by Gemma Files
— Ixchel, Lady of Traps and Snares, the Goddess of the Rope, suspended there between sky and earth like Juno enchained. Looking genuinely eerie in the storm’s shifting light, an icon shadowed with tarnish like gangrene, lambent skin slightly fallen in over the moon-sharp points of her black-spiralled cheekbones, her chin, the sunken orbits of her eyes. Somehow visible in clear detail to them all, despite rain and distance; as angels and saints were said to be, in legends. Yet not even the reaping angel of Egypt’s firstborn could seem so dark as this.
The new preacher muffled a tiny squawking sound; Asbury’s jaw dropped and Langobard gaped. Sophy’s face slackened in the first thing resembling true fear Rook had ever seen from her. In her arms, Gabriel screamed on and on. Even Rook’s hexmates were silent — Fennig audibly swallowed, and Clo crossed herself in what must be sheer childhood habit, the gesture giving Rook a sudden pang. Only Morrow did not turn, though he tightened his eyes near to slits, as if fighting the pull with everything he had.
“Did you really think,” Rook asked Sophy, “if I decided this job was big enough to come in on myself, that she wouldn’t come in on it with me?”
“As I’d heard, was you she once trusted, to do her dirty work.”
“Oh, that’s still true, in the main. But actually, it was her idea to pull Bewelcome back down, in the first place — let many waters quench Love, in literal as in figurative, and make a clean sweep. And in this, as in all things, we are her creatures.”
“That’s nothing to boast on, Reverend.”
“Ma’am, I don’t disagree.” Rook sighed, suddenly sick of this game. “You and I know that even such a deluge as this won’t end this town completely, not so long as its people have you to look to, for inspiration to rebuild — so I’ll make no more false offers concerning your life.” He willed more power into his shields until they blazed, looking to fend off whatever attack Morrow might mount in return. “Instead — surrender, let us end you clean here. I’ll guarantee young Gabriel grows up safe and sound. Swear it on my power itself, if you wish it — and there’s more happens when a hex breaks an oath than you know.” He extended his hands to either side; Fennig took one, Clo the other, their force-bubbles bleeding together into a single crackling halo, hissing with rain-steam. Behind Clo, Berta and Eulie put their hands on her shoulders, adding their strength to the moil.
On the horizon, the raindrops around Ixchel turned to swarming dragonflies, their buzz rising up in a deadly drone even through the thunder; light rippled beneath her, horizon turning fluid. And below that, a rumbling, more felt than heard.
Rook held Sophy’s gaze with his own. “Missus Love. Please.”
If she’d reacted differently, Rook was to think later — turned to rage, broke in pleading for Gabriel’s life, or tried at the last to bargain or persuade — he might’ve acted faster. But Sophronia Love only cuddled her screaming baby close, stroking Gabriel’s head. Face calm with a serenity he had never known, she looked up over his head, dismissing Rook entirely.
“The Lord is my shepherd,” she began, quietly, yet bell-clear. “I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me — ”
“Stop it!” It was Clo shouting, angrier than Rook had ever heard her; startled, he felt the sudden nauseous shift of power through his gut as her fury wrenched control of the conjoined hexation away. “Shut your hole, ye Protestant hoor! Shut it!”
“ — beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: He leadeth me in the path of righteousness for His name’s sake — ”
Above the prayer, Clo screamed on. “I’ll have your tongue out by the roots, yeh rotten mab!” The power spit and flared, sliding out of Rook’s grip entirely, as Fennig, Berta and Eulie all shouted unheard pleas. “I’ll wear your guts for garters! Stop that!”
“ — though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me; Thy rod and they staff, they comfort me — ”
Clo drew back her hand, then flung everything all five hexes had gathered at Sophy Love in a single roaring blast — but in the instant before it struck, light burst outward from Sophy’s arms, enveloped her and vanished into nothing, taking her with it. The fire blew through the empty stage, sending Langobard sprawling and the preacher diving to either side, leaving only a broken pile of smoking planks in its wake — but nothing of either mother or child. Clo’s scream took on a new note of cheated indignation.
