A Tree of Bones

by Gemma Files

  “So,” he said, to Ixchel. “Seems like you managed to get at least one other relative to join the party, after all.”

  She shook her head. “Alas, no. My brother, loath as I am to admit it, is right. They who sleep Below will not rise, at least for me. Which is why I have shepherded our Clodagh to another gift, different from that you and I gave to your lover, yet nearly as great — brought her into our ranks as tzitzimihtl.” The word had a rattlesnake sting, scarring the eardrum. “Because of their courage, those who die in childbirth may ascend the tzitzimime’s roads, travelling the deep dark between stars until the day comes for the Fifth World to die. And what will happen then, daughter?”

  Clo spoke, startling Rook badly; her voice sounded shockingly like it had in life, though her Irish lilt was slurred by fearsome dentistry. “Then, mother, we will descend from the night sky in our thousands, rending every human left living, so all the empty world is drowned in blood.”

  Ixchel clapped her hands, affectionately. “She is young yet,” she told Rook. “At her full power, you shall need a maguey-fibre mask to view her safely. But she is strong and fast enough to lay waste to our besiegers with only teeth and talons, nevertheless — faster than any spell-breaker bullet may be aimed, or magic-eating wheel-work brought to bear. So, husband — are you not satisfied? Can you say I have done ill?”

  At their feet, Hank Fennig stared silently from behind his spectacles’ smoked-glass protection — stiffened his long spine by slow degrees, like the man was bracing himself for something.

  “Thought you weren’t too worried over Pinkerton’s armaments, last time we spoke on it,” Rook observed.

  “I have revised my opinion. Is such not the prerogative of a queen?”

  “Mmm,” Rook agreed, raising his voice a trifle, to make sure all the City-folk within range could hear. “’Stead’a the whole god-passel, then, what we get is one measly demon? Strikes me we’re still in a bind, he comes against us with everything.”

  “One tzitzimihtl is worth a thousand soldiers, hex or no. Her effect is . . . shattering.”

  “So you say.”

  Ixchel’s grin vanished. “You require proof?”

  Wouldn’t have cared, once, Rook thought. Not so long as I got what I wanted — Chess by my side, alive, and fixed to stay that way. But . . . I need to show them just how bad it is. Her, in all her glory.

  Damn, if he wasn’t feeling his responsibilities. That never led anywhere healthy.

  Deliberately: “Call me Doubting Thomas, but proof’s always nice, yes. You offerin’ any?”

  “Daughter.”

  The whisper was so quiet Rook half-thought he had only imagined it; Ixchel’s lips had barely parted. In answer, though, Clo . . .

  or what had been Clo . . . moved, so fast she left a trail, stuttering from invisible to real and back again — a thousand poses, each scarring cornea and reality like a daguerreotype, acid-etched. First there, then here, slamming up nose-to-nose with complaint-happy Arkwright, who shrank from her eyeless leer, whimpering; head falling back, lips a-foam. Rook watched the hand he almost raised to fend her off wither, like wax in fire.

  A frenzy of shell-bells tolling, ten thousand funerals strong — and then she started in on the poor sumbitch with all ten claws, finishing a fast half-second later. After which everyone got to watch the result fall back, to break apart at her feet: one dumb hex’s worth of bloody bones, barely held together with gristle.

  Clo blinked, and was back by Ixchel’s side. “Your will be done, mother,” she said, licking her gore-stained lips.

  Now it was Ixchel’s turn to smile. “Well,” she asked Rook. “Are you satisfied?”

  “Not hardly,” Fennig replied.

  The crowd swerved, almost as one, to scope out where they’d probably forgotten he stood. In the murderous interim, he’d regained his feet and much of his former style — stood tall, hands braced on his cane, like he was about to pick a swordfight.

  “So that’s your deal, eh?” he asked. “A ‘guardian’ we can only trust to treat us all like her own personal coal-tender, somethin’ she can chew up by the cupful, whenever her boiler gets low.” Louder still, and as much to the crowd as to Ixchel: “’Cause that don’t strike me as fair-dealing, if so: what did any of us ever swear the damn Oath for, if it weren’t the promise of never gettin’ fed on such-a-ways again? By anyone?”

