A Book Of Tongues (17 page)

Rook looked over at Chess, so triumphant before at Love’s
expense — and saw him waver, reeling under the full weight of
what’d just happened: the spectacle of Love’s dead congregation, his
woman fallen to her knees and bent double to hide her baby from
the tide of rime. Same baby whose pudgy hand still protruded from
the folds of her shawl, the two of them already blurred together,
inseparable.

“Jesus, y’all
right
?” Hosteen asked Chess, genuinely worried.
Chess spat and shuffled himself back upright, batting the older man
away from him.

“Fine, idjit!” was all he said. But Rook, like Hosteen, knew better.
Because they could both see what Chess had brought up, shining
there amongst the drifts — a spray of liquid jewellery, bright red on
endless white.

I can’t see him killed,
Rook cast out into the ether, his mind
reaching for that Indian woman’s — Grandma, why not?
I won’t.

To which she sent back, faintly, from someplace far away — her
Yellow Mountain? —
You do not
want
to. But you will
have
to see it,
eventually, knowing what he is . . . what you are. Unless . . .

Unless?

“You’re
goin’
?” Chess demanded. “Where? Why?
Alone?
” He paused.
“For how long?”

“Don’t know, exactly. It’s this mountain over in Injun territory,
back by the border — ”

“You’re a Bible School-bred liar, Ash Rook. I come in here alone,
get myself beat to shit for you, and you lie right to my face? I killed
the Lieut for you!”

“You
were
plannin’ on killin’ him anyhow, I believe.”

Chess threw up his hands. “Yeah, sure . . . but when I
did
it, I did
it for
you
!”

Rook grit his teeth, and began again. “Chess, what happened
here just ain’t right, and you know it. I don’t whip this thing, I might
hurt — somebody — I don’t
want
to.”

“So you’re gonna leave me behind!”

“I don’t want you hurt, Chess. Is that so hard to understand?”

“Yeah, well — talk’s cheap, Rev. Prove it!”

Rook paused, sighed, heavy as Balaam’s laden ass — and clapped
a hand over Chess’s face, willing instantaneous sleep into him with
one muffled burst, a soft mortar-round. Chess folded back into
Hosteen’s grip, without a hint of protest.

“I just did,” Rook told him, knowing Chess couldn’t hear. To
Hosteen: “Look after him.”

“I will,” Hosteen replied. “I mean, much as he’ll let me.”

Not much point in further goodbyes, from Rook’s point of view.
So he just nodded —
I know you will, Kees
— and left, heading for open
desert. Thinking, as he did:
Okay, then.

Show me somethin’.

Two days later, as Grandma’s Yellow Abalone Shell mountain rose
to scar the sky, Rook suddenly realized that this was the longest
he and Chess had been apart since the day he’d been hung. But the
desert was a shockingly empty place once you faced it alone, and
he’d been walking slow enough now, for long enough, to let it steal a
good portion of the daily sound and fury of Chess’s companionship
away, though parts of him ached for lack of what he’d increasingly
come to regard as their due reverence. In fact, without Chess here to
do him worship, Rook’s formerly swelled head was deflating like a
popped pig’s bladder.

Like coming down off a three-week drunk, your very piss still
alcohol-laced enough to light up blue and high-flaming at the
slightest touch of a dropped lucifer. Or maybe the morning after
signing up, when he’d come to already in uniform.

Now, Rook stood in the peaks’ shadow, knowing San Francisco
lay somewhere on the other side: that terrible city which had spit
his own true love out into an unsuspecting world — all teeth from
the very start, yet still quite the prettiest thing Rook’d ever seen,
let alone killed for.

You’re doing this
for
him,
he told himself.
So you can build something
together — something ain’t just bed and bullets, something no one can
touch but you. Not even —

(
She
, deep in the murk with her dragonfly-cloak flapping, where
all shed blood sluices away down steep black chutes to keep the
world’s gears grinding.)

Dragging himself away from the cold touch of Lady Rainbow’s
shadow, with some not-inconsiderable effort, Rook forced himself
to look up at the mountain instead. He opened his mind wide, and
waited.

