The Hexslinger Omnibus

by A Book of Tongues; A Rope of Thorns; Tree of Bones; Hexmas; Like a Bowl of Fire; In Scarlet Town (Today) (epub)

  The challenge, this time ’round, had been to fashion and maintain the charm without his dread wife ever catching on to what he’d been up to; a calculated gamble, banking hard on her being distracted by her own decay, the cleverness of her gambit with Clo Killeen, her dreams of Chess’s imminent return and the Enemy’s threat alike. But then, Asher Rook had learned to account himself a fairly good schemer, well-versed in betrayal of every sort, particularly the most intimate. The kind that couldn’t ever be paid back, except in flesh.

  Only follow your own hungers, Tezcatlipoca had told him, through Chess’s wicked lips. If you agree to listen to me at the proper moment, to say what I tell you to whoever I tell you to say it to, then you will get what you want most.

  Well, here he stood on the precipice now, alone, with no still, small voice at all to follow, be it the Enemy’s or . . . any other. And yet — when he allowed himself to consider it just a bit further, he found himself fairly certain he already knew exactly what it was that bad angel “friend” of his had wanted him to do, all along.

  Rook let his head bow down, and felt a verse come on: The book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth . . . Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the LORD thy God is with thee, whithersoever thou goest. Joshua, 8 to 9. The quote lay cold behind his teeth, robbed of all magic, good or bad. Simply dead and gritty, ashy-tasting, a spent fire — his very tongue rejected it. Or were those God’s words which had rejected him, long since?

  But God turns away no one, he told himself, mockingly. Forgiveness for all so long as you own your sins, same’s the old creed claims, even hypocrite Antinomians; yeah, right. Like Chess always said — if things weren’t the same, they’d be different.

  But they ain’t. And time’s a-tickin’, even here.

  Flanked by Sal Followell and Eulie Parr, Rook opened up and cast wide while Ixchel’s faithful pack of self-cannibalizers stared stupidly on, sending his word-thoughts into the head of every hex New Aztectlan held — all those linked by the Oath, bound in their mutual promise to obey his every command as Priest-King, that lawyer’s loophole through which the Enemy had let in a wavering sliver of freedom-light just before it’d thrown him down and fucked him hard (admittedly, by his own invitation). And addressed his captive congregation out loud at the same time, in what he figured was like to be his very last sermon.

  “Ladies and gents, I have a plan to save us all, and no time to explain it. Granted, you none of you have any earthly reason to believe a word I say; can’t do much about that, unfortunately, not in the short space of time we’ve been given. Things bein’ desperate as they are right now, though, I’ll ask for but a single word alone, from each of you: no . . . or yes.”

  Eulie, softest of Fennig’s three ladies, stared hard at him, as though trying to read something written on the insides of his eyes; Sal’s own gaze seemed fit to bore holes, and damn sceptical, to boot. He could almost hear her gathering juice enough to spit.

  Yet it was the younger woman who answered, in the end. Saying: “Hank always used to say you was better than you thought, Rev — so for me, it’s yes.”

  Old Sal jolted a tad, at that — seemed as big a surprise to her as it was to Rook, frankly — but nodded, too. And the rest all followed astonishingly quickly, after that: Chu, the Shoshone, the blister-gals. Like watching a vote took long-distance, firefly flutter of signal-fires lit and doused, from wall to spider-, mortar-, train- and cavalry-damaged wall:

  Yes. Yes. (No.) (Absolutely not.) (Screw you, Reverend.) Yes, yes, yes . . .

  (Yesyesyesyesyes)

  Rook had the strange urge to weep, but tamped it down, hard.

  “All right,” he continued, instead. “Then as your king and Ixchel’s High Priest, on the Oath itself, I order you to take the City and go — anywhere. Don’t give me any details, just go, now. And for the Almighty’s own love, don’t look back.”

  Eulie blinked. “What about Her?”

  “She’s busy; probably won’t even notice what’s happenin’, ’til you’re already gone. If she does, I’ll try to throw a spanner in it. Either way, nothin’ you’re doing’s against her, so not a bit of it breaks your Oaths. Makes you completely safe from retribution, long’s you don’t come back ’til whatever happens next is done.”

  “And what about you?”

  “Do you care?”

