A Book Of Tongues

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

That they ended up in a graveyard, after — a cramped stripe of yellowing grass and tilted Spanish-carved stones, fenced off by black iron from the surrounding alleys, shaded by a dilapidated church to the west and new-raised houses on every other side — couldn’t help but strike Morrow as entirely fitting. The new houses’ whitewashed pinyon walls, he noticed, were superstitiously free of windows facing the tombs. What few did exist had been boarded up. Chess leaned against the back of a worn and grey sepulchre, bent over and panting hard.

Morrow stood with his arms crossed, shivering, thinking: Everything I had . . . everything I am. I just sent it all up in fuckin’ smoke, and for what? For who? The son-of-a-whore who’s gonna kill me too, like as not, once he’s got his damn breath. And that’s a fact.

It would make sense to run, he supposed. Run, keep running, see how far he got. But his legs hurt — and frankly, given what he already knew Chess could do, he didn’t much see the point.

Chess straightened — made to spit, but then thought better of it and just wiped his mouth instead. “Tell you one thing,” he said finally, without looking up, “that was some shindig, back there.”

“Sure was.”

“Guess you’ll be in pretty bad odour with the big boss from now on, too, considering.”

Morrow nodded, face lodged where between grim and blank. “Yup. Don’t doubt it — ”

At last Chess turned to glance up at him, but immediately shied away, hand over his face as if to shade his eyes from the sun. “Uh,” he snarled. “Just . . . stop lookin’ at me!”

Too tired to argue, Morrow complied, fixing his eyes on a smallish headstone. Assumpta Francisca Xaviera Contesquio, it read. 17 abril 1832 – 20 enero 1839. His Spanish was rusty, but he thought the line beneath read something like, Her beauty would only have grown greater.

He thought of the Mexican woman whose body Ixchel wore. Wondered who she’d been, before the goddess-bitch took up residence — her life, her name. Did anyone still live who’d want to commemorate her with a stone recording their sorrow?

Christ knew, Morrow sure couldn’t think offhand of anyone who’d bother doing the same for him.

“Ain’t so bad, when you don’t look,” Chess said, unexpectedly. “I mean, I still feel it comin’ off you, like standin’ by an open window with a rainstorm outside.” His voice dropped. “But when you look, it’s like the wind changes, and it’s blowin’ right through me.”

For half a heartbeat, the chill in Chess’s voice touched Morrow to his bones, for all the Mexico sun continued to blaze down upon them.

“What’s ‘it,’ Chess?” he asked, not really wanting to know, but feeling he should, somehow.

Chess thought hard on that one, an uncommon long span of time. “Might be . . . what you’re thinking. What’s inside you. The past, the future — I get it all the time now, from every-damn-body. Even Songbird, and I couldn’t make out the half of what she had goin’ on, let alone . . .” Chess trailed off, then struck the sepulchre’s wall with one palm, flat and angry. “And it’s always there, always, and I just can’t get rid of it, can’t block it out. Might be you, might be some other fucker a half-mile back, but it’s so loud, and I can’t fuckin’ make it stop. Goddamn, if I ain’t gettin’ to wishing I’d let Pinkerton finish the job. And on a related note, just who the hell told you to help me back there, anyways?”

Morrow shrugged. “Who’d ya think, you ass? Rook.”

Chess stiffened in shock. “Why?”

“’Cause . . .” Morrow took a deep breath. “He said you’d laid a spell on me — not to your knowing, just that you had, on instinct. Said if I wasn’t an idiot, I’d have to keep you alive long enough you’d learn how to take it off yourself.”

“Huh. Sounds the sorta thing he would say.” Chess put one fist to his mouth, eyes narrowed. “Assumin’ it ain’t more’a his bullshit, though. What if I don’t? Maybe I should just shoot your knees out and leave you here.” A sidelong glance. “Let you find out how long it takes whatever it is I laid on you to eat you up, from the inside.”

“Fuck if I know, you little piss-artist!” Amazing, really; no matter how far beyond anger Morrow thought fatigue had taken him, Chess still managed effortlessly to scrape up further irritation. “Think I really give a damn, this point?”

Anger sparked anger, and Chess rounded on him, green light flaring in his eyes. “Oh, but I think you do, Agent Morrow.” He shot out a hand and slapped it upside Morrow’s face, paralyzing him instantly, as swift and effective as Rook’s charm-bag ever had. Chess leaned close in to Morrow, seeming to shimmer as his power roused.

It felt like the Howe-clasp on a rich Easterner’s coat locking shut, mind hooking into mind at a hundred different points at once, rippling painfully through Morrow from scalp to anus. He flinched as Chess mercilessly tore away layers of pretence and wilful blindness, then smiled grimly at what he found. Then let go, as Morrow gasped, reeling.

“Yeah,” Chess said, aloud. “You give part of a damn, at least.” But the smile abruptly crumbled, leaving Chess to peer around the empty graveyard, disconsolate. “Much good as it does either of us.”

