Book Of Tongues

by Gemma Files

  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.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Previous November

  The air inside the private train-car was oppressively thick, hot as new-cooked honey. Morrow felt his collar starting to rub a raw spot under the point of his jaw, and did his best to keep still while the old man in the frock-coat — Joachim Asbury, a Doctor of Sciences specializing in Magical Research, on loan from Columbia University to the Pinkerton Detective Agency — droned on, his otherwise fascinating lecture pulling out like so much taffy. He was silver-haired and mild-looking, his sober upper dress a stark contrast to the flash check trousers current Northern fashion seemed to demand.

  “What we principally know of magicians — witches, wizards, shamans, et cetera — is threefold. Some are born with an inclination to such skill, yet only come to full expression of their talents later on, if at all; for females, generally at the onset of their menarche, while for males, generally during some great moment of gross physical insult. That once come to fruition, their powers seem virtually limitless, making it a foregone conclusion that if magicians were ever to act en masse, they would overrun the world within days.

  “Yet the third most well-known fact is equally clear. Magicians do not work together, because they cannot.”

  Asbury’s assistant changed the plate on his magic lantern, casting some gargantuan and disgusting insect’s wavering light-skeleton on the train-car’s wall. “Observe this specimen of the genus Oestridae, or common bot-fly — an endoparasite which deposits its eggs onto the skin of a host animal whose heat causes them to hatch, after which its larvae burrow into the animal’s skin and gestate, then drop onto the ground to complete their pupal stage. The bot-fly may also spread its eggs through the medium of an intercessor, by attaching them to a common housefly it has seized and restrained through superior power. In a way, this makes it somewhat representative of an epiparasite, a parasitical variant which feeds upon its fellow parasites.

  “Appearances aside, gentlemen, magicians may be reckoned very much like these bot-flies — ”

  “In that they’re all weird as hell and twice as scary,” someone muttered, near Morrow’s elbow.

  “ — since all fully expressed magicians cannot appear to help feeding parasitically upon each other’s power, as a type of autonomic reflex. Which is why the best two examples of this oh-so-puzzling human genus can ever manage is a sort of brief accord for the duration of a shared task, during which they agree to consider each other not rivals or prey, but allies . . . until, task done, they move quickly on before they are forced to turn on one another, and hope devoutly to never meet again.

  “Thus witches who bear witch-children to term (itself unlikely) must give their babies away at birth, or risk sucking them dry; thus there are no formal schools of magic, only apprenticeships, which all too often culminate in either death or murder. Thus two wizards cannot love, or live together if they do, for fear of their passion becoming mutually assured destruction.

  “‘Mages don’t meddle,’ as the old phrase goes. And for this, we who are not of that ilk must all, indis
putably, thank God.”

  “Is the point of all this we’re gonna be fighting hexes now, sir?” called out the same voice as before. Doctor Asbury opened his mouth to answer, but closed it again at Pinkerton’s gesture.

  “Let me take this one, will you?” As Asbury nodded: “Seems to me that what he’s sayin’ is — if we just play it right, we can trick ’em into fighting each other for us.”

  Asbury pursed his lips and made some ambiguous little movement of the head. “To some degree, yes, Mister Pinkerton. And yet — ”

  “Sorry, doc,” another agent broke in, “but . . . what-all exactly could we even fight ’em with, if we had to? Silver bullets?”

  “Och, I’ve found real bullets do just fine, long as you catch ’em off-guard,” Pinkerton said, dismissively. Then added: “’Specially when aimed straight to the head.”

  A flood of laughter rippled through the assembly, levity washing away all but the soberest members’ concerns. And sometime after that — when the train-car had long cleared itself once more, leaving Morrow alone with Asbury and Pinkerton — the true mission briefing began.

  “We need you to find Reverend Rook, Ed,” Pinkerton began, without preamble. “Chase down his gang, get yourself signed up, then move in close — close as possible, without recourse to the obvious.”

