; As he swooped both hands up, Rook saw the shaman’s co-rebels close their eyes, let their own hands go jerking skywards too, like marionettes. The old man clapped both fists together, sending a low thoom Rook’s way that seemed to pull the air after; their impact was thunder turned inside-out, all but silent.
Then a tidal wave smashed into him, sent him flying back ’til he smacked the ground all stunned and aching, his shields shattering same as the spit-glass gone to dust under his feet. Rook fought to raise his head, fear beginning to push its way past shock at last—marked how the stranger stood watching, coiling the power his coterie had apparently willed through him ’round one arm, like a bullwhip. Behind, the younger hexes swayed in place, too discomfited anymore to grin; their faces drew tight, wincing, as Rook felt their broken Oaths suck at their sorcerously allied strength.
The Mex, however, had sworn nothing, as yet. His strength was untouched, though hardly strong enough on its own merits to do such damage.
Rook knew the feel of the Oath by now, could sense its constant shape: a green-black line heart-rooted in every sworn witch or warlock, then run down into the ground, to the Temple’s Mictlan-Xibalba-sounding depths. Yet even through pain-blurred eyes, inchoate nerve-ends sizzling with frustrated power, he perceived now how each rebel bore another set of binding cords: a cat’s cradle connecting comrade to comrade, ’til all spun finally back upon their leader, galvanizing him in a concentric circuit.
Together, Rook thought. Working together. Lending each other their strength—or he’s taking it, at the least, and they’re letting him. How can that be?
Here Grandma entered his brain, yet once more—had the bitch ever truly quit it? Reminding him of that black marriage she’d dangled in front of him, back when he’d still dreamed he could have his Chess without eating him: mutual cancellation, self-sacrifice. They may live, but not as Hataalii. . . .
They swore to him, Rook realized, numbly. Another Oath, to share their power, so he could use it to break free of hers.
God damn, if the mad old man kicking his ass this very moment wasn’t some sort of state-uncertified genius.
The City’s Oath ran far deeper, of course; within moments, the Mex’s fellow coupsters would be drained, with no more power left to give—but within moments, they’d no longer need to. For the critical next few seconds, their collective was just too strong for Rook to beat, alone.
As the shaman stared down at him, sure of his victory, Rook mustered a last glare. “Traitor,” he called him. “We’re all hexes here, Goddamnit . . . turned away by everyone, everywhere, ’cept here. So what if Ixchel’s worship takes a toll? Blood ain’t exactly in short supply. Spill enough of it, and she’d’ve made us free.”
But the grey-haired stranger simply shook his head. “I already know your Lady, Rook—better than you do, for all you’ve shared her bed. She was one of my people’s gods, in long-gone times; we fed her, fed them, ’til the earth itself was soaked, so foul nothing would grow. But did they help us, when the steel hats came? When los conquistadors raped everything in their path, leaving only sickness behind? When the Christo-shouters burned our books and bodies?
“No. They are hungry ghosts, not gods at all, never trustworthy. One is bad enough—but she wants to bring back more, doesn’t she? To raise each and every one of them up from where they squat in darkness, down under the water, so deep even the bone canoe fears to penetrate it.”
Rook couldn’t deny it, even if this phantom grip squeezing both his lungs flat would allow him enough breath to. The effort of lying wasn’t worth whatever time he had left.
“Think you know her that well, you’d still best not be here when she comes lookin’ for me,” Rook managed, barely. But the shaman simply drew hard on the net once more, conjuring a fresh palmful of lightnings.
“Oh,” he replied, “I fully expect to die at Her hand, now or later—as you do too, or should. You already know she will destroy this world to bring on hers.”
“The Fifth ends in earthquakes—yeah, I heard. But the Sixth—”
Another head-shake. “No. Such creatures do not go forward, ‘Reverend.’ She seeks to sink us further still, to resurrect the Fourth World, which ended in floods when the Enemy, his brothers and his mother tore everything apart between them. When the earth itself was cracked like a bone and boiled, its marrow cooked sweet for sucking. And the Feathered Serpent was forced to steal our dust from Mictlan once more, afterwards, so that new men and women might be fashioned from it.”
