A Tree of Bones (19 page)

He trailed off, hoarsely, as Rook completed the thought for him:
Last time anyone tried to feed on you — or last time She fed on us all, puttin’ down trouble? Too bad the woman herself ain’t on hand just right now to take questions. . . .

Sucking in a breath, he recalled his old preaching techniques — breath control and dialectic, nothing fancy. “Friends,” he began, “we won a victory tonight, striving against Bewelcome’s witch-hunters and He Who Cannot Be Named himself, and this . . . was all part of the victory price, in ways I can’t detail just now. But I promise you, once the Lady — ”

Uncertain how to proceed, Rook paused to clear his throat, and realized that none of the crowd was looking at him, Marizol included. Instead, she was staring back over both their shoulders at the Temple, face fixed as though she’d spotted a rattlesnake nesting exactly where she was next about to step.

From the shadows within, Ixchel emerged. Even at this distance, she stank like rotted flowers, her borrowed flesh gone drawn and leathery, a bad imitation of dead Miz Adaluz’s luscious curves. But beneath the jade-chip mask, her eyes glowed with a heat as fierce as an open cook-stove. Behind, Fennig made his slow way out into the starlight as well, looking like he’d gone seventy rounds with a pugilist who’d somehow managed not to break his spectacles. To see sharp young Hank so dazed and stumbling gave Rook a start, fresh pain skewering his breastbone straight where that burnt-out lump he called a heart resided; when he opened his mouth to commiserate, Fennig only shook his head, in mute misery.

“Mother
and
child?” Rook asked Ixchel, who gave no reply. So he went on, reminding her: “As I recall, before we left, you promised us a terrible weapon — and if you’d delivered on that, ma’am, then Clo might’ve lived. Might be they
both
would’ve.”

Those knobs where her eyebrows should’ve been twitched upward, as if on strings. “Ah, but she died a warrior’s death, little king,” the goddess said, and Christ, even her
voice
was different — its liquid music gone to a harsher timbre, more in keeping with that high-breasted ghost-girl from his first visions. Yet entirely the same, in all other essentials: remote, cold, disdainfully amused. “A
hero’s
death, taking a baby in battle, at great cost of blood. And now, while her child hangs on the Suckling Tree, she too will live again . . .
as that very same weapon.”

Beyond the Temple’s gates, the blackness remained impenetrable, no matter how Rook stared. Fennig turned to look as well, but either his vaunted interior sight was failing him, or there was simply nothing to see. Until bare feet scuffed rock floor and the darkness parted, to show —

— Clo, standing there. Upright, if not alive.

Strips of torn parchment were woven through her tangled hair, Aztec characters sketched in smeared blood upon ’em, spelling out God alone knew what. A leather cord hung from her neck, strung with gristly lumps and irregular twig bundles that proved, on closer examination, to be shrivelled human hearts and hands. From her own limp fingers black talons protruded, shaped more like a rose’s thorns than a beast’s claws. Strange tattoos like eyes or stars circled every joint Rook could see, while more blood had been used to paint the stylized shapes of skull and crossed bones on her ruined dress, whose skirt hung thick with bone-bell shells. Her pert Irish miss’s features had drawn in so gaunt upon her skull that for a moment, Rook actually thought her face had been flayed.

Her eyes, meanwhile, were — gone, entirely. Only a cold blue radiance filled their blown orbits. And when she turned to fix Rook with those orbs, smiling, he saw her teeth had become a hundred jagged bone needles, densely packed as tiny spears.

Fennig took one stumbling step backward and fell right on his narrow behind, all dignity shucked, scrabbling for his dandy’s cane against the flagstones. Marizol screamed and buried her face against Rook’s side, shaking; Rook watched Clo’s smile widen at the sound, lips parted, as though savouring fear’s ozone-stink. He thought of Chess’s glee in those seconds before lead began flying — that
look
, presaging chaos and ruin, which said,
Finally, we’re doing what
I
like!

The world changed for Rook in that instant, with no marker other than a silent, almost resigned thought:
Ah, shit.

“So,” he said, to Ixchel. “Seems like you managed to get at least one other relative to join the party, after all.”

