A Book Of Tongues

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Stay with me, Chess’d ordered Morrow, after their fun was through. So Morrow had, though he mostly ended up just watching him sleep, all sprawled out, absinthe-dazed and snoring aniseed.

Even his damn scars are pretty, Morrow caught himself thinking, wondering just how God expected to get away with letting anything be so fair and yet so unrelenting foul at once.

But here Chess yawned wide and stretched, breaking Morrow’s reverie. He opened one lazy eye, winced at how the morning light pained him, and demanded — “Where in the hell’s that damn bottle?”

“They only had the one of them left, Chess, remember? And you drunk it already.”

Chess pulled a face, which seemed to hurt him in an entirely different way.

“I feel justabout the same, if that helps,” Morrow offered.

“Oh, do ya? That’s a comfort. . . .”

He levered himself standing, and stood there rude and proud as ever, though moving just a tad slower than he usually did, ’specially in and around the nether regions. Continuing, as he did: “. . . but if you really don’t got any liquor handy, then what I want’s a bath . . . so call me one, and get the hell out. ’Less you’re thinkin’ of comin’ in with me.”

And with this last part, he shot Morrow yet one more of those lash-veiled glances, causing him the now-requisite hot stab of equal parts shock and shame. I ain’t like that, Morrow would’ve been able to tell himself, up to only last night — but here it was at least an hour past dawn, and that once-fine certainty had gone the literal way of all flesh.

Now Chess was legging it over to the wash-stand, wincing slightly with each step. Casting back, over his shoulder — “Just so we understand each other, by the by, I ain’t sayin’ this didn’t happen — just that the Rev don’t need to know unless it’s from me, and me alone. You take my meanin’, Mister Morrow?”

“Oh, no damn fear, Mister Pargeter — you think I’m gonna tell him? I got at least as much to lose here as — ”

“No. No, you don’t.”

They paused a moment, Morrow studying Chess closely — not the full spread of him, so much, as the far more telling details.

“Hell, you feel bad, ’bout what we did — you ’n’ me, last night. Don’t ya?”

“Don’t be an idjit. I done a lot worse, with a lot of others. You think you’re special?” Chess shook his head, reaching for his trousers. “Second after Rook gets back, I won’t even recall that horse’s-ass face you make when you’re in your sin — that’s the damn truth.”

Morrow kept on staring, then shook his head in turn, grinning slightly. “If that don’t beat all,” he declared.

“If what don’t, Goddamnit?”

Feel bad for killin’ a man . . . feel bad for doin’ — that — with another one. Hell, it’s kinda like you ain’t the Chess Pargeter I heard tell of at all. Like you’re a whole ’nother man, entirely.

But: “How you really must love him, after all, strange as that might seem,” was what Morrow said out loud, instead. “That you even can.”

Chess ground his teeth at that, audibly, so loud it almost made Morrow take an actual step backwards — but let out his held breath a moment on, his anger set aside for the nonce: cooled, if never truly banked. “Yeah, I guess I do, at that,” he allowed.

Didn’t sound much of a happy insight, though.

“Okay, then. But love ain’t so bad, Chess. Is it?”

“My Ma always said love was a trick and a trap; took her oath on it, more times than I can count. Not that she ever kept her oath.”

“Well . . .” Morrow began, uncomfortably. “Might be . . . she wasn’t really the best authority on the subject.”

Wasn’t sure what to expect, by way of response — anything from a sob to a punch seemed just as likely. But Chess simply looked at him once more, eyes suddenly considerably less forlorn — sniffed like he’d heard better jests from gut-shot men slow-dyin’ but didn’t necessarily want to say so. And answered, “Oh yeah, that’s right, I forgot. You met her.”

Scrubbed and dressed once more, Morrow walked out, and ran straight into Hosteen, who gave him a look the likes of which he’d never previously seen. Because he knew, of course — hell, the whole of Splitfoot’s probably knew, come to that, since Chess wasn’t exactly quiet.

“Hey, Kees,” Morrow said, flushing hard.

Hosteen sighed. “So . . . you and Chess, huh? Boy, I thought you was smart.”

“Says the same man who give him his knife!”

