The Shotgun Arcana (6 page)

“Gillian Proctor is as well,” Maude said. “Thank you, Mutt. You’re the only one in my life that could understand.”

“Come home quick,” the deputy said. “We’ll miss you.”

Maude took no water, no food, no horse and no weapons with her. Her satchel contained only packets of herbs she could not find in the desert and a small coil of rope. Her excuse for leaving town was to fetch supplies for her new business in Virginia City. After Arthur’s death and the settlement of his estate, Maude and Constance were left a sum of money that was enough for them to live comfortably for some time, but not forever. Furthermore, Maude’s father, Martin Anderton, had set up the newly married couple’s financial affairs so that Arthur, and then Martin, were the custodians of the sizable inheritance that Gran Bonny had left to her, including Anne’s estate southwest of Charleston, Grande Folly.

The few correspondences Maude had conducted by mail with her father in the past year had not helped the situation. Martin was resolute that he remain the caretaker of the properties and her money. Given that Maude was a woman, most courts were still inclined to view her as an emotional child, unable to handle her own economic destiny, so she had little in the way of recourse.

Maude decided to do exactly what Gran Bonny had always told her to do—rely on no one but herself for her fortune or her life. She used some of the money her father gave her as an “allowance” to start her own business in Golgotha—a laundry, the town’s first.

At first it was just her and Constance doing the work, but as more orders came in and Golgotha continued to grow from the opening of the Argent Mine, Maude needed more laundresses. Gillian Proctor helped as much as she could, given her own jobs of running a boardinghouse and preparing and delivering meals to many of the town’s citizens, and her impending marriage to Auggie Shultz.

It was a bit of problem finding women out on the frontier that could work, and wanted to. Most were either wives or prostitutes; both were often forbidden to work outside their respective houses. The solution came when she met and engaged some of the Chinese women of Johnny Town, the sprawling Chinese community that made up the northwestern corner of Golgotha. With primary work on the transcontinental railroad finished, more Chinese were pouring into Golgotha daily, looking for work in the mines or on the proposed doglegs off the main railroad line.

The Chinese women were impressed that Maude spoke some of the Yue dialect that Gran had taught her. After some negotiations, three women, Jiao, Ron and Chuan, agreed to accept positions at the laundry and Maude’s business had enough people to keep up with the growing demand.

Maude also found in her late husband Arthur’s connections to the floundering Golgotha Bank and Trust a means to secure a position as a bookkeeper for the bank, which was now under the ownership of three gentlemen recently from Kansas City. Once Maude pointed out her discovery that one of the investors was covertly diverting funds, there were only two owners.

Maude approached the bankers, Daniel Bracken and Roger McCredle, with a quiet offer: she would invest her own capital into the bank in exchange for becoming a secret partner of the two men in the venture. After the two men reviewed the numbers and realized how much of an asset Maude had already been to them by uncovering the embezzlement, they agreed, with the implicit understanding she would remain silent about her stake in the bank.

With her immediate economic challenges conquered, Maude’s attention returned to the thing that kept her awake at night, the thing that haunted her dreams when she did sleep—nagging fear. Fear of having lost all the things she had worked so hard to obtain, in her flesh and in her heart; seeing how much of her years of training had been buried under almost two decades of neglect. And that led her to the cougar.

She had traveled in the bitter night and rested in the unforgiving day. All the tools Gran had given her to survive began to come back to her. She was surprised how many of them came to her without even conscious thought, simply instinct. She needed them to survive and they were there, waiting: rusty, buried but still there.

On the third night she followed the big cat’s trail into a hilly section of the scrubland, and into what at first appeared to be a natural cave, about halfway up the small mountain. There was lots of debris from the mountainside by the entrance, small rocks and even boulders split and shattered as if the whole mountain had undergone some terrible upheaval, struck by a massive hand.

Maude had been traveling by starlight, using a technique to adjust her eyes to allow her to see better in the low light. As she stood at the mouth of the cave, she realized this trick would do her no good more than a few yards in. The darkness was absolute—as dark as what waits for us on the other side of our final breath. She closed her eyes, measured her breathing, and moved the blood within her to the places her mind willed it. Gran had called it Blood Working, but explained that it was discipline and control over one’s facilities and body, not supernatural.

