A Book Of Tongues (5 page)

The skull-rack walls rang with groans of effort. Some played
half-blind, their eyeballs long since spilled out upon their cheeks on
glistening strings; others played by sound alone, sporting necklaces
cobbled together from their defeated opponents’ teeth, strung upon
intestines.

Ixiptla,
she called them. Even closer, her breath stirred his
hair — but not rank, as he’d expected. Smelling instead of something
fresh and green, a springtime scent, familiar enough to be doubly
wrenching when re-encountered in
this
horrid place.

Ix-what?
he asked, only to hear her rippling silver laugh, a many-layered chime of wind-blown glass.

Ixiptla
, she repeated.
Gods’-flesh. Sacred victims. How
generously they spill their blood for us, even here! Playing out
the old games, so they can serve themselves up to us like maize.
For they have all been Him, in their time — all aspects of the
Year-dancer, the Flute-player, best of all shared dishes. Xipe
Totec, Our Lord the Flayed One, who breeds flowers from meat
and flies from fruit, whose many deaths create and destroy the
world.

Crashing up against each other with a rotten gasp of impact
while their rucked hides bulged, flapped open along the backbone,
to display a sudden flash of naked spine: calculated as a whore’s
culottes, yet far more . . . intimate.

Ah
, she breathed once more, she who had no real breath.
Aaah,
but the pulp of men is SWEET, little king. Red-ripe with pain,
cradled in clicking yellow bone — and the heart itself, so precious
when proffered thus, especially if given in love. Man’s-heart set
unwrapped in its cracked cage of ribs, a jade ball . . . earthquake
anchor, skull-flower, jaguar cactus fruit. . . .

I don’t
—
he started to say, then choked it off. Seeing how each
player’s empty chest swung wide, then slammed shut again with the
game’s give and take, crunching. That they were nothing but raided
lock-boxes given just enough life to blunder back and forth through
the rising water, kicking up puddle-spray with their bare, bony feet.

A second hand hung from every wrist, cured-glove-limp, nails
and all. Skeleton palms rose to spike the ball off whatever wall
seemed nearest, sliming it with rot — after which the gamesters
would yell out in triumph, catch it on the rebound, and start over
again.

He shook his head, bile flushing his throat, and demanded —
What
are
you people? Goddamn demons?

We are the Gods
, she said.
We were you; we love you. Why
would we not? Your love keeps us alive.

I ain’t no damn part at all of
that
equation.

And here she smiled, so sweetly, with her tiny green teeth — each
of them filed to points, set with the same jade scales as her mask-face itself.

Replying, as she did:
. . .
Not yet.

And now . . . look up, through the moon’s eye. See how I follow
you, so closely, even here. See the door through which we two
will meet at last, the hole through which I will climb back up into
your world.

The
moon
in
question
was
black,
vaguely
squarish —
rectangulish? A tiny lozenge in the black-and-yellow sky. It struck
him as somehow familiar.

Here: I will show you a great mystery, seldom seen. For though
you witness me now in my glory, this was me, also, long ago: a girl
just like the witch who tries to drain your power now, trembling
on the cenote’s lip, pierced tongue’s overflow outlining her lips
and chin in a bloody tattoo. She with the thorn-rope tightening
around her neck, so that when she falls, she will not even feel her
impact. The water will take her like a lover, suck her down and
hold her fast, forever.

A massive sounding bell of rock, its sides jagged with lime,
through which bats dove and screeched. The water, blue shading to
black.

This well is full of bones, and all have them have
“
been
”
me, at
one time or another. All of them, and none.

He looked up, looked down, looked back up; could not seem
to stop himself. Saw the black moon swimming in the black-and-yellow sky. Watched as the rain of knives began to fall once more,
slicing downwards.

Now wake, little king, before that witch-girl drains you
beyond the point of being able to defend yourself. You are not
wholly your own anymore, to give yourself away at will. Neither
your own, nor hers, nor any living other’s.

You are MINE.

Though most of Songbird’s lower-floor Chinee-men didn’t seem
to know what the hell Morrow meant when he yelled Chess’s name
at them — even with the shotgun showing — he eventually blundered
on one who spoke at least some sort of English.

