by Gemma Files
“I took you under the earth, Lady, to your sanctuary ’neath the Temple,” said Rook. “You were near gone as made no never-mind; don’t surprise me you didn’t feel my sacrifices and supplications. Thought you might react better coming up where we went down.”
He dared one more swift lick of power, murmuring an verse of Genesis he’d always liked — “Then Jacob said unto his household, and to all that were with him . . . be clean.” — and swept the mud and dirt from her in one warm caress of shimmering air, re-gathering the warmth into both hands only to offer it up, going on one knee, like it was the proposal they’d skipped altogether.
Eternal instinct, along with the brutal hunger of the moment, betrayed her. Within seconds she had seized the dully glowing mass and gulped it back, throat bulging like a bullfrog’s.
Rook kept his head bent, carefully not thinking on the part of the verse he’d deliberately omitted: Therefore Put away the strange gods that are among you.
They had emerged before New Aztectlan’s closed gates, ceiba forest wreckage stretching away to left and right. Rook signalled the sentries above, then turned to look back out over the plain. “If the scouts read things a’right, Lady, that Mex battalion should arrive ’fore sundown,” he said. “They’re still intent on playing coy, so might be I can convince them to stall an attack; depends on whether this comandante Delgado carries as big a stick as he claims to.” He dusted his frock coat down by hand, not willing to draw more power, for risk of re-rousing Ixchel’s appetite. “With your permission, I should go meet ’em alone, seeing how I’ve strength enough to meet treachery and clout enough to deal honestly — ”
“No, husband,” Ixchel interrupted; she’d recovered enough of herself that her voice sounded something like human once again, though sick-grating. “The conquistador soldiers can wait. There is another treachery to face, far closer to hand . . .”
Everything in Rook’s guts froze up; he could feel the blood fall from his face. Oh, shit, was all he could think. Not now, not when the chance to act was so close! Besides which, he could have sworn she no longer had control enough to read him without him knowing it —
“. . . that of my brother,” she finished, at last.
Thank Christ.
Not looking back at Rook, she strode back into the City as its gates rumbled open. Which thankfully gave Rook a moment to master himself, before following.
He’d already sent word to the Council that all City-folk not directly involved in fighting take shelter, anyplace they could, and so far as he could see, that’d mostly held. But many — too many — were now emerging from their various hidey-holes to gawp down Main Avenue at the thing which’d forced itself up smack-dab centre in Temple Square, piercing that long, step-slatted black shadow like some foul bloom, spread sticky-wide and oozing with odd scent.
Not large, Rook saw, as he and Ixchel drew near, just a mound of Weed perhaps eight feet high and as many wide — verdant with new growth but slow-throbbing like some giant egg sac, fit to hatch any moment and pump out some fresh awfulness. Crimson flowers whirled, flared, folded all over, tiny mouths sucking hungrily with stamens and pistils alike fang-sharp at the hexation-rich air.
At the centre, the peak of its height, a tangle denser yet sketched a living, throne-like shape on which sat the Enemy, boneless-slouched as Chess himself might’ve, with one leg kicked over an arm of its living “chair” and its stolen head cocked on the opposite fist. It grinned down at them, slyly flirtatious.
“Took you long enough,” it said.
Honourable Chu, Sal Followell and the Shoshone all faced the mound, aglow with power, though Rook smelled none of the acrid thunderbolt stink of witchery anger-loosed; not yet come to blows, then — simply skirmish-ready, even in the midst of battle. Meeting Chu’s gaze, he nodded toward the busted-in wall, and saw that Celestial gentleman grimace in understanding. Lifting up airborne, he tapped his Injun partner on the shoulder as he did and waited for him to rise likewise, so they could hurtle back and fortify the breach before their newest enemies could take advantage.
Stepping into Chu’s vacated place, Rook glared up at the second body-thieving god it’d been his misfortune to meet up with in as many years. “This your plan all along, then?” He demanded. “Draw us into a fight with the Pinks, make us spend our strength, wait ’til our defences were down so you could finally just up and walk in, ready to destroy us all?”
To this, however, the Smoking Mirror merely chuckled, raising one of Chess’s red-gilt brows.
