by Gemma Files
“That Goddamn Asher Rook,” said Chess eventually. “I’m gonna find him, and then I’m gonna kill him.” There was no heat in it, no affect at all. “And it sure ain’t to save the damn world, neither.”
“Yeah, well.” Morrow pulled off his hat and raked his hair back wearily. “I think he halfway wants you to.”
Chess shrugged. “Then fuck him, maybe I won’t.” He caught Morrow’s eye for a moment. An urge to smile pulled at them both. Both felt it, and felt the other feeling it, and it died. Carefully, Morrow turned away.
“I’m . . .” Morrow let out his breath. “I’m not sure it matters where you go, or what you do. Rook . . .” He sighed. “Rook beat me, Chess. Outthought me at every step, knew what I was gonna do ’fore I did it and planned on me doin’ it. I don’t know if it’s hexation or just native wit, but if he could do that with me when he didn’t know me from Adam, how the fuck you think you’re gonna surprise him?”
Without looking, changing expression — hell, without even seeming to move — Chess’s gun was in his left hand and raised to point at Morrow’s temple. “By killing you? I mean, he seems to want you to stick by me. So why shouldn’t I make sure you can’t?”
Morrow’s mouth hung open for a moment. Then he closed it. “Shit, I got no answer, Chess,” he said at last. “Do what makes you happy.”
He closed his eyes, wondering if he’d ever open them again.
There was no warning. That hundred-handed grip seized on Morrow’s mind again, twined in and held, painfully hard. As little as six weeks ago the pain would have been bad enough to level him. And even stagger Chess — the mind-lock was hurting both of them, he only now realized.
Both saw in the other exactly what they recognized in themselves — the agonies and memories of their shared journey through Mictlan-Xibalba had changed both of them forever, even if only one of them had emerged as something more than human.
Might have been that resonance that opened up the link. Might have been part and parcel of the connection itself, or maybe only Chess’s complete lack of hex-training. But as Chess’s mind sieved through Morrow’s with clumsy, savage power, his own memory unfolded to Morrow’s sight as well, inverse mirror-images ricocheting off each other from touchstone concepts so fundamental, so absurdly different, it was like learning a new language with next to no terms in common.
Mother —
(a ragged, redheaded English girl curses and spits and beats a small boy with equally red hair, in a dark corner of an opium-stinking ’Frisco brothel / a tall, plain, rawboned woman calls three lanky boys and their father in from the farmyard, while a stew of beef, potatoes and carrots simmers on the stove and five clean tin plates wait on the table)
Fellowship —
(standing with eleven other men as Allan Pinkerton hands out badges, speaks words of congratulations, alive with pride, joy and satisfaction / watching over an absinthe glass as men you’ve bled beside drink and fight and fuck like animals, in absent disdain lessened only by the consolation that at least this vileness is honest)
Desire —
(one night born of boredom, anger, perversity / desperation, fear, loneliness / well-worn paths of flesh limned in shocked discovery / forgotten names of scores of men, release traded for release / a handful of women’s bodies, echoes of clumsy tenderness and soft curves in the dark / the weight of one man, chosen for lust, kept for — )
Love —
(a father’s hand on the shoulder / a young man not yet a Pink, laughing with fellows in a Chicago groggery / a greener, colder graveyard than this, standing silent for a brother fallen in war / a murdered lawman’s wife-turned-widow, weeping with grief and terror, huddled over a wailing infant while awful salt-whiteness creeps up both their flesh at the behest of . . .)
Rook.
Chess tore free in a burst of agony, collapsing back onto his ass with a look of stunned incomprehension. Like any other man might have looked staring on Bewelcome, or Calvary Cross, or Mictlan-Xibalba itself. The shreds of their communion still raw, Morrow keeled over as well, nerves afire with the same pain — but he knew its meaning immediately, because it was no revelation for him. Hoist on the petard of the exact same truth-compulsion he’d turned on Morrow, Chess couldn’t tell himself what he’d seen was a lie . . . and couldn’t lie to himself about what it meant.
