The Six-Gun Tarot (40 page)

“Fell,” Lucifer said. “Interesting choice of words. So why didn’t you seek me out? I would have welcomed you with open arms.”

Bick’s chuckle was a dry rasp. “Please. I haven’t given up my duty to the Host, to the Lord. I have no intention of joining you and your ‘revolutionaries’ in the root cellar. I just got a little lax in how I attended to my responsibility. I had to adapt; I mean they started learning, creating settlements, exploring, expanding. They breed like prairie rabbits, you know?”

Lucifer nodded, allowing him to continue.

“They sensed the power of that thing beneath this land and it drew them here. They had no idea what it was or why they came—it whispered to them in dreams and spoke to the disturbed, the mad and the evil. To remain here as guardian, I had to appear as something their minds could understand, could endure. To the first people, I was a sorcerer—they called me Be’kiwa-ah. I had powerful medicine and they left me alone. Even their spirits and gods avoided me.

“Then the white and black and yellow people came and I had to become a man named Bick for them. I became white, like the majority of them, just as I had been a red man when this land was theirs.

“I claimed my protectorate as my own, built a homestead and worked to control the access of those who crossed these lands in search of a new home. I maintained control of who settled here as best I could without arousing suspicion. The Bick family’s heir would ‘pass away’ and I would take on a new guise, as a new relative—a son, a distant cousin. It worked pretty well for a long time.”

“You really didn’t have to do all that,” Satan said with a sigh. “You really have let yourself go, Biqa. I mean, ruses and charades, pretending to be a mortal. You’ve even started thinking like a monkey—why not just cast a blight upon all who live here, or fill their hearts up with terror or turn a few into pillars of salt? They’d get the idea to stay away.”

Bick shook his head. “You never did accept it, did you? Tell me, O Prince of Darkness, why don’t you just come on up here all the time and snatch any old soul that strikes your fancy? Why don’t you set San Francisco ablaze and dance in the streets while your demons harvest sinners like wheat? Why all the contracts and fiddle contests?”

“Free will,” they said simultaneously.

“I hate it,” Lucifer said, kicking a rock. “Why would you give a bunch of short-lived, shortsighted murderous apes the power of cosmic veto? Why does He hold our power in check, but they can roam around and murder and lie and cheat with impunity?”

“For someone whose domain is Earth, you have a lot to learn about humans. The bottom line is He limits us and what we can do to them with our power, His power.”

Lucifer snorted. “For now. So you lived as one of them, came to enjoy their base pleasures. Now look at you, so weak you can actually be harmed by physical force, perhaps even killed. How did you plan to protect the land by letting human insects dig into it?”

“That was a miscalculation,” Bick explained. “The chains of divine fire that hold the Darkling are the most tangible manifestation of the Almighty’s power within the Earth. The presence of the power turned whole veins of base matter into semi-divine material, throughout the planet.”

“Silver,” Satan said, nodding. “That’s why it has the effect it does on preternatural creatures, and why men covet it so much.”

“Since this is where the Darkling was cast to Earth, where the world was first built around it, there is a lot of silver here in Nevada. That eventually brought prospectors. They found their way to the mountain, discovered the silver veins. Word got out before I could deal with them. The silver boom came to my little town.”

“You’re not telling me the whole story,” Satan said, smiling. “I can smell half-truths like horse flop and you, my noble angel, are lying by omission. Maybe even hiding a sin or two, hmmm?”

Bick looked away, back toward the town and the mountain. “It’s a long story, one for another day. The gist of all this is I had to allow the Argent Mine to exist for a time. I made sure the deed to the land belonged to the Bick family and was passed along from heir to heir. I arranged for the mine to be reported as having gone bust a few years back. Problem solved, or so I thought.”

“However…,” Satan said.

Bick sighed. “However, I didn’t count on the growing interference of lawyers, regulators, bureaucrats and politicians into my business. I swear it seems that every year they stick their noses into more and more.”

Lucifer chuckled. “Sorry about that—I outdid myself there.”

“I began to diversify my holdings. I ‘sold’ a number of them to individuals with an understanding that they were only keeping them in trust for me, but on paper it no longer appeared that Malachi Bick and the Bick family owned every rock between here and California.”

“You sold the mountain?” Lucifer shook his head. “You must have really been living it up with the monkeys to make such a foolish mistake.”