Rook had enough time to think, I . . . didn’t do that! before three thunderous cracks of shotgun shells shattered the Irish gal’s howling. Lulled by the same automatic disdain for gunfire they’d all learned long since, he turned to slap Morrow down, just a hair too slow — and saw Fennig twist away, narrowly avoiding death as his specs blew off his face in a burst of wire and smoked-glass shards. A second shot whined past Rook’s ear like a hornet. He felt the third shot before he heard it, first punching straight through his own shields, then in a searing slice across his shoulder.
A skirling shriek cut through his brain: distant Ixchel, sharing his pain through their bond, blind with the hot hate Rook himself was too stunned to feel. Instead, he flung the crudest hex possible in Morrow’s direction, sending chairs and benches scattering, but Ed hurled himself backward, out into the rain and the dark. A buzzing surge of amazed, shocked delight caught from Asbury, of all people, washed over Rook at the same moment, resolving spark-fast to some sort of psychic memory echo, perhaps from Morrow’s experiences in Tampico.
As any wire of iron or steel grounds the galvanic energies of lightning, or similar phenomena, so a certain alloy of silver, iron, and sodium in its metallic form serves to ground magical energies where they manifest, conducting them away to discharge harmlessly. . . .
Flipping, magic-lantern-like, to another image: Asbury on the war-bought train depot platform earlier that day, handing Morrow a small box of gleaming shells. These are experimental, Agent, too expensive as yet for mass production. But they should pierce any conjured barrier, though the side effects of disrupting particularly powerful castings may be somewhat . . . unpredictable. . . .
Meanwhile, he saw that Ixchel had already let loose the flood, sending waters pouring down the valley and racing across the plains. Rook heard screams rise up from the townsfolk outside, frozen where they stood while doom came thundering down upon them, and felt Ixchel’s rage like his own, inhumanly ancient, monstrously deep.
Remove yourself, little kings and queens, for this city ends now — now that they have dared to thwart My wishes, to strike at My high priest.
Not a moment’s concern in that sending, though — no care for him, for Fennig or the girls, for how close they had all come to death. As Berta went to support Hank while Eulie staggered under Clo’s weight, pulling her back from the stage, Ixchel stayed safe inside her vortex, not reaching out even a tendril to pluck them from harm’s way. Simply trusting they would save themselves, or deserve their own deaths.
Join me in the heavens, therefore, to watch our vengeance.
Rook fought down the pain with a groan and flung out his power to seize all the others at once, hauling them up into the sky: ten yards, twenty, thirty. High over Bewelcome’s rebuilt steeple, the five hexes clung to one another, watching the massive torrent boil and roar toward the town, and then splash upward, slamming into a barrier that ripped out of the earth on all sides in a single thick wall of hot-pulsing life like a vast bank of flayed muscle encircling Bewelcome, guarding it. More great slabs of the stuff — the Red Weed, Rook realized — slapped upward like giants’ hands, sending massive gouts of water into the sky to arc over the town, spraying wide and harmlessly. And in the town square beneath, another crack of lightning revealed a figure Rook knew had not stood there a scant second before, a figure he could barely see and yet knew in an instant, without needing to: small, slim, hair fire-touched in the hissing light as it looked up, grinning.
Chess —
“REV, LOOK OUT!”
Fennig’s yell c
ame too late — a huge surge of water had already struck the group, knocked them all spinning sideways, snapped apart. Rook saw poor Clo slam heavy into the church’s steeple, breaking bones and wooden beams alike, even as instinct told him to break his fall by grabbing at the air itself. He hit the town square’s mud in a roll, breath knocked from him with a thud, and lay still a moment, fighting for his wind. Then rolled over with a grunt of effort to find Fennig kneeling by him, face oddly young and naked without his specs.
“Henry! You harmed?” At Fennig’s headshake: “Then what in God’s name happened? Was it you smote the Widow, before Clodagh could?”
“Not me and none of us, ’cause wherever she’s gone, she ain’t been harmed — I’d’a seen, she was!” Grabbing Rook’s shoulders, the younger man leaned in close: “That boy of hers, though — I saw him flash as it happened, like bottle lightning.”
“Meaning?”
“He’s a hex.”
Jesus! That young? Could it even happen? Well, Clo’s belly shot out sparks whenever she got going. . . .
