Again, she met his eyes, and it was all he could do not to recoil from the sight. For now they were crimson as the veil that hid them, solidly, from sclera to pupils—Mars doubled, a study in vermillion. Until, having received the response she must have wanted, she blinked, and they returned to “normal.”
“Now read your silly book, and do not dare to address me further,” she told him, dismissively. And returned to her endless scrying, flicking his offered jewellery aside like some errant lump of dung.
Blasted by headache, Yancey retired early, ostensibly leaving the men to hammer out some sort of accord, though she knew in her heart any immediate agreement on strategy was unlikely at best; two former Pinkerton men and a man who thought Pink-killing admirable sport made for bad bedfellows, even with one of ’em being exactly that.
Funny how huge this cramped room seemed, when empty. For a single heartbeat, Yancey wished Morrow was here to fill it up, then resolutely pushed all such imaginings away. He’s spoke for that way, she told herself, even if his natural bent sometimes takes his mind—elsewhere. And I suppose I don’t want to . . .
Impose? Come between them? Deprive Chess Pargeter of what few minor comforts his life currently held—that horror of a man, impossible and unpleasant, his irreverent soul packed full of sorrowful rage with no other method of surcease?
I do like him, more fool me, she understood, ruefully. My Goddamn error, indeed.
Easing her boots off with a sigh, Yancey sat back against the headboard, let her lids droop ’til all she saw was the veins decorating their backsides, and counted breaths like sheep.
Until: Granddaughter, a voice said—that same voice, bearer of bad news and good advice alike. We must talk.
When she opened her eyes again, red-purple light striated the dream-sky above like a bruise. Yancey got to her feet, soil gritty under her bare soles. All around, scree-lined slopes rose up to an edged ring of stone. The air was thin and dry, cool with altitude, though the earth still held the dying day’s heat. A harsh scent of ash scored each breath she took, underlaid with something fouler. At the centre of the bowl, the dead grey-black embers of a fire sat, and beside them, oh, beside them . . .
The Yancey of but days ago would have retched, and even now, she had to gulp down bile. Yet it was not the mere appearance of this ruined corpse that so revolted—albeit leathery and shrunken, it was less repugnant than the contents of most renderers’ carts. But the miasma magnified tenfold as she stared, coating her throat with tar and decayed fruit.
“It is a Hataalii’s murder you smell, granddaughter.”
Though the words were in no language she had ever heard, she understood them without effort. Yancey closed her eyes again; at once, the revulsion shrank sharply. “You’ve called me that for some time now,” she said. “And I’m mindful what courtesy you might mean by it, for which I thank you. But my mother was Mala Colder, born Mala Kiraly Lukacz, and though I didn’t have the pleasure of knowing her mother, I have no other. So, respectfully: use my name or any other title you please, ’cause I’m no kin of yours.”
She braced herself, not daring to open her eyes, ’til dry laughter filled the air.
The woman who stood unwavering on the crater’s edge, steady-balanced as if weighted, was both squat and unlovely: a frog-faced Indian squaw of no tribe Yancey knew—Apache, Sioux? Her long white hair stretched down to her belt in two slim braids; the shawl wrapping her was woven in complex, interleaving stripes of colour, sole bright thing about her, other than her black eyes’ predatory shine.
“And this,” she announced, to no one in particular, “is why this one may be worth the talking to.”
Smiling as she said it, but with nothing that looked like kindness. And the red-purple light of the sky clung to her, its power palpable as a forge’s heat.
This, too, a days-younger Yancey would have found near-paralyzing. But after Chess Pargeter, and Love, and the feel of her blood going into the Weed, a steel she had never thought possible had woven itself through her spine. She met the woman’s gaze without flinching. “All right. Now . . . who are you, really?”
The smile fell, a discarded mask. “Bilagaana dead-speaker,” the woman called her. “Why not make me tell you? You could, if you tried.”
It was true, and Yancey suddenly knew it, the way she always did. And though the rush of that certainty was dizzying, she held onto herself, hard.
“Yes. But why would I?”