“Oh, Asher Rook,” it told him, “if you have still so failed to grasp what I have in common with your beloved boy, the very thing which makes him such a perfect vessel, then perhaps you have never understood either of us, at all. For this is the truth: since, with both of us, intention always gives way to instinct, no action of ours ever can truly rise to the lofty level of something like a plan.” Here it yawned, black shark teeth flashing, and added: “Besides which, as your minions here can tell you . . . I hardly walked.”
“Thing come up through the ground, like a damn fever blister,” Missus Followell cut in, angrily, “with Himself there riding it like his own personal cabriolet. And yeah, we all of us know your name, skin-changer, seein’ there’s one more like you told tales on in every place we hails from: coyote, crow, rabbit, spider, fox, whatever. But ain’t a one of us gonna honour such as you by speakin’ it, not ’less you make us.”
Tezcatlipoca cut a parody of Chess’s grin over at Ixchel — no cigar, yet well close enough to make Rook clench all over. “Such loyalty!” It complained. “How did you manage to win it, with so indifferent an investment? One more thing to credit that oh-so-able priest-king of yours with, perhaps.”
A taunt, meant to draw ire, if not outright blood. Yet the Enemy’s sister-mother-wife-and-all remained stock still, battered face showing not a hint of reaction — perhaps it couldn’t move anymore, Rook thought, beyond the minimum needed for speech.
“Don’t credit him alone!” Missus Followell snapped, fearless, without even a glance in Ixchel’s direction. “This here’s our place now, much as it is hers; we’ll see you out of it yet, or die tryin’, from the Rev on down. ’Cause that’s what happens when hex can stand with hex, finally — and after thirty-odd years abloom, if anyone knows how that’s worth bein’ killed for, I’m her, believe you me.”
“You almost speak as though she was of no consequence at all.”
And . . . now those fierce eyes did drop, finally, as though Sal herself realized she’d maybe gone too far. For which Rook found himself surprisingly grateful.
“Wouldn’t say that, no sir,” she told her feet, choosing the words with care. “Without the Lady, there wouldn’t be a City at all . . . we owe Her everything. That’s why we keep the Oath, after all.”
“Aaaah, yes. Your Oath.”
Such a strange note in the creature’s voice, neither mockery nor respect, but a strange amalgam of the two, with something else woven in beneath. A sort of yearning. Almost an envy.
Never had worshippers you didn’t have to lie to, huh, Trickster? Though at least you compelled ’em with sweet words and pretty pictures personally, I’m sure, ’stead’a getting someone else to do that for you, like some others I might mention.
Over this same thought, however — as though summoned by even the implication of her name, let alone its mention — was where he at last heard Ixchel’s voice intrude, hoarse yet clear, almost raw.
“‘My’ Oath is nothing new, brother . . . as you, like any of us, should know.” Now it was her tone caught Rook off-guard, for she sounded almost as she had in those very first days, when she’d been nothing more than a voice in his head — all impassioned, seductive persuasion. “More than anything else, it is only the old agreement returned in new vestments. Sacrifice as sacrament, true devotion, instead of necessity. Though blood flows still for blood, power for power, the result is shared, sustainable. None must die, though they are glad enough to do so.”
> “As you are glad enough to let them, my love — of that, I am most certain.”
Ixchel bowed her head, black cloud of hair falling only to drift upward once more, borne on a rising magical tide. “Surely. But you received your due share of ixiptla, gladly as any of us; you, too, flourished off the blood of those we now know to have been hexes-to-be, and like us all, worked wonders in return — preserving cities, renewing the land, shepherding the world through its seasons. Life for life, with pain the coin paid for existence. This has never changed and never will, since even the conquistadors’ creed admits the same, with their White Christ dying to bring rebirth! And thus it is we, we two, who are the very . . . gears of this Machine of my husband’s imaginings, its — workings, its . . . motor. We are the Blood Engine, ourselves.” Struggling for proper words, she came as far forward as she could without setting foot onto the Weed, stretching one hand up. Her pithed voice broke, almost pleading, as if she wanted to weep.
“It is not too late,” she told him. “Join me now, and all will be forgiven — we shall bring the Fourth World back or enter the Sixth, together. And it will be once more as it was, forever.”
