Book Of Tongues

by Gemma Files

  Was that Morrow at the back of his head, now, slicing in all of a sudden from behind him, and probably not even thinking he was doing so? Showing Chess himself, slant-viewed, in ways he’d never previously dreamt on. How he maybe wasn’t quite as black as he was painted, not even now, with Smoking Mirror’s pitch-smeared face lookin’ down over his mental shoulder.

  Ask yourself why Chess does so much of any damn thing, overall, and it’s always pure contrariness — Oh, you think you KNOW me? Think you know what I’m capable of, which way I’ll jump? Think the fuck again! — That’s what Pinkerton don’t care to understand, and Asbury just ain’t even halfway equipped to reckon. Though Songbird probably knows it, or I’d be much surprised.

  Jesus, Chess thought, head swimming, and we only lay down together the once, too. Who knows what-all the Pinkerton son-of-a-bitch might’ve found out, Rook’d only stayed away a few nights more?

  He buckled without warning, eyes wide, and puked another splatter of hot and coppery blood that hissed as it struck the char-smeared wooden floor. Songbird’s mouth tightened in distaste — then slackened, as Asbury gasped and Pinkerton’s eyebrows rose, when the thickened mass inside the blood stirred, pushed upwards, swelled into a floral bud of the same carnal colour. In the silence of astonishment, the faint cracks of roots working their way into the floorboard’s grain was clearly audible. Leaves unfurled along the stem. the bud grew further, spreading out red petals. With a dancer’s grace the blood-flower revolved to face Chess, opening wider as it did, as if yearning for the sun.

  Its central petals irised apart, revealing a bell lined with lamprey teeth that pulsed and tensed, a swallowing and hungry throat.

  “My . . . good God,” breathed Hosteen.

  Chess made a sound too sharp and harsh to be a laugh. “Oh, you think, Kees?” He rounded on Asbury. “Fuck your money, Doc, and fuck your mission too, Pinkerton. I’ll find Rook, all right — but not for you. He’s mine. ’Cause . . . that’s just the kinda bitch I am.”

  Songbird leaned slightly in Asbury’s direction, and murmured: “I told you so.”

  Pinkerton drew himself up to his full height, mind hardening and darkening. Behind Chess, Morrow tensed. The two currents met queasily in Chess’s midsection. “You’ll not earn the dignity of a second chance from me, Pargeter, if that’s your only answer.” Then his scowl skewed to puzzlement. “What in God’s name is that?”

  His eyes went to the nightstand. Chess turned — to see the thing he’d always thought was Morrow’s pocket-watch (Asbury’s famous Manifold, he plucked forth — all unsummoned — from that same gentleman’s over-hot brains), the device now eating all trace of magic from the air, come alive once more with its trademark chatter-whirring, ramping up ever louder and faster. More thought-stamps followed — from Morrow, a new surge of alarm and fear. Asbury’s mindstink cloud had frozen up too. Chess could taste the old man’s slimy terror in his own throat, bile mixed with blood.

  “Agent Morrow.” None of Asbury’s fear was in his voice, unless that flat evenness was itself the fear. “What — exactly — did that . . . woman . . . say she wanted to do, with Mister Pargeter?”

  “Sacrifice him, as I recall it.” Equally flat, equally controlled. A voice Chess had never heard from Morrow. The Manifold clattered and buzzed, the pitch of its gears winding higher and higher. “Make him some kind of a — skinned god. A god . . . who dies? Like Christ Jesus, I s’pose. Only — bloodier.”

  Asbury turned away, paced frenetically back and forth, unable to keep still in his ferocity of thought. “Sacrificial re-enactment,” he breathed, slapping his fingers against one palm. “The role of the avatar, rendered literal — yes, yes, with sufficient power directed upon it, bolstered by the faith of the worshippers . . . it could happen!” He stopped, excitement flash-flooding into dismay and horror, so vividly and powerfully Chess felt it strike everyone at once, for just that moment. “Oh, good Lord . . .”

  “What is this, Doctor?” asked Pinkerton, low and the more dangerous for his own fear. “What the hell did we take into our fold on your say-so?” He spun to Morrow, abruptly shouting. “Morrow, what did you bring us?!”

