A Book Of Tongues

CHAPTER NINE

Another few months flew by. In Solomonville, up near the New Mexico border, the gang’s object was the land office, where a fat payroll lay prepared for banking. Chess brought the company fast and hard — both guns already cross-drawn, guiding the horse with his knees — while Rook strode in front, hovering a yard above the ground and leaving no prints behind with a cloud of dust boiling out beneath him, like he was wearing Ten League Boots.

A dreadful flame lifted from his head, leaking out of every orifice, and whenever Rook blinked or spoke it guttered and danced, lighting up their way through the sandstorm-lively murk. By its baleful glare, Rook saw “good” people — parishioners much the same as his own, probably, once upon a time — scurrying from him and his in mortal panic, fast as their little legs would take them.

Fuck them all, he caught himself thinking, a grim smile curling his lips.

“No unnecessary casualties!” he roared down at Chess, who already had the land office manager in his sights; Chess brought his horse up short, reholstering, so he had both hands free to aid with his dismount. The manager just stood there trembling, too scared to even squirm.

“What-all do you men want?” he finally got out, through chattering teeth.

Chess returned Rook’s grin. “Fair question — ain’t it, Rev? What do we want, exactly?”

“Money’ll do, for now,” Rook replied. “That suit you?” he asked the manager. Adding, as if just struck by the thought: “Might end up bein’ blamed for all this, though, I suppose. For not puttin’ up an adequate defence of yours bosses’ funds.”

The manager coughed — a sound one-quarter laugh, three-quarters retch. “Ask me how much I care, long’s they don’t turn up here lookin’ like you.”

Rook smiled, yet again. Couldn’t help it, really. It was all just so funny. He could see his own teeth reflected in the man’s eyes as he did it, horrid little flickering red stars.

“Good man,” he said.

And the LORD said unto Moses, Stretch out thine hand toward heaven, that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt, even darkness which may be felt.

And Moses stretched forth his hand toward heaven. And there was a thick darkness in all the land of Egypt three days:

As it turned out, the book of Exodus proved wonderfully fruitful quotation-fodder for far more than just Solomonville’s aftermath. Might’ve made it to an even ten, eventually, had Rook not decided that three plagues in a row were probably good enough.

News of their exploits ran ahead of them as they rode on into the dark, a dry and bitter wind. By the time they reached Total Wreck, a waiter-gal sidled by to show off their very first official “wanted” post-bill, slapping it down along with their drinks. Chess was — to put it mildly — unsatisfied with the crudely inept artistic renderings attached thereto, especially the one apparently meant to look like him.

Rook let out a raspy bark of laughter. “You’re peacock-vain, is all, Chess Pargeter! Don’t cherish the idea of anybody thinkin’ you’re a skinny little snip with wall-eyes and a beard like the Wanderin’ Jew, the way this seems to prove.”

Chess studied the thing one more time, then spat on it and crumpled it up.

“I ain’t so vain,” he maintained. “But I damn well know I look a sight better’n that.”

Rook nodded. “And every soul in here knows it, including me.” Voice dropping further: “Care for a demonstration?”

That night, Rook turned Chess’s many lessons in mutual pleasure back on him, and drifted off with the ragged sound of Chess’s breath coming and going straight into his open mouth, head like an echoing sea-cave. But when he opened his eyes once more, he found that the bed had somehow dropped away into darkness, and that the body in his arms was even smaller, far softer — a girl’s. Lady Rainbow, dead far longer than Rook’s former faith had existed, with her black hair spread out beneath them like a pair of wings carved from funeral jet.

This close up, Rook could see how each of her delicate ears was flared in fans of beaten gold, the rope of thorns heavy between her little breasts. Her gaze seemed both fixed and dead, sheened to a terrible lustre and unnaturally long-lashed at its lower orbits — ’til those lashes fluttered, and he realized she had painted false eyes upon the lids of her real ones, for what reason he couldn’t possibly stand to guess at.

