A Tree of Bones (50 page)

Hell
, he thought.
To be shamed into foolishness, and at my age.

Swearing, he kicked his heels into his horse’s sweat-lathered sides and rode after, leaving his dropped spyglass to gleam brassily in the dirt behind.

Too Goddamn familiar entirely, this queasy, weightless feeling of falling to earth in the grasp of something mostly air and wishing. Clutched to Chess by both arms, Yancey and Morrow touched down just inside the walls of New Aztectlan, hitting the ground just north of where a swathe of spider-bred rubble had crushed half a dozen adobe-bricked huts; the farthest still stood mostly intact, and Morrow lunged into it the instant his boots touched earth, dragging Yancey and Chess after him. He pulled them in and ducked down, eyes kept fixed on the hexes atop the walls, as they battered the spider back by degrees.

Any inclination Yancey might’ve had to carp about being manhandled vanished on making contact with the ground. The twisting cramp that knotted her stomach, pain-vise clamping her head simultaneously, dragged out a startled groan; Chess caught it, quick as ever, and scowled.

“Wondered how this place’d take you, you finally got here,” he said. “Can you stand it?”

Yancey braced her hands on a fallen pile of bricks — they held her weight, but felt queerly thin to touch, like spun sugar — and fought to winch her shields back up. “Christ in Heaven, feels like if I jumped up too high, I’d fall straight through the ground coming down. Can’t they sense how torn up it all is, here? How can they even breathe? There’s . . . almost nothing
real
left. Anywhere.” She cringed, as more screams and explosions echoed from outside.

“Feels like tryin’ to swim a tub of molasses,” Chess agreed, jaw clenched — then added, with a half-grin: “When I’m in over my head. And it’s boiling.”

“None of us got any Oath protecting us,” Morrow suggested. “For me, that don’t matter. You two, though . . .” He trailed off, clearly unable to think of any ending didn’t make him unhappy. Chess moved forward to join him, hunkering down behind the pile of rubble, then rabbit-rising to squint over the top.

“Anyone see us?”

Morrow shook his head. “Think we got away with it. Not that that’s gonna make a difference, in a minute.” He slipped the knife from his belt. “If I’m getting to understand this shit at all, seems like the minute we start this, Herself’ll know it — and her big brother, too. How much time are we gonna have before she shows up, to make her point about it?”

Yancey shrugged. “She can get to us pretty much instantly, wherever we are; don’t expect it matters, aside from we’re within the walls.”

Chess nodded. “’Sides which, we
want
’em to come, don’t we? So I can put an end to this, if I can.”

“Yeah,
if
,” Morrow muttered. For which Chess couldn’t blame him.

“We’ll have as long’s we have, Ed,” he concluded. “Let’s just get it damn well done.”

Yancey nodded, and held out her wrist, matching Morrow’s gaze with her own. From outside came another mighty crash — some other part of the walls going down? With a quick look, Morrow directed Chess to stand between them; Chess obeyed, gallows-grim, then watched as Morrow took Yancey’s arm in his, a parody of hand-fasting, and laid her main veins open: a fiercer, more painful wound than any they’d dared before, liberating a gush of blood so strong it ate the fount of Yancey’s strength almost instantly. It struck the earth under Chess’s ghost-feet, pooled for a moment on the surface, before sinking in.

Next second, Ed had cut himself just as deep, the blood-stream doubling, rich red liquid puddling up until that whole same crimson store combined leapt upward, suffused itself throughout Chess’s shadow-shape, deepening his colour and inflating him toward opacity: became the rich plum of his coat, the red of his hair. He flung out his arms and gasped, sucking in air, substance, power all together. Yancey felt that parasite hex-hunger of his latch on, draining them out with terrifying speed, pulsing gore-drops actually flying mid-air in all defiance of gravity’s laws to enter him.

No prayers needed, this time: their sacrifice was free and willing, made right where the Crack in the world rendered all incantations meaningless. Within seconds, Chess had become almost solid, only the deep crimson flush of his skin betraying his fragile grasp on materiality; his body steamed in the cold air. As he opened his eyes, they glowed green as absinthe louched and lit.

At that precise moment, the roof blew off the hut, walls shattering outward — and Ixchel came descending, dragonfly cloak swarm-flapping to scour the sky. From below, simultaneously, the ground writhed and split, Weed spilling upward like maggots escaping a caved-in corpse; the Enemy stood atop, re-envisioned as Chess’s blue-skinned reflection, naked but for barbaric graveyard ornamentation.

