A Book Of Tongues (4 page)

“Listen, granddad,” he said, with surprising patience, “we ain’t
leavin’ ’til the Reverend here and Songbird sit down together. So you
go tell her that and see what it gets you, ’cause I can tell you right
now exactly what it’ll get you, if you don’t.”

The old man swallowed hard and drew himself up slightly, as
if steeling himself to refuse once more (and be shot for it, a good
Celestial soldier). But an imperious voice issued from just up the
street, saying: “No need for that, gentlemen . . . I will gladly see the
Reverend, if he cares to come inside.”

Chess shrugged, and put up his gun. The old man ran off without
a backward glance, calling out as he did: “
Chunren gweilo, waaah! Cao
ni zuxian shi ba dai!
”

“That don’t sound too nice,” Morrow remarked.

“It is not,” the voice — Songbird’s, he surmised — replied. “He is a
foolish old man, and I will deal with him later, harshly, for insulting
my guests. But again, gentlemen, will you enter?”

Morrow thought he’d rather not, another thing he knew enough
to keep to himself. Instead, he trailed Chess and the Reverend
into what proved the most luxurious establishment they’d yet
discovered: a snug red brick house, its dim-lit ground floor given
over to gambling — fan-tan, mah-jongg, a creepily silent general
click and shuffle of plain brass counters and polished elephant-horn
dominoes. On a low stage, a four-piece orchestra sat playing some
windy chaos which sounded to Morrow like they were still deep in
the process of tuning their weirdly shaped instrumentation. Girls
swayed back and forth on either side, doing a serpentine dance.

No sign of Songbird, though. Just a curtain made from jet beads
swinging back and forth atop a flight of stairs, and the same voice
calling down, impatiently: “Up here, Reverend Rook! Bring your
men with you, if you must. I mean you no harm, and trust you mean
me the same. You would never have come here at all were that not
true,
wei
?”

“Yes ma’am,” the Rev agreed, taking hold of Chess’s arm.

But Chess dug himself in. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere near that bitch,”
he said. “You already got her parole, so you don’t really need me. Just
the stink of this hole alone’s ’bout enough to make my head split
open, anyways.”

“Too much feminine perfume, and such?”

“Too much junk, more like. Take Morrow, you want some backup.”

Another rumbling laugh. “Your call, darlin’. Hell, though — I
thought you were up for anything, Chess. When’d you get so damn
nice?”

Chess nodded at the curtain. “You drug us down here to see some
baby whore who does table-rappin’ on the side; ain’t my idea of a
good time, is all. I’ll stay in easy callin’ distance.”

Morrow, dubious: “Baby whore?”

“’Course,” Chess snapped. “Chinee breed ’em that way — whores,
witches, what-have-you. Same as them little mush-faced dogs, or
them gold-colour fish with the floppy heads.” He shook his head,
nose wrinkling. “It’s creepish, the whole damn thing.”

“Sure you ain’t just jealous?” the Rev suggested. “I’ll be in fairly
close quarters with her, after all.” To which Chess’s sharp face
coloured and darkened, in equal measure.

“I’ll stay close,” he repeated. “Locked and loaded — all you gotta do
is yell. Meet you back out front, soon as you’re done your business.”

Rook shrugged. “Probably the best place for you, you feel that
strongly about it. Ed?”

“Sir.”

So they left Chess behind, climbing to meet the only other
magician Morrow’d ever run across so far, with nothing but a
shotgun and Rook’s Bible for cover. First witch-woman Morrow’d
seen since Old Mother Harelip, too, for all she was barely old enough
to . . . well, she’d have to at least be old enough to bleed, according
to Asbury’s strictures.

The curtain parted with a slither. Inside, one windowless room
took up the whole of the house’s second floor — spacious, yet
cramped by a stifling forest of screens which had been arranged to
turn one end of the room into a haphazard sort of pagoda. Where
Songbird slept, Morrow reckoned, and maybe conducted other sorts
of encounters.

“You are correct in this conclusion, Mister Morrow,” the voice
told him, with uncomfortable acuteness — and now issuing from
somewhere roughly behind him, which troubled Morrow even more.
“For while my maiden’s flower is far too highly valued to be sold
except at auction, there are no strictures levied against my allowing
an occasional ‘lookee’ if some white man wishes to pay for the
privilege, though I charge considerably more than fifty cents. I say
white
man, because most Celestials already know that the secret
parts of their womenfolk differ in no way from those of any other
female, be she yellow, white . . . or dead.”

