A Tree of Bones (3 page)

Carver wiped rainwater from his face. “Captain sent me to scout southward. All activity’s been to the north; he had it in mind might be a distraction.”

“Good thought, but wrong approach.” At Carver’s half-raised brow: “Washford’s thinking like an officer facing others, Private; Rook’s a hex, leading hexes. We’ve already seen how they move, in ways we sure as hell can’t stop ’em from going — all’s we can do is try and predict where they’ll light down next, and be there waitin’. Which means, if this was a distraction, it’d be from . . .” Morrow cut off, like he’d been slapped. “Oh,
shit
.”

“Sir?”

Morrow weighed his options, mind buzzing. “Private, I can’t trump Captain Washford’s orders, but I can tell you where you’re
really
needed to intercept the enemy.” More lightning roared past above, screams drifting back from what would have been the township’s limits, had the posts once indicating it as such not been either washed or blasted away. “Does your boss trust your judgement? And if he does, do you trust mine?”

Carver’s jaw clenched. “Lead the way, Mister Morrow.”

They pounded down the next swampy half-mile. As always, war’s affray made for ghastly accompaniment, all the more so for those eldritch elements woven among the usual tumult of gunfire and dying men’s shrieks. To their left some invisible creature gave out a wounded minotaur’s bull roar, while from elsewhere there came the sizzle of fried bacon fat cut with a monstrous rattling hiss and ponderous, slurping footfalls thudding hard enough to be felt. Half of it, Morrow suspected, might be nothing but sheerest illusion, yet no less deadly to terrified, armed men, for all that.

Determined to outpace the pandemonium, he turned down a side lane, Carver on his heels, heading for Bewelcome’s main meeting hall — and just as he did, the sky itself exploded, seeming to crack in half and hammer down, blowing the building’s roof apart. Morrow flung himself sideways into Carver, flattening them together as lethally sharp, still-burning fragments pincushioned the mud, hissing into puddles around them. Fire and smoke billowed up, high as Babel’s tower. The hall’s front doors burst open to expel the citizens who’d sheltered within, who fled, screaming.

Shielding his eyes with one arm, Morrow squinted through the black spots in his vision, gut clenched in dread. More to come, he well knew it. Like always.

Seconds later, a whole new torrent of
words
— silver-black and sparking, writ in crabbed Bible print, their capital points sharp as just-forged ironwork — began to fall through the clouds toward them like burning debris, touching their upturned faces with an awful light. And they’d’ve been considerably harder to read had an all-too-familiar voice not been heard rasping along, while the demonic text spiralled down:

W
oe to the crown of pride, to the drunkards of
E
phraim, whose glorious beauty is a fading flower, which are on the head of the fat valleys of them that are overcome with wine!

B
ehold, the
L
ord hath a mighty and strong one, which as a tempest of hail and a destroying storm, as a flood of mighty waters overflowing, shall cast down to the earth with the hand . . .

A
nd the glorious beauty, which is on the head of the fat valley, shall be a fading flower, and as the hasty fruit before the summer; which when he that looketh upon it seeth, while it is yet in his hand he eateth it up.

Isaiah 28, one to four
, Morrow thought, numbly. And watched the next disaster take shape, clear as the Devil’s own hand. Five more black tornado-strands, a figure clinging to the end of each, whip-striking down through the torn roof. Three were women, one heavily child-laden; one a slim young man, gangster-fashionable, his eyes hid behind smoked-glass spectacles and clutching a cane, the digits on his scarred left hand having been violently reduced to two fingers and a thumb.

Hank Fennig and his ladies, the full complement, which was surely bad enough, by any standards. But then there was that house-huge fifth figure — one Morrow hadn’t seen in almost half a year, but would recognize ’til the day he died, and maybe after.
He
went clad in black, a preacher’s frayed collar round his neck, and under that collar was a scar — the hanging rope’s kiss, his dreadful lady’s marriage token. Painful toll paid for his passage from faithless secesh preacher to hexslinger, outlaw, administrator supreme of all New Aztectlan.

Yeah, that’s right. And now . . . now, we’re well and
truly
fucked.