A moment, then another; the woman’s scowl relaxed. “You would not,” she admitted, “since you are no Hataalii. For which I am thankful.”
Yancey’s eyes slipped back toward the dead fire pit’s awful companion. “That’s . . . yourself, lying there,” she said.
The woman spat. “What was left behind, after Reverend Rook betrayed me to his Anaye-wife. Ai, that I was foolish enough to be merciful! But he was a man in love, though not with her.” She folded her arms and shook her head, bemused. “And for all that men say women do foolish things for love, a lovestruck man will let the whole world burn, or burn it himself.”
Yancey thought of the scar underlining Chess’s breastbone, and fought down a shudder. “Love’s . . . not what’s between them, now, it seems.”
The woman sniffed. “Seeming is nothing; you yourself told that red boy as much, just today. Now—come up here beside me, dead-speaker. See what lies waiting.”
Yancey calmed herself with a deep breath, then climbed the loose scree of the inner slope ’til at last she stood perched on the top edge by the woman’s side, where she was surprised to realize herself a good few inches taller than her mysterious mentor. Then she looked out—eastward, since the sunset was behind her—and caught her breath.
Nightfall lay thick over the land, lights sparking up here and there, sadly separate. Slowly, Yancey realized she must be seeing for miles and miles, far beyond what the horizon should have permitted: Towns, cities, states, territories—near the entire West, maybe even far as the Mississippi. But this darkness was something more, Weed’s onslaught the merest surface froth of something far more corrupt.
Like rancid oil at the bottom of a mud-darkened puddle, Yancey could trace the currents of wrongness that eddied over the world. Within seconds, she had linked them back to their thickest points—the blurred, half-real edifices of Rook’s hex-town; the quake-flattened wreckage of Mexico’s capital, hundreds of miles south; and most of all, the salt-flat, white-glowing husk of Bewelcome. Black cracks pierced each place like broken cinders, producing a rushing vertigo in her stomach.
“Once, when things were not so pressing,” her not-grandmother said, “I would have wasted time—cajoled, flattered, offered instruction, as I did with Rook. But I have been longer than I expected fighting my way back from the Far Places, and things are grown so bad it seems best to speak plainly, if only to avoid misunderstanding.”
“Likewise, and most decidedly,” Yancey said, unable to turn away from the horrid sight.
The woman sighed. “I have sent dreams to my own tribe’s dead-speakers, but they are too far away to be helpful. Still, they in turn have sent emissaries to their nearest enemies, reminding them we share a common foe—worse even, in its season, than your kind has been to us, ghost-face girl. A threefold menace, each branch sprung from the same tree of bones: the Weed, and who it follows after. The risen city, and those who rule it. The crack, and what comes out of it. All bent to one abominable purpose.”
“To destroy us?” Yancey guessed. “Or . . . everything?”
“Grandma” shook her head, sharply. “Merely to thrust this world on toward the Sixth would not appease she who drives this monstrousness, or serve her ends. She wishes to undo a destruction—force time itself backward to restore what she remembers as her followers’ glory, before your people meddled in their affairs.”
“My people?”
“T
hose who overcame the Mexica—steel hats, she calls them. Los conquistadors.”
“Um—conquistadors were Spanish, I believe.” At Grandma’s look: “But lay that by. . . . This’d be Reverend Rook’s ‘Rainbow Lady,’ I take it?” She’d almost said the name outright, but stopped in time, remembering Ed’s palm making harsh contact with her jaw to keep a similar name from possibly summoning its owner. Though what lingered was not the pain of the blow, but the stricken look in his eyes, immediately after.
Grandma spat. “She thinks herself fit to overturn Balance, who is nothing but a shed snakeskin of venom and folly. And for that, she has loosed such horrors upon the world. . . .”
