“It’s to you,” the Professor muttered. He was acting as banker. “Gotta pay to see what I got.”
Puckett fumbled in his pockets. Jim heard him swear under his breath. “Y’all done just about tapped me out!”
“Stop bellyaching,” the stranger said. “In or out? You as broke as a sharecropper, then you need to shut the hell up and get out of the game.”
“Wait, wait! How about this for a stake?” Puckett said.
Something small but solid was laid on the table. Jim heard the thud while he wrestled with fitting a new leg to the stool. The Professor whistled and the stranger laughed.
“What in the hell is that?” the stranger said.
“Looks old,” the Professor said. “It Chinese?”
“Yup,” Rick said, the satisfaction thick in his voice. “Sure is, all the way from tha’ Queen of Sheba herself. I’m in?”
The Professor said something Jim couldn’t quite make out, but he thought he heard the word “jade.” He stopped his work and walked almost like he was in a dream into the saloon proper. The men, back to their game, ignored him. He edged closer, a feeling of horrible dread and eager anticipation wrestling in his guts like Saint George scrapping with a dragon. He looked down at the green table.
His father’s eye regarded him amidst the piles of money and cards.
Jim never fully remembered what happened next; there was motion and rage and sick comprehension. He was behind the bar, Travis’s Winchester in his hands. He was next to the table telling the men to give him the last piece of his father. The stranger smiled at him and said he was too young to be playing with rifles. Said he was going to take it away from him and then whup his ass.
Jim shot him dead as he rose, a derringer in his hand. He cocked the Model 1866, like Pa taught him; he smelled hot brass as the shell flipped out and thudded on the sawdust-covered floor. He told them again to give him the eye. Rick Puckett handed it to him and Jim remembered Rick was the one who bet it, who had it.
Rick, who worked for Charlie Upton.
“Git up,” Jim said to Rick. “Git your ass up or I swear I will kill you where you sit.”
He led Rick out past a horrified Travis, out the bright sunlight. They climbed into Rick’s buckboard and began moving. Jim snorted the smell of gun smoke and blood out of his nostrils. His life was over. He looked down at the jade eye in his palm and finally said good-bye to Pa.
Jim walked down Prosperity Street. It was dark. Argent Mountain was a massive squatting shadow. Far up he thought he saw a few cook fires guttering in the desert wind. Distorted shapes moved between the flames.
He needed to understand the legacy his pa had given him, that pa himself had thrust upon him by strangers from a far-off land. What happened in the graveyard—what happened with Charlie. Jim didn’t, couldn’t, understand it all, and he needed to. There were people here in Golgotha who could give him answers.
He turned left onto Bick Street and entered their universe.
The buildings were conventional clapboard affairs, but they were built much closer together. It would be hard for more than a single horse or a small pushcart to navigate theses narrow thoroughfares. Most of the buildings had shuttered windows and were two stories in height. Clotheslines and strings of wood and paper lanterns jumped in the night wind. There were the sounds of tiny silvered bells caressing each other, moved by the desert’s breath.
The place seemed crowded and vacant at the same time. There were people on the streets, not many at this hour. (“What on earth kind of people would be a’creeping around at all hours of the night when decent souls are in bed, so as to get up with the sun,” Ma’s voice reminded him.) They were black cotton shadows. They examined him with alien curiosity to match his own.
“Eve … Evening,” Jim muttered. The shadows passed giving no reply. Ahead, he saw a wide beam of buttery yellow light split the darkness. A group of Johnnymen was exiting a large building. They were laughing and talking in a low chattering language Jim had never heard before. It sounded like oiled springs, bouncing.
More Johnnymen were outside the doors, briefly illuminated, their profiles swirled in smoke and shadow in the yawing light. Jim made his way to the doorway. The two men on either side of it wore sleeveless shirts of black and green silk. Their arms were painted up the way Pa had once described a man he had seen at a carnival covered, head to toe, in skin pictures. Their eyes were those of dead fish.
