A Tree of Bones (Hexslinger 3)

Over where the gates had once stood, the Honourable Chu and his Indian had rallied the last of the city’s defenders, fighting to stave off the Emperor’s soldiers as they attempted to force their way in. The hexes’ sup

ernatural might and desperation balanced the Mexes’ guns and numbers, and Farris had taken advantage of the stalemate to rally his Texican cavalry into a wedge, hoping to take the Mexes in the back. But before they’d covered more than half the distance, the spider’s death throes broke New Aztectlan’s last inch of morale. Even at this distance, and without his spyglass, Ludlow could see the City’s small-folk start to break and run.

Spurred by what they thought was victory, the Mexes whooped like Apache, pouring in over the wrecked gates after them — but a second later, when they got a close-up look at exactly what was flooding from the destroyed spider-beast’s wreckage, their cries turned from revelry to panic.

“Hold the line!” screamed Captain Farris, waving his sabre for emphasis, too far back to see what the Mexes were cringing from. “Hold the line, and ride them down! Ride, boys! For the Forty-Seventh!”

Geyer yodelled in answer, as did dozens of others, all around. Ludlow clung onto his horse and prayed.

Then the wedge closed with that foul, onrushing horde, and if Ludlow had had anything left in his stomach, he would have retched it up now. As if the giant spider had been nothing but a single titan womb on legs, the things it had released to scuttle in every direction around them were minuscule copies of itself — minuscule to their progenitor, but the size of Clydesdales to everyone else, except with twice the legs for twice the speed: spiders small enough to rope and ride, every bit as quick and vicious as the original.

Poor Captain Farris split one’s head with a savage swing, only to be taken out of his saddle by another’s leap, and brought down in a tangle; Ludlow watched his body swell with venom, skin separating at the joints, before the next row of horses came galloping over them both and foundered, screaming.

Gunfire rippled on all sides. Geyer blasted one spider away with a well-placed rifle shot, sending it flipping arse over thorax, ichor spewing, like it weighed no more than a tumbleweed. He dropped his muzzle to reload — and was immediately targeted by two more, who wasted a moment or so tussling with each other. Ludlow took advantage of the break to shoot one through what he could only think might be its brain pan with a gambler’s derringer he kept up his sleeve, but the other reared back and spat a sticky web-string from its hindparts, snaring hand and gun fast. Then set in to pull, hard.

Oh God, shit on a shingle . . .

From behind Ludlow, however, a new voice suddenly intruded — no, not so much new, as unfamiliar. It was Asbury, sounding firm, awake, adult for almost the first time since he’d met the man — not the sad old drunk of the last few months, but that legendary figure he’d heard tell of back in New York, in San Francisco. The man whose eccentric brilliance and machinery it’d spawned had spent the last few years bent on the insane goal of turning magic into one more branch of science . . . and almost succeeded in that aim, give or take a few disasters.

“Hold still, Mister Ludlow,” the Professor said, levelling his Manifold’s latest iteration at Fitz Hugh’s arm, the web, the spider beyond. “This will take a moment — and it may hurt.”

Ludlow felt, more than heard, the magnesium-filament surge; the blue flash travelled from Manifold to him, using his very flesh and blood as a conductor, then down along the web itself, a living wire, to freeze the spider in its multiple tracks. A brief yet intense struggle ensued, Geyer and Ludlow both similarly transfixed — Geyer in amazement, Ludlow drawn rigid with discomfort and shock admixed.

And then — it was over. The spider bowed its awful head, mandibles clicking out a rhythm that mimicked the Manifold’s own clockwork whirr, and rang for all the world like a signal of surrender. That same cone of dimness and silence Asbury had evoked in the desert fell over all three — four, if you counted their new “pet” — and shielded them from harm by erasing them from notice. Insects and combatants alike bypassed them as though they weren’t even there, ’til the combined in- and out-rush thinned, and they were left alone once more.

Now treating the sticky rope which still connected it to Ludlow as a combination of leash and bridle, the spider knelt down further, a bison-sized camel. Geyer let out his breath, telling Asbury: “That’s a neat damn trick, Professor. How’d you manage it?”

“More easily than you might suppose, Mister Geyer — the Manifold was constructed first to track and measure hexation, then to channel it. And what are these things made from, if not hexation-stuff itself . . . pure arcane impulse given shape through the Word, spell-directed, then taking on a kind of flesh which, can apparently outlast even removal from its originator?”

