by Gemma Files
Climb up and see me, grandson. Set your feet to the great rock’s hide. You are well come, though perhaps not soon enough . . . well come, and welcome.
Rook looked up the mountain’s face, and sighed. Should’ve known, he thought, shifting his travel-blistered feet. But far as he’d come already, there really was nothing left to do now but either refuse, or obey — stand fast, shout useless imprecations at the sky, fight, flee. Or climb.
He climbed.
Not until Rook had covered two-thirds or so of the upwards-rearing crests of stone, and lay panting on a ledge barely wide enough to hold him, did he wonder why he hadn’t simply pulled one more miracle from the Book to loft him upwards, ’stead of busting his already-bloody finger-pads with hauling himself up — levitation, bilocation or chariots of fire, he hadn’t lacked for choices. Yet somehow, the very notion’d never even entered his head.
Instinctive wariness, knowing himself to be entering the domain of another hexslinger? Or had Grandma’s command to climb held occult force so subtle he’d simply been unable to sense it wrapping its geas around him?
Sudden sweat broke cold on Rook’s forehead as he clung to the mountain with both raw hands, thinking: There are reasons we stay away from each other . . . and maybe what she wants is you out here, all alone. To take what you have. How foolish must you be, how trusting —
(little king)
(husband)
Grandson: CLIMB.
Finally, everything levelled off, and Rook lay — gasping, drenched, so mortal dusty he might as well’ve been hewn from the same stones cradling him — in the shallow slope of scree that lined the inside of the mountain’s pinnacle. The sky above was reddish-purple, draining to black. His lungs felt stuffed with grit. Gulping air and smelling something he couldn’t put a name to, immediately —
. . . heat, smoke. A fire. She laid a fire.
Well, that made sense. Had to see, after all — and eat. Then came the juicy smell of cooking meat, making Rook’s days-empty stomach spasm painfully. Hunger-driven, he rolled over, huge and clumsy — got his hands braced against the pebbled slope and levered himself up, with a groan of effort.
The woman who knelt over that delicious-smelling fire wore her hair in a waist-length pair of braids, thin and fine and strong as sunbleached corn-silk. By contrast, the rest of her was shockingly thick, sturdy to the point of squatness — nose flat and cheekbones broad, her wry-set mouth so wide it seemed virtually lipless. A slant pair of coal-in-paraffin eyes, small as currants, cut sideways over to Rook.
“Grandson,” she said, voice at once a gravelly rasp and a smooth, pure tone. It took Rook a second to understand what he was hearing: “inside” and “outside” voice, blended together, to bypass their mutual lack of common language. Trusting his instincts, therefore, he closed his eyes and felt ’round for the currents of power, for once riding them rather than shaping them.
“Grandma,” he replied.
The word itself was spoken in English, by necessity. The meaning, however, went back out to her just as hers had come to him — portmanteaued inside a visceral understanding which neither needed anything as crude as mere language to clarify.
“So. I see you have not forgotten all your manners.”
“Well, I do hope not . . . ma’am.”
And this drew an actual husky laugh, straight from the belly.
Shaking her head, she got to her feet, brushing down her shawl and stamping ash off her shoes.
“Men,” she remarked. “They always hope to charm. But then, even we of the Hataalii are still steered by what the First People put between our legs.”
“I meant no insult — ”
She shrugged. “Of course not. What else can be expected? You know nothing.”
“Hey, now,” he began, flushing — but she merely gestured, curtly, for him to sit . . . and he surprised himself, by obeying. Another laugh followed, equally gruff.
“That angers you, eh?” she asked. “To be ordered, like a child? That boy you’ve roped yourself to . . .”
“He’d just shoot you, you pissed him off bad enough.”
“Oh, he might try — and fail. But why charm, when honesty is better? You barely know what you are, ‘Reverend,’ your head still stuffed with blackrobe chatter-nonsense, while your boy does not even know that much, let alone how easily I have stopped bullets before. I am elder to you both, and worth respecting for it.”
Rook gritted his teeth. “I’d’ve thought the simple fact that I’m here was evidence enough of my respect.”
