Ah, she breathed once more, she who had no real breath. Aaah, but the pulp of men is SWEET, little king. Red-ripe with pain, cradled in clicking yellow bone — and the heart itself, so precious when proffered thus, especially if given in love. Man’s-heart set unwrapped in its cracked cage of ribs, a jade ball . . . earthquake anchor, skull-flower, jaguar cactus fruit. . . .
I don’t — he started to say, then choked it off. Seeing how each player’s empty chest swung wide, then slammed shut again with the game’s give and take, crunching. That they were nothing but raided lock-boxes given just enough life to blunder back and forth through the rising water, kicking up puddle-spray with their bare, bony feet.
A second hand hung from every wrist, cured-glove-limp, nails and all. Skeleton palms rose to spike the ball off whatever wall seemed nearest, sliming it with rot — after which the gamesters would yell out in triumph, catch it on the rebound, and start over again.
He shook his head, bile flushing his throat, and demanded — What are you people? Goddamn demons?
We are the Gods, she said. We were you; we love you. Why would we not? Your love keeps us alive.
I ain’t no damn part at all of that equation.
And here she smiled, so sweetly, with her tiny green teeth — each of them filed to points, set with the same jade scales as her mask-face itself.
Replying, as she did: . . . Not yet.
And now . . . look up, through the moon’s eye. See how I follow you, so closely, even here. See the door through which we two will meet at last, the hole through which I will climb back up into your world.
The moon in question was black, vaguely squarish — rectangulish? A tiny lozenge in the black-and-yellow sky. It struck him as somehow familiar.
Here: I will show you a great mystery, seldom seen. For though you witness me now in my glory, this was me, also, long ago: a girl just like the witch who tries to drain your power now, trembling on the cenote’s lip, pierced tongue’s overflow outlining her lips and chin in a bloody tattoo. She with the thorn-rope tightening around her neck, so that when she falls, she will not even feel her impact. The water will take her like a lover, suck her down and hold her fast, forever.
A massive sounding bell of rock, its sides jagged with lime, through which bats dove and screeched. The water, blue shading to black.
This well is full of bones, and all have them have “been” me, at one time or another. All of them, and none.
He looked up, looked down, looked back up; could not seem to stop himself. Saw the black moon swimming in the black-and-yellow sky. Watched as the rain of knives began to fall once more, slicing downwards.
Now wake, little king, before that witch-girl drains you beyond the point of being able to defend yourself. You are not wholly your own anymore, to give yourself away at will. Neither your own, nor hers, nor any living other’s.
You are MINE.
Though most of Songbird’s lower-floor Chinee-men didn’t seem to know what the hell Morrow meant when he yelled Chess’s name at them — even with the shotgun showing — he eventually blundered on one who spoke at least some sort of English.
“You go there!” this one yelled back, above the music’s caterwauling, indicating a dim passageway that dipped twistily ’round and beneath the central stairs, before trailing into what looked for all the world like a genuine hole in the ground.
Why would Chess head down here? he wondered. This place stinks worse’n the rest of it all put together.
At his back, Celestials were already starting to gather, so Morrow squared his shoulders, and dropped down inside. His first thought was that this place was built far more for Chess’s specifications than it’d ever be for his — but he bulled his way through nevertheless, the rock itself closing in on him mouth-wise, all teeth and no lip.
Eventually, he was spit out into a dead-end cave, its walls lined honeycomb-style with ragged little coffin-sized crevices — four apiece, moving upwards to the last length a man his height could reach while standing on tip-toe. The reek hit him face-on, a gag dipped in outhouse-water, as restless, shifting moans spilled down every-which-way from those same crevices’ occupants.
All women, from what little Morrow allowed himself to recognize, and all of them sick to dying, too — maybe with the pox, the weeping syph, or spitting up blood with the dreaded lung-complaint: consumption, battening on them fast and eating them alive.
Suffice to say, it was the last sort of place Morrow’d ever thought to find Chess Pargeter, with his fancy store-bought clothes and his bath-a-night clean self. But here he stood, hands braced on gunbutts, looking down at a sharp-faced slip of a thing laid back in her shift, a smoking opium-pipe still clutched in one bird-thin hand, with her waist-long rusty hair piled beneath her for a pillow.
She opened her eyes just a slit, narrow and green as Chess’s own, to say — hoarse and blurred by some Limey accent, but with no particular surprise — “Oh, so there you are, at long last. Where’s that warlock fancy-man of yours, any’ow?”
“None of your beeswax,” Chess replied. “You look like death warmed up, by the way.”
The woman drew hard on the pipe, coughed rackingly and grinned, showing a reddened half-mouthful of teeth. “Don’t I? Take a good long ken. This’ll be you too, one o’ these days.”
“Not down here, it won’t.”
It was Chess’s usual tone, all right — hot and cold at once, detached as though he was studying the world through the bottom of one of his just-emptied absinthe glasses. Still, Morrow heard a strange shiver run through it nonetheless: a crack, hairline for now. But spreading.
The woman laughed at that, rattle-harsh. “Ooh, big words. Fink I’m impressed, you cat-eyed bitch? Look at yerself. Could’ve ’ad a bloody soft life, you didn’t run off an’ act the fool, playin’ at soldiers. An’ look at us now.”
“Us? No such thing, thank Christ Almighty. And don’t rag me out like I’m knee-high no more, either — this bitch is feared ’cross six states. Might even go so far as to say I’ve killed more men than you’ve fucked, but I somehow doubt that’s possible. So speak to me as if I got enough in my pocket to pay your fare, or — ”