“The last document the president signed the night he was assassinated by that sorry secesh, Booth, was an executive order to create the Office of Special Intelligence Resources, Investigation, and Security.”
“Sounds fancy enough to beat the Dutch,” Highfather said, rising and refreshing both his and Kate’s mugs. “And what is all that, exactly?”
Kate took a sip and resumed. “It’s an esoteric branch of the Secret Service, which the president also signed into being the night of his death.”
“Secret Service works like the Marshals as I understand,” Highfather said. “Work any cases they care to: murders, bank robbery, try to hunt down folks passing bum script, too, I gather.”
Kate nodded. “Yes, and we carry normal Secret Service credentials. Our department is under the independent authority of Allan Pinkerton and the Pinkerton Detective Agency. We’re tasked with investigating activities and individuals of a preternatural nature that may prove to be a threat to the Republic. Allan reports directly to the president and his cabinet. We investigate the things that go bump in the night, Jon. I’ve been at it for five years.”
“I expect if it’s anything like around here, you all don’t make the papers too often,” Highfather said.
Kate laughed. “No, no we don’t. In fact, I was declared officially dead two years ago; most of the senior operatives are.”
“Dead? Don’t you have any family?” Highfather asked.
“No,” she said. “I guess Allan is the closest thing I have to that. I’m officially ‘buried’ in his plot, next to where he will eventually lie. Considering the kind of work I do, it’s best I don’t have anyone to fret over.”
“Sounds like Pinkerton looks after you pretty well,” Highfather said, looking straight at Kate as he took another drink. Kate waved her hand dismissively and laughed.
“Oh, no, no. Nothing like that. Mr. Pinkerton is a married man.”
“‘Mr. Pinkerton,’ not ‘Allan,’” Highfather said. Kate blushed and nodded.
“Very astute, Sheriff. You are quite a detective yourself.”
“None of my business, Kate,” Highfather said. “Pretty woman like yourself, man would have to be dead, buried and married not to notice you about.”
“Is that so?” she said, smiling and tracing her finger along the rim of the mug. “Well, aren’t you quite the charmer, Jon Highfather?”
“So what led you here?” he said.
“Changing the subject?” she said, laughing.
“Getting shot’s a damn sight less dangerous than dancing around pretty words with a woman, Kate,” he said. “So why are you in Golgotha and why have you been spying on us without at least checking in?”
“A wise man, you are. It’s called ‘assuming a role,’” she explained. “Allan developed it during the war. You go into enemy territory under a false pretense and with a false identity and cover story. It’s very effective, especially for me, as a woman. I walked past you quite a few times as a fancy girl and you never gave me a second glance. That hurt my feelings a little bit, to be honest.”
“My heart is as pure as Galahad,” Highfather said, grinning. “And my head is as thick as Gibraltar. So you were pretending to be one of the Doves for better part of two months.…”He let the implication hang in the air.
“It wasn’t the first time I’ve had to do something like that, Jon,” she said. “Doubt it will be the last.”
“How can Pinkerton do that to you?” Highfather said. “If he cares about you, loves you, how could he send you into…”
“Allan Pinkerton cares about duty first, country second, and everything else third,” she said. “He expects the same from his employees. He didn’t make me do anything, Jon. This is dirty work, and I knew that going in.”
Highfather shook his head. “I’m sorry, Kate. So you were tracking Vellas?”
Warne shook her head. “No, your boy Jim just dropped his name and I knew what he was capable of, so I took off to help you. I lost a good friend and a good partner to that evil bastard a few years back in Saint Louis. Vellas had been killing folks for a long time. We think he slaughtered a settlement near Fort Chambly in the northeast—forty-three men, women and children—all by himself. It felt damn good to see him finally go down.”
“Well, if it wasn’t Vellas, then who?”
Kate sighed. “This past summer, in the District of Columbia, someone started murdering women. His targets were all public girls, but very high-class ones—the secret mistresses of some of the congressmen and other government officials who reside in the District. The killer sewed his victims’ eyes shut as part of the mutilation of the bodies. He claimed five victims. I want him and I think he’s here.”
