Book Of Tongues (Hexslinger 1)

Inside his waistcoat pocket, Morrow’s hand clenched white-knuckled on the Manifold as it jerked Rook’s Lady’s way, holding its needle still and its gears frozen. Its workings bit into his callused fingertips, vibrating with the fierceness of their signal: ten times, a hundred times the strength of Rook.

Couldn’t he tell what she was? That she was outside any of them — outside their whole world?

The woman raised her head slowly, as if her black gaze took effort to lift. “So pleasant to meet you at last, Mister Pargeter,” she said to Chess, her tone absurdly gentle. “The Reverend thinks of you, oh, so often.”

Rook placed a hand on her knee. “Don’t scare him, Lady. Please.”

And at that, she finally smiled, a slow and awful snake’s-jaw stretch. “I doubt I could,” she returned softly. “Husband.”

The room went dead.

Chess’s shoulders actually shook. “What’d you just call him?” he whispered.

“Never you mind.” Rook stood, clapped his hands. “Boys, gather ’round — your patience is about to be rewarded. Got a few announcements.”

He twitched his fingers toward one wall, then the other, and all the lamps sprang into flame, sending the gloom fleeing. Morrow had a queasy feeling they would have lit even without wicks, or oil.

“You boys already heard about Songbird, I take it.” the Reverend said. “Well, since the Pinkertons turned her, seems they’ve been on quite the tear. Any hex don’t sign up, they either clap them in jail or throw them to the ’Frisco Madam . . . grist for their mill, and hers. By reports, must be damn near a hundred of them arrayed ’tween here and the Border.”

“A hundred?” Morrow blurted. “Pinks’d be lucky to pull an even fifty off of — ”

Too late, he stopped, realizing there was no way he should know that — not plain Ed Morrow, outlaw. But the rest were too busy goggling at Rook and each other to notice, while Lady Ixchel barely seemed aware he had spoken at all.

“Well, be that as it may . . . it’s Songbird I’m more worried over. Morrow here’s seen her at her work — ain’t you, Ed? Chess, too. She’s no one to trifle with.”

Hosteen lifted an awkward hand. “But Rev, you — you can beat her, right?”

“Fast enough to keep a hundred — sorry, Ed — fifty Pinks from drillin’ the rest of you full of lead, in the meantime? Hex cancels hex, Kees. You know that.”

“What’re you saying, Rook?” One of the new signups, this one, a burly mean-eyed fellow named Wade. “You’ve brought a fight on us you’ll be no good in? Maybe — ”

Chess turned — but Rook had already flipped a hand up, the air between them whip-cracking. Wade catapulted away, struck the saloon’s wall hard enough to shatter four-inch planking, then hit the ground, a render’s discards.

“Sorry, darlin’,” Rook told Chess. To the others: “Anyone else care to weigh in?” He waited, then nodded. “All right — best go get snookered. Come mornin’, we’re off for Mexico.”

“And how is it you figure on gettin’ from here to Mexico, exactly, without Songbird and that army of Pinks findin’ out, and blockin’ our way?” Chess asked.

Rook went to answer, but it was his odd companion who got there first.

“We will go by the low way, through the Place of Dead Roads,” she told Chess. “As to the mechanism of entry, meanwhile . . . the whole earth is a corpse, little warrior — the corpse of my mother, whose mouth opens into the Land of the Dead. And she is covered with mouths.”

“That’s handy, ain’t it?” said Rook.

Chess just blinked. “So . . . in other words . . .”

“That’s right. In other words . . . we’re goin’ by way of Hell, itself.”

Hosteen’s eyebrows soared, but he kept whatever disbelief he might have to himself.

Chess, though — secure in what had always, hitherto, been his cocoon of privilege — snapped: “Say what?”

“He means the land which was once called Mictlan, or Xibalba,” Ixchel told him, gently. “Now known as Mictlan-Xibalba, since all things run together down in the darkness, where even the gods forget their own names. The Sunken Ball-Court.”

“Hell.”

“Not your Hell, little warrior. But . . . yes.”

“I’m not sure I trust you, woman,” Chess said, bluntly, showing that same disregard for danger which had served him so well — ’til now. “And seein’ how every other hex the Rev’s met so far has tried to drain his juice and kill him dead, I sure as hell don’t know why he does.”