“Yet you took your time in getting here, and many have suffered. I see no reason for compliments.” She paused, stirring the fire. “And where is he now, your apprentice?”
“Hexes don’t take apprentices, is what I heard.”
“Yet here you are, nonetheless — come to learn from one you think knows more than you do, without even bringing me proper payment, and having left him behind. Did you not think he might benefit from a lesson or two as well, once his true nature is revealed?”
“Well, it ain’t done that just yet, and I don’t aim to enlighten him, either. He’s hard enough to handle as it is.”
“Mmmh. Selfish, secretive. Spoken like a true . . . hex.”
Rook shrugged. “Takes one to know one,” he suggested.
Again, Grandma glanced down at the fire. “The bird has minutes yet to cook,” she said, “which leaves time for one question.”
Rook had to smile. Carefully: “I’d consider it a kindness to be allowed to know my teacher’s name.”
She clapped her hands. “Ah, more manners! How I love the bilagaana way, so long as greed outweighs the fear which makes you burn down everything you do not recognize. But here is a thing you should know already, and do not: no smart Hataalii ever tells their name, to anyone. Most especially not to their own kind.”
“You know my name.”
Grandma nodded. “Exactly so. The more fool you, for telling me.”
Sparks flew up, and the moon blinked like an eye. Then Rook and she sat opposite each other, cross-legged on the dirt, while each tore at the meat they held, firm and hot and full of juice. The swiftness of it all disturbed Rook a tad, as it was probably meant to.
Grandma gave a small belch and licked her fingers, neatly, ’til they shone clean, while Rook wiped his on the tail of his coat.
“So,” she said, abruptly natural, as though their conversation had never been interrupted, “since you present yourself as my student, you will earn the knowledge of my name — until then, I shall stay Grand-mother. Now . . . let me ask you a question.”
“Ma’am.”
“I told you ‘climb,’ and you climbed. Did you forget how to fly?”
“Well . . .” Rook paused. “Seemed . . . I couldn’t think of quite the right way to put it, if I wanted to.” He saw endless flickering telegraph-transcriptions of Bible-verse fragments scoring its way through his brain’s centre-slice, tendrils digging bright hooks into either lobe, and shivered. “Just couldn’t — find the words.”
“From that Book of yours? Though you yourself know you have done without them, before.”
“True enough. But — ” That was when I had Chess with me.
The sudden truth of it stopped him mid-breath. With blessed courtesy, she gave him a moment to ride it out before answering.
“You still think of yourself as what you were, grandson . . . tied to your bilagaana One-God, even when you know yourself to have already gone beyond His narrow way out into the wider world, where the threads of true Balance may be woven. So when His Book failed you, you climbed. You forgot your own powers, because you thought yourself unworthy of them. That is the first truth.
“The second truth? Your powers are not all you are. To believe you are nothing without them is to be nothing but your own magic. And no Hataalii who makes himself so hollow can still retain his soul.”
“All right, then — yes. It does seem . . . right, somehow.”
“
Even though I might be lying.”
Rook stared at her, hard. “Why would you?” he asked, at last.
A shrug. “Why indeed?”
Those flat eyes, so unreadable in the reddish ebb and flow. Rook made himself meet them nonetheless, thinking: Liked you better by far when you were just one more voice in my head, woman — when you had to tempt, not browbeat, in order to get whatever it was you wanted. But that’s just what always happens, I guess, when the honeymoon’s over.
And with that, sure as iron to a magnet, his thoughts went skittering on back to Chess.
If he was here, this old lady’d be no match for us — it’d be Bewelcome all over again, and she and Mesach Love could lick each other’s wounds in Hell. But, then again — maybe she ain’t lying. Maybe she does want to help. And what am I, in the end, if I need Chess to fight all my worst battles for me?
With deliberate care, he took another small bite of the fowl, chewing it slowly before swallowing — then another, and another. Musing, as his vised stomach began to gradually unclench: Been a long time, for her, I expect — out here, all on her own, no other hex to feed from. She must be starved for company indeed. And yeah, could be she really does mean me well, just has a funny way of showin’ it . . . but even if she don’t, well — I think I can take her.
