A Book Of Tongues

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Come half of midnight, Morrow went looking for Hosteen and found him outside in the scrub, smoking and staring up at Chess’s window, like he was expecting Shakespeare’s Juliet to lean out at any second.

“You care for him, don’t you, Kees?” Morrow said.

Hosteen shrugged, like he’d never made any real attempt to deny it. “Used to think it was because he was nice t’me, back in the War — but I paid him for it, so . . . hell, I don’t know. Just do, that’s all. . . .”

“Pretty sure I know the reason, if you’re interested.” Then, as Hosteen looked at him: “It’s ’cause he’s a hex.”

“And he believed you,” Allan Pinkerton said, four weeks later — in that cramped Tampico hotel he’d engaged for Morrow’s debriefing, with Songbird and Doctor Asbury in attendance. The faint Scots burr still audible in Pinkerton’s voice sounded doubly incongruous in the white-plastered, Spanish-style dining room, bright with rich sunlight falling through slitted windows. “Just like that.”

Morrow sighed. “Hardly. But . . . yeah, he came ’round to the idea eventually, given time and talk enough. I made him a pretty good argument, obviously.”

“Obviously?” Asbury repeated, with that same air of constant vague puzzlement Morrow had long forgotten attended most of his pronouncements.

“Got y’all here, didn’t he?”

He knocked out another shot of the tequila Pinkerton had given him, to the skittery accompaniment of one of Miss Songbird’s dry little laughs. “So he did, Mister Morrow,” she agreed, smiling at Morrow’s bosses, her mouth safe-shrouded behind those filigree claws of hers. “Much to our . . . mutual satisfaction.”

Four weeks after Rook had led them into Hell, and Morrow had clawed his way back up somehow, into the Agency’s loving arms. And Chess —

Morrow decided not to think about Chess; not right now, at least. So he slammed the shot and continued with his report.

“Said it yourself, Kees. How is it Chess can shoot somebody standin’ thirty feet behind him, ’fore they even have a chance to squeeze one off? How is it two men as dog-on-cat different as Chess and the Rev ever tripped over each other in the first place, let alone got stuck at the dick?”

“Hexation?” Morrow nodded, quickly. Hosteen just snorted. “Naw,” he said. “You’re thinking crazy, Ed. Rook’s more’n man-witch enough for both of them, without tryin’ to bring Chess in on it.”

“What if I had proof?”

“Christ, what if? What’m I supposed t’ do about it, exactly?”

A fair question. With, much as Morrow might hate to admit it, only one real answer.

“Kees . . .” He stopped. Then continued, reluctantly: “. . . there’s somethin’ I need to tell you — ”

“Aw, shit.” The older man put a hand over his eyes. “This never goes nowhere good.”

“ — I’m a Pink.”

Hosteen stared. “Why . . . in the hell . . . would you tell me a thing like that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Have to be pretty damn desperate, wouldn’t I?”

They glared at each other a spell, ’til Hosteen sighed deep, and Morrow let out his own held breath at almost the same exact time, in grateful sympathy.

“Look,” he began, “Rook’s got a mojo-bag held over my head, that’s the long and the short of it. Chess and me, last night — wouldn’t surprise me if he had a hand in it, though I’m damned if I know why. But as it is, I have to stay the course, for fear of bein’ blasted. So if anyone’s left could do anything for Chess, Kees, it’d be you . . . assuming you were willin’.”

“You offered him a pardon.”

Morrow shook his head. “No, sir. For Kees it’s all about loyalty to the old cohort, and he’s known Chess a damn sight longer than he’s known the Rev. I did tell him your plans, though, Doc — how you were fixin’ to build a hexacious reserve. Gave him the idea that Chess might be worth more to the Agency alive than dead, for once.”

“That’s all well and good,” Pinkerton said, and sat back to mop his shining brow. “But as to Pargeter — just what is he now, anyways?”

“’Sides from not to be trifled with, or only at your own peril?” All Morrow had to offer was another shake, for that — plus a further swig, while Asbury and Pinkerton swapped significant glances.

Songbird rapped her gilded knuckles impatiently on the table-top. “My choice would be your genuine opinion on the matter, Mister Morrow. If you please.”