She shook her head. “Alas, no. My brother, loath as I am to admit it, is right. They who sleep Below will not rise, at least for me. Which is why I have shepherded our Clodagh to another gift, different from that you and I gave to your lover, yet nearly as great — brought her into our ranks as
tzitzimihtl
.” The word had a rattlesnake sting, scarring the eardrum. “Because of their courage, those who die in childbirth may ascend the
tzitzimime’s
roads, travelling the deep dark between stars until the day comes for the Fifth World to die. And what will happen then, daughter?”

Clo spoke, startling Rook badly; her voice sounded shockingly like it had in life, though her Irish lilt was slurred by fearsome dentistry. “Then, mother, we will descend from the night sky in our thousands, rending every human left living, so all the empty world is drowned in blood.”

Ixchel clapped her hands, affectionately. “She is young yet,” she told Rook. “At her full power, you shall need a
maguey
-fibre mask to view her safely. But she is strong and fast enough to lay waste to our besiegers with only teeth and talons, nevertheless — faster than any spell-breaker bullet may be aimed, or magic-eating wheel-work brought to bear. So, husband — are you not satisfied? Can you say I have done ill?”

At their feet, Hank Fennig stared silently from behind his spectacles’ smoked-glass protection — stiffened his long spine by slow degrees, like the man was bracing himself for something.

“Thought you weren’t too worried over Pinkerton’s armaments, last time we spoke on it,” Rook observed.

“I have revised my opinion. Is such not the prerogative of a queen?”

“Mmm,” Rook agreed, raising his voice a trifle, to make sure all the City-folk within range could hear. “’Stead’a the whole god-passel, then, what we get is one measly demon? Strikes me we’re still in a bind, he comes against us with everything.”

“One
tzitzimihtl
is worth a thousand soldiers, hex or no. Her effect is . . . shattering.”

“So you say.”

Ixchel’s grin vanished. “You require proof?”

Wouldn’t have cared, once,
Rook thought.
Not so long as I got what I wanted — Chess by my side, alive, and fixed to stay that way. But . . . I need to show them just how bad it is. Her, in all her glory.

Damn, if he wasn’t feeling his responsibilities. That never led anywhere healthy.

Deliberately: “Call me Doubting Thomas, but proof’s always nice, yes. You offerin’ any?”

“
Daughter.
”

The whisper was so quiet Rook half-thought he had only imagined it; Ixchel’s lips had barely parted. In answer, though, Clo . . .
or what had
been
Clo . . .
moved
, so fast she left a trail, stuttering from invisible to real and back again — a thousand poses, each scarring cornea and reality like a daguerreotype, acid-etched. First there, then
here
, slamming up nose-to-nose with complaint-happy Arkwright, who shrank from her eyeless leer, whimpering; head falling back, lips a-foam. Rook watched the hand he
almost
raised to fend her off wither, like wax in fire.

A frenzy of shell-bells tolling, ten thousand funerals strong — and then she started in on the poor sumbitch with all ten claws, finishing a fast half-second later. After which everyone got to watch the result fall back, to break apart at her feet: one dumb hex’s worth of bloody bones, barely held together with gristle.

Clo blinked, and was back by Ixchel’s side. “Your will be done,
mother
,” she said, licking her gore-stained lips.

Now it was Ixchel’s turn to smile. “Well,” she asked Rook. “Are you satisfied?”

“Not hardly,” Fennig replied.

The crowd swerved, almost as one, to scope out where they’d probably forgotten he stood. In the murderous interim, he’d regained his feet and much of his former style — stood tall, hands braced on his cane, like he was about to pick a swordfight.

“So that’s your deal, eh?” he asked. “A ‘guardian’ we can only trust to treat us all like her own personal coal-tender, somethin’ she can chew up by the cupful, whenever her boiler gets low.” Louder still, and as much to the crowd as to Ixchel: “’Cause that don’t strike me as fair-dealing, if so: what did any of us ever swear the damn Oath for, if it weren’t the promise of never gettin’ fed on such-a-ways again? By
anyone
?”

The thing Ixchel’d made from Clo seemed to find this amusing. But Rook’s Rainbow Lady puffed up with fresh menace, dragonfly cloak set a-buzz like an angry hive. “The Oath frees you from fear of each
other
, Henry Fennig,” she said. “Yet never for one moment think it protects you from
me
, your goddess.” She turned to the crowd, some of whom recoiled. “For
you
, whom I have folded in — given New Aztectlan as your home, your refuge — are all, to every last man, woman and child,
mine
.
By your own words.
”

“I’d beg to differ,” Fennig shot back. “Was Hex City they swore to, these ones — most of ’em don’t know what-all ‘New Aztectlan’
is
.”

