“As smoke is driven away, so drive them away: as wax melteth before the fire, so let the wicked perish at the presence of God . . . that thy foot may be dipped in the blood of thine enemies, and the tongue of thy dogs in the same.”
Psalms 68, Morrow thought, as the rot boiled inexorably on, and the dead men reduced themselves to utter ruin and dust.
“That’s just wrong,” someone exclaimed from behind Morrow — man, woman or child he couldn’t tell, but with a shaking voice, as though on the verge of tears. “Sin, a pure sin. It oughtn’t to be allowed.”
“O God, thou art terrible out of thy holy places,” Rook murmured to himself, his voice abruptly human once more, as if in answer. And in his secretest heart, Morrow agreed.
But now the film was lifting — he could see the sky again. The ants resolved themselves to dust as well, sank ’til they and the mud grew indistinguishable.
Rook stood there a minute more, his face blanker than the page his thumb still marked. Morrow let out a long breath, echoed by one from Chess, whose excitement had ebbed along with the flensing tide. Gunslingers and hexslinger made an uneven triangle together, ’til Rook briskly cracked his neck from side to side, and stowed his Bad Book away once more.
“Well,” he said. “Shall we, gentlemen?”
Morrow cut his eyes side to side, scanning what panting crowd remained: the various scum of San Francisco’s roughest region, finally stunned to silence by the Word of God. Yet twisted rather than holy, songs of faith turned to faithless uses, and made therefore to seem — though perhaps not tarnished themselves — somehow tarnishing.
“God damn, I hate this whole stinking city, and that’s a fact,” Chess Pargeter announced, meanwhile, strutting away like some pretty little Satan — the single brightest point of colour, from crisp red hair to gleaming boot-heels, in that entire dim sewer of a street. “Just the same’s I hate you, Ash Rook, for makin’ me come back here, in the first place.”
Rook smiled at Morrow companionably. “Best not to keep my good right hand waiting, Edward,” he suggested. “It’s a long walk yet to Chinee-town, or so he tells me.”
“Yes, sir.”
Rook turned away, following Chess. Morrow shook himself free of his own dread, and did the same.
Thinking, as he did — for neither the first time nor the hundredth, and definitely not the last — Oh Lord God of hosts, eternal friend and saviour: just what the hell am I doing here, again? With these two, or otherwise?
But he already knew the answer.
CHAPTER TWO
The Previous November
The air inside the private train-car was oppressively thick, hot as new-cooked honey. Morrow felt his collar starting to rub a raw spot under the point of his jaw, and did his best to keep still while the old man in the frock-coat — Joachim Asbury, a Doctor of Sciences specializing in Magical Research, on loan from Columbia University to the Pinkerton Detective Agency — droned on, his otherwise fascinating lecture pulling out like so much taffy. He was silver-haired and mild-looking, his sober upper dress a stark contrast to the flash check trousers current Northern fashion seemed to demand.
“What we principally know of magicians — witches, wizards, shamans, et cetera — is threefold. Some are born with an inclination to such skill, yet only come to full expression of their talents later on, if at all; for females, generally at the onset of their menarche, while for males, generally during some great moment of gross physical insult. That once come to fruition, their powers seem virtually limitless, making it a foregone conclusion that if magicians were ever to act en masse, they would overrun the world within days.
“Yet the third most well-known fact is equally clear. Magicians do not work together, because they cannot.”
Asbury’s assistant changed the plate on his magic lantern, casting some gargantuan and disgusting insect’s wavering light-skeleton on the train-car’s wall. “Observe this specimen of the genus Oestridae, or common bot-fly — an endoparasite which deposits its eggs onto the skin of a host animal whose heat causes them to hatch, after which its larvae burrow into the animal’s skin and gestate, then drop onto the ground to complete their pupal stage. The bot-fly may also spread its eggs through the medium of an intercessor, by attaching them to a common housefly it has seized and restrained through superior power. In a way, this makes it somewhat representative of an epiparasite, a parasitical variant which feeds upon its fellow parasites.
“Appearances aside, gentlemen, magicians may be reckoned very much like these bot-flies — ”
“In that they’re all weird as hell and twice as scary,” someone muttered, near Morrow’s elbow.
“ — since all fully expressed magicians cannot appear to help feeding parasitically upon each other’s power, as a type of autonomic reflex. Which is why the best two examples of this oh-so-puzzling human genus can ever manage is a sort of brief accord for the duration of a shared task, during which they agree to consider each other not rivals or prey, but allies . . . until, task done, they move quickly on before they are forced to turn on one another, and hope devoutly to never meet again.
“Thus witches who bear witch-children to term (itself unlikely) must give their babies away at birth, or risk sucking them dry; thus there are no formal schools of magic, only apprenticeships, which all too often culminate in either death or murder. Thus two wizards cannot love, or live together if they do, for fear of their passion becoming mutually assured destruction.
“‘Mages don’t meddle,’ as the old phrase goes. And for this, we who are not of that ilk must all, indis
putably, thank God.”
“Is the point of all this we’re gonna be fighting hexes now, sir?” called out the same voice as before. Doctor Asbury opened his mouth to answer, but closed it again at Pinkerton’s gesture.
“Let me take this one, will you?” As Asbury nodded: “Seems to me that what he’s sayin’ is — if we just play it right, we can trick ’em into fighting each other for us.”
Asbury pursed his lips and made some ambiguous little movement of the head. “To some degree, yes, Mister Pinkerton. And yet — ”
“Sorry, doc,” another agent broke in, “but . . . what-all exactly could we even fight ’em with, if we had to? Silver bullets?”