Deadlands--Thunder Moon Rising
Page 32
“I don’t know yet,” she said. “A few, to start, to help me look around some. After that, maybe all of them’d be a good idea.”
* * *
Montclair stood in the doorway, still naked and painted in blood, watching the clouds roiling overhead and the Thunder Moon rising to meet them, when the abominations rode into the yard. These looked nearly human on horseback, in their dark hats and long dusters. One horse carried two of them, with the girl sandwiched between. When she saw Montclair, she struggled, trying to break the hold the abominations had on her. But they were strong, which was part of why Montclair liked them. They had been here for centuries, guarding Thunder Moon’s resting place, so in effect he had inherited them. They did his bidding; they had, after all, been waiting for one to come along who knew the right words to speak, the rituals to perform, to transfer their loyalty from the long-dead shaman to him. Waiting for the one who had come to claim Thunder Moon’s sleeping power.
The arcane knowledge he had amassed, thanks to his father’s money—and perhaps thanks to the way his father had made that money—had brought him to this place, at this time. The Thunder Moon was on the rise, Sadie was already his, and soon this other one, the girl so powerful her essence stung his breath and lungs, like a sudden inhalation on a frigid day, would also be his.
And power unmatched in the history of the world would flow to him. Through him, once-forbidden knowledge would be unleashed into the world.
He had told Sadie that he would be a king and she a queen, but the truth was, with only her by his side, he would never amount to more than a duke in the mystical realms. With this other one, in whom power ran like the waters of a flash flood, he could indeed be a king.
The abominations holding her handed her down to others already standing on the ground. The ones who had gone into town were some of those that had taken on human form on a nearly permanent basis. They were not fully human and never would be, but they had adopted that shape, could speak intelligibly and function in human society to some extent. Those were the ones Montclair used as ranch hands, and for any interactions with other people. The rest were essentially shadows given substance, beings that had taken on vaguely human shape without necessarily replicating any of what made people what they were. They were good for spreading terror, but not much else.
Still, the value of that couldn’t be overstated. Look at all it had brought him.
As some of these dragged Little Wing, kicking and writhing, to Montclair, they made raspy, chittering noises he had never been able to interpret. They stopped a few feet from the door, one holding each arm and another one behind her. She glared at Montclair.
“You’re angry,” he said. He could see that on her face, but there was something else there, too. It took him a moment to isolate it. Pride? Defiance? Something along those lines.
“Your not-men stole me,” she said. “They hurt my friend. Let me go.”
“I can’t do that.”
“I know you.”
“You might have seen me in town.”
“No. I know you. For what you are.”
He couldn’t help smiling at that. “And what do you imagine that I am?”
“Evil,” she said.
“Perhaps.”
“Not perhaps. Evil. You will kill and burn and destroy to have what you want.”
“Yes,” Montclair said. “That is true. Does that make me evil?”
“What makes you evil is what you would do and what you want.”
He reached forward and squeezed her cheeks with the strong fingers of his left hand. She tried to squirm away, but the abominations held her fast. She tried to snap at him, but he only squeezed harder. He waved the abominations away. Now that he had touched her, she was bound to him. “What I want? You know what I want?”
“You want power. Power to bend still others to your will. Everyone you see, everything you touch, you want to command.”
“I want only what is due me,” he said. “What I’ve earned through my own effort and toil.”
“No one needs that much power. No one but—”
He squeezed her cheeks harder, cutting off the word. “Do not speak that name here. Since you know so much, girl, do you know what your role here is?”
She held his gaze with her eyes. Defiant, yes, she was that. Proud. Unafraid. Unbowed.
Her lack of fear infuriated him.
“According to you?” she asked. “I am to be a sacrifice.”
“Yes,” Montclair said. “You are to be consumed by my followers. Your power will nurture them, imparting to them yet more abilities for them to use at my bidding.”
“My power? Used at your bidding? Are you certain?”