Morrow threw a glance upwards, speculating on exactly how high you’d have to go before the roof above became the floor of Chess’s impromptu prison — that room where he lay asleep, ensorcelled deep in a trance of Songbird’s own making. Maintaining the same fierce slumber he’d endured ever since they’d both . . . resurfaced from their scramble through the depths, with Morrow clawing his way up mindlessly with one arm dug death-grip tight ’round the raw neck of what he could have sworn was Chess Pargeter’s gutted corpse.

How he’d ever found Chess down there, in the first place — laid a hand on his collar in the dark, once it’d all gone predictably to shit — that, even now, Morrow didn’t quite know himself. Only that during what he’d thought was three days ago and the month or so Pinkerton assured him had actually elapsed, enough “grievous physical insult” had occurred to make Chess exactly what Rook and his dragonfly-cloaked Lady had planned for: a sacrifice to dead forces, a new-expressed mage not yet aware of his own power, a son-of-a-bitching reborn “god-to-be.”

Songbird had to feel it, surely. Wasn’t the tasty pull of Chess’s power what had led her, Asbury and Pinkerton to Mexico City, where they’d dug Chess — and Morrow — up out of the earthquake’s rucked hide? But then again, perhaps it was just too big, too . . . alien, for her to fully realize. Which was why she still had to ask.

And that, if handled correctly — could be an advantage, for Chess. Morrow, too.

“Fuck if I know what he is,” Morrow lied, therefore, right to the former witch-queen of San Francisco’s pig-pale face, with far more sass than was probably warranted, or safe. And went to pour himself another, regardless of Pinkerton’s disapproval.

“Good enough, Mister Morrow,” Asbury said. “You are no expert in hexology, sad to say, as we are all of us aware. But if, barring such sidebars, you might continue with your recitative nevertheless.”

Morrow nodded. “Why not?” he asked, of no one in particular.

“Think they’d want Chess for that hex-army of theirs, if only we could get him took into custody?”

“Think Chess’d stand still for it, if we did?” Morrow shot back, without thinking. Hosteen’s face fell at the idea, a whole dropped wedding-cake of dolefulness.

“Maybe not . . .”

“But . . . maybe so, too,” Morrow suggested. “’Cause much as Chess may not mind dyin’, he still takes awful good care to keep himself alive.”

“Yeah. Maybe . . .”

They looked at each other, then, and knew it: a compact had been sealed.

“So here’s what you do,” Morrow told him — risking another glance upwards only to find the window gone dark, and shuddering to think what-all might be in progress behind it. “Go west nor’west, fast as you can. We got an outpost, maybe a day’s ride to get to, but they’ll bring you back a deal quicker, ’cause they got Songbird to work it for them — hell, she can probably slingshot Pinkerton’s private train right into the middle of Joe’s, she takes a damn mind to.” Hosteen stared. “C’mon, Kees! Can’t make fry-cakes without you break — ”

“ — eggs, yeah, yeah, I get it. But . . . Ed, you at least got credit with those fuckers, you pull out your badge. They ain’t got no fit reason under Heaven’s sky to believe me, on anything.”

Maybe not, Morrow thought. But they’re gonna want to.

“They will,” he said. “Long as you show them this.”

He reached inside his vest, where the Manifold clicked and chittered, to grasp it firm, pull it out, giving it no time for nonsense. And dropped it in Hosteen’s outstretched hand.

“I was very happy to receive my little device once more, by the by,” Asbury assured him. “The readings you’d taken, their impressive range of resonances . . . well, they were more than I’d hoped for. It was they which formed the spectrum allowing me to confirm your diagnosis of Mister Pargeter’s — condition — last night, once he was . . . secured.”

“Glad to be of service, Doc,” Morrow replied. And t’ finally get the damn thing off my chest . . . literally, he thought.

“Strange, however, that Reverend Rook would not have immediately gleaned your intentions in this matter,” Songbird remarked. “Or this goddess of yours, either . . . powerful as you make her seem, in your report.”

“Did seem to me how Rook was probably just a bit distracted, right at that very moment. And the Lady? Well — she probably didn’t much care what we did, either way. From what I’ve seen, we’re dirt under her feet.”

Pinkerton: “Mmm. Well, then, by all means . . . continue.”