“That was before the Rev. ’Sides which — Hell, I s’pose it don’t really matter much, in the end; just keep it to your damn self, is all. Considerin’.”

“Considerin’ what?”

“Scouts say they saw Rook comin’ — that cloud he walks around in sometimes, anyhow, tall enough to block out the sun. Should be here by nightfall, if he ain’t here sooner.”

From behind them both, a fresh squeak of the door announced Chess’s presence. The smell of hair-oil made Morrow blush afresh, but Chess didn’t even acknowledge it — just gave the both of them both a cool nod, and said: “’Bout time that son-of-a-bitch showed up.”

Hosteen nodded back. “They said he mighta had somebody else with him,” he said. “A woman.”

There was a general pause, during which Chess stared fixedly at Hosteen, while Morrow tried his level best to look pretty much anywhere else.

“She just better be a fuckin’ hex, is all I’m sayin’,” Chess announced, eventually, to no one. And stalked off past them, hips swinging, to take the staircase down.

Outside, a storm came in hard and fast — more dust than rain, bright orange-red, lighting up the whole sky from horizon to horizon. What denizens of Splitfoot Joe’s hadn’t already made themselves scarce, got busy either securing shutters or mudding up the various lintel-chinks, and since the chimney had to be blocked off first of all — no point in leaving it open, when all it drew was sand — the fire went out, leaving them to sit idle in semi-darkness, listening to the wind.

“Screw this,” Hosteen said, and started fiddling with a lamp.

Morrow felt his way closer.

“Need some help with that?”

“Had you a lucifer handy, I wouldn’t turn it down.”

Morrow took hold of the lamp’s glass bell and kept it upright, while Hosteen struck a match. The lucifer went blue, then yellow, as he guided it in — but it wouldn’t catch, nohow.

“Might be the wick’s too short,” Morrow suggested. “Or too soaked to light — ”

“Might be you should keep your opinions to yourself, ’less I go ask you for ’em.”

All of a sudden, the wick flared, light swelled to fill the room, and Morrow turned with a sigh of relief — that choked to a glottal sound of shock and fright as Rook’s grin gleamed down on him, from above the sofa on the far wall. The Rev seemed to materialize around that grin, coalescing out of the gloom: slumped at his leisure, one long arm slug over the sofa’s back.

And next to him sat someone entirely different, though — as advertised — visibly female. She was a dim blur, hair hung in a cowl, her haughty face the colour of good blonde tobacco. Had the same stone-black eyes as Songbird, too, albeit cut larger and far more lustrous: flat and glassine, much like the famous Smoking Mirror itself with that gal adorning it — broke apart in sections, forever caught falling downwards, froze in the instant before impact. Her hung-dagger earrings. Her flat nose, sloping forehead, swooped-up frieze of braids.

Her, by God.

Oh yeah, Morrow thought. She’s a hex, all right.

The company cried out, almost as one. Rook’s hand tightened on hers to hear it, in proprietary fashion; he was still smiling, though she looked like she might well not know how. And outside, the wind — that endless scraping trumpet, ubiquitous, deranged — went suddenly silent as an open grave.

“Shut the hell up, you buncha wailin’ jennys!” Chess hollered out, reaching for his guns.

“Boys,” Rook said, at the exact same time. To Chess: “Miss me, darlin’?”

But Chess’s eyes were stuck on Little Miss Nobody, firm as though they’d been glued there. “This her? The one you been dreamin’ on?” No answer. “She a hex?”

Rook’s smile deepened. “Oh, she’s more’n that.” Raising his voice, “Ain’t that right, Lady Ixchel?”

He pronounced the name so easily — Eeshzhel, fluid and guttural as a snake spitting blood — that for an instant it sounded as if some other voice entirely had spoken through Rook’s mouth.

Inside his waistcoat pocket, Morrow’s hand clenched white-knuckled on the Manifold as it jerked Rook’s Lady’s way, holding its needle still and its gears frozen. Its workings bit into his callused fingertips, vibrating with the fierceness of their signal: ten times, a hundred times the strength of Rook.

Couldn’t he tell what she was? That she was outside any of them — outside their whole world?