  The thing Ixchel’d made from Clo seemed to find this amusing. But Rook’s Rainbow Lady puffed up with fresh menace, dragonfly cloak set a-buzz like an angry hive. “The Oath frees you from fear of each other, Henry Fennig,” she said. “Yet never for one moment think it protects you from me, your goddess.” She turned to the crowd, some of whom recoiled. “For you, whom I have folded in — given New Aztectlan as your home, your refuge — are all, to every last man, woman and child, mine. By your own words.”

  “I’d beg to differ,” Fennig shot back. “Was Hex City they swore to, these ones — most of ’em don’t know what-all ‘New Aztectlan’ is.”

  “This is sophistry.”

  “Common sense, more like. A quality in short damn supply ’round here, as of late.”

  “Have a care, mortal man.”

  “Oh, I do, believe me. You should, too.”

  Been quite the while since anybody’d called Ixchel’s guff to her face; Rook had to reckon that alone kept her frozen as Fennig crossed over, rolling up his sleeves. His cane he passed to Berta and Eulie, their tear-stained faces white with worry on his behalf, while those fine back-up specs of his he folded and gave the Rev himself, pressing them into the larger man’s hand.

  “Keep these for me, will ya?” he asked, for all the world as though he expected to survive whatever happened next.

  Bemused, Rook stowed them in his vest pocket while Fennig continued blithely along his path to ruin, pausing just short of Ixchel’s reach. Clo he ignored, or tried to — instead, he met the Lady of Traps and Snares’ empty gaze straight on, his naked eyes shedding light in a manner not unlike his dead wife’s, if cooler.

  “You know I can see through you too, right, Missus?” he asked her. “Which is how I come to learn that savin’ the braggadocio, you ain’t nothin’ but a hex, same’s any other — well-fed, ghosted up, but that’s all. Talkin’ up how you own this whole world, how you can make and remake it at will. . . . So why is it you ain’t done that yet, exactly?”

  “You dare to question me?”

  “If I thought it’d do any good, sure. But since I know better, here’s what I will say. My g’hals and me come up here with eyes open, hopin’ that line you talked was only half a lie. And things went well, at first, but then I started seein’ cracks, like it’s given me to do — and lady, those cracks are big. Keep followin’ this path you’re on, all you’ll do is drag yourself back down into Hell, plus the rest of us along with you . . . not that you care.”

  “Be silent, insect. If you would keep those two wives you still have, let alone your life, then — ”

  Fennig laughed, bitterly. “Oh, yeah. Go ’head, threaten me louder, so’s everyone can hear. Do your worst, so’s they see what you really pay your wages out in.”

  The cloak spasmed and eddied, a black rainbow waterspout, high as the wave she’d called to drown Bewelcome. “Silence, I said! You think to chide your betters, gutter-rat, bred and fed on garbage? You, who owe me everything — ”

  “Yeah? Well, at least my gutter always stood behind me, whenever the bulls started in to crackin’ heads. I’m Five Points through and through, from cobbles t’curbs, and that’ll always beat bein’ a Mexican table-rapper’s mascot tricked out in half-naked stargazer-meat all to hell.” He folded his arms, bared his ill-set city dweller’s teeth, stiff with rage. “The long and the short of it is, Missus, you promised but you didn’t deliver, then made my son’s mother into that, and let my son die to do it. Way I see it, ain’t a single one of us owes you nothin’.”

  Ixchel stood a moment, while Clo grinned beside her. “Perhap
s you think me weak enough to address with such disrespect,” she said, at last, “since this vessel nears the end of its use, as any fool can see. But her successor awaits, and when I am reborn in her — ”

  Yet here she made yet another mistake, by looking directly at Marizol — at which point the girl’s already terrified expression went up like lucifer-touched flashpaper, as all her nameless dread became horrid comprehension. “Por amor de Dios, no!” she screamed, broke from Rook’s arms and flung herself on Berta and Eulie instead, rousing them from their grief-struck stupor. They grabbed her in a double hug, Eulie stroking Marizol’s hair and murmuring to her, while Berta exchanged a glance with Fennig so penetrating Rook could’ve sworn he saw words swimming back and forth inside it.

  Distracted by the effort of beckoning Marizol back, her tomb-rank voice willed almost sweet, Ixchel remained completely oblivious. “Come here, my heart’s heart,” she cooed. “I am not angry; you are a child, and cannot always see where the best way lies. Your parents will explain this when we are alone together, in ways you can understand.”

  “Que no! I will not do this thing! And if they seek to make me, to cast me off — then I cast them off!”