But here solid, squelching footsteps broke Rook’s daze as Morrow strode to them, shotgun levelled. Certain now of its efficacy, his eyes were steel-hard. “Rev, Mister Fennig — stand down, if you please.”
Rook looked round. From the wrecked main hall, the young minister — Catlin, his name was, Rook now recalled hearing — and Asbury had emerged with Langobard balanced between ’em, that New York fop with his notepad right behind, still scribbling. Catlin had purloined the mayor’s Manifold, which was chattering in his hand, frenzied by the hexation hanging thick in the air. Around them, blue-coated soldiers had materialized, all of them Negroes; their guns were levelled too, though Rook felt confident only Morrow bore a weapon of any import. One of the soldiers might’ve been that same young man he’d seen fleeing at Morrow’s side, just before they’d ripped the hall’s roof off. Beside him, a taller officer wore the epaulettes and stripes of a Union captain: Washford, Rook remembered from the intelligencers, Isaiah Washford.
The young soldier whistled, admiring Morrow’s work. “Like to get me one of those shells, sir, you got any spares goin’ beggin’.”
“You’ll have to talk to Doc Asbury ’bout that, Private Carver,” said Morrow.
Gathering what dignity he could, Rook slowly regained his feet. “Gentlemen,” he said, in his deepest voice, “the Professor’s devices notwithstanding, you still cannot hope to resist my Ladyship’s power. . . .”
But his sonorous declamation trailed off as he looked skyward, to see — nothing. Only the rain and the black night sky.
Fennig, following his look, clenched his jaw. Blue light blazed in his eyes.
“Bitch up and left us,” he observed, unnecessarily.
On the meeting hall’s wrecked front steps, Catlin suddenly began to laugh, hysterically. “See!” he cried. “The Devil abandons his servants, at the first good show of righteousness! I told you all we had to do was be strong in our faith, and — ”
Even Asbury looked disgusted. But the speed and fury of Fennig’s reaction caught everyone flat-footed; he turned with a glare, sending that same blue glow arcing straight at the idiot. Reflexively, Catlin flung “his” Manifold up; the light smacked into it and locked fast, discharging harmlessly into its whirring gearwork.
Agape, Catlin burst out into the same maniacal racket. “For behold, my God is a righteous God!” he choked, as Fennig sent ever more power at him, the Manifold’s buzz rising higher while Morrow, Washford, Carver stared on, mesmerized. “I shall fear no evil, not while I walk in His sight — ”
“Mister Catlin!” Asbury shouted. “Reverend, sir, you haven’t the training to — you don’t, you can’t — ” Abruptly shoving Langobard at the notepad scribbler, he didn’t wait to watch them hit mud before flinging himself backward, with a yell: “Everyone, take cover — !”
At which point the Manifold, overloaded, exploded in Catlin’s hand, blowing most of it off. He sat down hard, blood gouting from his left wrist’s wreckage.
With one forceful sweep, Rook smacked Morrow backward into the mud, sending the gun flying; two more tumbled most of the soldiers like ninepins. He pulled Fennig back, sprinting toward the steeple base, where Berta and Eulie were hauling Clo up. All three were sodden and filthy; Clo hung with her legs spread wide, and Rook’s heart clenched to see a dark stain spilling inexorably between them. Face bone white to the lips, her huge stomach glowed, swelling and pulsing, a swallowed star.
Eulie clung to her, weeping. “Sissy, sissy — oh, God! Don’t give up, now. . . .”
“I don’t feel well,” Clo replied, voice small and bewildered. “Is it . . .
s’posed t’be like this?”
Rook’s throat clogged up. Damn Ixchel, he thought, not caring if he was heard. Damn all gods and monsters. Like us. Like me.
Then, wounded shoulder burning, he glanced around, wondering if any of the soldiers had regained their feet, or Morrow his hex-killer gun . . . and locked eyes straight on with the figure standing in the mud not ten feet from them, clad all in purple shreds and lightning.
This close, in the awful light from Clo’s stricken, labouring womb, the blue tint to his skin glowed like alchemist’s venom; Weed twined up and down each limb, a mesh of skull-fragment armour hung with old ivory shards, red flowers like jewels swivelling to hiss at Rook’s approach. And when Rook took a single, truncated step more in his direction he smiled, revealing teeth like obsidian flakes chipped triangular, the hungry malice of it so close to what Chess’s smile had once been that Rook felt his groin clench and his pulse leap. Yet the eyes, the absinthe green eyes, were . . .