As her voice died away, a silence grew, hollowing Hex City’s heart. Tezcatlipoca stared down at her; for once, his borrowed features wore no smile. Another clench of cold went through Rook — this thing was a liar, he had always known that. Might it change whatever passed for its mind, now, even on the very cusp? How rich a cosmic jape that would be: Chess’s betrayer — himself — betrayed, in turn, by the inhabitant of Chess’s stolen flesh.
“Oh, sister,” the Enemy replied, almost in a whisper. “You might make it as it was, indeed, even now . . . but not forever. For just as nothing dead returns for long, nothing can last beyond its appointed time: not you, not me, not all our buried kin, drowned down there in darkness. Nothing.”
“I do not — ”
It sighed. “I know, I know. And still I will try to explain, much as I know it unlikely to help, before we do what we must.
“Listen. From First to Fourth, our worlds grew up around us — we were made and re-made with them, as part of them. All we ever were was a frightful tale, told so often and so well that all who heard, believed it — and we, ourselves, believed it so strongly that we became it. Of course we are the Blood Engine; that is what we were created to be, by the very mortals whose blood we drank to empower ourselves. Ghosts of dead magicians-to-be, grown so fat in turn on others’ unexpressed magic that we warped the very world around us into our mirror, and looked to that mirror as ‘proof’ we were what we thought ourselves to be.
“So we gutted our people to glut ourselves, and grew so dependent on the Machine that when it collapsed — our weakened subjects shattered by the conquistadors’ plagues, their guns and their greed, far swifter than we had ever imagined possible — most of us simply dissolved into oblivion. Which is as it should be. Because, as it has always been my role to proclaim, all things end.”
Astonishingly, the Enemy’s voice took on a note Rook had never heard before, from it or Chess: almost sympathetic. “Our time has gone, sister. What is to come will be different, taking place in a world much larger than ours ever was.” It smiled. “I confess, I rather look forward to it.”
Ixchel gaped up at him. “But doesn’t it feel right to accept the tribute, brother? Doesn’t it feel good?”
At that, Tezcatlipoca really did laugh, a hearty guffaw which threw its head back, making Rook’s throat lock and his eyes burn — for that was Chess’s laugh, pure and unalloyed, in all its nasty glee.
“Of course!” the Trickster-god declared, when its mirth had slackened enough to allow it. “Yet the mere fact that we like a thing doesn’t make it the right choice. If it did, the world would run on fucking, and not precious victim-king-blood at all.” And here the laughter ceased, as it whispered, eyes locked on hers: “Oh, but wait . . .
perhaps it does.”
A moment of silence, only one. Then Ixchel screamed, as much a bitter wail of grief as anything else; went charging up the Weed-slope, smashing the Enemy straight off its throne in a brute, inelegant tackle, strategy-stupid as any drink-addled groggery thug. They rolled over and down, coming to a tangled halt almost at Rook’s feet. He goggled at the dustup, while behind him the City-folk hollered half in horror, half hysteria, like onlookers in any given saloon brawl he’d ever seen.
Ixchel got one leg between Tezcatlipoca’s — Chess’s — knees, and kicked him off, bodily. He cartwheeled through the air only to light down standing, conjuring something out of his palm with a fluid movement: long and thin, shining white, a scaled whip spun from congealed lightning ending in a snake’s crack-jawed head. The creature writhed tail-end from the Enemy’s hand, looped ’round its knuckles, blind skull splitting wide to reveal two layers of yellowed ivory fangs which dripped smoking liquid in time with its own teakettle hiss.
Rook braced for its next move, fingers popping with black and silver print, random words fizzing ’tween his nails like firework sparks: He The LORD Do not Saieth Wrath End Ruin —
But before he could even consider striking, however, the Smoking Mirror had already lashed out, throwing that snake like a vaquero’s rawhide — whipping an arc which sliced cleanly through Ixchel’s vessel’s neck as though every scale were diamond-edged, sending her head to bounce on the ground once, twice, ’til it fell over, eyes staring sidelong. The headless body dropped to its knees and held there, balanced, same as a coin fallen miraculously on edge.
