His heart began, once more, to beat.
Morrow was helping Yancey up when it happened: Chess’s fall, Ixchel’s rise. Her last desperate grab for Reverend Rook, still on his knees, as if in unconscious mimicry of the pose Chess himself had struck just before worm-turning their battle his way forever — remaining hand on his nape, the other’s denuded stump thrust ’tween his jaws, prying them open like she meant to pull everything he had inside out of him by the tongue. Desperate for some final jolt to make a last stand with, and all unknowing that he was already sucked dry, forever.
Bent over his back monkey-style and snarling, as she did: You rose against me, husband, as you swore never to do. You know the punishment.
And the Rev, in return, plain as day: Oh, I know, ma’am, believe me. I know.
Even as Tezcatlipoca rushed to stop her, Ixchel reached deeper — deep enough to find Rook empty and, worse yet, cursed. Then realized, worse even than that, that the curse in question was already beginning to translate to her . . . to everything around her. Tezcatlipoca, as he laid a spectral paw on her shoulder. The very ground beneath their feet, that unsure spot where the Crack’s seam had been left yet unpicked when Clo Killeen brought Grandma’s suture-spinning spider down. Beneath them, the earth shivered and gave way — a sheer drop straight down into nothing, dark and cold and drear, all the way back to the Ball-Court, to Mictlan-Xibalba itself.
Ixchel fell, fast and hard: gone out of sight instantaneously, without last words of any sort. The cause of all their troubles removed forever in one swoop, with nothing — not a shadow, a rag or a bone or a hank of creepishly animate hair — left behind, to show she’d ever been there.
“Get back!” Morrow yelled as the schism widened, poised to yank Yancey’s arm, but she — as ever — was already three steps ahead, pulling him with her. Carver scrambled backward as well, just as speedily, hoisting Berta Schemerhorne over his shoulder like a sack; they made the nearest ridge and turned to see Chess still teetering at the abyss’s edge while the Enemy, poised at the pit’s edge likewise and watching what little purchase he had crumble away, turned to him with one final eerie grin, a tip of his metaphorical hissing blue-flame “hat.”
Well played, little brother, my sister’s husband’s husband! it said, with what truly did seem like genuine appreciation. Oh, how I have enjoyed you — enjoyed being you, in fact. Though I know, sadly, that you do not feel the same.
“Too Goddamn right, I don’t,” Chess managed, raising himself just a bit further into the air, Songbird-style; with a kick, he drove himself back from the pit’s lip as though he was afraid it’d exert some sort of gravity on him, an invisible quicksand suck. One dangling boot-heel brushed against Reverend Rook’s sleeve where he’d once more risen to waver at the very edge of the hole, bent in pain but doing nothing to assuage it, exhausted far beyond any concerns for his own welfare.
Yes. But now it is time to make an end to us at last, all three.
“The fuck you mean by that? Hey, answer me, you tricksy son of a — ”
Chess was yelling at the air, however, by this time. Since, before he was halfway done, the god of Night and Blood and Magic had already jumped in, too . . . disappeared out of sight with a similar lack of protest, a weird sort of panache, as befitted a creature naturally bent on foxing the whole world around it.
Now only the hole remained. The hole, and Chess.
And Rook.
Chess crossed his arms, heaved a sigh and half-turned, still aloft — studying Rook at an angle, obliquely, as though to distance himself until he felt able, at length, to offer up a begrudging hand.
“Long walk back to Bewelcome from here, if you ain’t got the juice to open doors between places,” he observed. “But I could get you there easy enough now, I guess, if I had to. And they’d probably have honest work to offer even you, considering the sorry state I hear you and yours left that crap-hole in.”
Though nothing else changed in his stance, bowed as he was ’round that hot spear of pain in his back — Carver’s bullet had probably bisected his shoulder blade, seeing his arm hung useless — Rook’s eyes shifted to Chess’s hovering figure, travelling sidelong and upward; gave him a look almost equally as long, as assessing. If Morrow could see them from this distance, he thought, he would probably find their quality strangely softened, now that the fierce halo of otherness that’d clung ’round the Rev from the moment they’d met was gone, never to return.