You really did think we were all fools, Morrow marvelled, half to himself and half expecting Chess would hear it anyway. You really did think any man talked about love was talkin’ out his ass — lyin’ to himself, or everyone else, or both. And any woman talked about love was just lookin’ to profit, some way or other. Whatever the words, you thought you had the truth of it. Thought you were safe.
Until him. Until . . .
ROOK.
It was a surge of fury mixed with helplessness and hurt, curdled milk boiling over — and something sick and dark beneath, violent and deathly. Chess hauled himself to his feet with the support of a convenient headstone. Breathing harsh and ragged, he snapped open first one gun, then the other, and touched his finger to each empty barrel, watching with grim intention: reloading, by God. Each touch filled the chamber with — Morrow couldn’t see what, exactly. A tiny, roiling mass of flame and shadow, nothing he could name. Fear crawled into his stomach and along his skin.
“Chess . . .” He didn’t even mean to speak, but the words forced their way out. “Down there, the Rev — he told me that none of this would’ve worked, you couldn’t’ve survived, if it hadn’t been real — true in your heart, even if it wasn’t in his.” No change in Chess’s look as he kept on loading, and Morrow’s stomach knotted. He pushed himself up. “Christ knows, we’ve seen how many sins each of us’s racked up — but you can’t make this one of them. You can’t. It’ll kill you.”
“Give me one good reason — ” Chess snapped one gun shut, “ — why I, you, anyone — ” click-clack: the other gun closed, “ — should give a tick’s ass-fuck whether I live or die.”
“’Cause when somebody’s as good in the sack as you are, they really do owe it to the rest of the world to keep themselves upright just as long as they can?”
Chess whirled, but Morrow — stunned at the words that had come all unsummoned out of his own mouth — saw it like he was looking through the wrong end of a telescope, plummeting far and back away as if tumbled off a cliff-high gallows. A thick black weight engulfed him, swathed him, deadening the sound in his ears. All avuncular malice and power and . . . concern?
Chess straightened, all expression falling away from his face. The guns dangled, but he didn’t holster them. As toneless as a sleep-talker, blurred and distant like he was underwater:
“Ash.”
“Darlin’.” The feel of Rook’s voice through Morrow’s throat made him want to gag. A burning ache spread through mouth and jaw as alien intonations and stresses overrode his own. The very weight of his body shifted as he stood, suddenly inflicted with a far heavier man’s sense of balance. “You want to kill me, and none alive could fault you for that. But try shootin’ me now, and . . .” Rook spread Morrow’s hands, shrugged his shoulders. “Won’t even inconvenience me. And for all his faults, I think you still might find Ed useful enough, in future, to not throw away so quickly.”
It was hard for Morrow to make much out, but he thought Chess might have tilted his head. “Maybe I don’t care any more ’bout what you call useful, Ash.”
Rook shook Morrow’s head, brought a laugh in his deepest register up from the gut, so low his throat felt sore. “Well, maybe not, at that. But I seem to recall you do take pride in payin’ your debts, Chess — bad and good. And can’t none of us deny without Ed’s help, you’d never have seen blue sky again.” The tides of feeling around Morrow shifted, washed toward true pain, regret, and . . . something else. “That’d’ve been an awful waste. Wouldn’t it?”
Rook stretched Morrow’s hand out to Chess’s face, stroked it as he had caressed it in the underworld, and Chess closed his eyes
. Mortified, Morrow fought to retreat deeper — but the response sizzled along his nerves anyway as Rook leaned him in close, used his mouth to kiss Chess, gently as any husband with a blushing virgin bride. The blackness smothering him flushed dark as wine, sweltering with sudden heat, while Chess’s mouth worked against his. Something wrenched at Morrow’s groin and stomach like a cable, pulling him in and down, vertigo and arousal spinning up together.
Until — a hard push threw him off balance, and he actually felt Rook’s presence slide sideways, halfway breaking free, before Morrow caught himself on a headstone.
Heaving in gasps, face red, Chess held out a hand palm-up before him, as if to brace a wall from falling. And snapped, “Not this time, you bastard — not now, and not like this. Not using someone else.” The hand clenched into a fist, which he shook in Morrow’s face — but at a careful distance, as if touching even Rook’s shadow in another man was too great a temptation. “You want me, you meet me face to face, where I can rip my answers outta your lyin’ fuckin’ brain-pan myself.”