“You go there!” this one yelled back, above the music’s
caterwauling, indicating a dim passageway that dipped twistily
’round and beneath the central stairs, before trailing into what
looked for all the world like a genuine hole in the ground.

Why would Chess head down here?
he wondered.
This place stinks
worse’n the rest of it all put together.

At his back, Celestials were already starting to gather, so Morrow
squared his shoulders, and dropped down inside. His first thought
was that this place was built far more for Chess’s specifications than
it’d ever be for his — but he bulled his way through nevertheless, the
rock itself closing in on him mouth-wise, all teeth and no lip.

Eventually, he was spit out into a dead-end cave, its walls lined
honeycomb-style with ragged little coffin-sized crevices — four
apiece, moving upwards to the last length a man his height could
reach while standing on tip-toe. The reek hit him face-on, a gag
dipped in outhouse-water, as restless, shifting moans spilled down
every-which-way from those same crevices’ occupants.

All women, from what little Morrow allowed himself to
recognize, and all of them sick to dying, too — maybe with the
pox, the weeping syph, or spitting up blood with the dreaded lung-complaint: consumption, battening on them fast and eating them
alive.

Suffice to say, it was the last sort of place Morrow’d ever thought
to find Chess Pargeter, with his fancy store-bought clothes and his
bath-a-night clean self. But here he stood, hands braced on gunbutts, looking down at a sharp-faced slip of a thing laid back in her
shift, a smoking opium-pipe still clutched in one bird-thin hand,
with her waist-long rusty hair piled beneath her for a pillow.

She opened her eyes just a slit, narrow and green as Chess’s
own, to say — hoarse and blurred by some Limey accent, but with no
particular surprise — “Oh, so
there
you are, at long last. Where’s that
warlock fancy-man of yours, any’ow?”

“None of your beeswax,” Chess replied. “
You
look like death
warmed up, by the way.”

The woman drew hard on the pipe, coughed rackingly and
grinned, showing a reddened half-mouthful of teeth. “Don’t I? Take
a good long ken. This’ll be you too, one o’ these days.”

“Not down here, it won’t.”

It was Chess’s usual tone, all right — hot and cold at once,
detached as though he was studying the world through the bottom
of one of his just-emptied absinthe glasses. Still, Morrow heard a
strange shiver run through it nonetheless: a crack, hairline for now.
But spreading.

The woman laughed at that, rattle-harsh. “Ooh,
big
words. Fink
I’m impressed, you cat-eyed bitch? Look at yerself. Could’ve ’ad a
bloody soft life, you didn’t run off an’ act the fool, playin’ at soldiers.
An’ look at us now.”

“
Us
? No such thing, thank Christ Almighty. And don’t rag me
out like I’m knee-high no more, either —
this
bitch is feared ’cross
six states. Might even go so far as to say I’ve killed more men than
you’ve fucked, but I somehow doubt that’s possible. So speak to me
as if I got enough in my pocket to pay your fare, or — ”

“Or what? Gonna shoot me? Least you can do — such a
big
man,
you, wiv yer guns.” And here she paused, her ghost-of-pretty face
twisted, a bent tin mirror reflection. “Go on,
do
it!”

Chess considered her, until a look came into his eyes that Morrow
couldn’t easily put a name to. “Well . . .” he said, eventually.

“Well, what?”

“Say you was to tell me ‘I’m sorry,’ just the once . . . ’bout — oh,
anything . . . then maybe I just might.”

The woman took her own half-moment to think on this, before
she shook her head.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t ya? Go on wiv yourself, ya prancing
molly. I ain’t done nothin’ in life worth apologizin’ for, least of all
to
you
.”

For a split instant, the green flame Morrow knew all too well
danced in Chess’s stare — that sick-lit kill-flash which always came
before lightning-fast trigger-cock and a body’s downward thump.
But it passed, and just as quickly.

“Yeah,” he said, calm again. “That’s what I thought. And that’s
why I wouldn’t waste the damn bullet.”

The woman sagged back, clutching her pipe in both hands. “Then
what bloody good are you to me?” she asked. And drew on the pipe,
its coal flaring up like she was sucking Hellfire — breathed it in ’til
her eyes rolled back, each a mere green thread under a low-slung lid.
All the vitriol drained from her, allowing Morrow a glimpse of what
she might have looked like young, fresh, even happy, once upon a
time. Or good enough at her calling to fake being so.

