A Rope of Thorns (20 page)

In that one instant, he envied Fennig and his pimp’s roster of lovelies so intensely, it made him sick—so much so that were he a far worse man, assuming that was even possible, he would’ve gladly killed ’em all, and walked away whistling.

Fennig almost seemed to see it, too—the beginnings of it, at any rate. He angled himself subtly to nudge Clo back behind him, just in case Rook saw fit to strike.

Don’t want it to come to that, if it don’t have to
,
Rook was surprised to realize.
I’d rather by far have this one with me than against me—and his womenfolk, too.

A moment only—less, perhaps.

’Til one second was split headlong from the next by a shout, somewhere by the southernmost intake gate—“
Reverend Rook!
I need words with you,
gringo!
”

And this, too, reminded him of Chess: the glad relief of imminent threat, distraction through destruction. So, shrouding himself in a tarry halo, Rook turned to defend Hex City and his lady’s dubious honour against this latest challenger.

“Here I am,” he said.

The group set dead-centre in front of him stood together, some fourteen strong, and only now did Rook see how their stance differed from the usual supplicants’: shoulder to shoulder, braced and spread-footed, intently focused. Strangely, the clear leader—a leathery man in buckskins whose grey hair still showed streaks of south-of-the-Border black—was the one man Rook didn’t recognize. All others had been Oathed weeks previous; a passel of young male hexes, most of ’em likewise Mex or part-Mex, with glyphs, fresh-smeared in red, shining from their worn serapes and dusty shirts.

A compact, then: some sort of coup in the making. And since Ixchel wasn’t to hand, it would fall to
him
to crush it ’fore it got the chance to take root, let alone spread.

Not that the Mother of Hanged Men ever deigned to do much of her own hunting—even in those first days, when the City comprised no more than a few dozen citizens, she’d more often than not been content to name the offender to Rook, and stand back. But the few times she
had
taken a hand herself still loomed large. One offender—some white-bearded old English gaffer, strong as Rook and twice as crafty, who’d styled himself a true wizard—was lofted up by invisible talons into the air and boiled away to a cloud of shreds while Ixchel stood rock-still beneath, not even looking at the man as he died; just set her jaw and smiled, as the precious blood fell like sticky rain. Another, some N’Orleans voodooist who claimed to channel spirits more powerful than the Ball-Court’s denizens, was shown her error when every fetish she wore exploded simultaneously, unravelling her from the ankles up.

Compared to further complicity in that sort of wanton slaughter, Rook was glad to assume the role of judge, jury and (unflinching, yet fairly humane) executioner—but intervene to slap down both challengers if a brawl not designed to oust the Lady broke out, just to make sure they didn’t lose anyone too potentially useful. The best way to tame wolves, Rook had always believed, was to make them your sheepdogs. And though he doubted so soft an option would satisfy this particular shaman’s honour, he probably owed it to the more peaceful New Aztectlanites—like Fennig, and his Missuses—to at least try.

“Some say mercy is nothin’ but folly gussied up nice,” Rook began, adding a touch of skull-echo to his best preacher’s boom. “And while I’m not amongst ’em, necessarily, the law I enforce proceeds from far beyond me, admitting no quarter for defiance. So here’s all the clemency you’re likely to get, gentlemen: one warning. Stop, or be stopped.”

The Mexican mage snarled, lips lifting back, and spat. Where it fell the earth turned to quartz, lifting free from the dirt with a sound like cracking glass.

“Squawk on, carrion crow,’” he replied, scornfully. “This is Mexica business, only—so bring forth
our
goddess, whose throne you have usurped. We would have what she owes.”

Rook kept his rope-burnt voice placid, even as his temper began to rise. “’Fraid you’ve been misinformed,
Señor
—there’s nobody talks to the Lady just for the asking, ancestry notwithstanding. You talk to me,
I
talk to her; maybe then, if you’re lucky. But probably not.”

“’Cause that’s how you want it, huh?” one of the younger hexes called out, his coppery skin and broad cheekbones marking him more Diné than Mex. Rook thought of “Grandma,” whose true name he still didn’t know, and never would—that grim old shamaness who’d meant to educate him out of Ixchel’s clutches, only to lose her own life for the offer’s foolish softness—and felt his stomach twist with wary guilt, as the boy went on. “You get the Lady’s ear,
Reverend
, and the rest of us just have to knee it?”