The woman raised her head slowly, as if her black gaze took effort to lift. “So pleasant to meet you at last, Mister Pargeter,” she said to Chess, her tone absurdly gentle. “The Reverend thinks of you, oh, so often.”

Rook placed a hand on her knee. “Don’t scare him, Lady. Please.”

And at that, she finally smiled, a slow and awful snake’s-jaw stretch. “I doubt I could,” she returned softly. “Husband.”

The room went dead.

Chess’s shoulders actually shook. “What’d you just call him?” he whispered.

“Never you mind.” Rook stood, clapped his hands. “Boys, gather ’round — your patience is about to be rewarded. Got a few announcements.”

He twitched his fingers toward one wall, then the other, and all the lamps sprang into flame, sending the gloom fleeing. Morrow had a queasy feeling they would have lit even without wicks, or oil.

“You boys already heard about Songbird, I take it.” the Reverend said. “Well, since the Pinkertons turned her, seems they’ve been on quite the tear. Any hex don’t sign up, they either clap them in jail or throw them to the ’Frisco Madam . . . grist for their mill, and hers. By reports, must be damn near a hundred of them arrayed ’tween here and the Border.”

“A hundred?” Morrow blurted. “Pinks’d be lucky to pull an even fifty off of — ”

Too late, he stopped, realizing there was no way he should know that — not plain Ed Morrow, outlaw. But the rest were too busy goggling at Rook and each other to notice, while Lady Ixchel barely seemed aware he had spoken at all.

“Well, be that as it may . . . it’s Songbird I’m more worried over. Morrow here’s seen her at her work — ain’t you, Ed? Chess, too. She’s no one to trifle with.”

Hosteen lifted an awkward hand. “But Rev, you — you can beat her, right?”

“Fast enough to keep a hundred — sorry, Ed — fifty Pinks from drillin’ the rest of you full of lead, in the meantime? Hex cancels hex, Kees. You know that.”

“What’re you saying, Rook?” One of the new signups, this one, a burly mean-eyed fellow named Wade. “You’ve brought a fight on us you’ll be no good in? Maybe — ”

Chess turned — but Rook had already flipped a hand up, the air between them whip-cracking. Wade catapulted away, struck the saloon’s wall hard enough to shatter four-inch planking, then hit the ground, a render’s discards.

“Sorry, darlin’,” Rook told Chess. To the others: “Anyone else care to weigh in?” He waited, then nodded. “All right — best go get snookered. Come mornin’, we’re off for Mexico.”

“And how is it you figure on gettin’ from here to Mexico, exactly, without Songbird and that army of Pinks findin’ out, and blockin’ our way?” Chess asked.

Rook went to answer, but it was his odd companion who got there first.

“We will go by the low way, through the Place of Dead Roads,” she told Chess. “As to the mechanism of entry, meanwhile . . . the whole earth is a corpse, little warrior — the corpse of my mother, whose mouth opens into the Land of the Dead. And she is covered with mouths.”

“That’s handy, ain’t it?” said Rook.

Chess just blinked. “So . . . in other words . . .”

“That’s right. In other words . . . we’re goin’ by way of Hell, itself.”

Hosteen’s eyebrows soared, but he kept whatever disbelief he might have to himself.

Chess, though — secure in what had always, hitherto, been his cocoon of privilege — snapped: “Say what?”

“He means the land which was once called Mictlan, or Xibalba,” Ixchel told him, gently. “Now known as Mictlan-Xibalba, since all things run together down in the darkness, where even the gods forget their own names. The Sunken Ball-Court.”

“Hell.”

“Not your Hell, little warrior. But . . . yes.”

“I’m not sure I trust you, woman,” Chess said, bluntly, showing that same disregard for danger which had served him so well — ’til now. “And seein’ how every other hex the Rev’s met so far has tried to drain his juice and kill him dead, I sure as hell don’t know why he does.”

Ixchel tilted her head at Chess, as if examining a bright-carapaced insect. Rook gave an exasperated headshake, and opened his mouth — then surprised Morrow by closing it again, suddenly thoughtful. For if Chess was the only one with the nerve to protest, none of the other men in the room looked particularly happy, either.