  Songbird, meanwhile, overtop — her mind’s voice shattered glass and smoke: KILL him, fools, while he’s distracted, kill him NOW —!

  Hell, Chess thought, and me with empty guns.

  The Manifold screamed on, a miniature steam-engine running at breakneck full-throttle, derailment-fast.

  Asbury panicked. Chess felt it happen, more than saw it — the shattering of every ounce of vaunted rationality in one thoughtless burst. Knew, even as the old man scrabbled for Hosteen’s gun, what he was going to do. Lifted his hand helplessly as Asbury wrenched Hosteen’s pistol from the startled outlaw’s holster, cocked it, spun to aim it at Chess’s breast.

  And then, right at that same instant: the crimson flower on the floor swivelled around and struck, lamprey-teeth closing fast on the silver thread-end beside it.

  A double-flash of light blinded the room, one carmine, one actinic white, as the flower vapourized, the thread liquefied instantly, and the Manifold burst with a flat sharp crack that buried smoking shrapnel in every wall. Battle instinct saved Morrow and Pinkerton, both of them dropping to the ground when they saw the flower move. Songbird’s shields had already snapped on, deflecting flying shards around her every which way, a jagged metal-and-glass halo. But Asbury yowled and fell to his knees, hands pressed to a long, bleeding gash traced all along his cheek.

  Hosteen swayed slowly in the doorway, one hand wandering up to his neck, where a thick red flow drenched collar, shirt, and vest as it spattered onto the floor. He subsided against the doorframe and slid down it, without haste. Chess gaped at him, barely able to see for the flash-blindness blurring his vision.

  The old Dutchman didn’t have enough strength left for a smile, but Chess felt the last of his thoughts curl around Chess’s own: Made you a damn . . . god, huh? Well. Always knew . . . you’d matter. To him . . . to me . . . always . . .

  His eyes went flat and fixed. A terrifying emptiness yawned for a moment inside Hosteen’s skull. Then — nothing. The thing in the door might as well have been a wax sculpture, for all the resemblance it bore to a man Chess’d fought beside and cared for.

  He glanced over at Morrow, met the man’s eyes, and was startled to find them equally stricken.

  Footsteps thundered up nearby stairs, down the hall. Pinkerton lunged to his feet. “Stay back!” he roared. “For the love of Christ, stay clear!” He whirled and drew his own piece — which promptly lofted out of his grip and clattered against the wall. Songbird lowered her hand with a look of deep disdain.

  “Silence from you, gweilo,” she ordered. “This is a matter for your betters, now.” Turning to face Chess, lightning crackling in her hair, as her own power — newly unshackled — puffed her like a windy sail. “Well, boy? Shall we finish at last that conversation we started, back in Selina Ah Toy’s?”

  Chess clambered to his feet, feeling power surge along nerves and muscles, electrifying and painful with his fury. Magic welled out from him, pushing back the inflood of thought and leaving him blissfully alone in his own head once more. “Sure you wanna do this? Seein’ what I am, I mean.”

  On nothing but sheer impulse, he swept his hand, palm-out, ’cross the air in front of him. felt an invisible flame spill down into the floorboards, wrenching them up and apart as a decade’s worth of vines and ivy grew in an instant, mounding up six inches high, curved before him in a tiny wall.

  Heat-shimmer rippled up between them from the vegetation, distorting Songbird’s face to a monstrous grimacing mask — but she just shook her head, and replied: “Oh, you are powerful, yes. But I — I know more.”

  She moved a mere finger in a minuscule yet complex pattern — and in an instant, the power flowing from Chess into the vine-fire wall simply went snap, a rotten log cracking in two. The barrier vanished, ivy withering. Energy backlashed into Chess, convulsing him
with a startled yell of agony.

  “Prince of flowers,” Songbird scoffed. “Does your new skin chafe? Perhaps we will cure that itch by taking it off for you, once more.”

