A Book Of Tongues

CHAPTER FOUR

That dream again. How many had he had already — a seemingly infinite roster of dreadful variations, each just as grotesque as the next? How many would he have to?

This time, he sat at his Rainbow Lady’s left hand on a dais made from bones. Her dragonfly cloak spread out behind them both to form a living tapestry, each dim-brilliant wing aflash, their collective buzz a rising ghost-whine.

She laid her small hand upon his arm, murmuring: Even the dark world has its seasons, or tides. And this, Our Flayed Lord’s young man-skinning month, is one of our shallowest points . . . when the waters recede far enough to show the mulch beneath. The endless death-muck swamp from which all life can — and will, and must — be reborn.

Look down, little king . . .

Elevated far above the crowd, he saw the Sunken Ball-Court’s fetid playing grounds teem with competitors — all splendid athletes, once upon a time. But now they were sadly denuded parodies, skins black with putrescence, slipping and sliding back and forth over drained-pale flesh rendered vaguely pink again with strain.

The skull-rack walls rang with groans of effort. Some played half-blind, their eyeballs long since spilled out upon their cheeks on glistening strings; others played by sound alone, sporting necklaces cobbled together from their defeated opponents’ teeth, strung upon intestines.

Ixiptla, she called them. Even closer, her breath stirred his hair — but not rank, as he’d expected. Smelling instead of something fresh and green, a springtime scent, familiar enough to be doubly wrenching when re-encountered in this horrid place.

Ix-what? he asked, only to hear her rippling silver laugh, a many-layered chime of wind-blown glass.

Ixiptla, she repeated. Gods’-flesh. Sacred victims. How generously they spill their blood for us, even here! Playing out the old games, so they can serve themselves up to us like maize. For they have all been Him, in their time — all aspects of the Year-dancer, the Flute-player, best of all shared dishes. Xipe Totec, Our Lord the Flayed One, who breeds flowers from meat and flies from fruit, whose many deaths create and destroy the world.

Crashing up against each other with a rotten gasp of impact while their rucked hides bulged, flapped open along the backbone, to display a sudden flash of naked spine: calculated as a whore’s culottes, yet far more . . . intimate.

Ah, she breathed once more, she who had no real breath. Aaah, but the pulp of men is SWEET, little king. Red-ripe with pain, cradled in clicking yellow bone — and the heart itself, so precious when proffered thus, especially if given in love. Man’s-heart set unwrapped in its cracked cage of ribs, a jade ball . . . earthquake anchor, skull-flower, jaguar cactus fruit. . . .

I don’t — he started to say, then choked it off. Seeing how each player’s empty chest swung wide, then slammed shut again with the game’s give and take, crunching. That they were nothing but raided lock-boxes given just enough life to blunder back and forth through the rising water, kicking up puddle-spray with their bare, bony feet.

A second hand hung from every wrist, cured-glove-limp, nails and all. Skeleton palms rose to spike the ball off whatever wall seemed nearest, sliming it with rot — after which the gamesters would yell out in triumph, catch it on the rebound, and start over again.

He shook his head, bile flushing his throat, and demanded — What are you people? Goddamn demons?

We are the Gods, she said. We were you; we love you. Why would we not? Your love keeps us alive.

I ain’t no damn part at all of that equation.

And here she smiled, so sweetly, with her tiny green teeth — each of them filed to points, set with the same jade scales as her mask-face itself.

Replying, as she did: . . . Not yet.

And now . . . look up, through the moon’s eye. See how I follow you, so closely, even here. See the door through which we two will meet at last, the hole through which I will climb back up into your world.

The moon in question was black, vaguely squarish — rectangulish? A tiny lozenge in the black-and-yellow sky. It struck him as somehow familiar.

Here: I will show you a great mystery, seldom seen. For though you witness me now in my glory, this was me, also, long ago: a girl just like the witch who tries to drain your power now, trembling on the cenote’s lip, pierced tongue’s overflow outlining her lips and chin in a bloody tattoo. She with the thorn-rope tightening around her neck, so that when she falls, she will not even feel her impact. The water will take her like a lover, suck her down and hold her fast, forever.

A massive sounding bell of rock, its sides jagged with lime, through which bats dove and screeched. The water, blue shading to black.

