A Tree of Bones (18 page)

“Chess — ” Oona began, pressing against him.

“I see ’em, Ma.”

“What are — I mean — are they
followin’
us, them fings? Or just followin’ along, general-like? I’m tryin’ t’see ’em clear, but I, I . . . can’t . . .”

“Me either, Ma, and I’m sure they’d like to keep it thus. Hush up, now.”

Got no real weapons to fall back on, nothing but myself, and her. So might could be we’ll just have to
think
our way out of this, as well . . .

Years since the War now, but all the various instincts of
fight-flight-fuck ’em all
came ratcheting back in a single skipped breath. Chess pulled Oona along at a rapid, semi-hunched lope which ate ground steadily, angled even further sideways. Concealment being out of the question, he thought it best to opt for speed; the pursuing shadows had a bestial feel to them, a carrion heat like the breath of battlefield-scavenging dogs — running outright would only mark them as prey. To left and right, meanwhile, a twisty skein of grey un-walls stretched out endless, growing ever dimmer as the no-light failed.

Fifty steps on, marking the shadows’ encroaching rate of advance, Chess dropped to his knees, pulling Oona down along with him. He pitched his voice low yet urgent, sibilants slurred for quiet, demanding: “Can you see it still? The Call, that thread?” She kept on staring back, eyes wide, rigid; Chess gave her a shake. “
Listen
to me, Oona: I need you mean and sharp, like usual. I need the bitch who raised me.”

Blinking, she searched the dust. For a second, he found himself making study along with her, as though some clue might leap out at him, he only squinted the fiercer. This thing which supposedly came with his name attached, an invisible invitation, but one he had to rely on
her
to track. . . .

“There,” she said, finally.

“Get in front of me, then.”

“Oh, you fink? Chance’d be a fine bloody — ”

“
Oona!
I ain’t got time to jaw on it.
Something’s
afoot, and one of us needs to have the way out scouted, you take my meaning?” He pushed back, deliberately opening a way between her and the nearing threat. “Or would you rather fight?”

Her answering swallow was so quiet it might’ve gone unnoticed, he hadn’t been listening.

“. . . believe I’ll watch the door, fanks ever so,” she decided.

“Thought as much.”

All at once, Chess jumped upright and turned, hands coming alight. Dark pressed hard ’gainst the blaze, force balancing against force before the sheer mass of it began to overwhelm, pushing him back. One fist Chess held braced against it while he simultaneously side-stepped, knotting the other
into
the no-wall so it rucked up like heavy silk. In the light’s backspill, he thought he could see black shapes thundering toward them, low-slung and brutish.

Before they could reach them, however, he’d already heaved with all his strength, ripping what lay between like a rotten curtain. Piercing shrieks rose up all ’round, blind and senseless as the wails of dying bluebellies, crushed beneath Captain Coulson’s artillery. Shutting them out, Chess hauled the ruptured membrane across the passage and slammed it straight into the other wall, sealing them off. A forge’s worth of sparks showering from both hands now, he ran his palms up and down the seam, fusing the wall together.

In seconds, it was done. Chess backed away, watching the membrane distort, throbbing and bulging under the thudding blows of whatever now lay trapped behind.

“Didn’t know you could . . . still
do
fings like that, down ’ere,” said Oona, from his elbow — impressed, despite herself. He could kick himself for the way his spirit lifted, just to hear it.

“Me neither,” Chess admitted, panting. And looked over to see her stock-rooted again, with that white, strained look around the eyes; was like the woman’d never been under fire in her life, he thought.

With an irritated jerk of his head toward what he could only assume was their destination, he reminded her: “Oona? Exit?”

“Right,” she repeated, collecting herself, and turned back, eyes on the ground. Now it was her turn to lead, she made the most of it — and as she pulled him on, the seal-wall shuddered as their pursuers continued to slam themselves into it. By some paradox of the light it was still visible, if distant, when Oona at last turned to the left and stopped by a particular point, indistinguishable from any other. “This’s the ticket — now open it, ’fore they catch back up.”

“Ain’t gonna have to cut my hand to shit again, am I?”

“Don’t fink so, just . . . yeah, ’at’ll do it. Press ’ard,
’ere
.” With a crooked grin, Oona slipped her fingers between two folds of mist-curtain, lifting ’em back like one of the hangings on Selina Ah Toy’s walls. Smoky red light stirred and breathed beyond; Oona gestured, a grand ballroom sweep. “After you.”

