A Book Of Tongues

CHAPTER ONE

For all it was just gone noon by the barkeep’s (carefully hidden) watch, the Bird-in-Hand dance-groggery was nevertheless crammed full with people either drunk from the night before, or continually drunk for the last few days, and counting. One of these, a huge fool in miner’s clothes, had spent the last ten minutes staring fixedly at Chess Pargeter, who stood sipping a shot of absinthe at the bar — a slim and neat-made man dressed in purple, head barely level with the miner’s breastbone, whose narrow red brows shaded to gold over a pair of eyes the same green as the wormwood and sugar concoction he held.

“Queer,” the miner said to the bar at large. “You can tell by the clothes.”

“I really wouldn’t, mister,” replied another man — almost as tall, and armed with a double-barrelled eight-gauge — who’d passed a similar length of time with his chair tipped back against the wall, shapeless hat pulled down to shade his eyes in such a way that the company had hitherto mainly supposed him asleep.

The miner squinted at him. “Think I want your opinion, asswipe?”

With a sigh: “Think you need it, for sure. Entirely your own business whether you choose to believe me.”

Chess took another sip, ignoring them both. His hair, twice as red as his brows, was close-cut enough to reveal he’d had one of his lobes pierced so that he could hang a lady’s ear-bob from it: a modest gewgaw shaped like a Hospitaller cross, chased in gold wire and set with Navajo turquoise. It caught the light as he swallowed, making the miner snort.

“‘I wouldn’t,’” the miner repeated, low and sneering. Then called, in Chess’s direction: “Hey, gingerbeer — didn’t your Ma work the Bella Union, back when? I mean, way back.”

“My Ma’s none of your concern, tin-pan.”

“So she ain’t a whore?”

Chess shrugged. “Oh, she’s that,” he allowed. “Just don’t see what it has to do with you.”

The miner stared at him a moment, then blustered on. “Well . . . think I mighta paid for her, a time or two — she had that same red hair, and all.” He pointed at the ear-bob: “Nice jewellery. Reverend Rook give it to ya?”

“This?” Chess shook his head, making the gem sparkle. “Nope. This, I bought for myself.”

“How come? Everybody knows you’re his bitch.”

Chess narrowed his eyes at that, ever so slightly. “I’m his, all right, like he’s mine. But I’m my own man still, and I pay my own way. How ’bout you, lard-ass?”

There was a general mutter, bringing the man by the door to his feet in one mighty heave. “Aw, here we go,” he announced, both barrels up and trigger cocking.

The miner spat out maybe half a word — the phrase he had in mind might have eventually proved to be damn faggot outlaw, had it been allowed to come anywhere near full expression — before Chess shot him neatly through the head without even seeming to draw, let alone to turn.

Chess licked the last of the absinthe from his glass’s rim, upturned it, and threw the barkeep money. “That’s for my tab,” he told him. “And more sawdust.”

“We get that stuff for free, Mister Pargeter,” the barkeep managed.

“Then use it to paint the wall again instead,” Chess snapped back, and left. The tall man tipped his hat to the company at large, put up his gun, and followed.

“Some pretty rough work, ’specially on a Sunday,” the tall man — whose name was Edward Morrow — remarked, as they stepped out into the muddy street.

“Oh? How so?”

“Son-of-a-bitch never even had a chance, let alone a fair one — that’s how so.”

Chess snorted. “Hell, Morrow, I was just standing there, drinking my drink. He was the one convinced he had to say something about — it, or me. . . .”

“ — you and Rook, more like — ”

“Me and Rook, then, or what-the-Christ ever. Came at me asking for trouble, and he got what he asked for. I mean, I wasn’t ’bout to start a damn fist-fight with him — you see the size of that idjit?”

“Looked ’bout my size, from where I was sittin’.”

Chess shot Morrow a bare flicker of sly white grin. “Exactly.”

A few steps on, they paused at the corner where Pacific Street met Moketown alley, under one of the many wash-lines of flapping coats and shifts — half-jokingly referred to by sailors on shore leave as “flags of Jerusalem” — which marked yet another of San Francisco’s multitudinous Poor John clothing shops. Chess drew a watch of his own from the inner pocket of his purple brocade waistcoat, and flipped it open.

“Seventeen of twelve,” he grumbled, peering down. “Man’ll be late to his own funeral, you give him the option.”

“People followin’,” Morrow broke in, looking back over his shoulder.

Chess didn’t raise his head. “From the melodeon? Yeah, I saw ’em — dead man’s drinking buddies, annoyed he won’t be picking up the next round. What do you suggest?”

“Head the other way, so’s nobody else gets killed?”

Chess gave this idea about a second’s consideration, before replying: “But here’s where Rook said to meet, and I ain’t shifting. So fuck that.”