This well is full of bones, and all have them have “been” me, at one time or another. All of them, and none.

He looked up, looked down, looked back up; could not seem to stop himself. Saw the black moon swimming in the black-and-yellow sky. Watched as the rain of knives began to fall once more, slicing downwards.

Now wake, little king, before that witch-girl drains you beyond the point of being able to defend yourself. You are not wholly your own anymore, to give yourself away at will. Neither your own, nor hers, nor any living other’s.

You are MINE.

Though most of Songbird’s lower-floor Chinee-men didn’t seem to know what the hell Morrow meant when he yelled Chess’s name at them — even with the shotgun showing — he eventually blundered on one who spoke at least some sort of English.

“You go there!” this one yelled back, above the music’s caterwauling, indicating a dim passageway that dipped twistily ’round and beneath the central stairs, before trailing into what looked for all the world like a genuine hole in the ground.

Why would Chess head down here? he wondered. This place stinks worse’n the rest of it all put together.

At his back, Celestials were already starting to gather, so Morrow squared his shoulders, and dropped down inside. His first thought was that this place was built far more for Chess’s specifications than it’d ever be for his — but he bulled his way through nevertheless, the rock itself closing in on him mouth-wise, all teeth and no lip.

Eventually, he was spit out into a dead-end cave, its walls lined honeycomb-style with ragged little coffin-sized crevices — four apiece, moving upwards to the last length a man his height could reach while standing on tip-toe. The reek hit him face-on, a gag dipped in outhouse-water, as restless, shifting moans spilled down every-which-way from those same crevices’ occupants.

All women, from what little Morrow allowed himself to recognize, and all of them sick to dying, too — maybe with the pox, the weeping syph, or spitting up blood with the dreaded lung-complaint: consumption, battening on them fast and eating them alive.

Suffice to say, it was the last sort of place Morrow’d ever thought to find Chess Pargeter, with his fancy store-bought clothes and his bath-a-night clean self. But here he stood, hands braced on gunbutts, looking down at a sharp-faced slip of a thing laid back in her shift, a smoking opium-pipe still clutched in one bird-thin hand, with her waist-long rusty hair piled beneath her for a pillow.

She opened her eyes just a slit, narrow and green as Chess’s own, to say — hoarse and blurred by some Limey accent, but with no particular surprise — “Oh, so there you are, at long last. Where’s that warlock fancy-man of yours, any’ow?”

“None of your beeswax,” Chess replied. “You look like death warmed up, by the way.”

The woman drew hard on the pipe, coughed rackingly and grinned, showing a reddened half-mouthful of teeth. “Don’t I? Take a good long ken. This’ll be you too, one o’ these days.”

“Not down here, it won’t.”

It was Chess’s usual tone, all right — hot and cold at once, detached as though he was studying the world through the bottom of one of his just-emptied absinthe glasses. Still, Morrow heard a strange shiver run through it nonetheless: a crack, hairline for now. But spreading.

The woman laughed at that, rattle-harsh. “Ooh, big words. Fink I’m impressed, you cat-eyed bitch? Look at yerself. Could’ve ’ad a bloody soft life, you didn’t run off an’ act the fool, playin’ at soldiers. An’ look at us now.”

“Us? No such thing, thank Christ Almighty. And don’t rag me out like I’m knee-high no more, either — this bitch is feared ’cross six states. Might even go so far as to say I’ve killed more men than you’ve fucked, but I somehow doubt that’s possible. So speak to me as if I got enough in my pocket to pay your fare, or — ”

“Or what? Gonna shoot me? Least you can do — such a big man, you, wiv yer guns.” And here she paused, her ghost-of-pretty face twisted, a bent tin mirror reflection. “Go on, do it!”

Chess considered her, until a look came into his eyes that Morrow couldn’t easily put a name to. “Well . . .” he said, eventually.

“Well, what?”

“Say you was to tell me ‘I’m sorry,’ just the once . . . ’bout — oh, anything . . . then maybe I just might.”

The woman took her own half-moment to think on this, before she shook her head.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t ya? Go on wiv yourself, ya prancing molly. I ain’t done nothin’ in life worth apologizin’ for, least of all to you.”

