A Book Of Tongues (2 page)

“Seventeen of twelve,” he grumbled, peering down. “Man’ll be
late to his own funeral, you give him the option.”

“People followin’,” Morrow broke in, looking back over his
shoulder.

Chess didn’t raise his head. “From the melodeon? Yeah, I saw
’em — dead man’s drinking buddies, annoyed he won’t be picking up
the next round. What do you suggest?”

“Head the other way, so’s nobody else gets killed?”

Chess gave this idea about a second’s consideration, before
replying: “But here’s where Rook said to meet, and I ain’t shifting.
So fuck that.”

Luckily for them, the miner’s “friends” had apparently barely
taken time to arm themselves at all before giving chase, and only
thought to do so with whatever came best to hand. Two men made
straight for Chess, waving a broken bottle and a smashed-up chair;
Chess cross-drew with a flourish and killed them both, then kept on
firing, while Morrow made sure he just took the kneecap off a third,
who fell back into the gutter, screaming. The whole exchange lasted
perhaps a minute, at most — a popped blister of muzzle-flash and
cordite smoke under heavy grey skies, spattering gaping passersby
with equal parts terror and grue.

When it cleared, an only lightly wounded barfly could just be
seen dragging the groaning cripple ’round a handy house-corner, his
shattered ruin of a knee leaving a reddish trail through the mud.
The rest were mainly corpses, though a couple were caught in midretreat with their hands held high, kowtowing awkwardly as Chess
sighted at them down his left-hand gun barrel.

Morrow nodded back at them, not quite daring to touch Chess’s
sleeve. “C’mon now, Chess — that’s enough for one day, ain’t it?”

Utterly affectless: “Think so?”

“They were his
friends
, Chess, that’s all . . . you know how it goes.
Hell, you’d do the same for me, we all swapped places — ”

“No I wouldn’t,” Chess said, letting his finger tighten. The
penitent dropped face-down at the trigger’s pre-click, shit-smeared
and yelling for mercy.

“I can’t leave you a minute, can I?”

The rasping basso voice behind them was audibly amused. Chess
curled his lip and turned his back, reholstering, then stalked over to
the big, broad-shouldered man in the black coat and stained white
collar. “It’s been
twenty
, Goddamnit,” he complained.

“Yet I do see you managed to make your own fun, nonetheless.”
Though rumour told of Reverend Asher Rook once having been a
melodious preacher, the crunch of hemp against larynx — from the
Confederate Army’s unsuccessful attempt to swing him rope-high —
had left him with a rasp fit to strike matches on, so hellish dark and
deep that whenever he spoke, you could almost smell the sulphur.

“Could’ve stayed in Arizona for that,” Chess said, taking one
last step, so he and Rook were safely nose-to-forehead — then
dragged him down by the hair and kissed him hard, right there in
the road for all to see. Morrow groaned at the sight, and not just
from discomfort; even if the gunfire alone hadn’t been enough to
attract attention, the spectacle of two men treating each other the
way neither would treat a woman whose favours he hadn’t already
purchased up front, certainly would.

Some might say Chess would never have dared be so open with
his affections if the Rev wasn’t so well-known — and well-feared —
but Morrow doubted it. From what he’d heard, Chess had lived his
life on the offence since long before Reverend Rook hove into sight.
Still, now they
were
bound together, he was probably worse: every
move a calculated insult, a slap to the collective face. A lit firecracker
shoved up the whole honest world’s backside.

A voice from the greyer parts of Morrow’s mind, long kept carefully
hid, came intruding: “
Asher Elijah Rook, Sergeant and unofficial
chaplain for his unit, took up for desertion under fire and murder of a
superior officer in the final weeks of the War. Some question as to the
legitimacy of the charges, but the execution proceeded nevertheless.
While other prisoners from the stockade waited, Rook fought with his
captors and began to curse, quoting St. John the Revelator. . . .
”

And I looked, and, behold, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself,
and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the
colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire.

Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living
creatures . . . and every one had four faces, and every one had four
wings . . . As for the likeness of the living creatures, their appearance
was like burning coals of fire . . . and out of the fire went forth
lightning. . . .

And when they went, I heard the noise of their wings, like the
noise of great waters, as the voice of the Almighty, the voice of
speech, as the noise of an host: when they stood, they let down their
wings.