“Mornin’ came. Rook got us all together. Told us what was gonna happen. Chess . . .” Morrow paused, the image still fresh in his mind. “He just stood there, with that woman, that thing — Lady Ixchel — holdin’ his hand. Didn’t say a damn word. Like he was — ”

“In a sort of trance?”

“Hypnosis,” Asbury said to himself, quietly. “Or perhaps as in the Codex Magliabecchi, when the deity-impersonator is ‘made drunken’ and ‘painted white’ in anticipation of transformation . . . though that may only be a metaphorical intoxicatory state, to be sure.”

“All right, Doctor,” Pinkerton said. “I’d suggest we can address that issue in fine detail some other time, assumin’ it even comes up.”

“They didn’t ask about Hosteen,” Morrow went on, “and I sure as Christ didn’t volunteer. Then, after the Rev’d said his piece, she just all of a sudden up and grabbed big Cow-Puncher Pete Van Damme by the head and bent him back over her knee. Pulled a knife out of her hair, cut his throat. And where his blood fell on the floor, it . . . opened up a hole. . . .”

“A hole,” Songbird repeated. “Which . . . you went through.”

“That’s right.”

“Into Hell.”

“Yup.”

Asbury gave himself a shake. “Gods and monsters,” he said, musingly. “You have glimpsed wonders we can only dream of, Mister Morrow.”

“Yeah, well — you’d seen even the half of what I saw down there, you’d be happy to keep it that way,” Morrow replied.

In the end, the voyage itself had seemed . . . impossibly easy. A plunge, taken. Like stepping off a cliff.

That yellow sky, leering down. The rain of knives, falling. No wonder Rook’d wanted the rest of his gang to come along, haplessly unsuited as they were to hexacious labours — they made for perfect cannon-fodder.

The Rev kept them moving steadily forward, with Chess on one arm and Morrow clinging tight to the other, a protective envelope of lightning a-snap in all directions. And the Lady Ixchel glided on effortless behind all three — behind, beside, around. Ixchel, bent near-double in the darkness to murmur in Chess’s ear — Ixchel, darker by far than anything around her, no matter how deep they went.

Wrapped in her buzzing dress of devil’s darning needles, with her copper limbs unstrung at the joints and set drifting in Mictlan-Xibalba’s current like kelp — her flesh shiny as burnt bones, hair a net of hooks, voice like broken bells chiming: . . . but there is nothing like death in war, a flowery death, so precious . . . I know you can see it far off, my husband’s husband, as you always have. Far off, and not so far. I know how you yearn for it!

The words thrumming through everything at once, everyone, reverberate eternally on a shimmering thread of prayer, both answered and not. The yearning witchery of each dead and living supplicant, each made and unmade name all crying out, together —

To die for a god

To die as a god

To die, in Pain, in Glory, wrapped in Hot Heart’s Blood, is

beautifulbeautifulbeautifulbeautifulbeautiful

Morrow heard Rook’s voice rise above the din, so heartbreakingly human amidst all this spectral awfulness.

“Where is this place you’re takin’ us, woman? I didn’t get swung by my neck and lose my damn soul just to get eaten by someone else’s demons in a hell I don’t even believe in — ”

Be silent, husband. I will not be spoken to thus, not in my own place. There is nothing here that poses any danger.

“Says you!”

Yes. The only ones of any consequence awake down here are you, I and he, little king. All others lie asleep, dead and dreaming. These are their nightmares, nothing more. And besides — we are here.

“Cow-Puncher Pete,” Pinkerton mused. “So that’s who was on that floor. Was a five grand reward on for him, I recall — spares us that expense, any road.” He gave Morrow a steady look. “They let us through, you know. First time we’ve ever been welcomed to Splitfoot’s vale without gunplay; Joe himself wouldn’t go inside his own tavern. And the body we found looked dried ten years in the sun.”

He drummed his fingers pensively upon the table. “I’ve seen hexation. But . . . Hell?” He took off his bowler hat and turned it over in his hands, as if wondering how it’d gotten there.

“There are ten thousand different Chinese hells, Mister Pinkerton,” Songbird put in. “And our explorers have drawn maps — detailed ones, or so my tutors claim. Fifty of them in the Emperor’s library alone.”

