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downward toward the great skeletal stage that God had named the Earth.
    The angel looked at the last of the Voidlings. His mind scrambled for purchase, for some foothold to comprehend something it was never designed to experience. The Voidling’s chains burned with the fire of unborn suns and sang endless hosannas unto the creator of the new universe.
    His heart should fill with joy at such sights, such sounds. But it didn’t. He had the sick feeling that nothing had been resolved. This new world was being built upon conflict and death. He feared such a foundation would poison the entire work. And the thing, the creature that was to be entombed at its heart, would squat in the darkness, an undying witness to the lengths to which ambition would reach. If Biqa was correct, it would seethe, it would hate and it would remember who put it there. But it would never, never die.
    The fair angel turned toward the promises of Heaven and spurred his mount. Unlike Biqa, he did not look back.

The Queen of Swords
    Maude Stapleton tucked the derringer she held in her palm back into the recesses of her sleeve sheath with a casual flick of her hand. The men and women walking down Main Street in that moment only saw Arthur Stapleton’s odd, quiet, slightly skittish, wife gather up her flowing hair and adjust her bonnet after the commotion in front of Shultz’s store—nothing more. No one noticed her returning the small pistol to the hiding place she had carried it in since she was fifteen years old.
    The deputy, the man everyone called Mutt, had almost noticed her draw the gun when the shotgun blast bellowed out of the general store, but he was too intent on tying to save her and Constance by driving them to the ground and covering them. Mutt. She wondered why someone with such kind eyes carried such a harsh name.
    It was the same drive, to protect her daughter, that had driven Maude to draw the gun. It was an old instinct, rusty like a neglected hinge, part of the training she had undertaken when she first accepted the responsibility of The Load, when she was just a girl, not much younger than Constance was now. Maude remembered the endless training, the drilling. The instincts it had built in her had gone to sleep, lost under the strata of motherhood, the duties of the good wife, some lost to age, more buried under fear and hesitation and doubt. She was surprised how much of it was still in her, though, still ready. She was just as saddened and a little shocked at how much of it was gone.
    “Why didn’t you stop the old man when he came in the store, Mother?” Constance asked as they made their way up the plank sidewalks of Main Street.
    While still splashed with mud, horse dung and other effluents best left to the imagining, the sidewalks were practically sanitary, compared to the ditches of filth on either side of them. To allow the two ladies to pass, men stepped off the planks, stepping right into the muck without a second thought. If they wore hats they doffed them to the ladies. Maude noticed how many looked at Constance’s chest, not her face, how many smiles hid leers. She nodded politely as the men stepped into the shit and allowed her and her daughter to pass. Maude knew over a hundred ways to blind them, cripple them, make them beg for an end to the pain. She was confident she could still muster the skill and enthusiasm to accomplish at least a few, despite her decline. In time she would teach Constance how to use these men’s instincts against themselves. But for now Maude did what most women did, tried to ignore the unwanted attention.
    “He had a gun,” Maude said, “and was intoxicated. That makes it difficult to predict his actions, gauge his reflexes. That gun was pointed at you. I couldn’t take any chances.”
    Constance nodded, seemingly satisfied with the half-truth. While that was all accurate, it was also true, Maude knew, that she was getting old, slowing down, and hadn’t had to take out an armed