A Tree of Bones

by Gemma Files

  Well played, little brother, it told Chess, with a wink. And vanished from sight, before Ixchel could do much more than goggle.

  Then Chess glanced back down, and grimaced at the damage Morrow and Yancey’d done themselves, glee dissipated by dismay. With one hand-flick, he sealed Morrow’s wound; a second closed up Yancey’s arm, stemming the tide.

  Then came something Morrow truly didn’t expect: Chess lifted his hands, flattened them into blades and brought them down, short and sharp, like an axeman cutting ship’s line. Pain backlashed, hammering Morrow’s head; too weak to move, he could only groan, realizing by the sudden absence in his mind just what Chess had to’ve done.

  Why would you — ?

  Ixchel shook her head, slowly. “Fool,” she rasped. “Twice fool, to cast away your last priests! How will you be renewed? How can you live, with no heart and no new form waiting in your cycle? When you exhaust the last of what you have now, you will die, surely as you should have in the Moon Room, when your lover cracked your breastbone.”

  Chess turned to face her. “S’pose that’s about right,” he agreed. “’Cause if my friends get to your Moon Court, like I’m bettin’ they will any second, that’s the exact state they said you’d be in. Not to mention how, since your friend and mine kept on sowin’ all this time he’s been wearin’ me for pyjamas, I still got a whole shitload of Weed all ’cross this state to pull on. Lose your City and your Court along with it, though, and what’ve you got to draw on, exactly?”

  There wasn’t quite enough mobility left in Ixchel’s face to show fear — but as she threw her head back to scream at the sky: “Daughter! To me!” — the terror which suffused that shout might’ve almost been the sweetest thing Morrow had ever heard.

  For a half-second, anyhow. Until rubble-dropped Clo Killeen hurled the massive block of stone pinning her off and rose back up looking almost good as new, undead demon that she was, snarling loud enough Ed could hear her from where he lay.

  Ah shit, was all he had time to think, then blacked out as well.

  Inside Hex City, Mexes, Texicans and hexes were fighting equal-hard, carving out a truly hellish scene. The spider, once mounted, proved an odd ride indeed — broad-set and hairy in ways that rubbed painfully, ass-end canted up far higher than its front, almost like a living saddle. Geyer, who’d taken pride of place, used its own silk to navigate the thing along while Ludlow swapped his derringer for Geyer’s rifle, blasting away at whatever blundered close enough to seem dangerous; perched on Ludlow’s right hand, Asbury clutched his Manifold while wedged almost sidesaddle, eyes kept peeled for any less mundane threats.

  This arrangement saw them safely into the main thoroughfare, where — once the crush increased so much that forward motion became impossible — Geyer urged their conveyance straight up the wall, jumping it literally from pillar to post, ’til they fetched at last within wrestling distance of a tall, flat-faced woman armed with gun and horse-jaw tomahawk. From her Wanted poster description, Ludlow recognized her as The Night Has Passed or Yiska, “Grandma’s” chief lieutenant. Surely, her presence here meant that Missus Kloves couldn’t be far behind, or Ed Morrow, for that matter.

  “Pinkerton man,” the squaw addressed Geyer, levelling her pistol at his head, even while Ludlow fought to draw similar bead on hers. “I remember you, from outside the Bone Channel, when we rode to Bewelcome. Come to finish what your master started?”

  “Hardly. Would’ve thought you’d’ve heard already — Pinkerton’s dead and there’s another Agency waiting to take his place, run by my friend, George Thiel.”

  “Ah, then you must feel proud for him. Where is he now, I wonder?”

  “Close enough, I’m sure. Though not close enough to stop you shooting me, you happen to take a mind to.”

  “No,” she agreed. And though her barrel hadn’t moved even an inch, Geyer nodded as well, nonetheless — civil, like they were taking tea together.

  “You’ve no reason to trust me,” he admitted, “or anyone else wears a government badge. But world’s end aside, things do have to change, and I believe we all well know it, ma’am — or may I call you Yiska?”

  “That is my name.”

  “Mine’s Geyer. Frank.”

  “I know. Say your piece, Mister Geyer — I have other business, elsewhere.”

  Ludlow felt sweat sting his eyes. Beside him, Asbury’s breathing seemed barely perceptible.

  By God, I wish I had my tablet out, he thought, swallowing, and shifted his grip on the rifle, fingers damp.

  “All right,” Geyer said. “Your band — Missus Kloves, Miss Songbird and the rest — ” At this last name, Asbury sat up a bit straighter, as though pricked. “You obviously had some scheme in mind, when you called this thing’s Mama up” — and here he touched the spider between its rows of eyes, gentle but firm — “same as the rest’ve us had, when we came running. Hex City goes down today or we all fall in the attempt, witch, wizard or other. Your group holds representatives from several that’ve been equal ill-treated by men like me, depending on you to keep ’em safe. And all I can swear to you is that George Thiel and me ain’t Pinkerton. No matter what the outcome, if we survive today and he ends up heading what’s left of the boss’s organization, from now on things’ll be different.”

  Yiska gave him a long, cool look, then lowered the gun, though she kept it unholstered. Which frankly seemed nothing but wise to Ludlow, considering the circumstances.

  “If we triumph,” she told Geyer, at last, “then it will be because of hexes, and worse . . . Celestials like Yu Ming-ch’in, secret Jews like Yancey Kloves, two-spirits like the red boy and Bad Indians like me. Your friend and you would do well to remember that, after.”

  “We will. Anything else you can think of, might sweeten the pot on an alliance ’tween our two nations?”

  “Hmmm. If you see another of those spiders, will you rope one for me?”

  Geyer looked at Ludlow; Ludlow stared back, stumped. But to everyone’s surprise, Asbury leaned forward and promised, with utter sincerity: “Madam . . . if you would be so kind as to provide us with an escort through this tumult, I believe Mister Geyer would be perfectly happy to give you this one.”

  Yiska grinned, widely. “You are a strange old man,” she told him. “Just as the White Shell Girl says.”

  Outside, Clo turned, hair puffed, eyes blazing; Chess braced himself for her attack, making torch-bright fists. But just as she tensed to move, the entirety of Hex City itself rose up like a table-rapper, and not by stages. Its elevation was complete, immaculate, a dreadful miracle — one more, in half a year of the same. From the pyramidal Temple at its heart and its earth-clogged under-mesh of dungeon-passages to every building which remained intact, with Oath-bound hex and small-folk alike — plus a good many helpless invading soldiers — caught in the web between, the City lifted into the winds on a patchwork disk of dripping soil and hex-shaped stonework. Random men and women stood on glassy air, screaming as they stared down, watching the Earth fall away. Its shadow carved a hole in the sky.

  And then, with a twist, a rip scored deep between worlds . . . New Aztectlan was erased, completely. Winked out, a popped eye, leaving nothing behind but the hole where its foundations had lain. Scattered here and there amid the wreckage, lone soldiers and small groups stared ’round in appalled incomprehension, deprived of purpose and danger at once. And in their midst, coat slightly flapping on the sudden wind, ragged wings of some gigantic carrion crow —

  — the Rev.

  Inside the Moon Court, time stood still, as it had during the clash with Sheriff Love and Pinkerton at Bewelcome when Rook and Ixchel drew Chess “aside” to offer an alliance with his greatest enemies, rebirth and redemption bought at the price of Ed Morrow’s blood. That meeting, in turn, was interrupted by Tezcatlipoca, string-puller extraordinaire, from which point things had gone . . .

  badly, to say the least. Yet Rook, who had been the one to work the trick directly — on Ixchel’s ins
tructions, but even so — still well-recalled its mechanics.

  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 the 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 like 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.