The words of the story wove themselves out, echoing hexation-aided through bone and blood, in three languages at once. Exhausted, Yancey let her cold-burnt lids drift shut and saw vague shapes unspool behind them — squarish symbols wrought from contorted bodies, all fangs and feathers, tongues and bulging eyes. Ink-black, macaw-red writing scribed on whitewashed walls, so fresh it almost ran, while a steaming green jungle rose behind, and the unfamiliar din of insects.
Her place, she thought. Lady Ixchel’s dead world, the one she wants to swap ours for.
“Tollan was chief city of the Tolteca,” Grandma said, somehow not stumbling over the names, though they couldn’t’ve come any more easy to whatever she used for a tongue than to Yancey’s own. “A great nation which existed before the Mexica built their Empire, down where the sun meets the swamp. But their last king, Huemac, fell into evil ways, and was punished. It began when a Hataalii who called himself Toveyo appeared in front of the city, a beautiful man painted all over in green, and was invited inside.
“With sweet music and spells, Toveyo tempted Tollan’s people to dance in their marketplace, making the song he played swirl faster and faster until it finally drove them into such a madness they rushed out through the city’s gates, throwing themselves headlong into a canyon in the earth. As they fell, they bounced off the walls, breaking all their bones, and when they finally reached the bottom, their bodies turned to stone.
“Moments later, the mountains overlooking Tollan began to growl and belch flames, in which the city’s priests saw figures making terrible gestures. Surely, they thought, the gods must be angry — and when Huemac ordered an offering to appease them, Toveyo was the first one seized. But when the priests bent his body over the altar stone and opened up his chest, they found he had no heart at all. His veins were also dry and empty, sending no precious blood spilling onto the temple’s stones. Then a stench rose from the body, and though the priests and onlookers fled, an epidemic of foul wasting diseases followed.
“For choosing a man with neither the heart nor the blood that creatures such as She of the Ropes and Snares require as a sacrifice, Tollan was punished with crop-killing frosts and summer droughts, wild storms, floods. Huemac fled, leaving his illegitimate son in charge. Two armies of invaders were bought off with the last of the city’s riches before the northern nomads known as the Sons of the Dog finally descended, at which point the first two armies turned back, and joined forces with them. For three years, the people of Tollan held them off with only a company of old men, boys and women, but eventually, the walls were breached. Tollan fell.”
“So Toveyo got his will,” Songbird said, examining her sheathless fingernails, while Yancey levered herself into a sitting position, each bout of shivering slightly less frantic. “He tricked Tollan into insulting their own gods, and those gods destroyed them. A victory for our kind.”
Grandma shook her head. “No. For according to the Mexica, Toveyo was simply a face worn by the Smoking Mirror, Rainbow Lady’s Ixchel’s ‘brother’ — Night Wind Tezcatlipoca, Enemy of all, who loves to stir up chaos for its own sake: god of all Hataalii, all hexes. Who some say stands for nothing less than conflict as a means to change itself.”
Songbird bristled. “He is not my god.”
“Mine either,” Yancey chimed in, surprised to find herself agreeing. And might be Grandma would’ve struck them both down in her rebuttal, had they not been interrupted.
“I should . . . hope not, Missus Kloves,” said a new voice, hoarse and desert-dry. “For little as we see eye to eye in other ways — murderous revenge as . . . justice, for example — I’d never’ve took you for a . . . heathen idolater.”
There, by the butte’s foot, right where its shadow would’ve fallen in the day: that was where Sheriff Love’s widow stood barefoot, her weeds ripped, long yellow hair unbound and heavy with dirt. Hoisted in her arms, she carried a good-sized baby boy who looked as though he’d been through similar straits, but was managing to sleep it off. Yancey felt her heart go foolishly soft at the very sight of his lumpy, boneless weight, mouth slack around one pudgy thumb.
“It is you, isn’t it?” she asked, looking straight at Yancey, freckle-set brow furrowed. “I mean . . . haven’t seen you since that . . . awful day. At Bewelcome.”
When I blew your man’s brains out, right in front of you? Yes ma’am, I recall it well. That was me, and so’s this.