  “Dear one, you know not what you say. Only wait, and I will — ”

  Fennig guffawed. “What, kiss it better? Looks like you forgot somethin’ you told us from the start, Lady — how for a sacrifice t’take, the one gettin’ done to’s gotta love you, or choose to let you, any road. Good luck ever gettin’ her to think of you that way, ever again.”

  “This is your fault.”

  “I should damn well hope so. But watch a minute — ’cause I ain’t done just yet.” He flung up an arm at the remaining Missus Fennigs — sent a gush of power into them so thick, it jolted ’em upright like puppets. And hollered, as the light in his eyes went out: “Berta, Eulie. Take the girl, and go!”

  No time to think yea or nay; might be this’d been exactly what Fennig and Berta were “jawing” over, while Marizol handed Ixchel her hat. But the three simply vanished with a crack, air collapsing to fill the space they’d occupied.

  Ixchel’s jade-chip parody of a face contorted; she turned on Fennig, hair wafting straight up, an inky nimbus. “Bring them back, dog!”

  “Make me,” Fennig snapped. “But ya can’t, can ya? ’Cause that ain’t what it says, in the fine print: ‘Service to the Suicide Moon,’ — that’s what you get, all you get, and welcome to it. Long as it ain’t a direct rise against ya, or flat-out doin’ something you told us not to, you got naught to say ’bout anything we do, Lady R. — no matter how much it . . . inconveniences you. My g’hals and me — we kept to the terms. You can suck us dry. But you can’t make us do your will — or any other damn thing, neither.”

  Rook rumbled, down in his chest. “That’s . . . very lawyerly of you, Henry. ‘Obedience to her High Priest,’ though, said priest being me — how ’bout that?”

  The gangster shrugged. “Oh, that one holds,” he admitted. “You could’ve stopped ’em ’fore they went, I have no doubt — stopped me from givin’ the order, for that matter, if you’d known it was comin’. But . . .”

  “. . . I didn’t. And now it’s too late.”

  “Exactly.” With a nod, Three-Fingered Hank stood up tall as Rainbow Lady Ixchel turned her dreadful eyes his way once more, blank and pitiless as her emblem the moon, if infinitely darker: a glare beneath which harder men than he had shivered, Rook included.

  Still, truth to tell, Fennig wasn’t even looking her way, keeping his own eyes trained instead square on the creature who’d once played triangle-point in his polyamorous affections — perhaps studying her for some recognition, however small, and getting none that Rook could perceive. Yet smiling slightly all the while, nonetheless.

  “I put trust in you, Henry Fennig,” Ixchel told him, slowly, “on my own consort’s word; looked to you and your women as helpmeets, my strong right arm in battle just as one of them serves me yet. Tonight, however, you have gone against your queen, your goddess — risked not only the Machine, but the new world it brings on. Of all people but one, you should know best the penalty for such betrayal.”

  “True enough. Think about it this way, though: killing me, right here and now, over an ‘offence’ don’t break none of your precious laws? That ain’t justice, so much as tyranny — same kind we fought a war over, back in old King George’s time. And that war, we won.”

  A ripple went through the crowd, gone almost before Ixchel could perceive it, let alone trace its source.

  You don’t even see what you’re about to do here, do you, darlin’? thought Rook. Teach ’em in one fell stroke what I’ve known all along — that you can’t be trusted, not to keep your word, and not otherwise.

  “So get ready, Missus,” Fennig finished. “Now everyone knows — I may be the first, but I damn sure won’t be last.”

  Good epitaph, son.

  Fennig met his eyes, his reply echoing straight inside Rook’s skull. Honoured, Reverend; you’re a good man, even when you ain’t. Now, don’t forget those glazers of mine, will you? Believe it or not, it’s worth your while.

  Ixchel didn’t even have to give the order. Between one heartbeat and the next, Clo was back in Fennig’s arms, like they’d never been separate. Except, of course, that this time her lips were peeled back to expose a shark’s double row of teeth, bottom and top. Though her right hand cupped the nape of his neck, deceptively loving, her thorn-clawed left had already plunged to split his breastbone like a sunk rail spike, fingers cupped cruel ’round his beating heart.

  Fennig coughed blood, arterial-bright and steaming. Rasped: “Love you, honey. Always will. This . . . ain’t your fault.”

  “Yes it is,” Clo replied, without a shred of remorse. And bit his face off first, a crunchy sweetmeat, before moving on to the rest.

