Book Of Tongues (Hexslinger 1)

“Oh, many.” The thing chuckled like the largest railroad engine in all the world grinding forward into motion, indicating its reflective stone foot. “Some call me, on account of this — ”

“Smoking Mirror.” Chess scowled, suddenly faint, and struggled for his next idea. “Yeah, uh . . . I remember the Rev showin’ me that . . . thought that was just the thing, though — the plaque, what-friggin’-have-you.”

“That was a Smoking Mirror, carved in my sister’s image, by worshippers so far removed from our glory days as to confuse us for each other. The Smoking Mirror — ”

“ — is you.”

“Yes, little brother. And now . . .” Shockingly, the thing laid its hand on Chess’s shoulder, fatherly gentle. “. . . you, too.”

Chess’s head swum and throbbed like that bisected heart. His mouth was wickedly dry, tongue all buds, barely cogent. “Getcher meat-hooks offa me,” he said, or tried to — muzzily at best.

Such ridiculous creatures we are, in the end, the Smoking Mirror continued, as though Chess hadn’t even spoke — and was it even speaking, as such? Not out loud, at any rate.

Oh Christ shit fire, my head, my head.

So powerful. So unrestrained. Yet so dependent on the very things we all too often kill with kindness, to survive. We blunder from Sun to Sun, seeking after humanity, nurturing it, destroying it. All the while refusing to accept that without it, we — the blood engine’s crew, centrepiece of an entire universe — are nothing.

“Goddamn ’f I know what’cha gettin’ at, ya skull-face sumbissh — ”

Look down, little brother.

Chess did. There was a crack spreading fast across the floor beneath his bed, hairline to gaping — flourishing open even as he watched, humping the floorboards up, the same way roots break open cobblestones. And beneath, beneath —

— sure ain’t the ground-floor, no sirree —

— was nothing but blood, and black, and cold water welling up, looking to breach the crack neat as a flooding river’s banks. A wind of knives, rising.

A living man should enter neither Mictlan nor Xibalba, Smoking Mirror observed, and those who try, pay prices beyond imagining, as my sister well knows. Perhaps she thought your lover’s retinue would suffice for exchange, allowing you, and he — along with that mutual toy of yours — to escape unscathed . . . and perhaps she would have been right, in less hungry times. But as it stands now . . .

Chess stared, spat — saw it drop away into the endless gap, back down to where the skull-racks sang and the ball-players danced. Then, wrestling with his own slack mouth, demanded: “You . . . sayin’ I did that, somehow?”

A shrug, and the voice in Chess’s head became Oona’s once more. Just sayin’ ’ow your warlock didn’t even ’ave the guts to ask outright, so ’e gambled on it bein’ easier to beg forgiveness after than ask permission before. Put you in a trance, tried to make you into one of me — an’ damn, if ’im and ’er didn’t succeed, but not the way they wanted. ’Cause when you’re enspelled, you can’t say yes or no, as such — can’t submit fully, gladly, as a good ixiptla should. If you ’ad, things’d be . . .

The clear implication: better. Less — apocalyptic, maybe.

Went on ahead and ended the whole world, him and you, with your Godlessness: that’s what you did. Sure ’ope you’re happy now. . . .

Chess spat again, a barely disguised snarl. Snapping, in reply: “Uh huh. And if my aunt had nuts, she’d be my uncle, and if things weren’t the same, they’d be different. So fuckin’ what?”

At that, cold wind from below met — abruptly — with an equally cold front of wind from above, a rush of “godly” disapproval: Don’t mock, meat-thing. Chess flashed his teeth outright, this time, and bore it. Perverse as it might be, he’d match his own hotness ’gainst the coldest shit on this earth any damn day, let alone from under it.

But merely thinking this blasphemy alone seemed enough to work the turn. That blue flame leaking from Smoking Mirror’s head-set coal-pot straightened in a quiff, rearing proudly once more. The monster itself loomed closer, holding Chess’s defiant eyes with its own. Crooning, wordlessly: Oh, but I do like you VERY much, little brother. You have true mischief in you, fit to breed and burn. Let loose, you will seed this Flat Earth well with chaos and horror, carving roads for all the things even now escaping from the Ball-Court’s gravity to follow.

“Screw you, you spooky motherfucker! I already shot you the once, even if it was in a dream — ”

Yes, I remember. And that . . . only makes me like you more.

Fast as it’d whipped up, the heat was draining out of Chess again, maybe through that same gaping, skin-shielded hole in his chest — he coughed and clutched himself, bent in over his own absence.

Naked, if not ashamed, he felt his numb-tongued incoherence return, and fought hard to demand, ’fore he was no longer capable of distinct speech. “Uhhmmmean . . . why the fuh sh’d I lissen t’ yuh ’t all, ’bout anythin’. . . .”

’Cause I’m you, little brother. No-voice sliding back to Oona’s naff scolding tone, now, fast as sooty London winter: Fink I can’t be ’er too, just ’cause she’s dead? All the dead are mine, no matter ’oo, an’ all of them find their way down ’ere to me, eventually. They come an’ go, like tides, but we endure, all my four faces — red, white, blue, black. All the same.

“Fuh yuh! Sure’s heh ain’t, ’n’ I . . . ne’er wih be!”

A shrug, so large it seemed to ripple the roof. No? Take a look, then — see for yourself.

Though Chess tried hard to keep his gaze from going back to that meat-set blackness, both eyes returned nevertheless, as of their own will — spellbound, death-magnetized. Without fanfare, he beheld himself enthroned, splendid yet ghoulish — all turned inside-out and hung with corn-silk, a garland of ripe ears in ’round his blood-sticky head, and the green of his eyes converted to new growth — the spirules of budding stalks pushing out his sockets, bisecting both palms in imitation of Christ’s passion, offered helpless to the world at large.