Luckily for them, the miner’s “friends” had apparently barely taken time to arm themselves at all before giving chase, and only thought to do so with whatever came best to hand. Two men made straight for Chess, waving a broken bottle and a smashed-up chair; Chess cross-drew with a flourish and killed them both, then kept on firing, while Morrow made sure he just took the kneecap off a third, who fell back into the gutter, screaming. The whole exchange lasted perhaps a minute, at most — a popped blister of muzzle-flash and cordite smoke under heavy grey skies, spattering gaping passersby with equal parts terror and grue.

When it cleared, an only lightly wounded barfly could just be seen dragging the groaning cripple ’round a handy house-corner, his shattered ruin of a knee leaving a reddish trail through the mud. The rest were mainly corpses, though a couple were caught in midretreat with their hands held high, kowtowing awkwardly as Chess sighted at them down his left-hand gun barrel.

Morrow nodded back at them, not quite daring to touch Chess’s sleeve. “C’mon now, Chess — that’s enough for one day, ain’t it?”

Utterly affectless: “Think so?”

“They were his friends, Chess, that’s all . . . you know how it goes. Hell, you’d do the same for me, we all swapped places — ”

“No I wouldn’t,” Chess said, letting his finger tighten. The penitent dropped face-down at the trigger’s pre-click, shit-smeared and yelling for mercy.

“I can’t leave you a minute, can I?”

The rasping basso voice behind them was audibly amused. Chess curled his lip and turned his back, reholstering, then stalked over to the big, broad-shouldered man in the black coat and stained white collar. “It’s been twenty, Goddamnit,” he complained.

“Yet I do see you managed to make your own fun, nonetheless.” Though rumour told of Reverend Asher Rook once having been a melodious preacher, the crunch of hemp against larynx — from the Confederate Army’s unsuccessful attempt to swing him rope-high — had left him with a rasp fit to strike matches on, so hellish dark and deep that whenever he spoke, you could almost smell the sulphur.

“Could’ve stayed in Arizona for that,” Chess said, taking one last step, so he and Rook were safely nose-to-forehead — then dragged him down by the hair and kissed him hard, right there in the road for all to see. Morrow groaned at the sight, and not just from discomfort; even if the gunfire alone hadn’t been enough to attract attention, the spectacle of two men treating each other the way neither would treat a woman whose favours he hadn’t already purchased up front, certainly would.

Some might say Chess would never have dared be so open with his affections if the Rev wasn’t so well-known — and well-feared — but Morrow doubted it. From what he’d heard, Chess had lived his life on the offence since long before Reverend Rook hove into sight. Still, now they were bound together, he was probably worse: every move a calculated insult, a slap to the collective face. A lit firecracker shoved up the whole honest world’s backside.

A voice from the greyer parts of Morrow’s mind, long kept carefully hid, came intruding: “Asher Elijah Rook, Sergeant and unofficial chaplain for his unit, took up for desertion under fire and murder of a superior officer in the final weeks of the War. Some question as to the legitimacy of the charges, but the execution proceeded nevertheless. While other prisoners from the stockade waited, Rook fought with his captors and began to curse, quoting St. John the Revelator. . . .”

And I looked, and, behold, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire.

Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures . . . and every one had four faces, and every one had four wings . . . As for the likeness of the living creatures, their appearance was like burning coals of fire . . . and out of the fire went forth lightning. . . .

And when they went, I heard the noise of their wings, like the noise of great waters, as the voice of the Almighty, the voice of speech, as the noise of an host: when they stood, they let down their wings.

“I believe that’s in Ezekiel, sir, not Revelation.”

“Yes, to be certain. The more important point being that one way or another, a cyclone near thirty feet across whipped up almost immediately, and blew away most of the camp. Rook and his fellow escapees simply walked away, made their way to the Arizona desert and began to commit the crimes that have lent him notoriety throughout the West: robbing trains and stagecoaches, levelling entire towns, all aided and abetted by Rook’s knowledge of Bible verse. In this manner, we see how graphic physical insult can cause talent for hexation to express, long after the normal parameters of adolescence have been surpassed.

“Our next dispatches reveal him to have taken up openly with this wild boy, Pargeter — similarly freed by Rook’s handiwork, after being convicted as an unrepentant murderer and sodomite. By all accounts an accomplished killer but no sort of soldier, Pargeter’s records show him to be uniformly uncontrollable, contemptuous, loveless. Yet he bridles himself for Rook, suffering restraint and direction, and love — of a sort — does seem to be the key . . . so much so that it becomes impossible to tell exactly who the corruptive element in this mixture truly is. . . .”

But Rook and Chess were done at last, at least for now. They broke apart, Rook leaning to tell him softly, in one passion-flushed ear: “I will say this, though. You need to stop treating every place we go like Tophet in Hinnom just ’cause your timetable and mine ain’t always congruent, Private Pargeter.”

