Book Of Tongues (Hexslinger 1)

His eyes went to the nightstand. Chess turned — to see the thing he’d always thought was Morrow’s pocket-watch (Asbury’s famous Manifold, he plucked forth — all unsummoned — from that same gentleman’s over-hot brains), the device now eating all trace of magic from the air, come alive once more with its trademark chatter-whirring, ramping up ever louder and faster. More thought-stamps followed — from Morrow, a new surge of alarm and fear. Asbury’s mindstink cloud had frozen up too. Chess could taste the old man’s slimy terror in his own throat, bile mixed with blood.

“Agent Morrow.” None of Asbury’s fear was in his voice, unless that flat evenness was itself the fear. “What — exactly — did that . . . woman . . . say she wanted to do, with Mister Pargeter?”

“Sacrifice him, as I recall it.” Equally flat, equally controlled. A voice Chess had never heard from Morrow. The Manifold clattered and buzzed, the pitch of its gears winding higher and higher. “Make him some kind of a — skinned god. A god . . . who dies? Like Christ Jesus, I s’pose. Only — bloodier.”

Asbury turned away, paced frenetically back and forth, unable to keep still in his ferocity of thought. “Sacrificial re-enactment,” he breathed, slapping his fingers against one palm. “The role of the avatar, rendered literal — yes, yes, with sufficient power directed upon it, bolstered by the faith of the worshippers . . . it could happen!” He stopped, excitement flash-flooding into dismay and horror, so vividly and powerfully Chess felt it strike everyone at once, for just that moment. “Oh, good Lord . . .”

“What is this, Doctor?” asked Pinkerton, low and the more dangerous for his own fear. “What the hell did we take into our fold on your say-so?” He spun to Morrow, abruptly shouting. “Morrow, what did you bring us?!”

Songbird, meanwhile, overtop — her mind’s voice shattered glass and smoke: KILL him, fools, while he’s distracted, kill him NOW —!

Hell, Chess thought, and me with empty guns.

The Manifold screamed on, a miniature steam-engine running at breakneck full-throttle, derailment-fast.

Asbury panicked. Chess felt it happen, more than saw it — the shattering of every ounce of vaunted rationality in one thoughtless burst. Knew, even as the old man scrabbled for Hosteen’s gun, what he was going to do. Lifted his hand helplessly as Asbury wrenched Hosteen’s pistol from the startled outlaw’s holster, cocked it, spun to aim it at Chess’s breast.

And then, right at that same instant: the crimson flower on the floor swivelled around and struck, lamprey-teeth closing fast on the silver thread-end beside it.

A double-flash of light blinded the room, one carmine, one actinic white, as the flower vapourized, the thread liquefied instantly, and the Manifold burst with a flat sharp crack that buried smoking shrapnel in every wall. Battle instinct saved Morrow and Pinkerton, both of them dropping to the ground when they saw the flower move. Songbird’s shields had already snapped on, deflecting flying shards around her every which way, a jagged metal-and-glass halo. But Asbury yowled and fell to his knees, hands pressed to a long, bleeding gash traced all along his cheek.

Hosteen swayed slowly in the doorway, one hand wandering up to his neck, where a thick red flow drenched collar, shirt, and vest as it spattered onto the floor. He subsided against the doorframe and slid down it, without haste. Chess gaped at him, barely able to see for the flash-blindness blurring his vision.

The old Dutchman didn’t have enough strength left for a smile, but Chess felt the last of his thoughts curl around Chess’s own: Made you a damn . . . god, huh? Well. Always knew . . . you’d matter. To him . . . to me . . . always . . .

His eyes went flat and fixed. A terrifying emptiness yawned for a moment inside Hosteen’s skull. Then — nothing. The thing in the door might as well have been a wax sculpture, for all the resemblance it bore to a man Chess’d fought beside and cared for.

He glanced over at Morrow, met the man’s eyes, and was startled to find them equally stricken.

Footsteps thundered up nearby stairs, down the hall. Pinkerton lunged to his feet. “Stay back!” he roared. “For the love of Christ, stay clear!” He whirled and drew his own piece — which promptly lofted out of his grip and clattered against the wall. Songbird lowered her hand with a look of deep disdain.

“Silence from you, gweilo,” she ordered. “This is a matter for your betters, now.” Turning to face Chess, lightning crackling in her hair, as her own power — newly unshackled — puffed her like a windy sail. “Well, boy? Shall we finish at last that conversation we started, back in Selina Ah Toy’s?”

Chess clambered to his feet, feeling power surge along nerves and muscles, electrifying and painful with his fury. Magic welled out from him, pushing back the inflood of thought and leaving him blissfully alone in his own head once more. “Sure you wanna do this? Seein’ what I am, I mean.”

On nothing but sheer impulse, he swept his hand, palm-out, ’cross the air in front of him. felt an invisible flame spill down into the floorboards, wrenching them up and apart as a decade’s worth of vines and ivy grew in an instant, mounding up six inches high, curved before him in a tiny wall.

Heat-shimmer rippled up between them from the vegetation, distorting Songbird’s face to a monstrous grimacing mask — but she just shook her head, and replied: “Oh, you are powerful, yes. But I — I know more.”

She moved a mere finger in a minuscule yet complex pattern — and in an instant, the power flowing from Chess into the vine-fire wall simply went snap, a rotten log cracking in two. The barrier vanished, ivy withering. Energy backlashed into Chess, convulsing him

with a startled yell of agony.

“Prince of flowers,” Songbird scoffed. “Does your new skin chafe? Perhaps we will cure that itch by taking it off for you, once more.”

“Get the hell offa me, you kinchin dollymop bitch!” Blindly, Chess spat more blood at her — only to watch it sizzle redly through midair, vitriolish. Songbird flipped her left hand up, a half-second too late. The hasty ward stopped all but one droplet, and she shrieked as it coursed down her face in a steaming red runnel, like she’d been hit with acid. By the time she mustered hexation enough to wipe it away, it had left a weeping, smoking scar near four inches long behind, running right down one perfect cheek.

Disbelievingly, she touched the wound with diffident fingers, tracing its path. Took them away to look at the blood. Then looked up at Chess — and all sense vanished from her face in a mindless demonic scream of fury as she threw herself upon him, the air between her fingers a-pop with ball-lightning, blue and vicious. “Aiyaaah! Lotus-boy ch’in ta, uneducated gweilo whoreson bastard!”

With absolutely no idea how to shield himself from her vengeance, Chess switched right on back to his old tricks, and punched her full in the face — a round-house haul-off, nothing fancy but nothing pulled, worthy of any given ball-house tap-room brawl. Songbird’s front teeth cracked across with a sound that filled the room as she went down, forehead-first, right at Pinkerton’s boot-tips.

As it turned out, Pinkerton packed more than the one gun. Which wasn’t much of a surprise, really — though hellish inconvenient, ’specially now he was brandishing the damn thing right in Chess’s face.

“I knew this was a mistake, from the very get-go,” Pinkerton told him, levelly. “Mad dogs should be put down, not catered to, no matter what other tricks they’re capable of. So here’s a proper end to it.”

Chess held himself in some pride for not even flinching. Wasn’t like he hadn’t always thought this was the way he’d go out, after all.

“Better go on ahead, then,” he said, “and drop your damn jawin’ — ’cause my only regret’s I didn’t kill a sight more of your men while I was at it, Mister King Shit Almighty Pinkerton. And if these guns of mine were loaded, I sure know where I’d start.”