If Rook really was twice Chess’s size, then he must be four times hers, yet she held him child-helpless with just a feather-light touch on either wrist. And beneath him, the jungle vipers which made up her skirt crept apart, rustling, to disclose the sticky lips of her hairless sex, then twined fast once more around them both, pulling them together: cock into cunt, feel of it already slightly unfamiliar — a flesh trap, snapping shut.

Desire laid lit powder up Rook’s spine, a spasm of pure betrayal. But when he tried to pull away, she simply laughed, and reached up to stroke the scar around his neck, twisting its painful residual energy ’round her fingers somehow, like haltering an invisible lariat.

This is mine, little king, she murmured, along with the rest — can you really have forgotten that, so soon? To give and to take . . . your death, your luck, your very life.

I don’t owe you a damn thing, you devil! Rook roared, soundlessly. With a shrug, she drew what Rook all at once knew was a stingray spine from her hair, licked quickly along its crabbed grey length (splitting her tongue crossways, to show meat within), and then — without even a wince — ran it through her bottom lip, piercing herself so deeply her chin slicked red, and the spine rang sharp against her teeth. She dragged him in so hard his neck cried out and smeared their lips together, laughing as he bit at her instinctively, the dew of her dripping straight onto his taste-buds, with all the kick of wine steeped in garbage.

There, she told him. You have tasted me, in honour of our marriage-pledge. Now — return the favour.

He shook his head. Then roared again as she slid the spine through his earlobe, freeing another hot spurt.

I have told you already, she said, as he clapped his palm to the wound, when I pulled you from the tree: you are Becoming, magician. You are the seed, the flower from the skull. So you will bend to me eventually, or go back down into darkness — under black waters, deep and deeper. Never to return.

Rook snarled back at her: You talk like I got no choice. Like I’m not still a child of God, free-willed from my mother’s womb, same as I was born from Original Sin into tribulation.

True, the Rainbow Lady agreed, I do not know much of this Fatherly One-God of yours, except as He may twin with my brother Feathered Serpent, the God-Who-Dies. Yet you do not have a choice — nor do you want one, in truth. You enjoy what you are Becoming far too much, for that.

A lie, he could only hope. Because yes, he could feel it curl inside him now, waiting to explode outward with wild new growth, to spray its poison pollen over everything he touched.

Then the world tipped up, and Rook realized they were flipping over. Lithe muscles gripped him, inside and out, the juice of their exertions drenching them both further in sweet foulness. The skirt-snakes rose up hissing in every direction from their sudden shift in momentum, tongues like little flickering flames, and the Lady’s dragonfly cloak rippled outwards, wrapping them as tightly as his sword fit her sheath.

Enraged, Rook fought her harder than he would have most men, but got nothing but laughter once more, for all his pains.

Enough talk, she said, at last. Bow your head to the yoke, little husband. The king must give blood, always — give blood to get blood. Or the land dies.

Rook scoffed. This ain’t your land, woman — mine either, come to think. This is the desert. It’s been dead a long damn time.

But it could be . . . something else.

And the red vine exploded, everywhere. Blooming and burning, flowers opening like firecrackers with a sound of fifty thousand dead hands clapping, a tumult-choir of stone bells and thighbone-carven flutes. The Rainbow Lady closed her true eyes once more at the sound of it.

Do what I tell you, little king, she warned him. Or I will take it back — all of it. And not from you only, either. . . .

Chess, he thought, helpless. She means Chess.

You . . . leave him the hell . . . alone, he managed, as the rest of it began to fade — knowing full well how useless it was to threaten her with anything.

She licked at his wounded ear, utterly predatory, weirdly loving. Whispering: And what will you do, to make me?

. . . whatever I have to, Rook thought, drowning in his own blood.

Instants (or years) later Rook woke, sun in his eyes and head buzzing, to find Chess watching him — already dressed, his eyes uncustomarily impossible to read.

“You’re bleedin’,” Chess said.