Morrow hauled Carver back upright, spitting mud, clapped him on the shoulder. “Get to Washford!” he bawled, over what he suspected were both their equally ringing ears. “Tell him the Rev is
here
, Private! Reverend Rook is
here!
”

Carver’s eyes widened; he saluted, turned, and ran.

Morrow swallowed, wishing with all his heart — disloyal as he knew the impulse was — that he could go with him.

This is where the Gods killed themselves, to make the sun and the moon come up.

Chess remembered.

His first time — down here below everything, where the blood-fed calabash bloomed and bone dust and black water mixed to breed a nightmare river of mud — he had stumbled through stinking water, naked in all senses of the word, goaded by pain inside and out.

He remembered the Enemy peering down at him off that wall of skulls, white eyes crinkled in a pitch black face, amused by the dim, obsidian mirror image of Chess’s flayed agony, drawling —

Ah . . . not sweet sister Ixchel’s
ixiptla
, after all. Who does that make you, then, little king? Little sweetmeat?

And him, snapping back in turn through all-nerve lips, each word a fresh spray of red:
Chess Pargeter, motherfucker; you really ought to’ve heard of me
.

That Hell was wet he’d known already, through hard experience. But not how
dirty
things could be when coal and other infernals were involved. The well-earned grime of a hard day’s ride was only dust and sweat sometimes cut with blood, half inconvenience, half seasoning. Here, all things bore a layer of ground-in scum, each touch leaving black smears; the walls ’emselves seemed dingy, porous, weeping grey.

So Goddamn cold.

Through the glass pane, so muck-crusted it looked like a rotting grave cloth stretched flat, he was still somehow able to see the looming column beyond. Crowned in sundials set shimmering in the constant soft downpour, its shadow reached out in every direction at once, like one of those blood-daubed stone images of Tezcatlipoca Chess had glimpsed before, in other visions.

K’awil, “God K,” Night Wind, Possessor of the Sky and Earth, We Are His Slaves. He who in red, white, blue and black aspects fuels every part of the Machine. Red Xipe Totec with his nude eyes flaring, facing the east . . .
blue Huitzilopochtli gathering lightning from the south, so bright he cannot be looked on directly . . . white Quetzalcoatl rising from the west like a feathered vision-serpent, drawing blood from his own penis to bring the last dead world’s bones back to life. . . .

The steel hats heard how my brother refused human sacrifice, red boy,
the Enemy’s voice told him, without warning.
They thought to twin him with their White Christ, claiming him as proof that fate brought them to our shores. As though he did not already have a twin of his own! But then, they rarely kept quiet long enough to learn the truth of things, even when they claimed to be interested.

Chess felt his empty hands flex and looked down, yearning for gun-butts to fill ’em, let alone a target to train ’em on. C
ouldn’t’ve known he’d drowned at least one of those other dead worlds himself, I guess
, he thought back,
and outta pique with
you
, no less. Or do I got it wrong? ’Cause, you know . . . when you tell me this shit, can’t say as how I’m always listenin’.

No. But if such observations distract, then I will leave you here, red boy, to your own devices . . . all alone.

And then there was only silence, once more.

So now he sat ensconced in the snug of some particularly rancorous varmints’ drink-groggery — called the Clock-house, he’d been told — watching the human tide eddy past. All ’round him, stinking ghosts spat and fought and roistered, so many that Chess could see the bilge-water which passed for whiskey in the phantom glass he gripped tremble with their movements. They jabbered as they elbowed ’round each other, Limejuicer voices shapeless and hoarse as crow-caws, blank gazes never quite meeting.

And all without a word thrown his way, staring right on through him, like he wasn’t even worth the hip-check needed to squeeze by.

No Ed to keep him company down here, in his despond. No Rev. No widowed Yancey Kloves, even, that calm grey gaze of hers just a lid ill-set over a hate as hot as his own. Only Chess’s own limping thoughts, slow as freezing, while he sat and shivered amidst the throng, utterly unmarked on.

Why can’t I feel Ash Rook, at least? Always could, before.

Like an absence, a wound, that was all. A fallen God-botherer-shaped hole.

’Cause he thinks you’re dead, is why
, something told him, shortly — not the Enemy, though equally unsympathetic. Maybe even grieves you, in his fashion.
But clever as he is, he saw you die and somethin’ else rise up wearin’ you like a coat; knows it was all his fault, too, if he’s halfway honest with himself. That’s got to leave a mark.

