The Six-Gun Tarot (7 page)

“But, but they are so, so unnatural,” Aputel said. “I mean they hate, us, Biqa—surely we have as much right to endure, our way to endure, as they do. Surely.”

Biqa smiled, a sad, fleeting thing. “I hate them too. I’ve seen them rip apart my brethren, my friends, and feast on their ichor, like wine. No, Aputel, we are invested now. It’s war. I just blame Him for making us to fight and suffer and die in His place; I blame Him for creating more and more layers of control and isolation between Himself and those He creates, those He claims to love.”

“Have care, Biqa; you again tempt His anger!”

The dark angel shrugged and turned back to the yawning eternal night.

“Mark my words, one day it will be His undoing. But today, I do my duty. I know my place and I shall serve Him and do His bidding. However, in this commission I shall not act with the zeal He breathed into us. I’ve had my fill of war.”

“You would do well to be careful,” Aputel said gently. “Others know of your disquiet. Some say you are correct; others call you dangerous and think the Almighty should punish you. Even Lucifer has been heard speaking of the merit of your arguments.”

“Sharp one, that Lucifer. I see why he is God’s most beloved. Best watch himself, though, if he wants to stay at the head of the table. No, my friend, I have no desire to make my concerns a cause, or my misgivings a revolt. I’m loyal and I always shall be—I give you my oath.” The angel loosened his blade in its scabbard. “Let’s get it over with.”

“Let us be about our duty, my friend,” Aputel said eagerly, hoping to infect his dark companion with some enthusiasm for the task to come.

The two angels turned their mounts in the direction of the battle when the Darkness began to roil. Great nebulas of dirty light bubbled up through the oily infinity. A sound vomited from the depths of the Darkness. It was unlike anything either of them had ever heard. The closest approximation to its timbre and its scope was the voice of the Almighty, singing. But this was no hymn; it was a dirge. In its annihilating cadence there was the menace of retribution, of an awful reckoning, an endless chorus of pain.

Behind them, Heaven’s first great arch groaned, shuddered and fell. The Darkness swelled and crashed all about them; massive waves of night threatened to crash upon the shores of light, drowning everything. All that was rippled, threatened to tear, to break like Heaven’s gate, but before that point of no return was reached the noise diminished, growing fainter and less expansive until finally all of creation was once again silent and still.

“We should get back,” Biqa said.

The angels turned toward the glittering dust settling over Heaven’s ruins. But before they could spur their Equina on, another rider appeared across the radiant plane. It became clear as he approached it was Jophiel, one of the highest of the Hosts. He did not look happy.

“Rejoice,” the dour angel said. “Lo, I bring you glad tidings. While you two tarried and shirked your obligations, the rest of us have tasted sweet victory in the glorious name of our Lord. The last of the enemy has been vanquished.”

“It has been destroyed?” Aputel said.

Jophiel’s naturally bitter demeanor deepened before he replied. “The beast was overpowered and about to be slain when the Lord saw fit, in His infinite justice and mercy, to stay His hand of rightly deserved vengeance and to order the creature to be bound and imprisoned.”

Aputel looked to Biqa, as if to see if this explanation satisfied the troubled angel’s mind.

“How many?” Biqa asked Jophiel.

“Pardon?”

“How many of our brethren were destroyed before He realized you couldn’t kill it?”

“What are you yammering on about now, Biqa? Perhaps it was best you were not in the fray—your judgment has been unsound as of late.”

“I’m calling you a liar, Jophiel. Is that clear enough?”

The Archangel darkened. His hand dropped to the hilt of his blade. “Remember to whom you speak, Biqa. To contradict my tale is to challenge the words of the Almighty Himself. The beast is to be imprisoned, locked away in chains of divine light for all time. Our losses are irrelevant. We exist to serve, to perish, as our Lord commands. Besides, if you were so concerned about your brethren you could have made your way to the battlefield.”

Biqa shook his head. “You couldn’t kill it. It’s the oldest of them, the largest; the others seemed to suckle it like they drew dark nectar from its form. It was too old, too powerful, to ever end. What unfathomable arrogance makes you think you can keep it chained up?”