Chess blinked, then bit his tongue — literally — on whatever he would have never hesitated to say next, if Rook had been anyone else. “We still have that business of yours to do up in Tong territory,” he said, finally, “so it strikes me we’d best get goin’. It ain’t really a place you want to end up once the afternoon’s gone, and it’s getting hard to see what to shoot at.”

“Lead on, then, darlin’ — I’ll willingly take your word. This is your home town, after all.”

Chess hissed like an affronted cat, and pulled away from Rook before the Reverend could try to stroke him smooth again. Rook smirked, then noticed Morrow’s expression.

“Problem, Ed?”

“Uh, well — ain’t me sayin’ so, Rev, but this’s bound to bring down the law, what little they got here. Dead bodies chokin’ up a central thoroughfare, and all . . .”

“I don’t see any bodies,” was all Rook replied. And Morrow saw his hand slip inside the front of his coat.

Oh, good Christ King Jesus.

But Rook was already thumbing through the small black Bible he kept pocketed there. Reaching something useful, he cracked the spine, lifted it to his lips, and blew. . . .

. . . and the grey sky rustled above them — flattened itself out somehow, a stretched oil-cloth — as a cold slaughterhouse reek drifted down. Chess turned to watch, a hand back on either gunbutt, eyes bright with excitement. His whole attitude and expression virtually crowing — That’s right, you fuckers, just go on ahead and get ready . . . ’cause my man here can do any damn thing, he takes a mind to.

As the Rev began to speak, Morrow shivered, barely keeping his breakfast down. Because he could see the text lift bodily from those gilt-edged pages in one flat curl of unstrung ink, a floating necklace of black Gothic type borne upwards on a smoky rush of sulphur-tongued breath . . . feel the beat of syllables spread throughout his blood, each vowel and consonant its own dull explosion, larding even his thoughts with grit, so they stiffened and scratched his brain. Until the words spread like cataracts across his eyes, lidding them over with dim white horror.

“And the locusts went up over all the land of Egypt, and rested in all the coasts of Egypt,” the Rev declaimed, and Chess laughed out loud at the sound, somewhere between delight and hysteria. “Very grievous were they; before them there were no such locusts as they, neither after them shall be such . . . For they covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened; Exodus, 10:14 to 10:15.”

The rustling peaked, became a chitinous clicking, and Morrow fought hard to stay still while the whole wheel-scarred road suddenly swarmed with insects — not locusts, but ants the size of bull-mice, their jaws yawning open. Neatly avoiding both Chess and Rook’s boots, they broke in a denuding wave over the corpses, paring them boneward in a mere matter of moments. A wind followed, to scatter what few scraps of bone and flesh were left.

“As smoke is driven away, so drive them away: as wax melteth before the fire, so let the wicked perish at the presence of God . . . that thy foot may be dipped in the blood of thine enemies, and the tongue of thy dogs in the same.”

Psalms 68, Morrow thought, as the rot boiled inexorably on, and the dead men reduced themselves to utter ruin and dust.

“That’s just wrong,” someone exclaimed from behind Morrow — man, woman or child he couldn’t tell, but with a shaking voice, as though on the verge of tears. “Sin, a pure sin. It oughtn’t to be allowed.”

“O God, thou art terrible out of thy holy places,” Rook murmured to himself, his voice abruptly human once more, as if in answer. And in his secretest heart, Morrow agreed.

But now the film was lifting — he could see the sky again. The ants resolved themselves to dust as well, sank ’til they and the mud grew indistinguishable.

Rook stood there a minute more, his face blanker than the page his thumb still marked. Morrow let out a long breath, echoed by one from Chess, whose excitement had ebbed along with the flensing tide. Gunslingers and hexslinger made an uneven triangle together, ’til Rook briskly cracked his neck from side to side, and stowed his Bad Book away once more.

“Well,” he said. “Shall we, gentlemen?”

Morrow cut his eyes side to side, scanning what panting crowd remained: the various scum of San Francisco’s roughest region, finally stunned to silence by the Word of God. Yet twisted rather than holy, songs of faith turned to faithless uses, and made therefore to seem — though perhaps not tarnished themselves — somehow tarnishing.

“God damn, I hate this whole stinking city, and that’s a fact,” Chess Pargeter announced, meanwhile, strutting away like some pretty little Satan — the single brightest point of colour, from crisp red hair to gleaming boot-heels, in that entire dim sewer of a street. “Just the same’s I hate you, Ash Rook, for makin’ me come back here, in the first place.”

Rook smiled at Morrow companionably. “Best not to keep my good right hand waiting, Edward,” he suggested. “It’s a long walk yet to Chinee-town, or so he tells me.”

“Yes, sir.”

Rook turned away, following Chess. Morrow shook himself free of his own dread, and did the same.

Thinking, as he did — for neither the first time nor the hundredth, and definitely not the last — Oh Lord God of hosts, eternal friend and saviour: just what the hell am I doing here, again? With these two, or otherwise?

But he already knew the answer.