by Gemma Files
“So you do keep your wild dogs leashed, then — that’s a mercy. For lo, One of themselves, even a prophet of their own, said, the Cretians are always liars, evil beasts, slow bellies; Titus, 1:12.”
“More collared than leashed, ma’am. But accurate otherwise, to a point.”
Morrow shut his eyes, unable to dismiss the immediate rush of memory: saw witches and warlocks, volunteers and prisoners alike, lined up knee to knee to wait their turn at the striking iron; with each fresh collaring a groan went up, along with a blast of heat, the slight smell of singed hair or flesh, the wince and stamp of pain. After which the blacksmith’s apprentice would douse their necks in a bucketful of water and move them to where the healers stood, charged hands already outstretched for a mighty laying-on, with the raw assault to everyone’s spiritual dignity left completely untreated.
Though Morrow hadn’t had occasion to sit down with their mutual “boss” for some time now, he found himself nevertheless already convinced of the scenario Asbury had occasionally let slip hints about, late at night, in his cups. For the idea that Pinkerton’s ultimate goal might be to make the Agency the States’ predominant outfit of internal control, sole wielders of the only arcane branch of technology allowing mere humans to police and identify hexes — to break them like horses, groom them like dogs, put them down like sick pets if and when they exceeded their purviews — was both a truly horrifying one, and all too easy to believe.
Strange how it’d taken the War, that dreadful upheaval pitting neighbour ’gainst neighbour, culling an entire generation at one swoop, to convince a divided America that centre-driven unity was better by far than state-to-state autonomy. In a way, it had become their own version of the Oath: a commitment to Missus Love’s Law, instead of that wild, God-given justice the first colonists had supposedly fled England in order to regain. And now, with the constant spectre of fresh Division hanging low over all their heads, Pinkerton was right in thinking how any nation who could use hexes like tools instead of having to deal with them like weather might expect to write its own ticket from now on, both at home and — eventually — elsewhere.
It could never be forgotten that staying within siege distance of New Aztectlan also kept Pinkerton close to a source of hexation he could sample at will, distilling it like the tinctures Asbury had once used to fend off his curse-pollution. Which might explain why all his strategic decisions hitherto seemed to suggest his aspiration was to take the city wholesale, thus enslaving the largest concentration of hexes in America — magicians already used to working together, if only under an oath of loyalty so stark that to break it would kill them outright.
To do so, he would have to dispose of Ixchel, Rook and probably the Enemy as well, a triple coup of spectacularly crazy proportions. Yet Morrow could well imagine that in his hex-juice-drugged state, Pinkerton might think this ambition more easily fulfilled than not.
Asbury drank a lot these days, for a man so patently unused to doing so; did it late in the night and early in the morn, with little pause for full recovery in between. His pleasure was gin, poured into a teacup with the pinkie extended, then chugged straight down without wincing. Sometimes he probably cut it with other things — Morrow’d heard tell that laudanum in red wine would give you horrors so bad you’d think you saw a woman’s nipples wink at you, and as manager of Pinkerton’s medical stores, the Professor sure had access to that. But for all Morrow could really prove, he might’ve been rolling the Red Weed and smoking it the way he claimed those old Mexes used to, or chewing it up like peyote buttons.
Didn’t much matter, either way. Though Asbury’s hands seldom shook and his voice remained slur-free, he did keep himself well-lit. From where he was sitting, for example, it was obvious to Morrow he’d already had a few nips today; luckily, no one else seemed to recognize this fact except perhaps for Langobard, who was probably willing to let it slide on account of being in a similar condition. And once past a certain point in his routine, Morrow’d lately had cause to observe that if you asked Asbury something straight out — no matter what, or what about — he’d just go right on ahead and answer it.
“That first bracket, the bracelet I made for Miss Yu, wasn’t right,” he’d told Morrow, a week back. “Untested. To lock it on a mere girl, in such primitive conditions . . .” He shook his head, sadly. “What right have I to call myself a scientist, after that sort of behaviour?”
“Much right as any here, I s’pose. More right than most, still.”