“’Cause that’s how
she
wants it, fool,” Rook snapped back. “I don’t have any more damn choice in the matter than you do:
gods don’t bargain
, as I’ve learned full well
.
So if you
truly
want her attention, do how she likes it best—throw yourself in now, and save me the bother.”

The old mage snorted. “Think you’re the only Way-walker’s seen gods,
gringo
?” Something opened behind his anger like a second set of eyes, dreadful and hollow. “There’s more moving out there than her, Rook, or that skinless bed-boy of yours. Something else is coming too, and soon—something you’ve got no measure of, not in your darkest nightmares.”

“Yeah? Well, that ain’t much of a surprise.” Rook made his voice like a wall, massive, impenetrable. “I’ve seen things’d turn the rest of your hair white, old man—and we’ll all see a whole lot more of such, before we’re through.”

“But you don’t care to know what-all we got to say about it?” the Diné youth challenged.

“Nope. And since you still don’t seem to understand, I’ll elucidate.” Without warning, Rook stomped down hard. A burst of black power detonated beneath his boot heel, shuddering the entire square in outward-arcing ripples; coupsters and citizenry alike grabbed at each other, just to stay upright. Only the great ziggurat stood unmoved. “See what I mean? Foregone conclusion. This place’ll keep on growing, be New Aztectlan ’til it isn’t anymore. Which is when them as ain’t in on this will wish to Christ Almighty that they were.

“Now, you already drew your line in the sand just by comin’ here, so your only real choice is to take the Oath, spill blood and keep to the right side of it, from now on. Or . . .”

“Or?” The chief mage said, expressionless.

“. . . into the Machine you go.
Like this.
”

Rook swung a backhand strike, lashing invisible tendrils ’round his opponent with casual ease. In his mind’s eye, he’d plotted an arc ending with this interloper slammed down atop the Temple’s highest altar, broken and bleeding. But when he hauled hard on the web of force, he staggered, as if he’d tried to lift the entire group at once. The snare fell away.

Too surprised for fear, Rook stared, while the younger contingent exchanged looks of shock and glee admixed—same as any greenhorn who’d just seen some long-loathed rival laid out with a single punch.

“You,” the stranger told Rook, “are not the only one who knows what can come of making a vow.”

As he swooped both hands up, Rook saw the shaman’s co-rebels close their eyes, let their own hands go jerking skywards too, like marionettes. The old man clapped both fists together, sending a low
thoom
Rook’s way that seemed to pull the air after; their impact was thunder turned inside-out, all but silent.

Then a tidal wave smashed into him, sent him flying back ’til he smacked the ground all stunned and aching, his shields shattering same as the spit-glass gone to dust under his feet. Rook fought to raise his head, fear beginning to push its way past shock at last—marked how the stranger stood watching, coiling the power his coterie had apparently willed through him ’round one arm, like a bullwhip. Behind, the younger hexes swayed in place, too discomfited anymore to grin; their faces drew tight, wincing, as Rook felt their broken Oaths suck at their sorcerously allied strength.

The Mex, however, had sworn nothing, as yet.
His
strength was untouched, though hardly strong enough on its own merits to do such damage.

Rook knew the feel of the Oath by now, could sense its constant shape: a green-black line heart-rooted in every sworn witch or warlock, then run down into the ground, to the Temple’s Mictlan-Xibalba-sounding depths. Yet even through pain-blurred eyes, inchoate nerve-ends sizzling with frustrated power, he perceived now how each rebel bore
another
set of binding cords: a cat’s cradle connecting comrade to comrade, ’til all spun finally back upon their leader, galvanizing him in a concentric circuit.

Together,
Rook thought.
Working
together
. Lending each other their strength—or he’s taking it, at the least, and they’re letting him. How can that be?

Here Grandma entered his brain, yet once more—had the bitch ever truly quit it? Reminding him of that black marriage she’d dangled in front of him, back when he’d still dreamed he could have his Chess without eating him: mutual cancellation, self-sacrifice.
They
may
live, but not as Hataalii. . . .

They
swore
to him,
Rook realized, numbly.
Another
Oath, to share their power, so he could use it to break free of hers.

God damn, if the mad old man kicking his ass this very moment wasn’t some sort of state-uncertified
genius
.