“Why here, Kate?” Highfather said. “Not that he wouldn’t fit in. But our Dove killer hasn’t sewn any eyes shut as far as I know. The only thing in common is they both prey on public girls, and even then it’s a long stretch from a senator’s girl to working the Dove’s Roost.”
“All very true,” Kate said. “And again, excellent detective work. However, I have one piece of information you are lacking that explains why I’ve been hiding out and looking for my killer here, Jon. Our District killer’s fifth and final victim was murdered in a suite at a very posh hotel in the District. She was slaughtered without a sound. He painted the walls in her blood.…”
Kate’s face became ashen and Highfather knew. He knew she was in that hotel room, right now, trying to snort the thick coppery stench out of her nostrils as she visited with the ripped and savaged dead. Instinctively, his hands went across the table and took hers. She looked at him as if she didn’t quite recognize him. He nodded, his lips moved, but he said nothing, just held her hands, anchoring her, like he had wished someone could have anchored him through all those horrible, frozen tumors of memory. Eden had, Larson had, until they became part of the atrocity gallery’s exhibits. Now he had no one to hold his hand as he walked between the screaming, looping paintings. But Kate did, at least this one time. He squeezed her hand and she squeezed his back.
“Does it ever get easier?” she said softly, finally.
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “If Pinkerton is your armor, Kate, then use him. You walk this alone, it will eat you alive.”
“How do you manage?” she asked.
“I’m a dead man,” he said.
She pulled her hands away from his, crossed her chest with them, hugging herself.
“Our District killer, he wrote on the walls in her blood. One word over and over and over.”
“Let me guess,” Highfather said.
“Golgotha,” she said.
The Three of Swords
Chi Mo Duan was cast out of the venerable Green Ribbon Tong of Chinese mystics, assassins and trained killers. Duan had been a member of the tong in Hangzhou and was considered one of the finest killers the secret society had ever produced. His downfall came due to his mental instability and bloodlust against the city’s community of Chinese, Muslims and Jews, whom he viewed as “infected.” His wanton, bloody killing sprees drew too much attention to an order whose greatest weapons were silence and anonymity.
Duan had the arrogance and presumption to voice his disgust with the direction of the tong to its leader, Ah Kung Ch’eng Huang, within the tong boss’s underground sanctum far beneath the squalid Chinese city’s streets. For his presumption and lack of respect, he was told to leave China or die, and was warned by Huang himself to stay out of Chinese communities across the globe. He was an outcast and unwelcome.
Duan sailed to America in 1865 and began to wander the railroad camps that dotted the American West, driving rail spikes into the eyes of his thirty-one Chinese and American victims. The Union-Pacific Railroad dicks who unsuccessfully tried to hunt him and stop him came to call him what the Chinamen who feared him called him: Yeng-Wang-Yeh. The Lord and Judge of the Dead.
Duan’s was number thirteen. He headed west, inspired by the voice in the dying sun to seek out o
ne who could give him his fill of blood, and of revenge.
The Knight of Wands
“You must do everything through being, nothing through acting,” Ch’eng Huang said. “The first and last step of being comes from the breath. Breathe.”
Jim sat in the venerable Chinese tong boss and mystic’s inner sanctum, cross-legged on the carpeted floor. He was struggling to place his hands in the first mudra position while regulating his breathing. The shadowy room’s walls were covered in astrology charts, horoscopes and ancient tapestries. The shelves of the room held all manner and shape of bottles holding numerous questionable liquids, crumbling scrolls, worm-eaten books, and trinkets of brass, glass and jade. A heavy brazier of hot coals and dozens of candles about the room provided the only light. The pouch Jim normally wore about his neck by a leather cord lay in front of him.
“You taught me this the first day,” Jim said. “I’ve been practicing, just like you told me. I breathe real good now.”
“No,” Huang said. “You practice breathing well. You must make it part of you, part of being, Jim, if you want to open your energy, want to access it.”