Pinkerton nodded. “ Hell I know, same as every other man,” he said at last. “‘Gods,’ well — no such except the Almighty, in my book.”

“There are more books than the Book,” Asbury pointed out, mildly, in return.

You’re right about that, Morrow thought.

But he had no dog in either fight — and Asbury was already off again in any event, theorizing out loud.

“As for the idea of ‘gods,’ Mister Pinkerton, consider them as magicians writ large, truly cosmic predators. The bloodshed perpetrated by Maya and Aztecs in veneration of their pantheons is, indeed, legendary. In fact, some credit the entire fall of the Mayan Empire to their religious excesses: killing whole generations of beautiful youths and maidens, destroying forests to build pyres, polluting rivers with entrail, ash and gore. . . .”

“And that’s what-all this woman of Rook’s aims to bring about again — that right, Morrow?”

“Far’s I know? Yes.”

Enthralled with his visions, Asbury just kept on going. “‘Gods,’ then, would be the sum of Expressed magicians plus worship, as a system of human sacrifice channels both the power inherent in such sacrifices — chosen without doubt from amongst the Unexpressed — and the power of human faith, of sheer zealotry and credulousness, into the ‘deities’ in question. A fascinating equation indeed.”

Pinkerton smacked the table, sharply. “Doctor Asbury,” he said. “Seems to me Mr. Morrow has not finished his account, some of which I gather may still be of interest to you — and all of which has earned him, at the least, courteous attention.”

To Morrow: “Now then. Where did this Lady Ixchel take you, precisely?”

Morrow took a deep breath. “She called it the Moon Room.”

The arch itself was perfect and smooth as any cathedral’s, the rock in which it was set raw, rough and dripping with lichen. Above the arch, at its apex, sat a gouged half-circle curve, an inlaid sickle of flint splotchily patterned with dark stains: a moon shape, fit only for shed blood, mirrored in the yellow-black sky above by an almost-full real moon — skull-bright, a burst lantern.

This is the Moon’s House, said Lady Ixchel. A door between worlds and ages, poised to open. Be honoured, my kings . . . and you too, o blood-guards, my husband’s retinue. For this is where the old age will come anew.

They entered.

Inside, the moon seemed to loom closer still, making a pitiless roof that blocked the rest of the sky entirely. Under it sat that same black disk from Songbird’s, re-grown to full size: ten feet in radius, from its ragged-punched central hole on out, its circumference a smaller, bleaker, reverse-coloured parody of the painfully white orb above.

Their boots clopped dull and dead upon the round black stone, as if swamp-thick air swallowed the noise, though to the lungs the cavern’s air felt breath-hitchingly thin and dry — the painful draw of a mountaintop. The men ranged themselves around the stone’s circumference without even being told to, an instinctive movement — the circle of the tribe in wordless wonder, agape at the blackness of the infinite night sky.

At the centre of the circle Lady Ixchel stood, hands uplifted and her hair stirring about her in a great black cloud, as if she floated in invisible water. To the right and left of her stood Rook and Chess, facing each other like bride and bridegroom. Between them, the hole in the centre of the stone yawned, so empty it went beyond black into something that seared with anti-light, antilife — as sight-sore to look at directly as the sun.

Against that emptiness, the power in all three figures blazed, actinic and flashing. Morrow had to shade his eyes and fight not to double up, retching, to try and cough out the acrid stench of magic.

Rook lifted one hand, stroked Chess’s jawline as if memorizing its feel. Then smiled, and murmured: “Skin off, darlin’.”

Without a second’s hesitation Chess flung away his hat, shrugged off his vest, blank face empty. His hands moved entirely of their own accord. But it wasn’t until the gunbelt hit the stone with a clatter — until Chess’s guns themselves went spinning away — that Morrow finally found the strength to protest. “You son of a bitch,” he choked out. “Just what the hell you fixin’ to do to him? He loves you.”

Rook didn’t look around, as Chess finished stripping down. His eyes seemed to shine in the murk — a tear, or just the gleam of power-lust? “Guess he really must, at that,” he said, wonderingly. “The Lady tells me this wouldn’t work, otherwise.”