  “. . . somewhat.”

  “Aw, that’s sweet.” It hurt to say, and more to see Eulie back-set so, but the last thing he needed now was more stupid loyalty. “Well, consider it this way: I didn’t bring her up, but I did help her stay. So when you think it over — ” Rook folded his arms, his voice raw sand on chalk. “ — I deserve just about anything I get.”

  A long silence, broken at last by dry-eyed, stone-steady Sal Followell.

  “It’s a fair-made point,” she said. “Get gone.”

  The pit the vanished City left behind was near a mile wide — shallow near its edges where Ixchel, Tezcatlipoca, the former Clodagh Killeen, and Chess stood with Morrow and Yancey Kloves sprawled out senseless beside ’em, deepening gradually toward the centre, then plunging into a lightless, bottomless hole at its very heart, from which air colder by far than the New Mexico winter wind still breathed. To get away from it, Rook willed himself forward, floating lightly over the wreckage of abandoned buildings toward his Lady and her foes; he took care not to meet Chess’s eyes, or even acknowledge him. Not time for that. Not yet.

  Ixchel took a stumbling step toward Rook, black eyes’ sclerae gone finally yellow, cataracting over. It struck Rook that at last, she actually looked something like that broke-apart figure on the “smoking mirror” Songbird’d once given him, with its triangle dugs and dagger earrings. Shrunken up and clumsy, with nothing at all that Rook could recognize of poor dead Miz Adaluz left, but for maybe the skeleton that kept her upright.

  “How . . .” she whispered. “Where — where did they . . . ?”

  “Ma’am, in all honesty — I haven’t the foggiest.”

  “They could not have done this without your permission. Not and expect to live.” Now that she was using her lips to talk with again, her voice was neither the clear bell of the ghost-girl in his first visions nor Adaluz’s rich huskiness — it was creaky, painful, the buzz of something ancient and desiccated, taking audible effort to raise its volume over her insect-cloak’s chatter.

  Rook nodded. “You’d think. But then again . . . maybe they all just got tired enough of your company to risk it, just the same.”

  Fury distorted Ixchel’s skull bones and face-hide, making them groan and snap like warped wood; she raised her crooked fingers at him, protruding bones sharp as claws. “You — ”

  But here the air between them darkened, as Tezcatlipoca transposed himself, massive as a storm. Murmuring, in Ixchel’s barely attached ear: I believe you may have a more pressing problem to deal with, sister.

  Chess looked where the thing he’d had to evict from his flesh was pointing, and laughed outright.

  “Seems like,” he agreed. “’Cause — that bitch of yours? She don’t look happy.”

  For it was true: something had shifted, not only inside Hex City but inside Clo’s star-demon form, as well. And while everyone else stood transfixed by the spectacle of an entire fortress’s unannounced departure, Clo had writhed in the throes of a very different sort of epiphany — the sudden release of everything Ixchel’s curse had robbed from her. Now she was giving Ixchel full benefit of the same rage-mask face she’d shown so many others, earlier today. And though her eyes and joints still flared, blood-splattered jaws split by too many teeth and hair a mane of foulness with her hands poised for tearing, a spectral vulture’s talons, she nevertheless looked much more like the buxom Irish lass Hank Fennig first introduced Rook to than she had for . . . hours, now. Hours, only.

  Made sense, for all it wasn’t like Rook’d calculated on it happening. Since Ixchel had pirated t
he whole City’s power to bring Clo over as tzitzimihtl, it followed that when the City absented itself, that bond she’d fashioned would disappear right along with it. Most ’specially since (as proven, time and time again) magic’s true “logic” was purely metaphorical: this for that, this into that, this as that. Professor Asbury — whom he’d glimpsed on his way down, bird-dogging the proceedings with a look on his face that said Oh, if I only had my instruments! — would probably explain it much better, Rook was sure; might even write a monograph on the subject, if they all survived the next few minutes.

  Jesus, Rook thought. What amazing Goddamn damage we’ve wreaked on this world, Herself and me, in such an amazingly Goddamn short time.

  “Why do you regard me thus, daughter?” Ixchel asked Clo, toneless.