For a split instant, the green flame Morrow knew all too well danced in Chess’s stare — that sick-lit kill-flash which always came before lightning-fast trigger-cock and a body’s downward thump. But it passed, and just as quickly.

“Yeah,” he said, calm again. “That’s what I thought. And that’s why I wouldn’t waste the damn bullet.”

The woman sagged back, clutching her pipe in both hands. “Then what bloody good are you to me?” she asked. And drew on the pipe, its coal flaring up like she was sucking Hellfire — breathed it in ’til her eyes rolled back, each a mere green thread under a low-slung lid. All the vitriol drained from her, allowing Morrow a glimpse of what she might have looked like young, fresh, even happy, once upon a time. Or good enough at her calling to fake being so.

Conversation over, obviously. But Chess kept on standing there, hands a-twitch like a dreaming dog’s, fingers reaching for the nearest trigger — or for something else entirely, perhaps. To tuck the sackcloth half-thrown across her up further, or at least re-right the opium pipe, so she didn’t set herself on fire.

Morrow cleared his throat. “Hey, Chess — Rook sent me t’ find you. Thought you said you was goin’ to wait outside. . . .”

Chess turned, scowl immediately slapped back on. “Don’t much matter, what I said or what I didn’t — how fast you got here’s your look-out, not mine.” A second’s pause. “So where the hell is he?”

“Uh, back up with Songbird, last I saw. Why?”

All at once Chess was up against him, close enough to lay hold of Morrow’s throat with his teeth. “You left him back there, alone? Stupid fuckin’ ox, you Goddamn skinned bear of a — ”

“Jesus, Chess, he told me to! What the fuck was I supposed to — ?”

“’Sides from come get me?” This last came called back over Chess’s shoulder as he flashed ahead through the tunnel, close to full-out running as the narrow walls would allow. “Don’t you know shit about hexes, Morrow, after all this time? They can’t take just a little!”

Back through the half-dark, panting and heart hammering, barking shoulders and shins. Then up into Selina Ah Toy’s proper again, blinking mole-ish, to find Chess already on point — both guns out and lips peeled back, ready to go down fighting, while customers and employees alike slid all sorts of crazy mediaeval weaponry out from beneath their coattails.

Above, Morrow could see Songbird stepping out onto her landing with the Rev’s huge shadow looming behind, big as ever, though slightly sleepwalk-swaying.

“Ash Rook!” Chess yelled. “You all right?”

The Rev gave a grunt, neither enough to confirm or deny. But Songbird turned her head, back-tracing the cry and smiling in recognition at Chess’s voice, with a hungry sort of interest.

“And here would be your lotus boy, Reverend — the redheaded man-killer himself. Did you enjoy your sojourn in the tunnels, Mister Pargeter?” Her voice dropped, a wintry whisper. “See anything you like?”

Chess levelled both barrels at her, without a second’s hesitation. “Not too much,” he said. “I’d spent any real money in this joint, in fact, I might feel inclined to put a ball right through your brain. So gimme back the Rev, quick-smart, and we’ll call it even.”

“Such discourtesy. I will excuse it on grounds of loyalty, however — or love, if you prefer.”

There was a wealth of cool contempt packed into that one over-enunciated word. To which Chess gave a nasty little grin of his own, and replied, “My Ma always said love’s the word they pull out whenever they don’t want to pay you. But then again, yours too, probably.”

A general hiss ran round the room. Songbird shook her head, sadly.

“Poor angry little boy,” she said, softly. “And I might have been so hospitable.”

“Uh huh, I’ll bet. You want it in the eye, or should I just aim for anyplace convenient?”

But with this, the crowd surged forward again, and Morrow found himself abruptly kitty-corner up against Chess’s side, wondering just how many blasts he could possibly get off — the full two? Only one? One and a half, however that might work? — before somebody grabbed his shotgun’s stock and wrestled it away. Chess cursed as Morrow jostled his elbow, and let fly, like he was punctuating a sentence. At such close quarters, the same bullet reduced half of one pigtail’s face to raw mash, wounding two others standing behind in the process.

“Now, listen all you motherfuckers — ” Chess began, still keeping the other gun trained vaguely Songbird-wards, but broke off as the gal gave out a sudden teakettle-shrill shriek. She didn’t sound angry, so much, as simply done with playing.