The air was so thick with magic now that Morrow almost felt he could see the cord of Rook’s geas: a shimmering tension like a glass rod glimpsed in flowing water, running taut from Morrow’s head to a point inside Rook’s coat, the pocket where the mojo-bag rested. He sucked in the deepest breath he could and grabbed for the line of power — felt it quiver against his palm, a ghost-wire of air and static.

“No,” Morrow ground out — and pulled on the geas, hauling himself a step forward, into the circle. It hurt like yanking his own brain out through his eye sockets. But Rook winced too, and put one hand to his head as if pained by a too-bright light.

Slowly, Chess’s staring eyes blinked.

Lady Ixchel did not move, her rapturous gaze holding fast upon the gigantic overhanging moon. But a wavefront of fury struck the circle in a sandstorm, hot and stinging; the men cried out, dropped to their knees. Given that Morrow was already half-mad with pain, however, it didn’t make much never-mind to him: he hunkered down and pulled himself another step forward. Two more, and Chess would be within arm’s reach. . . .

Rook sighed, and brought his hand to the nexus of the mojo-bag, stroking his coat. Every nerve in Morrow’s body went dead in an instant. He crumpled — slack, but for just that moment so blissful with numb release he didn’t care at all, tears smearing over the cold black stone, as he gasped out sobbing breaths.

“Now that . . . is truly something special,” Rook said. “Never once occurred to me you could pull on a binding from either end. Never thought anyone wasn’t already a hex’d be fool enough to try.”

“Ash . . .” Chess turned his head slowly, drunken. “Ash, I can’t . . . can’t move, Ash. Whuthah . . . fuck . . .”

“Shhh.” Rook cupped Chess’s face in his hands, and cold-kissed his forehead. “’S’all gonna be all right, darlin’. I wouldn’t do nothin’ to cause you real harm. I love you.” Holding Chess’s eyes with his own: “You believe that, right?”

“. . . shouldn’t I?” Chess’s glance cut sideways, to the dark woman-thing nearby, and blazed with fury. “Oh, ’course I should. ’Cause you been so damn nice to me, lately — you, and her. . . .”

Rook smiled. “Hex can’t stay true to hex, Chess. You saw me with Songbird — I paid her price, fair as fair does, and she tried to kill me anyhow. Just ’cause she knew damn well just exactly how nice it’d feel, if she did.”

“The fuck’s that . . . got to do with . . . you and me? I ain’t no — ”

“You are, darlin’. Always have been. Not awake like me, not yet — but you been wakin’ slow and sure these past years, and once you came to full flower, wouldn’t be nothing left for us but to feed. On each other. ’Til one of us was dead.” Rook’s voice roughened with sorrow. “’Cause that’s what hexes do.”

“You been . . . feedin’ . . . on me?”

“Since always, darlin’. I’d have left you a long time back, it weren’t so — and even now, I still want to eat you. So damn bad.”

“No.” Chess’s eyes went wide, all fear and desperation and rage. “I won’t hear this. You’re better’n me, always have been — you’re a good man.”

“Flattering, darlin’ — but in this case, I’m afraid, you’re much mistaken. Because — on this whole wide earth, there’s nothin’ worse than a bad man who knows the Bible.”

“You . . . think . . . I’m scared?”

At that, the gleam in Rook’s eyes showed itself after all: tears, runnelling down. “Never, Chess Pargeter. That’s what I like about you the most. You ain’t afraid to kill, or to die; you ain’t even afraid of pain.”

And here the Rev kissed him savagely, drawing power deep, so intense Morrow could see it swirl like inky water between them. “But don’t try to fight me, sweetheart,” he said, panting, when he broke off. “You ain’t strong enough for that, not yet.”

“Fuck off!” Chess writhed in his invisible bonds, unable to see his own aura surging black. “You’re a damn hex, you cheating motherfucker. I ain’t! I — ”

Rook, covering Chess’s mouth with his fingertips: “But . . . you will be.”

A blink, and the Lady was abruptly between them — pressing Chess down hard with both hands, all but grinding herself against him. Though Chess fought her, it did no damn good whatsoever, that Morrow could see.

She murmured, “My brother will ride you well, little warrior, once your flowers are brought to bloom. Husband of my husband, little light, little meat-thing.”

Chess spat. “Screw you, you hex-Mex hellbitch!”

