“Enough,” Sophy Love chose that same moment to interject, drawing herself up. “God alone knows my fate, Reverend. If this be my day and hour, then it will be His decision — not yours. And while you may have the power, you will never have right on your side, for that too is His to apportion.”
“Little lady, what makes you think there is any right?”
“If you truly believe that, sir, then strike me down this moment and do not hesitate; I fear no judgement. You?”
Fennig’s brows raised. “Stargazer’s got sand, ain’t she?” he muttered to Rook, who merely shrugged; the quality of Missus Love’s courage had never been in question, at least for himself. Still, while her willingness to throw her own life away might have no limit, did that willingness extend equally to others’ lives? Like, for example —
“Your day and hour, maybe,” Clo Killeen put in, unexpectedly completing the thought. “For a Jaysis-jabberer like yerself, I’m sure that’s of no moment. That boy of yours, though — ”
— young Master Gabriel —
“ — how would he feel about bein’ bargained away with only Heaven’s promise as a get-out, if he was old enough to know better?” As Sophy’s face whitened: “Don’t tell me you haven’t thought on it, woman.”
“That’s none of your concern.” But Sophy’s free hand had clenched to a fist, and she turned her body in blind reflex, shielding Gabe as best she could. Clo grinned, as lightning flashed above with the rolling boom of field cannon.
“All right, then, since logic doesn’t seem to appeal . . .” Rook raised his voice, through the thunder. “Look out there, Missus Love! See what’s comin’, and ask yourself if you wouldn’t rather remove you and Gabe from its path.”
He flung out one long, black-clad arm. All heads swerved together, as though magnetized. And there on the horizon, just where the canyons gave out onto what had once been flood plain, Rook watched the clouds and rain alike twitch apart, one huge, liquid curtain. To reveal —
— Ixchel, Lady of Traps and Snares, the Goddess of the Rope, suspended there between sky and earth like Juno enchained. Looking genuinely eerie in the storm’s shifting light, an icon shadowed with tarnish like gangrene, lambent skin slightly fallen in over the moon-sharp points of her black-spiralled cheekbones, her chin, the sunken orbits of her eyes. Somehow visible in clear detail to them all, despite rain and distance; as angels and saints were said to be, in legends. Yet not even the reaping angel of Egypt’s firstborn could seem so dark as this.
The new preacher muffled a tiny squawking sound; Asbury’s jaw dropped and Langobard gaped. Sophy’s face slackened in the first thing resembling true fear Rook had ever seen from her. In her arms, Gabriel screamed on and on. Even Rook’s hexmates were silent — Fennig audibly swallowed, and Clo crossed herself in what must be sheer childhood habit, the gesture giving Rook a sudden pang. Only Morrow did not turn, though he tightened his eyes near to slits, as if fighting the pull with everything he had.
“Did you really think,” Rook asked Sophy, “if I decided this job was big enough to come in on myself, that she wouldn’t come in on it with me?”
“As I’d heard, was you she once trusted, to do her dirty work.”
“Oh, that’s still true, in the main. But actually, it was her idea to pull Bewelcome back down, in the first place — let many waters quench Love, in literal as in figurative, and make a clean sweep. And in this, as in all things, we are her creatures.”
“That’s nothing to boast on, Reverend.”
“Ma’am, I don’t disagree.” Rook sighed, suddenly sick of this game. “You and I know that even such a deluge as this won’t end this town completely, not so long as its people have you to look to, for inspiration to rebuild — so I’ll make no more false offers concerning your life.” He willed more power into his shields until they blazed, looking to fend off whatever attack Morrow might mount in return. “Instead — surrender, let us end you clean here. I’ll guarantee young Gabriel grows up safe and sound. Swear it on my power itself, if you wish it — and there’s more happens when a hex breaks an oath than you know.” He extended his hands to either side; Fennig took one, Clo the other, their force-bubbles bleeding together into a single crackling halo, hissing with rain-steam. Behind Clo, Berta and Eulie put their hands on her shoulders, adding their strength to the moil.
On the horizon, the raindrops around Ixchel turned to swarming dragonflies, their buzz rising up in a deadly drone even through the thunder; light rippled beneath her, horizon turning fluid. And below that, a rumbling, more felt than heard.
Rook held Sophy’s gaze with his own. “Missus Love. Please.”
If she’d reacted differently, Rook was to think later — turned to rage, broke in pleading for Gabriel’s life, or tried at the last to bargain or persuade — he might’ve acted faster. But Sophronia Love only cuddled her screaming baby close, stroking Gabriel’s head. Face calm with a serenity he had never known, she looked up over his head, dismissing Rook entirely.
“The Lord is my shepherd,” she began, quietly, yet bell-clear. “I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me — ”
“Stop it!” It was Clo shouting, angrier than Rook had ever heard her; startled, he felt the sudden nauseous shift of power through his gut as her fury wrenched control of the conjoined hexation away. “Shut your hole, ye Protestant hoor! Shut it!”
“ — beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: He leadeth me in the path of righteousness for His name’s sake — ”
Above the prayer, Clo screamed on. “I’ll have your tongue out by the roots, yeh rotten mab!” The power spit and flared, sliding out of Rook’s grip entirely, as Fennig, Berta and Eulie all shouted unheard pleas. “I’ll wear your guts for garters! Stop that!”
“ — though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me; Thy rod and they staff, they comfort me — ”
Clo drew back her hand, then flung everything all five hexes had gathered at Sophy Love in a single roaring blast — but in the instant before it struck, light burst outward from Sophy’s arms, enveloped her and vanished into nothing, taking her with it. The fire blew through the empty stage, sending Langobard sprawling and the preacher diving to either side, leaving only a broken pile of smoking planks in its wake — but nothing of either mother or child. Clo’s scream took on a new note of cheated indignation.
Rook had enough time to think, I . . . didn’t do that! before three thunderous cracks of shotgun shells shattered the Irish gal’s howling. Lulled by the same automatic disdain for gunfire they’d all learned long since, he turned to slap Morrow down, just a hair too slow — and saw Fennig twist away, narrowly avoiding death as his specs blew off his face in a burst of wire and smoked-glass shards. A second shot whined past Rook’s ear like a hornet. He felt the third shot before he heard it, first punching straight through his own shields, then in a searing slice across his shoulder.
A skirling shriek cut through his brain: distant Ixchel, sharing his pain through their bond, blind with the hot hate Rook himself was too stunned to feel. Instead, he flung the crudest hex possible in Morrow’s direction, sending chairs and benches scattering, but Ed hurled himself backward, out into the rain and the dark. A buzzing surge of amazed, shocked delight caught from Asbury, of all people, washed over Rook at the same moment, resolving spark-fast to some sort of psychic memory echo, perhaps from Morrow’s experiences in Tampico.
As any wire of iron or steel grounds the galvanic energies of lightning, or similar phenomena, so a certain alloy of silver, iron, and sodium in its metallic form serves to ground magical energies where they manifest, conducting them away to discharge harmlessly. . . .
Flipping, magic-lantern-like, to another image: Asbury on the war-bought train depot platform earlier that day, handing Morrow a small box of gleaming shells. These are experimental, Agent, too expensive as yet for mass production. But they should pierce any conjured barrier, though the side effects of disrupting particularly powerful castings may be somewhat . . . unpredictable. . . .