  “Can’t think but Chess Pargeter might get a mite riled at me, I was to do that,” Morrow said, flushing slightly.

  “Oh, you know what I mean. Hell, chat him up too, while you’re at it. No easier way to come next to Rook, considering where the little bastard usually spends most nights.”

  “And the — formal — goal of this particular sortie, sir?”

  “Well, I’ll let Asbury here fill you in on that. It’s his baby, not mine.” As Pinkerton stepped back, the doctor moved forward once more, reassuming his place at the lectern. He rummaged inside his pocket, withdrawing an utterly unfamiliar device. Once flipped open, closer study showed a resemblance to those magnetic compasses Morrow had handled during his service in the War — albeit with some notable differences. This apparatus seemed to have two needles, each spinning counter-clockwise, plus a slim, strangely curved tine of something blendedly green and red which fluttered in a completely different direction. The whole array involved no obvious clockworks, these indicators instead floating “freely” on a mercury-dollop housed in the shallow depression located at the object’s centre.

  Morrow could see no reason for the way the needles spun and flipped without pause, as if constantly re-orienting themselves to an invisible horizon — if a pole, then neither of the ones already mapped, those immutable icons of fixity. For whatever this object was made to measure obviously moved, consistently yet erratically, as though it was alive.

  “I call it the Manifold . . . Asbury’s Manifold, naturally,” the doctor said, blushing slightly. “These needles I adopted from the Chinese science of acupuncture, which posits an invisible energy known as the ch’i that supposedly courses through every living creature. Medical difficulties are said to be caused by blockages in this energy-flow, necessitating the implantation of such needles underneath the skin at specific pressure-points throughout the human body. They know so much more than we do on so many different matters — yet never seek to share the information except under duress, these secretive Celestials.”

  Pinkerton broke back in, his tone almost as impatient as Morrow already felt: “With all respect, doctor, we’ve but a little time more before we pull into the next station.”

  “Of course, of course.” Dr Asbury held the Manifold up for Morrow. “Do you take note of these markings around the rim, here?”

  Morrow squinted. “I do, sir.”

  “Their purpose is to measure various gradients in the ebb and flow of this ch’i, which my researches have conclusively ascertained to be the driving connective force behind all hexation. Once its parameters are established, therefore, we may eventually use the Manifold to identify magicians whose talents are hidden not only from us, but also . . . from themselves.”

  “You mean the, uh . . . ‘unexpressed,’” Morrow said.

  Asbury nodded. “Consider what a stupid and terrible waste our dealings with the sorcerous amongst us have been, to this point,” he said. “What a wanton slaughterhouse the past is, when gone over with anything resembling a Christian conscience. Have you ever seen a witch-burning, Mister Morrow?”

  Morrow dry-swallowed. “Never had that inflicted on me, no,” he replied, carefully. “Though I do recall an old harelipped woman took up in my home-town when I was but eight or so, for travellin’ alone during a drought. They found cats living in her hotel room and a dried snakeskin in her bags, so they tied her to a cart and dragged her through town. My Pa said it was a miscarriage of justice against all of God’s strictures, no matter what Leviticus might have to say on the subject — but that was ’fore she spat vitriol at him, and cursed him blind in one eye.”

  “And what happened then?”

  Morrow sighed. “They buried her up to her neck in the sand,” he said, reluctantly, “and told us kids to chuck rocks at her ’til she stopped moving.” He paused. “Which . . . we did.”

  Asbury nodded again, without comment — as though he, too, could hear the irregular crunch of stone against bone ringing in Morrow’s mental ears — that wet snap of cheekbone and teeth breaking, punctuated by the cruel laughter of children he still considered friends.

  Said Pinkerton: “Only way, sometimes.”

  “If one knows no better,” Asbury shot back. “But think, gentlemen — if we had gotten to that woman earlier in her life, before a few decades’ worth of hatred and exclusion had warped her beyond salvage. If we had been able to treat her with kindness, with understanding.”