“How’d you get here, though, Missus Love, exactly?” she made herself say instead; polite, like they were taking tea. “Was it Reverend Rook sent you?”
Sophy Love shook her stately head, clutching her baby all the tighter. “No, one of that New York hex’s three — women; the Irish one, I believe. Tell the truth, I could barely understand her! But I knew she wished harm on Gabe and me, so I called on the Lord to aid us. And then . . .”
She narrowed her eyes, as though she couldn’t quite recall the specifics. But as she did, her son shifted in his slumber, gurgling — and beside her, Yancey felt Songbird suddenly stiffen and hiss, like a spooked cat. Felt something spike from her, and Grandma too: a pulling at the air, a pressure drop, as though before a storm. A hungry cry pitched almost too high to hear, so sharp it plucked even at her, and she wasn’t a hex at all; Yiska, too, hand falling automatically to her tomahawk’s grip.
They feel somebody, all of ’em, someone like them. Someone who could eat everything they have or be eaten, in turn. But . . . who?
That was when the baby — young Gabriel Love — jerked awake for good, seeking with barely focused gaze for a brace of rivals he couldn’t possibly spot, even at this distance, and sent up what seemed like the ghost of the same squalling, thin as fine-chopped bones. All of an instant, then, Yancey could almost see what they saw, plain as Songbird’s skin or Yiska’s nose. Plain as the flare ’round Grandma’s helmet-skull, lighting up her upturned bucket of a no-face, revealing her true nature to anyone.
“So sad,” Sophy Love said to herself, completely unaware; she looked almost drunk, to Yancey’s bar-bred eye — drunk on loss, on fatigue, on sorrow too long deferred, in favour of cold responsibility. “How I’ve hated you and prayed not to, for so long; foolish, really, for all the good it did me, either way. But now I see you again, you have my pity — to see any white woman so abandoned, fallen amongst savage witches.”
“Wouldn’t be so quick to insult them if I was you, ma’am,” Yancey replied. “These ladies are powerful. They might yet be the ones to save your son’s life.”
“Is that a threat?”
Yancey almost laughed, hearing Songbird’s mental speech yammering at her inner ear, at the same time — an endless reel of: Kill him, while we can, before he strikes at us! Kill her!
No, she thought. But that is.
Yiska tsked, out loud. “You disappoint me,” she said — to Songbird, though Sophy Love no doubt heard it directed at her. “This is a chance we have, here . . . to do right even when doubted, to teach this bilagaana Book-babbler by example. Do not let your fear control you.”
Songbird hissed again. And Grandma, stirring in her seat with the groan of a mountain settling, told her: “She is right, little ghost. The salt-man’s wife knows no better.”
Sophy’s eyes went wide, for all the world as if she hadn’t really noticed Grandma sitting there, ’til part of the butte itself took on life; her whole body recoiled a step, grip tightening on poor Gabe ’til her knuckles whitened. “My good Jesus,” she said, with admirable calm. “You’re . . . that other demon.”
“No such thing. But you may call me that, if you wish.”
Songbird threw her arms up, white braids swinging wide. “Enough coddling! We must defend ourselves, especially when our enemy knows nothing! I will do it, if you fear to — ”
She thrust one hand out toward Gabe, fingers crooked like horns, knuckle sparking; Yancey seized it without thinking, only to scream when Songbird’s conjured fire seared her palm. “Jesus Christ Almighty!”
“Loose me, dead-speaker!”
A familiar locust-chitter filled the air; Sophy Love whipped
a shiny new version of Doctor Asbury’s toy from her pocket, brandishing it Songbird’s way. “Lay one hand upon him,” she warned, “and I’ll kill you where you stand, you Godforsaken creature.”
But the Manifold’s needle swung back toward Gabe, who was crying harder than ever — slid straight into the red, and stuck there.
And even as his own corona snapped and flared, Yancey heard Grandma say, for once without any real sort of judgement, though equally little sympathy: “Perhaps you should look to your own house, bilagaana. For as that thing you hold can tell you, we are not the only ‘hexes’ here.”
