A Book Of Tongues

by Files, Gemma

  GEMMA FILES

  VOLUME ONE OF THE HEXSLINGER SERIES

  ChiZine Publications

  A BOOK OF TONGUES

  FIRST EDITION

  A Book of Tongues © 2010 by Gemma Files

  Jacket artwork © 2010 by Erik Mohr

  Cowboy Photo © iStockphoto.com/Nuno Silva

  All Rights Reserved.

  CIP data available upon request.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS

  Toronto, Canada

  www.chizinepub.com

  info@chizinepub.com

  Edited by Sandra Kasturi

  Copyedited and proofread by Helen Marshall

  Converted to mobipocket and epub by Christine http://finding-free-ebooks.blogspot.com/

  Table Of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  BOOK ONE: CITY OF JADES Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  BOOK TWO: SKULL-FLOWER Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  BOOK THREE: JAGUAR CACTUS FRUIT Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  About The Author

  For Callum, who can’t read it yet

  (and probably shouldn’t, when he can).

  But also for Steve, without whose support

  nothing would be possible,

  and Elva Mai Hoover and Gary Files,

  without whom I would not exist.

  Here is a book of tongues.

  Take it. (Dark leaves invade the air.)

  Beware! I now know a language so beautiful and lethal

  My mouth bleeds when I speak it.

  — Gwendolyn MacEwen

  I’ll be true to my love

  If my love will be true to me.

  — “Two Sisters,” Childe Ballad version

  BOOK ONE: CITY OF JADES

  The Barbary Coast, March 6, 1867

  Month One, Day Thirteen Dog

  Festival: Tlacaxipehualiztli, or Skinning of Young Men

  Today is ruled by Centeotl, the Lord of Maize, a version of Xipe Totec, Our Lord the Flayed One. Also known as Xilonen, “the Hairy One,” he holds the position of fourth Lord of the Night.

  The Aztec trecena (or thirteen-day month) Tecpatl, “Stone Knife,” is ruled by Mictlantecuhtli, Lord of Mictlan. This trecena signifies an ordeal or trial that pushes one to the very threshold of endurance. It forebodes an abrupt change in the continuity of things.

  By the Mayan Long Count calendar, the protector of day Itzcuintli (“Dog”) is also Mictlantecuhtli, who rules that day’s shadow soul. Itzcuintli is the guide for the dead, the spirit world’s link with the living. It is a good day for being trustworthy, a bad day for trusting others.

  These are good days to shed old skins; bad days to cling to what is already known.

  PROLOGUE

  The dream was always the same.

  She appeared above him, blown by a black wind, her back-sloping forehead girded with a hissing serpent, her swirling hair stiffened with mud. Her round face was set with jade scales, irregular as leaves. The lids and orbits of her wide-spaced eyes were decorated, mosaic-style, with tiny chips of shell, mother-of-pearl and obsidian. Her breasts were bare, high-set, the nipples pale and small — a virgin’s, or even a child’s. Sometimes he thought this meant she must have died young. Other times, however, he looked deep into her painted gaze and knew that it meant she might very well never have actually lived at all.

  Little king, she called him every time, little hanged man — you who are mine by right, as well as by choice. And he saw a great darkness rise up around her, spreading wide: a hissing cloud of dragonflies whose wings dazzled, every colour in the world at once. Like a rainbow.

  Water rose around his feet, burning cold, lapping at his ankles. The sky shone yellow and black. Knives fell like rain.

  To either side, grey stone walls retreated into shadow, studded with what seemed at first glance to be rough, irregular stones — but a closer look revealed that the stones were grinning, all leering teeth and empty nose-holes. An endless rack of skulls from whose orifices flowers bloomed at random, luscious pinky-red as heart-meat.

  Around her long neck a rope dangled, twisted from corn-silk and stuck all over with thorns. She held it up, looped around both thumbs — spread it wide, a cat’s cradle, a pair of opening jaws.

  Use this, she told him. Use it, while you still can. Kill what you love, choose your ixiptla, make your necessary sacrifices. Pierce your tongue, run it through the hole, and pray words of blood.

  The time of earthquakes is at hand, little king.

  The time of great floods, when the upper crust cracks, and the Sunken Ball-Court overflows.

  The Gods return, at long last. What we have been promised, we will have. So feed us once more, and apologize, before it is too late.

  He didn’t know what she meant, by any of it — never had, and never expected to. But then again, maybe it wasn’t even his dream to begin with.

  Twenty days later, though, there he was again — right smack back in the same place, slogging through black river water to his knees under the jaundice-yellow sky. Skulls to the left of him, flowers to the right, the very air itself an obsidian storm through which knives swirled by, drawing blood ’til it felt like all he had left for skin was a single walking wound. And as he struggled grimly forward, the only thing he could think was this — over, and over, and over —

  Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch.

  . . . that Goddamned son of a bitch, he went and left me behind.