  Only to have her spit blood at her feet — her own and others’, well-admixed. And snarl, in reply: “Ye pinch-faced hoor! You killed my babe, or good as . . . made me kill my Hank. You made me eat him.”

  “But that was only your new nature, asserting itself,” Ixchel said. “The tzitzimime devour everything, as only befits sisters of the First Sacrificial Knife — they tidy the universe’s leavings, ushering us all to our end, and these are Ending Times. Another world grows, and beckons; you have become one of the mechanisms which will take us there. A great honour! Can you not feel it, even now?”

  Clo heaved a long sigh, packed full of every sort of sorrow. The sound swept through Rook, plucking at strings he’d thought gone dead; hell, even Chess seemed to feel it. Yet Ixchel stood untouched as a stone in the midst of that flood, ’til Clo lifted her head once more, face scarred by her own tears, and whispered — in a voice that could have stripped not just paint but probably stone, as well —

  “. . . yes.”

  An instant later, she had already swept by her unsuspecting maker in an all-blade storm, stripping one side of Lady Rainbow’s defective vessel to the bone almost too fast to properly perceive; peeled her like a fruit and anatomized the rest, deeper than any textbook. The result was horror laid atop of horror — Ixchel threw up a hand only to watch the bones of it hurl free, no longer strung together by tendons, or even gristle. At the sight, her remaining eye fair started from its socket, while the raw hole on the other side matched it for roundness, if not for expressivity.

  You dare —

  Clo’s rabid slaver-grin turned actual smile, just for that moment — full of snap, the way a young girl’s should be, dead and damned or no.

  “Oh, I do that,” she returned, striking up a pose for the next go-’round. “Aim t’rob you of all you did me, if I can, though I doubt it’s possible — not since you never loved no one in your whole existence, you gutter-trod rag of a Devil’s saint. But if nothin’ else, it’ll do me some small good t’try.”

  An exhalation, then: one breath between breaths, poisoning the air between ’em with decay’s purest perfume. Rook knew it came from Ixchel without having to look — had sampled it himself a time or two, between engagements. From what he’d gathered, it meant she’d reached a decision.

  And after all the trouble you went to! he thought, mouth curving bitter. Woman — creature, thing, woman-shaped like you are — were I one tenth only of the man I used to think I was, might be I’d even pity you.

  Right there, within ten feet or three good strides, Chess stood once more corporeal and destruction-bent, watching carefully for his opportunity; Rook ached all over to touch him, just for the pleasure of getting slapped. Still, there’d be plenty of time for that later — since, at Chess’s back, he could already see the Enemy lean in close (having shifted positions sometime within the last few seconds, like some sort of ink-shrouded octopus) to hiss some more advice its “little brother’s” way. Wait and see, maybe. This is your chance, probably.

  Kept close tabs on its game pieces, did the old Night Wind, especially while in play — and Rook had already done his duty. No need to send any more attention his way, when Chess made for a perfect substitute.

  Gods or goddesses, you just can’t trust ’em. Cheatin’ Goddamn creatures.

  And thus it was here, now: giving her trademark steam-whistle shriek, meanwhile, Clo came back in with everything she had, bound and determined to break the rest of her formerly beloved “mother” down for parts.

  And Black Rainbow Ixchel, Mother of Hanged Men, Moon Lady, Gods-Eater, Long Black Hair of Death — six-in-one and a half-dozen of the other, risen up from Mictlan-Xibalba’s clammy depths on will alone, to carve the world that’d forgot her back into her own reflection —

  — struck down her own best handiwork with one black blast that left her crisped whole, an ash sculpture whose very momentum was enough to break it apart, irreparably, on the wind. A stinking fog hot with rageful pain crashed over them all, stabbing deep into nose and eyes yet clearing almost immediately, without ill effects. And when it did, there was nothing at all of Clo to be seen anymore, not even the smallest particle.

  As might only be expected, such a lavish expenditure cost Ixchel dear. Rook saw the after-shock take her right in the stomach, the throat, the ribcage she’d grown extra-thick with more bones than any human needed, just to keep Chess’s stolen heart from eating itself free and taking off running. She cracked open entirely all ’cross the boards, wounded side first, a seedpod spewing awful pollen — then twisted at the waist like someone was crumpling her, wringing her out from the inside.

