A Book Of Tongues

CHAPTER EIGHT

Even long after the twister’d moved on, Rook could remember with exquisite urgency how it’d felt when Chess first knelt down in front of him in its wake and brought him to absolute ruin. How he’d fetched himself so hard he’d seen genuine stars flare like Pit-bound souls in the redness behind his eyes, then hauled Chess up by both shoulders and told him, hoarsely, “I don’t want you doin’ that with anyone else again, not ever. Hear me, Private?”

“Or what?”

“Or — I’ll find them. And I’ll kill them.”

Chess just grinned, like this threat was the best compliment anybody’d ever given him.

“Suits me,” he said, and let Rook lift him further — kissed him with the taste of Rook’s own seed sour on his breath, wound his legs around Rook’s waist, and gave him his sin again.

The decision to become outlaws proved a surprisingly practical one, in the end. By limiting Chess’s choice of partners, Rook found, he’d unwittingly created a situation of scarcity which began to wear on the gang’s remaining members, as the camp and its horrors fell steadily behind.

“Find them whores,” was Chess’s sage advice — but whores meant money, of which they currently had none.

They’d already crossed into Arizona almost by instinct, making for the empty places, and spent a length of time wandering amongst the stones there, like Legion. Occasionally, they saw what they took for Apaches off in the distance, and Rook wondered if any of these could be numbered amongst those myriad spectral intelligences he now felt crowding in on him whenever he closed his eyes — as he had almost since that first morning he woke up sprawled next to Chess, sore with love-wounds, his head already a-ring with other people’s voices.

Chess stirred and murmured, sleepily. Rook hugged him a bit closer, and knew himself reborn, in far more ways than the not-so-simple fact of having merely fucked another man could ever explain.

“Hey,” he asked Chess, poking him lightly. “You think they heard us?”

“What, Hosteen and the rest?” Chess replied, muffled, into the broad expanse of Rook’s chest. “I think dogs for a mile ’round could probably hear us, if I was doin’ my job right. Why — prospect of bein’ known as queer make you antsy, Reverend?”

“Not . . . as such, surprisingly.”

“Well, ain’t you sweet.” With a smirk, Chess sat up, right into a particularly luxuriant stretch — stark naked, and not seeming to give much of a damn who might be watching. Rook saw scars on him, both old and fresh, which hadn’t been quite so obvious in the hours before: a pink curlicue tracing one rib, the pale flowery knot of a plugged bullet hole punctuating one shoulder blade.

Chess turned back to catch Rook gaping at the fierce white slash that hooked from right-hand sideburn to just under his jaw — suddenly visible, even beneath the red — and said, airily: “Yeah, that’s where my Ma stuck me with her yen hock, same night I told her I was signin’ up. Stung like a bitch, the whole time I was growin’ out my beard to cover it.”

“My God!”

Chess shrugged. “Suited me fine; I’m prettier shaved, which gave her the grand idea she might rig me up as some she-he, sell me that-a-way to fools who crave somethin’ extra up under the skirts. But I ain’t fit to be no girl, much less a poor jest of one — while I may not be the sorta man most think they are, I’m a man, just the same. Made to ride and fight, take what I want or swing tryin’, not die on my back or live on my knees. Knew that the minute I first touched a gun.”

“Colonel Colt, et cetera.”

“Exactly so.” He cast Rook a sidelong glance. “Think you’d like me better if I was a gal, Ash Rook?”

The Rev looked him up and down, and answered, without a hint of equivocation, “I don’t really see how I could, Chess Pargeter. Seein’ how you already move me absolute best of any damn thing I’ve come across, thus far.”

He got to his own feet then, towering over Chess, and smiled at the way his shadow seemed to knit them both together, long before he gathered him fiercely back in. They collided, mouths open, tongues working sweetly.

When he pulled away, at last, he was equally pleased to see how Chess’s pale eyes seemed all but dazed with arousal. And then something entirely brand new came into his look, an angry sort of hope.

“I . . . wasn’t raised to — care — for no one,” Chess told him. “But if I did grow fond of any man, outside the usual transactions, well . . . you might be that one, Rev.”