He fell back against the sepulchre, boneless with annoyance, then slid down it, taking a seat on the ground. Morrow followed suit, as the truth of their plight sank in deep. Alone, penniless, hunted, and hundreds of miles from the American border, with no gang left on Chess’s side. Hosteen dead — and whose fault was that? Near-equal on each part, Morrow reckoned — Rook rejected and gone, and no Agency on Morrow’s side, not anymore.

“That Goddamn Asher Rook,” said Chess eventually. “I’m gonna find him, and then I’m gonna kill him.” There was no heat in it, no affect at all. “And it sure ain’t to save the damn world, neither.”

“Yeah, well.” Morrow pulled off his hat and raked his hair back wearily. “I think he halfway wants you to.”

Chess shrugged. “Then fuck him, maybe I won’t.” He caught Morrow’s eye for a moment. An urge to smile pulled at them both. Both felt it, and felt the other feeling it, and it died. Carefully, Morrow turned away.

“I’m . . .” Morrow let out his breath. “I’m not sure it matters where you go, or what you do. Rook . . .” He sighed. “Rook beat me, Chess. Outthought me at every step, knew what I was gonna do ’fore I did it and planned on me doin’ it. I don’t know if it’s hexation or just native wit, but if he could do that with me when he didn’t know me from Adam, how the fuck you think you’re gonna surprise him?”

Without looking, changing expression — hell, without even seeming to move — Chess’s gun was in his left hand and raised to point at Morrow’s temple. “By killing you? I mean, he seems to want you to stick by me. So why shouldn’t I make sure you can’t?”

Morrow’s mouth hung open for a moment. Then he closed it. “Shit, I got no answer, Chess,” he said at last. “Do what makes you happy.”

He closed his eyes, wondering if he’d ever open them again.

There was no warning. That hundred-handed grip seized on Morrow’s mind again, twined in and held, painfully hard. As little as six weeks ago the pain would have been bad enough to level him. And even stagger Chess — the mind-lock was hurting both of them, he only now realized.

Both saw in the other exactly what they recognized in themselves — the agonies and memories of their shared journey through Mictlan-Xibalba had changed both of them forever, even if only one of them had emerged as something more than human.

Might have been that resonance that opened up the link. Might have been part and parcel of the connection itself, or maybe only Chess’s complete lack of hex-training. But as Chess’s mind sieved through Morrow’s with clumsy, savage power, his own memory unfolded to Morrow’s sight as well, inverse mirror-images ricocheting off each other from touchstone concepts so fundamental, so absurdly different, it was like learning a new language with next to no terms in common.

Mother —

(a ragged, redheaded English girl curses and spits and beats a small boy with equally red hair, in a dark corner of an opium-stinking ’Frisco brothel / a tall, plain, rawboned woman calls three lanky boys and their father in from the farmyard, while a stew of beef, potatoes and carrots simmers on the stove and five clean tin plates wait on the table)

Fellowship —

(standing with eleven other men as Allan Pinkerton hands out badges, speaks words of congratulations, alive with pride, joy and satisfaction / watching over an absinthe glass as men you’ve bled beside drink and fight and fuck like animals, in absent disdain lessened only by the consolation that at least this vileness is honest)

Desire —

(one night born of boredom, anger, perversity / desperation, fear, loneliness / well-worn paths of flesh limned in shocked discovery / forgotten names of scores of men, release traded for release / a handful of women’s bodies, echoes of clumsy tenderness and soft curves in the dark / the weight of one man, chosen for lust, kept for — )

Love —

(a father’s hand on the shoulder / a young man not yet a Pink, laughing with fellows in a Chicago groggery / a greener, colder graveyard than this, standing silent for a brother fallen in war / a murdered lawman’s wife-turned-widow, weeping with grief and terror, huddled over a wailing infant while awful salt-whiteness creeps up both their flesh at the behest of . . .)

Rook.

Chess tore free in a burst of agony, collapsing back onto his ass with a look of stunned incomprehension. Like any other man might have looked staring on Bewelcome, or Calvary Cross, or Mictlan-Xibalba itself. The shreds of their communion still raw, Morrow keeled over as well, nerves afire with the same pain — but he knew its meaning immediately, because it was no revelation for him. Hoist on the petard of the exact same truth-compulsion he’d turned on Morrow, Chess couldn’t tell himself what he’d seen was a lie . . . and couldn’t lie to himself about what it meant.

You really did think we were all fools, Morrow marvelled, half to himself and half expecting Chess would hear it anyway. You really did think any man talked about love was talkin’ out his ass — lyin’ to himself, or everyone else, or both. And any woman talked about love was just lookin’ to profit, some way or other. Whatever the words, you thought you had the truth of it. Thought you were safe.

Until him. Until . . .

ROOK.