  CHAPTER ONE

  For all it was just gone noon by the barkeep’s (carefully hidden) watch, the Bird-in-Hand dance-groggery was nevertheless crammed full with people either drunk from the night before, or continually drunk for the last few days, and counting. One of these, a huge fool in miner’s clothes, had spent the last ten minutes staring fixedly at Chess Pargeter, who stood sipping a shot of absinthe at the bar — a slim and neat-made man dressed in purple, head barely level with the miner’s breastbone, whose narrow red brows shaded to gold over a pair of eyes the same green as the wormwood and sugar concoction he held.

  “Queer,” the miner said to the bar at large. “You can tell by the clothes.”

  “I really wouldn’t, mister,” replied another man — almost as tall, and armed with a double-barrelled eight-gauge — who’d passed a similar length of time with his chair tipped back against the wall, shapeless hat pulled down to shade his eyes in such a way that the company had hitherto mainly supposed him asleep.

  The miner squinted at him. “Think I want your opinion, asswipe?”

  With a sigh: “Think you need it, for sure. Entirely your own business whether you choose to believe me.”

  Chess took another sip, ignoring them both. His hair, twice as red as his brows, was close-cut enough to reveal he’d had one of his lobes pierced so that he could hang a lady’s ear-bob from it: a modest gewgaw shaped like a Hospitaller cross, chased in gold wire and set with Navajo turquoise. It caught the
light as he swallowed, making the miner snort.

  “‘I wouldn’t,’” the miner repeated, low and sneering. Then called, in Chess’s direction: “Hey, gingerbeer — didn’t your Ma work the Bella Union, back when? I mean, way back.”

  “My Ma’s none of your concern, tin-pan.”

  “So she ain’t a whore?”

  Chess shrugged. “Oh, she’s that,” he allowed. “Just don’t see what it has to do with you.”

  The miner stared at him a moment, then blustered on. “Well . . . think I mighta paid for her, a time or two — she had that same red hair, and all.” He pointed at the ear-bob: “Nice jewellery. Reverend Rook give it to ya?”

  “This?” Chess shook his head, making the gem sparkle. “Nope. This, I bought for myself.”

  “How come? Everybody knows you’re his bitch.”

  Chess narrowed his eyes at that, ever so slightly. “I’m his, all right, like he’s mine. But I’m my own man still, and I pay my own way. How ’bout you, lard-ass?”

  There was a general mutter, bringing the man by the door to his feet in one mighty heave. “Aw, here we go,” he announced, both barrels up and trigger cocking.

  The miner spat out maybe half a word — the phrase he had in mind might have eventually proved to be damn faggot outlaw, had it been allowed to come anywhere near full expression — before Chess shot him neatly through the head without even seeming to draw, let alone to turn.

  Chess licked the last of the absinthe from his glass’s rim, upturned it, and threw the barkeep money. “That’s for my tab,” he told him. “And more sawdust.”

  “We get that stuff for free, Mister Pargeter,” the barkeep managed.

  “Then use it to paint the wall again instead,” Chess snapped back, and left. The tall man tipped his hat to the company at large, put up his gun, and followed.

  “Some pretty rough work, ’specially on a Sunday,” the tall man — whose name was Edward Morrow — remarked, as they stepped out into the muddy street.

  “Oh? How so?”

  “Son-of-a-bitch never even had a chance, let alone a fair one — that’s how so.”

  Chess snorted. “Hell, Morrow, I was just standing there, drinking my drink. He was the one convinced he had to say something about — it, or me. . . .”

  “ — you and Rook, more like — ”

  “Me and Rook, then, or what-the-Christ ever. Came at me asking for trouble, and he got what he asked for. I mean, I wasn’t ’bout to start a damn fist-fight with him — you see the size of that idjit?”

  “Looked ’bout my size, from where I was sittin’.”

  Chess shot Morrow a bare flicker of sly white grin. “Exactly.”

  A few steps on, they paused at the corner where Pacific Street met Moketown alley, under one of the many wash-lines of flapping coats and shifts — half-jokingly referred to by sailors on shore leave as “flags of Jerusalem” — which marked yet another of San Francisco’s multitudinous Poor John clothing shops. Chess drew a watch of his own from the inner pocket of his purple brocade waistcoat, and flipped it open.

  “Seventeen of twelve,” he grumbled, peering down. “Man’ll be late to his own funeral, you give him the option.”

  “People followin’,” Morrow broke in, looking back over his shoulder.

  Chess didn’t raise his head. “From the melodeon? Yeah, I saw ’em — dead man’s drinking buddies, annoyed he won’t be picking up the next round. What do you suggest?”

  “Head the other way, so’s nobody else gets killed?”

  Chess gave this idea about a second’s consideration, before replying: “But here’s where Rook said to meet, and I ain’t shifting. So fuck that.”

  Luckily for them, the miner’s “friends” had apparently barely taken time to arm themselves at all before giving chase, and only thought to do so with whatever came best to hand. Two men made straight for Chess, waving a broken bottle and a smashed-up chair; Chess cross-drew with a flourish and killed them both, then kept on firing, while Morrow made sure he just took the kneecap off a third, who fell back into the gutter, screaming. The whole exchange lasted perhaps a minute, at most — a popped blister of muzzle-flash and cordite smoke under heavy grey skies, spattering gaping passersby with equal parts terror and grue.