Startled, Rook slapped at his ear, and saw his palm come away thinly red-smeared, though the lobe itself seemed still intact.

“So I am,” he agreed, at last.

“Must’ve been some dream you were havin’.”

“I . . . don’t rightly recall.”

“Uh huh. So who is she, exactly?” Adding, as Rook looked at him: “Yeah, I heard you, yellin’ her damn name in your sleep!”

Rook shook his head, as though to clear it, then looked over at Chess again, and this time found him fairly bristling mad. Like he wanted to get into it right then and there, only held back by not knowing where to find this phantom woman whose face he so yearned to scratch.

“Are you jealous?” Rook asked.

Chess’s eyes flared. “Why? You think I can’t be?”

“Well, uh . . . no, ’course. Just seemed . . . somewhat unlikely.”

“Think I don’t care, right? Or shouldn’t, maybe. ’Cause whores’ boys grow up whores themselves, no matter what . . .” Here he broke off. In a savagely choked voice: “Well, fuck you, Reverend. Even a whore — ”

Rook wasn’t about to argue the point. Especially not since he felt the definite flicker of something rising up in him to meet Chess’s rage — similarly hot, if far blacker. Half of him could taste Chess’s true pain buried beneath the bluster, more fully than Chess himself was equipped to, and ached to salve it even while the other half savoured it, drank deep. Licked its lips, and wanted more.

Ah, but the blood of men is sweet, little king.

“Chess . . .” Rook began again, “. . . who is it you think I’ve had instance to get close with, in all this time, ’sides from you?” Chess didn’t reply. “I was dreamin’, sweetheart.”

“Don’t you ‘sweetheart’ me, Ash Rook.”

“What’s all this about? C’mon, now. You can’t possibly think yourself cheated on, not ’cause I had a damn nightmare — that woman’s not anybody I want to spend time with. And I don’t think you’re a whore.”

“Then don’t treat me like you do.”

A whole new note quivering at the very lowermost range of Chess’s voice now, plaintive with injured pride and barely masked need. It hit Rook in a dark stream pumped straight through the heart, and he rode its current without effort, fascinated by the ill strength of his own arousal.

Rook laid one huge hand on the younger man’s jaw-hinge, and turned his face ’til their eyes locked fast. “Look at me,” he ordered. “C’mere — sit a while. Be with me.”

Chess shook his head. “I got things to see to — ”

“What’d I say, Private? Come here.”

Rook wove the geas instinctively, fingers flexed like a mountebank’s, shuffling Fate’s card-rack. The gesture kicked up a fresh ripple of energy that drew Chess close enough so the Reverend could collar him by the shirt-neck and kiss him hard, suck down breath and soul-juice together, in a dizzying, drunken exchange which left Chess looking drained.

“God damn — ” was just about all Chess could say, once he had most of his breath back. “You work a hex on me, right then?” he demanded.

“Was that what it felt like?”

“What it felt, was . . .” Chess stopped a moment. “. . . like I didn’t like it, was how. You hear? Do any damn thing similar to me again, and I’ll — ”

Rook laughed out loud, needlessly cruel. Could’ve said, You’ll do what, little man? — just to add insult to injury — but in all fairness, he didn’t see the point.

So he crushed Chess’s mouth back to his, instead, before Chess could even think to protest, flipped him prone and squirming with one hand shoved quick down the front of his fly, and worked him ’til Chess’s eyes rolled back. Lowered him onto the bed and rumpled him all over, not letting go ’til he was good and done with him.

There, Rook thought. That’s an end on it, for now.

In Calvary Cross, to cover their escape, Rook turned to Exodus once more, and sowed a rain of fire. It worked the trick, all right — then kept on falling for three more full days and nights, pinning them down into a humid, smoky and woefully over-extended billet with the staff and patrons of Ollemeyer’s Saloon. Knowing that fear of Chess’s guns and his own witchery were the only things keeping the company safe from night-slit throats, Rook put the two of them on rotating watch — six hours up, six hours asleep, with one ready at all times to spill blood, should any of their terrified co-residents make a move.

