by Gemma Files
“I see ’em, Ma.”
“What are — I mean — are they followin’ us, them fings? Or just followin’ along, general-like? I’m tryin’ t’see ’em clear, but I, I . . . can’t . . .”
“Me either, Ma, and I’m sure they’d like to keep it thus. Hush up, now.”
Got no real weapons to fall back on, nothing but myself, and her. So might could be we’ll just have to think our way out of this, as well . . .
Years since the War now, but all the various instincts of fight-flight-fuck ’em all came ratcheting back in a single skipped breath. Chess pulled Oona along at a rapid, semi-hunched lope which ate ground steadily, angled even further sideways. Concealment being out of the question, he thought it best to opt for speed; the pursuing shadows had a bestial feel to them, a carrion heat like the breath of battlefield-scavenging dogs — running outright would only mark them as prey. To left and right, meanwhile, a twisty skein of grey un-walls stretched out endless, growing ever dimmer as the no-light failed.
Fifty steps on, marking the shadows’ encroaching rate of advance, Chess dropped to his knees, pulling Oona down along with him. He pitched his voice low yet urgent, sibilants slurred for quiet, demanding: “Can you see it still? The Call, that thread?” She kept on staring back, eyes wide, rigid; Chess gave her a shake. “Listen to me, Oona: I need you mean and sharp, like usual. I need the bitch who raised me.”
Blinking, she searched the dust. For a second, he found himself making study along with her, as though some clue might leap out at him, he only squinted the fiercer. This thing which supposedly came with his name attached, an invisible invitation, but one he had to rely on her to track. . . .
“There,” she said, finally.
“Get in front of me, then.”
“Oh, you fink? Chance’d be a fine bloody — ”
“Oona! I ain’t got time to jaw on it. Something’s afoot, and one of us needs to have the way out scouted, you take my meaning?” He pushed back, deliberately opening a way between her and the nearing threat. “Or would you rather fight?”
Her answering swallow was so quiet it might’ve gone unnoticed, he hadn’t been listening.
“. . . believe I’ll watch the door, fanks ever so,” she decided.
“Thought as much.”
All at once, Chess jumped upright and turned, hands coming alight. Dark pressed hard ’gainst the blaze, force balancing against force before the sheer mass of it began to overwhelm, pushing him back. One fist Chess held braced against it while he simultaneously side-stepped, knotting the other into the no-wall so it rucked up like heavy silk. In the light’s backspill, he thought he could see black shapes thundering toward them, low-slung and brutish.
Before they could reach them, however, he’d already heaved with all his strength, ripping what lay between like a rotten curtain. Piercing shrieks rose up all ’round, blind and senseless as the wails of dying bluebellies, crushed beneath Captain Coulson’s artillery. Shutting them out, Chess hauled the ruptured membrane across the passage and slammed it straight into the other wall, sealing them off. A forge’s worth of sparks showering from both hands now, he ran his palms up and down the seam, fusing the wall together.
In seconds, it was done. Chess backed away, watching the membrane distort, throbbing and bulging under the thudding blows of whatever now lay trapped behind.
“Didn’t know you could . . . still do fings like that, down ’ere,” said Oona, from his elbow — impressed, despite herself. He could kick himself for the way his spirit lifted, just to hear it.
“Me neither,” Chess admitted, panting. And looked over to see her stock-rooted again, with that white, strained look around the eyes; was like the woman’d never been under fire in her life, he thought.
With an irritated jerk of his head toward what he could only assume was their destination, he reminded her: “Oona? Exit?”
“Right,” she repeated, collecting herself, and turned back, eyes on the ground. Now it was her turn to lead, she made the most of it — and as she pulled him on, the seal-wall shuddered as their pursuers continued to slam themselves into it. By some paradox of the light it was still visible, if distant, when Oona at last turned to the left and stopped by a particular point, indistinguishable from any other. “This’s the ticket — now open it, ’fore they catch back up.”
“Ain’t gonna have to cut my hand to shit again, am I?”
“Don’t fink so, just . . . yeah, ’at’ll do it. Press ’ard, ’ere.” With a crooked grin, Oona slipped her fingers between two folds of mist-curtain, lifting ’em back like one of the hangings on Selina Ah Toy’s walls. Smoky red light stirred and breathed beyond; Oona gestured, a grand ballroom sweep. “After you.”