It was a surge of fury mixed with helplessness and hurt, curdled milk boiling over — and something sick and dark beneath, violent and deathly. Chess hauled himself to his feet with the support of a convenient headstone. Breathing harsh and ragged, he snapped open first one gun, then the other, and touched his finger to each empty barrel, watching with grim intention: reloading, by God. Each touch filled the chamber with — Morrow couldn’t see what, exactly. A tiny, roiling mass of flame and shadow, nothing he could name. Fear crawled into his stomach and along his skin.

“Chess . . .” He didn’t even mean to speak, but the words forced their way out. “Down there, the Rev — he told me that none of this would’ve worked, you couldn’t’ve survived, if it hadn’t been real — true in your heart, even if it wasn’t in his.” No change in Chess’s look as he kept on loading, and Morrow’s stomach knotted. He pushed himself up. “Christ knows, we’ve seen how many sins each of us’s racked up — but you can’t make this one of them. You can’t. It’ll kill you.”

“Give me one good reason — ” Chess snapped one gun shut, “ — why I, you, anyone — ” click-clack: the other gun closed, “ — should give a tick’s ass-fuck whether I live or die.”

“’Cause when somebody’s as good in the sack as you are, they really do owe it to the rest of the world to keep themselves upright just as long as they can?”

Chess whirled, but Morrow — stunned at the words that had come all unsummoned out of his own mouth — saw it like he was looking through the wrong end of a telescope, plummeting far and back away as if tumbled off a cliff-high gallows. A thick black weight engulfed him, swathed him, deadening the sound in his ears. All avuncular malice and power and . . . concern?

Chess straightened, all expression falling away from his face. The guns dangled, but he didn’t holster them. As toneless as a sleep-talker, blurred and distant like he was underwater:

“Ash.”

“Darlin’.” The feel of Rook’s voice through Morrow’s throat made him want to gag. A burning ache spread through mouth and jaw as alien intonations and stresses overrode his own. The very weight of his body shifted as he stood, suddenly inflicted with a far heavier man’s sense of balance. “You want to kill me, and none alive could fault you for that. But try shootin’ me now, and . . .” Rook spread Morrow’s hands, shrugged his shoulders. “Won’t even inconvenience me. And for all his faults, I think you still might find Ed useful enough, in future, to not throw away so quickly.”

It was hard for Morrow to make much out, but he thought Chess might have tilted his head. “Maybe I don’t care any more ’bout what you call useful, Ash.”

Rook shook Morrow’s head, brought a laugh in his deepest register up from the gut, so low his throat felt sore. “Well, maybe not, at that. But I seem to recall you do take pride in payin’ your debts, Chess — bad and good. And can’t none of us deny without Ed’s help, you’d never have seen blue sky again.” The tides of feeling around Morrow shifted, washed toward true pain, regret, and . . . something else. “That’d’ve been an awful waste. Wouldn’t it?”

Rook stretched Morrow’s hand out to Chess’s face, stroked it as he had caressed it in the underworld, and Chess closed his eyes. Mortified, Morrow fought to retreat deeper — but the response sizzled along his nerves anyway as Rook leaned him in close, used his mouth to kiss Chess, gently as any husband with a blushing virgin bride. The blackness smothering him flushed dark as wine, sweltering with sudden heat, while Chess’s mouth worked against his. Something wrenched at Morrow’s groin and stomach like a cable, pulling him in and down, vertigo and arousal spinning up together.

Until — a hard push threw him off balance, and he actually felt Rook’s presence slide sideways, halfway breaking free, before Morrow caught himself on a headstone.

Heaving in gasps, face red, Chess held out a hand palm-up before him, as if to brace a wall from falling. And snapped, “Not this time, you bastard — not now, and not like this. Not using someone else.” The hand clenched into a fist, which he shook in Morrow’s face — but at a careful distance, as if touching even Rook’s shadow in another man was too great a temptation. “You want me, you meet me face to face, where I can rip my answers outta your lyin’ fuckin’ brain-pan myself.”

Rook laughed. It racked Morrow’s guts. “Answers? Hell, sweetheart, those were yours for the askin’, each step of the way. All you ever had to do . . .” A sly, mocking note, “. . . was ask.”

Chess’s face went blank again. Morrow tried to find some shred of will inside to brace himself, expecting the guns to thunder any second. But Chess surprised him — surprised Rook, too. Morrow couldn’t mistake the startled mind-blink as Chess’s hands fell open.

“What was it you did to me?” Calm, quiet, almost despairing. “You even know, for sure? Everything I touch . . .” As he swept a helpless hand over the graveyard, Morrow deliberately made himself recall the hotel battle, and relished as best he could the astonishment in Rook’s mind as the images sank in. “I didn’t mean to do nothin’ that happened back there, any of it. And I don’t do nothin’ I don’t mean!”

Morrow felt Rook marshal his thoughts. “Had to, Chess,” the hexslinger used his lips to say. “Otherwise . . . you’d’ve gone to Hell. The real one, forever. unending agony, God’s last Judgement. That Hell.”