As early as the first changeover, Chess growled under his breath, as Rook got dressed: “Ten minutes, Ash. I could clear this place for good in ten. You could do it even faster, I bet.”

Rook pulled on his boots. “Might, at that.”

“Then why don’t you?”

“’Cause I’ve no clear idea when that — ” Rook nodded through a window at the dull red streaks lashing down outside “ — will be lettin’ up, and no great wish to share the roof with a score of corpses on the rot. Or to send one of our own out to die, trying to toss them out. ’Sides, you know well enough my work ain’t the equal of yours for precision . . . not yet.”

Chess snorted at that, and let him go with only a kiss, laying down to get what sleep he could. But as the hours wore on into days, Rook could see that unwillingly banked fire burning ever hotter in Chess’s eyes, an inner mirror of the fire-rain falling relentlessly outside.

Yet it still startled him when Hosteen caught him alone in the saloon’s rapidly emptying pantry, and told him what he hadn’t been awake to see: Chess, whetting Hosteen’s former buck-knife to a sharp edge right in front of Ollemeyer’s wife and children. Forcing the house pianist to play the same tune over and over again, at gunpoint. And checking, every few minutes — sure as clockwork — up the stairs to Rook’s room, as if his gaze alone could make the Rev wake faster.

“I thought you’d want to know,” said Hosteen. “That you already would know.”

“What is it you’re sayin’, Kees?”

“Look, he loves you. I know that. I just thought . . .”

“What?”

“. . . nothin’.”

But it wasn’t fear that silenced Hosteen, not alone. It was resignation. Doubt.

You wonder, sometimes, thought Rook, if I love him the same way he does me. And sometimes — so do I.

Thankfully, the rain of fire ran out before Ollemeyer’s pantry did, and never set the roof on fire. Even more thankfully, it ran out on Rook’s watch, not Chess’s. So it fell to Rook to get the rest of the gang up and moving, then haul Chess into the street — had him up on his horse, still groggy with sleep, and halfway out of the town long ’fore he was sensible enough to think about killing.

Nevertheless, it did worry him somewhat — not just that he was continuing to dictate gang policy around Chess’s offhanded murderousness, but that Chess’s bloodthirstiness seemed to be on the increase, generally. Like he never had recovered from Rook working a hex on him, that one time.

I always thought he was changing me, Rook thought, from the very beginning. But what if I’m changing him, just like I set out to? Only — not for the better.

They rode on to the Two Sisters, where Chess — still off-colour, still uncertain why — started in on a bottle of absinthe, while the rest of the gang made various sorts of hay. Rook sat in the corner and watched, nursing a whiskey shot of his own, while Chess cleaned his guns and hummed to himself tunelessly.

“So here’s the latest,” Hosteen told Rook, sitting down next to him, and brandished a fresh-printed newsbill in front of Rook’s face, as he did so. “Turns out, we got us an honest-to-God posse bein’ formed against us.” As Rook took another sip, not even deigning to look. “Could read ’bout it yourself, right here, you cared to.”

“Why don’t you go ahead and summarize, instead? Seein’ I know you’re literate.”

For a second there, Rook almost thought Hosteen was going to snap back at him, in reply — Saved your life a few too many times, back when we was still at War, t’play your damn secretary, Reverend! But the glance Rook turned his way seemed to freeze the older man in his tracks, making him clear his throat instead and commence, stiff but steady:

“Various recent train and payroll robberies executed at No Silver Here, Solomonville and Calvary Cross are all to be laid at the feet of one Asher E. Rook, late of the Confederate Army, a convicted murderer and so-called ‘hexslinger.’ The so-called ‘Reverend’ Rook . . .”

“I think we both know who I am, by this point, Kees.”