  “Get the hell offa me, you kinchin dollymop bitch!” Blindly, Chess spat more blood at her — only to watch it sizzle redly through midair, vitriolish. Songbird flipped her left hand up, a half-second too late. The hasty ward stopped all but one droplet, and she shrieked as it coursed down her face in a steaming red runnel, like she’d been hit with acid. By the time she mustered hexation enough to wipe it away, it had left a weeping, smoking scar near four inches long behind, running right down one perfect cheek.

  Disbelievingly, she touched the wound with diffident fingers, tracing its path. Took them away to look at the blood. Then looked up at Chess — and all sense vanished from her face in a mindless demonic scream of fury as she threw herself upon him, the air between her fingers a-pop with ball-lightning, blue and vicious. “Aiyaaah! Lotus-boy ch’in ta, uneducated gweilo whoreson bastard!”

  With absolutely no idea how to shield himself from her vengeance, Chess switched right on back to his old tricks, and punched her full in the face — a round-house haul-off, nothing fancy but nothing pulled, worthy of any given ball-house tap-room brawl. Songbird’s front teeth cracked across with a sound that filled the room as she went down, forehead-first, right at Pinkerton’s boot-tips.

  As it turned out, Pinkerton packed more than the one gun. Which wasn’t much of a surprise, really — though hellish inconvenient, ’specially now he was brandishing the damn thing right in Chess’s face.

  “I knew this was a mistake, from the very get-go,” Pinkerton told him, levelly. “Mad dogs should be put down, not catered to, no matter what other tricks they’re capable of. So here’s a proper end to it.”

  Chess held himself in some pride for not even flinching. Wasn’t like he hadn’t always thought this was the way he’d go out, after all.

  “Better go on ahead, then,” he said, “and drop your damn jawin’ — ’cause my only regret’s I didn’t kill a sight more of your men while I was at it, Mister King Shit Almighty Pinkerton. And if these guns of mine were loaded, I sure know where I’d start.”

  “A fine thing for me that they’re not, then.”

  Yeah, too damn bad, Chess thought — then whipped his head ’round, as he heard almost the exact sentiment echoed from behind him.

  “Too bad, yeah,” said Morrow. “But still — ”

  Songbird looking up, at the same time, her mouth’s pain a spike through the tongue: What is that in your mind, gweilo?

  “Still what, agent?” Pinkerton demanded, as Chess and Morrow locked gazes.

  To which Morrow answered, slow but distinct, “Still, occurs to me . . . since you are a hex, Chess, with at least as much juice as Rook, if not more . . . just what the hell’s it matter, anyhow?”

  Pinkerton opened up his jaws, drill-sergeant quick, like he was just about to bark at Morrow to shut his mouth — but it was too late. As though just giving the idea voice, however obliquely, had turned a key in Chess’s gut, filling him back up top-to-toe with a virulent force that suddenly made all things possible.

  Chess grinned, wolfish. “Always did like you, Ed,” he said.

  And cross-drew, fulfilling every outlaw’s dream in one fell swoop with two impossible shots — that of shooting Allan Pinkerton in the face — or close as made no never-mind, clipping the Scotsman ’cross one ear-top as he swerved and went down ass-backwards, biting his own tongue so badly Chess could see the glinting muscle — with no ammunition but a spell.

  He heard Asbury cry out. Heard Songbird laugh, even through her own pain, in sheer delight.

  The bedchamber door heaved and sprang from its hinges, and a flood of agents spilled in, all blazing-ready to defend their sire. Chess turned to meet them head on, automatic, his guns already up. Only to have Morrow grab him up under the arms and sling him headlong through the white-curtained window, bursting out onto the first-floor roof in a spray of glass. He rolled and fell to the dusty street below, turning mid-air to find his feet like a cat.

  Following hot on his heels, Morrow landed far heavier, with a yelp and a curse — jerked up and started limp-loping down the street, yelling back over his shoulder: “Jesus Christ, Chess, they’ll be on us in a minute — you comin’, or what?”

  Chess shook his head, but only to clear it. There’d be choice words ’tween him and Morrow later on, obviously regarding — various issues. For now, however . . . he turned, reholstering, to make better speed.

  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.