Rook laughed. It racked Morrow’s guts. “Answers? Hell, sweetheart, those were yours for the askin’, each step of the way. All you ever had to do . . .” A sly, mocking note, “. . . was ask.”
Chess’s face went blank again. Morrow tried to find some shred of will inside to brace himself, expecting the guns to thunder any second. But Chess surprised him — surprised Rook, too. Morrow couldn’t mistake the startled mind-blink as Chess’s hands fell open.
“What was it you did to me?” Calm, quiet, almost despairing. “You even know, for sure? Everything I touch . . .” As he swept a helpless hand over the graveyard, Morrow deliberately made himself recall the hotel battle, and relished as best he could the astonishment in Rook’s mind as the images sank in. “I didn’t mean to do nothin’ that happened back there, any of it. And I don’t do nothin’ I don’t mean!”
Morrow felt Rook marshal his thoughts. “Had to, Chess,” the hexslinger used his lips to say. “Otherwise . . . you’d’ve gone to Hell. The real one, forever. unending agony, God’s last Judgement. That Hell.”
“Oh, do not turn preacher again on me now, you son-of-a — ”
Rook shook Morrow’s head. “None of that. Just — you’d’ve never given me up, doomed yourself, and called it fair. This way . . . well, I still might burn. But you won’t. That’s good enough, for me.”
Chess stared at him a long moment, uncomprehending. Morrow knew he could also feel Rook’s total certainty, the irrefutable “truth” lurking behind that claim, however insane it might seem to anyone else.
Confusion whirled into frustrated rage. Chess surged forward and grabbed Morrow’s shirt in both fists, twisted hard, so the cloth came up in bunches. “Just what the fuck are you even talkin’ about? You incredible goddamned dumbass!” He shook Morrow savagely. Wrapped in Rook’s presence, Morrow felt barely a twinge, but knew he’d be aching tomorrow. “Where the fuck you think I was, all that damn time? I’ve Christ-well been to Hell already, Ash. That’s where you put me!”
Morrow felt Rook’s grip slacken — confusion welled up, weakening the bond it bled through. And suddenly, for all his furious fear of the Rev’s supernatural trickery, Morrow found it ten times more terrifying to consider how Rook maybe might not really know the exact parameters of what he’d set in motion.
“You . . . remember that? But you weren’t supposed to — ”
“She tell you that, you stupid donkey?” Chess roared. “And you believed her? Well, look this over a spell!”
He slapped his palm to Morrow’s forehead, sent memories geysering into Rook’s mind through Morrow’s like superheated steam. Where far off, Rook’s mouth opened wide, opening Morrow’s with it.
(Mexico City, near a full fifth of it, levelled. Pinkerton’s voice echoing, from Morrow’s mind: This sort of thing starts bloody wars. . . .
(Oona Pargeter, gutted, metamorphosing into a black inhuman giant with obsidian ribs and a stone plaque for a foot: I’m your Enemy, son — yours, an’ every other’s . . .
(Lightless cracks in the earth, felt more than seen, seeping slow poison and dream-sickening corruption. One beneath the ruins of Mexico City, one in a Tampico hotel room, one under the salt-flat plains of a devastated town named Bewelcome. A half-dozen others, opening even now — as they “spoke” — in various strange and silent places.
(And that voice once more — Oona’s, but not. Informing all three of them at once, with a scornful, half-crazed cheer: Went on ahead and ended the whole world, him and you, with your Godlessness: that’s what you did. Sure ’ope you’re happy now. . . .)
Did you really think you could go down so far and come back up alone, little kings? Little priest-consort, little sacrifice-turned-god, little husbands?
The mind-flood cut off at last, a sluice-gate slamming shut. Morrow collapsed to his knees, painful-sharp aware that Rook had just nearly done the exact same thing over a thousand miles away, only holding back for fear of her attention.
Shock and awe, not just at how bad things really were, but also from the sheer scope of what’d come along with it, from Chess: hatred, true as a blade. Not just the spite of a born pariah for the world ringed ’round against him, nor the casual cruelty that had always let him kill as surely and impersonally as a force of nature, but a near-Biblical fury, a desperate pain and loathing, which could come only when unlooked-for love found itself abruptly used up, betrayed, destroyed.