Eventually, that
other
voice-in-his-head sent thrumming down
the line from the centre of it all: “Grandma,” as he lived and breathed.

Climb up and see me, grandson. Set your feet to the great rock’s hide.
You are well come, though perhaps not soon enough . . . well come, and
welcome.

Rook looked up the mountain’s face, and sighed.
Should’ve known,
he thought, shifting his travel-blistered feet. But far as he’d come
already, there really was nothing left to do now but either refuse, or
obey — stand fast, shout useless imprecations at the sky, fight, flee.
Or climb.

He climbed.

Not until Rook had covered two-thirds or so of the upwards-rearing
crests of stone, and lay panting on a ledge barely wide enough to hold
him, did he wonder why he hadn’t simply pulled one more miracle
from the Book to loft him upwards, ’stead of busting his already-bloody finger-pads with hauling himself up — levitation, bilocation
or chariots of fire, he hadn’t lacked for choices. Yet somehow, the
very notion’d never even entered his head.

Instinctive wariness, knowing himself to be entering the domain
of another hexslinger? Or had Grandma’s command to
climb
held
occult force so subtle he’d simply been unable to sense it wrapping
its geas around him?

Sudden sweat broke cold on Rook’s forehead as he clung to the
mountain with both raw hands, thinking:
There are reasons we stay
away from each other . . . and maybe what she wants is you out here, all
alone. To take what you have. How foolish must you be, how trusting —

(little king)

(husband)

Grandson: CLIMB.

Finally,
everything
levelled
off,
and
Rook
lay — gasping, drenched, so mortal dusty he might as well’ve been hewn from the
same stones cradling him — in the shallow slope of scree that lined
the inside of the mountain’s pinnacle. The sky above was reddish-purple, draining to black. His lungs felt stuffed with grit. Gulping air
and smelling something he couldn’t put a name to, immediately —

. . . heat, smoke. A fire. She laid a fire.

Well, that made sense. Had to see, after all — and eat.
Then came the juicy smell of cooking meat, making Rook’s days-empty stomach spasm painfully. Hunger-driven, he rolled over,
huge and clumsy — got his hands braced against the pebbled slope
and levered himself up, with a groan of effort.

The woman who knelt over that delicious-smelling fire wore her
hair in a waist-length pair of braids, thin and fine and strong as
sunbleached corn-silk. By contrast, the rest of her was shockingly
thick, sturdy to the point of squatness — nose flat and cheekbones
broad, her wry-set mouth so wide it seemed virtually lipless. A slant
pair of coal-in-paraffin eyes, small as currants, cut sideways over to
Rook.

“Grandson,” she said, voice at once a gravelly rasp and a smooth,
pure tone. It took Rook a second to understand what he was hearing:
“inside”
and
“outside”
voice, blended together, to bypass their
mutual lack of common language. Trusting his instincts, therefore,
he closed his eyes and felt ’round for the currents of power, for once
riding them rather than shaping them.

“Grandma,” he replied.

The word itself was spoken in English, by necessity. The
meaning
,
however, went back out to her just as hers had come to him —
portmanteaued inside a visceral understanding which neither
needed anything as crude as mere
language
to clarify.

“So. I see you have not forgotten
all
your manners.”

“Well, I do hope not . . . ma’am.”

And this drew an actual husky
laugh
, straight from the belly.

Shaking her head, she got to her feet, brushing down her shawl and
stamping ash off her shoes.

“Men,” she remarked. “They always hope to charm. But then,
even we of the
Hataalii
are still steered by what the First People put
between our legs.”

“I meant no insult — ”

She shrugged. “Of course not. What else can be expected? You
know nothing.”

“Hey, now,” he began, flushing — but she merely gestured, curtly,
for him to sit . . . and he surprised himself, by obeying. Another
laugh followed, equally gruff.

“That angers you, eh?” she asked. “To be ordered, like a child?
That boy you’ve roped yourself to . . .”

“
He’d
just shoot you, you pissed him off bad enough.”

“Oh, he might try — and fail. But why charm, when honesty is
better? You barely know what
you
are, ‘Reverend,’ your head still
stuffed with blackrobe chatter-nonsense, while your boy does not
even know
that
much, let alone how easily I have stopped bullets
before. I am elder to you both, and worth respecting for it.”