Staring at this pair, Yancey dimly knew she ought to be frightened — terrified, even. But . . . she was tired, so she folded gently to ground instead, which felt only slightly colder than she herself did. Reached for Ed’s hand, feeling her slit tendons flap, her nicked bones grate uselessly together. Soon, she reassured herself, they would get up and run. In a second, perhaps . . . just after they’d rested only a scant tick, or two . . . .

Someone was shouting, but she couldn’t tell who. Her eyes skewed sidelong, turned up, rolled ’til she could almost glimpse the dark inside her own skull. Then closed.

She was gone.

Outside the City’s breached wall, the spider lunged up in a titanic final spasm, rising to stand almost vertical, palps and mandibles stretching skyward. Red light bloomed in its eyes, brightened until — with a sodden explosion — all eight of ’em simply burst and Clo Killeen’s immortal remains came rocketing up out of its forehead, scorched but triumphant, a penetrating stink of boiled mucus trailing her in a venomous cloud. She screamed in triumph, flipping dolphin-gleeful, then slid back down to spew gloating yet incomprehensible Irish jibber-jabber at the mortally wounded monster.

It was her undoing. The closest foreleg — whipping down, in a movement perhaps half spasm, half vengeance — caught her by the waist even as its owner tilted backward, describing a slow, dreadful, inexorable arc. Curling inward, the beast’s immense bulk crashed down, smashing a second immense breach open in what was left of the wall before bursting open on impact like a piñata, spilling a vast tide of indistinct black, wriggling forms — were those guts? Organs? Or something . . . living? — both into and out of the City.

Over where the gates had once stood, the Honourable Chu and his Indian had rallied the last of the city’s defenders, fighting to stave off the Emperor’s soldiers as they attempted to force their way in. The hexes’ supernatural might and desperation balanced the Mexes’ guns and numbers, and Farris had taken advantage of the stalemate to rally his Texican cavalry into a wedge, hoping to take the Mexes in the back. But before they’d covered more than half the distance, the spider’s death throes broke New Aztectlan’s last inch of morale. Even at this distance, and without his spyglass, Ludlow could see the City’s small-folk start to break and run.

Spurred by what they thought was victory, the Mexes whooped like Apache, pouring in over the wrecked gates after them — but a second later, when they got a close-up look at exactly what was flooding from the destroyed spider-beast’s wreckage, their cries turned from revelry to panic.

“
Hold the line!
” screamed Captain Farris, waving his sabre for emphasis, too far back to see what the Mexes were cringing from. “
Hold the line, and ride them down! Ride, boys! For the Forty-Seventh!
”

Geyer yodelled in answer, as did dozens of others, all around. Ludlow clung onto his horse and prayed.

Then the wedge closed with that foul, onrushing horde, and if Ludlow had had anything left in his stomach, he would have retched it up now. As if the giant spider had been nothing but a single titan womb on legs, the things it had released to scuttle in every direction around them were minuscule copies of itself — minuscule to their progenitor, but the size of Clydesdales to everyone else, except with twice the legs for twice the speed: spiders small enough to rope and ride, every bit as quick and vicious as the original.

Poor Captain Farris split one’s head with a savage swing, only to be taken out of his saddle by another’s leap, and brought down in a tangle; Ludlow watched his body swell with venom, skin separating at the joints, before the next row of horses came galloping over them both and foundered, screaming.

Gunfire rippled on all sides. Geyer blasted one spider away with a well-placed rifle shot, sending it flipping arse over thorax, ichor spewing, like it weighed no more than a tumbleweed. He dropped his muzzle to reload — and was immediately targeted by two more, who wasted a moment or so tussling with each other. Ludlow took advantage of the break to shoot one through what he could only think might be its brain pan with a gambler’s derringer he kept up his sleeve, but the other reared back and spat a sticky web-string from its hindparts, snaring hand and gun fast. Then set in to pull,
hard
.

Oh God, shit on a shingle . . .

From behind Ludlow, however, a new voice suddenly intruded — no, not so much new, as unfamiliar. It was Asbury, sounding firm, awake,
adult
for almost the first time since he’d met the man — not the sad old drunk of the last few months, but that legendary figure he’d heard tell of back in New York, in San Francisco. The man whose eccentric brilliance and machinery it’d spawned had spent the last few years bent on the insane goal of turning magic into one more branch of science . . . and almost succeeded in that aim, give or take a few disasters.