Lady Ixchel simply crooned back at him, tutting slightly, stroking his fever-flushed cheek — and Chess melted under her touch, losing energy like she’d popped a spigot on his soul. Beside her, Rook had finally withdrawn the Bible from his inner pocket and stood flipping through it, searching (no doubt) for some relevant passage to soothe Chess with . . . but that was when the whole of it burst into flames in his hand, each page going up like flash-paper and vanishing, with not even ash — his namesake — left behind.

“You will need that no longer,” she told him. “We will write a new book together — a book in stone, and blood, and gold. A Book of Tongues.”

The phrase ran through Rook, Chess, even Morrow, in a silver skewer. They shivered and nodded, as one.

“Now . . . kill what you love.”

“Why?” Rook managed.

That is YOUR sacrifice.

Open your heart to me, darlin’. ’Cause there’s no more time, at all.

But it was Rook who opened Chess up, skin-first, blood spraying — and Chess who screamed at the feel of it, high and harsh and sounding far more in rage than pain, though Christ knew it had to hurt. His flesh went flying — and as Chess spilled his blood on the stone it began to shine, its image humping up by parts so each section peeled and tore itself free and added itself to Ixchel somehow, making her huge, terrible, inhuman. Rook plunged his axe-blade hand under his lover’s breast-bone, plucked out his beating heart like a dripping carnal jewel —

Jaguar Cactus Fruit, from which all of us will grow anew. . . . — and gave it over to Lady Ixchel, who chawed it down, ate it whole, smashing it against her mouth ’til her lips ran with his blood. Then kissed Rook right in front of Chess’s betrayed eyes — a kiss like clashing swords, like split skulls. A kiss with teeth.

“My little kings,” she said, beatific, fond as any other mother. “My . . . husbands.”

Screw all this for a game of Goddamn soldiers, Morrow thought, drawing his gun. And before Rook could maybe think to stop him — but would he even want to, seein’ what she’d made him do? — Morrow’d already fired directly into the back of that dark and bloody goddess’s head, blowing a gaping hole right where skull met spine.

But: The rest of her head spun ’round, a Satanic whipping-top, to roar full in his face, her mouth so wide, inside it a tangle of other tiny people screaming, rows on rows all red, and —

the earth quaked

the Moon Room walls rocked

the air went foul and full and stiff

darkness everywhere, all but where something blue sizzled, some awful coal-pot set atop a monster’s skull and

an irregular chopping noise infecting it all, a sluggish wooden heart beating, getting

closercloserclosercloser

— but then it was four weeks later, and Morrow was already clawing his way back up, alone but for Chess Pargeter’s broken body clutched one-armed to him — reaching out in the dark by blindest drive alone and catching hold of somebody else’s hand, tiny and cold, its brass-hard nails curved and sharp as a harpy’s — screaming out loud as he was dragged inexorably upwards, out into the light.

Where a hearty Scots voice greeted him, burred and blessedly familiar: “Damnable good to see you again, Agent — even under these sad circumstances.”

Cries, screams, shrieks and Spanish oaths formed a howling, incomprehensible music around them, as mobs of panicked men, women and children rushed everywhere. Dust clouded the sky in a choking, shadowy veil. Amid broken brick, splintered wood and fractured stone, Pinkerton knelt over the disgusting ruin of what had once been Asher Rook’s lieutenant. Songbird, who’d plucked him from the hole, had taken up position on Pinkerton’s left hand, and was shielding her albino complexion with an incongruously dainty parasol of red-lacquered paper. And here came Asbury, toddling along in the rear, examining some sort of trail snaking — crack-like — up through the dirt.

Morrow glanced back at Chess, and immediately wished he hadn’t: the man lay there flayed and gutted, only recognizable because his jaunty earring was held on by a few threads still, tenaciously attached to that slack flap which had once been his earlobe.

“Well, he’s good and dead,” Pinkerton remarked, while Asbury looked disappointed.

But Songbird, whose pale eyes saw more than either of them, simply shook her head. “Perhaps . . . not.”