“Private Pargeter’s reservations,” he said. “Am I right in guessing they’re shared at large, fellows?”

“Aw, Rev, c’mon — ” Hosteen flushed. “You know we’d follow you into, um . . . wherever takes your fancy.”

“I know, Kees, I know.” He clasped his hands behind his back and took them all in with a level look. “But here’s the thing . . .”

Oh good, Morrow thought. It’s damnation and a lecture, tonight.

“. . . since all of you know how hexes can’t work together long, seein’ me here with the Lady, you must think: what viper have we taken to our bosom?” He glanced at his “wife,” who had not taken her black eyes off Chess even the once, in all this intervening time. “But Lady Ixchel here, she’s more than just your ordinary hex — more than me, Songbird, or any other sorcerer you may have heard tell of. Where she comes from, them that use magic are powerful beyond the dreams of any minor mage or witch. They don’t gobble each other up, ’cause they don’t have to. They got other ways to get what they need — ”

— by takin’ it from us somehow, no doubt —

“ — and that alone’s what proves she’s got the goods to show me how to bind any other hex — every other hex — I meet to our cause.” He brought his hands together and knotted them in one another, as if strangling a ghost. “Or just suck the life outta any won’t join up anyhow, whichever comes first.”

As Rook’s voice took on an unnatural resonance, the steel-spike pain flared in Morrow’s skull once more. He saw the other men’s eyes glaze over too, and knew hexation was at work.

“We’ll live like emperors, boys, doing whatever we want, whenever we want. No more running and hiding, just sweet cream and an endless river of gold, once I gain my apotheosis — become a god, or damn near like unto one.”

“The God ain’t bound t’like that much, I’d think,” Hosteen muttered. “I mean . . . ain’t makin’ yourself a god somewhat ’gainst Bible-lore, at least a little, for a preacher?”

Morrow felt the hairs on his neck ruff just a tad, and braced himself for yet more offhand killing. But Rook just smirked.

“Almost certainly so,” he replied. “But I hate to tell you, Kees . . . me and the Good Lord ain’t been on speakin’ terms for quite some time now.” He shot a hot glance at Chess, and added: “Obvious reasons.”

Usually, Chess would have returned the look in kind — but not today. Not with Lady Ixchel looking on.

“Me a god, Chess,” Rook said. “You too, maybe. How’s that sound?”

Chess reddened. “Sounds like . . . well, no sorta fun at all, t’me,” he finished, and fell sullen-silent, as if even he could hear the whine in his own voice. A balky child quibbling over wrapping, when the present itself was rare beyond belief.

That did make the whole room laugh, right out loud. Even Hosteen smiled, and Rook himself guffawed with deep hilarity. But there was an odd, almost unconscious affection in it as well.

“Joe,” Rook called out, over the laughter, “uncap every bottle you got.” He reached inside his coat, pulled out a purse heavy with strange metal, and flung it at the barkeep, who caught it one-handed. “Should be enough in there to cover it all, with gold left over. Gentlemen — tonight, the drinks’re on me. ’Cause tomorrow, we spit in the Devil’s eye, and take the world for our own!”

A general maddened hurrah erupted, with Morrow, Hosteen, and Chess the only ones who didn’t immediately rush the bar; Chess stood still where he was, glowering at the Rev while trying to ignore Lady Ixchel completely — which didn’t bode well, for anybody. So Morrow risked both a hand on Chess’s shoulder and a nudge forward, praying Joe might have just one more bottle of absinthe he hadn’t admitted to still in store.

“Look kinda green, Chess,” he said. “Let me stand you one.”

Chess didn’t fight, but didn’t shift his eyes, either. “Tryin’ to get me gay? Hope you’re not lookin’ for some sort of repeat performance, Morrow.”

“Hardly. Naw, I reckon you’re still the Rev’s just like he’s still all yours, tonight and always.”

“Just like,” Chess repeated, with even less affect.

“You got any cause to doubt it?”

“No.”

“Well . . . act like you mean it, then.” Glancing back at Lady Ixchel, Morrow added: “I mean — you can’t be worried over her account, can ya? Long as you and the Rev been — together?” He shook his head. “Throw it off, son. It’s a chigger-bite in a windstorm.”