She seized Yancey’s arm, pointed at the throbbing void centring Bewelcome’s whiteness. “It has reached further down now, to the Ball-Court’s lowest levels. Past the Mexica host, presided over by Mictantecuhtli and his fleshless lady Mictecacuihuatl, into the realm of One and Seven Death and all their nightmares.” Grandma’s voice fell into a mesmerizing rhythm, and with each name, images flashed before Yancey’s eyes—too quick to be truly seen, too ghastly to forget. “Jaundice Demon and Skull Sceptre, who cause the flesh to sicken and fall. House Corner, his sharp teeth bared. Lord of Rubbish and the Stabbing Lord, who attack from the blind side. Packstrap and Wing, whose victims die struck from above on the roadway, alone, with the dark wind blowing past.
“And in their company, neither leading nor following, something that has been here already for longer than we dream—enjoying their progress, pointing them the way—”
Yancey felt it in her gut, a landed punch. “The Enemy.”
“We know him by many names, dead-speaker, and sometimes he seems to care for us, if only because we keep him busy. But in this form he is the Trickster without care—the King who Eats Himself, playing his flute on a staircase of human skulls. And this crack he keeps open will be the root his Bone Tree grows from.”
So what does any of that mean? Yancey choked back the urge to yell. As Grandma’d said, the hour was getting late—terminology hardly mattered, considering it all sounded equally bad.
“Why don’t you tell Mister Pargeter all this,” she asked, instead, “seeing he’s the only one might be able to do something about it?”
“Because he cannot hear me—will not, perhaps. He is a stubborn fool.”
“I can’t disagree.”
“So it is, when a man hates his own mother—the earth opens up under his feet, one way or another. Women live in your warrior’s blind spot; he cannot see them, or see them coming. How else do you think the Rainbow Lady was able to take his man even as he lay beside him, right out of his very bed? How was she able to make him come panting at her call, though it goes against his very soul to do so?”
I do wish you hadn’t made me remember that, Yancey thought.
“Suppose he’d say . . . ’cause she’s ‘a damn hex-god,’” she replied, out loud. “’Cause she’s not like you or him, or Reverend Rook, either.”
“No. She is exactly like him, and me, and every other of our kind—puffed up with stolen blood, writ large, gone bad. For whatever she and her Enemy are now, they were once as I . . . as you, even. And though she refuses to see it, her time is already done; what she and Rook have worked with Rook’s little killer proves as much. Gods sleep within us all, waiting to be prayed alive. And gods can kill other gods.”
She turned to fix Yancey with one eye, head cocked like a carrion bird’s. “You, meanwhile, the red boy needs, along with his travelling companion—that one man who stayed with him for friendship’s sake, even after knowing what he really was. Which is why he begins to mistrust you both, as he fears anything which might make him weak.”
Yancey frowned. “He isn’t, though. He’s crazy strong.”
“Tell him that, then. Make him even stronger. Or he will drive you both away, and ensure all our dooms.”
She turned once more to the horizon, where Hex City cast its weird light upwards, deforming the stars behind. “Something is happening there, in that city Rook’s perfidy helped her build. I did not see it coming, while still in my body; it was as yet hidden in time’s creases, even when looked at through the weave of Changing Woman’s own loom. But now I am bodiless I see my vengeance is less important than the seed these two have sown. Properly nurtured, it will benefit all Hataalii, no matter their blood . . . and therefore, though it galls me to say so, it must be preserved.”
“Now you’ve lost me, ma’am.”
The old squaw hesitated, as though she almost feared to speak the words. “In that place,” she said, at last, “we—hexes—can work together.”
“That . . . just doesn’t happen.”
“Nowhere but there, dead-speaker. Do you understand me?”
And here Yancey took her own pause, jaw set, frankly afraid to admit that she really didn’t.
“So you need us kept together,” she said, instead. “Is someone coming to help us? One of your—Hataalii?”
“Hataalii? No. None could stay close to your red boy now, without risking death-duel. Yiska, the one my people sent to, would be a full medicine woman already, if only she could give up her love for weapons—born Diné, but she rides with the Na’isha of late, since all is fallen into confusion. A spirit-talker, like you in some ways . . . in others, not.” She pointed out over the plain, now gone completely black. “She and her band travel quickly, but they do not have the capacities your red boy does. Expect them soon.”