  When it cleared, an only lightly wounded barfly could just be seen dragging the groaning cripple ’round a handy house-corner, his shattered ruin of a knee leaving a reddish trail through the mud. The rest were mainly corpses, though a couple were caught in midretreat with their hands held high, kowtowing awkwardly as Chess sighted at them down his left-hand gun barrel.

  Morrow nodded back at them, not quite daring to touch Chess’s sleeve. “C’mon now, Chess — that’s enough for one day, ain’t it?”

  Utterly affectless: “Think so?”

  “They were his friends, Chess, that’s all . . . you know how it goes. Hell, you’d do the same for me, we all swapped places — ”

  “No I wouldn’t,” Chess said, letting his finger tighten. The penitent dropped face-down at the trigger’s pre-click, shit-smeared and yelling for mercy.

  “I can’t leave you a minute, can I?”

  The rasping basso voice behind them was audibly amused. Chess curled his lip and turned his back, reholstering, then stalked over to the big, broad-shouldered man in the black coat and stained white collar. “It’s been twenty, Goddamnit,” he complained.

  “Yet I do see you managed to make your own fun, nonetheless.” Though rumour told of Reverend Asher Rook once having been a melodious preacher, the crunch of hemp against larynx — from the Confederate Army’s unsuccessful attempt to swing him rope-high — had left him with a rasp fit to strike matches on, so hellish dark and deep that whenever he spoke, you could almost smell the sulphur.

  “Could’ve stayed in Arizona for that,” Chess said, taking one last step, so he and Rook were safely nose-to-forehead — then dragged him down by the hair and kissed him hard, right there in the road for all to see. Morrow groaned at the sight, and not just from discomfort; even if the gunfire alone hadn’t been enough to attract attention, the spectacle of two men treating each other the way neither would treat a woman whose favours he hadn’t already purchased up front, certainly would.

  Some might say Chess would never have dared be so open with his affections if the Rev wasn’t so well-known — and well-feared — but Morrow doubted it. From what he’d heard, Chess had lived his life on the offence since long before Reverend Rook hove into sight. Still, now they were bound together, he was probably worse: every move a calculated insult, a slap to the collective face. A lit firecracker shoved up the whole honest world’s backside.

  A voice from the greyer parts of Morrow’s mind, long kept carefully hid, came intruding: “Asher Elijah Rook, Sergeant and unofficial chaplain for his unit, took up for desertion under fire and murder of a superior officer in the final weeks of the War. Some question as to the legitimacy of the charges, but the execution proceeded nevertheless. While other prisoners from the stockade waited, Rook fought with his captors and began to curse, quoting St. John the Revelator. . . .”

  And I looked, and, behold, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire.

  Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures . . . and every one had four faces, and every one had four wings . . . As for the likeness of the living creatures, their appearance was like burning coals of fire . . . and out of the fire went forth lightning. . . .

  And when they went, I heard the noise of their wings, like the noise of great waters, as the voice of the Almighty, the voice of speech, as the noise of an host: when they stood, they let down their wings.

  “I believe that’s in Ezekiel, sir, not Revelation.”

  “Yes, to be certain. The more important point being that one way or another, a cyclone near thirty feet across whipped up almost immediately, and blew away
most of the camp. Rook and his fellow escapees simply walked away, made their way to the Arizona desert and began to commit the crimes that have lent him notoriety throughout the West: robbing trains and stagecoaches, levelling entire towns, all aided and abetted by Rook’s knowledge of Bible verse. In this manner, we see how graphic physical insult can cause talent for hexation to express, long after the normal parameters of adolescence have been surpassed.

  “Our next dispatches reveal him to have taken up openly with this wild boy, Pargeter — similarly freed by Rook’s handiwork, after being convicted as an unrepentant murderer and sodomite. By all accounts an accomplished killer but no sort of soldier, Pargeter’s records show him to be uniformly uncontrollable, contemptuous, loveless. Yet he bridles himself for Rook, suffering restraint and direction, and love — of a sort — does seem to be the key . . . so much so that it becomes impossible to tell exactly who the corruptive element in this mixture truly is. . . .”

  But Rook and Chess were done at last, at least for now. They broke apart, Rook leaning to tell him softly, in one passion-flushed ear: “I will say this, though. You need to stop treating every place we go like Tophet in Hinnom just ’cause your timetable and mine ain’t always congruent, Private Pargeter.”

  Chess blinked, then bit his tongue — literally — on whatever he would have never hesitated to say next, if Rook had been anyone else. “We still have that business of yours to do up in Tong territory,” he said, finally, “so it strikes me we’d best get goin’. It ain’t really a place you want to end up once the afternoon’s gone, and it’s getting hard to see what to shoot at.”

  “Lead on, then, darlin’ — I’ll willingly take your word. This is your home town, after all.”

  Chess hissed like an affronted cat, and pulled away from Rook before the Reverend could try to stroke him smooth again. Rook smirked, then noticed Morrow’s expression.