“This is sophistry.”

“Common sense, more like. A quality in short damn supply ’round here, as of late.”

“Have a care, mortal man.”

“Oh, I do, believe me. You should, too.”

Been quite the while since anybody’d called Ixchel’s guff to her face; Rook had to reckon that alone kept her frozen as Fennig crossed over, rolling up his sleeves. His cane he passed to Berta and Eulie, their tear-stained faces white with worry on his behalf, while those fine back-up specs of his he folded and gave the Rev himself, pressing them into the larger man’s hand.

“Keep these for me, will ya?” he asked, for all the world as though he expected to survive whatever happened next.

Bemused, Rook stowed them in his vest pocket while Fennig continued blithely along his path to ruin, pausing just short of Ixchel’s reach. Clo he ignored, or tried to — instead, he met the Lady of Traps and Snares’ empty gaze straight on, his naked eyes shedding light in a manner not unlike his dead wife’s, if cooler.

“You know I can see through you too, right, Missus?” he asked her. “Which is how I come to learn that savin’ the braggadocio, you ain’t nothin’ but a hex, same’s any other — well-fed, ghosted up, but that’s all. Talkin’ up how you own this whole world, how you can make and remake it at will. . . . So why is it you ain’t done that yet, exactly?”

“You dare to question
me
?”

“If I thought it’d do any good, sure. But since I know better, here’s what I
will
say. My g’hals and me come up here with eyes open, hopin’ that line you talked was only half a lie. And things went well, at first, but then I started seein’ cracks, like it’s given me to do — and lady, those cracks are
big
. Keep followin’ this path you’re on, all you’ll do is drag yourself back down into Hell, plus the rest of us along with you . . . not that
you
care.”

“Be silent, insect. If you would keep those two wives you still have, let alone your life, then — ”

Fennig laughed, bitterly. “Oh, yeah. Go ’head, threaten me louder, so’s everyone can hear. Do your worst, so’s they see what you
really
pay your wages out in.”

The cloak spasmed and eddied, a black rainbow waterspout, high as the wave she’d called to drown Bewelcome. “
Silence
, I said! You think to chide your betters, gutter-rat, bred and fed on garbage? You, who owe me
everything
— ”

“Yeah? Well, at least
my
gutter always stood behind me, whenever the bulls started in to crackin’ heads. I’m Five Points through and through, from cobbles t’curbs, and that’ll always beat bein’ a Mexican table-rapper’s mascot tricked out in half-naked stargazer-meat all to hell.” He folded his arms, bared his ill-set city dweller’s teeth, stiff with rage. “The long and the short of it is, Missus, you promised but you didn’t deliver, then made my son’s mother into
that
, and let my son die to do it. Way I see it, ain’t a single one of us owes
you
nothin’.”

Ixchel stood a moment, while Clo grinned beside her. “Perhaps you think me weak enough to address with such disrespect,” she said, at last, “since this vessel nears the end of its use, as any fool can see. But her successor awaits, and when I am reborn in her — ”

Yet here she made yet another mistake, by looking directly at Marizol — at which point the girl’s already terrified expression went up like lucifer-touched flashpaper, as all her nameless dread became horrid comprehension. “
Por amor de Dios, no!
” she screamed, broke from Rook’s arms and flung herself on Berta and Eulie instead, rousing them from their grief-struck stupor. They grabbed her in a double hug, Eulie stroking Marizol’s hair and murmuring to her, while Berta exchanged a glance with Fennig so penetrating Rook could’ve sworn he saw words swimming back and forth inside it.

Distracted by the effort of beckoning Marizol back, her tomb-rank voice willed almost sweet, Ixchel remained completely oblivious. “Come here, my heart’s heart,” she cooed. “I am not angry; you are a child, and cannot always see where the best way lies. Your parents will explain this when we are alone together, in ways you can understand.”

“
Que no!
I will
not
do this thing! And if they seek to make me, to cast me off — then I cast
them
off!”

“Dear one, you know not what you say. Only wait, and I will — ”

Fennig guffawed. “What, kiss it better? Looks like you forgot somethin’ you told us from the start, Lady — how for a sacrifice t’take, the one gettin’ done to’s gotta
love
you, or choose to let you, any road. Good luck ever gettin’ her to think of you
that
way, ever again.”