Jim had been coming to Huang, with his long white beard that fell to his knees, his dark, almost infinite eyes and his robes of green silk, for almost eight months now, to try to understand the artifact that was his birthright—his father’s jade eye.
The eye’s original owner, Huang said, was Pangu, the god that created the universe. One of Pangu’s eyes became the sun and the other, the left eye, Jim’s eye, the moon. Apparently the Eye of the Moon had been stolen by another Chinese god and returned to men, and from there had made its way to Billy Negrey.
Huang sat on cushions behind a low table of teak in the center of the opulent room on the second floor of Huang’s sprawling saloon, brothel and opium den, the Celestial Palace.
The Palace was the heart of Huang’s empire in Golgotha, as the Paradise Falls was Malachi Bick’s stronghold. Huang controlled the four or five blocks of narrow maze-like streets that the white locals called Johnny Town, which housed the growing population of Chinese who called Golgotha home.
Jim closed his eyes and tried to relax. He exhaled deeply, feeling it all the way to his abdomen, and then slowly, deeply, filled his lungs again, breathing all the way to his lower stomach. He kept doing this, emptying his mind as Huang had taught him to do. His breathing deepened and thoughts diminished. He was breathing and feeling very good.
He was uncertain how long he was like this before he heard Huang’s voice.
“Good,” Huang said. “Now bring forth the eye.”
He imagined the eye was between and above his eyes. He felt his body fill with light with each deep, cleansing breath. Jim slowly directed the light to the pouch he could see in his mind and slowly the eye rolled out of its own volition. The light lifted it off the floor and the eye arose, held aloft seemingly by nothing. It hovered before the boy’s head.
“Very good,” Huang said quietly. “You are doing very well, Jim. Now, today,” Huang continued, “we will work toward using the eye to open doorways. It is a gateway to many different worlds and powers, if you can unlock the proper doors.”
“Is that why you’re always talking about keys?” Jim said.
“Chi,” Huang corrected, “and in a manner of speaking, Chi can be used to open many doors, within and without.”
“The eye ain’t never done nothing, ’cept at night in the moonlight,” Jim said. As he spoke, the eye faltered in the air before him. He gasped and tried to right it. It dropped a few inches, then remained hovering.
“The eye is tied to the moon, true,” Huang said. “But it is also tied to the sun, its brother eye. The moon reflects the sun. It will work in the day, but it requires more effort on your part to make it do so, Jim. Now stop diverting your attention, stop jabbering. Breathe, be.”
When Jim had first arrived in Golgotha, he’d worried that Ch’eng Huang had wanted to steal the eye. The eye; his father’s pistol from the war; and Jim’s horse, Promise, were all he had left of his family and his life before he began his run. Talking with the old man, at the urging of the mysterious Malachi Bick, had proven to be the right thing to do and Jim had been able to use the eye to save Golgotha and possibly even the world. That part seemed very unreal even now, a year later. Folks in Golgotha tended to make their way through a disaster and then try as hard as they could to forget all about it, cover it up, hide it. Jim didn’t agree with doing that, but he could understand it.
Huang said the eye had nearly infinite power but that it could only be unlocked by a Wu, a trained sorcerer, whatever that meant exactly, so Jim had asked Huang for instruction. He had come a long way, mostly learning how to calm himself and to focus his mind. He had begun the long and treacherous path of joining his mind to the mudras, the finger meditations that Huang said were a critical component of unlocking the jade eye’s secrets. Now, almost a year in, Jim saw he had so much further to go, but he was determined to master the eye, and to make his pa proud.
“I want you to imagine the eye in the center of your forehead, as we discussed,” Huang said. “I want you to feel the coolness of the glass against your skin, feel it connected to you.”
“Okay,” Jim said after a few moments.
“Now, imagine standing on a plain. Feel the wind move around you, through you. Feel the wind caress your face, your hair. Hold that image, that feeling, don’t let it fall away.”