And everybody else?

There damn well isn’t “anybody else” down here. Just you and the dead folks, and
him
, and —
her.

“Talkin’ to yourself again, I see,” “English” Oona Pargeter’s shade observed from where she sat, a few arms’ lengths past where his elbow rested — just beyond reach, yet far too close for comfort.

“Yeah, well, might be I got friends you ain’t privy to, woman,” Chess shot back, “which’d be a sight more’n
you
could ever claim.” A grin, gap-toothed in her raddled face, was her only answer. “Ain’t you got some other place to be?”

“From the look of fings, I’d guess not.”

If he had one last straw left, this was it. Chess threw back his chair and shoved his way out onto the cobbled streets outside, where he couldn’t even muster sufficient dismay worth snarling again to find Oona already standing there in the rain, waiting for him.

Fuckin’ perfect.

You really ought to’ve heard of me
, he remembered telling Tezcatlipoca, his first time in Hell.
I mean, seein’ how you’re the Devil himself
.

And now that very phrase rang in his ears yet, mockingly, as proof of his own naive assumption that every bad thing in every bad place existing should surely be aware of him by name or reputation. Worst moment but one in Chess’s entire life and he’d been so
certain
he was still somebody’s nightmare, Goddamnit, a skeleton strung with lit nerves tearing ass through the underworld, undebatably bad and unrepentant with it, too. With a cocked gun fisted in either raw-meat-on-bone hand, ready to fire at will.

But he’d been wrong about that in the end, like so much else.

Ripping his own empty chest open in the name of self-sacrifice — or pissiness, more like — aside, he sure hadn’t ever expected to find himself here again, buried alive in one more dark place beneath the world’s skin. The Sunken Ball-Court, the Place of Dead Roads, and now —
this
crap-hole, named by his Ma as
Seven Dials
for the same teetery column they stood beneath, from which seven streets radiated, all alike in the awful unending dark. Just a din of muck and yammer cut with a cacophony of clanks a-boom in the middle distance, like faraway ordnance.

Almost enough to make a man miss ’Frisco
, Chess thought.

“Gone, that is, in London true,” said Oona, staring up at those looming dials. “Long ’fore I drew a breath, let alone got big enough to — ”

“ — screw your way clear?”

“That’s right. Always did fink yerself a cut above, though, didn’t you? Too good for the likes of anyone else.”

“Never claimed to be ‘good,’ woman, or anything like it.” Chess stuffed his hands inside his coat, trying futilely to warm them while wondering if the truly dead at least got to sleep; felt like he’d been up for days, maybe a week or even more. “Whatever I am, though, I know I’m a damn sight better than you.”

“What, ’cause you was born wiv that piece ’twixt your legs?” And that
note
, that sneering scorn, going straight to his gut. Fifteen years fell away. “All you
are
, old son, is lucky. Only wish to Christ you
’ad
been born a girl, so’s . . .”

“So’s you’d know what best to charge, I expect,” Chess snarled.

Only to watch her spit, and snarl back: “
No
. ’Cause then I could’ve made you suffer like I did,
just
like, and not no different. The
exact bloody same
.”

“I suffered enough,” Chess said, turning his back. And strode on, boots clopping through the rain, with his spurs trailing a-scratch on the cobbles like a dead man’s fingernails.

Though he might have walked for hours, the stones underfoot did not change, and every wall looked like its neighbour; even the ceaselessly moving crowds had nearly vanished. So when the dry voice came back into Chess’s mind, at last, he was lonesome enough that he didn’t even flinch.

What do you plan to do now, red boy?

Leave this damn place. Kick your damn ass.

Laughter like a desert gust, sere and hot and swift.

You appear to have your work cut out for you.

Suck my dick, you spectral motherfuck.

Chess took a corner at random, followed by another, and another — then abruptly found himself back in the sundial column’s square, meeting Oona’s eyes yet once more, and clenching both empty fists at her smirk.

“Shouldn’t’ve given your irons away up top, you wanted t’stay armed,” she agreed, as if she could read his mind. “But then, you never could plan ahead for bollocks.”