Over Hosteen’s shoulder, Rook could just glimpse Chess casting drink-narrowed eyes at three newish gang-conscripts playing a clueless game of whist to his left, all haplessly unaware of how close they were to risking injury for the grand crime of obstructing his door-ward sight-line. Even from here, Rook could almost hear the way Chess had begun to tick, an ill-wound watch with just a hint of lit fuse in the background. That sulphurous hiss.

I could stop this, he thought, whatever “this” turned out to be. But . . . why should I?

Hosteen ran a blackened finger down the newsbill’s centre column, and continued: “Uh . . . the posse against Rook’s gang will be led by Sheriff Mesach Love, who retired from the Union Army upon announcement of Armistice. Once a gentleman of leisure, he has since invested in a small cattle ranch nearby the township of Bewelcome, New Mexico. The fees paid by Union Pacific for Rook’s capture will go to raise a permanent church for this district, where Love himself is well-known as a Nazarene preacher of avid devotion. . . .”

Rook ground out a short laugh. “Don’t want the competition, might be,” he suggested.

Hosteen half-shrugged, half-nodded. “‘Having heard ample testimony that this man-witch Rook quotes Scripture while practicing his vile sorcery,’ Love states, ‘I take it as a holy charge to see him caught and punished for propagating such blasphemy. For how can any Christian stand to see God’s Word perverted, especially by one who — if rumour holds true — is guilty not only of using Satan’s power for gain, but of all the sins which saw Gomorrah blasted, along with her even-more-infamous sister city?’”

Taking a quick shot of whiskey to distract himself, Rook found his eyes automatically drawn back to Chess, only to find him already looking his way — tracking one of the Sisters’ resident whores, as she sashayed in Rook and Hosteen’s direction. Toying with the ribbon which anchored a faded sateen flower just above her overspilling cleavage, the woman slung a leg up over Hosteen’s startled lap, fixing Rook with a sleepy smile.

“Buy a gal a drink, Reverend?” she drawled.

“I’d’ve thought the house already stood you a few per shift, to be frank,” Rook returned. “Ain’t that what the surcharge is for?”

She made a practiced moue. “Oh, now; we both got our parts t’play in this affair, don’t we? Go along to get along, that’s what they say. . . .”

Always assuming you’re my kind of destination, in the first place, Rook thought. But —

“Move by, woman,” Chess snapped, stepping up behind her in one quick stride, at the same time. “He ain’t for you.”

The whore barely turned a hair. “Oh no?” she asked, one brow arching. “Well, I know you for damn sure ain’t interested in my wares, little pussy . . . but I’ll bet the Rev here can prob’ly speak for himself, one way or t’other. What’cha say, darlin’?”

Rook gave her a sad smile, and shook his head. Before he could finish shooing her away, however, Chess had already broken his empty bottle across the whore’s head, knocking her to the ground in a shower of dirty glass.

Then leaned down and snarled, right in her ear: “’Cept he don’t have to, ’cause I just did. So how’s your hearin’ now, bitch? Better? Or worse?”

The fiddle and squeezebox wheezing away at each other in the far corner fell silent, and some drunk cried out a name — Sadie, Rook thought it was. Another barfly lunged Chess’s way, only to end up froze in place with a barrel to his jaw, while Chess used his other gun to cover the rest of the patrons; probably couldn’t really shoot all of them, or at least not all at once. But he certainly looked game to try.

Hosteen threw Rook a begging glance: C’mon, Rev! While Rook just sat there, stony, a fresh-poured shot already in hand.

“Look, mister,” the barfly told Chess, his voice shaky. “I . . . don’t know what sorta beef you’n her got with each other, but take a gander. She needs help.”

“Why bother? She’ll be dead in a year, either way — pox, or gut-rot. She fuck you for free the once, so now you think she’s sweet on you? Or . . .” As Chess’s thumb caressed the firing pin, his voice dropped into a purr. “. . . is it that you’re sweet on her?”

Sadie’s prospective saviour blushed. “None of your affair!”