Chess might have hesitated, if the air behind ’em hadn’t just that second given off with an awful tearing sound, nauseatingly fleshy. He whirled ’round just in time to see upright shapes pouring through a torn gash in the seal, coursing down the passage toward them: a thick wave of shadow with long, cowled forms mounted on the same dark flood, mouths open so wide as to unhinge their jaws, rattlesnake-style.
Sick dread froze him in place. Once again, it wasn’t the innate monstrosity of this vision itself; he’d seen worse, by far — done it, too. But even in this empty place where all should have been equally unrecognizable, he somehow knew these things: not nameless monsters, random Hell-harrowers. They were the dead.
His dead.
I’ve killed a lot of people, boy, he remembered telling one of them, once, impatiently — dead whore Sadie’s little defender, back in Joe’s, before he and Ed became better acquainted. Before the Rev brought home that night-shiny new “wife” of his and let her have her way, driving a stake through their concord’s heart a good twenty-four hours before she tore Chess’s own ticker out bodily and ate it, right in front of his eyes. Back before he himself had tasted the grave’s so-called delights, and therewith been transformed without hope of repair — become the awful object he was now, chased by a horde of kills too many to recall, or regret.
“Chess!” Oona screamed, slapping him ’cross the chops. And with that all-too-familiar pain, it at last became her turn to haul him, fast as humanly possible, straight out of one Hell, and headlong into another.
Chapter Eight
When Night’s house grew up and the Crack gaped wide, all other things fell silent, as if made suddenly aware of their own danger. But then again, this was a dangerous world, or at least far more so than ever.
Outside New Aztectlan, things gathered in the darkness, waiting. While inside . . .
The baby came out blue, in pieces. Rook had seen birthings go wrong before, ’course; when the doctor failed, next one you sent for was always the preacher. But it’d been a long time. On some level, he’d hoped — expected — never to play this part again: bearer of tidings so far beyond bad they approached a sort of dire grandeur.
By any lights, tonight should’ve marked an uncontested victory. Bewelcome they’d left humbled if not destroyed, reminded once again just who, and what, they dared to squabble with. And they’d achieved a goal of near-equal importance, for Sophy Love was gone, at last — if not dead then surely lost beyond any expectation of return, and without their personal Joan of Arc, the Bewelcomites could only be a spent force. In his experience, a wound to morale was often deadlier than the greatest bloodshed, and harder to heal.
But here was bitter proof of the same maxim wreaked on them, by fate’s cruel hand. Indeed, were Rook’s own faith yet intact, or he’d put more credence in the Widow’s invocations, he might suspect judgement of an even higher type.
He’d brought the raiders straight back to his own sleeping chamber, laid Clo down and left her there with Fennig gripping her hand, while Berta and Eulie wept. Then he’d conjured Sal Followell in and himself out with another wrench of power, an expenditure so great it left him exhausted — too weak to shield himself from the flood of images he’d thought to escape, magic lantern-projected directly into
his brain: Clo screaming, lips white; Auntie F.’s strong mahogany arms, gloved to the elbow in blood. A flickering light cupped inside Clo’s bulging stomach, red-gold glow dimming to anoxic blue, like a torch strangling in mineshaft air. The opaque disks of Fennig’s hastily conjured replacement glasses, still as two dark moons in the unlit gloom.
Those tiny limbs slipping out on a flood, bedsheets darkening beneath — broken, pallid, yet twitching with the last few jerks of life. That tiny face, mouth barely open enough to cry before it turned aside, gave a single gasp, went slack.
And on the wall behind, a shadow, rearing up — tall, curvaceous, with just a hint of exposed bone for ornament — to watch it all without comment, enthroned in cruel contemplation. Waiting for . . . something; just what Rook didn’t know, or want to.
Staggering down through the Temple’s dark stone halls, he emerged at last into the square and slumped to the snow-streaked ground, as empty of magic as of hope.