“I believe that’s in
Ezekiel
, sir, not
Revelation
.”

“
Yes, to be certain. The more important point being that one way or
another, a cyclone near thirty feet across whipped up almost immediately,
and blew away most of the camp. Rook and his fellow escapees simply
walked away, made their way to the Arizona desert and began to commit
the crimes that have lent him notoriety throughout the West: robbing
trains and stagecoaches, levelling entire towns, all aided and abetted
by Rook’s knowledge of Bible verse. In this manner, we see how graphic
physical insult can cause talent for hexation to express, long after the
normal parameters of adolescence have been surpassed.

“
Our next dispatches reveal him to have taken up openly with this
wild boy, Pargeter — similarly freed by Rook’s handiwork, after being
convicted as an unrepentant murderer and sodomite. By all accounts an
accomplished killer but no sort of soldier, Pargeter’s records show him
to be uniformly uncontrollable, contemptuous, loveless. Yet he bridles
himself for Rook, suffering restraint and direction, and love — of a sort —
does seem to be the key . . . so much so that it becomes impossible to tell
exactly who the corruptive element in this mixture truly is. . . .
”

But Rook and Chess were done at last, at least for now. They broke
apart, Rook leaning to tell him softly, in one passion-flushed ear: “I
will say this, though. You need to stop treating every place we go like
Tophet in Hinnom just ’cause your timetable and mine ain’t always
congruent, Private Pargeter.”

Chess blinked, then bit his tongue — literally — on whatever he
would have never hesitated to say next, if Rook had been anyone
else. “We still have that business of yours to do up in Tong territory,”
he said, finally, “so it strikes me we’d best get goin’. It ain’t really a
place you want to end up once the afternoon’s gone, and it’s getting
hard to see what to shoot at.”

“Lead on, then, darlin’ — I’ll willingly take your word. This
is
your
home town, after all.”

Chess hissed like an affronted cat, and pulled away from Rook
before the Reverend could try to stroke him smooth again. Rook
smirked, then noticed Morrow’s expression.

“Problem, Ed?”

“Uh, well — ain’t me sayin’ so, Rev, but this’s bound to bring down
the law, what little they got here. Dead bodies chokin’ up a central
thoroughfare, and all . . .”

“I don’t see any bodies,” was all Rook replied. And Morrow saw
his hand slip inside the front of his coat.

Oh, good Christ King Jesus.

But Rook was already thumbing through the small black Bible
he kept pocketed there. Reaching something useful, he cracked the
spine, lifted it to his lips, and
blew
. . . .

. . . and the grey sky rustled above them —
flattened itself out
somehow, a stretched oil-cloth — as a cold slaughterhouse reek
drifted down. Chess turned to watch, a hand back on either gunbutt, eyes bright with excitement. His whole attitude and expression
virtually crowing —
That’s right, you fuckers, just go on ahead and get
ready . . . ’cause
my
man here can do
any
damn thing, he takes a mind to.

As the Rev began to speak, Morrow shivered, barely keeping his
breakfast down. Because he could see the text lift bodily from those
gilt-edged pages in one flat curl of unstrung ink, a floating necklace
of black Gothic type borne upwards on a smoky rush of sulphur-tongued breath . . . feel the beat of syllables spread throughout his
blood, each vowel and consonant its own dull explosion, larding
even his thoughts with grit, so they stiffened and scratched his
brain. Until the words spread like cataracts across his eyes, lidding
them over with dim white horror.

“And the locusts went up over all the land of Egypt, and
rested in all the coasts of Egypt,”
the Rev declaimed, and Chess
laughed out loud at the sound, somewhere between delight and
hysteria.
“Very grievous were they; before them there were no
such locusts as they, neither after them shall be such . . . For
they covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was
darkened
; Exodus,
10:14 to 10:15.”

The rustling peaked, became a chitinous clicking, and Morrow
fought hard to stay still while the whole wheel-scarred road suddenly
swarmed with insects — not locusts, but ants the size of bull-mice,
their jaws yawning open. Neatly avoiding both Chess and Rook’s
boots, they broke in a denuding wave over the corpses, paring them
boneward in a mere matter of moments. A wind followed, to scatter
what few scraps of bone and flesh were left.