They finished their meal in silence, consuming the bird down to the bones, which the desert witch cast into the fire. Then squatted down to peer at them as they smouldered, and said, “Now, Preacher Rook — look closely, and listen. Let me show you how the world really works: how every world grows out of the one which came before, into the next — and just as all worlds are connected, everything must be paid for.”
“Could you . . . be a touch more specific, maybe?”
Grandma snorted again, tossing back her braids, and rummaged inside the skin pouch she wore on her belt, cross-strapped right at the vague indentation where her waist should be. Withdrawing a smaller bag, she shook a few pale yellow grains out into her big, scarred palm.
“Cornmeal,” she explained. “Now: one more time, listen. And see.”
With two fingers, she twisted a hole in the sand at her feet, shook the meal down and bent to breathe a low croon in after it, then sat back, smoothing it over. Above them, the sky hung heavy with stars . . . until, gradual but unmistakable, those same stars began to go out.
A cloud, Rook thought, and Grandma nodded, like she could hear him. Like she knew he’d already forgotten how she probably could.
“Come down, nilch’i biyázhí,” she called up, into the air. “Wind’s children, hear me — spin your wool to my loom, gift me with threads to weave this working, keep my heart clean. Keep me from misstepping upon the Witchery Way.”
Rook could all but feel their two species of magic pass by each other in the night — her own strong faith, versus his sorrowful lack of it — and when she smiled back over at him, he realized he’d never before been so aware that a person’s teeth were also part of their skull. The sight made the hairs on the back of his neck prick up, a thin violet whining sound echoing through his head. And yes, bellyful of fresh-cooked meat aside, it also made him . . . hungry.
“Give me your hand,” Grandma told him, her deep voice oddly shaky, and Rook felt his scalp tighten. Was that a note from the very same famished scale he heard, behind her words’ bone-born “English” translation?
“Why — ”
“Give it.”
He hesitated — and saw it jerk forward of its own accord, her power a taut-snapped leash around his wrist. Heat flowed swoonishly outwards, dizziness mounting up fast as blood-loss. Scraping down deep to his very marrow, like she aimed to eat it with a spoon — and letting him know just how helpless he was to stop her from doing so, if she happened to choose to.
Two conclusions to be gleaned here, neither welcome. First off: she was much stronger than Rook had thought, or hoped.
And second — is this how Chess must feel, he thought, when I do it to him?
“This sort of spell cannot be done through natural means alone,” Grandma told him. “It needs more than one Hataalii’s power, whether or not the other aims to give it. Which shows us why it should probably not be done at all.”
With a flourish, Grandma shook her fingers over the hole, and Rook saw two types of hexation rain down into it, glinting hotly: his and hers, admixed. The earth drank it gladly, puffed up the way dough does in hot oil and shot up one green sprout, blindly seeking for an absent sun.
“Things must be what they are,” Grandma said, stroking the corn-stalk lightly. “From one grain I can make a kernel, and then — from that kernel — ”
Sprout became stalk, grew to nodding-height with startling speed — leafed out, a dancing-girl’s flapping skirts, spun all of a sudden with dry-rustling silken tassels. Ears whose ripe husks budded quick as grenades, golden-juicy fruit beneath aglow with an inner light that stunk so high of artifice it made Rook’s mouth fill with sour water.
“Take one,” she ordered. Rook did, gingerly. Even its weight felt wrong.
“Now eat.”
Rook bit savagely into the ear of corn, chewed, and was halfway through his second bite when the taste struck him at last — dust and ash, warm-slimy with decay. And as he choked down the third, the whole cob disintegrated in his hands, stalk curling over upon itself, shrivelling to the ground. Rook breathed deep, feeling his own stolen power flood back into him.
“That was never meant to be,” said Grandma. “Do you see, now? If I must steal from you to create a good thing, no matter how I try, I cannot make it stay. It cannot be other than it is — one grain of cornmeal in a new dress, sewn from dreams.”