“The power comes from you, yes. But I will be the one giving them the gift. Their indebtedness and their loyalty will redound to me.”
She tried to break his mystical grip. She concentrated, almost shutting her eyes, letting her lips part. He could feel the energy rush off her in waves. It nearly worked. He had to redouble his own concentration. If she hadn’t been on his own land, at his house, with his minions around them, and him so recently fed on Sadie’s heart, she might have done it.
She was strong. Stronger than he had realized. It would not do to underestimate her.
She was bound, by ropes that could not be seen and were tougher than any made by man’s hands. But he was suddenly afraid that wouldn’t be enough. He raised his right hand and made a beckoning gesture. Abominations surged forward. He nodded his head toward the girl, giving an unspoken command. They swarmed her, lifting her off her feet and hoisting her onto their shoulders. She tried to fight, but her limbs were no longer hers to control.
She didn’t scream, though she could have. Montclair wasn’t preventing that. He admired her courage.
Pity it would do her no good in the end.
He looked into the house. “Sadie? It’s time to go, my dear.”
* * *
Sadie knew so much more in death than she had in life.
She understood so much. Jasper Montclair had eaten of her, and in so doing, had made her part of him. She remembered her own short, unhappy life—child, young woman, prostitute, wife. But she remembered his life, too, even parts that he had forgotten.
She followed him out the door. His abominations were carrying that girl, Little Wing, into the mountains. As they went, they were chittering but also calling, making sounds almost like birds, like the strange, throaty, reverberating chuckles of quail, but much louder, interspersed with low, undulating whoops. Montclair followed them. She followed him.
Other abominations—dozens, a hundred, more—flooded from the hillsides. She’d had no idea there were so many, until he had eaten her heart, and then shared it with some of them. When that happened, she had been immersed in an emotion somewhere between love and acceptance. It was nothing she had ever felt, but it was warm and good, so much better than even the best moments on laudanum. It was as if by giving up her own heart, she had been taken into theirs. Montclair’s, and whatever the abominations had that passed for hearts.
On the way, following Jasper into the hills, she poked around in his memories. On a day he had been watching her, in town, he had seen a boy in the street, and that boy had reminded him of another one, from his childhood. He had recalled that the boy had been kicked by a mule, and he had died right before his eyes.
What he didn’t remember—or if he did, he hid it from himself—was how that had come about.
The boy had been a playmate of young Jasper’s, once in a while, but he had not come from the same social class. Even then, the Montclairs were rich. The boy’s father had been a tradesman, someone who came to the Montclair estate once in a while to work in the gardens. Sometimes, he brought his son, who was Jasper’s age. Usually the boy worked alongside his father, but on one occasion, the boy had been ill, and the father—humiliated by the necessity of asking—had begged for him to be allowed to rest while the man did his job.
Jasp
er’s mother had agreed. But when Jasper had happened upon the boy, sitting in the shade instead of working, he had insisted that the boy play with him. The boy hadn’t wanted to play—he had been weak from illness, overheated, sweating. Jasper was the young master, though, so the boy had relented, and played until he felt dizzy and feverish. Then he had pushed Jasper, hard. Jasper fell and struck his head on a flagstone, opening a gash on his cheek and damaging his right eye—the eye that remained damaged even now.
Jasper’s maid had taken him inside and washed the cut, then bandaged it, while they waited for a doctor to arrive. As she held him, rocking him gently to soothe his nerves, she had promised that the boy would get what was coming to him. “Nobody hurts my little man,” she had said, over and over.
What Jasper had not understood until later in life was that his maid had dabbled in the dark arts herself. He had never known, in those days, why she sometimes tied knots in pieces of string and put them in what seemed to him to be odd places, or buried things in the garden, or lit candles and made patterns with the hot wax. There were other signs, things he couldn’t interpret and only remembered as dreams, if that.
But he knew now what had been going on then. She had been practicing witchcraft, or something like it. And when she promised her young charge that the boy would get his, she had meant it. The coach that knocked him into a building’s corner and opened his skull was proof of that.