Jim’s eyes were closed. He felt the dry desert wind kiss him. He was riding Promise across the scrubland at the edge of the desolate 40-Mile. It was warm, but not hot. He could feel the grit on his pursed lips and smell the leather of the reins. He was there; the rhythm of Promise’s gallop was hypnotic.
“Good,” a distant voice said. “Now I want you to open the eye. Imagine opening your other eyes wide, but you are only opening the jade eye. Wide … wider. Feel the wind pass through you, through the eye. Wide open now.…”
Jim saw through the jade eye. The world was painted in lines of force, cause, effect and color, brilliant, prismatic strands of thread tied to everything. Swirling winds of gold, crimson, azure and emerald roared, vibrating the humming, resonant cords. The eye saw the music of the world.
Jim felt arms about his waist. Soft, slender, strong arms warmer than the desert wind that was against his face. He felt a head resting on his shoulder. He turned and saw long brown hair fluttering, shining, in the sun. Constance Stapleton, her wide, brown eyes looking at him as she raised her head from his shoulder. She looked beautiful, but a little sad. She was saying something but he couldn’t hear. Constance leaned closer to his ear.
“Wider…,” Huang’s faraway voice said. “Open.”
Jim’s eyes opened. He was back in Huang’s chamber. Huang had placed a large cylinder of a green candle on the low table between them. Its wick was trailing black smoke. A few of the papers behind the old man fluttered as did the wisps of his beard. The jade eye began to drop and Jim held out his hand. It fell into his palm with a soft thud. Jim closed his hand around the eye and looked at Huang.
“Adequate,” Huang said, his face quickly recovering from some surprise. “A good start.”
One of Huang’s men, a member of the notorious Green Ribbon Tong, brought tea and cakes. Tattoos festooned his arms. Guns and axes hung from his belt as he entered and exited like a servile ghost. Huang prepared the tea for himself and his young guest.
“So last night, at the church, I got an idea to use the eye to try to find the murderer of these women,” Jim said as he accepted a cup from Huang. “And it worked! I made all the lights in the church flare up and found him. He got away, but the eye did what I wanted it to do … sort of.”
“The eye’s power comes from the moon,” Huang said. “Moonlight is a redirection of the sun’s true light. The eye’s powers are tied to misdirection, distortion, mystery and reflection. It is good you are growing more confident in its use, Jim.”
“Well, I wanted to
ask you,” Jim said. “The first thing I learned the eye could do was let me speak to haints—y’know, the dead. Last year I was able to talk to Mr. Stapleton and he helped identify his killer for us.”
“Yes?” Huang said.
“I tried the same trick with the two dead girls,” Jim said, “last night, when her body and Molly’s were both over at Clay Turlough’s place, but I got nothing. I was wondering if I was doing something wrong?”
“First of all, what the eye does is no trick,” Huang said, somewhat indignant. “It is a power of the highest order, tied to the creation of the universe. Second, these women, they were of a low station, yes? Few ties to their homes and families? Such lonely and isolated people, ones at the fringes of society, they have few anchors to hold their spirit here and few to miss them, to mourn them. Also they were torn from this world in a most savage and horrible way, correct?”
“Yes,” Jim said coldly, his jaw set. Ch’eng Huang nodded.
“You have a great capacity for compassion, boy,” Huang said. “Have a care. Emotion is the fuel that drives a sorcerer, gives him power when all other resources have failed him. Too much fuel ignited devours everything.”
“What happens to people like that, fringe people, when they die?” Jim asked.
“The same thing that happens to everyone else,” Huang replied, “exactly what they have trained their souls to expect. Now tell me of your vision from today.”
“It was like I was there, in the desert,” Jim said. “At first it was me imagining what you were talking about—the wind.”
“Yes,” Huang said, nodding. “I wanted to see if you could open the door to the House of the Tiger, the land of the wind. I have undertaken your horoscope and you are born under the tiger. Though your element is wood, not wind, you were successful. You did very well, Jim. However, there was something else that happened?”
The Shotgun Arcana Page 21