Ludlow felt sweat sting his eyes. Beside him, Asbury’s breathing seemed barely perceptible.
By God, I wish I had my tablet out, he thought, swallowing, and shifted his grip on the rifle, fingers damp.
“All right,” Geyer said. “Your band — Missus Kloves, Miss Songbird and the rest — ” At this last name, Asbury sat up a bit straighter, as though pricked. “You obviously had some scheme in mind, when you called this thing’s Mama up” — and here he touched the spider between its rows of eyes, gentle but firm — “same as the rest’ve us had, when we came running. Hex City goes down today or we all fall in the attempt, witch, wizard or other. Your group holds representatives from several that’ve been equal ill-treated by men like me, depending on you to keep ’em safe. And all I can swear to you is that George Thiel and me ain’t Pinkerton. No matter what the outcome, if we survive today and he ends up heading what’s left of the boss’s organization, from now on things’ll be different.”
Yiska gave him a long, cool look, then lowered the gun, though she kept it unholstered. Which frankly seemed nothing but wise to Ludlow, considering the circumstances.
“If we triumph,” she told Geyer, at last, “then it will be because of hexes, and worse . . . Celestials like Yu Ming-ch’in, secret Jews like Yancey Kloves, two-spirits like the red boy and Bad Indians like me. Your friend and you would do well to remember that, after.”
“We will. Anything else you can think of, might sweeten the pot on an alliance ’tween our two nations?”
“Hmmm. If you see another of those spiders, will you rope one for me?”
Geyer looked at Ludlow; Ludlow stared back, stumped. But to everyone’s surprise, Asbury leaned forward and promised, with utter sincerity: “Madam . . . if you would be so kind as to provide us with an escort through this tumult, I believe Mister Geyer would be perfectly happy to give you this one.”
Yiska grinned, widely. “You are a strange old man,” she told him. “Just as the White Shell Girl says.”
Outside, Clo turned, hair puffed, eyes blazing; Chess braced himself for her attack, making torch-bright fists. But just as she tensed to move, the entirety of Hex City itself rose up like a table-rapper, and not by stages. Its elevation was complete, immaculate, a dreadful miracle — one more, in half a year of the same. From the pyramidal Temple at its heart and its earth-clogged under-mesh of dungeon-passages to every building which remained intact, with Oath-bound hex and small-folk alike — plus a good many helpless invading soldiers — caught in the web between, the City lifted into the winds on a patchwork disk of dripping soil and hex-shaped stonework. Random men and women stood on glassy air, screaming as they stared down, watching the Earth fall away. Its shadow carved a hole in the sky.
And then, with a twist, a rip scored deep between worlds . . . New Aztectlan was erased, completely. Winked out, a popped eye, leaving nothing behind but the hole where its foundations had lain. Scattered here and there amid the wreckage, lone soldiers and small groups stared ’round in appalled incomprehension, deprived of purpose and danger at once. And in their midst, coat slightly flapping on the sudden wind, ragged wings of some gigantic carrion crow —
— the Rev.
Inside the Moon Court, time stood still, as it had during the clash with Sheriff Love and Pinkerton at Bewelcome when Rook and Ixchel drew Chess “aside” to offer an alliance with his greatest enemies, rebirth and redemption bought at the price of Ed Morrow’s blood. That meeting, in turn, was interrupted by Tezcatlipoca, string-puller extraordinaire, from which point things had gone . . .
badly, to say the least. Yet Rook, who had been the one to work the trick directly — on Ixchel’s ins
tructions, but even so — still well-recalled its mechanics.
The challenge, this time ’round, had been to fashion and maintain the charm without his dread wife ever catching on to what he’d been up to; a calculated gamble, banking hard on her being distracted by her own decay, the cleverness of her gambit with Clo Killeen, her dreams of Chess’s imminent return and the Enemy’s threat alike. But then, Asher Rook had learned to account himself a fairly good schemer, well-versed in betrayal of every sort, particularly the most intimate. The kind that couldn’t ever be paid back, except in flesh.
Only follow your own hungers, Tezcatlipoca had told him, through Chess’s wicked lips. If you agree to listen to me at the proper moment, to say what I tell you to whoever I tell you to say it to, then you will get what you want most.
Well, here he stood on the precipice now, alone, with no still, small voice at all to follow, be it the Enemy’s or . . . any other. And yet — when he allowed himself to consider it just a bit further, he found himself fairly certain he already knew exactly what it was that bad angel “friend” of his had wanted him to do, all along.
Rook let his head bow down, and felt a verse come on: The book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth . . . Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the LORD thy God is with thee, whithersoever thou goest. Joshua, 8 to 9. The quote lay cold behind his teeth, robbed of all magic, good or bad. Simply dead and gritty, ashy-tasting, a spent fire — his very tongue rejected it. Or were those God’s words which had rejected him, long since?
But God turns away no one, he told himself, mockingly. Forgiveness for all so long as you own your sins, same’s the old creed claims, even hypocrite Antinomians; yeah, right. Like Chess always said — if things weren’t the same, they’d be different.
But they ain’t. And time’s a-tickin’, even here.
Flanked by Sal Followell and Eulie Parr, Rook opened up and cast wide while Ixchel’s faithful pack of self-cannibalizers stared stupidly on, sending his word-thoughts into the head of every hex New Aztectlan held — all those linked by the Oath, bound in their mutual promise to obey his every command as Priest-King, that lawyer’s loophole through which the Enemy had let in a wavering sliver of freedom-light just before it’d thrown him down and fucked him hard (admittedly, by his own invitation). And addressed his captive congregation out loud at the same time, in what he figured was like to be his very last sermon.
“Ladies and gents, I have a plan to save us all, and no time to explain it. Granted, you none of you have any earthly reason to believe a word I say; can’t do much about that, unfortunately, not in the short space of time we’ve been given. Things bein’ desperate as they are right now, though, I’ll ask for but a single word alone, from each of you: no . . . or yes.”
Eulie, softest of Fennig’s three ladies, stared hard at him, as though trying to read something written on the insides of his eyes; Sal’s own gaze seemed fit to bore holes, and damn sceptical, to boot. He could almost hear her gathering juice enough to spit.
Yet it was the younger woman who answered, in the end. Saying: “Hank always used to say you was better than you thought, Rev — so for me, it’s yes.”
Old Sal jolted a tad, at that — seemed as big a surprise to her as it was to Rook, frankly — but nodded, too. And the rest all followed astonishingly quickly, after that: Chu, the Shoshone, the blister-gals. Like watching a vote took long-distance, firefly flutter of signal-fires lit and doused, from wall to spider-, mortar-, train- and cavalry-damaged wall:
Yes. Yes. (No.) (Absolutely not.) (Screw you, Reverend.) Yes, yes, yes . . .
(Yesyesyesyesyes)
Rook had the strange urge to weep, but tamped it down, hard.
“All right,” he continued, instead. “Then as your king and Ixchel’s High Priest, on the Oath itself, I order you to take the City and go — anywhere. Don’t give me any details, just go, now. And for the Almighty’s own love, don’t look back.”