No. Not him, at all.
And — whose fault is that, exactly?
Rook’s arousal died. Behind those empty eyes, something inexpressibly weary pressed its unnatural weight upon the earth.
I raise a mirror to you, priest-king, his Enemy said, softly. Do you see yourself?
To which Rook only shuddered, bursting head-to-toe with cold, and grabbed for Fennig’s hand to connect them all again. Ripped the air open headlong, bridging the miles back to Hex City in a single spasm of shared pain.
Thinking, at the same time: Oh Chess, oh darlin’. What the hell have I done?
No answer seemed forthcoming, if there even was one.
Morrow trudged stiffly toward the Chess-thing, shivering himself as it turned to fix him with that horrifying, black-glass grin. Barely aware of Asbury stumbling up behind him, he bowed his head, and rasped: “Thank you.”
It chuckled. “So polite. This, I hope, puts paid to any notions you may have that I am allied in any way with Reverend Rook, or the Lady Ixchel? For as I have said, many times before: I am their Enemy.”
“Ours, too,” said Morrow, through dry lips.
“You remember, soldier! Yes, yours too. Everyone’s. Which is why I will not tell you where your Missus Love has gone.” Then, as cheerful-flirty as Chess himself might, it winked at him — while to Asbury, it simply gave a cool: “A clever working, Professor. Very . . . interesting.”
And sank back down through the ground, leaving nothing behind but lightning twisting itself dark in the mud, a wet mess of fuses.
Asbury stared at the spot, blinking. “Why — would he do that?” he asked, presently.
“Why’s it do any damn thing?” Morrow sighed. “’Cause it’s what we wouldn’t expect.”
He trudged to what was left of the church steps and sat down, too tired to stand another minute. Couldn’t hear Catlin’s screams anymore; whether that meant he’d died or been helped, Morrow couldn’t tell, and didn’t much care.
Asbury followed, looking dubious. “You know him best of all of us, I suppose, Mister Morrow.”
“Chess, maybe. But like I said . . . that ain’t him.”
He broke open his shotgun, ejected the empty shell casings and began to wipe the mud from the stock and barrel. And froze, Asbury along with him, as a soft but undeniable voice echoed up through
both their skulls:
Are you so sure of that, conquistador?
CHAPTER SEVEN
Down under the black water of Mictlan-Xibalba, sinking deep and deeper, to truly unreckonable fathoms. That was where Yancey glimpsed Chess Pargeter, yet once more: sitting next to a woman she could only assume was his mother, red-haired as himself but wasted from the inside out, who either squinted up at Yancey sourly or gave an occasional broke-toothed sneer of secret knowledge, like she was reckoning odds. While the little pistoleer, on the other hand, simply looked right through her, when his gaze chanced to fall Yancey’s way at all — then sighed, took a shot of not-whiskey from his phantom glass and turned to stare glumly out the window once more, watching Seven Dials’ ghosts pass by.
Made no difference at all how Yancey called and yelled at him, not even if she broke down and begged outright; Chess might hug himself a little, like he’d felt a draft, or a goose walking over the grave he’d never yet lain in. And then Yancey would feel Songbird and Grandma reel her back up by the silver cord she’d come down on, vaulting levels ’til she thought her chest would crack and her eardrums burst. ’Til she emerged at last from the latest inconclusive session atop Old Woman Butte, sweat-drenched and head banging, only to look up and see the hexes scowling down on either side of her again — equally annoyed (in their very different ways) by her consistent failure to make Chess even register her presence, let alone communicate with him directly.
Crossed legs all pins and needles, Yancey unfolded herself with a grunt of pain, fighting the urge to vomit. The fire had long since died to ashes, leaving them only shapes and sketchy gleams in the starlight.
“‘Dead-speaker,’” Songbird spit out, scornful. “How polite you are! Inefficient, as well; ghosts need a heavier hand, a master’s voice. When you travel through the Ten Thousand Hells you must threaten, not wheedle.”
“Don’t notice you stepping in for a turn,” Yancey replied, face gone hot.