“Step aside,” he told her, shortly. And moved close enough to the brick to think he could taste his own no-breath, reminding him how long it’d been since he’d even pretended to eat.
“Punch our way through, maybe,” he said, more to himself than anything else. “Or — blow it down? The two of us together, should be easy.”
“Fink so, wouldn’t you?”
Chess swung ’round, immediately on guard, with steam beginning to wisp upward through his tight-clenched knuckles. “What’s that s’posed to mean?”
“Means ‘I don’t bloody know,’ is all. This place ain’t a shooting gallery — it was, you’d’ve already flown the coop long since, without any ’elp from me. So maybe each step of the way out’s less about ’oo’s got the sand to pound ’ard as it is gettin’ answers; finding the right path, not just the easiest.”
Her tone, surprisingly, rang convincing enough to make Chess flatten his palms against the wall, close his eyes and lean his head down, the stone rough but damply soothing ’gainst his throbbing forehead.
I’m no good with this shit, he wanted to say. Ain’t no book-smart intriguer like Rook, or even a Pinkerton-trained puzzle-solver, the way Ed had to be; my grand ideas at Hoffstedt’s Hoard came straight from little Miss Yancey’s brainpan, and they all went south quick enough, once Sheriff Love got involved. Shoot it if it stands and cut it if it runs, that’s my strategy’s extent. I can barely plan out my morning meals, let alone solve a Goddamn riddle designed to keep them that’s Hell-locked from making their escape. . . .
“I don’t know either,” he found himself admitting, at last, as despair lapped up over him.
To which she sniffed, and replied: “Then give up, why don’t you? Just like a bloody Adam! Well, it’s like I always said — ”
That phrase alone, however, was enough to sweep him away, borne off on a dirty tide of similarly bad advice. The wisdom of a life spent facedown, with only your own blood left to spit at the world that’d kicked you; Oona Pargeter’s rule-book, each chapter beginning exactly like the last, with these same, cheerless words: My Ma always said —
— Get the fawney up front. Never dish out what you can’t take. Don’t never beg; rave and curse, go down fightin’, ’cause them that folds easy gets the boot. Now get out o’ here, you skin-waste, and sing for our bloody supper. My Ma always said: What are you, a ponce? A bloody molly-coddle? Go cry to ’eaven and see ’oo answers, you flamin’ soft-arse nancy. My Ma always said: Nothin’ comes for nothin’ in this world, boy. Sell for as much as they’ll pay, and charge more, if you can. And if they won’t fork over, then do the only fing makes you different from me . . . and kill ’em. . . .
I loved her a good long time, missy, he remembered snarling at Yancey Kloves, when she’d pressed him. And then I learned better.
But he knew now, oh, how he knew — that he never really had.
“’Cause all men are dogs, huh?” he asked Oona now, out loud, voice deceptively even.
She nodded. “And pigs, and rats — vermin of all descriptions.” Then paused, eyes softening slightly: “But then, you ain’t really a man at all, are you? No matter ’ow you look.”
He almost thought she might’ve meant it for a compliment, of a sort. But even so, it made him snap upright once more, too angry to even reply ’til he’d took a deep breath, blew it out.
“Yes, I damn well am,” he told her.
“All right, then. Do what a man does, supposedly — look, and see. Your Pa was a bastard, but ’e knew ’is works, by God. So fink on it, ’cause it’s you this Call’s meant for, not me; might be it’s you needs to take a gander, wivout all your jaw, and ponder it through in ways I can’t. Bloody fink, for once!”
Chess’s hand throbbed, a literal phantom pain. He squinted down at the raw-scraped smear it left behind on the wall — only to watch light bloom from his palm. Oona’s shadow leaped up, towering on the bricks behind her with a sizzling power-crackle. And framing it, visible now under Chess’s personal footlight, three rough lines sketched out a brick rectangle, some open door backlit by the sun beyond.
At shoulder level, the red ghost of Chess’s blood still shone, the only true colour in this entire pocket world.
With more gentleness than he’d intended, Chess pushed Oona out of the way, stepping into her place; his glory-hand’s light faded, plunging the alley back into darkness. But now that Chess had seen the cracks, he couldn’t unsee them. He drove fingers along their length, scrabbling for the hidden catch or trip-switch, tearing his own no-nails. The pain galvanized him to punch brick over and over again, hooking it from left to right and back to left once more, as if trying to bust nonexistent hinges. His knuckles shredded, dripping blood hot enough to steam, which the fissures drank up in turn. And again and again he struck, smearing that blood along every inch, to what damn end he couldn’t’ve begun to reckon, even if you’d asked him.
Without warning, the wall’s blood-delineated portion simply disintegrated, collapsing with an outward-bellying whoof of dust and mica. Chess and Oona jerked back, shielding their eyes, and lowered their hands to see — nothing. A gap of absolute black, not even reflecting the chill gleam of Seven Dials’ rain. Yet Chess knew that darkness, down in his gut. Had glimpsed it before, inside the Enemy’s empty ribcage and the bottom of Her Goddamn Rainbow Ladyship’s grinning black eyes, as she stared down into his while riding him: the darkness of a crack in the world, the place where the light bled out.
Oona seized him by one hand, blood notwithstanding, and didn’t leave go. Chess’s throat felt like sand and glass when he finally spoke. “So . . . it’s in there, I guess, or stay here. Forever.”
Beside him, his mother’s too-young shape only nodded; didn’t need to turn to see it, not at all. Not with her shoulder’s muscle popping slightly and their no-pulses hammering in unison: her dead heart, his long-gone one.
Chess closed his eyes, and groaned.
“Fuck it,” he said, finally. And leaped, pulling Oona with him.
Gravity seemed to slow. They stepped through, touched down over the threshold, the lintel between. And just as promised by that first glance, all that rose to meet them was nothing: an absence, delicious in its way, airless and sere.
There was something under their feet, though, if noiseless and unforgiving — something making bleak walls on either side, too, with scarce enough room for Chess’s shoulders to pass between, his arm turning in its socket to lead Oona through in turn. He felt a wrench of panic at the idea that they might forge forward only to find themselves trapped in a gradually narrowing space, eventually lodging too fast to go either way, and for a bare second, the still-open portal back into Mictlan-Seven Dials shone like sanctuary.
Oona’s fingers clutched at his palm, waxy-cold, sticky with sweat. Not looking so much to comfort her as simply to hurry her up a bit, he shifted his grip to her thin wrist and pulled, hard enough to feel the bones grate.
“Let’s get a move on, old woman,” he told her, not looking back. And set his teeth, stepping straightaway into a blast of pressure that blew neither hot nor cold but horizontally, bruisingly stiff. Yet though the force of it rattled his teeth, flapped his lips askew and numbed his tongue, he bladed through setting heel to toe, heel to toe, snarling soundless, indomitable. Dragging his mother along with him until they broke free with an audible snap, a broke-pelvis crunch, into someplace entirely other yet again.
Dust on dust, a wilderness of it, buff and granular. And light, too, for all Chess couldn’t tell where it came from — sifting down or welling up, extruding through the walls’ pores, slicking everything with distinction. On either side, a doubled fall of what might be curtains receded, muslin-thin, static, aside from those shadows flickering intermittently behind.
“Chess — ” Oona began, pressing against him.
“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.”
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