Chess might have hesitated, if the air behind ’em hadn’t just that second given off with an awful
tearing
sound, nauseatingly fleshy. He whirled ’round just in time to see upright shapes pouring through a torn gash in the seal, coursing down the passage toward them: a thick wave of shadow with long, cowled forms mounted on the same dark flood, mouths open so wide as to unhinge their jaws, rattlesnake-style.

Sick dread froze him in place. Once again, it wasn’t the innate monstrosity of this vision itself; he’d seen worse, by far — done it, too. But even in this empty place where all should have been equally unrecognizable, he somehow knew these things: not nameless monsters, random Hell-harrowers. They were the dead.

His
dead.

I’ve killed a lot of people, boy,
he remembered telling one of them, once, impatiently — dead whore Sadie’s little defender, back in Joe’s, before he and Ed became better acquainted. Before the Rev brought home that night-shiny new “wife” of his and let her have her way, driving a stake through their concord’s heart a good twenty-four hours before she tore Chess’s own ticker out bodily and ate it, right in front of his eyes. Back before he himself had tasted the grave’s so-called delights, and therewith been transformed without hope of repair — become the awful object he was now, chased by a horde of kills too many to recall, or regret.

“
Chess!
” Oona screamed, slapping him ’cross the chops. And with that all-too-familiar pain, it at last became her turn to haul
him
, fast as humanly possible, straight out of one Hell, and headlong into another.

When Night’s house grew up and the Crack gaped wide, all other things fell silent, as if made suddenly aware of their own danger. But then again, this was a dangerous world, or at least far more so than ever.

Outside New Aztectlan, things gathered in the darkness, waiting. While inside . . .

The baby came out blue, in pieces. Rook had seen birthings go wrong before, ’course; when the doctor failed, next one you sent for was always the preacher. But it’d been a long time. On some level, he’d hoped — expected — never to play this part again: bearer of tidings so far beyond bad they approached a sort of dire grandeur.

By any lights, tonight should’ve marked an uncontested victory. Bewelcome they’d left humbled if not destroyed, reminded once again just who, and what, they dared to squabble with. And they’d achieved a goal of near-equal importance, for Sophy Love was gone, at last — if not dead then surely lost beyond any expectation of return, and without their personal Joan of Arc, the Bewelcomites could only be a spent force. In his experience, a wound to morale was often deadlier than the greatest bloodshed, and harder to heal.

But here was bitter proof of the same maxim wreaked on them, by fate’s cruel hand. Indeed, were Rook’s own faith yet intact, or he’d put more credence in the Widow’s invocations, he might suspect judgement of an even higher type.

He’d brought the raiders straight back to his own sleeping chamber, laid Clo down and left her there with Fennig gripping her hand, while Berta and Eulie wept. Then he’d conjured Sal Followell in and himself out with another wrench of power, an expenditure so great it left him exhausted — too weak to shield himself from the flood of images he’d thought to escape, magic lantern-projected directly into his brain: Clo screaming, lips white; Auntie F.’s strong mahogany arms, gloved to the elbow in blood. A flickering light cupped inside Clo’s bulging stomach, red-gold glow dimming to anoxic blue, like a torch strangling in mineshaft air. The opaque disks of Fennig’s hastily conjured replacement glasses, still as two dark moons in the unlit gloom.

Those tiny limbs slipping out on a flood, bedsheets darkening beneath — broken, pallid, yet twitching with the last few jerks of life. That tiny face, mouth barely open enough to cry before it turned aside, gave a single gasp, went slack.

And on the wall behind, a shadow, rearing up — tall, curvaceous, with just a hint of exposed bone for ornament — to watch it all without comment, enthroned in cruel contemplation.
Waiting for
. . . something; just what Rook didn’t know, or want to.

Staggering down through the Temple’s dark stone halls, he emerged at last into the square and slumped to the snow-streaked ground, as empty of magic as of hope.

Too much power in flux to have any chance of hiding what had happened. Cautiously, people began to congregate, some dressed for bed, others barely decent. A nightshift-clad Marizol ran up, little feet bare against the cold ground, only to stop in horror when she caught sight of Rook’s face. At the same time, two more figures came lofting in over her head on a carpet of solid air, thudding to earth: Honourable Chu and the Shoshone, both grim-visaged, battle-experienced enough to recognize the flavour of pain pouring hexaciously from the Temple.

