“Will he, though? ’Cause much as I hate to say so, darlin’, last time I looked he’d almost no notion of what he was juggling, either. And didn’t particular
ly want none.”
They both paused here, recalling in tandem Chess crying out in the wilderness, his dream’s desert: Goddamn you both! I will not do what I won’t!
“But he must,” she said. “He is the Year-dancer, and the year is almost up . . . his very existence has shuffled the calendar, moving us too quick to stop toward the nemotemi, the Empty Days. That time when nothing should be done, because everything is possible.”
“Well, you could try just tellin’ him that, I suppose, and hope he jumps which way you want to push him.” She threw him a cold black stare, which he was pleased to realize he now found hilariously easy to ignore. “But lay that by. How goes it down below? Manage to invite any more of those relations of yours to join the fray on our side—dig up a few that’re awake, at least, anyhow? Or likely to become so?”
“Do not address me this way, Asher Rook.”
“But how else should I think to address you, honey? Intimate as we’ve become, like you just pointed out.” He returned her original smile, with interest. “So . . . they’re all a-slumber yet, is what you don’t want to cop to. Which, in terms of full-fledged gods currently in play, would leave it basically just you . . . and him. The Enemy.”
“As it has always been.”
“Well, in terms of steering Chess where he’s wanted, your God K has a hellacious head start already. So might be it’s time for us both to take a more direct hand.”
She nodded, a queenly dip of her back-sloped forehead, from which dead Miz Adaluz’s locks were creeping steadily back, restoring her original Mayan hairline.
“He must Become, completely,” she agreed, “and whatever help we can give him to do so will aid all three of us, in the end. Yet perhaps we should not discuss such matters of true import in front of your . . . pet.”
Oh, don’t mind me none, Hosteen began, only to have her round on him in full terrible aspect, dragonfly cloak whipping out every which way, to fill the tomb with buzzing choir music.
“Silence, creature!” she snapped. “You have no right to insult me with speech at all, let alone so informally!”
If ghosts had shoulders, Hosteen would’ve been squaring his, fists rising like he thought the two of them were like to settle the issue with an all-out bar-brawl. Silence your damn self, Jezebel! ’Cause with me, you’re pretty much none for none: I ain’t a hex, never took your Oath, and you already got me killed.
“If you truly believe yourself somehow outside my power simply because you are dead, old soldier—”
Rook interposed, smoothly. “Kees . . . consider yourself dismissed.”
The bottle appeared in his palm at a finger-snap, Hosteen’s hair-smoke coiling aimlessly inside. Immediately, his former friend’s sad imprint accorded it the entirety of his attention, like a pointing dog; Rook almost thought he could see the semblance of his grey mane rise, ruffling the way a vulture’s crest puffs in anticipation of something nicely rotten.
I can go now, that’s what you’re sayin’? he asked, understandably suspicious.
“With my blessing.”
Keep it. But—if you happen to get the chance, tell Chess—
Hosteen stole a look back at Ixchel, who barely seemed aware he hadn’t left already. “Tell him what?” Rook prompted, gently.
A raft of emotions flickered ’cross the dead man’s face, all equally truncated. At last, he merely shook his head, and sighed: . . . nothin’.
Rook cast the bottle down, heard it pop, and watched what little was left of his third-in-command blow out, a windless wind-gust, leaving nothing behind but those next uncertain steps along his future’s bleak road.
’Round and ’round it goes, Rook thought. Like a mill wheel ’cross the threshing floor. And the grain is ground into chaff, good and bad likewise, so one from the other is rendered indistinguishable.
“I’m thinking we might leave Three-fingered Hank in charge, while we’re both gone,” was all he said out loud, however. “Him and his ladies, that is. Makes for four pairs of eyes watchin’ our backs, ’stead of just the one.”
“As you see fit.”
“Should probably go up and tell ’em, then.”
“Yes,” she replied, utterly remote even as she reached for his hand, fingers cold as ever in this deep-set chamber pot of a place; rough with wear, slick with something he could only hope was sweat. One lavender fingernail seemed ill-set in its bed, peeling upwards, perhaps about to detach, so he covered it with his own lengthy index, fist engulfing all her stolen digits like a mitt.
My bed, he reminded himself, repeating the words incessantly, a caltrop rosary. And folded her to him, allowing the hiss-winged swarm-cloak to carry them both away.
Yancey was well-braced to see Sheriff Mesach Love’s leprous salten face again, once she, Geyer and Morrow followed Chess down to the saloon’s front door. Yet she hadn’t at all expected what Chess did next, upon that threshold: stopped short, one hand thrown up, warning them all back—a former soldier’s gesture, ripe with uncharacteristic caution.