“Some say mercy is nothin’ but folly gussied up nice,” Rook began, adding a touch of skull-echo to his best preacher’s boom. “And while I’m not amongst ’em, necessarily, the law I enforce proceeds from far beyond me, admitting no quarter for defiance. So here’s all the clemency you’re likely to get, gentlemen: one warning. Stop, or be stopped.”
The Mexican mage snarled, lips lifting back, and spat. Where it fell the earth turned to quartz, lifting free from the dirt with a sound like cracking glass.
“Squawk on, carrion crow,’” he replied, scornfully. “This is Mexica business, only—so bring forth our goddess, whose throne you have usurped. We would have what she owes.”
Rook kept his rope-burnt voice placid, even as his temper began to rise. “’Fraid you’ve been misinformed, Señor—there’s nobody talks to the Lady just for the asking, ancestry notwithstanding. You talk to me, I talk to her; maybe then, if you’re lucky. But probably not.”
“’Cause that’s how you want it, huh?” one of the younger hexes called out, his coppery skin and broad cheekbones marking him more Diné than Mex. Rook thought of “Grandma,” whose true name he still didn’t know, and never would—that grim old shamaness who’d meant to educate him out of Ixchel’s clutches, only to lose her own life for the offer’s foolish softness—and felt his stomach twist with wary guilt, as the boy went on. “You get the Lady’s ear, Reverend, and the rest of us just have to knee it?”
“’Cause that’s how she wants it, fool,” Rook snapped back. “I don’t have any more damn choice in the matter than you do: gods don’t bargain, as I’ve learned full well. So if you truly want her attention, do how she likes it best—throw yourself in now, and save me the bother.”
The old mage snorted. “Think you’re the only Way-walker’s seen gods, gringo?” Something opened behind his anger like a second set of eyes, dreadful and hollow. “There’s more moving out there than her, Rook, or that skinless bed-boy of yours. Something else is coming too, and soon—something you’ve got no measure of, not in your darkest nightmares.”
“Yeah? Well, that ain’t much of a surprise.” Rook made his voice like a wall, massive, impenetrable. “I’ve seen things’d turn the rest of your hair white, old man—and we’ll all see a whole lot more of such, before we’re through.”
“But you don’t care to know what-all we got to say about it?” the Diné youth challenged.
“Nope. And since you still don’t seem to understand, I’ll elucidate.” Without warning, Rook stomped down hard. A burst of black power detonated beneath his boot heel, shuddering the entire square in outward-arcing ripples; coupsters and citizenry alike grabbed at each other, just to stay upright. Only the great ziggurat stood unmoved. “See what I mean? Foregone conclusion. This place’ll keep on growing, be New Aztectlan ’til it isn’t anymore. Which is when them as ain’t in on this will wish to Christ Almighty that they were.
“Now, you already drew your line in the sand just by comin’ here, so your only real choice is to take the Oath, spill blood and keep to the right side of it, from now on. Or . . .”
“Or?” The chief mage said, expressionless.
“. . . into the Machine you go. Like this.”
Rook swung a backhand strike, lashing invisible tendrils ’round his opponent with casual ease. In his mind’s eye, he’d plotted an arc ending with this interloper slammed down atop the Temple’s highest altar, broken and bleeding. But when he hauled hard on the web of force, he staggered, as if he’d tried to lift the entire group at once. The snare fell away.
Too surprised for fear, Rook stared, while the younger contingent exchanged looks of shock and glee admixed—same as any greenhorn who’d just seen some long-loathed rival laid out with a single punch.
“You,” the stranger told Rook, “are not the only one who knows what can come of making a vow.”
As he swooped both hands up, Rook saw the shaman’s co-rebels close their eyes, let their own hands go jerking skywards too, like marionettes. The old man clapped both fists together, sending a low thoom Rook’s way that seemed to pull the air after; their impact was thunder turned inside-out, all but silent.
Then a tidal wave smashed into him, sent him flying back ’til he smacked the ground all stunned and aching, his shields shattering same as the spit-glass gone to dust under his feet. Rook fought to raise his head, fear beginning to push its way past shock at last—marked how the stranger stood watching, coiling the power his coterie had apparently willed through him ’round one arm, like a bullwhip. Behind, the younger hexes swayed in place, too discomfited anymore to grin; their faces drew tight, wincing, as Rook felt their broken Oaths suck at their sorcerously allied strength.