The anger flared in Bick again, but he fought it down. Satan was right—he had fallen far too deeply into the role, had lost sight of his mission and foolishly believed the time he was now faced with would never come. He had failed when he had given Arthur Stapleton the deed to Argent Mountain, failed his Lord and failed the humans he had come to admire so much. He had failed Caleb.

“Yes,” he said, “it was a mistake, my mistake. But I intend to rectify it.”

“You best do it soon,” Lucifer said. “I was sent to tell you as much. What the Darkling’s servants are doing is weakening the divine chains. They are failing and the Darkling is waking up. God doesn’t seem to be taking any meetings these days about reinforcing the chains, so you had better come up with something else, and soon.”

“The Lord does not speak with the Highest Host about the crisis?”

“Or anything else for that matter. He’s been pretty quiet since He finished up the Earth. I think He’s studying something—you know how He gets with His hobbies. Either that or He’s foreseen what’s in the wind and He’s hiding. If you can’t stop them from awakening it, it will tear the Earth apart as it breaks free of its prison, and it won’t stop till everything we’ve created is gone. Heaven, Hell, but first and foremost your precious Earth. You remember how awful that thing was last time, don’t you—the siege at the Pillars of Tranquility? How many angels did we lose that day, phalanxes? ”

Bick nodded. He rubbed his eyes. The sky should be getting brighter at the approach of dawn. It wasn’t. He noticed stars began to drop from the sky like sparks drifting away from a campfire. He felt cold fear slip into his bowels.

“Better to reign in Hell than get devoured by that thing, I say,” Lucifer offered.

“So I shouldn’t count on your help?” Bick said. “I’m shocked. How about the Host?”

“It’s still your post,” Lucifer said. “You know the rules—‘one riot, one ranger,’ so to speak. If it gets free, no one will be able to stop it again—not even the Almighty could kill it, remember? No one in Heaven or Hell is going to be fool enough to stand against that thing. So it’s up to you, Biqa, but honestly, in the shape you’re in, I wouldn’t expect much.”

Neither did he. He knew what that thing could do, knew how limited his powers really were here, especially now, since his lapses. It was impossible. He couldn’t stand up to the creature’s worshipers, let alone the Darkling itself, and what could possibly replace chains of divine fire to hold the thing and keep it sedate?

Another scream from the town, it sounded like a child. Bick nodded to Lucifer and began walking back toward Golgotha.

“I’ve got work to do. Go back to Hell and hide under your ottoman.”

“You? You’re so compromised I’ll bet you can’t even wield your sword anymore. Can you even perceive its true nature as you are? You’re not much more than a human now, Biqa.”

“That will suffice,” he said to the lord of Hell, still walking away.

“What do you want me to pass along to the Host?” the Devil called out.

“Tell them to have faith!” Bick shouted back as he disappeared over a rocky ridge. “Tell them we’re on it.”

Another star fell beyond the shadowed horizon. The desert was quiet, like the whole of creation was holding its breath.

“
We?
” Lucifer said.

The Emperor

The dawn never came. The stars, the moon, all fell into an endless, frigid night, sliding behind clouds of ink, never to reemerge. Once the celestial illumination was swallowed, the only light came from men—torches, lanterns and, of course, the fires that ran wild through Golgotha.

Riley Finn staggered out into the darkness to see why Redbilly, his prize rooster, had not crowed. Finn’s homestead was off of Druffer Road—not much more than a tarpaper shack, a bare feeding yard and a small coop to house the chickens that made him a decent living in the town. Most folk around Golgotha knew the gangly man with the crooked smile and the red hair simply as “the Egg Man.”

“Redbilly, lad, what’s gotten into you? Why aren’t you squawking? It’s already—”

He squinted in the lantern light as he popped open the lid to his pocket watch. The hands were bent and the glass was broken. The watch had broken precisely at dawn. Riley had no way of knowing that every timepiece in Golgotha had suffered the exact same fate, at exactly the same time.

“Bloody hell,” he muttered, and stuffed the broken timepiece back in his pocket.

“Redbilly?” Riley called as he pulled open the narrow door to the silent chicken coop and swung his lantern toward the opening to see. Blood dripped down from the straw-filled rows of roosts, each holding a still, mute hen. The blood pooled on the floor. Riley crossed himself, then stepped into the coop, his lantern leading the way.

