A Book Of Tongues (35 page)

Chess stiffened in shock. “Why?”

“’Cause . . .” Morrow took a deep breath. “He said you’d laid a spell
on me — not to your knowing, just that you
had
, on instinct. Said if
I wasn’t an idiot, I’d have to keep you alive long enough you’d learn
how to take it off yourself.”

“Huh. Sounds the sorta thing he
would
say.” Chess put one fist
to his mouth, eyes narrowed. “Assumin’ it ain’t more’a his bullshit,
though. What if I don’t? Maybe I should just shoot your knees out
and leave you here.” A sidelong glance. “Let you find out how long it
takes whatever it is I laid on you to eat
you
up, from the inside.”

“Fuck if I know, you little piss-artist!” Amazing, really; no matter
how far beyond anger Morrow thought fatigue had taken him, Chess
still managed effortlessly to scrape up further irritation. “Think I
really give a damn, this point?”

Anger sparked anger, and Chess rounded on him, green light
flaring in his eyes. “Oh, but I think you
do
,
Agent
Morrow.” He shot
out a hand and slapped it upside Morrow’s face, paralyzing him
instantly, as swift and effective as Rook’s charm-bag ever had. Chess
leaned close in to Morrow, seeming to shimmer as his power roused.

It felt like the Howe-clasp on a rich Easterner’s coat locking
shut, mind hooking into mind at a hundred different points at
once, rippling painfully through Morrow from scalp to anus. He
flinched as Chess mercilessly tore away layers of pretence and wilful
blindness, then smiled grimly at what he found. Then let go, as
Morrow gasped, reeling.

“Yeah,” Chess said, aloud. “You give part of a damn, at least.”
But the smile abruptly crumbled, leaving Chess to peer around the
empty graveyard, disconsolate. “Much good as it does either of us.”

He fell back against the sepulchre, boneless with annoyance, then
slid down it, taking a seat on the ground. Morrow followed suit, as
the truth of their plight sank in deep. Alone, penniless, hunted, and
hundreds of miles from the American border, with no gang left on
Chess’s side. Hosteen dead — and whose fault was that? Near-equal
on each part, Morrow reckoned — Rook rejected and gone, and no
Agency on Morrow’s side, not anymore.

“That Goddamn Asher Rook,” said Chess eventually. “I’m gonna
find him, and then I’m gonna kill him.” There was no heat in it, no
affect at all. “And it sure ain’t to save the damn world, neither.”

“Yeah, well.” Morrow pulled off his hat and raked his hair back
wearily. “I think he halfway wants you to.”

Chess shrugged. “Then fuck him, maybe I won’t.” He caught
Morrow’s eye for a moment. An urge to smile pulled at them both.
Both felt it, and felt the other feeling it, and it died. Carefully,
Morrow turned away.

“I’m . . .” Morrow let out his breath. “I’m not sure it matters where
you go, or what you do. Rook . . .” He sighed. “Rook beat me, Chess.
Outthought me at every step, knew what I was gonna do ’fore I did it
and planned on me doin’ it. I don’t know if it’s hexation or just native
wit, but if he could do that with me when he didn’t know me from
Adam, how the fuck you think
you’re
gonna surprise him?”

Without looking, changing expression — hell, without even
seeming to
move
— Chess’s gun was in his left hand and raised to
point at Morrow’s temple. “By killing you? I mean, he seems to want
you to stick by me. So why shouldn’t I make sure you can’t?”

Morrow’s mouth hung open for a moment. Then he closed it.
“Shit, I got no answer, Chess,” he said at last. “Do what makes you
happy.”

He closed his eyes, wondering if he’d ever open them again.

There was no warning. That hundred-handed grip seized on
Morrow’s mind again, twined in and held, painfully hard. As little
as six weeks ago the pain would have been bad enough to level him.
And even stagger Chess — the mind-lock was hurting both of them,
he only now realized.

Both saw in the other exactly what they recognized in
themselves — the agonies and memories of their shared journey
through Mictlan-Xibalba had changed both of them forever, even
if only one of them had emerged as something more than human.

Might have been that resonance that opened up the link. Might
have been part and parcel of the connection itself, or maybe only
Chess’s complete lack of hex-training. But as Chess’s mind sieved
through Morrow’s with clumsy, savage power, his own memory
unfolded
to
Morrow’s
sight
as
well,
inverse
mirror-images
ricocheting off each other from touchstone concepts so fundamental,
so absurdly different, it was like learning a new language with next
to no terms in common.