Rook nodded, carefully.

“I think I’d like that,” he replied.

“You’re damn right, you would,” Chess agreed. And gripped Rook by both biceps at once, his fingers leaving bruises, kissing him so hard spit mingled with blood.

They raised the subject of outlawry that night, ’round the campfire, and watched it pass unanimously. “Always did think I’d probably end up robbin’ folks, once the War was done,” was old Hosteen’s only comment.

“It’s dangerous work, is what I hear,” Rook pointed out.

“Sure,” Chess said, “same as anything else. But we’ll be right enough, I expect.”

“How’s that?”

That crooked, dazzling smile. “’Cause we got you.”

True, Rook thought, as far as that went. The only problem being he didn’t actually know, himself, just how far that was . . . not with any true degree of accuracy. Particularly not under pressure.

Magic had its price, was what Rook had always heard, and that price was mighty hard. On the one hand, whatever he preached did come true, indisputably — and since everything he preached came straight from the Book itself, the direct and truthful word of God, he believed he might be forgiven for having assumed it would be good work he did with it overall, rather than the reverse. Yet everything he preached went bad, in the end — swiftly, and often inventively.

In the Painted Desert, for example — waiting for information on which trains might be best worth robbing, with what food they’d brought along running out fast — he turned to the tale of Elijah, who was fed by ravens. Soon, a plague of black-feathered birds huge as his namesake descended, dashing themselves to death against the canyon walls. The gang, starved enough to overcome their disgust at this haphazard delivery system, handily ate them roasted, only vaguely plucked and splinter-crunchy with hollow broken bones.

So Rook turned to Moses and his manna instead, bringing unleavened bread falling from the air (straight into dirt, soft and sticky, not exactly nourishing). It was blander, but kept better.

“Maybe you should seek for other hexes,” Chess suggested. “Chat them up, get them to tell you what they do, or don’t, in similar situations. Couldn’t hurt.”

“Couldn’t it?”

(Minds always touching his, feeling him out, harrying him: Go here, do this, do that. Stay clear. Most he couldn’t put a name to, ’sides from a Chink gal called Songbird to the west whose thoughts coiled and spat in a venomous centipede nest. Rook hoped to never come near enough for her to see what he looked like, let alone lay hands on him directly.)

“Hell, I don’t know — I ain’t no hex. But I got my best advice from other gunslingers, same’s I got my worst. Take it all, pick through it at your leisure . . . and practise.”

That morning, before dawn, Rook woke first and left Chess wrapped in both their coats, careful not to wake him. Then sat down in the dust bare-assed, stretched out a hand, frowned at the largish, greyish rock set opposite, and ordered it — “Come here, to me. C’mon, now.”

Nothing happened.

“Here, I conjure thee. I . . . command.”

Still nothing. Rook felt ridiculous. Even his voice seemed flat, dry, without a shred of its now-normal rope-rough timbre. As though . . .

You are only talking for yourself, one of the voices told him — right in his ear, yet resonating considerably deeper: inside the hills around, the earth itself. Inside him.

A woman’s voice, but not his Rainbow Lady, who hadn’t spoken directly to him since his escape, for all he glimpsed her face in dreams. “And who should I talk for?” he asked her, out loud — more to see what would happen, than because he actually wanted an answer.

One man’s voice is only that, she replied — one small part of the whole. We must be larger than that, in order to keep our balance.

Sounds like an Indian, he thought. And felt, rather than saw, her smile curve, with the same quality to it his grandmother’s used to have, back when Rook was still Little Asher.

She is not to be trusted, your Lady of the Snares and Traps, she told him. But then, you know that, in your heart. And as for you, grandson . . . perhaps you must continue to speak in your blackrobe Lord’s voice, until you have the time — the inclination — to finally come find me, and learn better.

Then she was gone, leaving Rook alone in the desert, looking at a rock. His mind slid, automatically, to whatever Biblical claptrap might serve best, given the situation:

The lion’s whelps have not trodden it, nor the fierce lion passed by it.