Sophy Love looked down, caught breath balanced between love and revulsion, into her son’s squalling face. Yancey didn’t have to try to rifle through the woman’s thoughts, now; hell, she was hard-pressed to keep ’em out. A dreadful black tide slopping up, transmuting that same maternal pull to bitterest gall: 1 Samuel, 15:53. For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry, so Because thou hast rejected the word of the LORD, he hath also rejected thee from being king.
Oh, Gabriel — not you, of all people. How will you ever fulfil your father’s legacy now? How could you even live among his own town’s people — good, kind, Christian people — let alone rule them the way you were born to, knowing they’d think you the Devil’s own cub?
Great and powerful God, why must you make only the most devoted of all your servants suffer so?
“Not my boy,” Sophy Love murmured to herself. And sat down in a flump with her skirts pooled ’round her, face turned from the child she still hugged tight.
Yancey took three or four small steps toward the Widow; got down on her trousered knees in the dirt, her joints still stiff. And held out her arms for Bewelcome’s former heir — exiled through no fault of his own to a desert worse than the one where Satan had tempted Christ, where stones could never be made bread, not even by the Word of God.
“I’ll take him if you want, ma’am,” she told Missus Love, softly as she could. “You just rest. And we’ll talk it over later, in the morning.”
Sophy said neither yea nor nay, but didn’t put up much of a fight when Yancey lifted Gabe free and put him over one shoulder, patting his back ’til his wails trailed off into hiccups. Simply sat there slumped with her hair hanging down — mouth moving, perhaps in silent prayer — and looking at her hands, as though she wasn’t quite sure whether or not she had the right to bury her face in them.
“I must get away from here,” Songbird whispered, agitatedly, in Yiska’s ear. “That boy knows nothing, he cannot control himself — ”
“But you can, and set an example, doing so. Has he tried to feed on you, or the Spinner?”
“He will, as any of us would. He is . . . what he is!”
Grandma leaned in: “A Hataalii, yes, but untrained, unblooded; he took his mother away from that woman by instinct, instead of striking back himself. I feel no hunger in him, not as yet.”
“Ai-yaaah! You pretend to great wisdom, as ever, but we Han have known of such things for centuries. Was it not we who first mapped the flow of ch’i through the body, as well as those points where it may escape, or be stolen? It is only because of our knowledge that object works at all.”
On the horizon, further even than half-smitten Bewelcome itself, a foul star seemed to bloom. There was an awful noise; Yancey couldn’t have named it if she’d tried. And out in the darkness, something else laughed long and loud, equally dreadful — as though amusement were its currency, and it accounted itself well-paid.
At the sound, Grandma’s head swung ’round once more, spun on that boneless thing she called a neck ’til it all but made complete revolution, fast as wooden ribcage shutters snapping to over a bloody, beating heart.
“What has that thing the blackrobe Rook married done now?” she demanded, apparently of the universe itself.
SEVEN DIALS: FOUR
Our current world is Nahui-Ollin, the Earthquake Sun. It will shake itself apart one day, after which everything Quetzalcoatl stole will be returned to its rightful owner, Mictantecuhtli. The Seed of All will be re-buried at the bottom of a charnel pit, awaiting its next red watering. And then, eventually . . .
. . . everything will begin, once more, only to die, wither, be reborn. Again, again, again.
Endlessly.
We stole our bones from the gods of the Underworld, over and over — bones and flesh, our souls, our very selves. Which is why we will always try to keep them as long as we possibly can, no matter what the price, no matter how dreadful the reckoning.
No matter what, or who, it costs.
They were well out onto the bridge before he even realized what it was, and when he did, the understanding almost undid him. Chess had no worse a head for heights than anyone else raised up mostly at ground level, but this wasn’t something mortal man was meant to look upon — a thread of black stone, less than a yard wide, stretching impossibly far into the distance without buttress or brace to prop it up, no rail to break your stumble, and sickeningly uneven underfoot. While below, an awful shifting ocean of fire spilled from horizon to horizon, its scorching light a sickly amalgam of pus-streaked blood and fever sweat.
It stank, too; a rip-throat stench, vile as any sulphur spring. Between those virulent tongues of flame, countless shapeless forms writhed while screams struck upward, so skull-splittingly loud the wall of noise hit almost as hard as the heat.