“As smoke is driven away, so drive them away: as wax melteth
before the fire, so let the wicked perish at the presence of God
. . . that thy foot may be dipped in the blood of thine enemies,
and the tongue of thy dogs in the same.”

Psalms
68, Morrow thought, as the rot boiled inexorably on, and
the dead men reduced themselves to utter ruin and dust.

“That’s just
wrong
,” someone exclaimed from behind Morrow —
man, woman or child he couldn’t tell, but with a shaking voice,
as though on the verge of tears. “Sin, a pure
sin
. It oughtn’t to be
allowed.”

“
O God, thou art terrible out of thy holy places
,” Rook murmured to
himself, his voice abruptly human once more, as if in answer. And in
his secretest heart, Morrow agreed.

But now the film was lifting — he could see the sky again. The
ants resolved themselves to dust as well, sank ’til they and the mud
grew indistinguishable.

Rook stood there a minute more, his face blanker than the page
his thumb still marked. Morrow let out a long breath, echoed by one
from Chess, whose excitement had ebbed along with the flensing
tide. Gunslingers and hexslinger made an uneven triangle together,
’til Rook briskly cracked his neck from side to side, and stowed his
Bad Book away once more.

“Well,” he said. “Shall we, gentlemen?”

Morrow cut his eyes side to side, scanning what panting crowd
remained: the various scum of San Francisco’s roughest region,
finally stunned to silence by the Word of God. Yet twisted rather
than holy, songs of faith turned to faithless uses, and made therefore to seem — though perhaps not tarnished themselves — somehow
tarnishing
.

“God damn, I hate this whole stinking city, and that’s a fact,”
Chess Pargeter announced, meanwhile, strutting away like some
pretty little Satan — the single brightest point of colour, from crisp
red hair to gleaming boot-heels, in that entire dim sewer of a street.
“Just the same’s I hate
you
, Ash Rook, for makin’ me come back here,
in the first place.”

Rook smiled at Morrow companionably. “Best not to keep my
good right hand waiting, Edward,” he suggested. “It’s a long walk yet
to Chinee-town, or so he tells me.”

“Yes, sir.”

Rook turned away, following Chess. Morrow shook himself free
of his own dread, and did the same.

Thinking, as he did — for neither the first time nor the hundredth,
and definitely not the last —
Oh Lord God of hosts, eternal friend and
saviour: just what the hell am I doing here, again? With these two, or
otherwise?

But he already knew the answer.

The air inside the private train-car was oppressively thick, hot as
new-cooked honey. Morrow felt his collar starting to rub a raw spot
under the point of his jaw, and did his best to keep still while the
old man in the frock-coat — Joachim Asbury, a Doctor of Sciences
specializing in Magical Research, on loan from Columbia University
to the Pinkerton Detective Agency — droned on, his otherwise
fascinating lecture pulling out like so much taffy. He was silver-haired and mild-looking, his sober upper dress a stark contrast
to the flash check trousers current Northern fashion seemed to
demand.

“What we principally know of magicians — witches, wizards,
shamans, et cetera — is threefold. Some are born with an inclination
to such skill, yet only come to full expression of their talents later on,
if at all; for females, generally at the onset of their menarche, while
for males, generally during some great moment of gross physical
insult. That once come to fruition, their powers seem virtually
limitless, making it a foregone conclusion that if magicians were
ever to act
en masse
, they would overrun the world within days.

“Yet the third most well-known fact is equally clear. Magicians
do
not
work together, because they
cannot
.”

Asbury’s assistant changed the plate on his magic lantern, casting
some gargantuan and disgusting insect’s wavering light-skeleton on
the train-car’s wall. “Observe this specimen of the genus
Oestridae
,
or common bot-fly — an endoparasite which deposits its eggs onto
the skin of a host animal whose heat causes them to hatch, after
which its larvae burrow into the animal’s skin and gestate, then drop
onto the ground to complete their pupal stage. The bot-fly may also
spread its eggs through the medium of an intercessor, by attaching
them to a common housefly it has seized and restrained through
superior power. In a way, this makes it somewhat representative of an
epi
parasite, a parasitical variant which feeds upon its fellow parasites.