Certainly, in its wake, Rook himself could feel himself becoming nothing but a sad shadow of the man Chess had once known, back during the War . . . same one he’d taken a shine to, flirted with, killed over. Though God knew, he might well’ve done that last part anyhow, considering.
Chess, hung up from the heavens with his red hair a-glisten and his purple coat new-brushed, like it’d come right off the tailor’s dummy; Chess, green eyes narrowed against a light they seemed to share. And Asher Rook in his comparative shabbiness, his remade ordinariness — merely human again, after so long a time as priest, king, consort to two gods at once.
What could there possibly be for him now that would ever compare to this hole at his feet, the one he had helped rip in the world, especially when that was closed over for good?
“No,” Rook said, at length. “Not much call for a faithless preacher in a town that Word-ridden, even with their own minister laid up from havin’ his hand blown off. I believe I’ll have to decline.”
Chess’s brows lowered, brow wrinkling. “Don’t be foolish.”
A hoarse scratch of a laugh, the rope’s passage yet worn rough along every note. “Oh, I’m long gone way past simple folly, darlin’ — wouldn’t you say? Still, I did save your soul from Hell, after all, like I promised . . . and you got to keep your hexation, to boot. Told you so.”
“You didn’t do a thing to get me out of Hell, you great ass, ’cept for puttin’ me there in the first damn place. That was all me, with Yancey Kloves leading in front and my Ma kickin’ my ass from behind. And now look at you!”
“Look at me,” Rook agreed, smiling slightly, as if the idea of Chess being his destruction just warmed him through and through. “And look at you, too, Chess — oh, you are something, all right. Always were.”
That’s why I love you yet, darlin’, in spite of everything — always will.
He saw Chess’s gaze widen, then, like some sense of what Rook was contemplating had jolted itself through this hex-blind shell he now stood stranded in, encased away from the magic that should have lit his veins. As though they still knew each other so well, so intimately, they barely had to speak at all.
“You’re the only thing here I’ll miss, and that forever,” Rook told him, stepping backward.
Chess grabbed for Rook’s hand, quick-draw fast; snatched the air so shy of his fingertips that he could feel their warmth. But Rook opened his wide, the span of it wider than all ten of Chess’s neat pistoleer’s fingers put together, and was gone. By the time Chess dived for the Crack as well, already folding itself shut over the whoosh of Rook’s passage, he found himself caught fast in Ed Morrow’s bear-hug grip with Yancey holding on almost as tight from the other side, as he kicked and flailed and screamed.
“Let go of me, fuckers! I could still — ”
“Chess, you can’t. It’s too narrow, see? You’d never make it back up.”
“I could blast it open, catch him ’fore he reaches where they’re bound; Christ, I know the way, or close as! Let me GO!”
“Not gonna happen,” said Morrow, hugging all the harder.
Yancey nodded. “’Sides which, you pop it again, what d’you think’ll happen to the rest of us, given how much we already paid to get this thing closed? You really prepared to make everybody else suffer, in order to get your last chance at Rook?”
Chess cast her a glance full of all the venom he could muster, but she didn’t shrink an inch. It’s like you don’t even know me, he thought, grinding his teeth �
� but nothing came out, no smart words, not even a San Fran gutter insult. Just an inarticulate groan ratcheting up to some sort of howl that dinned so bad in his own ears, he found himself trying to bash his head outright against the scar-rucked ground.
“Was the whole world you just stopped from ending, Chess. That was a good thing, wasn’t it?” No reply, no reply. Simply Ed’s voice continuing in his ear, gentler and far more understanding than he deserved: “Well, wasn’t it?”
Followed by another voice still, faint and growing fainter, seeping up through the ground, into Chess’s aching temples. Which whispered, in a tone so full of affection he truly believed he’d someday surely want to take comfort in its memory, during the awful moment of his own eventual death. Impressed me, all right, that one said. But then, I always knew you had it in you.
“You fuckin’ liar,” Chess whispered back, rolling his tear-stained face in the dust.