  After near everyone else had turned away but Ixchel, Rook (who’d forced himself to watch) and Clo (still intent on her pleasure, taking far longer with Fennig than she had with Arkwright, for reasons Rook didn’t want to contemplate), Ixchel put a hand on her “daughter’s” shoulder, pulling her gently free of what little was left.

  “Enough,” she told her, wiping blood from Clo’s lower lip only to lick it off her finger, savouring the taste. “You are young yet, and though you do not tire, there is no reason not to pace yourself. Return to your chamber, to await my will.”

  “Yes, mother.”

  Taking Clo by the chin, Ixchel kissed her too-red mouth and stepped away, passing Rook by in the opposite direction. “I will expect you soon, my husband,” she threw back, cloak humming in her wake, as if over-stimulated by tonight’s amusements. “Do not keep me waiting.”

  He made her a leg, bowing low, which seemed acceptable. And hung back one minute longer, stroking the bulge Fennig’s spectacles made through his vest cloth, feeling that residual pulse of energy under his fingertips as though the man was absent rather than excised: a patient, intimate resonance, like this fragile rig of wires and lenses carried just enough intelligence of its own to have stubborn faith he might one day return to reclaim them.

  Fennig had to have known, or at least suspected, what Rook saw now: the specs were talisman as much as tool — mere contact conferred a stark fraction of Fennig’s gift. Enough to look at the horrid ruin Ixchel had made of Clo Killeen . . . and realize it yet contained a last seed of the original.

  Something that might even bloom again, one day.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Night’s house, with its many chambers, its many occupants. Like the one located high on a hill overlooking Bewelcome where Chess Pargeter and “Reverend” Rook had once paused their horses, contemplating pre-emptive action ’gainst zealous young Sheriff Mesach Love, where two considerably less distinctive-looking men now stood in shadow, examining at a cautious distance the lamentable extent of Bewelcome’s current devastation.

  Both wore duster coats and sported neat-waxed walrus moustaches, one blond, the other da
rk. The dark one used a brass telescope to mark points of particular interest while the other rocked back and forth with hands dug deep in his pockets, all but toe-tapping to signal his impatience.

  “I’ll point out it’s your intelligencer we wait on, Mister Geyer,” the dark one said, without turning, “so whatever strategical quandary you find yourself enmeshed in, it’s entirely of your own making. Actually, given how little faith you seem to have in this fellow, I’m driven to wonder why you thought to engage him, in the first place.”

  “Lack of options,” ex-Pinkerton Agent Frank Geyer replied. “He was well-situated, well-disposed . . . and to be frank, George, he works cheap.”

  “Perfectly good qualities, in any spy,” agreed the other man — ex-Agent George Thiel, of course, first official defector from their former mutual boss’s increasingly dubious organization. “Pinkerton himself would approve.”

  “Not if he knew what we were doing with him, I don’t think.”

  “And there’s where I’d agree with you,” a third voice called out, from the shadows, as its owner made his way up the hill’s backside. This soon proved to be Fitz Hugh Ludlow, dandified clothes still mud-stiff from the fray. Reaching the hill’s apex, he stooped and huffed for a moment before straightening, trotting out the same oily grin that’d so failed to ingratiate him to Ed Morrow. “But may I say how disheartening it is to hear yourself described with such unfortunate accuracy, ’specially by those who don’t know you’re on hand to listen in?”

  “Where’ve you been, Ludlow?” Geyer demanded.

  “Extricating myself from that matchstick-pile Sophy Love and company used to call a meeting house, for starters, after which I was forced to stop awhile and observe Reverend Rook and his cadre beating unholy hell out of her husband’s unworthy successors.”

  Thiel turned, quirking an interested brow. “To what outcome?”

  “Oh, bad all ’round, pretty much universally. Missus Love stood proud ’gainst the hexacious tide, only to get herself disintegrated. Reverend Catlin preached on God’s supremacy while holding one of Doc Asbury’s little machines, letting it suck in witchcraft ’til he blew his own hand off. Then Queen Rope herself appeared and tried to flood the town out, only for Chess Pargeter’s ghost to rise up through the dirt, ass-naked but for a set of Red Weed underclothes, and put paid to her scheming. Can probably see the moat he made from here, you only squint hard enough.” Ludlow paused for breath. “In short, an exciting evening had by all, well worth an entire yellow novel chapter to itself. And you, gentlemen?”