The Archangel smiled for the first time. It was as disquieting as the turmoil earlier. “All has been attended to, you shall see. Now, I came to give you this news and to escort you, Biqa, into the presence of the Almighty, personally.”

“Very well,” the dark angel said. “Why am I to be so honored?”

“Do not dare to mock the privilege given unto you,” Jophiel snapped. “You are ordered to attend and you shall. That is all you need know.”

“It is merely a question, Jophiel.”

“Yes. You ask far too many of those for my taste, Biqa. Attend me, now. The Lord commands it.”

Biqa brought his mount alongside the Archangel’s Equina, which was still snorting black ash from the battlefield. The dark angel regarded Aputel.

“You should commend this one, Jophiel. He has been chastising me for my absence. Obviously he has been paying close attention to your sermons about duty and responsibility.”

Jophiel narrowed his gaze at the fair angel.

“As well he should. Be about your duties, Aputel. To tarry is to defy the Lord’s will.”

“Yes, Archangel.”

Aputel frowned as he watched the two angels depart toward Heaven. Biqa looked back, smiled and winked. Then they were gone, lost in the brilliant incandescence of the fields.

Already, the Darkness was receding; the angelic hosts glittered in the indigo filament. A great shape, a shape that defied the newly christened concepts of color and dimension, mass and thought, was dragged downward toward the great skeletal stage that God had named the Earth.

The angel looked at the last of the Voidlings. His mind scrambled for purchase, for some foothold to comprehend something it was never designed to experience. The Voidling’s chains burned with the fire of unborn suns and sang endless hosannas unto the creator of the new universe.

His heart should fill with joy at such sights, such sounds. But it didn’t. He had the sick feeling that nothing had been resolved. This new world was being built upon conflict and death. He feared such a foundation would poison the entire work. And the thing, the creature that was to be entombed at its heart, would squat in the darkness, an undying witness to the lengths to which ambition would reach. If Biqa was correct, it would seethe, it would hate and it would remember who put it there. But it would never, never die.

The fair angel turned toward the promises of Heaven and spurred his mount. Unlike Biqa, he did not look back.

The Queen of Swords

Maude Stapleton tucked the derringer she held in her palm back into the recesses of her sleeve sheath with a casual flick of her hand. The men and women walking down Main Street in that moment only saw Arthur Stapleton’s odd, quiet, slightly skittish, wife gather up her flowing hair and adjust her bonnet after the commotion in front of Shultz’s store—nothing more. No one noticed her returning the small pistol to the hiding place she had carried it in since she was fifteen years old.

The deputy, the man everyone called Mutt, had almost noticed her draw the gun when the shotgun blast bellowed out of the general store, but he was too intent on tying to save her and Constance by driving them to the ground and covering them. Mutt. She wondered why someone with such kind eyes carried such a harsh name.

It was the same drive, to protect her daughter, that had driven Maude to draw the gun. It was an old instinct, rusty like a neglected hinge, part of the training she had undertaken when she first accepted the responsibility of The Load, when she was just a girl, not much younger than Constance was now. Maude remembered the endless training, the drilling. The instincts it had built in her had gone to sleep, lost under the strata of motherhood, the duties of the good wife, some lost to age, more buried under fear and hesitation and doubt. She was surprised how much of it was still in her, though, still ready. She was just as saddened and a little shocked at how much of it was gone.

“Why didn’t you stop the old man when he came in the store, Mother?” Constance asked as they made their way up the plank sidewalks of Main Street.

While still splashed with mud, horse dung and other effluents best left to the imagining, the sidewalks were practically sanitary, compared to the ditches of filth on either side of them. To allow the two ladies to pass, men stepped off the planks, stepping right into the muck without a second thought. If they wore hats they doffed them to the ladies. Maude noticed how many looked at Constance’s chest, not her face, how many smiles hid leers. She nodded politely as the men stepped into the shit and allowed her and her daughter to pass. Maude knew over a hundred ways to blind them, cripple them, make them beg for an end to the pain. She was confident she could still muster the skill and enthusiasm to accomplish at least a few, despite her decline. In time she would teach Constance how to use these men’s instincts against themselves. But for now Maude did what most women did, tried to ignore the unwanted attention.