Bread falling from the air, tasteless, unnourishing: Rook remembered. But the bad things you used your own — and Chess’s — power to do, all of them . . . those things stand still. The train, bisected. Bewelcome, in all its salt-slick glory.
Grandma reached down, prising up a rock to reveal the fossil which clung close beneath it, froze in mid-crawl, as though excreted straight from stone.
“Or this,” she said. “This slimy thing . . . something from the Fourth World itself, perhaps. Suck from you — ’til you sleep, or die, and I grow fat and drunk — and I might be able to make it creep, free to roam once more. But how far would it get, before it drowned in air it was never meant to breathe? Its time has passed. So I could feed you for years out here, grandson, just as I have kept myself fed — but never on corn, or sea-insects.”
“Not much of a miracle, then, is it?”
“Only gods do miracles, Asher Rook. Your own Book says as much.”
“And . . . we’re not gods.”
“Powerful, yes: Hataalii, born to Balance or un-Balance, to do right or walk the Witchery Way, perverting our own magic for profit. But we are not gods, and never could be.”
“There’s one I’ve spoke with, now and again,” Rook replied, slowly, “who might tend to disagree with you.”
And we both know who that is, now, don’t we?
No need to even nod. ’Cause from somewhere far below, the threads of his dragonfly-cloaked Lady’s influence came spinning up ’round both of them in a slack silk knot, just waiting for any excuse to tighten. And as she sat on the Sunken Ball-Court’s sloshing sidelines, Rook knew she grinned to hear herself discussed — she, her, the One Now Woken.
You, Rook “heard” Grandma blurt out.
And heard the reply in turn, a barest liquid murmur — Ah, yes: me.
A surging snap lit Rook from within, at the very sound. Not fear, so much, as a terrible urge to run wild and aimless in any direction, run ’til his skin rucked up and his muscles unstrung themselves, leaving his slick red bones to rattle at last into a sticky heap, reconfigured by their own momentum.
Before he could, however, Grandma’s hand moved again, and the unseen leash jerked him taut, puppet-stiff. When he made to protest, she sewed a quick seam across his lips with one needle-sharp nail, muffling them shut — a lock
ed purse, his tongue curled too tight in on itself to even move.
“Stay still,” Grandma told him. “The Lady of Traps and Snares has made threats, made you promises — of this I have no doubt. But even she, powerful as she has become, is no true god, grandson. She is Anaye, a monster. Enemy to all. Did she tell you you could be a god, perhaps, if you only did her bidding? Or was it . . . that he could?”
There was a note in her double-voice which rung through Rook like a bellyful of angry hornets, and made him just pissed off enough to wrench his sealed lips free — just pop them back open, uncaring of what might rip, and spit a mouthful of his own blood up, before answering: “Don’t you . . . talk about . . . him.”
He’d at least hoped to startle her, but had to settle for a bare smidgen of genuine respect, instead — before, with a flick of her fingers, she wound him tight on himself again.
And here the Rainbow Lady came whispering once more, from deep inside his ear’s shell — You are in a bad place now, little king. Do you wish my help?
Grandma’s head whipped ’round, bent low and seeking, as if she might be able to find the words’ source somewhere in the dust at her feet, if only given enough time to study it. “Do not answer her!” she ordered Rook, peremptorily.
The Lady, ignoring her, continued: For I will give it. That is how close we already are, given the blood we have shared, our marriage pledge. You have only to say the words . . .
Rook managed a groan, nothing more. Kicked out hard against Grandma’s net, and got the blood cut off to all his limbs at once, in return.
“Ohé, grandson — you will only hurt yourself, if you continue to struggle,” she warned him, without much sympathy. “I might have broken you of these bad habits gently, but my dreams tell me there is no time. If you do not learn your business quickly, she will hang you once more, and finish the job, this time — you, me, everyone else. Even that boy of yours.”
“His name is Chess. And he ain’t no boy.”
“No. He is rage and fire, a fierce warrior, one whose blood would enrich any tribe, did he not prefer to lie down with his own sex. I have seen many such, in my time: two-spirited as Begochiddy himself. But love is love, and you do love him, after all.”
