A Rope of Thorns (Hexslinger 2)

But it was Fennig who actually interposed: lunged in fencer-swift, using his cane like an epée, to send the Redskin somersaulting face-first into the nearest wall. Gravity, hex-augmented, was enough to snap his jaw one way, neck the other, with a furious crack.

Ixchel looked Fennig’s way, and nodded. To which Fennig tipped his bowler, like she was just another skirt to flirt with.

“Least I could do, ma’am,” was all he said, aloud. Adding, with his mind—Seein’ this is your city, after all. And you the reason, in the end, that me and my g’hals here have free run of it.

Oh, I like this one, husband.

Times like these, Rook wondered why they ever bothered to speak aloud to each other at all, ’sides from so as not to lose the ability.

The shaman snarled, and wrenched a final helping of power from his bond-donors, who crumpled, curling around their guts. Knowing better than to strike at Ixchel, he sent it whipping at Fennig instead: an arc of liquid lightning, overcooked energies spinning off in all directions.

Fennig, however, simply stepped backward, allowing Berta, Eulie and Clo to join hands around him. Of a sudden, Rook could see the bindings netted between them, a living ward-circle: raw ghost-currents drawing only on each other, with not a single thread of the girls’ own power—or Fennig’s—reaching out to drink of the shaman’s spillage. And as the spell broke harmlessly over their hunched shoulders at once, Clo’s mid-section gave an all but imperceptible heave, shrugging the bluish farewell crackle ’round itself and folding it away, all neat and tidy, ’til it winked

itself out like a stepped-on cheroot.

I was right, Rook realized, amazed. The child, too. All of ’em, working in tandem. It’s the Goddamn future growin’ up, right in front of us.

Then: Time to end all this, ’fore someone gets hurt that shouldn’t.

Yes, little king. And so it shall be ended, now.

Ixchel turned hard black eyes back on the shaman and his donors. “Prostrate yourselves,” she ordered, forcing the fallen hexes to splay themselves instantly flat, muscles spasming; blood broke from eyes, ears, noses, as choked cries of agony squeezed out through their locked jaws. To the Mex, in specific, she continued—“You wish to shed your precious water in my direction—make chalcihuatl from nextlaualli while seeking xochimiquitzli, the flowery death, as was your ancestors’ right, and pleasure. How dearly I love to be reminded of these things, here in this new land! It is a great gift, and I accept it, gladly.”

Oh, what a terrible creature she was, as Rook well knew already. Thinking, numbly: But I’m the one who’ll have to lie down with her, later on.

Though he somehow thought any one of these fools would be right glad to trade places with him, to save ’emselves from what came next.

The smile Ixchel gave was beatific, dreadful as the sickly skull-fragment moon which hung above. “Feed me,” she said.

For just one moment, shaman and followers froze, pain apparently ceased. Then their skins went purple—bloating, glowing—as their blood pushed out and upwards through every pore at once, heating to a boil in mid-rise, flushing a fresh-carved meat-stink throughout the air. Fanning her hands toward her face, Ixchel inhaled this sanguinary cloud in a single, impossibly long breath, ’til at last it dissipated, leaving behind a clutch of sinewy stick-figure mockeries: swollen-jointed and crumbly, already disintegrating, with black pits for eyes.

After, it took some effort for her to regain her stillness. Even as she turned and glided over to Rook’s side, she had not mastered it perfectly; the nox vomica of pure power she’d swallowed danced behind both furnace-grate pupils, making her twitch.

For a moment, he was eight years old again, caught by his mother in mid-disaster, sick with suspense to learn his punishment. But the goddess who owned him only went up on her toes, so much smaller (and stronger) than him it fairly hurt, to kiss his sweating forehead.

“I have saved you, little king, yet again. Now, seeing I am past due thanks . . . it behooves you to come with me, and do me reverence.”

As if all this had been nothing more than a trivial detail, absently settled. As if none of it really mattered.

We’re dreams to her, Rook thought, good, bad or indifferent. This was nothing, like everything else. A shadow-show between blinks.

“Up in a tick,” he told her, lips dry. “Wouldn’t do to keep you waiting.”

“No,” she agreed. And was gone.

Left behind, the corpses powdered inevitably apart, then blew away on a rising wind. Clo let out a whoosh, and folded back onto the others, who murmured at her like doves. Fennig, meanwhile, gave her a quick comfort-clasp of the hand before once more pinning Rook with those oh-so-penetrative re-hid oculars.

“Knowing you’re wanted elsewhere,” he said, “I don’t s’pose you’d care to jaw a while, if the ladies walk on.”

Rook looked at him, face kept strictly unreadable, from half a year’s practice. Did he really dare?

“Have to be quick,” he said, eventually.

“As typhus, Reverend.”

Minutes after, they stood side by side, watching smoke from the Blood Engine’s stacks rise up forever. Even now, Rook knew, there were a horde yet of supplicants massing who’d need to be Oathed, ’fore they grew so weary from the Call tearing at their guts that they turned on each other, and had to be put down for the current citizens’ edification. Ixchel hadn’t thought much on that, obviously, when commanding he gift her with both his immediate presence and a workable cock-stand. But then again, such things meant equally little, in her ancient eyes.

“Your hex-work’s in seeing,” Rook said. “Which means you must’ve noted the same bindings ’tween our dead friends I did.”