“Oh, do not turn preacher again on me now, you son-of-a — ”

Rook shook Morrow’s head. “None of that. Just — you’d’ve never given me up, doomed yourself, and called it fair. This way . . . well, I still might burn. But you won’t. That’s good enough, for me.”

Chess stared at him a long moment, uncomprehending. Morrow knew he could also feel Rook’s total certainty, the irrefutable “truth” lurking behind that claim, however insane it might seem to anyone else.

Confusion whirled into frustrated rage. Chess surged forward and grabbed Morrow’s shirt in both fists, twisted hard, so the cloth came up in bunches. “Just what the fuck are you even talkin’ about? You incredible goddamned dumbass!” He shook Morrow savagely. Wrapped in Rook’s presence, Morrow felt barely a twinge, but knew he’d be aching tomorrow. “Where the fuck you think I was, all that damn time? I’ve Christ-well been to Hell already, Ash. That’s where you put me!”

Morrow felt Rook’s grip slacken — confusion welled up, weakening the bond it bled through. And suddenly, for all his furious fear of the Rev’s supernatural trickery, Morrow found it ten times more terrifying to consider how Rook maybe might not really know the exact parameters of what he’d set in motion.

“You . . . remember that? But you weren’t supposed to — ”

“She tell you that, you stupid donkey?” Chess roared. “And you believed her? Well, look this over a spell!”

He slapped his palm to Morrow’s forehead, sent memories geysering into Rook’s mind through Morrow’s like superheated steam. Where far off, Rook’s mouth opened wide, opening Morrow’s with it.

(Mexico City, near a full fifth of it, levelled. Pinkerton’s voice echoing, from Morrow’s mind: This sort of thing starts bloody wars. . . .

(Oona Pargeter, gutted, metamorphosing into a black inhuman giant with obsidian ribs and a stone plaque for a foot: I’m your Enemy, son — yours, an’ every other’s . . .

(Lightless cracks in the earth, felt more than seen, seeping slow poison and dream-sickening corruption. One beneath the ruins of Mexico City, one in a Tampico hotel room, one under the salt-flat plains of a devastated town named Bewelcome. A half-dozen others, opening even now — as they “spoke” — in various strange and silent places.

(And that voice once more — Oona’s, but not. Informing all three of them at once, with a scornful, half-crazed cheer: Went on ahead and ended the whole world, him and you, with your Godlessness: that’s what you did. Sure ’ope you’re happy now. . . .)

Did you really think you could go down so far and come back up alone, little kings? Little priest-consort, little sacrifice-turned-god, little husbands?

The mind-flood cut off at last, a sluice-gate slamming shut. Morrow collapsed to his knees, painful-sharp aware that Rook had just nearly done the exact same thing over a thousand miles away, only holding back for fear of her attention.

Shock and awe, not just at how bad things really were, but also from the sheer scope of what’d come along with it, from Chess: hatred, true as a blade. Not just the spite of a born pariah for the world ringed ’round against him, nor the casual cruelty that had always let him kill as surely and impersonally as a force of nature, but a near-Biblical fury, a desperate pain and loathing, which could come only when unlooked-for love found itself abruptly used up, betrayed, destroyed.

A low sound rippled up from Morrow’s chest, and he felt sick to realize Rook was laughing.

Chess’s green eyes widened. “You motherfucker,” he whispered. “What makes all this so funny, to you, again?”

“You, darlin’,” Rook wheezed, “you. ‘My only love, turned to my only hate.’” He made Morrow get up, regaining control. “Listen, Chess — I made a mistake. I know that now. I need for you to set it right, even if you gotta kill me to do it.”

Chess smiled. “Oh, you don’t have to fret yourself none on that account. I’m comin’ for you.”

Rook made Morrow’s mouth smile in reply, oddly gentle. “I know.”

“I think . . . I might be stronger than you, now.”

Morrow felt Rook’s hold start to fade, releasing him one part at a time, yet saving his mouth for last. “Sure hope so,” Rook murmured.

Why? Morrow thought, numb. But the answer wasn’t long in coming.

“ Listen. You hear that?”

“What?”

“Shut up, darlin’. Listen.”

Chess opened his mouth. Stopped, brows furrowing. Then turned, a hound tracking a cry on the wind. Helplessly, Morrow strained his own ears, more than half certain it was pointless — ’til he heard it too, at last, a distant echoing howl sliding through Rook’s hex-senses into his. Rook’s grim consent pulsed within him, a wordless nod:

You need to know, Ed, just as much. If not more.

It came from nowhere in the graveyard. Only the faint noise trickling in from nearby streets, the mutter and rumble of human traffic, made any real sound here. But behind that there rose a noise that Morrow could name, immediately — a high, nasal wail, underscored with rattles, clacks, and irregular thumps, strange glassy crashes, guttural growls and roars. And not a single note in all this cacophony that sounded even halfway human.