Too much power in flux to have any chance of hiding what had happened. Cautiously, people began to congregate, some dressed for bed, others barely decent. A nightshift-clad Marizol ran up, little feet bare against the cold ground, only to stop in horror when she caught sight of Rook’s face. At the same time, two more figures came lofting in over her head on a carpet of solid air, thudding to earth: Honourable Chu and the Shoshone, both grim-visaged, battle-experienced enough to recognize the flavour of pain pouring hexaciously from the Temple.
“Clodagh,” said the Shoshone, in visible dismay. “How?”
“Enemy,” Rook replied, voice flat. “Lady tried to drown the place, and failed; Chess . . . her Enemy, I mean . . . thwarted it, so she left us behind, and the back-burst knocked us all to perdition.” He pressed his hands to his forehead, sticky with Clo’s cooling blood. “Sal’s in with her now.”
“For what good that will do,” Chu snapped. “Did I not say it was foolish for the girl to go?” The threads of blue light crawling in his tunic illuminated him eerily. “In a bad birth, the child’s ch’i-hunger will be at its worst. We may lose them both now, when we can ill afford losing even one.”
“Think we already have,” the Rev couldn’t keep from saying, even as not-your-Auntie Sal’s voice whispered at him: Ate that boy of mine all up, without ever even wantin’ to.
The Shoshone’s face fell. “That does it, then. They’re bound together tight as ticks, the Fennigs, from long before they took the Oath; lose one, it as good as guts them all — in their hearts, and their hex-strength.”
“A ridiculous theory, as always,” Chu scoffed. “You have no idea — ”
Neither would have a chance to argue the point further, however. Chu’s tunic suddenly dimmed mid-word, a lamp guttering out; the Shoshone swayed, bonnet’s feathers rising like a lizard’s frill, and almost fell. All over the crowd, onlookers jackknifed, faces turned sick, grey, hollow; some collapsed on one knee, or retched outright. Rook took the punch of it deep in his own gut, ice-needle cold spiking through every vein. The power bled out from all of them, spurting toward the Temple in hot, shimmering, invisible jets.
Death, Rook realized, through his pain. Worse: an unsanctified demise, not given willingly on any level — a rejection of the Oath to its very core, sending the dying hex’s power uselessly outward rather than channelling it back into the Machine. Such Oathbound-wide bouts of weakness hadn’t happened since the City’s early days, when ill-made Temple sacrifices sometimes went to waste, before the population had grown numerous enough to shrug them off. That everyone felt it now — apparently without exception, and so strongly — might be grim testimony to the thinness of Hex City’s resources, or bittersweet evidence of how beloved Clo had been, in her hellion Irish way. Or . . .
Something else, something hidden, impenetrable and ancient. Something with his lady wife’s increasingly fleshless fingerprints all over it.
The sickening pull went on, and now it wasn’t only hexes that fell. On one side of Main Street, the diamond cube of Cordell Arkwright’s chirurgery suddenly shattered, resolving to a pile of glass-clear shards; on the other, the huge vaudevillian façade that Luca de Belfort had conjured for his groggery-saloon crumpled to the ground like a theatrical scrim cut from its rigging, revealing the ugly crude-hammered plank walls behind. In every direction, hex-built structures collapsed, hex-woven garments shredded, hex-forged tools and objects came apart, or resumed their former mundane shapes.
Rook’s heart stuttered in his chest; an awful pain shot up his left arm like a bolt. With a cry of fright, Marizol flung herself into his arms, clinging close.
The scream which rang out from Rook’s balcony high above was raw with agony, holding a heartbreakingly defiant note even to the last: “Ahhhhh, Christ, shittin’ Jaysuuuuuuuss — !”
But there it stopped, snapping to silence, a new-broke bone. The pull vanished with it. Still holding Marizol, Rook straightened far enough to signal Chu and the Shoshone with a finger-snap: “Check the defences — the rest we can rebuild later, once we don’t have to worry whether Pinkerton knows what’s happened. Those wall-wards, though . . . they have to stand.”
The two of them nodded, and left on the run. A fresh wave of sickness threatened to capsize him. At his elbow, Marizol whispered: “Jefe — you are all right? You must be. For them.” She nodded to the stunned crowd. Shamed to realize just how much of his considerable weight Marizol had actually been supporting, Rook drew himself up straight — permitted himself one hand only on her shoulder, and smiled down at her, as he did. She returned it, shyly.
