The Shotgun Arcana

by R. S. Belcher

  “And that,” Highfather said, riding up, “should be Black Rowan’s contribution to the shindig—some of her Barbary Coast associates. She promised me some backup and she was good to her word. I like that in a criminal mastermind.”

  “What are those things they’re dropping from?” Jim asked.

  “Hot-air balloons left over from the war,” Highfather said. “Both sides used them for reconnaissance. Rowan collected a bunch of them and their pilots after the Union canceled the program. She calls them her Aerial Algerines.”

  “Well,” Jim said as he reloaded, “don’t that just beat the Dutch. They’re a sight keener than cowboys, for sure.”

  “I’ll pretend you didn’t say that,” Highfather said, turning his mount to dive back into the battle while Jim spun up the barking Gatling gun again.

  The pirates’ pistols boomed as they took the Praetorian emplacements completely by surprise, and as they hit the ground cutlasses, daggers and knives were drawn and the screaming, howling, tattooed, half-naked men cut a bloody swath through the confused and demoralized clusters of mercenaries they attacked. The Green Ribbon Tong warriors took advantage of the confusion caused by Black Rowan’s pirates to strike quickly and silently as well. The bizarre assortment of troops led by Highfather and supported by Jim’s withering Gatling gun fire slowly began to turn the tides of the war along Main Street in the favor of the Golgotha forces.

  * * *

  Inside the Paradise Falls, Maude and Emily drifted silently through the kitchen door, entering as soon as Zeal started making his initial address to the crowds. The small cluster of guards milling at the kitchen entrance never saw Maude coming, and Emily was amazed at the speed, silence and grace with which this masked woman laid low three trained soldiers.

  “How, how did you do that?” the girl asked as Maude disarmed the unconscious men and tossed their weapons away.

  “More practice than I care to recall,” Maude said. There was a crack of distant gunfire repeated and then another series of discharges.

  “The signal,” Emily said. “They got the hostages free!”

  “Okay, Emily,” Maude said, “only move when I move and step exactly where I’ve stepped, yes?” Emily nodded and the two began to slowly move across the main floor of the saloon. Everyone was outside, listening to Zeal. Maude thought she heard Auggie Shultz’s voice calling out to the crowd. They reached the second floor as a lone shot boomed out and Maude heard the crowd erupt in anger. A horrible image filled her imagination: Gillian weeping over a wounded or dead Auggie. No. No, damn you, Zeal. If he brought that down on such good souls …

  But for now she had to stick to the plan: get Emily to the office and …

  Batra stepped out of an impossibly small shadow to her left and blocked the hallway to Bick’s office. He snapped a knuckle blow at Maude’s throat, designed to crush her windpipe and kill her. Maude caught his hand and jammed a nail into his ulnar artery. He twisted and turned to get free, and as he did, Maude side-kicked him over the railing. As he plummeted toward the floor below, he caught the railing and swung back onto it, balancing on the thin plane.

  “Emily! Get what you need in the office,” Maude said.

  She jumped after Batra onto the rail and tumbled, hands over feet, toward the assassin.

  * * *

  Mutt and Snake-Man grappled both bloody, cut and battered, raging like angry ghosts, like hot desert winds, instead of men. Mutt’s blood knife tore halfway through a hitching post and stuck there, vibrating. He let go of the knife, as Snake-Man ripped an ugly gash in Mutt’s stomach with one of his hook blades and followed through with a dizzying punch to the side of Mutt’s head. Mutt staggered and Snake-Man pressed his advantage, trying to grab Mutt’s hair and open the lawman’s throat, but as he moved in for the kill, Mutt rallied and drove the heel of his palm into Snake-Man’s chin, while the shaman swept his leg to knock Mutt over, but Mutt jumped clear and followed up by driving his fist into Snake-Man’s face. The medicine man bellowed in pain and stumbled backward. Mutt shoved and tripped him and then dropped on top of the stunned medicine man, pinning his arms under his knees. Mutt punched him again and again, blood spraying from his face. “Give,” Mutt said. Snake-Man began to open his mouth to speak. Mutt drove a fist squarely into Snake-Man’s nose and the medicine man was still.

