The ridgepole sags to the breaking point.
Six at the top:
One must go through water that goes over one’s head.
Misfortune, but no blame.
“Meaning?”
“There are things more important than preserving one’s own life, so long as the right prevails.” She hissed through her teeth. “Ai-yaaa! Such foolishness. Yet the true reading is plain. If anyone is doomed to sacrifice himself to rebalance the whole, it will be English Oona’s son, not anyone sworn to our cause.”
“Why cast these runes at all, then, if you see the future they speak of so clearly?”
“Because luck can change, always; that is its nature. And always in more than one way.”
Asbury nodded. “Indubitably. And yet . . . in a world containing both science and hexology, surely we have no need for such antiquated concepts as luck?”
Obviously, Songbird did not feel this last observation worthy to be dignified with any sort of response. Instead, she let her red veil swing closed like a door, returning to her efforts; Asbury sighed, reaching for a fascinatingly appropriate yellow-backed dime novel he’d picked up at their last stop: The Salten Town, or, Outlawry Aplenty at Hex City’s Door!
“It’s a hard life you lead, for one so young,” he said, as though to himself. “All . . . this. Were you not—” Here he glanced up again and hesitated, finding her dim gaze returned to him, even more off-putting than before. “—what you are, I mean,” he finished, weakly.
“Were the sky not blue, perhaps, or the moon and sun exchanged? Old fool! What should I do, play with dolls? A hundred generations went to make me. I am a warlord born—an empress reduced to a brothel figurehead, sold alongside peasant girls in a muddy pigsty. More than match to any full-grown American sorcerer. So what matter, if I rail against time’s cage on occasion, or find myself intemperate?” He saw her fingers flex and tremble in their gilded sheaths, perhaps with the effort expended to not hex him silly.
“Please—I meant no insult.”
Songbird sniffed, suddenly cool and remote once more. “Gweilo go-se shifu, elevated undeservedly by cleverness—you have not substance enough to insult me. In the Forbidden City, they would have made a eunuch of you.”
“And we have made you a whore. Is that so preferable?”
“We each use the other for our own ends—you give me shelter from Reverend Rook’s accursed Call, and I lend power, as needed. If that counts as prostitution, I am hardly the only whore in this compartment.”
Asbury flushed. “Nevertheless,” he went on, doggedly. “I am not unconscious of your position’s injustice. I sought only to offer you freedom, or the best version of it I can give; a kind you may not yet have contemplated, perhaps.”
“What . . . freedom?”
Diffidently, Asbury placed a Manifold upon the table where the coins of the I Ching yet rested. Beside it, he laid a delicate bracelet made up of a dozen interwoven rods; its metal looked like silver, but the dull clank it made on wood lacked silver’s chime, sounding somehow dead. Songbird narrowed her eyes further, as if both objects might be scorpions disguised by glamour.
“You know the latest iterations of my device can drain away the hexaciously gifted’s accumulated power,” Asbury said, tapping the Manifold. “But this—” his hand moved to the bracelet “—is the next step. By donning the guard, composed of the same alloys that ground thaumaturgical forces, the hex’s affinity is blocked—he no longer draws in such forces to replenish himself, nor feels any hunger to do so, nor provokes such hunger in other hexes. With one simple bracelet, he can deny altogether the responsibilities of a never-asked-for burden.” He leaned forward, urgent. “You’d be free both of the Call and of any obligation to us. Without your power, Mister Pinkerton will have no need for you, and you could return to—well, wherever you want. San Francisco, far Cathay . . .”
Songbird lifted her gaze. “And this ‘guard’—is it always made so, removable at will?” Her voice went softer yet, a silken rope noose-coiled. “Or are other forms of it yet more . . . permanent?”
Asbury grew pale, stammering: “But surely, you see there are those of your kind who cannot be permitted . . . who are not . . . safe.”
But here he broke off, realizing that thin squeaking he heard was her nail-sheaths grating against themselves.
“Old man,” she said, “take care how you speak to me, or to any other ch’in ta, for that matter. I do not want your pity, or your ‘h
elp.’ Your devices mean nothing to me—less than nothing. For even if they do what you claim they will, it cannot be made permanent.”
“I beg to differ—”
“Beg all you wish. Do you truly think you can cure this sick world, wracked to its very core, by ‘curing’ me? I have a part to play, like the spider, the wolf, the carrion crow. And because I know this, because I am not stupid enough to deny it, I am already so far beyond your grasp that you should truly be afraid. Just think how much further even than that such as Chess Pargeter, Reverend Rook or his Lady of the Long Hair must be!” She smiled, revealing kitten-teeth. “Especially so, since—on your employer’s orders—we now travel toward them, rather than away from them.”
Asbury swallowed. “You’re at risk too, then, as much as we, if not more. For all three will be hungry, when we arrive.”
“Yes. But I, at least, will either conquer or die, doing what I was meant for. And you will not deprive me of my chance to do either with this manacle of yours, unless you wish to be cut a hundred times in a hundred different ways: denied xiao by ling-shi, both in this world and the next—all the next worlds, from Mictlan-Xibalba up through each and every one of the Ten Thousand Hells my amahs promised me.”
Again, she met his eyes, and it was all he could do not to recoil from the sight. For now they were crimson as the veil that hid them, solidly, from sclera to pupils—Mars doubled, a study in vermillion. Until, having received the response she must have wanted, she blinked, and they returned to “normal.”