Book Of Tongues (Hexslinger 1)

Morrow nodded back at them, not quite daring to touch Chess’s sleeve. “C’mon now, Chess — that’s enough for one day, ain’t it?”

Utterly affectless: “Think so?”

“They were his friends, Chess, that’s all . . . you know how it goes. Hell, you’d do the same for me, we all swapped places — ”

“No I wouldn’t,” Chess said, letting his finger tighten. The penitent dropped face-down at the trigger’s pre-click, shit-smeared and yelling for mercy.

“I can’t leave you a minute, can I?”

The rasping basso voice behind them was audibly amused. Chess curled his lip and turned his back, reholstering, then stalked over to the big, broad-shouldered man in the black coat and stained white collar. “It’s been twenty, Goddamnit,” he complained.

“Yet I do see you managed to make your own fun, nonetheless.” Though rumour told of Reverend Asher Rook once having been a melodious preacher, the crunch of hemp against larynx — from the Confederate Army’s unsuccessful attempt to swing him rope-high — had left him with a rasp fit to strike matches on, so hellish dark and deep that whenever he spoke, you could almost smell the sulphur.

“Could’ve stayed in Arizona for that,” Chess said, taking one last step, so he and Rook were safely nose-to-forehead — then dragged him down by the hair and kissed him hard, right there in the road for all to see. Morrow groaned at the sight, and not just from discomfort; even if the gunfire alone hadn’t been enough to attract attention, the spectacle of two men treating each other the way neither would treat a woman whose favours he hadn’t already purchased up front, certainly would.

Some might say Chess would never have dared be so open with his affections if the Rev wasn’t so well-known — and well-feared — but Morrow doubted it. From what he’d heard, Chess had lived his life on the offence since long before Reverend Rook hove into sight. Still, now they were bound together, he was probably worse: every move a calculated insult, a slap to the collective face. A lit firecracker shoved up the whole honest world’s backside.

A voice from the greyer parts of Morrow’s mind, long kept carefully hid, came intruding: “Asher Elijah Rook, Sergeant and unofficial chaplain for his unit, took up for desertion under fire and murder of a superior officer in the final weeks of the War. Some question as to the legitimacy of the charges, but the execution proceeded nevertheless. While other prisoners from the stockade waited, Rook fought with his captors and began to curse, quoting St. John the Revelator. . . .”

And I looked, and, behold, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire.

Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures . . . and every one had four faces, and every one had four wings . . . As for the likeness of the living creatures, their appearance was like burning coals of fire . . . and out of the fire went forth lightning. . . .

And when they went, I heard the noise of their wings, like the noise of great waters, as the voice of the Almighty, the voice of speech, as the noise of an host: when they stood, they let down their wings.

“I believe that’s in Ezekiel, sir, not Revelation.”

“Yes, to be certain. The more important point being that one way or another, a cyclone near thirty feet across whipped up almost immediately, and blew away most of

the camp. Rook and his fellow escapees simply walked away, made their way to the Arizona desert and began to commit the crimes that have lent him notoriety throughout the West: robbing trains and stagecoaches, levelling entire towns, all aided and abetted by Rook’s knowledge of Bible verse. In this manner, we see how graphic physical insult can cause talent for hexation to express, long after the normal parameters of adolescence have been surpassed.

“Our next dispatches reveal him to have taken up openly with this wild boy, Pargeter — similarly freed by Rook’s handiwork, after being convicted as an unrepentant murderer and sodomite. By all accounts an accomplished killer but no sort of soldier, Pargeter’s records show him to be uniformly uncontrollable, contemptuous, loveless. Yet he bridles himself for Rook, suffering restraint and direction, and love — of a sort — does seem to be the key . . . so much so that it becomes impossible to tell exactly who the corruptive element in this mixture truly is. . . .”

But Rook and Chess were done at last, at least for now. They broke apart, Rook leaning to tell him softly, in one passion-flushed ear: “I will say this, though. You need to stop treating every place we go like Tophet in Hinnom just ’cause your timetable and mine ain’t always congruent, Private Pargeter.”

Chess blinked, then bit his tongue — literally — on whatever he would have never hesitated to say next, if Rook had been anyone else. “We still have that business of yours to do up in Tong territory,” he said, finally, “so it strikes me we’d best get goin’. It ain’t really a place you want to end up once the afternoon’s gone, and it’s getting hard to see what to shoot at.”

“Lead on, then, darlin’ — I’ll willingly take your word. This is your home town, after all.”

Chess hissed like an affronted cat, and pulled away from Rook before the Reverend could try to stroke him smooth again. Rook smirked, then noticed Morrow’s expression.

“Problem, Ed?”

“Uh, well — ain’t me sayin’ so, Rev, but this’s bound to bring down the law, what little they got here. Dead bodies chokin’ up a central thoroughfare, and all . . .”

“I don’t see any bodies,” was all Rook replied. And Morrow saw his hand slip inside the front of his coat.

Oh, good Christ King Jesus.

But Rook was already thumbing through the small black Bible he kept pocketed there. Reaching something useful, he cracked the spine, lifted it to his lips, and blew. . . .

. . . and the grey sky rustled above them — flattened itself out somehow, a stretched oil-cloth — as a cold slaughterhouse reek drifted down. Chess turned to watch, a hand back on either gunbutt, eyes bright with excitement. His whole attitude and expression virtually crowing — That’s right, you fuckers, just go on ahead and get ready . . . ’cause my man here can do any damn thing, he takes a mind to.

As the Rev began to speak, Morrow shivered, barely keeping his breakfast down. Because he could see the text lift bodily from those gilt-edged pages in one flat curl of unstrung ink, a floating necklace of black Gothic type borne upwards on a smoky rush of sulphur-tongued breath . . . feel the beat of syllables spread throughout his blood, each vowel and consonant its own dull explosion, larding even his thoughts with grit, so they stiffened and scratched his brain. Until the words spread like cataracts across his eyes, lidding them over with dim white horror.

“And the locusts went up over all the land of Egypt, and rested in all the coasts of Egypt,” the Rev declaimed, and Chess laughed out loud at the sound, somewhere between delight and hysteria. “Very grievous were they; before them there were no such locusts as they, neither after them shall be such . . . For they covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened; Exodus, 10:14 to 10:15.”

The rustling peaked, became a chitinous clicking, and Morrow fought hard to stay still while the whole wheel-scarred road suddenly swarmed with insects — not locusts, but ants the size of bull-mice, their jaws yawning open. Neatly avoiding both Chess and Rook’s boots, they broke in a denuding wave over the corpses, paring them boneward in a mere matter of moments. A wind followed, to scatter what few scraps of bone and flesh were left.