Book Of Tongues (Hexslinger 1)

Still nothing. Rook felt ridiculous. Even his voice seemed flat, dry, without a shred of its now-normal rope-rough timbre. As though . . .

You are only talking for yourself, one of the voices told him — right in his ear, yet resonating considerably deeper: inside the hills around, the earth itself. Inside him.

A woman’s voice, but not his Rainbow Lady, who hadn’t spoken directly to him since his escape, for all he glimpsed her face in dreams. “And who should I talk for?” he asked her, out loud — more to see what would happen, than because he actually wanted an answer.

One man’s voice is only that, she replied — one small part of the whole. We must be larger than that, in order to keep our balance.

Sounds like an Indian, he thought. And felt, rather than saw, her smile curve, with the same quality to it his grandmother’s used to have, back when Rook was still Little Asher.

She is not to be trusted, your Lady of the Snares and Traps, she told him. But then, you know that, in your heart. And as for you, grandson . . . perhaps you must continue to speak in your blackrobe Lord’s voice, until you have the time — the inclination — to finally come find me, and learn better.

Then she was gone, leaving Rook alone in the desert, looking at a rock. His mind slid, automatically, to whatever Biblical claptrap might serve best, given the situation:

The lion’s whelps have not trodden it, nor the fierce lion passed by it.

He putteth forth his hand upon the rock. He overturneth the mountains by the roots.

He cutteth out rivers among the rocks. And his eye seeth every precious thing. . . .

Job, 28:8-10.

And the rock cried out, he thought, feeling the words come up through him, scar ’round his throat left raw again, in their wake. The rock, at the very same time — a seed-pod stuffed with granite dust, cleft with an invisible axe — split wide open.

Oh, sinner-man. Where you gonna run to?

Behind, Chess slept on, hearing nothing of any of it, ’til Rook woke him with a kiss.

A week after, they rode down to No Silver Here and waited for the train to come smoking down its track, laid skeletal atop the new-blasted ground. Intelligence suggested it would be guarded by Pinks, equipped with at least one Gatling and a brace of pepperboxes; this Hosteen confirmed, via telescope. So they separated into two columns, Chess drawing fire on the right, while Hosteen made sure Rook could pull close alongside and catch the engineer’s eye, gesturing at him to haul on the brakes — thus giving a man they all called Big Al time to jump in through the back and clap a pistol to the man’s temple, making sure he would.

As the train started to slow, the accompanying gear-jerk threw one Gatling-operator into the other, spinning the gun’s muzzle in such a way that it laid two of Chess’s posse down. Rook dug in his spurs, surged maybe thirty yards ahead, reined in and slid off, stepping directly into the dreadnought’s path. As it bore down on him — the uppermost Pinkerton already back on his feet, grasping for the Gatling’s crank — he opened his mouth and preached, from Corinthians:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

It was one of the sweetest verses known to man, quoted at every wedding he’d officiated. But when his lips shaped the words, something else came out through his mouth along with them — a lashing ghost-tongue spear of silver-gilt which rammed full-speed through the boiler without jumping the train off its tracks, just pinning it there like a massive iron bug, releasing its entire compliment of steam in a hissing cloud.

And that was the problem, in the end. It was a bit too dense for Rook to completely calculate what he was doing. So though he’d meant for whatever effect he produced to stop short, or just slap the Pink silly, it split the man’s skull and neck alike, spraying everything around it with gouting red.

The gang met it with a half cheer, half yelp — alternately disgusted, and pretty damn impressed. ’Course, that all changed once Rook turned to yell fresh orders at Chess, not realizing the spell-spear was still trailing along with him. Before he knew what was happening, it’d sheared off Joe Skopp’s left arm at the shoulder, and Joe fell, screaming.

Rook clapped both hands over his face immediately, unmindful of what damage he might do to himself (none, it turned out). Hosteen tried — and failed, miserably — to tourniquet Joe’s stump.

Meanwhile, Chess sprang up into the breach, yelling: “C’mon, you bastards! There’s lootin’ to be done!”

The others streamed after him, automatically — all but Petrus Kavalier, Joe’s best buddy, who stopped in mid-stride and looked back at Rook, eyes gone blank with shock. “

You’re the damn Devil, Rev,” he said, wonderingly, like he’d just worked it out. Raising his gun, cocking it back —

Maybe I am, Rook thought, while the LORD is my shield and the point of my salvation knocked hard against his teeth from the wrong side ’round — so easy to simply let it out, and watch what happened next. But it was a moot point, because that was when Chess shot Kavalier through the heart over his own shoulder, without even turning — an impossible feat, for impossible times. Almost . . . magical.

You ever notice how Chess hardly ever reloads? Hosteen had asked Rook. Or how he can fire in two separate directions at once, and still shoot straight? He fans the trigger, just for fun, and he actually hits his target. Ain’t no motherfucker on this earth can do that.

I don’t know that much about firearms, Rook had found himself replying, which wasn’t exactly untrue. Yet —

Chess’s hair lifted slightly in the wind, a tight blood-halo, and Rook could tell from the way he stood that he was grinning.

The train was taken five minutes on, with most of the remaining Pinks kneeling in surrender, down on their knees so fast they must’ve bruised the caps. But by the time Rook had coughed enough times to be sure his killing words were well-dispersed, Chess had already head-shot three of them, and was taking aim at the fourth. Rook slapped his gun up, annoyed.

“The fuck you do that for?” Chess snarled.