PROLOGUE
The dream was always the same.
She appeared above him, blown by a black wind, her back-sloping forehead girded with a hissing serpent, her swirling hair stiffened with mud. Her round face was set with jade scales, irregular as leaves. The lids and orbits of her wide-spaced eyes were decorated, mosaic-style, with tiny chips of shell, mother-of-pearl and obsidian. Her breasts were bare, high-set, the nipples pale and small — a virgin’s, or even a child’s. Sometimes he thought this meant she must have died young. Other times, however, he looked deep into her painted gaze and knew that it meant she might very well never have actually lived at all.
Little king, she called him every time, little hanged man — you who are mine by right, as well as by choice. And he saw a great darkness rise up around her, spreading wide: a hissing cloud of dragonflies whose wings dazzled, every colour in the world at once. Like a rainbow.
Water rose around his feet, burning cold, lapping at his ankles. The sky shone yellow and black. Knives fell like rain.
To either side, grey stone walls retreated into shadow, studded with what seemed at first glance to be rough, irregular stones — but a closer look revealed that the stones were grinning, all leering teeth and empty nose-holes. An endless rack of skulls from whose orifices flowers bloomed at random, luscious pinky-red as heart-meat.
Around her long neck a rope dangled, twisted from corn-silk and stuck all over with thorns. She held it up, looped around both thumbs — spread it wide, a cat’s cradle, a pair of opening jaws.
Use this, she told him. Use it, while you still can. Kill what you love, choose your ixiptla, make your necessary sacrifices. Pierce your tongue, run it through the hole, and pray words of blood.
The time of earthquakes is at hand, little king.
The time of great floods, when the upper crust cracks, and the Sunken Ball-Court overflows.
The Gods return, at long last. What we have been promised, we will have. So feed us once more, and apologize, before it is too late.
He didn’t know what she meant, by any of it — never had, and never expected to. But then again, maybe it wasn’t even his dream to begin with.
Twenty days later, though, there he was again — right smack back in the same place, slogging through black river water to his knees under the jaundice-yellow sky. Skulls to the left of him, flowers to the right, the very air itself an obsidian storm through which knives swirled by, drawing blood ’til it felt like all he had left for skin was a single walking wound. And as he struggled grimly forward, the only thing he could think was this — over, and over, and over —
Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch.
. . . that Goddamned son of a bitch, he went and left me behind.
CHAPTER ONE
For all it was just gone noon by the barkeep’s (carefully hidden) watch, the Bird-in-Hand dance-groggery was nevertheless crammed full with people either drunk from the night before, or continually drunk for the last few days, and counting. One of these, a huge fool in miner’s clothes, had spent the last ten minutes staring fixedly at Chess Pargeter, who stood sipping a shot of absinthe at the bar — a slim and neat-made man dressed in purple, head barely level with the miner’s breastbone, whose narrow red brows shaded to gold over a pair of eyes the same green as the wormwood and sugar concoction he held.
“Queer,” the miner said to the bar at large. “You can tell by the clothes.”
“I really wouldn’t, mister,” replied another man — almost as tall, and armed with a double-barrelled eight-gauge — who’d passed a similar length of time with his chair tipped back against the wall, shapeless hat pulled down to shade his eyes in such a way that the company had hitherto mainly supposed him asleep.
The miner squinted at him. “Think I want your opinion, asswipe?”
With a sigh: “Think you need it, for sure. Entirely your own business whether you choose to believe me.”
Chess took another sip, ignoring them both. His hair, twice as red as his brows, was close-cut enough to reveal he’d had one of his lobes pierced so that he could hang a lady’s ear-bob from it: a modest gewgaw shaped like a Hospitaller cross, chased in gold wire and set with Navajo turquoise. It caught the light as he swallowed, making the miner snort.
“‘I wouldn’t,’” the miner repeated, low and sneering. Then called, in Chess’s direction: “Hey, gingerbeer — didn’t your Ma work the Bella Union, back when? I mean, way back.”