“He had a gun,” Maude said, “and was intoxicated. That makes it difficult to predict his actions, gauge his reflexes. That gun was pointed at you. I couldn’t take any chances.”

Constance nodded, seemingly satisfied with the half-truth. While that was all accurate, it was also true, Maude knew, that she was getting old, slowing down, and hadn’t had to take out an armed opponent in decades. She had hesitated, been frightened, acted like a mousey, untrained woman. Gran would have cursed her up one side and down another for that, rightly so. It had worked out well, but due to luck, not preparation. And luck was as reliable as the men’s smiles that passed them.

“That Indian deputy was looking at you funny,” Constance said with a half smile. “Especially when he was on top of you.” She giggled.

Maude looked down at the planks as they walked. Her face reddened. She smiled and laughed with her daughter. “I suppose he did. But what men other than your father do or think is none of my concern, young lady. Or yours.”

Constance snickered. “Yes, Mother.”

They rounded the corner of Main Street and stepped down a short set of steps off the sidewalk. They began to head up Prosperity Street toward their house, near the base of Rose Hill. The dusty, filthy streets of Golgotha grudgingly gave way to a narrow, smooth stone path lined with shading desert willow trees. The path ran adjacent to a gently sloping dirt road that wound leisurely up Rose Hill, past the homes of the town’s most wealthy and respected citizens. The Stapleton homestead resided near the base, as afforded their station in the town’s aristocracy. Bankers, like Arthur, were wealthy, true, but they were functionaries, a necessary evil and not privy to the heights. The subtle distinction in class irritated Arthur, who constantly strove to climb Olympus, but Maude didn’t care. She had money; she’d lost it. What she carried was infinitely more precious than any treasure or status and no one could take it from her. Well, apparently no one but herself.

Maude and Constance waved to Mrs. Kimball, their neighbor, who was tending the water pump that resided in the center of the cluster of homes on this stratum of the hill.

“You poor dears look like you’ve been feeding the hogs!” Mrs. Kimball called. “What happened?”

“Trouble at Shultz’s,” Maude said as she unlocked the door to her home, a modest Italianate Victorian, whitewashed and bleached silver by the attention of the desert sun.

“Regular trouble or Golgotha trouble?” Kimball asked.

“Regular, as far as I could tell,” Maude said.

“Oh, good. We’ve had quite enough of the other kind to last us for some time!”

The house was shady, quiet and cool. Dust motes drifted lazily in the shafts of light through the leaded-glass windows. Constance unloaded their baskets on the rosewood dining table they had brought with them from South Carolina, while Maude opened a few shutters to let in enough light to chase off the gloom.

“You are a mess,” Constance said, smiling.

“Well, you are certainly not in your finest form either. Put the provisions away and then fetch us some water. We’ll clean up.”

“Then practice?” Constance said eagerly.

“Haven’t you had enough excitement for one day?”

“Please!”

“We’ll see. Off with you!”

Maude retired to her and Arthur’s bedroom. She closed the door and began the byzantine ritual of undressing from her muddy clothes. First the dress, gloves, boots, then unlacing the canvas stays that held her chest and spine erect. She sighed with pleasure at her escape from the bindings. Then the layers of petticoats, followed by her thigh-high stockings and finally her simple cotton shift. Maude regarded herself, nude, in the mahogany cheval mirror that Arthur had brought back with him from one of his trips to San Francisco.

She had to force herself to look up at her image. Her skin was pale; the faint memories of scars from her years with Gran Bonnie and the training were even paler and crisscrossed her body. While she carried the marks of her years and motherhood on her flesh, she retained a surprising amount of her strength and wiry youth. It was a good body, and she knew it deep inside, but it was hard to feel it under the weight of her life. She was ashamed and she hated herself for feeling that way. Ashamed of feeling old, ashamed of feeling ugly and unwanted. Ashamed of being past the point of relevancy anymore, at least to Arthur and to herself. She hated caring about all that. Why should she give a damn about what others thought of her, what men thought of her? Especially Arthur. She could hear Bonnie saying the words in her skull, but the fire and the joy they had once carried was gone. In its place she had regret and an ache stronger than any she had ever known to secure in her daughter the tools needed to never fall into the trap Maude had found herself in, the one she had sworn to never fall into.