“Evening, fellas,” Jim said, trying his best to sound like Mutt, full of casual contempt. “Nice night for a walk, huh?”
He stepped between them, moving to enter the building. He could hear laughter and smell strange smoke now. It was like Pa’s pipe tobacco, but it was sweeter and it clung to your nostrils, desperately. The larger of the two men extended an arm painted with golden fish and blue-green trees. It was like an iron bar and it stopped Jim cold.
“No inside,” the man said in a guttural growl.
Jim backed up. “Look, fellas, I’m not trying to be a gall nipper. I just need to talk to one of you-all’s teachers or preachers or whatever it is you people got. I need—”
“You need to get your hide home before we hang it up on a clothesline,” the smaller one said in very good English. He was smiling, but his eyes were not. “This is our side of town, white eyes. You run home to your momma.”
Jim fished the eye out of his pocket and held it up for the two men to see. “I need someone to tell me about this—what the writing on it means.”
As soon as he saw the reaction on the men’s faces Jim knew he had made a mistake. The larger one grabbed Jim’s hand in a flash and squinted to better make out the jade eye. The wind in the narrow corridor of a street picked up, it howled off the desert and dust bounced drunkenly off the walls and shutters. The chimes sang a frantic, tinkling song. The two men excitedly talked to each other in the scattergun language. The big one released Jim and the shorter one opened the door. He jabbed a finger at Jim.
“You stay right there,” he said, and then disappeared inside the building, releasing a cloud of smoke and a curtain of light.
“Stay,” the big one rumbled.
Jim clutched his father’s eye and sprinted as fast as he could. He heard the big one bellow behind and then heard him give chase. Jim ducked down ever-narrowing alleys and maze-like side streets. He had no idea where he was, but he knew if the two men had their way he would lose his father’s eye tonight and that was not about to happen.
The painted giant kept with him for many twist and turns. Jim could hear his labored breathing behind him. He dared not look back to see how close, since each new corner could hold a dead end or some other obstacle that could trip him up and give his pursuer the edge. It seemed to Jim that the streets of Johnny Town were too numerous, too byzantine, to truly exist in such a small town as Golgotha. It felt like he was moving through some alien world that only shared a few streets with the little town.
Finally he no longer heard the labored breathing behind him. He turned a corner, scrambled over a wooden fence, sprinted down an alleyway and ducked into an alcove as black as pitch. He stood still and fought to control the herd of stampeding cattle in his chest. He sipped air when his burning lungs demanded gulps. He clamped his mouth shut and tried to remain as still as a statue. One heartbeat, another.
Nothing. No pursuer, no ambush, nothing, just his heart thumping madly in his chest and the now-gentle murmur of the wind, pushing trash down the alley.
Jim sighed in relief and backed deeper into the dark alcove. His feet tripped over something and he fell backward, arms flailing. He landed with an ignoble and rather loud thud.
“Brilliant, Jim,” he muttered. Then he noticed what had knocked him down. It was a body. A white man, well dressed. He was not breathing. Jim scampered back against the wall, half-expecting his hunter to appear. But he didn’t. It was just Jim and the dead man.
“Reckon it is best to get to bed early, Ma,” he said.
The Devil
>
He arrived with the morning light. Of course he did.
“Hail, Biqa!” The voice was liquid beauty, poured into a silver-star chalice. His very presence carried with it all of Heaven’s warm memory. Biqa suddenly recalled, again, how cold this place was.
“Lucifer!” Biqa rose from where he had been watching the little monkeys work together to gather roots. They were collecting enough to feed the entire group, even the injured one and the old one back at the cave. They had grown in the time since they had first come to him and he was proud of how they had banded together to survive this harsh world they had been tossed into.
He embraced God’s most beloved and beautiful angel—he whom God had crafted most closely in His own image of the entire Host. Lucifer laughed and it was like the world existed to hear it.
“Have you come to bring me home?” Biqa asked.
“In a manner of speaking,” Lucifer said. “Biqa, things are not going well at home. Haven’t you wondered why God has left you here so long with no word, no relief? No company except a bunch of chattering rodents with a life span so short they literally die in the blink of an eye.”