Rook gritted his teeth. “I’d’ve thought the simple fact that I’m
here
was evidence enough of my respect.”

“Yet you took your time in getting here, and many have suffered.
I see no reason for compliments.” She paused, stirring the fire. “And
where is he now, your apprentice?”

“Hexes don’t take apprentices, is what I heard.”

“Yet here
you
are, nonetheless — come to learn from one you think
knows more than you do, without even bringing me proper payment,
and having left
him
behind. Did you not think
he
might benefit from
a lesson or two as well, once his true nature is revealed?”

“Well, it ain’t done that just yet, and I don’t aim to enlighten him,
either. He’s hard enough to handle as it is.”

“Mmmh. Selfish, secretive. Spoken like a true . . . hex.”

Rook shrugged. “Takes one to know one,” he suggested.

Again, Grandma glanced down at the fire. “The bird has minutes
yet to cook,” she said, “which leaves time for one question.”

Rook had to smile. Carefully: “I’d consider it a kindness to be
allowed to know my teacher’s name.”

She clapped her hands. “Ah, more manners! How I love the
bilagaana
way, so long as greed outweighs the fear which makes you
burn down everything you do not recognize. But here is a thing you
should
know already, and do not: no smart
Hataalii
ever tells their
name, to anyone. Most especially not to their own kind.”

“You know
my
name.”

Grandma nodded. “Exactly so. The more fool you, for telling me.”

Sparks flew up, and the moon blinked like an eye. Then Rook and
she sat opposite each other, cross-legged on the dirt, while each tore
at the meat they held, firm and hot and full of juice. The swiftness of
it all disturbed Rook a tad, as it was probably meant to.

Grandma gave a small belch and licked her fingers, neatly, ’til
they shone clean, while Rook wiped his on the tail of his coat.

“So,” she said, abruptly natural, as though their conversation had
never been interrupted, “since you present yourself as my student,
you will
earn
the knowledge of my name — until then, I shall stay
Grand-mother. Now . . . let me ask
you
a question.”

“Ma’am.”

“I told you ‘climb,’ and you climbed. Did you forget how to fly?”

“Well . . .” Rook paused. “Seemed . . . I couldn’t think of quite
the right way to put it, if I wanted to.” He saw endless flickering
telegraph-transcriptions of Bible-verse fragments scoring its way
through his brain’s centre-slice, tendrils digging bright hooks into
either lobe, and shivered. “Just couldn’t — find the words.”

“From that Book of yours? Though you yourself know you have
done without them, before.”

“True enough. But — ”
That was when I had Chess with me.

The sudden truth of it stopped him mid-breath. With blessed
courtesy, she gave him a moment to ride it out before answering.

“You still think of yourself as what you
were
, grandson . . . tied
to your
bilagaana
One-God, even when you know yourself to have
already gone beyond His narrow way out into the wider world, where
the threads of true Balance may be woven. So when His Book failed
you, you climbed. You forgot your own powers, because you thought
yourself unworthy of them. That is the first truth.

“The second truth? Your powers are not all you are. To believe
you are nothing without them is to
be
nothing but your own magic.
And no
Hataalii
who makes himself so hollow can still retain his
soul.”

“All right, then — yes. It does seem . . . right, somehow.”

“Even though I might be lying.”

Rook stared at her, hard. “Why would you?” he asked, at last.

A shrug. “Why indeed?”

Those flat eyes, so unreadable in the reddish ebb and flow. Rook
made himself meet them nonetheless, thinking:
Liked you better by
far when you were just one more voice in my head, woman — when you
had to
tempt
, not browbeat, in order to get whatever it was you wanted.
But that’s just what always happens, I guess, when the honeymoon’s over.

And with that, sure as iron to a magnet, his thoughts went
skittering on back to Chess.

If he was here, this old lady’d be no match for us — it’d be Bewelcome
all over again, and she and Mesach Love could lick each other’s wounds
in Hell. But, then again — maybe she
ain’t
lying. Maybe she does want
to help. And what am I, in the end, if I need Chess to fight all my worst
battles
for
me?