At that age, Jasper Montclair had not understood any of it, though he had begun to within a few years. That understanding had led to a lifelong passion for the arcane. His father’s fortune had ensured that he could study with the best, acquire the texts that would advance his knowledge, and practice any ritual, however perverse or flatly illegal, without fear of punishment.
That pursuit had led them to this place, this time. Here, under the light of the Thunder Moon, with a light breeze stirring the oaks, the earthy smell of damp soil blending with the harsh but somehow sweet stink of the abominations, with their ululating calls echoing back and forth, and the love she felt for them and Montclair, and they for her. She didn’t need her heart to love, as it turned out. Or to be loved.
Whatever she needed for that, she had.
She had never been so happy, and it occurred to her, in an offhand way, that there was something odd about the fact that true happiness had eluded her until after she had lost her heart.
Chapter Fifty-one
Another downpour hit between the place where they left Kanouse’s body and Montclair’s ranch headquarters. It drenched them and moved on fast, leaving behind fresh, thick mud and a lightning-torn sky and thunder that echoed from the canyons that carved the Huachuca Mountains into a series of jagged peaks and deep clefts.
By the time they neared the headquarters, the clouds were breaking and the big moon was shining through, paling toward white as it climbed. A barbed wire fence surrounded the place. Tall pillars flanked the gate, with a beam suspended between them that had BROKEN M painted on it. Atop each pillar, as if judging all who entered, was the skull of a longhorn steer.
Tuck was staring up at them when Cale spoke. “Uhhh, Mr. Bringloe? Kuruk?”
“Yes, boy?” Kuruk said.
Cale didn’t answer. He was pointing at something on one of the wooden fence posts, just down from the gate. It looked like a flap of leather, nailed to the post. “Oh,” Kuruk said. Tuck edged his mare over for a closer look.
He needed a few moments to understand what he was seeing. It was a piece of … something, tacked at the top and hanging loose beneath. There were two holes, about five inches down from the top. Below them was a protuberance, then another, larger hole, and a few more inches below that to the bottom.
When it became clear, he shuddered. “It’s a face.”
“That’s what I thought,” Cale said. “I seen one before. Is it…?”
“It’s human.”
“I think I’m gonna be sick.”
“Save it,” Kuruk advised. “There’s worse to come.”
“Worse?” Cale asked.
“Worse.”
The scout had already passed through the gate. Tuck didn’t want to know what he had seen that made him say that, but he had to find out. No point in coming all this way if they didn’t finish what they’d started. “Come on, Cale,” he said. “We’ll meet it together, whatever it is.”
“Thanks, Mr. Bringloe,” Cale said. He didn’t sound at all cheered by the idea.
The stench that had been present but subdued since they had entered Montclair’s land, cut by the rain and the plant life, was much stronger here, and the chill was more pronounced. Tuck shivered and swept his gaze across the area inside the fence. He saw perhaps a dozen buildings, including a solid looking adobe ranch house, a good-sized barn, a couple of bunkhouses, a tack house, and others with less immediately apparent uses. Scattered around those were mesquites and yuccas, and the ranch house was nestled among live oaks that had spilled out of the mountains the ranch shouldered up against.
At first glance, it looked like any other thriving ranch. But the moonlight was too bright to allow him to ignore the rest of the scene.
Piles of bones gleamed in the silvery light, each about five feet tall and topped with a layer of human skulls, vacant-eyed and grinning. Hanging by ropes from the branches of the oaks were arms and legs, hands and feet, in various stages of decomposition. Jutting from the ground in spots, as if they had rooted there along with the trees and brush, were poles, ten feet tall and sturdy enough to hold the corpses impaled on them. Lines stretched from the house to some of the trees, the poles, even to stakes driven into the ground as if around a tent, and tied to those lines were more body parts: faces and scalps, long peelings of flesh as if from torsos or backs, and more.