Asbury shook his head. “Pinkerton’s idea. Wanted a demonstration of its efficacy; demanded I use it just as soon as opportunity presented itself, and on Miss Yu too, if at all possible. Left to my own devices, I would never, but — he insisted. And . . . circumstances were exigent, at the time.”
“No doubting that,” Morrow had assured him.
“Yes. Grateful as he was to reap the rewards, though, he was equally quick to inform me that the effects fell markedly short of his true ambitions.”
Morrow forced a laugh. “What’d he want,” he made himself ask, lightly, “for it to make him turn hex altogether and rule America, like Rook and Chess might’ve planned? Or be President, then, after he’d made short work of Johnson — hell, what about king?”
Asbury muttered something into his collar, the only part of which Morrow thought heard sounded like “uh guh” — followed by another long swallow, to compose himself. After which he eventually managed to eke out: “No. For Pinkerton, you see, wants more. Desires, in short, to be . . . a . . .”
And here things took on a far darker filter, like looking through a pebbled storm window. Because what the word in question turned out to be was “god.”
After all, if Asbury’s theories held true — which they certainly had, thus far — even the “gods” of Old Mexico were once no more than hexes, just as all hexes were once mere humans, thus suggesting that any human charged with hex-power could (in theory) become a god. How, though, exactly? This was the question Morrow most dreaded, hoping devoutly to never see it answered — yet fearing, more and more, that he was doomed to do so.
“Can’t be done,” he’d replied. “Right?”
Asbury regarded his booze-filled teapot, bleakly. “Such a transition requires sacrifice, obviously, from what we saw happen to your Mister Pargeter — that the applicant himself be sacrificed, in point of fact. Yet sacrifice is simply death, placed in special context. And when we speak of creatures as powerful as Lady Rainbow, let alone that Other, are we even really speaking of death, per se? Disruption alone might suffice, if it lasted long enough. The resultant backwash of released mantic energy, horrifyingly strong as it would have to be . . . I see no reason why Mister Pinkerton might not use it to elevate himself to their power status, if only temporarily.”
Temporarily’d be bad enough, Morrow didn’t have to say, since he could only suppose they were both thinking it. And a few minutes later, Asbury put his head down on his folded arms for “a short rest,” never lifting it up again ’til morning.
And here I am, stranded right in the middle of a pile of shit, just like effin’ always, Morrow concluded, his long musing over. Sure hope Yancey and the others have found the real Chess by now, wherever the Enemy might’ve stashed him — that they have a plan to go with that idea, too, if and when . . .
Up on stage, Langobard raised “his” new Manifold to the light, admiring its shine. A second later, however, he almost dropped the thing as though burned — for it had begun to twist in his hand, buzzing waspish, mercury popping like it wanted to escape.
“The hell — ?” was all he had time for.
Outside, the thunder cracked like God’s own whip, shaking Nazarene Hall to its foundations. And between them, on the table, a noise rose up that Morrow’d hoped never to hear again: ticking and chattering, magnified by fifty-odd. The Manifolds themselves, rattling like bees in a sack.
“. . . what?” This from the Reverend Catlin, still left off to one side, pathetic in his lack of pr
actical understanding. But the rest of them knew better.
“Hexation,” was all Sophy Love said, folding her little boy close. While Morrow just shifted back into fighting stance, one hand automatically going to his gun.
It’s on, he thought. And ran for the door.
CHAPTER FIVE
Atop Hex City’s southernmost ramparts with Fennig at his elbow, Reverend Rook looked down on a four-foot-wide bowl that had been made by hexation-gloved hands digging up the stone like wet clay, tossing it pell-mell over the edge to shatter. Then filled by bucket after bucket hauled laboriously up from the city’s wells — that part had to be done without magic, the man who’d designed it had told them, or the reflections it cast would be false, and therefore impotent.
The water must be a mirror, the mirror an eye, without flaw or artifice. It is known, barbarians. Everywhere, it is known! All civilized places, at least.
Have you truly no system of traditions here, in this empty pigsty of yours, this bone-kennel? Do you not at the least strive to educate yourselves, knowing no one else will do it for you?