Hell — true Hell at long last, straight out of the Book itself. One a’them like Ash was always rabbiting on about, in between the Thou-Shalt-Not chorus.
Gehenna, Chess could almost hear Rook rumble, as he went reeling down the bridge after Oona. Where the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abhominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone . . . . Revelation, darlin’. No man can pretend he doesn’t know his fate, he’s only got ears to hear.
Just shut up, you Goddamn man! Chess longed to scream, clinging precariously to his balance and his Ma’s ghostly hand. But demanded instead: “The fuck’s all this? What’s a Bible-thumper’s perdition doin’ down this-a-way, lodged fast in the Enemy’s own gullet?”
Ixchel’s voice, cooing up through his gullet: Tezcatlipoca, who — Mictantecuhtli’s claims to the title of Death’s rulership aside — truly contains all those gone on, since he is the very Night the dead swim in . . .
And you shut up too, you unhallowed bitch: shut up, shut up, shut up —
“’Ell should I know?” Oona yelled back. “Fings all run together down ’ere, if you ain’t already noticed — I’ve seen men runnin’ through the Dials what looked like bloody Swedes all got up for battle, or looked through mirrors an’ seen places like them Chinks talks about — rooms full of knives and snakes, and whatnot. . . .”
She glanced back over her shoulder, like she expected to find ’em nipping at her heels — and shrieked out loud, face spread flat with sudden terror, when she saw what really was. The sight sent Chess whirling ’round to deliver the same sort of back-kick he’d used to fell Doc Glossing’s corpse-doll, back in Mouth-of-Praise — ’til he caught sight of what he was about to go toe-to-toe with, and thought better.
That giant black thing already reared up cavern-roof high, one limb drawn back as if to scythe his head clean off at the shoulders with its foot-long talons, swept its blow instead near a yard too high; its great leg, lifting forward for a further step, snagged on Chess’s boot-heel, and folded. Released at last, Oona’s fright-yell disappeared into the cacophony as the thing overbalanced, staggered too far to one side, and went over the edge. It spun as it fell, topmost portion dimming to a vague point, oval enough to form some sort of head; the blank where a face should have been, which turned to Chess’s until for hal
f an instant, it was a face. A human face, bloodstained and familiar, contorted into something no longer sane beneath its over-groomed crown of Bushwhacker locks, with the wreckage of an officer’s grey shell-jacket flapping away on either side like dirty wings.
The name came up with an agonizing tug, yanked from his brain as if by hooks: Saul Mobley. Or — as Chess’d thought of him for half a year, before blowing out the back of his skull to escape his maddened death-charge plans, after which he’d never thought of him again — the Lieut.
So here’s where you fetched up, Chess thought, viciously, all mortar fire and smoke, worse by far than any earthly battlefield — you who wanted to fight on even after the War was lost, ’til all of us were dead, or crazy as yourself; almost got Rook and me hung, too, but not quite. Hope you relish it, you jackanapes motherfuck.
If there was recognition in that hate-crazed gaze, however, Chess couldn’t see it — the Lieut, or what little was left of him, was gone too fast anyhow, plunging into the inferno below. Chess stared after, a reckless mistake, as vertigo made him gasp. For an instant, the impulse to fling himself forward as well took hold, stomach seeming to float, bilious yet barely tethered, as if he’d already taken the final dive.
Then two small hands seized him by cheek and jaw, hauling his head back up for Oona to whack her forehead impatiently against his — a Bristol kiss, she’d called it, first time he’d run home with a split skull after having that same move demonstrated on him. And while no blood flowed, Chess’s eyes teared up, nonetheless.
“Ow, Christ! Son of a mother — ”
“Yeah, all that. Now stop sightseein’, pull yer bloody trousers up, and run!”
He opened his mouth to complain again, but realized she was right — for that familiar rhythm was once more coming up from behind, shaking the bridge like a twanged guitar string. The Dead Posse itself, closing in like nightfall. Morbidly curious, he squinted, trying to tell features at this rancid-lit distance, even as Oona tried her best to haul his arm from its socket.
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