“A lot of what you do, they will call magic, girl,” Gran had said, long ago, sitting on her driftwood bench on the beach, the crashing Atlantic her classroom.

Anne Bonny, at well over one hundred fifty years of age, was slender, slight even, with a mane of snow white hair, a few stray strands of iron and copper remaining, and was still capable of making a sailor blush or laying any man on the planet low. She cackled and raised a bony finger at young Maude, age thirteen, sitting crossed-legged in the Indian fashion before her great-great-great-grandmother. A wicked intelligence, and a soul thirsty to drink deeply, drunkenly, of life, flashed from the emerald fire in the old woman’s eyes. “That’s so they can fear you, label you, call you a ‘witch’ and worse. Like animals afraid of lightning.

“Bah! Magic! ’Tis nothing of the sort!” She spit onto the sand at her feet. “I know magic, girl, seen it all over the world. Different names, different sources—juju, Satanism, Kabala, hoodoo, Kapu and thousand others—and it’s all the same. Unpredictable, clumsy at times, relies on gods and spirits and all kinds of nonsense that ain’t you, ain’t in you, ain’t of you. Damnable stuff is less reliable than guns … or men. What we practice you can count on, from tit to tail, lass. You respect it, practice it and it will serve you.”

“Isn’t the blood of Lilith magic?” Maude asked.

“Is the sunset magic? The opening eyes of a babe? Cool water when you’ve been walking the desert? Love? Is love magic?” Gran reached under her tunic and pulled out the ancient flask that she wore on a crudely wrought iron chain about her neck. The flask was made of iron and yellowed bone with a thin filigree net of silver wrapped over its ancient, pitted surface. The flask was capped with a blood-red ruby the size of a thumbnail. “There are so many things in this life that are wondrous and defy being jammed into a category, hard as we might want them to. The blood is one of those. It doesn’t give us our abilities, or our skills. It simply toughens us up a bit, gives us the fortitude, the focus and the strength to endure the training. You can learn this stuff without the blood, lass, most of the abilities were added to by Daughters of Lilith from across the world over the long eons, since the first of us drank The Mother’s blood and took up The Load. Who knows, you might add a few tricks of your own to the repertoire.”

“But how do Daughters from all over the world, from different ages, learn the knowledge, the skills of another half a world away? Do we all meet from time to time?”

“No,” Anne said. “There are a few things that might draw us all together. All of them horrid. Hopefully you won’t have that happen in your time. No, it’s a property of the blood. We just ‘know’ things about the others who carry The Load and them about us. It comes in dreams and in the secret parts of your mind that are always at work, always whispering, but that you are mostly unaware of. As knowledge that affects us all is added, we all just sort of become aware of that possibility and then we have to still train and perfect the skills or seek out the full information, but we just … know.”

“That sounds like magic to me,” Maude said, smiling. Gran growled.

“Infuriating little wagtail!” she said. “Let’s quiet all those questions with some breath-control exercises! Into the water, now! I want you fully immersed and holding your breath for thirty minutes this time! Go!”

At the entrance to the cave, Maude increased the sensitivity of her hearing and the acuity of her sense of touch. She could feel and “see” the currents of air moving about her, perceive the openings and the obstacles in the darkness of the cavern. Her nose picked up a hint of the heady musk of the mountain lion’s scent and even perceived a sourness in it that would indicate a sickness, perhaps a poisoning. She stepped into the darkness and swam with it, in it. She was as silent as smoke. As she moved deeper into the cavern, she discovered it descended, and that a well-worn set of stairs was hewn into the rock. The big cat had gone down the stairs. Maude followed. Continuing downward on the narrow, winding stairs, Maude’s closed eyes began to register some kind of light beyond her lids. She opened her eyes and could see, but she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

The stone stairs spiraled down into a cavern, the walls of which were carved in intricate relief; the façades of ionic columns of the Greek fashion circled the circular stone vault. Between the faux pillars were strange murals depicting scenes of monstrous beings crashing to the Earth, thrown by other monsters from on high, beyond the stars. Other murals depicted the creatures, composed of writhing snakes and parts akin to crustaceans, birds and insects, possessing millions of gibbering mouths, being warred upon by women with spears and others wielding flame. The final murals depicted the creatures being dragged down under the sea and into mountains, where, in chains, they slumbered, dreaming. The last panel of bas-relief depicted the stars tumbling down, the mountains shattering and the seas boiling as the horrible things arose from their slumber, and most prominent in the depiction of the destruction was a thing that seemed to possess the qualities of a man and serpent.