  Hamstrung, Ixchel fell to her knees, shattering one, and vomited, long and loud: not food, obviously, nor blood. Not even hex-stuff — this was something far worse. An endless, coring stream of matter that oozed and writhed, taking on shapes only to lose them again, like wax in a fire. The bulk of her hair fell forward, struck limp, only to be snared by this boiling mess; the seized locks shrivelled and split, changed, degraded.

  With each fresh retch, Ixchel herself seemed to thin, all over — to lose heft, substance. Rook found he could glimpse the spine through her skin, that filmy imitation of clothing she wore worn away, leaving her naked. Then something else, in the dip between her stunted-wing shoulder blades — something familiar, though he himself had only ever heard it described by a dead man — a dapper young New York cynic who’d lived carefully opportunistic almost to the last, yet nevertheless somehow managed to die for love.

  Cannibalism, theophagy . . . that’d be why she has a hole she can’t fill, no-how and with nothin’. ’Cause takin’ a bite out of them took a bite out of her.

  Again, Rook found his eyes pulled over to Chess, like they were on strings. And watched the Enemy’s mouth move, knowing in his heart what it was it must be saying.

  As I told your soldier and that man of yours likewise, little brother, so I now tell you — this is your moment. Do as your instincts tell you, and get what you want most.

  “Better be talkin’ ’bout my heart, is all I’m gonna say.”

  Certainly I am. Yours, along with the hearts of many others, all kin to she and me. And you have only to do the work . . . reach in, reach deep, and . . . pull them out of her.

  It all came down to instinct, for Chess, in the end — gunplay, love, magic, life itself, he’d blundered through them all on reflex and intuition, because (he’d always believed) when a second’s hesitation got you dead, it was quicker and easier just to move on from your screw-ups than to waste time tryin’ not to make ’em in the first place.

  As Ed might have observed, though, if he’d been awake: There’s a word for a man won’t take time to do a job right, ’cause he don’t feel like owning up to it if he does it wrong. And if the hell Rook and Chess had both made of their lives had taught Chess anything at all, it was that those weaknesses you wouldn’t admit were the very things bound to get you, in the end.

  Smoking Mirror’s (never entirely well-meant) advice aside, therefore, when Chess took five quick running steps and leaped onto Ixchel, he hadn’t entirely trusted instinct to guide him. He’d timed his assault not for the moment she’d lain
most helpless but to catch her in the second she began to rise from that pool of greyish-black hex-vomitus, because he knew through long experience how that was the moment when a human body — something he wagered Ixchel had never quite remembered how to live in — was most off-balance. Must’ve been the right choice, after all, for he bowled her over easily, cutting her outraged cry off by driving her face back down into the dirt.

  If she’d been mortal, or he’d still had Kees Hosteen’s knife, he’d have punched her naked ribs at that point, ’til something gave or he got thrown off. But that instinct was pointless too, and he threw it aside. Even the now-familiar hex-hunger, that ravening vacuum in his gut which longed to batten on lamprey-like and suck, he denied, since trying to take her power that way would only open him up to her again. Instead, he brought his right fist back, then drove it — index knuckle extended slightly to concentrate all its force, along with his own hex-power, onto one point — straight down between her shoulder blades, just to the right of her spine.

  The awful crunch his fist made as it penetrated almost made him want to retch himself. Skin and bone broke like sugar; when Chess yanked his hand out, a double palm-width of rib and hide flipped off along with it, bursting to dust the ground. The goddess wailed, a piteous, ear-scraping sound. But there was no mercy in Chess now, not even anger — only determination, ruthless and inexorable, to see this done. Over with.

  He reached in, fingers blazing with hexation; grabbed something that felt like a handful of cobwebbed lace twined with sickeningly moist, hot sinew and hauled, with all his strength.

  What came out was more heat-shimmer than substance, flickering in and out of being. Chess thought he saw a woman’s face rippling in it, dead and still, a rope around its neck, while alien sigils whose meaning he understood all the same burned briefly into his eyes: Ixtab, Rope Woman. Then it dissolved, and was gone. Snake-quick, Chess dove in again, tore out another handful, producing a second ghost-cloud: Chalchiuhtlicue, Jade Skirt, this one named itself, shining green for one brief moment, before it fled likewise.