Morrow’s skin didn’t just crawl. It lurched, as though his primordial fear was trying to rip it from his body. And a sickening second later, his stomach plunged as he realized the fear was as much Rook’s as it was his own. Which meant —

Oh, shit, we’re well and truly fucked.

No beginning, and no end — only an insistent grinding, a key turning in some locked door so large it kept two whole worlds separate.

But — no more. Distant dark places full of hateful, clamouring things. Fissures forming.

Chess scrubbed at his mouth, hard, and looked straight through Morrow’s eyes, into Rook’s. “All ’cause of us, ain’t it?” he demanded. “’Cause you ripped me outta the dead lands, and left the door open behind you — some almighty sorcerer you are, for all your Goddamned airs. Your new wife know how bad you fucked up yet, Reverend?”

Rook set Morrow’s lips. “Suspect she’s startin’ to, yes. But then again, for all I know . . . she might not really care.”

Chess shrugged at that.

“’Course,” Rook pointed out, “it ain’t just about me and her, Chess, or even me, her and you — you know that. There’s that other fella, too.”

The Smoking Mirror.

“He says he don’t mean me any harm.”

“Maybe, maybe not. They’re not like us, as you may’ve already figured — but some things are gonna change, no matter what. ’Cause he come up the same way we all did . . . and he sure didn’t come up alone.”

Chess made as though to snap a harsh line back, but something gave him pause. He looked down again, instead, sagging slightly, like the air in his lungs’d gone stale.

Quiet, he said, “He told me I . . . was him, now. One sort of him — or half, at least. ’Cause you fucked up in the makin’ of me, just like I said.”

“That’s right.” Rook leaned closer, Morrow straining against him as he did — the resultant motion subtle at best, though Rook seemed to consider it significant enough to fight for. And heard his own voice drop even further, as Rook finished: “But . . . you don’t have to be.

“For here we have the key to write you a new gospel, Chess,” came the words, out of Morrow’s mouth. “Every god needs a prophet. Every crusade, a messiah. John to Jesus, Stephen to the Apostles. She showed me how to make you something I didn’t have to kill, or be killed by . . . and we’re gonna show her that just ’cause she and her kin want back in, don’t mean we’ll leave the world to them without a fight.

“Make the common folk fear him, as much — or more — as they’ll fear those who come in his wake, Ed.” And as the world blurred out to black, Morrow thought he saw Rook’s face swim up to hang before him, dark eyes deep and burning. Chess, the graveyard, the faraway wailing of the cracked world, all were gone. “Spread the word of the Skinless Man, that the only way to save themselves is to let blood in his name. Draw it in a bowl, tip it out the front door, circle the house. Tell them what will happen to any as says no. Spill your worst nightmares on their heads — then tell them to pray that’s all they endure. Or the Skinless Man will end them in ways no man can even think about and stay sane — let alone know yourself responsible for.”

Rook did not smile, but the awful intention in his eyes was threat enough. “Then by the time her kind have returned for good, every hex and every soul they might’ve claimed for their Machine will be already marked as ours, instead — and they’ll have to either accept their place under our rule, or go back to the Hell they built themselves. Forever.”

So caught up in his vision was Rook that, for a moment, Morrow’s vocal cords slackened. He managed to draw in a rasping breath.

“And you think Chess’ll do all this — let this all be done, in his name — just on our say-so? ’Cause you made him a god?” Astonishingly, he found a hacking laugh of his own. “Ain’t the way any god I know’s supposed to act.”

Rook blinked. Then he returned the laughter, a dark, smoky chuckle. “Well . . . knowing him the way we both do, Chess ain’t too likely to be a god of love, is he?”

And that last was so crazily, hysterically, absurdly true that Morrow found himself laughing right along, while the darkness washed away into the graveyard’s dust-choked dimming sunlight — and Chess stared at him in furious horror, hearing two voices echo from one throat.

“I’m right Goddamn here, Goddamnit!” he shouted, at the both of them.

The final absurdity was enough at last to bust Morrow free of Rook’s waning spell. He staggered, caught himself. Shook his head as Rook’s influence boiled off faster than black tar cooking. “Two of you stuck together at the hip and such, for how long?” he gasped. “Plighting your troth for all the world, play-actin’ the part of two souls in one body, or a heart torn in half reunited. And . . . in the end, Reverend, after all you’ve seen and done — you don’t hardly know that little fucker at all, do you?”

Switching mid-word to thought, without meaning to, it all crashing out of him in one great wave hurled up against the thinning black cloud of Rook’s shadow.

Chess Pargeter. Who’s never done what anyone wants, for any reason, if he could help it — anyone but you, Rook. Chess, who’s never been no man’s tool and no man’s toy — but yours. Chess, who’s only ever played the fool for love, and only back when he didn’t dream there even was such a thing. But now he knows better. Because . . . you taught him.

