“Tread carefully, then, granddaughter.”
“As you say.” Yiska straightened her own spine, and said, “Spinner, when you anger yourself thus you risk losing control, knowing that to do so is to set your foot upon the Witchery Way. You risk Becoming what you fight — Anaye. And who will it fall to, then, to deal with you, as you hope to deal with the bilagaana blackrobe Rook?”
“Is it The Night Has Passed, scalper of Pinkertons and burner of ranches, who warns me against risks?” Grandma sounded half amused, half annoyed. “There is no safe choice for us, granddaughter. We face too many monsters. Like all of us, I do only what I must to fight them.”
“Anaye-power used against Anaye.” Yiska shook her head. “How is this different from the Reverend and his bride?”
“You dare ask me that, who lost my body at Rook’s own hands? Since I have shed no undeserving blood to return here, I have earned the right to restore that Balance myself — ”
“ — a Balance that cannot be restored so long as you stay here,” Yiska rejoined, unflinching. “‘The dead are dead, and must move on.’ You told me that yourself, Spinner. What would you have done with Yu Ming-ch’in, had Yancey not stopped you? Tell me plainly she was never in any danger — that you sought only to frighten her, if you could.” The fact that Yiska knew Songbird’s true name was only slightly less startling than the honest pain in her voice. “Truly, Grandmother, I would hear that from you. Please.”
Grandma’s golem-body neither breathed nor stirred of itself, when not wilfully moved by its rider, and though it didn’t slump, the long silence that followed made it seem empty as a dropped puppet. Yancey held her breath.
“I cannot slacken,” said Grandma, at last. “This city is Rook’s dream, and I will see it fall.”
“Her dream,” Yiska pointed out. “How often have you said that Hataalii should find a way to band together? Now look — here are Hataalii, a whole city of them! It is their dream, too. What better revenge than to help them take it from Rook and the Lady, to make it ours . . . and theirs?”
My God, Yancey thought, forgetting entirely to mask herself, so stunned was she by the very idea, which had frankly never hitherto occurred to her. Could that work?
“I see no reason not, dead-speaker,” Yiska replied, without moving, as Grandma’s “head” slid ’round, grating in its socket. “It seems to work well enough for them now, even under Rook and Lady Suicide’s reign.”
Hex City as destination rather than obstacle, then: a refuge for all hexes, if events saw Rook and Ixchel removed. As already proven, it could certainly sustain itself; once Oathed to each other instead of the Lady, its inhabitants wouldn’t feel the need to parasite on newcomers, or even on the non-hexacious. In fact, so long as that Balance Yiska and Grandma were always chawing over stayed preserved, it might go even further than accepting “just” hexes — considering how well-defended and powerful such a place would be, Hex City could provide a refuge for all peoples who felt themselves not part of “the Union.” Natives, for example, starting with these two’s own tribes. Freed slaves, Chinee ’scaping ’Frisco’s immigration quota; Jews, like Yancey’s Pa; gypsies, like her Ma. The two-spirited, even . . . hard women and frilly men, like Yiska, or Chess. Any-damn-one.
No one would feel they had to hide themselves anymore, to take a false name or put on a false face. No one would feel they had no place of refuge, no Promised Land to flee to.
“They do not know what we know, most of them,” Yiska told Grandma, “that Hataalii are everywhere, always — part of the Land’s plans, and thus to be neither feared nor avoided, any more than one may avoid weather. But we can teach them a better way, you, I and the dead-speaker here . . . and Yu Ming-ch’in as well, if she is amenable.”
Grandma seemed to look down, contemplating her nailless, mitt-like hands.
“You want me to solve the whole world’s problems,” she said, “when this thing I call my flesh, containing neither flesh nor blood, is coming apart like a seedpod.”
Again, Yancey heard her own voice reply, without knowing it was going to: “All the more important, then, for things to be done quickly . . . and right.”
This time Yiska did glance back, long enough to give her a single firm nod of approval. To which Yancey could only think back, a trifle flustered: Thank you kindly, sir — ma’am, I mean; oh, that doesn’t sound right at all. No offence meant, Yiska. I’m a bilagaana fool.
But Yiska simply shrugged a bit, one hand making a dismissive flutter. As Grandma allowed, slowly, “Something is happening in that city of Rook’s . . . his city, and Hers. I did not see it coming, while in my body; it was as yet hidden in time’s creases, even when looked at through the weave of Changing Woman’s own loom. But now I am bodiless I see far more clearly, knowing in my soul my vengeance is less important than the seed these two have sown, without even knowing they did so. There is something growing, alive and unforeseen, and though it galls me to say so, it must be preserved.”
A high laugh cut the air behind them. Yancey didn’t have to turn to know that Songbird had slunk out of her hole once more and climbed to listen as well, standing there with her blanket-shawl wrapped tight against the night wind, her hair — unbound for sleep — blowing like snow.
“Fools,” she said, though less scornfully than usual. “Even if I had my full power once more, these are gods we trifle with — they cannot be killed, and guard what they consider theirs jealously. As Pinkerton will discover soon enough, should he overstep himself. And how I shall laugh to see it, when he does!”
Yiska shook her head and tsked, as if disappointed.
“No,” Grandma told her, equitably enough. “Whatever they are now, Suicide Moon and her Enemy were once only as you and I . . . as this ghost-speaker here, even. He proves it, that red boy we seek after so desperately. Gods sleep within us all, waiting to be prayed alive, or bought and paid for with blood. And gods can kill other gods.”
They all took a moment after that, sitting and standing, in the moon’s bright light. ’Til suddenly, a fresh new thought struck Yancey full force ’tween the eyes, and she gasped out loud. “I really am a fool,” she said, to no one in particular.
Yiska’s eyes sharpened. “How so?”
“Because — we’ve been trawling down through Hell-that-ain’t for how long, wasting our time trying to get Chess Pargeter to hear me, and all ’cause I’m a dead-speaker, right? But see, thing is . . . he’s not dead.”
Now it was the three other women’s turn to look her way in unison, with the same sort of stare you’d give some idiot.
“We know this already,” Yiska reminded her. “But what can we ever do to remedy it except try again, and harder?”
“Well, I don’t know. Talk to his Ma, maybe, who is damn well dead? ’Cause considering I see her sitting right beside him most of the time, I’m thinking that might be helpful!”
And if not, given all she’d heard about Oona Pargeter, from Chess himself . . . well, there were dead people everywhere in Mictlan-Xibalba. And now she’d remembered it was so, Yancey could just as easily speak to any one of them.