Not on this, Chess Pargeter. I told you . . . if one of us has to be damned, let it be me.
“Liar,” Chess repeated, to no one, as Yancey and Morrow exchanged a pair of similarly baffled glances. “Bastard, fool, fucking stupid idjit — I would’ve took damnation, always, if I knew you’d’ve been there with me!”
Ah, but darlin’, I wouldn’t be, since that’s the institution’s whole point, as I think you probably know. Hell’s a prison fitted with nothin’ but solitary cells, where each prisoner makes his way back to God alone, for however long and hard a time it takes.
He saw himself as if from a great height, and wondered at the ridiculousness of it: heartless, restless, wicked Chess Pargeter, left behind yet one more time with the heart he’d so long sought — at such terrible cost — finally regained, finally able to feel it all once more, only to lose what made feeling matter. Chess brought low, furious in his prideful anger, with nothing to do about it but roll in the dirt and shriek. Lost, bereft, utterly alone.
“I give it up!” He roared, in desperation — unsure who he might be talking to, exactly, if not the God he’d never quite believed in, for all he’d seen small-g gods aplenty. “All of it, all this happy horseshit! I give it up, I give it back, CHRIST — ”
Too late by far, Chess; you can’t. This is what you are. Wouldn’t make any difference anyhow, even if you could.
“God damn you, Ash Rook! God DAMN YOU!”
Oh, I’m pretty sure He already has.
Those last words barely audible at all, a spray of consonants, petering off into silence.
With Ed and Yancey looking on, Chess gave yet one more coyote howl, then pulled his own ear-bob out and threw it down where the Crack used to be so hard it skittered ’cross what ridge of knit rock was left, leaving a trail of blood.
He tore at his own hair with both hands, utterly unheedful of any damage he might do himself, and cried out while he did it, like Rachel at Rama, “Ohhhhhhhh, that damn MAN! Lord God Almighty, Jesus Jesus fuck — what the hell’m I gonna do now, Ed, Yancey — what, for the love of Christ-shit-Jesus, without him to keep on runnin’ after? What’m I gonna do?”
Hammering on the ground with bloody knuckles ’til Ed grappled even closer hold of him from one way, Yancey from the other, and held on ’til his yells stilled to sobs.
So that by the time Hex City came back — slowly but spectacularly, by degrees, kept aloft with nothing but the combined willpower of a hundred oath-linked hexes — they found the battle over, the world repaired. And Chess Pargeter — former god of Red Weed and War-Lightning — collapsed in the wreckage, weeping in Ed Morrow and Yancey Colder Kloves’ arms, unashamed as a child.
The next day, Morrow and Yancey were gone, and Chess with them. But even had they been present to lend a hand, Frank Geyer thought New Aztectlan would still have required far more mending than its citizenry were currently feeling up to. The hex-folk in general, having gutted themselves to work their great translocation, had barely enough strength to keep breathing — not to mention that with the Crack sewn closed, they simply weren’t like to regain their personal power anywhere near as quick as they’d become used to being able to.
Eventually, seeing how little there was left by way of real food and supplies, Jonas Carver — last survivor of the Thirteenth still present — volunteered the now-empty Camp Pink, pointing out that the quartermasters’ tents were still well-stocked with all manner of usefulness: bandages, bottles of ether and surgical alcohol, provisions and water barrels, cots and blankets for the wounded, and so on. He, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, and Sal Followell organized the City’s small-folk, leading them out to scavenge the campsite.
Meantime, Comandante Delgado of the Mexican Imperial Army cloistered himself with his countrymen, including those poor souls who’d been Ixchel’s blood-cultists; Sophy Love, surprisingly, had joined in his crusade, ministering to men, women and children alike, treating wounds and counselling them on their bewildered loss. Geyer hadn’t known she spoke Spanish, but when he realized she’d borne Gabe with her all throughout, much became clear. Nothing was yet decided, far as he could tell, but it spoke well for Delgado’s common sense that even though he couldn’t possibly have grasped everything which had happened, he saw no fault in ceasing to fight when no enemy remained worth continuing on with. If today’s bloodshed did provide grounds for a true declaration of War some time in the future, therefore, it would not be at Delgado’s exhortation.