  “Good choice,” Mutt said, slumping.

  * * *

  Jagged tongues of blue-white lightning streamed down Main Street, destroying buildings, starting fires and killing and scattering troops on both sides of the conflict. Soldiers and civilians, Praetorians, tongs and pirates all were burned and killed by the electrical blasts. Several of the hot air balloons were struck and exploded, tumbling to the ground like burning party streamers.

  Professor Zenith laughed as he adjusted the dials and knobs on his galvanic emitter and loosed more sky fire on hapless forces along and above Main Street. The Professor’s weapon looked like a massive cylindrical rifle with a tuning fork instead of a barrel. A mass of sparking, knotted wires and cables ran from the back of the emitter to the helpless organic voltic piles that writhed mindlessly in pain in the back of his wagon. Zenith pulled the trigger and called down another electrical strike on the rabble. He was like unto a god, now, and he would wipe the street and the sky clean of the insects who dared to defy his patron, Raziel.

  There was an odd rumble and a strange hum from some distance. The lightning seemed to weaken, as if its power was being diverted, drained away.

  * * *

  A few hundred feet farther down the northern side of Main Street, Clay Turlough’s small cart had come to rest. Clay patted the horse that had drawn his wagon gently on the rump and the horse trotted away, free. Clay’s wagon was covered in odd apparatus, much like Professor Zenith’s, and it seemed to be drawing all the destructive electricity the professor was trying to hurl about, down into some kind of multitiered tower of steel and wires, much like a lightning rod, built into Clay’s machine.

  “What!” Zenith shouted, “Preposterous! How dare you trifle with the progress of science, sir!”

  “How dare you pretend to call that science, sir!” Clay shouted back. “You pervert the very quintessence of science to simply slake your own bloodlust. You are no man of knowledge. I know the most probable source of your voltic batteries as well, sir and you are a madman and a blackguard!”

  “You feeble bumpkin,” Zenith hissed. “Your ionic grounding system couldn’t stand up to a strong wind, let alone the unleashed fury of the subtle fluid!”

  “Oh, and by the looks of your discharge leakage, your calculations are at fault as well,” Clay called as he pulled down a heavy pair of smoked work goggles over his eyes. “Have at you, sir, may the better design win!”

  “En garde!” Zenith shouted, and twisted the knob on his machine to above the safe power threshold, hurling a tunnel of lightning at Clay and his machine. Clay “parried” the blast by modulating and dispersing the harmful energy. What little of Clay’s hair remained stood on end from the discharge.

  He redirected part of the electricity and turned it back on Zenith, who “caught” much of it with the focusing fork on his device. The professor’s wild mane of hair singed and smoked from the portion of Clay’s assault that got through.

  The electrical duel raged on. The sky swirled with dark clouds and alien energies while the other forces fighting along the streets recovered from the electrical barrages and began to battle once again.

  * * *

  Maude and Batra danced along the railing of the second floor of the saloon, trading kicks and strikes, blocking, jumping and tumbling on the four-inch wooden handrail, defying gravity with each impossible act.

  “Your training is excellent,” Batra said. “It is a pity you are a woman. I would enjoy facing a man as skilled as you.”

  “Really, now?” Maude said. “What would your Dark Mother say about that?”

  Batra’s cheeks darkened. “Do not mock the Dark Mother.” He
advanced, hurling knife strikes and sweeping kicks at Maude, angrily.

  “Anger is your enemy,” she said, and spun, avoiding his punch and sweeping his leg just as he began a wide kick.

  Batra plummeted and smashed into the faro table. He recovered quickly and tumbled off it. He hurled a throwing iron at Maude and it struck her squarely in the chest as she flipped down onto the table. The force of it knocked her to the floor, but she backflipped and came up on her feet, hurling the odd branching weapon back at Batra. He dived toward the kitchen entrance, dodging the iron as it imbedded itself into the wall. Maude rubbed her bruised and cut chest, coughed up a little blood, raised her kerchief to spit it out and then followed the Thuggee into the Paradise Falls kitchen.

  Batra had vanished. As Maude moved carefully between the wooden counters and cabinets, she took a deep breath, adjusted her perceptions and blood, and listened. He was to her left; his breathing was still, almost non-existent, but his slowed heart still thudded. She moved closer, giving him an opening to take, but he didn’t.

