A Rope of Thorns (Hexslinger 2)

This festival honours Tlaloc, Chalchiuhtlicue and Quetzalcoatl, all of whom are somehow identified with wind and rain. The drought is over—waters rise, and life begins anew.

The Aztec trecena Mazatl (“Deer”) is ruled by Tepeyollotl, yet another form of Tezcatlipoca. But by the Mayan Long Count calendar, day Ollin (“Movement”) is governed by Xolotl, the Twin Shapeshifter, Lord of the West and Double of Quetzalcoatl. Though identified with sickness and physical deformity, he nevertheless accompanied Quetzalcoatl to Mictlan in order to retrieve the bones from those who inhabited the dead world of the Fourth Sun and create new life from them, thus repopulating our present world, that of the Fifth Sun.

This is a day of the purified heart, a moment when human beings may best perceive what they are Becoming. A good day for transmutation, which arrives like an earthquake.

Chapter Nine

Black shapes outlined in spectral fire under a darkened sky, the air itself rent and somehow sparking, set abuzz like galvanized metal; it’d been a lamentably long time since “Reverend” Asher E. Rook felt the necessity of “casting” a spell, per se. Yet here he was, knelt down in the shadow of that first step-sided black ziggurat his dear, dread Rainbow Lady had raised up out of the cracked Arizona earth, which now formed the very heart of New Aztectlan—quoting his long-burnt Bible from memory, and hiding his perfidy in plain sight.

Hexes, beware hexation, he thought, intentionally misquoting Webster. Not a one of us worth the trusting, to our very marrow. Yet we still all go on hoping, like fools.

Gods on earth, writ large or small, still scrabbling desperately for love or lashing out in hate, same as the humans they used for dogs, for toys, for kindling. Still steered ’round by their nethers, in whatever direction least suited logic.

But as Chess had once remarked, on much the same subject: As for me . . . I’m certainly no exception.

For a second, Rook shivered helpless in memory’s grip, feeling the print of Chess all along him like a scar. For damn if he couldn’t use the contentious little bastard right now—him, or someone like him.

All around, the Blood Engine’s fires burned low and sullen, smoke-towers just rippling the horizon with heat. Oil lamps, candles and witch-fire alike dotted up and down the temple’s walls, outlining New Aztectlan’s spreading borders in a malignant melanoma of light. From where he knelt—the roof of an empty adobe hut on its easternmost border, built a scant few weeks back, by some now-dead Redskin mage—Rook heard this place others had come to call “Hex City” murmur like a giant complaining in its sleep, troubled by dreams.

For lack of any better plan, he’d begun by drawing a charcoal circle, but that in itself had run the full extent of his preparations. Lack of the most basic training showing, yet again; with all his lore culled straight from the Old Testament and various gospels, what could he possibly hope to know of mystic sigils, names of power, sacred talismans?

But then again, how much did any hex truly need such thespianish trappings? Will and skill, that was all any of it’d ever been based on in his experience, no matter how spectacular the result. Fortune’s favour, if not God’s.

From an inner pocket, the Rev took a mojo bag much like that he’d once used to bind Ed Morrow; upended it into his palm, shook out a short-chopped, greying, mouse-brown lock and tossed it into the circle. A mental twitch of power was all it took to ignite the offering, rendering the immediate air acrid with burning hair-reek.

“The hand of the LORD was upon me,” he murmured, as the smoke rose up and twined about itself, a snake trapped in its own coils. “And carried me out in the spirit of the LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley, which was full of bones. And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry.

“Ezekiel 37, 2 to 3.”

In a cavern under the ziggurat, Ixchel (or the mortal woman’s body she rode, at least—poor Miss Adaluz, that was) lay this very second cocooned in something part trance, part narcoleptic reverie. She had cast herself downward into dark water, as she did with ever-increasing regularity; seeking out the Sunken Ball-Court’s slimy deeps, to commune with those same relatives of hers she aspired to pull back up into the light. And all the while trusting implicitly in Rook to do her business and keep her safe, according him roughly the same contemptuous parody of respect accorded any given guard dog.

Playing the part, he’d stood watch there a few hours, just to see what might happen. In sleep-death, her proud face slackened, she almost looked young enough to evoke an utterly unnecessary stab of protectiveness—but as attempts on her “life” by some of the city’s earliest and least willing converts had proven, she was all but impossible to harm, even if Rook had thought to try.

Indeed, the longer she stayed embodied, more skin-out human she seemed, the more dangerous she became . . . her habitual lack of expression just one more mask, power boiling from her pores, that phantom cloak of dragonflies billowing behind her in a buzzing tide whenever she moved, so slow and stately, almost swimming. As though the desert air she cut through was black Mictlan-Xibalba-water, stagnant with a promise of plague.

Sometimes she bled, without seeming to know that she did so. Enthroned beside her, he often saw it come and go, unremarked: blood beneath her nails or streaking from the corner of one eye or the other like tears, to paint the black spirals on her cheeks; liquid carnelian rimming her areolae, or hung from the dark nipples themselves like extra jewellery. Blood welling up from somewhere inside her, spilling down those strong brown thighs to dye her ankles, well hid beneath her Chalchiuhtlicue-aspect’s scaly skirt of writhing, hissing ghost-snakes.

Of course, Ixchel’s vessel had been dead a good long time, at this point. So perhaps she was simply breaking the flesh down for parts, in anticipation of a second resurrection—soon-impending, at least by her personal calendar. And far more glorious.

“And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord GOD, thou knowest.”

Then again, what amused Rook most was how these offhand manifestations of hers now rang so interminably routine; for all he spent his days immersed neck-high in awful wonders, nothing disgusted or frightened him, for more than maybe a minute at a time. Which maybe explained why, for many of New Aztectlan’s other hexes, he was just as much a figure of sharp fear and odd arousal as she . . . more so, perhaps, given they saw him far more often and had more immediate cause to fear what he might do, in his “wife’s” unholy name.

For her part, she liked him to play fist to her glove, though the laws he enforced all came straight from her cyanose lips. Telling him, more often than not:

You know my mind, little priest-king husband, as is only fitting, since you are the lash I strike with, the mask I wear. My good right hand.

Like Chess was to me, Rook thought, the person does for you what you yourself can’t see needs to be done. If I hadn’t done myself out of Chess Pargeter, he and I could’ve ruled this whole world, together. . . .

Yes, if Rook had trusted him enough to bring him over from the beginning, or Chess had been able to grow beyond the limits of his own imagination without having to be pushed—why, they might have been twin mage-Presidents of America by now, with no deific aid necessary. ’Til they’d destroyed it, and each other, in the process.

He will return, little king, Ixchel would say, were she awake enough to listen. You know this.

Come back here to die, you mean.

To die, yes. And live again. Perhaps adding, in that oddly softer way she sometimes had: I find I begin to miss him as well, if that is of help.

Which he could rightly believe, given how important Chess had made himself to her plans. But knowing that wasn’t much of a comfort.