Chess tilted his head a bit at that, those poison eyes musing. “You maybe need to get on back to ‘your’ woman, Reverend,” he said, without much heat. “That’s what I think. ’Cause we all three of us know just how pissy she can get, when things don’t exactly go her way.”

He raised his hand in distinct imitation of Songbird, a backhand salute, to push every last trace of Asher Elijah Rook from Morrow’s bruised soul.

Just past where Bewelcome glinted, Rook snapped back to himself, aching but whole. He touched a hand to his mouth, still feeling the trace of Chess’s kiss on Morrow’s lips.

“Is it done, husband?” Ixchel asked, from behind him — a dark figure on a darkening landscape, sky already shading down to dusk, hanging back with a strange courtesy. Willing to wait at least a few beats more for him to . . . commit himself, he supposed, given the gravity of what they were about to set in motion, and all.

“I believe so,” he answered. “One way or t’other — he’s coming.”

She came up behind him, rested her forehead against one shoulder blade, inhumanly affectionate. “He shall come. He has no choice. All this was fated a thousand years before your births. Are you ready to prepare him the Way?”

“As I’ll ever be,” he replied, at last. And felt, rather than saw, her smile.

She took his hands in hers as he turned to face her, fisted them together in profane prayer, and began to chant. Within moments Rook heard himself echoing her as the spell enveloped them, aligned them, before unfurling itself, parasol-wide, across the land. Power fanned out from Bewelcome’s salt-flat ruin in a hundred directions at once.

Down ley lines, the invisible currents of power running through air and soil. Along the rails of the Pacific Overland and its tributaries, near two thousand miles of steel. Through the continental copper mesh of Western Union’s telegraph lines, chattering with Morse code. The spiderweb reached out all ’round them, lighting up, a silvery-glint net cast over half a continent to catch — their own kind, gathering and weaving together any who fell somewhere between those strands.

Sending out the impulse: Come. Come seek out Ixchel, the Mother of Hanged Men. Come stand before Her priest-king, to offer up your service. Come to build the First City of the Sixth World — the world of wonder, the world of power. Come, and join New Aztectlan.

Not every mark would prove receptive, obviously. Songbird and Chess, at the very least, would fight the call as hard as possible, and Rook didn’t doubt that they’d succeed.

Many others either wouldn’t try, or would try and fail — and then they’d end up here, lost and delirious, throwing themselves headlong into the famous Machine’s endless suck-hole. As many as necessary, for Ixchel-Ixtab-Yxtabay-and-all-the-rest’s purposes.

Yours as well, Reverend, supposedly. Yours as well.

For leagues on every side, the wires hummed and sang, lit and clicked. We call this category of crime “lightning-theft,” Rook told her, without moving his mouth. Means commandeering telegraph wireservice without payin’ for it — committing bank-fraud, or suborning fools to commit it for you, under duress. It’s a Federal offence.

And this, predictably, she found more amusing still — though he couldn’t quite figure if her hilarity was sparked more by the ridiculousness of the charge, or the insanity of having one centralized government, supposedly, to reign over a hundred thousand separate territories that’d barely each support a law of their own.

Such ideas can never work efficiently, little king . . . at least, not when left to mere humans’ administration. Then, cheerfully: But we shall fix all that, you and I . . . while my brother watches, and your paramour is driven by hungers he cannot fathom to soften the land before us, whether or not he thinks he wishes to do so.

Rook nodded, slightly, watching her close for any sign that the pressure of supporting such a massive, complex binding was distracting her — which it was, increasingly, the spell itself a choir of iron bells and stone gears all set drainingly a-clank, louder and louder and louder. Loud enough to drown him out when he finally allowed himself to think, soft yet clear, beneath the tumult of cemeteries blooming fresh from sea to shining sea — oh, goody.

Remembering that moment down in Mictlan-Xibalba, when Morrow’s bullet hit Ixchel’s brain — that unholy snap, throwing him clear for one cold instant from his warm bath of predestinate fate, that fine, slickly impenetrable shell of need to get this finished, worry ’bout the cost later. When he’d looked down and seen nothing but the horrid meaty undeniability of what he’d caused to be done — fuck that, what he’d done, himself, with his very own reeking hands.

Chess, and the awful damn mess he’d made of him, with all his bad intentions. Chess, dead and split open, staring vacant, when all he’d ever told himself was that he wanted him kept alive, kept running: a hundred times magnified, saved and salvaged, eternally rendered powerful, beautiful, unstoppable.

And now Rook knew the result — had seen it himself, albeit through Morrow’s eyes. But that wrench persisted. It wasn’t enough, and never would be.

Made a mistake, I know it now. Need for you to set it right, ’cause . . . I just can’t.