Fresh mill-grist, Rook thought, throat burning. Fresh jaguar cactus fruit to be squeezed for its pulp, over a thousand rebuilt altars.
“This is what she wants—the doom you have already helped her put in place. So true mercy, I think, would be for you not to have to watch it come to pass.”
His hand swung down, straight into someone else’s deceptively flimsy grasp: four slim fingers and a thumb, all five nails cyanose, outlined in black blood. Dread Lady Ixchel stood suddenly between them, abrupt and upright, whole form ablaze with chilly lunar radiance—and at her touch the old Mex recoiled, gobbling, as Rook heard his wrist snap like a rotten twig.
“Old owl,” Ixchel named him, tonelessly. “Foolish nahual. You claim to know me? Then you should know better.”
So ice-cold and freakishly arousing at once, as always, stinking of death and barely clothed. Rook saw a thorn shoved through either nipple and some random jagged bone-shard bisecting her septum, leaving upper lip and cleavage crusted purple-red, a triangle of phantom claw-marks got in underground battle. But enough to make every prick in the place perk up regardless, and probably grease every pussy as well, to boot; never any call for Rook to think on someone else in order to give her her due and proper, and she knew it. He’d seen with his own eyes how the bitch could make even those queer-to-the-bone long to go digging in her charnel treasure-box.
(Chess’s white face, lips set, teeth too gritted even to let out a proper sob of hate as she lowered herself onto him, while Rook did nothing but watch—breath held, heart hammering. Watch and await his own turn, with both of them.)
A man who beds with a goddess becomes a god, little king, or dies. Or both.
Her black blossom of hair lifted high, eddying. Behind her, the cloak of dragonflies billowed forth and rose up buzzing, a tinsel-winged plague.
The shaman’s mouth moved like a fish’s, gasping; his unmaimed hand gave one final tug at the cords binding Rook, only to see Ixchel send them snapping, severed, with a single finger-flick. As he dove back, momentum sending his gang sand-wards along with him, her gaze traced those invisible strands from body to body, following the lesser oath-web: a sloppy working at best, red-gold-gouting, fogging the air. Yet the nude bed where one eyebrow should have been did lift at the sight, if only slightly.
Clever, Rook heard her “say,” abandoning outward speech entirely. Clever peasants, clever dogs. Sons of a million tlacotin-slaves.
The sheer strength of her contempt was hundred-proof at least, good enough to scour pots, and gave Rook the strength to power himself back upright. As he did, his eye fell onto Fennig and his beauties, caught up unknowing in the brawl’s very heart—all three women had their hands linked for protection, a dim flame flowing to blanket Clo in particular, cupping her stomach’s distention. Rook almost thought he could glimpse the child asleep inside, its tiny heart a-pulse with sorcerous potential.
The witch-ménage concentrated mainly on each other, a single unit, eyes downcast, so’s not to attract undue attention. Fennig himself, meanwhile, was staring at Ixchel straight-on, sliding his spectacles down slightly in order to consider her over their rims. If he squinted, Rook could see an image of his queen-wife caught there, twinned on both corneas and clarifying under pressure, the way a daguerreotype takes shape. As though Fennig were somehow incapable of turning away—helpless not to stay and see what might develop, literally.
At the same time Rook regained his, the Diné youth—the only one of the shaman’s donors still left upright—hauled out a knife and jumped for Ixchel’s throat, coming at her silent, blindside-first. The dragonfly cloak parted to allow him passage, buzz-hum ascending to warning shriek; Rook found himself stuck in mid-automatic ward-stance, both hands up, fingers crooked to fire whatever his instincts deemed necessary. Though since he’d once observed Ixchel take a ball to the skull from Ed Morrow’s pistol and still blast him backwards out of Hell, it was all probably pretty moot.