The City’s Oath ran far deeper, of course; within moments, the Mex’s fellow coupsters would be drained, with no more power left to give—but within
moments
, they’d no longer need to. For the critical next few seconds, their collective was just too strong for Rook to beat, alone.

As the shaman stared down at him, sure of his victory, Rook mustered a last glare. “
Traitor
,” he called him. “We’re all hexes here, Goddamnit . . . turned away by everyone, everywhere, ’cept here. So what if Ixchel’s worship takes a toll? Blood ain’t exactly in short supply. Spill enough of it, and she’d’ve made us free.”

But the grey-haired stranger simply shook his head. “I already know your Lady, Rook—better than you do, for all you’ve shared her bed. She was one of my people’s gods, in long-gone times; we fed her, fed
them
, ’til the earth itself was soaked, so foul nothing would grow. But did they help us, when the steel hats came? When
los
conquistadors
raped everything in their path, leaving only sickness behind? When the
Christo
-shouters burned our books and bodies?

“No. They are hungry ghosts, not gods at all,
never
trustworthy. One is bad enough—but she wants to bring back more, doesn’t she? To raise each and every one of them up from where they squat in darkness, down under the water, so deep even the bone canoe fears to penetrate it.”

Rook couldn’t deny it, even if this phantom grip squeezing both his lungs flat would allow him enough breath to. The effort of lying wasn’t worth whatever time he had left.

“Think you know her
that
well, you’d still best not be here when she comes lookin’ for me,” Rook managed, barely. But the shaman simply drew hard on the net once more, conjuring a fresh palmful of lightnings.

“Oh,” he replied, “I fully expect to die at Her hand, now or later—as you do too, or should. You already know she will destroy this world to bring on hers.”

“The Fifth ends in earthquakes—yeah, I heard. But the Sixth—”

Another head-shake. “No. Such creatures do not go
forward
, ‘Reverend.’ She seeks to sink us further still, to resurrect the Fourth World, which ended in floods when the Enemy, his brothers and his mother tore everything apart between them. When the earth itself was cracked like a bone and boiled, its marrow cooked sweet for sucking. And the Feathered Serpent was forced to steal our dust from Mictlan once more, afterwards, so that new men and women might be fashioned from it.”

Fresh mill-grist,
Rook thought, throat burning.
Fresh jaguar cactus fruit to be squeezed for its pulp, over a thousand rebuilt altars.

“
This
is what she wants—the doom
you
have already helped her put in place. So
true
mercy, I think, would be for you not to have to watch it come to pass.”

His hand swung down, straight into
someone else
’s deceptively flimsy grasp: four slim fingers and a thumb, all five nails cyanose, outlined in black blood. Dread Lady Ixchel stood suddenly between them, abrupt and upright, whole form ablaze with chilly lunar radiance—and at her touch the old Mex recoiled, gobbling, as Rook heard his wrist snap like a rotten twig.

“Old owl,” Ixchel named him, tonelessly. “Foolish
nahual
. You claim to know me? Then you should know better.”

So ice-cold and freakishly arousing at once, as always, stinking of death and barely clothed. Rook saw a thorn shoved through either nipple and some random jagged bone-shard bisecting her septum, leaving upper lip and cleavage crusted purple-red, a triangle of phantom claw-marks got in underground battle. But enough to make every prick in the place perk up regardless, and probably grease every pussy as well, to boot; never any call for Rook to think on someone else in order to give her her due and proper, and she knew it. He’d seen with his own eyes how the bitch could make even those queer-to-the-bone long to go digging in
her
charnel treasure-box.

(Chess’s white face, lips set, teeth too gritted even to let out a proper sob of hate as she lowered herself onto him, while Rook did nothing but watch—breath held, heart hammering. Watch and await his own turn, with both of them.)

A man who beds with a goddess becomes a god, little king, or dies. Or both.

Her black blossom of hair lifted high, eddying. Behind her, the cloak of dragonflies billowed forth and rose up buzzing, a tinsel-winged plague.

The shaman’s mouth moved like a fish’s, gasping; his unmaimed hand gave one final tug at the cords binding Rook, only to see Ixchel send them snapping, severed, with a single finger-flick. As he dove back, momentum sending his gang sand-wards along with him, her gaze traced those invisible strands from body to body, following the lesser oath-web: a sloppy working at best, red-gold-gouting, fogging the air. Yet the nude bed where one eyebrow should have been did lift at the sight, if only slightly.