Morrow felt a small shoulder brush lightly against his elbow and
all but fell back, the stock of his shotgun knocking one screen sharp
enough that it rang against the sanctum’s wall like a muffled bell.
The Reverend, no doubt more used to these sorts of tricks, simply
stepped aside, bowing as Songbird settled onto a throne set with a
high silk cushion.

“Have to decline the kind offer, Honourable Lady,” Rook said.
“Though for all I probably couldn’t afford it, I’m sure it makes a
lovely view. What I’m more interested in, however, is your skill — ”

“ — as an interpreter of dreams? I know.”

And here Songbird raised her face to what light there was,
revealing herself as a truly spectral vision: twelve years old at most,
a porcelain doll dressed all in red bridal silk whose features matched
those of the painted courtesans decorating her walls almost exactly,
aside from one peculiarity — a near-complete lack of colour in the
face under her sheer red veil, pig-pale skin, crone-white hair and
faded hazel eyes all bleached by some hideous trick of nature. Her
hands she held folded in her lap, interlaced fingers covered with
long, gilded filigree spikes which gave off a dry, squeaking tone as
they rubbed together, a distant cymbal’s clash.

“Albino,” the Rev observed. “You must be almost blind, I’d think.”

A tiny nod. “Almost. Luckily, I find it aids in my speculative
endeavours. And now, since we have dispensed with formalities:
your dream. It began when you first came to power?”

“Exactly at that same point, yes.”

“When the gallows-trap opened? Or when your neck broke?”

The Rev took this in. Though still loomingly tall, he seemed
suddenly smaller, less assured. “I don’t think it ever actually
broke
,”
he said, at last.

Songbird smiled, thinly. “Such prevarication, for such a powerful
man. Show me the kiss she gave you, your ‘Rainbow Lady.’”

“Thought you said — ”

“I can
feel
very well, Reverend.” Voice dropping further: “Now — I
have other business of my own to conduct tonight, as do you, no
doubt. So open your shirt, and
bow down to me
.”

Was there an extra thrum to the words she spoke? For Morrow, it
was mere speculation — but from what he could see, Reverend Rook
took them full in the face, a thrown glass of cold water. His huge
hands were already rising to obey, unbidden, when he shook himself
like a dog and hauled them back down again.

“Little girl,” he said, “you’d best be able to give me what I want.
Or I will tear this damn place of yours down around you, without
ever even opening my Book.”

Songbird yawned, covering her mouth with those huge gilt nail-sheaths. “We will see.”

The Rev exhaled through his nose, then popped the requisite
buttons, shrugging collar aside from the puckered rope-scar which
still encircled his thick neck, bent himself until Songbird could
reach up and place her naked palm against the furrowed flesh
without having to rise. She stroked the burn, delicately, like she was
planning to buy more of it by the ell.

Creepish
, Morrow heard Chess’s voice remark, from the back of
his brain.

“Do you believe in ghosts, Reverend Rook?” she asked, at last.

“Sure,” the Rev replied, straightening up again. “Why?”

“And do you believe in God?” As Rook stared: “
Gods
?”

This drew a frown. “Old heretic deities, the things they
worshipped in Philistine times? Baal and Moloch, and such?”
Songbird nodded once more. “I was taught those were devils, sent by
Satan to fool with unbelievers. Like Solomon with his wives’ idols,
or Ahab and Jezebel.”

Songbird shrugged. “Gods or ghosts, energy begets energy —
prayer, worship, sacrifice, revenge. Like the
ch’i
, which you and I
both carry inside us; a stream the whole universe drinks from, for
good or ill. Nothing really dies.”

“I do hope there’s some point here beyond the merely philosophical
you’re eventually aimin’ to make, for both our sakes.”

“Certainly. This woman of yours — who watches over all hanged
men, and claims you for her own — is both god
and
ghost. Doubly
powerful, and thus doubly dangerous. She demands something
from you . . . and until you render it to her, she will never let you go.”

“Well, that ain’t actually too helpful, since Goddamn if I know
what that might be.”

“You must ask her.”