“The Carlotta colonist soldiers demand repatriation,” Sophy told Geyer, during a quiet break near noon. They sat at an outdoor trestle table brought back from Camp Pink, Gabe hungrily feeding at Sophy’s breast. “Back to Texas, with never a care for what agreements they break; just like all men, my Mesach excepted. Those benighted worshippers of Her, though, have so little left to guide them in this world, I misdoubt they have any clear idea where to go.” She paused. “Then again, Bewelcome is still on a new rail line, and has room for any who wish to stay.”
“You do know everyone there thinks you’re dead, ma’am.”
“Yes, and telling them otherwise will be awkward. But it’ll have to be done.” She sighed, looked down at Gabe — who had fallen asleep, happily sated — and rebuttoned her dress, briskly. “Perhaps it’s for the best we won’t be staying.”
“Ma’am?”
Sophy gave an impatient snort. “Our Oath, Mister Geyer. My son’s bound to Miss Songbird for life, or as good as, so therefore I am too, through him. And with Miss Songbird, in turn, bound to that heathen shamaness, Yiska . . .” Geyer noted with interest that she’d said “heathen” far more as absent habit than with any real judgement. “. . . well, they do seem to prefer not to settle long in any one place, whatever its virtues.”
Geyer hesitated, staring at the table-top. “Friend of mine told me one of his favourite jokes, once — he’d been a chaplain in the Union Army, back in the War,” he said at last. “He said to me, ‘Frank, do you know the one sure way to make God laugh?’” He paused until Sophy finally brought her gaze back to him, then finished: “‘Tell Him your plans.’”
Sophy blinked, gave an odd, abrupt sound that seemed half sob, half laugh, and wiped her eyes.
“For who knoweth the hour and the day, indeed,” she agreed.
As they sat there in companionable silence, meanwhile, Doctor Asbury bustled up, plunking himself down without waiting to be invited. In one hand, he held one of his Manifolds, a sheaf of scribble-covered paper in the other, which latter he brandished at Geyer as if it were a map to buried treasure, blue eyes alight with near-fanatical excitement.
“These measurements of the ambient ch’i confirm it! They match my calculations — not exactly, but so close as to preclude coincidence. Do you realize what this proves, Mister Geyer? That the relationship between magical energies is exactly that exhibited by Newtonian mathematics vis-à-vis gravity and mass! And this, in turn, only strengthens my primary hypothesis: that what we term hexation, ‘magic,’ must therefore operate not in antithesis to the laws of the physical universe, but in sym
pathy with them, even when it initially appears to break those same laws, completely!”
But Geyer had already stopped paying attention by the time he saw Thiel coming up behind Asbury, and stood to greet him. “George,” he said. “See you managed to make Doctor Asbury’s acquaintance without my help, after all.”
Thiel waved a dismissive hand. “Best laid plans, Frank, just like you said to Missus Love; don’t give it a thought.” He sat down, giving Sophy a respectful nod, and gestured Geyer back to his seat. “I was lucky enough to encounter the Doctor while he took surveys of the City’s, what would you say, magical geography? If his analyses prove correct — and so much of his work has, thus far — well, then . . . they open up some very interesting possibilities indeed, to say the least. For our nation, and the world.”
“Pinkerton thought the same, you’ll remember.”
Thiel’s face clouded. “Indeed. But that’s why you’ll need to be a part of it, Frank, from the very beginning — to act as my conscience, a true critic, a friend, rather than an underling. What the boss never had, in other words.”
The rest of it lay between them, unspoken: A check on me, if needed. To make sure things never go so far again.
Glancing up once more, Thiel recognized yet another approaching figure and stood, in reflex courtesy; Geyer mirrored him automatically, then saw why. It was Songbird, veiled in new-conjured red silk under an equally new-made parasol. Asbury, still intent on jotting the Manifold’s numbers down in his notes, did not notice until Thiel cleared his throat.
“Lady Yu,” he announced, loudly.
The Hexslinger Omnibus Page 103