  Her hands dropped to a butcher’s blade on the stained wooden table to her right. She took a step, another. Her timing would have to be perfect or he would kill her this time, but to get her shot she had to get closer, closer. Batra’s muted heartbeat fluttered just a tiny bit and that was all the warning Maude needed. She hurled the knife from the table into the shadow with one fluid motion. Batra materialized, as if the darkness had vomited him forth, kukri at the ready. The blade thudded deep in his shoulder, blood blossoming from his tunic. He stepped toward her, staggered and then took another step. He blinked and then dropped to his knees only a few feet from her. He looked up at Maude with dimming eyes and muttered.

  “Poison?” he said. “How did you?” He looked at his wrist where her nail had torn his flesh. “Very good.”

  “Better than you,” Maude said.

  “My apology,” Batra said, his words slurring. “May Kali allow us to fight again in Hell. It would be a pleasure.”

  Batra fell to the floor, unmoving. His chest began to rise and fall, deeply, as the narcotic wrapped itself tightly about his blood.

  “Not that kind of poison,” Maude said. “You don’t get to die a martyr. You get to live in disgrace.” She remembered something from the fever dream when she had fallen into the well and she thought that, for a moment at least, she knew what the voice had meant about the warrior’s peace.

  * * *

  Emily hurried to the door of her father’s office and opened it. She could hear the screams and shooting going on outside through the open balcony doors. She stepped behind her father’s desk and opened the top drawer. She took out the item her father had told her about and clutched it like a drowning man grabbing at a rope. She hurried out into the hallway and down the stairs. Emily stopped when she found herself face-to-face with Zeal himself, advancing up the stairs.

  “Well, well,” Zeal said, smiling at her. “Look what sneaked in the kitchen door while I was on the front porch. Hello, Emily. I’ve been looking all over for you.”

  * * *

  Professor Zenith snarled in frustration. This hick was thwarting his every action. His organic voltic piles had mercifully, for them anyway, perished in the exchanges of energies. He was forced to rely on his backup etheric condenser to power his weapon. Suddenly the professor noticed a stabilizing of the magnetic field in regards to the orgone flow and he saw his opportunity to fry the fool’s machinery and then get back to killing the other simpletons of this town.

  He began to slowly increase the degree of electrical fluid through the regulator panel on the back of the cart when he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Clay, holding a large wrench.

  “You ever hear of Occam’s Razor, jackass?” Clay swung the wrench with both hands and landed it successfully alongside the good professor’s skull. Zenith dropped to the ground and lay still.

  Clay hopped up on the cart. “I swear,” he muttered to himself as he shut down Zenith’s contraption, “anyone with a little copper tubing and a dynamo thinks they’re a scientist these days.”

  The Chariot

  Emily raised the white feather she clutched in her hand. “Stop,” she said. “Don’t move.”

  Zeal didn’t. The smile left his face. “Now where did you get that?” he said, frozen almost like a statue.

  “My father got it from the sheriff,” she said. “It was from your son, Vellas. It’s like the one my father gave me. It lets me command you. It can let me kill you.”

  “Yes,” Zeal said. “It can. It is our highest expression of trust, to give a part of ourselves to another. To give them power over us. The question is, Emily, do you have it in you to kill me?”

  “I … I don’t want to,” Emily said. “I don’t want to kill anyone.”

  “Well then,” Zeal said, smiling again. “That is a shame.”

  Charles Cook shot Emily in the back with his derringer from the top of the stairs. The girl fell forward, tumbling down the stairs, a dark flower spreading across her back. The feather, now flecked with her blood, floated down to the ground floor. It fell at Malachi Bick’s feet.

  “Children,” Zeal said, laughing. “Gone so soon, eh, Biqa?”

  “Enough,” Bick said.

  The Paradise Falls buckled and exploded as if a bomb had gone off within it. Every window shattered, the wall of the saloon splintered as if struck by a tornado. The carbonized remains of Charles Cook, the wealthiest man in California, floated down as hot, black ash across collapsing three-story ruins. No piece of furniture, no stick of wood, was spared being shattered to near-dust by the force that men called Malachi Bick. The form of Emily Bright lay amid the debris, untouched by the destruction. No living thing, save Cook and his master, were harmed by the town-shaking blast.

