The Shotgun Arcana (23 page)

“I will listen, Clayton, and you are going to tell me everything, and then we’ll see if I go to the sheriff and tell him exactly what you’ve been up.”

“Gillian, please put that down, before someone gets hurt, yes?” Auggie said. “You know I’d never let anyone hurt you, darling.”

Gillian hung onto the blade and backed into the workbench.

“I love you, Auggie, but no more secrets. I want the truth and I want it now, or else I go to Jon Highfather.”

Clay and Auggie looked at each other. Auggie nodded to Clay. “I want the whole truth, too, Clay,” Auggie said. “I think we both deserve that.”

Clay looked at the ground and then nodded. “I reckon you both do,” he said. “Well, to start off with, I’ve discovered the secret to eternal life.”

The Emperor (Reversed)

Twenty-one years earlier …

April 10, 1849

San Francisco

San Francisco hummed with a song of life, surging, mad, vibrant. The streets were teeming streams of faces, noise and commotion: different languages, shouting, street vendors hawking, whistles, music from voices and instruments, shouts of anger and bursts of laughter, the barking of dogs, the shrill calls of exotic birds, the mouthwatering scents of cooking from dozens of different cultures around the country and the globe, the stench of gutters overflowing, the honeyed voices of women from windows above the crowds urging clients to come up to call.

One word had turned San Francisco from another sleepy port town to a boomtown with hundreds of newcomers arriving daily—gold. Whole crews were jumping ship as soon as they docked at Clark’s Point. Overnight, hotels, general stores, saloons and whorehouses all sprung up due to demand.

Malachi Bick walked through the teeming throngs, smiling in wonder. The crowd seemed to naturally part for him. Despite the grim reason for his visit to this blooming Bay City, he couldn’t help but marvel at the life, the energy, teeming here. He loved cities, loved being among people. After his long isolation in the desert, he had to admit he was happy to be away from Golgotha, if only for a little while.

He turned left off Broadway onto Kearney Street. The neighborhood got a bit rougher here and much more bawdy. He paused outside a saloon called Dennison’s Exchange, which faced toward Portsmouth Square’s sprawl of open-air markets, peddlers and street performers.

Bick turned back toward the saloon. A small girl, maybe seven years old, stood looking up at him with intense green eyes.

“Hello,” Bick said.

“My mum is sick and playing the sleeping game with a man and my da is gone off to sea,” she said. “I’m hungry.” The child was dressed in a thin, filthy dress; her bare feet were black. Her skin was golden and dark, her ebony hair a wild mane that fell below her shoulders. She resembled a tiny, disheveled, dark lion.

“What’s your name, child?” Bick said.

“Rowan,” she said.

“You are a very good liar, Rowan,” Bick said, and handed the girl one of the newly minted gold dollar coins. “You almost fooled me and that is very hard to do.”

“Is this real?” The child snatched the coin and clutched it to her chest. Bick nodded.

“As real as anything is, girl. Off with you now, before I take it back.”

Rowan laughed and ran away.

Bick entered the cool, smoky darkness of the saloon. The place was tightly packed and the rumble of the patrons’ conversations and the warm, mahogany of the black piano player’s voice as he sung “Old Rosin the Beau” made Bick wish he could sit and enjoy a drink and soak it all in. A young boy of perhaps six with dusky skin and long curly black hair, shot through with coppery strands, accompanied the piano player, obviously his father. The boy was quite good.

Bick approached the stairs leading up to the private rooms on the second floor. Several Mexican and Indian women were leaning over the rail of the stairs, negotiating with saloon patrons. Two men lounged near the foot of the stairs, guns on their hips. They looked up as Bick approached.

“I’m here to see him,” Bick said.

“He’s busy,” the one wearing the bowler said. The other, an Indian with a necklace of mummified human ears, crossed his arms.

“I know what you’ve done, Jeremiah,” Bick said to the man in the bowler, his voice oiled steel. “You, too, Simon,” he said to the Indian. “All the terrible things. All the lives you’ve ended. That family that came in on the Hastings Route. What you did to their children after you killed them.… The preacher in Nacogdoches you crucified.… I can see them, see their eyes staring into you as you snuffed out their light.”

Both men’s eyes widened as Bick stared them down. Jeremiah began to weep. Simon clutched at his chest.

“Look at them, look at all of them,” Bick said. “Can you feel their gaze clawing at your eyeballs, your soul? Can you feel them crawling inside you? They have something to share with you.”