The whole cave was bathed in a sick, lemony light that came from a small naturally formed cistern beside the foot of the stairs. As Maude silently neared the foot of the staircase, she noted that the water in the cistern seemed clear and clean, but gave off an unearthly greenish-yellow glow. She couldn’t tell if it was the water itself glowing, or if it was a property of something within the natural pool.

The whole place reminded Maude of the well room, deep below the Argent Mine, where she had battled to save her daughter and the world last year. Similar, but this place’s architecture seemed to be firmly grounded in the ancient Western world, a temple to some blasphemous pantheon of gods the Greeks feared enough to placate but dared not worship.

The chamber had an intrinsic wrongness to it. The very atmosphere, the feel of the gravity—it all felt wrong, off, to Maude.

She didn’t have long to ponder the mystery of an ancient Greek temple buried in the foothills of Nevada as a dark shape dropped upon her with a growl that shredded the silence. Maude twisted her upper body and that instinct alone saved her from the mountain lion’s ambush. The great cat had been lounging on a rock shelf above the room and had pounced silently, surprising her. It suddenly occurred to Maude, as she pushed the pain of the gash in her back to a distant place in her mind, that despite her silent movement, the cat had smelled her approach and had been ready for her. She had grown arrogant, thinking her training made her invisible, untouchable.

The cat scrambled to lock its teeth onto her neck, but Maude tumbled backward and landed a powerful kick to the side of the cougar’s head. The cat staggered backward and shook its head from the force of the blow. That led to a standoff, the two predators crouched near each other, knowing that only one was going to leave this cave.

Maude felt the wet blood on her back oozing. The wound needed attention, but for now all she could do was slow the flow of the blood and keep the pain contained.

The cougar padded over to the cistern and lapped at the glowing water with its wide tongue. It shuddered, as if it had a seizure, then growled low and turned back to glare at Maude, some mad, alien light now reflected in its beautiful eyes.

“So that’s what made you sick, you poor girl,” Maude said. “I’m so sorry, this isn’t your fault, is it?”

The big cat snarled and began to pace before the cistern, its tail slashing back and forth. Maude stayed low and watched very carefully the fluid ripple of muscles and the twitch of tendons beneath the cougar’s golden fur.

This was the reason she had come out here. Her training had taught her how to heal, manipulate, misdirect, kill or incapacitate people. She knew the roadways of nerves and pressure points that crisscrossed the human body. Very little time had been paid to types of animals other than man, but Maude had a vague feeling, like an old memory itching at the back of her mind, that there was … something.

She stood and took a clumsy step to the left, slightly turning her back to the cougar. It was a feint and it worked; the cat launched itself at her with a roar. Maude twisted suddenly right and moved her legs to a stable, balanced position. The cat shifted, too, in mid-flight, to compensate for Maude’s trick.
Clever girl,
Maude thought. It was the only thought she had time for as she saw fangs and claws barreling down on her. Her response was pure instinct; she dropped to one knee and saw the cougar’s belly sail over her, claws flailing wildly at her. From this angle she could strike upward and most likely rupture most of the cat’s major organs. Again, by instinct, Maude didn’t take the killing blow. Instead, she launched herself from the crouch into a spinning flip that brought her above and behind the cougar as they both sailed toward the cave floor.

Maude slid her arms under one of the cougar’s forelegs and behind the great cat’s neck as they hit the ground. The two tumbled and rolled. Maude hung on as the cat tried to get around and find purchase to rake Maude with her claws, or shake her loose. Maude held on. Quickly, she slid her free arm under and up around the cat’s other foreleg and completed the hold around the mountain lion’s neck. The cat raked her arm as she slipped by it, leaving an ugly, gushing wound on her right forearm. The pain was hot, jagged fire up her arm and shoulder. Maude didn’t let go.