The Mex, however, had sworn nothing, as yet. His strength was untouched, though hardly strong enough on its own merits to do such damage.
Rook knew the feel of the Oath by now, could sense its constant shape: a green-black line heart-rooted in every sworn witch or warlock, then run down into the ground, to the Temple’s Mictlan-Xibalba-sounding depths. Yet even through pain-blurred eyes, inchoate nerve-ends sizzling with frustrated power, he perceived now how each rebel bore another set of binding cords: a cat’s cradle connecting comrade to comrade, ’til all spun finally back upon their leader, galvanizing him in a concentric circuit.
Together, Rook thought. Working together. Lending each other their strength—or he’s taking it, at the least, and they’re letting him. How can that be?
Here Grandma entered his brain, yet once more—had the bitch ever truly quit it? Reminding him of that black marriage she’d dangled in front of him, back when he’d still dreamed he could have his Chess without eating him: mutual cancellation, self-sacrifice. They may live, but not as Hataalii. . . .
They swore to him, Rook realized, numbly. Another Oath, to share their power, so he could use it to break free of hers.
God damn, if the mad old man kicking his ass this very moment wasn’t some sort of state-uncertified genius.
The City’s Oath ran far deeper, of course; within moments, the Mex’s fellow coupsters would be drained, with no more power left to give—but within moments, they’d no longer need to. For the critical next few seconds, their collective was just too strong for Rook to beat, alone.
As the shaman stared down at him, sure of his victory, Rook mustered a last glare. “Traitor,” he called him. “We’re all hexes here, Goddamnit . . . turned away by everyone, everywhere, ’cept here. So what if Ixchel’s worship takes a toll? Blood ain’t exactly in short supply. Spill enough of it, and she’d’ve made us free.”
But the grey-haired stranger simply shook his head. “I already know your Lady, Rook—better than you do, for all you’ve shared her bed. She was one of my people’s gods, in long-gone times; we fed her, fed them, ’til the earth itself was soaked, so foul nothing would grow. But did they help us, when the steel hats came? When los conquistadors raped everything in their path, leaving only sickness behind? When the Christo-shouters burned our books and bodies?
“No. They are hungry ghosts, not gods at all, never trustworthy. One is bad enough—but she wants to bring back more, doesn’t she? To raise each and every one of them up from where they squat in darkness, down under the water, so deep even the bone canoe fears to penetrate it.”
Rook couldn’t deny it, even if this phantom grip squeezing both his lungs flat would allow him enough breath to. The effort of lying wasn’t worth whatever time he had left.
“Think you know her that well, you’d still best not be here when she comes lookin’ for me,” Rook managed, barely. But the shaman simply drew hard on the net once more, conjuring a fresh palmful of lightnings.
“Oh,” he replied, “I fully expect to die at Her hand, now or later—as you do too, or should. You already know she will destroy this world to bring on hers.”
“The Fifth ends in e
arthquakes—yeah, I heard. But the Sixth—”
Another head-shake. “No. Such creatures do not go forward, ‘Reverend.’ She seeks to sink us further still, to resurrect the Fourth World, which ended in floods when the Enemy, his brothers and his mother tore everything apart between them. When the earth itself was cracked like a bone and boiled, its marrow cooked sweet for sucking. And the Feathered Serpent was forced to steal our dust from Mictlan once more, afterwards, so that new men and women might be fashioned from it.”
Fresh mill-grist, Rook thought, throat burning. Fresh jaguar cactus fruit to be squeezed for its pulp, over a thousand rebuilt altars.
“This is what she wants—the doom you have already helped her put in place. So true mercy, I think, would be for you not to have to watch it come to pass.”
His hand swung down, straight into someone else’s deceptively flimsy grasp: four slim fingers and a thumb, all five nails cyanose, outlined in black blood. Dread Lady Ixchel stood suddenly between them, abrupt and upright, whole form ablaze with chilly lunar radiance—and at her touch the old Mex recoiled, gobbling, as Rook heard his wrist snap like a rotten twig.