“She don’t really speak my language.”

“No — or you hers, I gather. Few probably live who do. This is why
you must speak to her directly.” Pinning Morrow with a red-tinged
glance: “If you would be so good as to reach behind you, Mister
Morrow . . . yes, there, exactly. Thank you.”

The item in question proved to be a long slab of black stuff
like congealed tar, four inches by six, inscribed all over one side
of it with queer figuring. Peering closer, Morrow thought he could
make out the remains of a prehistoric murder, some creature left
in dismembered wreckage — but no, it was a woman, her cheeks
picked out with spiral patterns, black breasts pendulous and stiff
coif balanced by a massive pair of dagger-sharp earrings, fit to carve
someone else the same way she herself had already been unstrung.

Rook shook his head. “That ain’t her.”

“Not completely,” Songbird agreed. “And yet . . . I was given this
in tribute, by a man from Tlaquepacque. He called it a ‘smoking
mirror.’ Your Rainbow Lady will respond to it favourably, if given
the right sort of impetus.”

“Which would be?”

She beckoned him back down again, and whispered in his ear.
Slowly, Morrow saw a cold understanding wash across Rook’s face.

“Uh huh, all right. How much?”

“It depends. How much are you prepared to pay, Reverend?”

“Enough.”

“And by . . . ?”

“. . . the usual method.”

Songbird breathed in, hungrily. “Aaah,” she said. “I
had
hoped
you would honour the traditions.”

“I’m a man what keeps his bargains.”

“Oh, not always, I think.” Songbird’s eyes flicked back to Morrow.
“Perhaps you should send your friend away now,” she suggested.

Rook nodded. “Go find Chess for me, Ed, would you? You may’ve
noticed how he tends to make himself some trouble to get into,
whenever he’s riled.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll be back out in a minute.”

Morrow nodded as well, but found himself lingering — so
obviously, even Songbird couldn’t fail to notice. She smiled, in a way
that made Morrow’s hair rise like quills.

“He will be quite safe with me, Mister Morrow. After all, I am
only a young maiden . . . no fit threat at all to the Reverend. What he
does here, he chooses to. Yes, Asher Rook?”

“Yes.”

“Then . . . it is decided.”

She grabbed hold of the back of Rook’s head with both hands, so
fierce and fast it made Morrow take yet another step back, rattling
the screens’ slick-painted forest. This sly little thing with her
sugar-stick bones, digging her golden claws deep in the Reverend’s
hair, kissing him like she meant to suck out his very soul. Which
she maybe might’ve, since he could see something pass between
them, blurred and subtle, a sort of heat-shimmer that tugged at the
corners where their two mouths met and puffed both their throats
out like frogs’.

They prey on each other,
Asbury had said.

Songbird gulped hard, and Morrow heard the Rev’s usual rumble
become a species of moan that scared him more than anything
else he’d seen thus far. He knew that Chess would’ve tried to do
something about it and screw the consequences, had he only been
in range. Perhaps that was why the Rev had taken pains to make so
damn sure he wasn’t.

But that was Chess, and this was Ed, who didn’t love Reverend
Rook at all — not more than his life, at any rate.

So all Morrow did in response was grit his teeth hard, stop his
ears and take to his heels, shotgun snapping up like a third arm,
already cocked. And left ’em to it.

That dream again. How many had he had already — a seemingly
infinite roster of dreadful variations, each just as grotesque as the
next? How many would he
have
to?

This time, he sat at his Rainbow Lady’s left hand on a dais made
from bones. Her dragonfly cloak spread out behind them both
to form a living tapestry, each dim-brilliant wing aflash, their
collective buzz a rising ghost-whine.

She laid her small hand upon his arm, murmuring:
Even the
dark world has its seasons, or tides. And this, Our Flayed Lord’s
young man-skinning month, is one of our shallowest points . . .
when the waters recede far enough to show the mulch beneath.
The endless death-muck swamp from which all life can — and
will, and must — be reborn.

Look down, little king . . .

Elevated far above the crowd, he saw the Sunken Ball-Court’s
fetid playing grounds teem with competitors — all splendid athletes,
once upon a time. But now they were sadly denuded parodies, skins
black with putrescence, slipping and sliding back and forth over
drained-pale flesh rendered vaguely pink again with strain.