She stood in the centre of the blast, naked and pale, girl-slender again — not quite his same height or make, being curved at hips and breast with red hair rain-plastered back over a narrow fox-face, thatching the junction of her legs in a slightly darker triangle. And when she smiled, her teeth were crooked yet but there, bright, sharp and clean — porcelain, almost, like the whites of those green, green eyes. . . .
“I’ll be Goddamned and go to hell,” Chess Pargeter said, out loud, knowing exactly how stupid those words must sound. But Oona’s new-made grin just widened, almost to her back molars.
“Come now, lovey,” she replied, voice a silver bell soaked in sour wine. “Nuffin’ comes from nuffin’. Didn’t fink you was the only ’ex wiv my name, did you?”
More damn fool me, Chess thought, for thinkin’ there’s any part of me don’t have her thumbprint on it already. For thinkin’ I was special.
“Okay, then,” he said. “Let’s damn well hear it.”
CHAPTER TWO
The night before she’d dreamed Ed Morrow held her in his arms again, warming her all over, and counted herself lucky. But in the morning Yancey Colder Kloves woke cold and stiff as usual, eyes narrowed against the unforgiving sky as it rose purple over what Grandma and Yiska called Tse Diyil, Old Woman Butte, a massive outcrop of stone stacked in concentric rings jutting up from sand and furze that cast its shadow on a seemingly endless series of lava drifts making their way from horizon to horizon, uneven as some badly laid road.
I hurt, she thought, too much in pain generally to be more specific, even if she’d wanted to. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do that in life, one day, ’stead of always touching with only our minds? Or would that really be too much to ask, considering the circumstances?
Beside her, Songbird stirred, unhappily. “You think too loudly, innkeeper’s daughter,” she muttered. “This is what comes of some talent and no instruction.”
“That’s really the way you feel about it, then maybe it’d be best to stay out of my brainpan.”
The Chinese girl-hex hissed. “I would if I could, believe me! Waaah, chi-shien gweilo, cho ya-de, cao ni zu zong shi ba dai . . . to think I find myself stranded here, caught between two savages and a long-nosed ghost — I, who am the product of a thousand years of breeding! It is not to be borne, this disgrace.”
While Yancey thought back, each syllable pitched uncharitably loud, since she now knew Songbird could hear her: Yes, yes, you great bleached baby.
The band had been squatting for weeks in a spattering of caves hollowed from the butte’s side, telling time by the sun dagger’s track as it eked its way across the spiral petroglyphs carved into three separate south-facing sandstone slabs. They’d made their way to this refuge sidelong, now hiking, now riding — and occasionally using what Yancey had come to call the “punch-a-hole” method, with Grandma and Songbird pooling their resources to move instantaneously from one place to another. A vortex would gape open in the air — the “Bone Road” Yiska had travelled to meet them at Bewelcome — and they’d all plunge through it. Grandma in her bone relict-suit, shaking the ground with each creaky step; Songbird eddying along behind just a foot or so up off the ground, jerked like a kite by one long sleeve; Yiska and the rest of her bravos on horseback, taking the jump at a steeplechase gallop and ululating as they did, while Yancey clung on for dear life with both white-knuckled hands ?
?round the Diné boy-girl’s hard, flat waist.
Each such trip, however, began with Grandma and Songbird going at each other like cats in a bag as they argued points of procedure. The shamaness’s ghost would loom threateningly above her spindly little companion, berating her for not yet being fully recovered from whatever damage Doctor Asbury’s bracelet had done her, while Songbird in turn clenched her delicate hands (their clawed golden finger-sheaths long since removed, relegated to Yiska’s saddlebag) and scowled as though contemplating evil she obviously felt still ill-equipped to deliver.
“You have bad habits,” Grandma told her, “this is your trouble! And being stronger than your teachers has not helped to break you of any of them — it has only made you slow to regain your power, because you so much fear being weak.”
“Unlettered barbarian, old mountain sow — you, who could not read your own spells, even if you knew how to write them down! What do you think you know that I, educated by Imperial tutors, do not?”
“Better than you, not-yellow yellow girl, especially here on my people’s land, where my people’s ways work best. You let an old man rob you of everything, gambling he was too entranced by your helplessness to take advantage; I brought myself back from the dead.”
Songbird’s face screwed up, pale gaze full of poisons. “Not entirely.”
“I balance on the threshold, yes. Will you be the one to push me one way or the other?”
The question seemed to take Songbird aback, which might have been the point — the China-girl was still enough of a child to be much more tractable when thrown off balance. As the silence stretched on, however, she narrowed her eyes at the giant bone-puppet carrionette, waiting in inhuman stillness. Yiska and her riders watched too, keen attention in their eyes setting Yancey’s nape hairs a-tingle.
“Perhaps I will not have to,” Songbird said, at last. While Yancey exerted herself to rein in a shudder, as her mother’s words came back: It behooves us to know how to spot them, the hexes — so we can run the other way.
And I should have, shouldn’t I? she thought, watching the two work their castings in synchrony, prying open the Bone Road’s door once more. Should’ve told someone straightaway I knew Chess for who he was, or else never spoke to him — or Ed — at all; it’s sheerest hubris I didn’t, considering the cost. Just . . . couldn’t stand not having a hand in my own fate, I s’pose.
Now here she was, a killer herself, by commission as well as omission. A maker of orphans and widows, just like Chess, and Mesach Love, too.
Was it such a crime, to refuse the place that the world had made for you? And was the price of that refusal, ever after, to never find any other place for yourself at all?
She still hadn’t found an answer to either question, but then again, pondering them over while stuck on Tse Diyil probably wasn’t helping matters much. Though the sheer age and silence of this place would have been exhausting by themselves, for anyone, from the very moment Yancey had touched the butte’s topsoil, shallow over stone, she’d also known that there was far more to reckon here than simple history. The air atop the upthrust megalith smelled of a lightning strike; when she took off her boots, the rock itself tingled beneath her bare feet, seeming to hum.
Like Bewelcome, in other words, this too was a thin place — another point on the endless “Crack” in the world that Grandma was always going on about. And even though she now knew just as well as any hex how often things mystical had to be understood more poetically than literally, Yancey had to admit she’d still half-expected it to be some kind of physical chasm, a tangible rift in the earth. It wasn’t until reaching the butte that she’d finally understood the sheer scale of the damage, a winding, miles-wide line of hexacious force which bestrode the land from north to south.
“Web of the Spider,” Yiska had called it early on, one night around the cookfire. “Warp and woof of Changing Woman’s loom. Bilagaana Rook’s witch city lies on it, as does the salt-man’s Welcome-town reborn, and this place too — even the Mexica capital, that place your red boy wrecked when he first came up. It is all the same.” She’d snorted then, not unkindly, at Yancey’s appalled look. “What, dead-speaker? Did you think our task would be as simple as finding some big rock, and stuffing it into a hole?”
“. . . no.”
“Oh yes, you did — you bilagaana all think that way, just as the White Shell Girl’s people think in circles, devious as coyote. But if things were so easy we would not need both of you, nor the Spinner as well.”