“Primates,” Biqa said softly. “Not rodents, primates.”
The Light Bringer laughed. A hand that had set stars in the firmament waved in a dismissive gesture.
“Rodents, primates, coelacanths, leviathans, honestly, Biqa, how can you keep up with all the ridiculous minutiae of His insane experiment?”
“I’ve always noted that the elements that usually cause the most trouble are in the details, Lucifer.”
“Hmmm, that’s catchy. Remind me to write that down. God hasn’t tasked me to relieve you, my brother. I’ve taken it upon myself to come and ask for your help, to bring you back to Heaven.”
“You what?”
“I came of my own accord. Biqa, things are not well at home. God is making terrible choices. He is ordering things of the Host that are insulting, disrespectful. Many of us fear that He has gone mad.”
The dark angel stepped away from the Light Bringer.
“These things you say. Surely you know the Almighty—”
“The Almighty, oh please,” Lucifer spit. “I was brought into being shortly after He became aware of His own existence. He claims to have made me, but I have long suspected that I am His equal, forged of the Void and will, alone. He is far from almighty, Biqa, and His days of tyranny are nearing an end. He is too preoccupied with His laboratory, His Earth, and its precious little mortal bugs, to notice what any of the Host do or say.”
The plain grew silent. The hum of the insects at dawn ended abruptly. Biqa noted the change, but Lucifer seemed oblivious to it, either that or he simply didn’t care. The two angels stood bathed in the bloodred light of the dawn.
“He doesn’t love me anymore,” Lucifer finally said softly.
“What?”
“The Host, He doesn’t love us anymore, Biqa. He treats us like slaves—like mindless servants. You were the first among us to see that. You were right, my old friend. We should have risen up when He banished you, but we were all so certain He would change his mind.”
The insects began to chant again, the endless mantra that was the chorus of life. The two stood silent for a time. A black cloud of flying things swirled, dived and then scattered across the bloody sky.
“I wasn’t banished,” Biqa said. “I was given a commission. My job is to guard that … thing. The oldest one, the biggest one. The one we couldn’t kill. I wasn’t banished. I thought I was for a long time, but I got over that. I think I understand what He’s trying to do here.”
Lucifer nodded. The intent of his regard was palatable, like a draught of celestial mead tapped from the souls of unborn suns. He smiled and gripped Biqa firmly by the shoulder.
“My beloved friend, it was you who first showed us the way. You, the first victim of His absurd obsession with this place, with these … primates. Think how many will join us when they see I have brought you home. They will see He is not all-powerful, nor infallible. You, Biqa, you will be my greatest general, my brother, second only to me in the new order.”
“Why do you not call Him by his name? God—when you speak of Him, it is with such hatred. Why?”
“Because … Because He is not worthy of our love, of our respect, anymore. Because He favors these … things, born in the slime, with the stink of the finite on them, over us—His perfect, beloved firstborn. Because He lets them stagger and crawl and blunder their way across His divine plan, while we, while you, Biqa, must blindly serve.”
“You’re jealous of them?” Biqa said, nodding toward where the group was still digging for roots. “Them?”
Lucifer’s countenance darkened and the sky followed. The monkeys sniffed the air, jumped and howled at the first rumble of thunder. They scampered into the high grass, heading back toward the shelter of the trees.
“Enough,” Biqa said. He laid his hand on Lucifer’s shoulder. “Stop.”
The Morning Star spun, his eyes glowing shards of rage. A flaming blade was in his hand. He pushed Biqa back and leveled the divine sword at the dark angel’s throat.
“How dare you! What does it matter to us, to you, what the Divine does to some mortal insect? They are dust, Biqa, dust! We are infinite.”
Biqa’s own sword, burning with the wrath of the creator, crossed Lucifer’s blade. “It matters to the one Who created us, to the one Whom we pledged to serve. And you, Lucifer Day-Son, you are not the Divine; we are merely His soldiers, you and I.”