She put her hand almost in Chess’s grievous central wound, hovering right above his open rib-cage, only to have it close with a sticky Venus Flytrap snap, trying for the fingers themselves. Startled, she tried to yank back, but seemed unable to move — was caught, squirming, that same meat-to-fluid slide of hex-on-hex drawing hard at her, the way a five-year drunk inhales his night’s first jolt.

And all the while mould grew over Chess, flourishing with each wave of her stolen juice — a cocoon of green, a husk that turned gold, then brown. Then peeled away, in its turn to reveal a fresh new Chess, naked, re-skinned once again. Perfect as ever.

Perhaps more so, even . . . seeing how they all of them — even Pinkerton, even Songbird — gave out a collective hungry gasp at the sight of him, like it’d reached down into their privates and twisted.

“Aw, shit,” was all Morrow found he had left to say, on the subject, before slumping backwards into similar unconsciousness.

The sunlight had angled and deepened only to afternoon, but Morrow felt he could sleep for days. “And everything after that . . . you know.” He massaged at his forehead, fighting not to yawn.

Pinkerton stroked his beard. “You deserve a medal, Agent Morrow,” he said gravely. “And were there any way to cast you one this minute, I’d do so.” One side of his mouth lifted. “Though I’d dearly love to see the faces of the men, when we tell them how ’twas earned.”

Morrow stared at the table-top. “Thank you, sir,” he replied, in a mutter so low he could only hope Pinkerton would put its distinct lack of enthusiasm down to a state of impolite but understandable exhaustion. After all, he hadn’t found out until waking — in one of a convoy of stagecoaches thundering back to the Pinks’ unofficial headquarters in Tampico port — that the pile of rubble they’d dug him from had actually been a too-damn-large part of Mexico City itself. The quake he’d kicked off down in that dreadful world below had wreaked sympathetic damage on a monumentally destructive scale.

This sort of thing starts wars , Morrow thought. If anyone ever reckons just what exactly happened. . . .

Once out of the debriefing, however, the air smelled suddenly clearer. He’d forgotten just how bad the incense-and-gunpowder stink produced by Songbird’s opening ritual, when she’d stripped Rook’s mojo-bag geas from him, must have clung. Still, a bath might be in order, before he bedded down.

Upstairs, he came on Hosteen conferring with a Mexican sawbones in front of Chess’s chamber door — authority writ large in every limb of him, like he’d negotiated on the Agency’s behalf his entire life. “Pinkerton says he needs Mister Pargeter fit to travel, Doc.”

“Señor, he may not live out the night. That man is down in Mictlan again, I think. By tomorrow, he’ll either be better or dead.”

Hosteen clicked his tongue impatiently, and turned away — past Morrow, who he seemed intent on ignoring outright. But Morrow wasn’t having any.

“Good to see you made it here all right, Kees,” he said.

“Uh huh,” Hosteen flung back, over his shoulder. “Too bad Chess didn’t.”

Morrow shut the door of his room, leaned back against it and let himself hang there, boneless. Felt how every part of him ached with roughly the same intensity, an all-over throb.

Sleep, he thought. Sleep. Until —

He heard it rise, slowly, softly — that shuttery click-clack again, wooden-soft, hollow as a rotted log. Blue sparks appearing at the very edges of his vision, sizzling.

Aw, hell no, damn it. Just — NO.

Morrow half-ran to the wash-basin, splashed his face and shook his head, as though he could throw the last three-days-that-were-thirty off just by willing it. Kept his eyes shut throughout, black shading to red, ’til the sound receded and there was nothing but his own pulse to hammer at the world’s edges, his own breath to hiss in his ears like the sea.

But when he opened them once more, it was no dice: Rook’s face hung inside the mirror, staring right into his own. Like they were contemplating each other through a damn window.

Ed.

“Reverend.”

I see you got that spell of mine took off you, in the interim — she’s a good one ’bout her business, that Miss Songbird. Ain’t she?

“Sure is, yeah,” Morrow agreed.

And you’ve told your tale by now, I’m certain — must’ve gotten quite the reaction from your boss. But you didn’t tell them the absolute whole of it, though, did you?

“No, Reverend. I did not.”

And now it was Rook’s turn to smile, finally, awful as ever. Awfuller.

Good man, he “said.”

Hardly, Morrow thought. And bowed his painful head against the cool tin surface, eyes shutting once more, to await further instructions.