A low sound rippled up from Morrow’s chest, and he felt sick to realize Rook was laughing.
Chess’s green eyes widened. “You motherfucker,” he whispered. “What makes all this so funny, to you, again?”
“You, darlin’,” Rook wheezed, “you. ‘My only love, turned to my only hate.’” He made Morrow get up, regaining control. “Listen, Chess — I made a mistake. I know that now. I need for you to set it right, even if you gotta kill me to do it.”
Chess smiled. “Oh, you don’t have to fret yourself none on that account. I’m comin’ for you.”
Rook made Morrow’s mouth smile in reply, oddly gentle. “I know.”
“I think . . . I might be stronger than you, now.”
Morrow felt Rook’s hold start to fade, releasing him one part at a time, yet saving his mouth for last. “Sure hope so,” Rook murmured.
Why? Morrow thought, numb. But the answer wasn’t long in coming.
“ Listen. You hear that?”
“What?”
“Shut up, darlin’. Listen.”
Chess opened his mouth. Stopped, brows furrowing. Then turned, a hound tracking a cry on the wind. Helplessly, Morrow strained his own ears, more than half certain it was pointless — ’til he heard it too, at last, a distant echoing howl sliding through Rook’s hex-senses into his. Rook’s grim consent pulsed within him, a wordless nod:
You need to know, Ed, just as much. If not more.
It came from nowhere in the graveyard. Only the faint noise trickling in from nearby streets, the mutter and rumble of human traffic, made any real sound here. But behind that there rose a noise that Morrow could name, immediately — a high, nasal wail, underscored with rattles, clacks, and irregular thumps, strange glassy crashes, guttural growls and roars. And not a single note in all this cacophony that sounded even halfway human.
Morrow’s skin didn’t just crawl. It lurched, as though his primordial fear was trying to rip it from his body. And a sickening second later, his stomach plunged as he realized the fear was as much Rook’s as it was his own. Which meant —
Oh, shit, we’re well and truly fucked.
No beginning, and no end — only an insistent grinding, a key turning in some locked door so large it kept two whole worlds separate.
But — no more. Distant dark places full of hateful, clamouring things. Fissures forming.
Chess scrubbed at his mouth, hard, and looked straight through Morrow’s eyes, into Rook’s. “All ’cause of us, ain’t it?” he demanded. “’Cause you ripped
me outta the dead lands, and left the door open behind you — some almighty sorcerer you are, for all your Goddamned airs. Your new wife know how bad you fucked up yet, Reverend?”
Rook set Morrow’s lips. “Suspect she’s startin’ to, yes. But then again, for all I know . . . she might not really care.”
Chess shrugged at that.
“’Course,” Rook pointed out, “it ain’t just about me and her, Chess, or even me, her and you — you know that. There’s that other fella, too.”
The Smoking Mirror.
“He says he don’t mean me any harm.”
“Maybe, maybe not. They’re not like us, as you may’ve already figured — but some things are gonna change, no matter what. ’Cause he come up the same way we all did . . . and he sure didn’t come up alone.”
Chess made as though to snap a harsh line back, but something gave him pause. He looked down again, instead, sagging slightly, like the air in his lungs’d gone stale.
Quiet, he said, “He told me I . . . was him, now. One sort of him — or half, at least. ’Cause you fucked up in the makin’ of me, just like I said.”
“That’s right.” Rook leaned closer, Morrow straining against him as he did — the resultant motion subtle at best, though Rook seemed to consider it significant enough to fight for. And heard his own voice drop even further, as Rook finished: “But . . . you don’t have to be.
“For here we have the key to write you a new gospel, Chess,” came the words, out of Morrow’s mouth. “Every god needs a prophet. Every crusade, a messiah. John to Jesus, Stephen to the Apostles. She showed me how to make you something I didn’t have to kill, or be killed by . . . and we’re gonna show her that just ’cause she and her kin want back in, don’t mean we’ll leave the world to them without a fight.
“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.”