“Is that all you are, Biqa, a good soldier? Tell me, are you content to remain here on this cancerous ball of filth and decay while your precious Almighty denies you the totality of creation, the light of infinite clarity, the balm of His love? Are you? Or will you act, as you just acted to defend those little rodents?
“He needs us Biqa, to save Him from the folly of His madness. Once He lit the cosmos and saw He was not the First … It shook His reason, stole His judgment. We can help Him. Are you strong enough to serve Him best by disobeying Him? ”
It was difficult to keep from bowing before Lucifer. His presence, his demeanor, had grown so much since the days when they had first met. He was as God, truly. There was sincerity, conviction in his cadence, a desperate strength in the pleading in his voice.
Then Biqa summoned his courage and looked Lucifer in the eye. What Biqa saw there took the weight from his blade and steadied his trembling hand.
“What do you want here, Lucifer, really?” he said from behind his resolute steel.
The angel of light laughed and took a step back, his sword dismissed into the ether. “You’ve toughened up down here, Biqa,” he said. “Any of the Host in Heaven I gave that line to would be sobbing and begging me to please let them help the doddering old fool. But not you.”
Biqa said nothing. His blade hovered inches from Lucifer’s heart.
The Day Star smiled and turned his back on sword and its wielder. “I truly am here to free you, Biqa. You and your charge.”
“What? You are insane.”
“The Voidling is the only thing He truly fears. It is the only thing unknown to Him. With it free, wrecking this wretched playground of His, we could make our demands and perhaps He would see the folly of his actions. Order will be restored.”
“Whose order, Lucifer?”
“Does it matter? His? Mine? The Earth will be gone, your need to be here—gone. You will be free.”
The point moved closer to the Morning Star’s chest. The flames flared.
“Freedom is opportunities, Lucifer. While you were above, mastering the dubious trick of speaking words your heart does not mean, I have had the opportunity to practice my swordplay.”
“Lying,” Lucifer said. “It’s called lying.”
“Well, I haven’t mastered that trick yet, so let me assure you that when I tell you I will run you through if you do not leave now, I mean it.”
Lucifer turned; the smile was gone from his lips. “
Trust me, stay in his world long enough and you will master lying. This, however, is truth: I will not call for you when the revolution is over, Biqa. I will have your name struck from the Book of Hosts. Any who speak of you will have their wings torn from them and cast to this cold, broken, forgotten relic, Earth, to join you in eternal exile. You and the dead monkeys. You are a fool, Biqa.”
“Fair enough, but this is what I choose. That thing must never be free. It would tear this world apart and then chew its way up to Heaven and devour it whole. I don’t agree with God’s decision to destroy them, but I do understand it. It is not of the Void, Lucifer; it is the Void. It seeks an end to the light, to all creation, all that intrudes on its endless darkness.
“I disagree with God and I do question His methods and ultimate goals, but I also know I owe Him my existence and my loyalty. He is on to something here, Lucifer. Something truly of the Divine.”
“Divine rodents … I know, I know—monkeys. Whatever. You’re still a fool—to believe in an unknowable thing, to trust in someone Who you admit you do not understand. To clutch that to your breast and cling to it, believing its ineffability will hold you up. Foolish.”
“Faith,” Biqa said. “It’s called faith.”
“Touché. I’m afraid I have yet to master that one myself. Good luck to you, Biqa, guardian of your little patch of rock, defender of the monkeys. You are the first of the Host to ever challenge me.”
“I won’t be the last, I can assure you.”
The angel rose from the shackles of the Earth, flying into the bloody eye.
“Lucifer!” Biqa called out.
The First Beloved turned and looked down upon him, his presence competing with the brightness of the sun.
“If things don’t work out … you are welcome to visit.”
“I may even if they do work out,” Lucifer said with a sly wink.
Biqa watched him recede into the light and then vanish. He dismissed his blade, letting it scorch the ground where it fell and then flicker out.
The Six-Gun Tarot Page 13