“Holy Christ, Reverend, what was that?” shouted the first hex back on his feet — Arkwright, as it happened. “Look at my friggin’ shop — the whole damn city! Ain’t felt anything like that since . . . well, since the last time some fool tried to . . .”
He trailed off, hoarsely, as Rook completed the thought for him: Last time anyone tried to feed on you — or last time She fed on us all, puttin’ down trouble? Too bad the woman herself ain’t on hand just right now to take questions. . . .
Sucking in a breath, he recalled his old preaching techniques — breath control and dialectic, nothing fancy. “Friends,” he began, “we won a victory tonight, striving against Bewelcome’s witch-hunters and He Who Cannot Be Named himself, and this . . . was all part of the victory price, in ways I can’t detail just now. But I promise you, once the Lady — ”
Uncertain how to proceed, Rook paused to clear his throat, and realized that none of the crowd was looking at him, Marizol included. Instead, she was staring back over both their shoulders at the Temple, face fixed as though she’d spotted a rattlesnake nesting exactly where she was next about to step.
From the shadows within, Ixchel emerged. Even at this distance, she stank like rotted flowers, her borrowed flesh gone drawn and leathery, a bad imitation of dead Miz Adaluz’s luscious curves. But beneath the jade-chip mask, her eyes glowed with a heat as fierce as an open cook-stove. Behind, Fennig made his slow way out into the starlight as well, looking like he’d gone seventy rounds with a pugilist who’d somehow managed not to break his spectacles. To see sharp young Hank so dazed and stumbling gave Rook a start, fresh pain skewering his breastbone straight where that burnt-out lump he called a heart resided; when he opened his mouth to commiserate, Fennig only shook his head, in mute misery.
“Mother and child?” Rook asked Ixchel, who gave no reply. So he went on, reminding her: “As I recall, before we left, you promised us a terrible weapon — and if you’d delivered on that, ma’am, then Clo might’ve lived. Might be they both would’ve.”
Those knobs where her eyebrows should’ve been twitched upward, as if on strings. “Ah, but she died a warrior’s death, little king,” the goddess said, and Christ, even her voice was different — its liquid music gone to a harsher timbre, more in keeping with that high-breasted ghost-girl from his first visions. Yet entirely the same, in all other essentials: remote, cold, disdainfully amused. “A hero’s death, taking a baby in battle, at great
cost of blood. And now, while her child hangs on the Suckling Tree, she too will live again . . .
as that very same weapon.”
Beyond the Temple’s gates, the blackness remained impenetrable, no matter how Rook stared. Fennig turned to look as well, but either his vaunted interior sight was failing him, or there was simply nothing to see. Until bare feet scuffed rock floor and the darkness parted, to show —
— Clo, standing there. Upright, if not alive.
Strips of torn parchment were woven through her tangled hair, Aztec characters sketched in smeared blood upon ’em, spelling out God alone knew what. A leather cord hung from her neck, strung with gristly lumps and irregular twig bundles that proved, on closer examination, to be shrivelled human hearts and hands. From her own limp fingers black talons protruded, shaped more like a rose’s thorns than a beast’s claws. Strange tattoos like eyes or stars circled every joint Rook could see, while more blood had been used to paint the stylized shapes of skull and crossed bones on her ruined dress, whose skirt hung thick with bone-bell shells. Her pert Irish miss’s features had drawn in so gaunt upon her skull that for a moment, Rook actually thought her face had been flayed.
Her eyes, meanwhile, were — gone, entirely. Only a cold blue radiance filled their blown orbits. And when she turned to fix Rook with those orbs, smiling, he saw her teeth had become a hundred jagged bone needles, densely packed as tiny spears.
Fennig took one stumbling step backward and fell right on his narrow behind, all dignity shucked, scrabbling for his dandy’s cane against the flagstones. Marizol screamed and buried her face against Rook’s side, shaking; Rook watched Clo’s smile widen at the sound, lips parted, as though savouring fear’s ozone-stink. He thought of Chess’s glee in those seconds before lead began flying — that look, presaging chaos and ruin, which said, Finally, we’re doing what I like!
The world changed for Rook in that instant, with no marker other than a silent, almost resigned thought: Ah, shit.