Both men fell to the floor shuddering, convulsing, sobbing. Simon rolled over and began to heave. The whole bar was silent, except for the weeping of the two men.

“We did it for him,” Simon mewled. “We did all of it for his glory.”

“Yes,” Bick said. “I need to have a word with him about that.”

Bick walked over them and began to climb the stairs. He tipped his hat to the shocked prostitutes as he passed them.

He kicked in the bedroom door, third on the left. There were four women, all nude, slumbering even after the crash of Bick’s entrance. Ray Zeal was sitting up in the bed, naked and smiling at Bick.

“Malachi, my old friend,” Zeal said. “You look as miserable as ever. I take it you dealt with my men on the stairs and at the door? Pity, they’ll be no good to anyone after that. Now if my boy had been here, then you would have had a fight on your hands.”

“We need to talk, Ray,” Bick said. “Now.”

Zeal was just over six feet, with a slender, muscular build. His hair was spun gold, curly and falling in loose locks down to his neck. He sported muttonchops but was otherwise clean-shaven. His face was perfect, like a Greek statue, and his smile was both infectious and sincere, as if Zeal were smiling with every fiber of his existence. And of course his teeth were perfect too. Zeal climbed over the pile of slowly stirring women and stood beside the bed, completely unconcerned with his lack of clothes.

“Alone,” Bick said, nodding to the women. Zeal laughed and clapped his hands.

“Ladies, wakey-wakey! I know I promised you a good long rest after our horizontal refreshment, but I’m afraid I must entertain an old friend.”

A few of the women began to climb out of the bed, groaning, and slipped on robes. One didn’t stir. Zeal leaned over her.

“Out!” he bellowed. “Now!” The woman jumped to her feet, terrified, and fled the room, still in a state of undress. Laughing, her peers followed her and Bick closed the door behind them. By the time the door closed, Zeal’s smile was back at full brightness.

“And what occasion drags you away from your dingy little hellhole in the desert, Malachi?” Zeal asked as he leaned against the bed and pulled on a pair of denim work pants.

“Guess,” Bick said, grabbing a chair by the door and sitting down. He began to roll himself a cigarette. Zeal pointed to Bick and held up two fingers. Bick sighed, nodded and began to roll a second cigarette. “It’s about the skull. Do you have any idea what it’s done? How many people are dead or half mad because of it?”

Zeal shrugged. He slid on a gray shirt and began to button it. It appeared to be made of silk or some other smooth, shiny material. It rippled like water as he buttoned it. “You mean it’s not locked up tight and safe in that cave of yours?”

“Of mine!” Bick said, tossing the cigarette at Zeal. The blond man caught it easily, the smile never leaving his face. “It is your responsibility, your duty! You left it in Golgotha because you were tired of guarding it and wanted to go play in the world.” Bick gestured to the room.

“And played I have,” Zeal said, sliding on a pair of heavy black boots. “You should really try it. It’s an amazing world, if you enjoy slumming, Biqa. Can we just drop the whole ‘Ray-Malachi’ thing? It gets tiresome and the children are all out of the room. Grown-up time.”

“As you wish, Raziel,” Malachi Bick, the angel Biqa, said. “I’m not the one who chose ‘Ray Zeal’ as a traveling name anyway. It’s a bit cheeky.”

“Cheeky!” Raziel said. “Not at all, it has the flair of the dramatic and it denotes a positive outlook on life. I like it. It’s just nice to drop pretenses and let your wings down, so to speak, with someone from the old hometown.”

Biqa lit his own cigarette, then the golden angel’s as well. Both angels were silent for a moment as they enjoyed the tobacco.

“Any word from home?” Raziel asked.

“No,” Biqa said. “There’s never word from home.”

“Do you ever consider that perhaps we are just two lunatics sharing a delusion? That we are no more angels than the moon is made of cheese?” Raziel said.

“No,” Biqa said. “This reality is not our home. We are not from here. This is just the crossroads. Our home is the Radiance. We are here to perform our duties for the Almighty. Your duty is to guard that skull, and you have shirked that responsibility for far too long and people have died for it.”

“And what would you have me do, Biqa?” Raziel asked. “Sit in a dark cave staring at a moldering old hunk of bone until the stars burn away?”

“Yes,” Biqa said. “If that is what is needed to secure it and keep that thing from being loosed on this world, the other worlds, then yes.”