Mother
—

(a ragged, redheaded English girl curses and spits and beats
a small boy with equally red hair, in a dark corner of an opium-stinking ’Frisco brothel / a tall, plain, rawboned woman calls three
lanky boys and their father in from the farmyard, while a stew of
beef, potatoes and carrots simmers on the stove and five clean tin
plates wait on the table)

Fellowship
—

(standing with eleven other men as Allan Pinkerton hands out
badges, speaks words of congratulations, alive with pride, joy and
satisfaction / watching over an absinthe glass as men you’ve bled
beside drink and fight and fuck like animals, in absent disdain
lessened only by the consolation that at least this vileness is honest)

Desire
—

(one night born of boredom, anger, perversity / desperation, fear,
loneliness / well-worn paths of flesh limned in shocked discovery
/ forgotten names of scores of men, release traded for release / a
handful of women’s bodies, echoes of clumsy tenderness and soft
curves in the dark / the weight of one man, chosen for lust, kept
for — )

Love
—

(a father’s hand on the shoulder / a young man not yet a Pink,
laughing with fellows in a Chicago groggery / a greener, colder
graveyard than this, standing silent for a brother fallen in war /
a murdered lawman’s wife-turned-widow, weeping with grief and
terror, huddled over a wailing infant while awful salt-whiteness
creeps up both their flesh at the behest of . . .)

Rook.

Chess tore free in a burst of agony, collapsing back onto his ass
with a look of stunned incomprehension. Like any other man might
have looked staring on Bewelcome, or Calvary Cross, or Mictlan-Xibalba itself. The shreds of their communion still raw, Morrow
keeled over as well, nerves afire with the same pain — but he knew
its meaning immediately, because it was no revelation for him.
Hoist on the petard of the exact same truth-compulsion he’d turned
on Morrow, Chess couldn’t tell himself what he’d seen was a lie . . .
and couldn’t lie to himself about what it meant.

You really
did
think we were all fools,
Morrow marvelled, half to
himself and half expecting Chess would hear it anyway.
You really did
think any man talked about love was talkin’ out his ass — lyin’ to himself,
or everyone else, or both. And any woman talked about love was just
lookin’ to profit, some way or other. Whatever the words, you thought you
had the truth of it. Thought you were safe.

Until him. Until . . .

ROOK
.

It was a surge of fury mixed with helplessness and hurt, curdled
milk boiling over — and something sick and dark beneath, violent
and deathly. Chess hauled himself to his feet with the support of
a convenient headstone. Breathing harsh and ragged, he snapped
open first one gun, then the other, and touched his finger to each
empty barrel, watching with grim intention:
reloading
, by God. Each
touch filled the chamber with — Morrow couldn’t see what, exactly.
A tiny, roiling mass of flame and shadow, nothing he could name.
Fear crawled into his stomach and along his skin.

“Chess . . .” He didn’t even mean to speak, but the words forced
their way out. “Down there, the Rev — he told me that none of this
would’ve worked, you couldn’t’ve
survived
, if it hadn’t been real —
true in
your
heart, even if it wasn’t in his.” No change in Chess’s look
as he kept on loading, and Morrow’s stomach knotted. He pushed
himself up. “Christ knows, we’ve seen how many sins each of us’s
racked up — but you can’t make this one of them. You can’t. It’ll kill
you.”

“Give me one good reason — ” Chess snapped one gun shut, “ —
why I, you, anyone — ”
click-clack:
the other gun closed, “ — should
give a tick’s ass-fuck whether I live or die.”

“
’Cause when somebody’s as good in the sack as you are, they really do
owe it to the rest of the world to keep themselves upright just as long as
they can?
”

Chess whirled, but Morrow — stunned at the words that had
come all unsummoned out of his own mouth — saw it like he was
looking through the wrong end of a telescope, plummeting far and
back away as if tumbled off a cliff-high gallows. A thick black weight
engulfed him, swathed him, deadening the sound in his ears. All
avuncular malice and power and . . .
concern?

Chess straightened, all expression falling away from his face.
The guns dangled, but he didn’t holster them. As toneless as a sleep-talker, blurred and distant like he was underwater:

“Ash.”