Her men cowered away, leaving Chess and Morrow to take the full brunt, as it eventually resolved itself into a string of imprecations: “Mei, tamade hundan, liu koushui de biaozi he houzi de ben erzi! To come inside my house and speak to me thus, as though you knew no better — ”

Chess snarled. “Yeah? Well, koo nee day, po-foo! You bring your ass down here and say that, ’fore I come on up and — ”

Aw, crap, Morrow thought, bracing himself. But at that very same instant, Songbird cried out in a very different way and slid sideways to avoid the Rev as he crashed through the banister, wood-splinters bursting to rain every which way, dropping to land heavy almost at Chess’s feet.

Rook shook himself, groggy; hadn’t quite recovered from whatever Songbird’d been doing to him, up top. Then reached ’round Chess’s waist with one outsized hand, fisting it hard enough to keep them locked together, contact sparking between them in a way that made Chess stagger, guns drooping, like he wasn’t quite sure what he was here for anymore. Rook rummaged in his coat with the other, tucking the “smoking mirror” he still clutched away, while Morrow used the distraction to empty his remaining shells: one in the nearest lamp, spraying lit oil, and the other into some gigantic Tong-boy who immediately came jumping back up with an axe even so, seemingly oblivious to the impact and looking to split a still-dazed Chess in two.

The shot’s report seemed to snap Chess awake again, prompting him to gut-shoot his potential murderer, then catch Morrow’s eye on the go-’round as they both went to reload. Morrow found Chess’s glance uncharacteristically full of surprise and respect, admixed.

“Nice shot,” Chess said, before going back to his usual business, as Rook finally got his Bible flipped open. Above, meanwhile, Songbird screamed out some new phrase, prompting Morrow to look up just in time to see — her whole bottom jaw unhinge, snake-wide, and a stream of live bats pour out of it like fluttery black vomit, filling the air around all three of them with shrieks and teeth. Chess pivoted with one of ’em already clinging fast to the side of his head, and emptied both guns in a matter of seconds. The results, though spectacular — delicate wings shred-torn, furry bodies popped apart like clay pigeons full of blood — were so sadly inefficient overall, he was soon reduced to trying to pistol-whip the damn things to death.

“Jesus fuck-damn fuck!” Chess yelled, in disgusted rage. “Fuck all y’all, you filthy fuckin’ things! Rook, if you’re gonna do somethin’, best time’d be ’bout right the fuck NOW — ”

Rook nodded. “Then the LORD said to Joshua, See, I have delivered Jericho into your hands. . . . When you hear them sound a long blast on the trumpets, have all the people give a loud shout. . . .”

“Chapter Six, two to twenty-seven,” Morrow told himself, as the house began to shake and the Rev preached on. The text spiralled out of Rook’s mouth flat and quick, a smoky snake-tongue of close-packed silver typeface, to dart inside the walls through any available route: old cracks, cracks newly opening in skeleton fans, every mislaid plank and empty nail-bed.

“. . . and when . . . the wall collapsed . . . they took the city. They devoted the city to the LORD and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it — men and women, young and old. . . .”

The cracks in Selina Ah Toy’s foundations were wide enough now to both let in daylight and let out the bats, who almost immediately tried to get back in, blinded by the dull glare of ’Frisco’s watery exterior. “And at that time Joshua pronounced this solemn oath,” the Rev continued declaiming, implacably. “Cursed before the LORD is the man who undertakes to rebuild this city, Jericho: At the cost of his firstborn son will he lay its foundations; at the cost of his youngest will he set up its gates.”

Quite some judgement, Morrow thought. But Songbird merely spat, unimpressed, maybe hoping it’d hit Chess on the way down. Hissing at Rook, in turn: “This cannot be forgotten, gweilo ch’in ta. Do you hear me?”

The Rev nodded, equally sanguine. “Goodbye, Songbird,” was all he said, in return.

One final spasm, a crunching twist that ripped skin and muscle from the rack of the world, saw all three somehow thrown bodily straight from Songbird’s bagnio to the muddy river-bank on ’Frisco’s outskirts where they’d left the rest of their gang: a dry gold-panning operation with at least one shack left intact, just right for purposes of shelter and disguise combined.