Conversation over, obviously. But Chess kept on standing there,
hands a-twitch like a dreaming dog’s, fingers reaching for the
nearest trigger — or for something else entirely, perhaps. To tuck the
sackcloth half-thrown across her up further, or at least re-right the
opium pipe, so she didn’t set herself on fire.

Morrow cleared his throat. “Hey, Chess — Rook sent me t’ find
you. Thought you said you was goin’ to wait outside. . . .”

Chess turned, scowl immediately slapped back on. “Don’t much
matter, what I said or what I didn’t — how fast you got here’s your
look-out, not mine.” A second’s pause. “So where the hell is
he
?”

“Uh, back up with Songbird, last I saw. Why?”

All at once Chess was up against him, close enough to lay hold
of Morrow’s throat with his teeth. “You
left
him back there, alone?
Stupid fuckin’ ox, you Goddamn skinned bear of a — ”

“Jesus, Chess, he
told
me to! What the fuck was I supposed to — ?”

“’Sides from come get
me
?” This last came called back over
Chess’s shoulder as he flashed ahead through the tunnel, close to
full-out running as the narrow walls would allow. “Don’t you know
shit about hexes, Morrow, after all this time? They can’t take just a
little
!”

Back through the half-dark, panting and heart hammering,
barking shoulders and shins. Then up into Selina Ah Toy’s proper
again, blinking mole-ish, to find Chess already on point — both guns
out and lips peeled back, ready to go down fighting, while customers
and employees alike slid all sorts of crazy mediaeval weaponry out
from beneath their coattails.

Above, Morrow could see Songbird stepping out onto her landing
with the Rev’s huge shadow looming behind, big as ever, though
slightly sleepwalk-swaying.

“Ash Rook!” Chess yelled. “You all right?”

The Rev gave a grunt, neither enough to confirm or deny. But
Songbird turned her head, back-tracing the cry and smiling in
recognition at Chess’s voice, with a hungry sort of interest.

“And here would be your lotus boy, Reverend — the redheaded
man-killer himself. Did you enjoy your sojourn in the tunnels,
Mister Pargeter?” Her voice dropped, a wintry whisper. “
See anything
you like?
”

Chess levelled both barrels at her, without a second’s hesitation.
“Not too much,” he said. “I’d spent any real money in this joint, in
fact, I might feel inclined to put a ball right through your brain. So
gimme back the Rev, quick-smart, and we’ll call it even.”

“Such discourtesy. I will excuse it on grounds of loyalty,
however — or
love
, if you prefer.”

There was a wealth of cool contempt packed into that one over-enunciated word. To which Chess gave a nasty little grin of his
own, and replied, “My Ma always said
love’s
the word they pull out
whenever they don’t want to pay you. But then again, yours too,
probably.”

A general hiss ran round the room. Songbird shook her head,
sadly.

“Poor angry little boy,” she said, softly. “And I might have been
so hospitable.”

“Uh huh, I’ll bet. You want it in the eye, or should I just aim for
anyplace convenient?”

But with this, the crowd surged forward again, and Morrow found
himself abruptly kitty-corner up against Chess’s side, wondering
just how many blasts he could possibly get off — the full two? Only
one? One and a half, however
that
might work? — before somebody
grabbed his shotgun’s stock and wrestled it away. Chess cursed as
Morrow jostled his elbow, and let fly, like he was punctuating a
sentence. At such close quarters, the same bullet reduced half of one
pigtail’s face to raw mash, wounding two others standing behind in
the process.

“Now, listen all you motherfuckers — ” Chess began, still keeping
the other gun trained vaguely Songbird-wards, but broke off as the
gal gave out a sudden teakettle-shrill shriek. She didn’t sound angry,
so much, as simply done with playing.

Her men cowered away, leaving Chess and Morrow to take the full
brunt, as it eventually resolved itself into a string of imprecations:
“
Mei, tamade hundan, liu koushui de biaozi he houzi de ben erzi!
To
come inside
my
house and speak to me thus, as though you knew no
better — ”