  Raziel, stunned and battered by the full force of the destruction, smashed into the Dove’s Roost, over a hundred yards away. Zeal crashed through the front wall of the empty house of ill repute and came to rest in the demolished parlor. He struggled to stand, the whole house creaking and groaning, threatening to collapse.

  Zeal rubbed his head and turned. Biqa was there, upon him before he could even fully comprehend what had happened, looping space-time to punch Zeal a million infinites in the space of a nanosecond, converting the mass of his hand to nearly light-speed while containing, shunting, the force of each blow, to channel all the destructive force to Raziel alone, sparing the planet’s atmosphere from being torn away by the energy of each punch. The Dove’s Roost began to rain down around the two, but Biqa didn’t care. Raziel was his universe now. Raziel crashed through one side of Scutty’s boardinghouse and out the other. The building exploded, nearly atomized, from the structural damage of being hit by something roughly approximating the planet’s mass. Again, Biqa calmed the angry forces of nature and minimized the destruction, while giving Zeal a taste of as much of it as the world of man could stand.

  Fortunately, almost the whole town was occupied with the battle raging over on Main, so the buildings and sidewalks on Bick Street were mercifully empty.

  Raziel smashed through the wall of the Golgotha Scribe’s office and into the newspaper’s huge iron and steel printing press, converting a great deal of its dense mass into glowing molten slag. Raziel’s countenance now resembled Biqa’s own, torn, swollen, bruised and bleeding. The fair angel’s blood hissed as it spattered on the glowing press. Raziel hefted the press with one hand and batted Biqa with it as the snarling angel launched himself at Raziel again, churning dark, primal energy in his wake like spectral wings of diluted ink. The force of the blow, as Raziel converted all the mass into pure energy, floored Biqa, especially since he had to redirect a good amount of the energy into his own personal space-time to avoid the blow shattering the planet like an egg being struck by a sledgehammer. The remainder of the newspaper building vaporized into a brilliant cascade of photons about the two of them.

  Biqa, gasping and smoking, shook the charred debris off him as he lay on his
hands and knees, still reeling, fighting to rise. Raziel, panting, bleeding, stayed on his feet and drew his cavalry saber. Biqa saw the blade for what it truly was—pure, divine fire from the forge of creation itself.

  “’Member this little pig-sticker, Biqa?” Raziel said, staggering forward. “The old Heavenly Toothpick…? ’Member wha’ it can do, even to our kind? I shed a lot of angelic blood with this during the rebellion. Good times, good times. You don’t have one anymore do you, Biqa? That is a pity.”

  Biqa struggled to his feet. He began to stagger out of the wreckage, running as best he could. The mortal form of Malachi Bick shuddered back into place as he stumbled across Prosperity Road, looking back at Raziel in all his angelic fury, flaming sword in hand. The mad angel strode after him slowly, confidently, his injuries masked by his unearthly light.

  “Aw, don’t run, Biqa,” Raziel called out. “Have at least a little dignity. You acted like one of the Host there for a second. If you hadn’t been so worried about breaking this little matchstick town, this ridiculous planet of His, you might have even had me.”

  Bick staggered farther down the other side of Prosperity. Off in the distance were the sounds of chaos: gunfire, explosions, the challenging shouts of the brave, the mad and the defiant, the sobs of the dying and those who loved the dying. War swaggered unchecked down Main Street. Bick fled into a small alley, running farther and deeper into the mazes of narrow corridors that made up this side of Bick Street.

  Raziel followed him, picking up his pace, eager to taste Bick’s blood. He advanced, ignoring everything save his weakened, battered prey stumbling up ahead. He found Bick standing, bloody but defiant, in a tiny courtyard, the nexus of half-dozen dark, twisting alleys.

  “Time to finish it,” Raziel said.

  Bick said nothing, only glared at the gore-splattered golden angel.

  “I’m going to flay you alive,” Raziel said, “a molecule of perfect pain at a time.”