He putteth forth his hand upon the rock. He overturneth the mountains by the roots.

He cutteth out rivers among the rocks. And his eye seeth every precious thing. . . .

Job, 28:8-10.

And the rock cried out, he thought, feeling the words come up through him, scar ’round his throat left raw again, in their wake. The rock, at the very same time — a seed-pod stuffed with granite dust, cleft with an invisible axe — split wide open.

Oh, sinner-man. Where you gonna run to?

Behind, Chess slept on, hearing nothing of any of it, ’til Rook woke him with a kiss.

A week after, they rode down to No Silver Here and waited for the train to come smoking down its track, laid skeletal atop the new-blasted ground. Intelligence suggested it would be guarded by Pinks, equipped with at least one Gatling and a brace of pepperboxes; this Hosteen confirmed, via telescope. So they separated into two columns, Chess drawing fire on the right, while Hosteen made sure Rook could pull close alongside and catch the engineer’s eye, gesturing at him to haul on the brakes — thus giving a man they all called Big Al time to jump in through the back and clap a pistol to the man’s temple, making sure he would.

As the train started to slow, the accompanying gear-jerk threw one Gatling-operator into the other, spinning the gun’s muzzle in such a way that it laid two of Chess’s posse down. Rook dug in his spurs, surged maybe thirty yards ahead, reined in and slid off, stepping directly into the dreadnought’s path. As it bore down on him — the uppermost Pinkerton already back on his feet, grasping for the Gatling’s crank — he opened his mouth and preached, from Corinthians:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

It was one of the sweetest verses known to man, quoted at every wedding he’d officiated. But when his lips shaped the words, something else came out through his mouth along with them — a lashing ghost-tongue spear of silver-gilt which rammed full-speed through the boiler without jumping the train off its tracks, just pinning it there like a massive iron bug, releasing its entire compliment of steam in a hissing cloud.

And that was the problem, in the end. It was a bit too dense for Rook to completely calculate what he was doing. So though he’d meant for whatever effect he produced to stop short, or just slap the Pink silly, it split the man’s skull and neck alike, spraying everything around it with gouting red.

The gang met it with a half cheer, half yelp — alternately disgusted, and pretty damn impressed. ’Course, that all changed once Rook turned to yell fresh orders at Chess, not realizing the spell-spear was still trailing along with him. Before he knew what was happening, it’d sheared off Joe Skopp’s left arm at the shoulder, and Joe fell, screaming.

Rook clapped both hands over his face immediately, unmindful of what damage he might do to himself (none, it turned out). Hosteen tried — and failed, miserably — to tourniquet Joe’s stump.

Meanwhile, Chess sprang up into the breach, yelling: “C’mon, you bastards! There’s lootin’ to be done!”

The others streamed after him, automatically — all but Petrus Kavalier, Joe’s best buddy, who stopped in mid-stride and looked back at Rook, eyes gone blank with shock. “You’re the damn Devil, Rev,” he said, wonderingly, like he’d just worked it out. Raising his gun, cocking it back —

Maybe I am, Rook thought, while the LORD is my shield and the point of my salvation knocked hard against his teeth from the wrong side ’round — so easy to simply let it out, and watch what happened next. But it was a moot point, because that was when Chess shot Kavalier through the heart over his own shoulder, without even turning — an impossible feat, for impossible times. Almost . . . magical.

You ever notice how Chess hardly ever reloads? Hosteen had asked Rook. Or how he can fire in two separate directions at once, and still shoot straight? He fans the trigger, just for fun, and he actually hits his target. Ain’t no motherfucker on this earth can do that.

I don’t know that much about firearms, Rook had found himself replying, which wasn’t exactly untrue. Yet —

Chess’s hair lifted slightly in the wind, a tight blood-halo, and Rook could tell from the way he stood that he was grinning.

The train was taken five minutes on, with most of the remaining Pinks kneeling in surrender, down on their knees so fast they must’ve bruised the caps. But by the time Rook had coughed enough times to be sure his killing words were well-dispersed, Chess had already head-shot three of them, and was taking aim at the fourth. Rook slapped his gun up, annoyed.