Raziel exhaled smoke through his nose and shook his head. “Back home, you would never have dared speak to me in this manner. I was the Keeper of Secrets, the vessel of divine knowledge, one of the Princes of the Second Heaven. When the Almighty whispered mysteries, he whispered them to me.

“Don’t presume to lecture me on my duties, Biqa. How many times have you snuck away from that pit you guard? How many divine bastards have you sired, even knowing what such a birth always does to the mortal mother? Tell me, Biqa, how far have you fallen?”

“Not so far that I have forgotten who I am and what I am,” the dark angel said. “Not so far that I disobey my orders. I do my job as well as yours. It escaped using a child, Raziel, a child! If either of the things we guard escape, everything ends—mine quickly like a bomb, yours slowly, like rabies. You cannot simply desert your post.”

“My post.” Raziel laughed and fell back on the bed, his long legs over the side, still touching the floor. “My post, our orders. Do you fancy yourself a soldier, Biqa? Did you slay many Voidlings in the War of Darkness, the First War?” He sat back up, quickly; the smile was now a sneer.

“Did you hear the sound of the war against the rebels, against Lucifer’s traitorous army, while you were down here standing watch over the mother of the Voidlings and playing patty-cake with the monkeys? Did you see the Pearlescent Gates burn and fall? Did you spill your brother’s blood on your blade, listen to it hiss as it boiled? Hear the howls, the begging, the screams of rage and terror as they were cast out?

“You are no solider, Biqa. You are the same thing I am, an exile. You, for questioning His motives and actions in the War of Darkness; me, for daring to give divine knowledge to the monkeys that my fellow Archangels of the Sephirot said they were unprepared to receive, the hypocrites! Exiles, Biqa. Not quite fallen, not quite whole, in-between, given meaningless tasks, cosmic busywork and kept away from the balm of the Radiance for our transgressions.”

Biqa exhaled smoke. “I’ve seen my share of war,” he said. “All of them. Despite what you think, Raziel, our tasks are far from meaningless. I used to think I was an outcast, but I’ve come to believe that I was sent here to learn. This Earth, this world, is a classroom. I’m here to learn lessons and I do fail, oh, do I fail, but I remember why I am here.”

Biqa regarded the cigarette and dropped it at his feet, crushing it out with his boot.

“I think I’m very sure of why I’m here too,” Raziel said. “And I think I have gleaned any lessons I need to out of this construct of decay, illusion and death.”

Raziel stood holding the cigarette by his lips as he slipped on a brocaded vest of blue and left it unbuttoned. He picked up a gun belt off the table by the bed and a cavalry saber, sheathed. He buckled on the belt and then affixed the sheath to it.

“Do those lessons include setting yourself up as a false god to these people?” Biqa said, his eyes on the guns and the blade at the golden angel’s belt.

“Oh, that,” Raziel said. “You mean my little congregation.”

“Yes,” Biqa said. “That. You have followers, more than that, worshipers, a cult. Across the globe, small bands of cutthroats, murderers. Sick, evil predators, like those two downstairs. They commit atrocities for you, in your name—Raziel. Explain yourself.”

Raziel laughed again. He walked to Biqa and knelt on one knee before the sitting angel, leaning in close to his face.

“Explain myself? To you? Very well … old friend.

“You see, Biqa, what I discovered in the wars was that I liked killing, maiming. I loved it. I loved that my creator gave me a purpose, and that purpose is to slaughter. It thrilled me, it made me feel like the Almighty understood me, loved me so much he gave me wars and rebellions to slake my thirst for blood, for murder; that he created this whole charnel house, this joke of a world, just for me.”

“You’ve lost your way, Raziel,” Biqa said. “Perhaps it was the skull; it may have influenced you.…”

“Influenced me,” Raziel laughed, looking into Biqa’s dark, calm eyes with his own brilliant, shining blue ones. “Biqa, I was made to be the skull’s guardian, its master. I felt this way before the Earth was even forged. I felt this way from the instant of my creation. What things do you think the Almighty was whispering into my ear all those countless eons? Words of endearment? Of joy and peace and love? No. He dipped his tongue in the blackest blood and he whispered to me of slaughter, of death, of torture and atrocity. That is your creator, Biqa. He built this entire lovely, lovely playground so that he could tear it apart, abuse and neglect his toys and listen to the terrified screams of the monkeys as they tried to understand. And only I was capable of comprehending that desire, that uncontrollable urge to control, to destroy and to feed on terror.”