“Hold still, Mister Ludlow,” the Professor said, levelling his Manifold’s latest iteration at Fitz Hugh’s arm, the web, the spider beyond. “This will take a moment — and it
may
hurt.”

Ludlow felt, more than heard, the magnesium-filament surge; the blue flash travelled from Manifold to him, using his very flesh and blood as a conductor, then down along the web itself, a living wire, to freeze the spider in its multiple tracks. A brief yet intense struggle ensued, Geyer and Ludlow both similarly transfixed — Geyer in amazement, Ludlow drawn rigid with discomfort and shock admixed.

And then — it was over. The spider bowed its awful head, mandibles clicking out a rhythm that mimicked the Manifold’s own clockwork whirr, and rang for all the world like a signal of surrender. That same cone of dimness and silence Asbury had evoked in the desert fell over all three — four, if you counted their new “pet” — and shielded them from harm by erasing them from notice. Insects and combatants alike bypassed them as though they weren’t even there, ’til the combined in- and out-rush thinned, and they were left alone once more.

Now treating the sticky rope which still connected it to Ludlow as a combination of leash and bridle, the spider knelt down further, a bison-sized camel. Geyer let out his breath, telling Asbury: “That’s a neat damn trick, Professor. How’d you manage it?”

“More easily than you might suppose, Mister Geyer — the Manifold was constructed first to track and measure hexation, then to channel it. And what are these things made from, if not hexation-stuff itself . . . pure arcane impulse given shape through the Word, spell-directed, then taking on a kind of flesh which, can apparently outlast even removal from its originator?”

“Uh huh. Well, at any rate; thanks for that.”

“You’re very welcome, sir.”

On either side of Hex City’s ill-defended limits, Mexes and hexes made fierce battle, with Texican interference; the first wave of spiders were all either crushed or fled, leaving a perimeter of wounded men and leg-broke steeds behind, along with a slew of corpses, human and equine. Longer they were in the suddenly docile spider-thing’s presence, meanwhile, the more violently Asbury and Geyer’s horses kicked and squealed and snorted, like they’d had their noses rubbed in pepper. Geyer dismounted and let slip the reins, slapping its flank, not even turning to watch it flee.

Instead, he squinted down at their Manifold-hypnotized captive, as if making calculations in his mind which Ludlow frankly feared to hear voiced, before venturing, at last: “Seems tame enough, and I can’t help but think it’d make good time, ’specially up walls. So, Doc, Mister Ludlow . . . how d’you think it’d take to being saddled?”

Distracted by his own thoughts, Ludlow couldn’t keep track of Asbury’s answer, though it seemed to be in the affirmative. Telling himself, instead, no matter what was decided on:
It is beyond my control now, all of it — has been, for quite some time. I preside here at the birth of hundred new things, recording them for posterity: truly, an age of terrible wonders!

That’d more than do for a cut-line, anyhow.

In the Moon Court, Ixchel’s blood-cultists knelt naked in a spiral, all pseudo-Christian modesty discarded, praying for their Lady’s triumph in a language none of ’em actually understood. The women passed stingray spines through earlobes, nipples, labia, shedding life-essence in drops, lactating a steady red stream; they thorn-roped their tongues, chanting words of blood, while their men pierced and re-pierced through frenums, urethrae, foreskins with volcanic glass shards, twisting to enlarge the holes in order to slip their own braids of
maguey
-fibre stuck with cactus through again and again, running their own flesh ragged. The overflow they dripped on the same sort of bark paper that demon who’d once been Clo now wore in her hair, then burned in a great stone bowl filled with incense, the chamber’s centrepiece; the smoke went up slow and creepishly concentric, describing an almost symmetrical set of loops and coils, like a serpent couching to strike.

As repayment for their devotion, some smallish part of Ixchel must’ve been ensuring the wounds — which surely would have felled any lesser worshippers — kept on healing ’emselves perpetually, whatever else the rest of Her might be doing at any given time: hardly a kindness, really, at least not such as Eulalia Parr’d been raised to think of. But then, considering what she’d seen up above in their frantic duck-and-dash to reach this place, she really hadn’t expected any better.