while containing, shunting, the force of each blow, to channel all the destructive force to Raziel alone, sparing the planet’s atmosphere from being torn away by the energy of each punch. The Dove’s Roost began to rain down around the two, but Biqa didn’t care. Raziel was his universe now. Raziel crashed through one side of Scutty’s boardinghouse and out the other. The building exploded, nearly atomized, from the structural damage of being hit by something roughly approximating the planet’s mass. Again, Biqa calmed the angry forces of nature and minimized the destruction, while giving Zeal a taste of as much of it as the world of man could stand.

Fortunately, almost the whole town was occupied with the battle raging over on Main, so the buildings and sidewalks on Bick Street were mercifully empty.

Raziel smashed through the wall of the
Golgotha Scribe
’s office and into the newspaper’s huge iron and steel printing press, converting a great deal of its dense mass into glowing molten slag. Raziel’s countenance now resembled Biqa’s own, torn, swollen, bruised and bleeding. The fair angel’s blood hissed as it spattered on the glowing press. Raziel hefted the press with one hand and batted Biqa with it as the snarling angel launched himself at Raziel again, churning dark, primal energy in his wake like spectral wings of diluted ink. The force of the blow, as Raziel converted all the mass into pure energy, floored Biqa, especially since he had to redirect a good amount of the energy into his own personal space-time to avoid the blow shattering the planet like an egg being struck by a sledgehammer. The remainder of the newspaper building vaporized into a brilliant cascade of photons about the two of them.

Biqa, gasping and smoking, shook the charred debris off him as he lay on his hands and knees, still reeling, fighting to rise. Raziel, panting, bleeding, stayed on his feet and drew his cavalry saber. Biqa saw the blade for what it truly was—pure, divine fire from the forge of creation itself.

“’Member this little pig-sticker, Biqa?” Raziel said, staggering forward. “The old Heavenly Toothpick…? ’Member wha’ it can do, even to our kind? I shed a lot of angelic blood with this during the rebellion. Good times, good times. You don’t have one anymore do you, Biqa? That is a pity.”

Biqa struggled to his feet. He began to stagger out of the wreckage, running as best he could. The mortal form of Malachi Bick shuddered back into place as he stumbled across Prosperity Road, looking back at Raziel in all his angelic fury, flaming sword in hand. The mad angel strode after him slowly, confidently, his injuries masked by his unearthly light.

“Aw, don’t run, Biqa,” Raziel called out. “Have at least a little dignity. You acted like one of the Host there for a second. If you hadn’t been so worried about breaking this little matchstick town, this ridiculous planet of His, you might have even had me.”

Bick staggered farther down the other side of Prosperity. Off in the distance were the sounds of chaos: gunfire, explosions, the challenging shouts of the brave, the mad and the defiant, the sobs of the dying and those who loved the dying. War swaggered unchecked down Main Street. Bick fled into a small alley, running farther and deeper into the mazes of narrow corridors that made up this side of Bick Street.

Raziel followed him, picking up his pace, eager to taste Bick’s blood. He advanced, ignoring everything save his weakened, battered prey stumbling up ahead. He found Bick standing, bloody but defiant, in a tiny courtyard, the nexus of half-dozen dark, twisting alleys.

“Time to finish it,” Raziel said.

Bick said nothing, only glared at the gore-splattered golden angel.

“I’m going to flay you alive,” Raziel said, “a molecule of perfect pain at a time.”

Bick lowered his head. His eyes burned with cold, controlled anger, his mouth curled painfully into a wolf’s tight grin. Raziel’s sword guttered like a dying torch and the flame evaporated. Raziel’s divine image shivered like a reflection in a shattering mirror and faded. Ray Zeal stood, holding mere mortal steel.

“What?” Zeal said.

Ch’eng Huang stood on a balcony overlooking the narrow crossroads of streets. The old man said nothing, merely nodded to Bick.“Welcome to Johnny Town,” Bick said.

Bick charged Zeal, binding his sword arm to his side and driving a knee to Zeal’s groin as he drove a thumb into the bewildered angel’s eye.

The pain of the blinding forced Zeal backward, stumbling and doubled over. Bick pressed him, knocking the sword from his hand by twisting and breaking his wrist. Zeal gasped at the mortal pain flooding fully into his all-too-mortal nerves. Bick began to shuffle and snap one powerful punch after another to Zeal’s stomach, then his face, then ribs. Shuffling, moving, working on Zeal like a lumberjack chopping down a massive tree.

“How does it feel to have all your power taken away?” Bick said, blood spraying from his lips with each word, each violent punch. “To have all your certainty stripped from you, and to have to fumble alone to make sense of the world? You like it, Ray? Do you?”

Bick drove an uppercut into Zeal’s jaw. Blood and perfect teeth flew like confetti.

“You know what human beings know, Ray?” Bick asked as he drove a solid punch into Zeal’s throat, and then followed up by grabbing the semiconscious angel by his curly blond hair and forcing Zeal down to the ground, smacking his face into the mud and muck of the street. “They find reason where they can. Even in terror and horror and death, because they have no choice in the matter. Pain is the admission price you pay for life.”

Zeal was choking on his own blood, unable to breathe well due to the blow to his throat and the face full of mud. Bick held him down close to the muck of the street, occasionally smashing his head into the ground.

“And it’s a fair price,” Bick said. “My daughter taught me that.”

Zeal was on the ground, shuddering, barely alive. Bick let Zeal go; he crawled over to the discarded sword and put it to the convulsing angel’s throat, held it there for a long moment. He lowered the saber and let it drop to the dirt.

“She taught me that too,” Bick said.

The Sun (Reversed)

Martin Anderton, Maude’s father, rode into Golgotha with his granddaughter Constance by his side and a troop of U.S. soldiers from Camp Bidwell on Saturday morning. The federal troops helped clean up the messes, clear the debris and put out the fires. They also helped Highfather, his deputies and good number of volunteers secure the remnants of Zeal’s army and cult. There was also the matter of gathering the dead and putting them to rest.

All told, the event that would go down in Golgotha history as the Ray Zeal Riot had a bloody toll. A hundred and twelve townsfolk perished, either fighting to retake their town or in the violent crossfire. Another ninety or so were reported as wounded or injured in the chaos, and the most ominous number of all were the over fifty citizens of Golgotha that simply vanished during the few days that Ray Zeal and his madmen ruled the town.