A Tree of Bones (Hexslinger 3)

Eulie blinked. “What about Her?”

“She’s busy; probably won’t even notice what’s happenin’, ’til you’re already gone. If she does, I’ll try to throw a spanner in it. Either way, nothin’ you’re doing’s against her, so not a bit of it breaks your Oaths. Makes you completely safe from retribution, long’s you don’t come back ’til whatever happens next is done.”

“And what about you?”

“Do you care?”

“. . . somewhat.”

“Aw, that’s sweet.” It hurt to say, and more to see Eulie back-set so, but the last thing he needed now was more stupid loyalty. “Well, consider it this way: I didn’t bring her up, but I did help her stay. So when you think it over — ” Rook folded his arms, his voice raw sand on chalk. “ — I deserve just about anything I get.”

A long silence, broken at last by dry-eyed, stone-steady Sal Followell.

“It’s a fair-made point,” she said. “Get gone.”

The pit the vanished City left behind was near a mile wide — shallow near its edges where Ixchel, Tezcatlipoca, the former Clodagh Killeen, and Chess stood with Morrow and Yancey Kloves sprawled out senseless beside ’em, deepening gradually toward the centre, then plunging into a lightless, bottomless hole at its very heart, from which air colder by far than the New Mexico winter wind still breathed. To get away from it, Rook willed himself forward, floating lightly over the wreckage of abandoned buildings toward his Lady and her foes; he took care not to meet Chess’s eyes, or even acknowledge him. Not time for that. Not yet.

Ixchel took a stumbling step toward Rook, black eyes’ sclerae gone finally yellow, cataracting over. It struck Rook that at last, she actually looked something like that broke-apart figure on the “smoking mirror” Songbird’d once given him, with its triangle dugs and dagger earrings. Shrunken up and clumsy, with nothing at all that Rook could recognize of poor dead Miz Adaluz left, but for maybe the skeleton that kept her upright.

“How . . . .” she whispered. “Where — where did they . . . ?”

“Ma’am, in all honesty — I haven’t the foggiest.”

“They could not have done this without your permission. Not and expect to live.” Now that she was using her lips to talk with again, her voice was neither the clear bell of the ghost-girl in his first visions nor Adaluz’s rich huskiness — it was creaky, painful, the buzz of something ancient and desiccated, taking audible effort to raise its volume over her insect-cloak’s chatter.

Rook nodded. “You’d think. But then again . . . maybe they all just got tired enough of your company to risk it, just the same.”

Fury distorted Ixchel’s skull bones and face-hide, making them groan and snap like warped wood; she raised her crooked fingers at him, protruding bones sharp as claws. “You — ”

But here the air between them darkened, as Tezcatlipoca transposed himself, massive as a storm. Murmuring, in Ixchel’s barely attached ear: I believe you may have a more pressing problem to deal with, sister.

Chess looked where the thing he’d had to evict from his flesh was pointing, and laughed outright.

“Seems like,” he agreed. “’Cause — that bitch of yours? She don’t look happy.”

For it was true: something had shifted, not only inside Hex City but inside Clo’s star-demon form, as well. And while everyone else stood transfixed by the spectacle of an entire fortress’s unannounced departure, Clo had writhed in the throes of a very different sort of epiphany — the sudden release of everything Ixchel’s curse had robbed from her. Now she was giving Ixchel full benefit of the same rage-mask face she’d shown so many others, earlier today. And though her eyes and joints still flared, blood-splattered jaws split by too many teeth and hair a mane of foulness with her hands poised for tearing, a spectral vulture’s talons, she nevertheless looked much more like the buxom Irish lass Hank Fennig first introduced Rook to than she had for . . . hours, now. Hours, only.

Made sense, for all it wasn’t like Rook’d calculated on it happening

. Since Ixchel had pirated the whole City’s power to bring Clo over as tzitzimihtl, it followed that when the City absented itself, that bond she’d fashioned would disappear right along with it. Most ’specially since (as proven, time and time again) magic’s true “logic” was purely metaphorical: this for that, this into that, this as that. Professor Asbury — whom he’d glimpsed on his way down, bird-dogging the proceedings with a look on his face that said Oh, if I only had my instruments! — would probably explain it much better, Rook was sure; might even write a monograph on the subject, if they all survived the next few minutes.

Jesus, Rook thought. What amazing Goddamn damage we’ve wreaked on this world, Herself and me, in such an amazingly Goddamn short time.

“Why do you regard me thus, daughter?” Ixchel asked Clo, toneless.

Only to have her spit blood at her feet — her own and others’, well-admixed. And snarl, in reply: “Ye pinch-faced hoor! You killed my babe, or good as . . . made me kill my Hank. You made me eat him.”

“But that was only your new nature, asserting itself,” Ixchel said. “The tzitzimime devour everything, as only befits sisters of the First Sacrificial Knife — they tidy the universe’s leavings, ushering us all to our end, and these are Ending Times. Another world grows, and beckons; you have become one of the mechanisms which will take us there. A great honour! Can you not feel it, even now?”

Clo heaved a long sigh, packed full of every sort of sorrow. The sound swept through Rook, plucking at strings he’d thought gone dead; hell, even Chess seemed to feel it. Yet Ixchel stood like untouched as a stone in the midst of that flood, ’til Clo lifted her head once more, face scarred by her own tears, and whispered — in a voice that could have stripped not just paint but probably stone, as well —

“. . . yes.”

An instant later, she had already swept by her unsuspecting maker in an all-blade storm, stripping one side of Lady Rainbow’s defective vessel to the bone almost too fast to properly perceive; peeled her like a fruit and anatomized the rest, deeper than any textbook. The result was horror laid atop of horror — Ixchel threw up a hand only to watch the bones of it hurl free, no longer strung together by tendons, or even gristle. At the sight, her remaining eye fair started from its socket, while the raw hole on the other side matched it for roundness, if not for expressivity.

You dare —

Clo’s rabid slaver-grin turned actual smile, just for that moment — full of snap, the way a young girl’s should be, dead and damned or no.