“Old owl,” Ixchel named him, tonelessly. “Foolish nahual. You claim to know me? Then you should know better.”
So ice-cold and freakishly arousing at once, as always, stinking of death and barely clothed. Rook saw a thorn shoved through either nipple and some random jagged bone-shard bisecting her septum, leaving upper lip and cleavage crusted purple-red, a triangle of phantom claw-marks got in underground battle. But enough to make every prick in the place perk up regardless, and probably grease every pussy as well, to boot; never any call for Rook to think on someone else in order to give her her due and proper, and she knew it. He’d seen with his own eyes how the bitch could make even those queer-to-the-bone long to go digging in her charnel treasure-box.
(Chess’s white face, lips set, teeth too gritted even to let out a proper sob of hate as she lowered herself onto him, while Rook did nothing but watch—breath held, heart hammering. Watch and await his own turn, with both of them.)
A man who beds with a goddess becomes a god, little king, or dies. Or both.
Her black blossom of hair lifted high, eddying. Behind her, the cloak of dragonflies billowed forth and rose up buzzing, a tinsel-winged plague.
The shaman’s mouth moved like a fish’s, gasping; his unmaimed hand gave one final tug at the cords binding Rook, only to see Ixchel send them snapping, severed, with a single finger-flick. As he dove back, momentum sending his gang sand-wards along with him, her gaze traced those invisible strands from body to body, following the lesser oath-web: a sloppy working at best, red-gold-gouting, fogging the air. Yet the nude bed where one eyebrow should have been did lift at the sight, if only slightly.
Clever, Rook heard her “say,” abandoning outward speech entirely. Clever peasants, clever dogs. Sons of a million tlacotin-slaves.
The sheer strength of her contempt was hundred-proof at least, good enough to scour pots, and gave Rook the strength to power himself back upright. As he did, his eye fell onto Fennig and his beauties, caught up unknowing in the brawl’s very heart—all three women had their hands linked for protection, a dim flame flowing to blanket Clo in particular, cupping her stomach’s distention. Rook almost thought he could glimpse the child asleep inside, its tiny heart a-pulse with sorcerous potential.
The witch-ménage concentrated mainly on each other, a single unit, eyes downcast, so’s not to attract undue attention. Fennig himself, meanwhile, was staring at Ixchel straight-on, sliding his spectacles down slightly in order to consider her over their rims. If he squinted, Rook could see an image of his queen-wife caught there, twinned on both corneas and clarifying under pressure, the way a daguerreotype takes shape. As though Fennig were somehow incapable of turning away—helpless not to stay and see what might develop, literally.
At the same time Rook regained his feet, the Diné youth—the only one of the shaman’s donors still left upright—hauled out a knife and jumped for Ixchel’s throat, coming at her silent, blindside-first. The dragonfly cloak parted to allow him passage, buzz-hum ascending to warning shriek; Rook found himself stuck in mid-automatic ward-stance, both hands up, fingers crooked to fire whatever his instincts deemed necessary. Though since he’d once observed Ixchel take a ball to the skull from Ed Morrow’s pistol and still blast him backwards out of Hell, it was all probably pretty moot.
But it was Fennig who actually interposed: lunged in fencer-swift, using his cane like an epée, to send the Redskin somersaulting face-first into the nearest wall. Gravity, hex-augmented, was enough to snap his jaw one way, neck the other, with a furious crack.
Ixchel looked Fennig’s way, and nodded. To which Fennig tipped his bowler, like she was just another skirt to flirt with.
“Least I could do, ma’am,” was all he said, aloud. Adding, with his mind—Seein’ this is your city, after all. And you the reason, in the end, that me and my g’hals here have free run of it.
Oh, I like this one, husband.
Times like these, Rook wondered why they ever bothered to speak aloud to each other at all, ’sides from so as not to lose the ability.
The shaman snarled, and wrenched a final helping of power from his bond-donors, who crumpled, curling around their guts. Knowing better than to strike at Ixchel, he sent it whipping at Fennig instead: an arc of liquid lightning, overcooked energies spinning off in all directions.