  “Break her to the bridle and use her, like any other animal. Turn a wolf into a dog.”

  Morrow noted that though Asbury seemed far less enamoured of this simile than Pinkerton, he made no overt protest.

  Asbury continued: “Or consider the trail of destruction Reverend Rook himself left behind, when he first manifested — good men killed, law and order left in ruins, and why? Because he accounts himself abused, in large part owing simply to the circumstances of his . . . second ‘birth,’ one might call it. Using the Manifold, we could avoid all that horror by discovering witches and wizards before they come to their full power . . . our ideal being not to exterminate them, as in previous centuries, but to nurture — and, at length, recruit — them.”

  Pinkerton nudged Morrow, pointing to Asbury. “That’s why we call him ‘witch-finder general,’” he confided.

  “The point being, Mister Morrow,” Asbury concluded, ignoring Pinkerton’s joke, “that we are in desperate need of data. A reading from Rook would allow us to map out a spectrum with which to assess potentials.”

  Morrow frowned. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

  “I’d teach you, of course — the process is simplicity itself. Observe.” He held out the Manifold again, balanced in one palm, pointing it directly at Morrow. Morrow felt an instantaneous urge to bolt, for no very good reason, and fisted both hands at once to keep himself in check. But the needles simply spun on in their different orbits, clicking fiercely, and Asbury gave him a kindly little smile, probably prompted by Morrow’s obvious trepidation.

  “No visible reading whatsoever,” Asbury told him, just to clarify. “We have two scales, one running clockwise, the other counter-; a power like Rook’s would doubtless cause both needles to meet — and lock — somewhere along the red scale, in the upper numbers.”

  “So . . . what’s that mean, then?”

  Now it was Pinkerton’s turn to smile again, clapping Morrow’s shoulder once more for emphasis, like he was congratulating him on having knocked up his wife. “It proves you’re no magician, Morrow — not even the beginnings of one. So we don’t have to worry over you givin’ us a false positive.”

  Thank God, was all Morrow could think.

  “W
hat do you say, son? You up to the task?”

  Worth a promotion, Morrow knew, if he said “yes.” Better pay. Some way of building a secure life for himself at the end of all this, ’stead of dying alone or starving on an uncertain pension after a bullet shattered something beyond repair. Wasn’t like you could ever hope to live your whole life without dealing even once with hexslingers — not as a Pinkerton, and for damn sure not out here. Just wasn’t . . . practical.

  “Yes sir,” Morrow said, at last, “I somewhat think I might be, at that.”

  Which was always what they liked best to hear, down at the front office — and easy enough to say, before he’d actually spent any sort of time in Reverend Rook’s company.

  Three months ago, and counting; an age, seemed like. Eighty days and nights, twice the length of time God took to drown the world, or Jesus to wrestle Satan in the desert. And in all that time spent standing idly by while Rook and Chess cut their bloody double swathe over an already-wounded landscape, he’d never yet been able to get close enough to take the reading which would kick him free from this whole nightmare for good.

  Or remembered to do so, anyhow, whenever he had gotten that close.

  So here he was, and here he stayed. Would stay, however long it took — until he finally got it right.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Present

  “They call this Whore City,” Chess said, balancing back on his heels and surveying the area with a cold eye. “Though why folks make that distinction, given the rest of this crap-heap . . .”

  “Weren’t you born here?”

  “That’s how come I get to say so.”

  To the casual observer, ’Frisco’s Chinee-town — or at least the part of it known as China Alley, a dingy passage extending from Jackson to Washington Street — was completely given over to a sprawling tangle of semi-respectable bagnios on the one hand, outright cribs on the other. It had begun to rain sometime during their trek down, reducing visibility considerably, with mist and mud conspiring to further dim the overhanging lurch of shadows. Outside the bagnios red paper lanterns had been posted, casting a hellish light.