“You ain’t my damn daddy,” Chess snapped, automatically. Then, after a moment: “She smells like him, you get in close.”

Morrow shrugged. “She is like him.”

“That ain’t what I mean, and you know it.”

Any other time, this last would’ve come out as a sucker-punch, or even accompanying one. Instead, Chess leaned back against the bar with his arms crossed — trying for insouciance, yet almost hugging himself. His purple-clad shoulders rose high and he bent his head first right, then left, his tense neck cracking audibly.

“Been a while since he’s had him one, I guess,” he said, as if to himself. “That’s all — somethin’ familiar. Though . . . it is true how he ain’t queer down to the bone, like me. Not really. And me . . .” Chess paused. “. . . me, I ain’t no hex, Goddamnit.”

Morrow had to bite his tongue. “Well — ”

“Well what?”

“You never know, right? Do ya. I mean . . . I could be a hex, I just got hurt bad enough. That’s the rumour, anyhow.”

“Sure it is. Want me to gut-shoot you right now, so we can find out?”

That did succeed in drawing a laugh, after all — from both of them at once, equally sharp, yet genuine. Morrow felt an instant’s strange stab of kinship with the little monster standing next to him, ’specially since there were two others within easy reaching distance who really did have him beat for scariness.

But here came one of them sidling up, a raw flicker of dark on dark, to lean past Morrow and loom over Chess with a small smile curving her lips, as she murmured: “Ah, but no . . . there is no power waiting dormant in your bed-warmer, little warrior. He is a man, nothing more or less — as good as any other, I suppose, for doing those things that men do.” The smile deepened, letting out a sliver of teeth. “Though you may feel free to enlighten me, if I misjudge.”

Morrow, unable to figure out what best to say in return, just stood there, a wax-hall dummy.

But Chess blushed deep, eyes fair throwing out sparks, and snarled back, “Ain’t too sure how they do things where you come from, ‘Lady’ — but for my money, Ed and I were havin’ ourselves a private palaver, and I don’t recall you bein’ invited.”

Ixchel’s own laugh rippled out, an ascending glissando of music — light and cold, yet weirdly innocent. “Aaaaah,” she said, her teeth fully out now. “You are such an angry little man, Mister Pargeter. For so little cause, and with such small result.”

“There’s a host of dead men would disagree with you on that one — ”

“But then,” she continued on, without even seeming to hear, “he did warn me of this when we discussed you, earlier. . . .”

“Who did — Ash?” Chess blushed further. “Ash wouldn’t — ”

“And why would he not? Being, as he is, my very own. . . .”

Not the guns, then, but Hosteen’s knife. Chess had it out and brandished before Morrow could blink, so close its shine lit Lady Ixchel’s dolorous eyes from the outside-in. Saying: “Keep on callin’ him ‘husband,’ you gimcrack bitch, and I’m gonna stick this right in your — ”

“Oh, shhhh.”

No pause in the surrounding rollickry, but as of that exact split-second Chess was stuck — eyes locked with hers, strung tight and humming. Unable even to close his own lips as she leaned near enough to steal the breath from them, crooning: “Here, child. Here. Yes. This is better.” She gave him a protracted huff, sniffing him deep. “Aaaah, yes. It is as the Reverend implied. So strong, so singular . . . and so untouched, even now. So . . . inviolate.”

Morrow looked for Rook, and found him closer than he’d thought — a step or so behind Lady Ixchel, near enough to look down over her shoulder — yet hardly close enough for comfort.

Chess’s lids were fluttering now, ever-so-slightly, and . . . damn, if Morrow hadn’t seen that look before, back at the Two Sisters, watching the air between Rook and Chess grow slimy-liquid and run like blown glass, while Rook sucked a portion of Chess’s very life from him in the service of a Little Death.

And yet Chess managed to bite out, while the lover he’d thus far trusted to protect him simply stood there and watched — “You . . . don’t . . . know me worth shit on a shingle, ’f that’s what you think . . . ‘Lady.’”

