Book Of Tongues (Hexslinger 1)

“Did seem to me how Rook was probably just a bit distracted, right at that very moment. And the Lady? Well — she probably didn’t much care what we did, either way. From what I’ve seen, we’re dirt under her feet.”

Pinkerton: “Mmm. Well, then, by all means . . . continue.”

“Mornin’ came. Rook got us all together. Told us what was gonna happen. Chess . . .” Morrow paused, the image still fresh in his mind. “He just stood there, with that woman, that thing — Lady Ixchel — holdin’ his hand. Didn’t say a damn word. Like he was — ”

“In a sort of trance?”

“Hypnosis,” Asbury said to himself, quietly. “Or perhaps as in the Codex Magliabecchi, when the deity-impersonator is ‘made drunken’ and ‘painted white’ in anticipation of transformation . . . though that may only be a metaphorical intoxicatory state, to be sure.”

“All right, Doctor,” Pinkerton said. “I’d suggest we can address that issue in fine detail some other time, assumin’ it even comes up.”

“They didn’t ask about Hosteen,” Morrow went on, “and I sure as Christ didn’t volunteer. Then, after the Rev’d said his piece, she just all of a sudden up and grabbed big Cow-Puncher Pete Van Damme by the head and bent him back over her knee. Pulled a knife out of her hair, cut his throat. And where his blood fell on the floor, it . . . opened up a hole. . . .”

“A hole,” Songbird repeated. “Which . . . you went through.”

“That’s right.”

“Into Hell.”

“Yup.”

Asbury gave himself a shake. “Gods and monsters,” he said, musingly. “You have glimpsed wonders we can only dream of, Mister Morrow.”

“Yeah, well — you’d seen even the half of what I saw down there, you’d be happy to keep it that way,” Morrow replied.

In the end, the voyage itself had seemed . . . impossibly easy. A plunge, taken. Like stepping off a cliff.

That yellow sky, leering down. The rain of knives, falling. No wonder Rook’d wanted the rest of his gang to come along, haplessly unsuited as they were to hexacious labours — they made for perfect cannon-fodder.

The Rev kept them moving steadily forward, with Chess on one arm and Morrow clinging tight to the other, a protective envelope of lightning a-snap in all directions. And the Lady Ixchel glided on effortless behind all three — behind, beside, around. Ixchel, bent near-double in the darkness to murmur in Chess’s ear — Ixchel, darker by far than anything around her, no matter how deep they went.

Wrapped in her buzzing dress of devil’s darning needles, with her copper limbs unstrung at the joints and set drifting in Mictlan-Xibalba’s current like kelp — her flesh shiny as burnt bones, hair a net of hooks, voice like broken bells chiming: . . . but there is nothing like death in war, a flowery death, so precious . . . I know you can see it far off, my husband’s husband, as you always have. Far off, and not so far. I know how you yearn for it!

The words thrumming through everything at once, everyone, reverberate eternally on a shimmering thread of prayer, both answered and not. The yearning witchery of each dead and living supplicant, each made and unmade name all crying out, together —

To die for a god

To die as a god

To die, in Pain, in Glory, wrapped in Hot Heart’s Blood, is

beautifulbeautifulbeautifulbeautifulbeautiful

Morrow heard Rook’s voice rise above the din, so heartbreakingly human amidst all this spectral awfulness.

“Where is this place you’re takin’ us, woman? I didn’t get swung by my neck and lose my damn soul just to get eaten by someone else’s demons in a hell I don’t even believe in — ”

Be silent, husband. I will not be spoken to thus, not in my own place. There is nothing here that poses any danger.

“Says you!”

Yes. The only ones of any consequence awake down here are you, I and he, little king. All others lie asleep, dead and dreaming. These are their nightmares, nothing more. And besides — we are here.

“Cow-Puncher Pete,” Pinkerton mused. “So that’s who was on that floor. Was a five grand reward on for him, I recall — spares us that expense, any road.” He gave Morrow a steady look. “They let us through, you know. First time we’ve ever been welcomed to Splitfoot’s vale without gunplay; Joe himself wouldn’t go inside his own tavern. And the body we found looked dried ten years in the sun.”

He drummed his fingers pensively upon the table. “I’ve seen hexation. But . . . Hell?” He took off his bowler hat and turned it over in his hands, as if wondering how it’d gotten there.

“There are ten thousand different Chinese hells, Mister Pinkerton,” Songbird put in. “And our explorers have drawn maps — detailed ones, or so my tutors claim. Fifty of them in the Emperor’s library alone.”