A Tree of Bones (Hexslinger 3)

“Do I seem kind, to you?” she demanded.

“You could be. Could try to, anyhow.”

Songbird nodded slightly, as if to say: I know it. “Yes,” she agreed.

CHAPTER THREE

There were no clocks in Hex City, no more than newspapers, so what information Reverend Asher Rook got on the outside world came mainly from the mouths of dying men with a side order of illusory infiltration and spying-by-proxy, since there were those to hand who could throw their consciousnesses up and peep through passing birds’ eyes, or cast ’em down into the narrow minds of a whole stealthy hoard of creeping things. Or cough out bits of ’emselves to fashion fetches from, tiny jewel-eyed sickness-bugs they’d let loose to float across to Pinkerton’s encampment, there to gather what intelligence they might before being spotted and squashed.

Every night, darkness beat the sun down like a hammer, reddening the horizon with its blood. Yet every dawn it struggled back up again, eager for similar punishment.

Even with Chess, Rook had woken to an otherwise empty bed or bedroll as often as not, yet that fact had never troubled him, no more than when a housecat leapt from your lap, tired of caresses. Most times, he could crack open an eye, roll to one side and find Chess crouching sentinel by the fire’s ashes or sitting in a chair cleaning his pistols, green eyes bright in the gloom. Never far, with something always left behind — some heat, some scent — to hold his place ’til he came back.

The bed Rook slept in now, in a vast stone room midway up the Temple’s side, was the grandest he’d seen west of the Mississippi: down-filled pillows, silken sheets, rich dark wood ornately carved as any Continental throne. And if it might’ve been nothing but deadfall and grave cloth before the Lady set her power to it, that hardly mattered, for once fixed in shape, the sybaritic softness was real enough. But however many nights Ixchel shared it with him — fewer and fewer, of late — no warmth ever lingered in its hexaciously self-cleaning sheets. The limestone walls held cold silence, as if jealous of the favour their maker showed him; the chalky flint of the floor stung his feet, and shadows sulked in every corner. Rook almost wished he had his Bible back, just so’s he might find words enough to express how deeply he’d come to hate it.

But a room amongst the people did not befit the High Priest-king of New Aztectlan — and hateful though it might be, Rook had to admit, this chamber did have its advantages: wards fierce enough to keep anybody but Herself from entering without his say-so, for example, or wake him if anyone tried. So when the Mexican girl, Ixchel’s pet — Marizol, her name was, one of the blood-cult’s get — walked in, Rook snapped instantly alert, cold and tense, a literal curse on his lips.

“Jefe?” Her accent, so like that of dead Miz Adaluz — Ixchel’s unfortunate first vessel — slurred liquid yet higher-pitched, diffident and breathy. “Forgive me — the Lady, she said I could come. That you could . . . use me.”

Use you? Well, that was mighty nice of her. Like how, I wonder?

Rook felt the urge to laugh and a surge of anger, but managed to fight ’em both down, hopefully unnoticed. This job certainly was good for his self-restraint, if nothing else.

“Marizol,” he rasped, scrubbing a palm ’cross his bristles. “I’m sure the Lady must have . . . a sight more useful things for you to do than wait on me. Could be you’re needed at services, maybe? In the Moon Court?”

Marizol shook her head. “No, jefe, please! I don’t want to go back — you don’t know, I think, how bad it’s gotten. Terrible things are done there. Terrible . . .” She seemed a mere shadow herself, face unreadable. “Lady Rainbow, she knows I like it here, far more than back with mis padres, los Penitentes — I’ll run errands, do whatever’s needed. Anything. So if you truly have no use for me, maybe just send me on to someone who will . . . Mister Glass-eyes Hank, or his ‘g’hals’?”

“Darlin’,” he said, as gently as he could, “I’m sure you mean well, but — the Missuses Fennig are hexes, you understand? Brujas. Can’t think what-all you might do for ’em that they couldn’t get just as easy from each other, or almost anybody else.”