Rook’s legs folded under him, as if all his strength had simply decided enough, and shut itself off; he thudded to the ground beside Ixchel’s popped-off skull, knees on fire, wondering if death was ’bout to seize him, too.
But not so much, no. For in the world they now shared, as already established, death did not mean as much as it otherwise might.
Instead, Ixchel’s eyes rolled to meet his, dread stare strangling a half-born shriek in Rook’s throat; she bit into her own lower lip and chewed, almost hard enough to sever it.
With black syrupy blood pouring down her chin, her impossible voice pounded into the Rev’s head, rail spike deep: Fool! He thinks to show me weak — prove him wrong!
Overcome by a dreamlike detachment, Rook somehow knew what to do without even asking — so he picked the head up by its tresses, coated his palm with blood and smeared it over the neck stump like caulking, then lofted it in a hexation-boosted throw toward the kneeling body, where it landed angled so as best to set vertebra to vertebra, neat as you please. While the smoking blood sealed together like boiling oil cut with molasses, Ixchel heaved herself to her feet, black-shrouded in counter-luminance.
Through jaws clenched so tight Rook thought they might have fused likewise, she grated out, “Not enough, brother. Not nearly enough.”
The grin the Enemy gifted her with, in return, seemed to rock ground and sky at once: purest berserkery, without any of Chess’s usual sense that no matter what, he would survive. This was a grimace which risked everything, at once utterly aware and utterly unafraid of mortality — its own, obviously, along with everyone else’s.
Very well, then, sister, it replied. We start over, though not in the way you mean.
And as she blinked her slow, dead lids at him, not understanding, Rook saw the Weed around him begin to flex, to stir . . . to grow.
Too soon, Rook thought, desperately. Christ Jesus Almighty blast other gods small and large alike, altogether! Too Goddamn soon, entirely.
He slid a hand into one pocket, reaching for the token he’d hid there: just a dried spruce wand, nothing to look at, a mere peeled twig — but trigger, nonetheless, for the mightiest spell Rook’d yet devised, so powerful he’d had to work it in careful stages throughout the night while Ixchel slept, weaving it into the wards over the entire City and tying its activation to a single, simple physical event, for fear she’d sense its presence. Worthless, perhaps, depending — yet it was all he had. So he braced his thumb on the wand’
s middle and pushed, felt it bend . . .
Then froze, as did both undead gods and all their watchers, as a sharp and steely call stabbed into every mind within the City’s walls. It had no words, only the simplest possible meaning —
Danger comes! Danger! To the East Gates!
A voiceless “voice” that carried the Honourable Chu’s unmistakeable harsh tones. And simultaneous with it, something else: a vibrant pulse, so deep as to be felt more than heard, the lowest string of some Titan’s harp plucked once and then again, each note just slightly louder. Sal Followell turned at its call, shoulders hunched and eyes wide to their whites, her fear freighted with an awful fatigue, thirty years’ worth of disasters in the making: What now, for all God’s love? What next?
“What . . . is that?” Ixchel rasped, echoing her, all unawares. And addressing the question neither to Rook nor any other human but to her fellow petty deity, with all the casual thoughtlessness of kin before strangers, as if their duel was already forgotten.
Rook, too intent to feel insulted, was already whipping back a reply to Chu, along the same channels: Mexes here already, that it? Laying down fire, preparatory to attack?
No. They are here — but —
A most curious sensation: Chu’s mind went blank and grey, an empty sheet, as if sheer bewilderment precluded any coherent image.
And almost simultaneously, the Enemy’s next words wiped Rook’s own mind equally blank, as it observed: Aha, I see. Interesting, indeed. The Crack . . . is closing.
Soft, and so awed that even the god’s infuriating sly glee had faded; the lightning-snake danced forgotten on its wielder’s palm, finally folding back inside once Tezcatlipoca remembered it the way a frog’s tongue retracts.
Impossible! Ixchel burst out, to which the other only shrugged.
And yet, it replied, dryly. Your yellow ancient sees it, from where he sits. Only wait long enough, look hard, and it will become clear to us all. Can you not feel the stitchery, rucking this crust beneath us like skin? Somewhere, someone — and I think we both know who — is sewing the grievous wound we gave this New World up.