The voice in Reverend Rook’s mind didn’t much sound like Songbird’s except in terms of tone — that damnable Celestial arrogance, a thousand years of Chinee witchery made literal flesh. For the Emperors and mandarins had done with both their ancestors what Auntie Sal’s Marse Followell had only dreamed on: in- and out-crossed ’em generation after generation like any other owned creature, culling their bloodlines for potential, power and amusement-value deformity — as pets and slaves, equally. Living weapons used ’til they broke, then bred again and again ’til their children outstripped them, or died trying.
And here he was now, the man himself — the Honourable Chu, squatting over that same pool like a snapping turtle. He was short and broad, black eyes narrowed, the water below him rippling in red circles as he stirred it with a handful of long yarrow stalks. With his frayed black cotton pyjama pants and callused bare feet, he looked most like what he’d once masqueraded as: a scholar reduced to beggary, escaping his inherited yoke by slipping on the uniform of a simple railway-labour coolie. One thing alone marked him out as maybe more — the tatters of a royal blue silk tunic, faded almost lavender.
When Chu spoke, threads of light writhed in that silk like the worms which had birthed it, showing him for what he was: New Aztectlan’s war-master, born of a culture with millennia invested in the arts of battle and hexation. No matter how worn the garment became, Chu never removed it, and answered no questions about how it had been ruined. But Rook, thinking back on his own black-covered Bible — long gone now — and of Songbird, so trapped in her sacred whore’s gilded red lacquer cage that the earthquake he’d called down on her must’ve seemed less a disaster than a freedom-spawning miracle, thought he could guess.
Next to Chu, another man crouched, taller and browner though equally broad, his cheekbones flat as copper axe blades. “See it yet?” he demanded, raking his long hair back behind one ear, while the beaded pectoral covering his chest rattled like an abacus. “Spinning its web, under the earth’s skin . . . there, and there. If you can’t, you must be going blind, old idiot.”
“There are no spiders here, fool. Only dragons, rulers of weather and water — Ying-lung, who brings rain and floods, whose name we have called every day this week. Will you never learn?”
“Day I need to ‘learn’ from you, yellow man, I’ll lay myself face down in this pool and try breathing water. Who was here first, uh? Your people, or mine?”
“More of mine left here than yours, you dung beetle, even with the quota. As for lying face down — that must’ve been the extent of your strategy, when the gweilo came. The sage Sun Tzu says, Confront them with annihilation, and they will then survive; plunge them into a deadly situation, and they will then live. When people fall into danger, they are then able to strive for victory . . . but he never met any Shoshone.”
“Oh, go eat a buffalo liver, you miserable creature.”
Chu replied, without turning: “Seeing there are fewer shaggy cows roaming these hills now even than Shoshone, that would be difficult. So, are you ready at last to assist me, or do you need yet more time to complain, like a woman?”
The Shoshone snorted, sounding somewhat like a buffalo himself. “Aiweape-ha,” he said, to the air. “Crazy person, wandering free. You’d think you had no family to look after you . . . oh, wait.”
Chu flipped water at him, without looking, which the Shoshone avoided effortlessly. The droplets fell on the pool’s dusty rim, smoking slightly, before resolving themselves like mercury, then sliding sideways to rejoin the rest.
“Think them dames’ll stop squabblin’ anytime soon?” Fennig inquired, watching the scene.
Rook sighed. “Probably not, without I tell ’em to.”
“Well, we I on a schedule, or so Herself says. Interesting, though, how she wants to tag along just now, when she never did before. . . .”
“Who of us knows her mind, really? And don’t say me, ’cause flattering though that might’ve once rung, these days you’d be wrong.”
Now it was Fennig’s turn to sigh, casting a glance behind him, to where his three women sat arm in arm, laughing, their legs hung a-dangle over the abyss. “Morts is all somewhat mysterious by nature, Rev,” he observed, as though Rook hadn’t already noticed, “no matter who, or how big the size’a their hex-bag. Believe you me, I should know.”
