Book Of Tongues (Hexslinger 1)

But when he opened them once more, it was no dice: Rook’s face hung inside the mirror, staring right into his own. Like they were contemplating each other through a damn window.

Ed.

“Reverend.”

I see you got that spell of mine took off you, in the interim — she’s a good one ’bout her business, that Miss Songbird. Ain’t she?

“Sure is, yeah,” Morrow agreed.

And you’ve told your tale by now, I’m certain — must’ve gotten quite the reaction from your boss. But you didn’t tell them the absolute whole of it, though, did you?

“No, Reverend. I did not.”

And now it was Rook’s turn to smile, finally, awful as ever. Awfuller.

Good man, he “said.”

Hardly, Morrow thought. And bowed his painful head against the cool tin surface, eyes shutting once more, to await further instructions.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

In the room next door, meanwhile, Chess Pargeter’s body lay in bed, while his lost soul loped nameless against the Sunken Ball-Court’s sluggish currents headlong, black water breaking in stagnant waves to his knees — stinking of old death, no part left of him that didn’t hurt. Off in the distance, he saw a blue and smoking light sizzling beneath that constant rain of knives which fell, blade-first, all around him: a torch, maybe? Lantern? Something to anchor him in the endless darkness’s midst, anyhow. Something maybe worth the following.

Skinless, he stumbled on, thanking the God he didn’t believe in there were no mirrors handy. Because even without one, he knew himself horrific: nose’s bone gleaming cuttlefish-white from a red mess of face, exposed eyes clicking dryer with every useless blink. And the pain, Jesus, pain everywhere, so much it faded to nothing whenever he tried to concentrate on reckoning it exactly. Like flies buzzing on exposed nerve.

At least he had his guns yet, as the belt’s further torment proved, tenderizing the laid-open meat of his waist with every step. He didn’t even want to think about what must hang, nude and knocking, beneath it.

At his chest’s centre a gaping hole sat open, mouthing the awful wind.

The tunnels narrowed as he went, closing ’til all he could see was skulls, flowers, skulls. Eventually, he turned a sharp corner, and fetched up against a skeleton twenty feet high, leaning quizzical over the wall of bony brainpans, which set up a great wailing. Ixchel, this said, inexplicably. You . . . are hers.

No, I damn well ain?

?t, the dreamer snapped back, fast enough — though he couldn’t quite recall, himself, why he was so insulted by the implication.

At that very moment, though, another figure leapt up out of nowhere, squatted atop the wall, leering down at him. Wrapped in a mantle of feathers worked with skulls and crossed bones, this new phantom had a small disk set where its foot should be — pitch-black, yet still shiny enough to reflect the dreamer’s current haggard lack of face, in horrid detail: all nude eyes, his scalp askew ’round his shoulders with the rest of his head-hide split wide in two rotten peels, turned inside-out.

Ah, this figure said, undressing him further with its awful gaze. So you are not sweet Sister Ixchel’s ixiptla, after all. Who does that make you, then, little king? Little sweetmeat?

And oh, he should be able to answer that one, he thought, cursing himself for straining after what was once so uncommon clear. But there was only the pain, worse than ever, everywhere at once. A white-hot eraser. A salt-lick scrape.

Then a chorus of voices entered his head, in fragment.

Reverend Rook . . . everyone knows you’re his bitch.

You Engarish Oo-nah’s boy, wei?

So there you are, at long last. Such a big man, wiv your guns. . . .

With the most important voice of all saved for last, rumbling low as thought up through hot flesh, gentle and terrible all at once: What wouldn’t I do, for you? Damn my own soul, gladly.

And . . . that was it, right there. That was enough.

“Name’s Chess Pargeter, you skinny motherfucker,” he managed, at last, through lipless teeth. “I mean, seein’ how you’re prob’ly the Devil himself . . . you really ought t’ve heard of me.”

And before the spooky bastard could tell him any different, he gave him both barrels, right in his damn fleshless skull.

Then he woke, but didn’t. Saw himself on the hotel-room bed, gyved at wrist and ankle — hung above his own empty body and watched it glow, a flesh candle.