“The fuck you do that for?” Chess snarled.

“We need one of them left upright, at least. To tell what happened.”

“So they’ll be warned, next time? Where’s the fun in — ”

“Not all of us’re quite so fond of murder as yourself, Chess. Or maybe you hadn’t noticed.” He indicated Hosteen, staring sick-white down at what was now Joe’s corpse.

Chess just sniffed, disapprovingly. “Well, you don’t have to coddle them, do ya?”

“Like it fine enough when I indulge you, don’t you, darlin’?”

Back to the grin. “But that’s different. Ain’t it?”

Rook couldn’t deny how something in him came ticking up to meet that wicked smile, even right now — like sticking his dick inside Chess had turned the key in a door that the whole world would’ve probably been better off keeping shut. And it would have been shamefully easy to believe it was Chess’s fault, but Rook knew the truth: he was changing himself to fit Chess. To be the mountainous man Chess dreamt on, fit to finally crush his rebel heart into submission — a man truly worth kneeling before.

“Think Kavalier was right?” Rook asked him, that night. “Am I the Devil?”

Chess snorted. “I’ve been called that, for a hell of a lot less. What I think’s that if there even is a Devil in the first place, we’re all him — and as for God, him and me ain’t ever met, ’less you count him puttin’ me in your path.”

He nipped hard at Rook’s lip, the pain of it both increasing familiar and increasingly pleasant. But the Reverend wasn’t quite done.

“With Joe, though, or the Gatling-operator — I never meant to do that. Jesus Lord God of Hosts, that was awful.”

“Yeah, well, Joe knew what he was gettin’ into. We all of us do, or should. As for the rest, meanwhile — hell, they was just Pinkertons, and I surely do hate all them fuckers. Stole my first gun from a Pink, I ever tell you that?”

“Not as I recall, no.”

“Yeah, I lifted his roll while he was busy feelin’ up my Ma, so he hauled me out into the back alley, beat me somethin’ bad. Didn’t know I had a razor in my boot, though — more fool him. ’Cause that’s the first damn thing that junked-out lunatic ever taught me, the only one I ever found worth remembering: sell yourself high, and dearly.”

They drifted off at last, soaked and sticky — replete, even in the face of Rook’s own deepest doubts. And Rook dreamt that old Indian lady again, sitting so close near a fire he could almost glimpse her face, nested in shadow beneath the overhanging folds of her shawl.

You should come and see me, grandson, she told him, without moving her lips. And soon. Before your Lady finishes the web she weaves, and sets her snares for you.

And how would I know where to go?

She shrugged. Easy enough, to let your feet move where your instincts point you. There is a mountain which we Dinécall the yellow Abalone-shell. She is a good place to go, if one wishes to make one’s vision quest . . . which you have not, as yet.

Thought that was just for — your people.

The People, we call ourselves, as all peoples do. But we are both of a very different tribe than those we were born into, you and I — and your Lady, too, once upon a time.

Meaning you’re a hex. Like I’m a hex.

We say it differently, of course, but . . . yes. And in my tradition, grandson, we do not wait for misfortune to push us headlong into power — nor shun and spurn the powerful, as your blackrobes counsel. What would be the point of that? But for the gods, we alone see the future, and make it come to pass. There must be balance. If we break it, it breaks us. Should we not help each other to keep it, then, if we can?

Rook hesitated. On the one hand, it did sound logical — hell, the idea of seeking out mentorship’d sounded logical even coming from Chess, and that was really saying something. Yet he also recalled hearing rumours to the contrary, especially as regards to magicians.

I . . . don’t know, he said, at last. What’s happening to me?

This I have told you already, grandson. Until you do come to me — or to someone — you will always be a danger . . . to yourself, as well as to others.

Got no reason to trust you —

No more than you have to trust anyone, even yourself. Yet there is someone else involved, after all — one you would do no hurt, if it might be avoided. Am I wrong, grandson?

She wasn’t.

Well, then. Come, if you decide — when you decide. I will be waiting. And do it soon.

But they both knew he wouldn’t.