“Clodagh,” said the Shoshone, in visible dismay. “How?”

“Enemy,” Rook replied, voice flat. “Lady tried to drown the place, and failed; Chess . . . her Enemy, I mean . . . thwarted it, so she left us behind, and the back-burst knocked us all to perdition.” He pressed his hands to his forehead, sticky with Clo’s cooling blood. “Sal’s in with her now.”

“For what good that will do,” Chu snapped. “Did I not
say
it was foolish for the girl to go?” The threads of blue light crawling in his tunic illuminated him eerily. “In a bad birth, the child’s
ch’i
-hunger will be at its worst. We may lose them both now, when we can ill afford losing even one.”

“Think we already have,” the Rev couldn’t keep from saying, even as not-your-Auntie Sal’s voice whispered at him:
Ate that boy of mine all up, without ever even wantin’ to.

The Shoshone’s face fell. “That does it, then. They’re bound together tight as ticks, the Fennigs, from long before they took the Oath; lose one, it as good as guts them all — in their hearts,
and
their hex-strength.”

“A ridiculous theory, as always,” Chu scoffed. “You have no idea — ”

Neither would have a chance to argue the point further, however. Chu’s tunic suddenly dimmed mid-word, a lamp guttering out; the Shoshone swayed, bonnet’s feathers rising like a lizard’s frill, and almost fell. All over the crowd, onlookers jackknifed, faces turned sick, grey, hollow; some collapsed on one knee, or retched outright. Rook took the punch of it deep in his own gut, ice-needle cold spiking through every vein. The power bled out from all of them, spurting toward the Temple in hot, shimmering, invisible jets.

Death
, Rook realized, through his pain. Worse: an unsanctified demise, not given willingly on
any
level — a rejection of the Oath to its very core, sending the dying hex’s power uselessly outward rather than channelling it back into the Machine. Such Oathbound-wide bouts of weakness hadn’t happened since the City’s early days, when ill-made Temple sacrifices sometimes went to waste, before the population had grown numerous enough to shrug them off. That everyone felt it now — apparently without exception, and so
strongly
— might be grim testimony to the thinness of Hex City’s resources, or bittersweet evidence of how beloved Clo had been, in her hellion Irish way. Or . . .

Something else, something hidden, impenetrable and ancient. Something with his lady wife’s increasingly fleshless fingerprints all over it.

The sickening pull went on, and now it wasn’t only hexes that fell. On one side of Main Street, the diamond cube of Cordell Arkwright’s chirurgery suddenly shattered, resolving to a pile of glass-clear shards; on the other, the huge vaudevillian façade that Luca de Belfort had conjured for his groggery-saloon crumpled to the ground like a theatrical scrim cut from its rigging, revealing the ugly crude-hammered plank walls behind. In every direction, hex-built structures collapsed, hex-woven garments shredded, hex-forged tools and objects came apart, or resumed their former mundane shapes.

Rook’s heart stuttered in his chest; an awful pain shot up his left arm like a bolt. With a cry of fright, Marizol flung herself into his arms, clinging close.

The scream which rang out from Rook’s balcony high above was raw with agony, holding a heartbreakingly defiant note even to the last: “
Ahhhhh, Christ, shittin’
Jaysuuuuuuuss — !”

But there it stopped, snapping to silence, a new-broke bone. The pull vanished with it. Still holding Marizol, Rook straightened far enough to signal Chu and the Shoshone with a finger-snap: “Check the defences — the rest we can rebuild later, once we don’t have to worry whether Pinkerton knows what’s happened. Those wall-wards, though . . . they have to stand.”

The two of them nodded, and left on the run. A fresh wave of sickness threatened to capsize him. At his elbow, Marizol whispered: “
Jefe
— you are all right? You
must
be. For them.” She nodded to the stunned crowd. Shamed to realize just how much of his considerable weight Marizol had actually been supporting, Rook drew himself up straight — permitted himself one hand only on her shoulder, and smiled down at her, as he did. She returned it, shyly.

“Holy
Christ
, Reverend, what was that?” shouted the first hex back on his feet — Arkwright, as it happened. “Look at my friggin’ shop — the whole damn
city
! Ain’t felt anything like that since . . . well, since the last time some fool tried to . . .”