A spasm ran through him, heel to head, as he struggled to free himself — and almost succeeded, before Lady Ixchel laughed again, and made a casual motion with her left hand’s little finger, insultingly tiny. Which tied him up tight once more, jaws locked and straining. She leaned farther forward, to sleek her lips up the cords of his tense throat, spilling out a rope of foreign words whose syllables crackled and crawled, sluggish, bruising the eardrum.

On Chess, their effect was both immediate and horrid: it brought him up against her in a single hapless heave, pressing himself to her curves, inhaling her smell — wrapping himself in her torrential hair, which almost seemed to rise and embrace him, in its turn. Set his pupils skittering, frantic for escape, even as it hooked him deep between the legs, pushing his trouser-fronts tight.

Oh God, what? What the ever-friggin’ hell —

The day Chess Pargeter looks t’ engage himself with any woman’s situation’ll be a cold one in the Hot Place for sure, Hosteen had told Morrow, once — and though Morrow found he couldn’t remember why, the remark had stuck with him ever since. Which was just one of many reasons why this, right here, was unnatural . . . awful.

Like he’d said last night, Chess wasn’t made that way — and the Lady damn well seemed to know it. To revel in it.

Morrow looked back to Rook again, heart slamming, but registered no appreciable difference in attitude. In fact, the Rev seemed similarly statue-bound, one hand held mid-rise, on its way toward Ixchel’s shoulder. The long span of it twitched, as though galvanized — or like he, too, were deriving a sick spiritual nourishment from Chess’s plight. Were somehow piggybacking on the Lady’s extraction, siphoning away its topmost layer for his own enjoyment while Chess hung in agony between them, made a meal of . . . predator turned prey, at the mercy of two hungry hexes.

Goddamn vampires, the pair of them, Morrow thought, as the Manifold spun and kicked with vile activity. Yet not a soul around seems to see it, savin’ me, Hosteen, Chess. Chess, who can’t do nothin’ to save himself. And us — who won’t.

Lady Ixchel stroked Chess Pargeter’s cheek with one hand, deftly plucking his knife away with the other — turned it so the blade was toward him and briefly menaced one green eye with it, as though to see if he’d give out any betraying blink. But when he refused to, she only grinned the wider, reversed it once more and slid it straight down the front of her bodice. A single perfect brown breast sprang forth, grazed along its inner orbit, deep enough that one small blood-drop ran quick and sure to gild the sharp, red nipple.

Chess stared at it, hypnotized. And when Ixchel flicked that littlest fingertip of hers yet again — he went down on both knees, heavy enough to skin them. Mashed his face into her cleavage and opened wide, sucked at that poisonous orb like he was a baby once more, so unfamiliar with his own nature that he might think to take small comfort there. And groaned aloud as he did so, utterly overcome: his deadly pistoleer’s hands aflutter ’round his stretched-to-busting trouserfront buttons, like he yearned to pop them all at once and bring himself off in a stroke or two, spill his seed in the saloon-floor’s trash.

“Oh yes,” Ixchel told him, stroking his head softly — while all around her his stolen power boiled off in waves, contemptuously wasted. “I know you, warrior. Ixiptla. Little god-to-be. I have known you a thousand times — you and all men who were born to die for me, in shame, and pain, and ecstasy. Your heart’s-blood is fire. I could drink it a million years, and never weary.”

“Lady . . .” Rook said, finally.

To which she responded by hugging Chess closer, whispering, into his ear, “But because my little king loves you, I will not; your blood is his, and his alone, to shed.”

A few steps over, Morrow glimpsed Hosteen keeping his own gaze steady-trained anywhere else, unable to bear to watch. And Christ, how he envied the man for not having to see Chess and the Lady tandem-step in a funeral march, heading for the stair, while Rook followed after, his hand still on Chess’s arm. Pushing.

“I’d move on now, Ed, if I was you,” he said, all but throwing back a damn man-of-the-world wink. “I mean . . . you had your fun, already. Didn’t you? But tonight’s for us, and we really don’t need no witnesses.”

Chess moved sleepwalker-slow past Morrow’s elbow, his stunned stare flicking just the once to lock with his, then fall as though cut free. And Morrow . . .

Morrow did nothing to stop him — stop it. Because there was nothing he could do.

At all.