The hens were all dead; their white, plump bodies were still warm, their feathers flecked with blood. Riley picked up an egg, gingerly, from one of the nests. His dead mother’s face was impressed on the egg’s surface, frozen in terrified pain—exactly how she had looked the moment she had died in Dublin from the Black Vomit. The detail was like a photograph in its horrible clarity. It almost seemed to move. Riley gasped and dropped the egg. It hit the floor with a wet crunch. He grabbed another egg—again his mother’s frightened, frenzied eyes, her sunken cheeks, the flecks of foam at the corners of her mouth, a perfect depiction of her last pained breath. And on another egg, and another and another.

“Our Father Who art in Heaven…” Riley muttered the prayer even as he swung the lantern toward the back of the coop. Redbilly was there, hanging limply from the roost. The cock had somehow, through sheer terror, managed to twist his own neck backward until it snapped. The rooster had wrung his own neck rather than sing the song of this blasphemous day.

“… hallowed be Thy name…”

The coppery smell of blood mixed with the rich stench of chicken shit and a palpable fog of fear. Something creaked close by. A loose floorboard? The death rattle of a poor, dead, mad animal? Riley’s mind tumbled through the terrible permutations like a gambler shuffling cards.

“… thy kingdom come…” His voice quivered.

He tried to snort the spoor of death from his nostrils. He had to get out, get out into the fresh air, out into cool air and reason. He spun toward the coop’s door. His lantern’s beam was caught by a wet, black face with eyes as empty as the rooster’s, and oily hands clawing toward him.

The Egg Man’s short-lived scream was lost in the cacophony of Golgotha’s death throes.

“You have got to be pulling my leg,” Highfather said. His horse and Mutt’s galloped down Prosperity Street and turned onto Main. Donnie Broyles and his crew were walking out of the Golgotha Bank and Trust lugging bags overflowing with cash. They halted on the stairs of the bank as the sheriff and his deputy pulled their mounts to a stop in front of the robbers’ horses.

“What the hell are you doing, Donnie?” Highfather shouted. “I don’t have time for this!”

“How in tarnation do you know it’s me?” Donnie asked.

“’Cause no other soap lock in this town is stupid enough to rob the bank when the whole damned world is falling down. Now take that ridiculous bandana off your face and put the money back in there, right now.”

“Naw!” Donnie shouted as he tugged down the neckerchief from in front of his nose and mouth. “I ain’t gonna do it, Sheriff. Now git outta my way, or else we’re going to have to slap leather, right here, right now!”

Highfather looked at Mutt. The deputy rolled his eyes and shrugged. The sheriff dropped his hand near his holster and became very still. His eyes locked with Broyles’s.

“You sure you want to do this, Donnie?” Highfather said softly.

“You didn’t say nothin’ ’bout shooting no lawman, Donnie!” one of the other bandana-wearing men on the steps said. “Specially not a lawman that’s some kinda haint!”

“Shut up!” Donnie barked. “He ain’t no ghost—that’s jist a tale! He ain’t nothin’!”

Donnie looked at the sheriff. He’d have to cross draw to hit Donnie, and Donnie already had his gun in his hand. He was a dang good shot too. He could kill Highfather before he even got his gun out of his holster, dead to rights. And there was Donnie’s crew—all armed, all ready to cut the lawmen down. It was a done deal. He was sure of it. Sure of it right up until he looked in Highfather’s face, really looked. There was no fear in Jon Highfather right now, no uncertainty. Only a mild annoyance and perhaps a hint of pity. Then all the stories began rattling around in Donnie’s skull, like a bullet ricocheting. What if he couldn’t be killed? What if Donnie’s bullets just went on through him?

“Think about it, Donnie,” Highfather said. “Look around; look at the sky. You think you can ride away from this? Think the stars are still twinkling in Kansas City or Mexico? Where you going to spend that money when it’s all going to hell? You going to buy yourself a sunup? Still, I reckon if you got to pick a night to die, might as well be on the last night ever, huh? So, what do you say Donnie, we doing this or not?”

The pale eyes didn’t waver. The hand hovered inches from the holster, still as stone. Donnie’s dark eyes blinked; he swallowed hard and then laid his gun slowly on the ground.