She shrugged her skinny shoulders, let the fabric fall away. Revealing — a torso like an awful wax-rendering, anatomically denuded: bloodless neck, skin to her cleavage, and from thence on down nothing but a set of flapping ribcage-sides all wet red and whitish yellow, gristle-strung haphazardly together only at the bisected breastbone, the glistening spinal column. Guts coiled inside, and above that the heart, hung like a fruit — bright, hot, fluttering with life. Smoking with it.
He felt the sight of it in his own empty chest, like a fist. Felt his own response to it setting brain and gut afire, and found himself not cringing away in disgust, but reaching forward, fascinated, almost desperate. Wanting to feel that sheer pulsing force under his fingers, unbarred by fat and skin.
“Reach in, little brother, if you wish.” By pitch and timbre it was still Oona’s voice, but the Limey drawl was fading, washing away into an accent like ink stirred into blood. “Reach in, and perhaps I will give you a new heart, to fill the hole.”
Her smile was half invitation, half mockery — and it was the mockery that broke his daze, reminding Chess far too sharply of what no longer lay beneath his own scars. So he flushed, scowling, stopping his hand in mid-air . . . while, inches from his fingertips, cradled under dripping bones, the heart beat a little faster — as if amused, or excited.
The bony arches of the ribcage reminded Chess for a moment of the whorled-dome walnut halves old Chang used to run games for the waiting pikers, back at the whorehouse. The salient point of suchlike endeavours, whispered slyly to him one night while setting it up, having been: Trick, boy-ah, is not put ball under one shell, make gweilo pick other shell. Trick is —
“ — make sure there’s no ball in the game, at all,” Chess murmured, almost under his breath. “That every shell’s empty, no matter what they pick — so you can make ’em always lay something out, but get nothin’ back in return.”
Then added, voice rising again: “As you’d goddamn well know already, you actually were my Ma — ’cause she’s the exact bitch first gave me any version of that same advice, her own damn self. So you can keep your ‘new’ heart; old one’ll do me just fine, once I find out where to go get it.”
“Oona” stared at him, that sugary smile well-gone now, for good.
The movement of her upper body was so small that Chess almost didn’t see it in time. It was the noise alone warned him, a dampish whicker, as the open ribs suddenly spread wide — then lashed back together, almost chipping each other with the force of it, to mesh sharp as a shut clam-shell.
“Jesus!” he shouted, whipping his hand back with only a cunthair’s width to spare, feeling what had once seemed normal bone slice the air coldly over his skin. Because it was all black and matte and glassy now, like tar-smoked quartz, and made a horrible glutinous sound as its razor-edges sheared the heart in half, mid-beat.
Wide-eyed, Chess recoiled, cradling his hand to his chest.
Stone grated on stone as the obsidian rib-blades slid over and through each other, like interlocking fingers. This is the church, this is the steeple, Chess heard faintly sing-songing, in his mind. Open the doors —
A wavering pane of flat smooth blackness assembled itself before him, his own face dimly visible in its glassine dark. For a beat of the heart neither now had, he recognized himself.
Then — change.
Crimson feathers, gold, ivory-hued bone and strips of reddish-dark leather adorned him. A long black wig streamed glossy hair from his head, and a pale, oddly tailored coat clung tight around shoulders, wrists and waist. He seemed to have four hands, and his face — his face, still — looked slack and empty.
Yet even as Chess realized that the person in that mirror was wearing his own flayed skin as a cloak (his staring eyes rimmed not in red paint but the naked flesh left behind after their violent striptease), the image changed again. Now the headdress was a bright and virulent turquoise, and a monstrous head reared over it, while the figure clutched a serpent made of fire and considered him with a face similar to Chess’s own, but older — a man past thirty, his wars all behind him, and settled into ruling . . . what?
Some place I ain’t never seen, and ain’t too like to.
A further ripple of light and colour brought change, once more. Now the man was white-haired, white-feathered, a pectoral like a conch shell cut in half dangling on his chest and books and scrolls tucked beneath one arm. Yet the face, the face . . . was still Chess’s, old as he had never thought ever to be. Venerable, respectable, even. Respected.
And behind all the faces, he heard cries and chants in a language unrecognizable, the frenzied howls of thousands in ecstatic adoration. Felt the huge, tremendous pulse of the earth’s long slow turnings, the piling up of seasons upon seasons into centuries. The taste of blood at the base of his tongue, salty-sweet as Rook’s seed, but richer, hotter, smoother.
Blur yet again, and now the face in that reflection was nothing near Chess at all, barely human: black-skinned, monstrously tall, knives of night-coloured stone sheathed everywhere. A buzzing corona of blue flame lifting from its slumped head. And one foot, one foot . . . was gone. In its place, an oblong plaque of stone, ornately carved. Like that thing — hell, it was the thing! Same one Rook had torn down Selina Ah Toy’s to get hold of. . . .
Smoking Mirror.
And with that, it was no mirror at all anymore. “Oona’s” head was gone, her slender white arms now long and coal-coloured, the monstrous face he’d seen reflecting his now rearing tall above him. The thing sat on his bed, huge and inhuman and steaming, and still all Chess felt was that leap in his heart, that excitement, that alien, utterly natural-seeming joy.
This is me. I’m with my own, at last. I have come home.
He fought it down, though, tooth and goddamn nail. ’Cause if there was one thing Chess Pargeter had learned never to trust
, it was happiness.
“You’re her kind,” he said, “that bitch of Rook’s, Ixchel, or whatever. Ain’t ya.”
The enormous face tilted, pensive. “Might could be,” it replied, tone — and jargon — now mimicking his.
“Thought she said all y’all were — ”
“Asleep? Well, that was her error. She woke me. With you.” Chess blinked. “She tried to make you into me, little brother. One of me, anyhow. But you ain’t made to cooperate, for which I love you dearly — so now you’re only half me, and I am awake once more, wholly. Which, given I woke her in similar fashion, once, will be interesting, yes. Perhaps even satisfying, eventually.”
Which made sweet fuck-all sense to Chess. “How many of you are there? You got a name?”