For the first time since her death, he found himself ruminating a bit on Grandma. It occurred to him only now that maybe the reason she’d faced him alone hadn’t been predatory at all. Or at least, not mainly so. For Injun hexes seemed to favour working in bunches with true shamans, the preachers of their kind. Them as were human, yet able to tap a-purpose into something far larger than themselves, perhaps that same force he’d felt boil from poor Sheriff Love’s Word-struck pores.

From that angle, Grandma might actually have thought she was protecting her people by going hand-to-hand with Rook solo. Old and crafty as she was, she’d have known Rook’s proximity would rouse her hungers and smother her honour — put her at the mercy of her power-thirst, like any “normal” magician. And then her people would’ve been caught in the overspill, her focus torn, forcing herself to care about making sure they came out okay.

Faith could produce miracles, no question. But hexes, perhaps because they bred miracles automatically, seemed to have no access to faith’s power, unless they could somehow become gods, themselves.

Human sacrifice was the key, Rook thought — the worst taboo of all, worse than rape, patricide, or cannibalism. Gods fed and bred on the death of others, spiked higher-than-high with two parts suffering to three parts ecstasy, mirroring the blood-echo of their own. The God Who Dies . . . but not a milkwater Hebrew messiah, content to overspend his coin-flesh in others’ service ’til He was good and broke. No, this was a shell-game god whose hungers ebbed and flowed in earthquake-driven tidal waves, meeting out glorious, cyclical destruction. Like Ixchel and Smoking Mirror.

Like Chess.

Chess, whom Rook had held, watched sleep. Chess, who fit in his arms as if he was made for it. Chess, who’d kill him, if he could . . . and very well might, when all was said and done.

But no such godhood for Rook, never; that boat had good and sailed. Only the vague sense that while he couldn’t right now conceive of anything to do for Chess, for Morrow — he still knew himself at least willing, when the time for it came ’round, to at least try.

His palms still red and sore, even in her coldly imperative, power-soaked double-grip, where the Bible had burnt him.

My guilt talkin’, that’s exactly what that was — stand-fixed, as ever, on how I don’t deserve to use His Word. How I never did.

But she’d the right of it too, he knew — the Good Book had been just a crutch for him all this time, and one without which he could get along perfectly fine, as their current spectacular working all-too-well proved.

Still, he couldn’t say he didn’t miss it. Almost as much as he missed — other things.

Ah, but which parts of your Word do you miss most, Ash Rook? whispered a voice like Chess’s, if only a little, in his inner ear. The part says repentance brings forgiveness? Or the parts that tell how Vengeance Is Mine?

The spell was winding down, resolving itself reel on reel, a wound-back thread from the world’s force-ravelled cloak. Ixchel’s gaze came back to him, re-possessing his Judas heart and argumentative Satan’s mind, eating him alive. Yet Rook stood free a moment more, idly considering his hands in the sunset’s glow, as though they were still gloved wrist-high in the cooling red of Chess’s insides.

And for once, something came to him that wasn’t from the Bible at all: something unbidden, new, slipping sidelong into his head. Shakespeare again, The Tempest, which he’d seen performed once back in Crickside, albeit heavily bowdlerized. Gonzago the shipwrecked Venetian courtier, of his boatswain: I have great comfort from this fellow. Methinks he hath no drowning mark upon him; his complexion is perfect gallows. Or the vengeful magician Prospero, or savage witch-boy Caliban — two points on the same compass, inalienable: This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.

To which Caliban, his myriad sins found out, replies, “. . . I shall be pinched to death.”

Rook said it aloud — trying it on his tongue, weighing it like it came lozenge-sized, while little miss Snare-and-Trap Ixchel just stared at him, her flat black eyes particularly empty.

Replying, after a moment — “I do not understand.”

Rook shook his head. “Wouldn’t expect you to.”

. . . darlin’.

In the cemetery, things were growing just as dark. From beyond the gates, scattered throughout shrouded Tampico, Morrow heard screams begin to rise. He laid a tentative hand on Chess’s shoulder, only to find it shaking.

“Christ, oh Christ, what is this?” Chess choked out, liquid, scrabbling at his eyes. “I’m cryin’ fuckin’ blood, here. I’m . . . back to coughin’ up Goddamn flowers. . . .”

Remembering what’d come along with those last time, Morrow almost shied away, but half-hugged Chess instead, for all the smaller man’s frame was so tense it hurt and sweaty enough to stick. “Should prob’ly get a move on, come full nightfall.”

He broke off as Chess gave an inarticulate cry of frustration, punching both fists straight down into the dirt. There was a pulse, barely visible, and a sound of innumerable mice scrabbling. Bare seconds later, bones began pushing their way out around them, driven upside by a glut of vines and roots: whole, fragmentary, unidentifiable shards and crania with some skin attached, clacking jaw-harnesses, chittering unstrung teeth. They skittered around, circling Chess desperately, seeking a guiding will from a god too new to know what that might be.

“Shit!” Chess shouted, like he was near as surprised as Morrow — for all that seemed highly fuckin’ unlikely.