“‘Morts’?” Rook repeated, cocking a brow.
“Ladies, I mean. Females. Them as ain’t men — or she-hes, neither.”
Nodding, Rook looked down, recalling when he and Chess had stood atop that ridge outside Bewelcome, surveying it like Lucifer and Jesus with all the kingdoms of the earth laid out before ’em. It’d been a spectacularly deadish place back then, with points north and west a veritable painted desert of wild green shale and furze, points south and east a barren scree studded with long-dead sea creatures and shadowed by arroyos dried near to crumbling; what little Sheriff Love’s bunch had managed to wrest from the earth had come up small and mean, fed by rigid faith, paid for in the sort of blood that didn’t reap crops worth speaking of. Not much magic to be found, one way or the other.
Now the same area was soaked in it, and the landscape lay utterly transformed.
Two months ago, as Pinkerton’s forces began trickling onto the surrounding plains, Ixchel had stood atop Her temple and spoken to the earth, which answered by thrusting great walls of granite and sandstone up ’round the city in a perfect circle. Those dwellers caught outside, their houses not within the walls’ arc, had scrambled fiercely to get back in — and strangely enough, not all had succeeded, exploding when they touched the wall-wards. She’d called that cull a Flowery War, its lost citizens martyrs to their cause . . . but what she’d really been after was the blood they left behind: tribute, tithe, tool. A red ring which was then met and matched by just as many “volunteer” lottery sacrifices on the Temple’s top, Machine-grist sent flowing down to sink into the soil, causing a forest of ceiba trees to blossom as a second defensive ring, tight enough that there was barely a handsbreadth left between brick and bark.
The ceibas’close-set branches had leaves sharp as obsidian, sap smoking and venomous, and whenever anyone tried to slip between they were met with swift-strangling vines that snaked out to lasso unwary scouts, dragging them off in pieces. The City folk on the wall had cheered to watch Pinkerton’s men die, until one had overbalanced and fallen; his magic was enough to break his plunge safely upon the ground, but not enough to save him from the trees, either.
Maybe a mile beyond the forest, meanwhile, a wide swath of fires and lanterns eventually began to appear as the sky darkened, sketching the outlines of hundreds of tents and a few new-raised buildings, all raw plank and whitewashed adobe: Camp Pink, meeting place for Agency and Army alike, with old Doc Asbury running interference between — yes, and that traitor Ed Morrow too, if rumour spoke fact.
Ed hadn’t been anything b
ut a toy tossed between competing currents, though, if Rook forced himself to be charitable; a good man torn between bad people, put in untenable situations mostly by the Rev’s own hand, and acting as he saw fit. Hell, Rook couldn’t even really resent him having shared Chess’s bed, not when he’d sent him there himself — for if he did, he’d soon be forced to scour the whole West for other men he’d be similarly constrained to waste his precious time killing.
Doesn’t matter, anyhow, a thin voice whispered, nastily, at his inner ear. All that with you and Chess, the epic tryst? Gone, never to return. One thing alone he ever asked of you, and you, you son of a bitch, went on ahead and left him.
He won’t forgive you now, no matter what. Not if you tore your own damn heart out and gave it to him, still beating, to plug up the wound where his used to be.
“Nor should he,” the Rev said out loud, to no one but himself.
“What was that, Rev?” asked Fennig, from behind him.
“Nothing, Henry.”
Rook turned back, encouraged to see Chu and the Shoshone engaged over their work once more. The yarrow stalk bunch discarded, both mages wove their fingers in opposing cat’s cradle patterns across the pool, rolling energy back and forth like they were carding wool. Soon enough, its surface began to dance and dimple, slopping up ’til it sprouted a funnel the size of a wine-ready goblet, above which a storm-cloud bloomed — bruise-dark, small but intense, rotating at a slow tilt. And growing.
“You must wait for it to swell further, before letting it slip,” Chu ordered. “Not too soon! Let it reach the size of a small dog, or a large child.”
“Who d’you think you’re talking to, railroad man? I was making rain before you ever knew this place existed.”