Fennig, however, simply stepped backward, allowing Berta, Eulie and Clo to join hands around him. Of a sudden, Rook could see the bindings netted between them, a living ward-circle: raw ghost-currents drawing only on each other, with not a single thread of the girls’ own power—or Fennig’s—reaching out to drink of the shaman’s spillage. And as the spell broke harmlessly over their hunched shoulders at once, Clo’s mid-section gave an all but imperceptible heave, shrugging the bluish farewell crackle ’round itself and folding it away, all neat and tidy, ’til it winked itself out like a stepped-on cheroot.
I was right, Rook realized, amazed. The child, too. All of ’em, working in tandem. It’s the Goddamn future growin’ up, right in front of us.
Then: Time to end all this, ’fore someone gets hurt that shouldn’t.
Yes, little king. And so it shall be ended, now.
Ixchel turned hard black eyes back on the shaman and his donors. “Prostrate yourselves,” she ordered, forcing the fallen hexes to splay themselves instantly flat, muscles spasming; blood broke from eyes, ears, noses, as choked cries of agony squeezed out through their locked jaws. To the Mex, in specific, she continued—“You wish to shed your precious water in my direction—make chalcihuatl from nextlaualli while seeking xochimiquitzli, the flowery death, as was your ancestors’ right, and pleasure. How dearly I love to be reminded of these things, here in this new land! It is a great gift, and I accept it, gladly.”
Oh, what a terrible creature she was, as Rook well knew already. Thinking, numbly: But I’m the one who’ll have to lie down with her, later on.
Though he somehow thought any one of these fools would be right glad to trade places with him, to save ’emselves from what came next.
The smile Ixchel gave was beatific, dreadful as the sickly skull-fragment moon which hung above. “Feed me,” she said.
For just one moment, shaman and followers froze, pain apparently ceased. Then their skins went purple—bloating, glowing—as their blood pushed out and upwards through every pore at once, heating to a boil in mid-rise, flushing a fresh-carved meat-stink throughout the air. Fanning her hands toward her face, Ixchel inhaled this sanguinary cloud in a single, impossibly long breath, ’til at last it dissipated, leaving behind a clutch of sinewy stick-figure mockeries: swollen-jointed and crumbly, already disintegrating, with black pits for eyes.
After, it took some effort for her to regain her stillness
. Even as she turned and glided over to Rook’s side, she had not mastered it perfectly; the nox vomica of pure power she’d swallowed danced behind both furnace-grate pupils, making her twitch.
For a moment, he was eight years old again, caught by his mother in mid-disaster, sick with suspense to learn his punishment. But the goddess who owned him only went up on her toes, so much smaller (and stronger) than him it fairly hurt, to kiss his sweating forehead.
“I have saved you, little king, yet again. Now, seeing I am past due thanks . . . it behooves you to come with me, and do me reverence.”
As if all this had been nothing more than a trivial detail, absently settled. As if none of it really mattered.
We’re dreams to her, Rook thought, good, bad or indifferent. This was nothing, like everything else. A shadow-show between blinks.
“Up in a tick,” he told her, lips dry. “Wouldn’t do to keep you waiting.”
“No,” she agreed. And was gone.
Left behind, the corpses powdered inevitably apart, then blew away on a rising wind. Clo let out a whoosh, and folded back onto the others, who murmured at her like doves. Fennig, meanwhile, gave her a quick comfort-clasp of the hand before once more pinning Rook with those oh-so-penetrative re-hid oculars.
“Knowing you’re wanted elsewhere,” he said, “I don’t s’pose you’d care to jaw a while, if the ladies walk on.”
Rook looked at him, face kept strictly unreadable, from half a year’s practice. Did he really dare?
“Have to be quick,” he said, eventually.
“As typhus, Reverend.”
Minutes after, they stood side by side, watching smoke from the Blood Engine’s stacks rise up forever. Even now, Rook knew, there were a horde yet of supplicants massing who’d need to be Oathed, ’fore they grew so weary from the Call tearing at their guts that they turned on each other, and had to be put down for the current citizens’ edification. Ixchel hadn’t thought much on that, obviously, when commanding he gift her with both his immediate presence and a workable cock-stand. But then again, such things meant equally little, in her ancient eyes.
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