The Hexslinger Omnibus

by A Book of Tongues; A Rope of Thorns; Tree of Bones; Hexmas; Like a Bowl of Fire; In Scarlet Town (Today) (epub)

  “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, meting 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’s 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 tha
t 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.