“Uh huh. Well, at any rate; thanks for that.”

“You’re very welcome, sir.”

On either side of Hex City’s ill-defended limits, Mexes and hexes made fierce battle, with Texican interference; the first wave of spiders were all either crushed or fled, leaving a perimeter of wounded men and leg-broke steeds behind, along with a slew of corpses, human and equine. Longer they were in the suddenly docile spider-thing’s presence, meanwhile, the more violently Asbury and Geyer’s horses kicked and squealed and snorted, like they’d had their noses rubbed in pepper. Geyer dismounted and let slip the reins, slapping its flank, not even turning to watch it flee.

Instead, he squinted down at their Manifold-hypnotized captive, as if making calculations in his mind which Ludlow frankly feared to hear voiced, before venturing, at last: “Seems tame enough, and I can’t help but think it’d make good time, ’specially up walls. So, Doc, Mister Ludlow . . . how d’you think it’d take to being saddled?”

Distracted by his own thoughts, Ludlow couldn’t keep track of Asbury’s answer, though it seemed to be in the affirmative. Telling himself, instead, no matter what was decided on: It is beyond my control now, all of it — has been, for quite some time. I preside here at the birth of hundred new things, recording them for posterity: truly, an age of terrible wonders!

That’d more than do for a cut-line, anyhow.

In the Moon Court, Ixchel’s blood-cultists knelt naked in a spiral, all pseudo-Christian modesty discarded, praying for their Lady’s triumph in a language none of ’em actually understood. The women passed stingray spines through earlobes, nipples, labia, shedding life-essence in drops, lactating a steady red stream; they thorn-roped their tongues, chanting words of blood, while their men pierced and re-pierced through frenums, urethrae, foreskins with volcanic glass shards, twisting to enlarge the holes in order to slip their own braids of maguey-fibre stuck with cactus through again and again, running their own flesh ragged. The overflow they dripped on the same sort of bark paper that demon who’d once been Clo now wore in her hair, then burned in a great stone bowl filled with incense, the chamber’s centrepiece; the smoke went up slow and creepishly concentric, describing an almost symmetrical set of loops and coils, like a serpent couching to strike.

As repayment for their devotion, some smallish part of Ixchel must’ve been ensuring the wounds — which surely would have felled any lesser worshippers — kept on healing ’emselves perpetually, whatever else the rest of Her might be doing at any given time: hardly a kindness, really, at least not such as Eulalia Parr’d been raised to think of. But then, considering what she’d seen up above in their frantic duck-and-dash to reach this place, she really hadn’t expected any better.

Between the rampaging Mexes and those horse-sized spider-things, Yiska, Songbird, Carver, Sophy and the terrified, barely manageable Gabriel had only just managed to get Eulie to the Temple’s gate alive. She’d ordered them to flee the instant she crossed into this sanguinary edifice — “It’s no place for any of you,” she’d told them, overriding their protests. “Any not sworn to the Oath who goes in there, they won’t come out. Ever.”

Jonas had argued, of course: “Least let us guard the way out for ya!” he’d tried to insist. “Suppose things get even worse up here?”

Eulie had only laughed. “Private, things seem ’bout already as bad as they’re ever likely to get.” But really, she thought to herself, it probably wasn’t a good idea to ever assume that, ’cause going by her recent experience, at least, things could always get worse.

So she squared her shoulders and stepped into the incense-choked, torchlit stone hall, gathering force ’round herself like a boiled-leather coat. Called out as she did, louder than anybody’d probably ever heard her speak, outside of Hank and the others: “Which of you were little miss Marizol’s kin? Marizol, mama y papa? I got news you need to hear, ’fore you go any further.”

A dozen eyes in as many shades of dark, black to brown to grey to blue, looked up at her, startled, as she crossed the hall — she “heard” their internal whispers clearly, for all her gutter-learned marketplace Spanish wasn’t up to the task of exact translation: Bruja! Cual es su nombre? Una de los Fennigs, los traidoras! Call Her, before we are distracted, La Madre, La Muerte Hermosa —

“First one tries to call the Lady, I’ll stop their throat for ’em, swear to Christ. Ahora, rapidamente! Any of y’all got a daughter named Marizol went missing a day or so gone, now’s the time to speak up . . . c’mon, nobody? For serious?”

There was one second more of baffled silence, before a woman from the Court’s left-most quarter ceased her labour and rose knees to toes, straightened gamely tall, still leaking from every which way.