As he’d assumed, Marizol had no answer for that one. Just stood still, biting her lip, while Rook let his mind wander back to the rest of her group, whom he rarely saw; they lived sequestered in Ixchel’s throne room, that raw stone hole she’d taken to calling the Moon Court, pouring the juice of themselves out like water for her to feast on — and died, too, the most tapped-out amongst ’em conveniently content to stagger to the window slits and throw ’emselves out, so’s not to stink up the place. But then again, there always seemed to be more where they came from.

That the cultists’ faith bolstered Ixchel’s power was undeniable — but in a way, it was equally good for everyone else, as well; kept the Machine fed, so nobody had to bleed for it who didn’t want to. And though the Americans had resented the “lottery” system which chose victims at random, these Mex enthusiasts were downright happy to contribute, volunteering with a smile, instead of being tricked or taxed into it.

Not all of ’em, though, he guessed, looking into Marizol’s frightened eyes while she stared on, mute pleading writ large in every line — older by far than when she’d first arrived, if only in spirit, her slender figure bent with the weight of that moonstone-laden trinket Ixchel’d clasped ’round her throat like some thrall’s collar.

“Please,” she repeated, without much hope. As though he could do anything about . . . anything.

Goddamnit, little girl, you’re come amongst nothing but monsters and bad men here, even the ones you think you like. If you’ve any hope of surviving, you need to grow the hell up.

“Your parents know where you are?” Rook asked her, finally.

“Mi madre, mi padre . . . they stay with Her, always.” The implied capital rang strangely chilling. “They don’t need me. She don’t need me.”

Repeating it like a rosary, in fervent hopes that if she said it enough times, it’d make it so. When the truth was, Ixchel did have a very specific use for this girl-child, as the gal herself probably well knew. With her current body withering, held together only by magic and sheer awful will, the dread goddess needed a new one to cram herself inside, and was grooming Marizol for that express purpose — the way her Enemy-brother Smoking Mirror had with Chess, maybe, after Bewelcome’s resurrection left him bled out and on the point of dying. Trying to make her want to submit, aspire to nothing so much as to be Ixchel’s ixiptla, her sacrificial anchor in this world . . . the carrion-fed human tree from which all her grand schemes might finally bear their stinking, blood-soaked fruit.

Rook remembered walking in on them together, in the Throne Room — Ixchel balancing Marizol on her bony knee like an uncomfortably large child, extolling her loveliness while stroking her up and down. All but counting down the days to Marizol’s “flowering,” the very instant she’d be mature enough to consent, while simultaneously trying to ladle boiled-sugar sweets into her with both hands.

Dear child, hold still; have more, if it pleases you. Tell me that you love me — that you hold me in your heart, as I hold you in mine. Oh, what a pretty thing you are!

In his mind’s recesses, Rook heard Ixchel’s deeper dream-voice murmur, as it once had to him alone: This well is full of bones, and all of them have “been” me, little king . . . all of them, and none.

Sometimes she made the girl thorn-rope her own tongue, dragging each prickly link through in turn, while her cheeks glazed with tears. Then kissed her deeply, spreading the blood between them both like rouge.

Rook shut his eyes on the image, just for a breath. Choked down a sliver of bile, and tried to cast his mind elsewhere — only to have it slide back to Chess, and all the harm he’d done him, in the process of trying to “save” him. As the God he’d abandoned only knew, Rook had spent some long, numbed time after that last skirmish thoroughly convinced that by struggling to turn Chess’s Hell-bound trajectory Heaven-ward once more, he’d done nothing but get the one man in all the world he’d ever cared for killed outright. But even though he’d since had ample proof to the contrary, he still didn’t believe that the thing wearing his hide “was” Chess, not where it most counted. For nobody could meet that black stone gaze, in battle or out of it, and truly think they saw any part of Chess Goddamn Pargeter staring back . . . not if they were intimately familiar with the original, at any rate.

Chess, however, had gotten no forewarning of Rook’s perfidy — while Marizol, far as Rook could figure, understood at least a bit of what Ixchel had in store for her, and shunned it. For much as her parents might worship the Lady, this girl had been dragged here, threatened with abandonment and damnation every step of the way. What few charms Hex City held for her all lay outside Ixchel’s quarters, back in the sunlight, amongst people who’d only died o

nce — thus far.