“Sure ain’t. Then again, slow as she moves, I guess she’s probably pretty easy for any dumbass to throw a leg across. . . .” Confidingly: “It’s the syphilis does that, most times, so best make sure and check your pecker, once you get somewheres a bit more private — ”

“Oh, you son-of-a-bitching little redhead faggot motherfucker!”

Rook sighed, and rose, before Chess could finish the fool off. “Stand down, Private Pargeter,” he rumbled.

“What do you care?”

“I don’t, except that my word not be taken lightly. So stand down.”

“Make me.”

“Think I can’t?”

“Oh, I know damn well you can! You think that makes me apt to trust you anymore? Who knows what-all else you mighta made me do, when I wasn’t lookin’?”

“Nothing. Not one single friggin’ thing, ever . . . that you didn’t already want to.”

They were outright yelling at each other, now, right in front of the appalled eyes of everyone, Chess’s kill-to-be very much included. And though Rook wasn’t exactly sure how things had gotten quite this far out of hand in quite so short a time, he did know they weren’t going any further.

“Put up,” he growled, slapping Chess’s piece away from the barfly’s face so the man fell to his knees like his hamstrings’d been slashed, then scrabbled crabwise ’til his back hit the nearest wall and stuck there. Pissed beyond measure, Chess swung his other gun ’round, only to have Rook grab that, too.

“Let Goddamn go, Goddamnit!”

“Chess — ” Rook said, warningly. Then: “C’mon, darlin’ — you know you’re outmatched, so don’t be an idiot, for Christ’s sake. Least . . . not where folks can see you.”

Provoked beyond endurance, Chess dropped both guns outright and lunged straight for Rook like a rat-killing dog, all ten fingers hooked into claws. Without planning it out at all, Rook flung Chess’s weapons down and caught him by the neck, lifting him neatly off the ground.

“That how your Momma taught you to fight, boy?” he demanded, voice almost too low to recognize himself.

Chess tore a laugh out through his rapidly bruising throat. “Yuh, wuh — works pretty well, don’t it? ’Sides which . . . my Ma could’ve wiped the floor with any one’a these fuh . . . fuckers, and she don’t even pack a gun.”

Rook hauled him closer. “Don’t make me do something we’ll both regret, Chess.”

“I’d like . . . tuh . . . see that. . . .”

A darkness seemed to fall between them, ecliptic. Barely noticing how fast the Sisters had already cleared out, Rook let Chess fall momentarily free — doubled up and hacking — before pinning his arms from behind and hauling him upstairs parcel-style, virtually tucked under one tree-limb arm. With that same charge flashing back and forth between them, energizing and exhausting, all the while: each touch a dry powder-burn, a branding iron’s kiss.

And here was where he truly knew it, for the first time — how with every touch, he was sucking something out of Chess. Gulping it down, the way a gut-shot man will drink ’til he bleeds out and dies, regardless of the gaping hole where his belly should be. The darkness rising in him spurred a similar darkness in Chess, rendering him ten times as dangerous as usual to everything around him (himself very much included). And though Chess fought it tooth and nail, exhausting himself, he also fought to cleave to Rook just as hard, if not harder.

Rook had been the true trap. And now Chess was caught, fast as any fly in amber.

Reaching the second floor, Rook kicked in the first door he saw, popping it clear off its hinges. Then threw Chess down on the bed, face down, and let the unnatural take its course.

After, he felt bad — as bad as he’d felt so all-fire good, just a hot, gasping moment previous. The hurt and injustice of it crashed over him in a wave, sticking him chest-first to Chess’s spine, and he buried his face in the nape of the smaller man’s trembling neck, hugging him fit to bruise. Chess stiffened for a moment, mouthed at Rook’s wrist like he wanted to bite, then curled back into him, with a little sighing sob.

“I ain’t just yours, you know.”

“I do.”

“You’re mine, you witch-rode ox.”

“I am, Chess, yes. I — surely, surely am.”

The things I’d do, to keep you safe, little man, Rook thought, tongue gone abruptly cold and sour in his own mouth. What I’d do . . . you can’t imagine.

Thankfully.