“My Ma’s none of your concern, tin-pan.”
“So she ain’t a whore?”
Chess shrugged. “Oh, she’s that,” he allowed. “Just don’t see what it has to do with you.”
The miner stared at him a moment, then blustered on. “Well . . . think I mighta paid for her, a time or two — she had that same red hair, and all.” He pointed at the ear-bob: “Nice jewellery. Reverend Rook give it to ya?”
“This?” Chess shook his head, making the gem sparkle. “Nope. This, I bought for myself.”
“How come? Everybody knows you’re his bitch.”
Chess narrowed his eyes at that, ever so slightly. “I’m his, all right, like he’s mine. But I’m my own man still, and I pay my own way. How ’bout you, lard-ass?”
There was a general mutter, bringing the man by the door to his feet in one mighty heave. “Aw, here we go,” he announced, both barrels up and trigger cocking.
The miner spat out maybe half a word — the phrase he had in mind might have eventually proved to be damn faggot outlaw, had it been allowed to come anywhere near full expression — before Chess shot him neatly through the head without even seeming to draw, let alone to turn.
Chess licked the last of the absinthe from his glass’s rim, upturned it, and threw the barkeep money. “That’s for my tab,” he told him. “And more sawdust.”
“We get that stuff for free, Mister Pargeter,” the barkeep managed.
“Then use it to paint the wall again instead,” Chess snapped back, and left. The tall man tipped his hat to the company at large, put up his gun, and followed.
“Some pretty rough work, ’specially on a Sunday,” the tall man — whose name was Edward Morrow — remarked, as they stepped out into the muddy street.
“Oh? How so?”
“Son-of-a-bitch never even had a chance, let alone a fair one — that’s how so.”
Chess snorted. “Hell, Morrow, I was just standing there, drinking my drink. He was the one convinced he had to say something about — it, or me. . . .”
“ — you and Rook, more like — ”
“Me and Rook, then, or what-the-Christ ever. Came at me asking for trouble, and he got what he asked for. I mean, I wasn’t ’bout to start a damn fist-fight with him — you see the size of that idjit?”
“Looked ’bout my size, from where I was sittin’.”
Chess shot Morrow a bare flicker of sly white grin. “Exactly.”
A few steps on, they paused at the corner where Pacific Street met Moketown alley, under one of the many wash-lines of flapping coats and shifts — half-jokingly referred to by sailors on shore leave as “flags of Jerusalem” — which marked yet another of San Francisco’s multitudinous Poor John clothing shops. Chess drew a watch of his own from the inner pocket of his purple brocade waistcoat, and flipped it open.
“Seventeen of twelve,” he grumbled, peering down. “Man’ll be late to his own funeral, you give him the option.”
“People followin’,” Morrow broke in, looking back over his shoulder.
Chess didn’t raise his head. “From the melodeon? Yeah, I saw ’em — dead man’s drinking buddies, annoyed he won’t be picking up the next round. What do you suggest?”
“Head the other way, so’s nobody else gets killed?”
Chess gave this idea about a second’s consideration, before replying: “But here’s where Rook said to meet, and I ain’t shifting. So fuck that.”
Luckily for them, the miner’s “friends” had apparently barely taken time to arm themselves at all before giving chase, and only thought to do so with whatever came best to hand. Two men made straight for Chess, waving a broken bottle and a smashed-up chair; Chess cross-drew with a flourish and killed them both, then kept on firing, while Morrow made sure he just took the kneecap off a third, who fell back into the gutter, screaming. The whole exchange lasted perhaps a minute, at most — a popped blister of muzzle-flash and cordite smoke under heavy grey skies, spattering gaping passersby with equal parts terror and grue.
When it cleared, an only lightly wounded barfly could just be seen dragging the groaning cripple ’round a handy house-corner, his shattered ruin of a knee leaving a reddish trail through the mud. The rest were mainly corpses, though a couple were caught in midretreat with their hands held high, kowtowing awkwardly as Chess sighted at them down his left-hand gun barrel.