“Got that right,” Morrow yelled back, kicking ossuary junk away with both feet at once. “Make them lie down again, Goddamnit!”

They were both upright, back-to-back. Morrow swore he could feel Chess shake his head frantic-fast, where ’round mid-spine. “I’m tryin’ — I think. But — ”

— problem is . . . you just don’t know all too much, really, about any of this crap. Why it happens. How to stop it.

Now the stones themselves were getting in on the act, rocking and shuffling like they’d been hit by an influx of mole-diggery, spraying dust and earth in plumes, up high. The bones leapt and tangled, trying their best to reassemble themselves, or maybe cobble something entirely new out of their own ruin — strange and teetery, spider-legged, all grabby-stroking pinchers mated from fingerbones and shoulder blades, tentacles of re-beaded vertebrae dragging ’round in spasmic switching tails. Weird growth of marrows and tubers putty-sticking skull to skull, ribcage to ribcage. Flower-eyes a-bloom and seeking blindly, soft scrabbly root-clumps gone hectic as millipede legs.

And all of it closing in at once, like it wanted to kiss Chess. Lick his boots with its vegetable tongues, leaving a pungent trail of rot and growth behind.

“Chess, for Christ Jesus’ sake, c’mon — ”

Above, a swarm of bats flapped by, their wings squeaking slightly. At closer vantage, they proved to be butterflies made from black volcano-glass, filigreed, rough-hewn. Dipping in formation as they flew, they made a strange back-and-forth mutual flutter, as though saluting Chess with the synchronized rise and fall of their shadows passing by: fluid and staining, same as gunpowder, or ink — or those hellish-cold rivers they’d waded through, near-endlessly, on the road to the Moon Room.

You’re one of them, now, Morrow thought, looking anywhere but at Chess. One of their kings. And they love you for it, all of them.

“Chess — please — ”

“Beggin’ again, huh?” So deadpan-dry, it took Morrow a second to realize Chess Pargeter had made a joke. Like any man faced with craziness and death, and the choice of either laughing or going mad.

Morrow gulped. “Well,” he said, balancing on the fulcrum of his own rising hysteria, “I . . . I did recollect hearing how you liked it that way. . . .”

Which was maybe flirting with intent, or even skirting too close to Chess’s Ma’s old stomping grounds. But at this point, Morrow wasn’t minded to be finicky — just about anything that got them both out the gate would do.

Seein’ how, whatever’s comin’, I’ll definitely stand a far better chance of surviving if I got you by my side.

Chess flickered a grin at him, his old devil-take-everyone-but-me grin. “Ed, you got more guts than smarts. And you already had too many smarts.” Without a second’s pause he turned, held up his hands palm-together, then swept them apart with a cry: “Begone, Goddamnit!”

So thoughtless instinct succeeded, where lack of conscious skill had failed. The bone-creatures, black stone butterflies, bouncing stones and writhing vines, all parted Red Sea-wide, then fled away and out of the graveyard, vaulting the fence or sliding between its iron bars, into half a dozen alleys and out the main exit.

Within moments, the dull background of screams ramped up sharper, harsher. Closer. Running shadows crossed the nearby streets, and a general smell of panic and blood filled the air.

Chess lowered his hands, gaping. After a moment: “Aw, shit.”

“It’s you,” said Morrow, coming to stand by his side. “You bein’ here, what you are, that’s what’s causin’ it. We leave, this ends . . . I think, leastways.”

A narrow sidelong look: “‘We,’ huh?”

Then, before Morrow could marshal further arguments: “Ah, hell. Might as well.”

From Bewelcome township’s dead heart, meanwhile, a tiny stream of ants — unseen, unchecked, under Rook and Ixchel’s noses both — bore salt away into the desert, grain by tedious grain. To where a black-faced figure squatted by an empty campfire at the crux of a thousand dead roads, studying the future in his own mirrored foot: past and present converging, diverging, splintering.

A million possibilities. Pick one, plant it, water well with blood. See what grows.

Looking deep into the wavy greyness, to seize — at last — upon one particular face and pull . . . hard enough to draw a devotee down once more from his own promised Heaven, to twin him with vengeance unslaked. Rebuild him, particle by icy white particle, then turn him loose — why not? — for no better reason at all than simply to see what happened next.

A man of salt opening his eyes, coughing out the residue of his lungs to glitter on the night wind. And turned his head only slightly, just far enough to catch what light remained aglint off the sharpfiled points of his resurrector’s awful smile.

Your name, little earth-apple . . . give it to me, and quickly. What did they call you, when last you were alive, mi conquistador?

Stretched out full-length, the man coughed again — gathered his strength even in devilry’s overt face, like any warrior of the one true God.

Then rose to meet his brave new life, unashamed in his tall, salt-glazed nakedness, and replied — “. . . Sheriff Mesach Love.”

TO BE CONTINUED IN

A ROPE OF THORNS