The sudden rending — and mending — of their arcane passage was enough to make old Kees Hosteen spill the coffee he was boiling up, yelling out, as he did, “Christ on a coffin-nailed cross, boys! The Rev’s come back!”

Above, the open sky growled. Chess hugged the Rev to him, wet to both knees and virtually holding him up — most of him, anyhow. Frilly little catamite’s a sight stronger than he looks, Morrow found himself thinking — then kicked himself in the mental ass, hard, for being so surprised.

“You are a damn fool,” Chess told Rook. “I told you them Chinee witches ain’t worth the trouble of truckin’ with, no matter the odds. But did you listen?”

Rook heaved a long sigh, bracing both hands on the small of his back and cracking his own spine ’til he groaned like he’d been beat all over. Finally managing to allow: “I did not.”

“Nope. And considerin’ we barely got out of there alive, I hope it was Goddamn well worth it.”

“Well, since you ask . . . it was. Which means, I suppose, that I probably need to thank you for all your help on this particular campaign, in whatever way you might find most congenial. Always assuming that sounds like adequate payment in kind, to you.”

A long, cool glance exchanged between ’em followed, with heat banked none too secretly underneath.

“We’ll see,” Chess said, at last. And turned away.

Half a night and a day of hard riding later, they holed up in a shanty barroom-whorehouse combo called the Two Sisters Saloon, where Chess insisted on laying out for a bottle all of Morrow’s own, and stuck around ’til he’d drunk at least half of it. It was probably the longest he’d been in close quarters with Chess since joining up without the Rev there to mediate between them, and Morrow was vaguely shocked to realize he wasn’t actually struggling to stay on his guard anymore. Mister (ex-)Private Pargeter could be fairly good company, when he wasn’t determined to pick fights that ended in murder.

“Two Sisters,” he said, thickly. “That who started this place up?”

Chess laughed, a genially smashed cat-sneeze cackle. “Hardly. It’s the song, you know, with the . . . river, and the mill, and whatnot . . . you know that song?” Morrow shook his head. “Well, then maybe it was just my Ma, after all — some Limey jig she used to sing, whenever she got low. Goes like . . .

“There lived an old lord by the Northern Sea,

Bow we down —

There lived an old lord by the Northern Sea,

Bow and balance to me;

There lived an old lord by the Northern Sea

And he had daughters, one two three . . .

I’ll be true to my love,

If my love will be true to me.”

Morrow squinted, feeling the room lurch around him. “So he had three daughters.”

“Yeah, and one of ’em steals the other’s finance, so the other one throws her in the river to drown. Then she floats downstream and snags in the mill, and the miller drags her out — ”

“So she’s rescued.”

Another laugh. “’Til he cuts the rings off her fingers, and throws her right back in.”

“An’ the third?”

“She don’t even come into it, Morrow; three’s a better rhyme than two, is all.” Chess shot him a quick glance, and even mellow as he was, Morrow felt a quick stab of superstitious dread, unable to deny that even in the bar’s smoky semi-shadow, the pistoleer’s eyes really did throw back light like a cat’s. “You’re an odd sorta bastard when you’re drunk, ain’t ya?”

Morrow swallowed. “Yeah. When I ain’t drunk, too — or so I’ve been told.”

And then, because the Two Sisters was so warm and dark, maybe, packed full to the gills with outlaws and really almost too noisy to talk at all, Morrow found himself asking, without thinking twice, “What the hell was that place, anyhow? Back at Songbird’s?”

But to this, Chess didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he continued to study on his own empty glass a while, once more deep entranced by what he saw there: that cool, sticky green world where nothing mattered, ’cause everything was already well-drained hollow.

“Down in the hole?” he said, at length. “They call it the hospital — not that it’s for gettin’ better, you understand. ’Cause that’s just where they put the whores who really are on their last inch of trim.”

“’Bout how long you think they all got, then?”

“Oh, not too long. Undertakers’ll be by tomorrow. If they ain’t dead by then, they better try harder.”

“So — that woman you were talkin’ with . . .” Another gulp, as the room continued on its merry, wobbly way. “. . . who was she?”

And here Chess’s eyes flicked over yet again, all the more disturbing for their unpredictable lack of anger.

“Well, hell, Morrow,” he said, lightly, “I’d’ve thought you’d’ve already guessed. That there was the famous English Oona . . . Pargeter.”