“And until then?”
“Delay, child. For as long as you can. I have other plans to set in motion; impossible things, under any other circumstances. But here, now, between the crack and that woman’s ‘New Aztectlan’ . . . yes. I think they can be done.”
“And if I do . . . what’s in it for me?”
Grandma stepped back, blinking—the first purely human expression she’d worn. “Do you bargain with me?” she asked, then snorted again. “Bilagaana! You do not know even to respect the dead.”
“Mayhap, but since you’re not my dead, I owe you no particular restitution. Where I come from, we expect to be paid for our labour, ’specially if it could get us just as dead as you.”
“What is it you want, then?”
This, at least, required no thought at all. “Sheriff Mesach Love, under my grip. Close enough for me to dig my muzzle in, ’fore I plug his dead heart.”
A slow smile spread over Grandma’s ugly face, darkly gleeful. “Ah, you are brim-full with hate, little dead-speaker. But in this, our wants coincide—for where the Enemy goes, your enemy shall surely follow.”
“A preacher and the Devil—someone else’s devil, anyhow.” Yancey shook her head at the very idea. But Grandma gave only a shrugging hmph, unimpressed as any town biddy.
“Nothing worse, in this whole world, than a bad man who knows his Bible. So Asher Rook once said, faithless blackrobe that he is, opening his prayer book only to find fresh curses. And as for your Sheriff Love—if he was an honest enough man before Bewelcome’s fall, now he dances to the Enemy’s tune, knowing all along his newfound power comes from nothing good. But like you, he does not care who he treats with, so long as he gets what he seeks. And in the end, this will be his undoing.”
“How so?”
“When he fought with your red boy at your wedding, the town itself was levelled, your husband and kin cut down. You yourself might have died, or either of the Pinkerton men. But did any blow one monster dealt the other do lasting damage? No, because each draws from the same source. It was as though they fought themselves.”
A sudden understanding lit Yancey’s brain, from ear to ear. “Was the Enemy brought Love back, not God at all . . . he said as much, when Chess quizzed him on it. So—if there was some way to turn him back, to undo what Rook preached on his homestead, with Chess’s syphoned-off hexation as connivance—”
<
br /> “I knew you would see it, eventually.”
“Not being stock-stupid? Thanks, ever so. But . . .” Here the flash gave out, leaving her once more in darkness. “What I don’t know is how that even could happen, let alone how to make it come about.”
“Of course not, for you are no Hataalii. How fortunate, then, you have at least spilled your blood to feed one.”
The clear implication being: Chess Pargeter could, given enough incentive—enough sacrifice. Just like he helped Rook turn Bewelcome to salt, he could now turn it back, on his own hook; get him there, pray into him extra hard, see what happens. Unless . . . no, wait . . .
Something was scratching at her, some piece too jagged to fit. And then, all of a sudden, it dropped straight down into her mouth.
“Doctor Asbury says Bewelcome’s a dead spot; no magic gets in, or out. Same for the Weed, and since that’s what Chess gets his mojo from—”
Again, that fierce smile, darker by far than the lips which shaped it.
Your doctor does not know everything, Grandma said, without using her mouth, for extra emphasis. Not even the half. Like too many bilagaana, he thinks this world works by machinery alone—that it may be solved like a puzzle, written down, re-written. Between the two, you would do better by far to follow our Enemy’s counsel.
Yancey bowed her head. “All right, then, ma’am; I’ll do that. Thank you kindly.”
The hex-ghost considered her a moment, and Yancey thought she could almost see something close to affection in those stone-obdurate eyes. But perhaps it was simply a reflection from one light source or another—strange things moving under the surface, a fish’s maw in a murky pond, invisibly toothed. For the dead did not give up their secrets, ordinarily, without great pressure—more than Yancey had thought she’d brought to bear, so far.
But then again, perhaps the pressure just was great, all on its own, without Yancey doing a thing. Perhaps things really were just that bad for everyone, whether dead or soon-to-be.
The Hexslinger Omnibus Page 51