Tuck’s mother, he thought, would have felt right at home.
Cale leaned off the side of his horse and retched. Tuck stayed close until he was done. He felt for the boy. He was sickened, too, at the inhuman cruelty before them. Whatever else Montclair was, he was a monster of the first order.
Tuck worried all the more for Little Wing, and even Sadie.
The buildings seemed empty. The front door of the house was wide open, and moths clouded the doorway, drawn by the glow of lamps from within. Delahunt and Johnson dismounted and took a quick look inside. When they returned, they were ashen. “Just like out here,” Delahunt reported. “Only worse. Ain’t nobody inside, though.”
“Let’s keep going, then,” Tuck said. The ground between the house and barn was heavily trodden. Lots of people had passed through, and recently. He followed the trail. Cuttrell came behind him, then Kuruk and Cale. Delahunt and Johnson flanked the wagon as it trundled along after them.
Between the house and the mountains, things were even stranger. There were dozens of small, rough-hewn structures back there, little more than lean-tos constructed from branches, yucca stalks, and skins. Those, Tuck realized with a grimace, were both animal and human. Bones were scattered everywhere, not neatly stacked like the ones in front. This place was an abattoir, and had been for a long time. He kept riding, though his horse stepped lightly, snorting often, obviously disturbed by the surroundings.
The small structures continued, seventy or eighty or more, leading away from the house and up into the foothills. From the reeking miasma around them, Tuck was sure these were the dwelling places of those creatures Little Wing had called “not-men.” There must have been more than he could have imagined.
But where were they? And where were Montclair and Little Wing and Sadie Cuttrell? The trail led up, through a fringe of oaks and into a deep, shadowy canyon. It was narrower here, choked with trees and huge rocks. He wasn’t sure the battlewagon could negotiate it much farther. Water coursed through streambeds and creeks that had sat bone-dry for most of the year. The scents of mountain air and rich vegetation would have been invigorating, but for the remnant stink of the not-men.
“I don’t like this,” Kuruk said.
�
��You and me both.”
“We celebrate the Mountain Spirits,” Kuruk continued. “The Gah’e are dancers who represent them in our ceremonies. The Chiricahua, I’m talking about, my people. The Mountain Spirits keep us safe from enemies and disease. But when they’re angered, they’re very dangerous. I don’t know if Montclair is using the Mountain Spirits, but if he is, and has somehow twisted them into spirits that murder and mutilate, then…” He let the sentence trail off, then swallowed and picked it up again. “Anyhow, there’s gonna be trouble ahead. Bad trouble.”
“You don’t have to come, Kuruk,” Tuck said. “We’re all volunteers, here.”
“Little Wing is up there,” Kuruk said. “I’m going.”
“Fair enough,” Tuck said. His words were swallowed by a deafening peal of thunder. Lightning threw the canyon ahead into stark contrast, trees and boulders catching the brilliant flare against the shadowed walls. On the tail of the thunder, he heard something that sounded like a voice, speaking words in a language he didn’t know. It boomed from deep in the canyon’s upper reaches, and when the thunder faded, he still heard it. Although the lightning was gone, lights still flashed in the distance, rolling through the treetops like tumbleweed across a flat plain.
“What the hell’s that?” Johnson asked.
“It’s a voice,” Cuttrell replied. “It’s Montclair’s voice.”
“It’s so loud,” Cale said.
“This is no good,” Kuruk said. “He’s messing with things he don’t understand.”
“Or he does understand ’em,” Delahunt said. “Might could be worse that way.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Tuck said. “But we’re here. Let’s find out what’s going on.”
While they were stopped, the hatch on the wagon’s cupola opened and McKenna climbed out. He was dripping with sweat, as soaked as if he had been out in the rain. “I don’t know how you did that for so long, Willie,” he said. “It’s killin’ me.”
“Take five, Lieutenant,” Cuttrell said. “There’s no point in us killing ourselves before we engage the enemy.”