“
Darlin’.
” The feel of Rook’s voice through Morrow’s throat made
him want to gag. A burning ache spread through mouth and jaw as
alien intonations and stresses overrode his own. The very weight of
his body shifted as he stood, suddenly inflicted with a far heavier
man’s sense of balance. “
You want to kill me, and none alive could fault
you for that. But try shootin’ me now, and . . .
” Rook spread Morrow’s
hands, shrugged his shoulders. “
Won’t even inconvenience
me
. And for
all his faults, I think you still might find Ed useful enough, in future, to
not throw away so quickly.
”

It was hard for Morrow to make much out, but he thought Chess
might have tilted his head. “Maybe I don’t care any more ’bout what
you
call useful, Ash.”

Rook shook Morrow’s head, brought a laugh in his deepest
register up from the gut, so low his throat felt sore. “
Well, maybe
not, at that. But I seem to recall you do take pride in payin’ your debts,
Chess — bad
and
good. And can’t none of us deny without Ed’s help, you’d
never have seen blue sky again.
” The tides of feeling around Morrow
shifted, washed toward true pain, regret, and . . . something else.
“
That’d’ve been an awful waste. Wouldn’t it?
”

Rook stretched Morrow’s hand out to Chess’s face, stroked it
as he had caressed it in the underworld, and Chess closed his eyes.
Mortified, Morrow fought to retreat deeper — but the response
sizzled along his nerves anyway as Rook leaned him in close, used
his mouth to kiss Chess, gently as any husband with a blushing
virgin bride. The blackness smothering him flushed dark as wine,
sweltering with sudden heat, while Chess’s mouth worked against
his. Something wrenched at Morrow’s groin and stomach like a cable,
pulling him in and down, vertigo and arousal spinning up together.

Until — a hard push threw him off balance, and he actually felt
Rook’s presence
slide sideways
, halfway breaking free, before Morrow
caught himself on a headstone.

Heaving in gasps, face red, Chess held out a hand palm-up before
him, as if to brace a wall from falling. And snapped, “Not this time,
you bastard — not now, and
not
like this. Not using someone else.”
The hand clenched into a fist, which he shook in Morrow’s face — but
at a careful distance, as if touching even Rook’s shadow in another
man was too great a temptation. “You want me, you meet me face to
face, where I can rip my answers outta your lyin’ fuckin’ brain-pan
myself.”

Rook laughed. It racked Morrow’s guts. “
Answers? Hell, sweetheart,
those were yours for the askin’, each step of the way. All you ever had to do
. . .
” A sly, mocking note, “
. . . was ask.
”

Chess’s face went blank again. Morrow tried to find some shred
of will inside to brace himself, expecting the guns to thunder any
second. But Chess surprised him — surprised Rook, too. Morrow
couldn’t mistake the startled mind-blink as Chess’s hands fell open.

“What was it you did to me?” Calm, quiet, almost despairing. “
You
even know, for sure? Everything I touch . . .” As he swept a helpless
hand over the graveyard, Morrow deliberately made himself recall
the hotel battle, and relished as best he could the astonishment in
Rook’s mind as the images sank in. “I didn’t mean to do nothin’ that
happened back there, any of it. And I don’t do
nothin’
I don’t mean!”

Morrow felt Rook marshal his thoughts. “
Had to, Chess,
” the
hexslinger used his lips to say. “
Otherwise . . . you’d’ve gone to Hell.
The real one, forever. unending agony, God’s last Judgement.
That
Hell.
”

“Oh, do
not
turn preacher again on me
now
, you son-of-a — ”

Rook shook Morrow’s head. “
None of that. Just — you’d’ve never
given me up, doomed yourself, and called it fair. This way . . . well, I still
might burn. But you won’t. That’s good enough, for me.
”

Chess stared at him a long moment, uncomprehending. Morrow
knew he could also feel Rook’s total certainty, the irrefutable “truth”
lurking behind that claim, however insane it might seem to anyone
else.

Confusion whirled into frustrated rage. Chess surged forward
and grabbed Morrow’s shirt in both fists, twisted hard, so the cloth
came up in bunches. “Just what the fuck are you even
talkin’
about?
You incredible goddamned dumbass!” He shook Morrow savagely.
Wrapped in Rook’s presence, Morrow felt barely a twinge, but knew
he’d be aching tomorrow. “Where the fuck you think I
was
, all that
damn time? I’ve Christ-well
been
to Hell already, Ash. That’s where
you
put me!”