They finished their meal in silence, consuming the bird down to the bones, which the desert witch cast into the fire. Then squatted down to peer at them as they smouldered, and said, “Now, Preacher Rook — look closely, and listen. Let me show you how the world really works: how every world grows out of the one which came before, into the next — and just as all worlds are connected, everything must be paid for.”
“Could you . . . be a touch more specific, maybe?”
Grandma snorted again, tossing back her braids, and rummaged inside the skin pouch she wore on her belt, cross-strapped right at the vague indentation where her waist should be. Withdrawing a smaller bag, she shook a few pale yellow grains out into her big, scarred palm.
“Cornmeal,” she explained. “Now: one more time, listen. And see.”
With two fingers, she twisted a hole in the sand at her feet, shook the meal down and bent to breathe a low croon in after it, then sat back, smoothing it over. Above them, the sky hung heavy with stars . . . until, gradual but unmistakable, those same stars began to go out.
A cloud, Rook thought, and Grandma nodded, like she could hear him. Like she knew he’d already forgotten how she probably could.
“Come down, nilch’i biyázhí,” she called up, into the air. “Wind’s children, hear me — spin your wool to my loom, gift me with threads to weave this working, keep my heart clean. Keep me from misstepping upon the Witchery Way.”
Rook could all but feel their two species of magic pass by each other in the night — her own strong faith, versus his sorrowful lack of it — and when she smiled back over at him, he realized he’d never before been so aware that a person’s teeth were also part of their skull. The sight made the hairs on the back of his neck prick up, a thin violet whining sound echoing through his head. And yes, bellyful of fresh-cooked meat aside, it also made him . . . hungry.
“Give me your hand,” Grandma told him, her deep voice oddly shaky, and Rook felt his scalp tighten. Was that a note from the very same famished scale he heard, behind her words’ bone-born “English” translation?
“Why — ”
“Give it.”
He hesitated — and saw it jerk forward of its own accord, her power a taut-snapped leash around his wrist. Heat flowed swoonishly outwards, dizziness mounting up fast as blood-loss. Scraping down deep to his very marrow, like she aimed to eat it with a spoon — and letting him know just how helpless he was to stop her from doing so, if she happened to choose to.
Two conclusions to be gleaned here, neither welcome. First off: she was much stronger than Rook had thought, or hoped.
And second — is this how Chess must feel, he thought, when I do it to him?
“This sort of spell cannot be done through natural means alone,” Grandma told him. “It needs more than one Hataalii’s power, whether or not the other aims to give it. Which shows us why it should probably not be done at all.”
With a flourish, Grandma shook her fingers over the hole, and Rook saw two types of hexation rain down into it, glinting hotly: his and hers, admixed. The earth drank it gladly, puffed up the way dough does in hot oil and shot up one green sprout, blindly seeking for an absent sun.
“Things must be what they are,” Grandma said, stroking the corn-stalk lightly. “From one grain I can make a kernel, and then — from that kernel — ”
Sprout became stalk, grew to nodding-height with startling speed — leafed out, a dancing-girl’s flapping skirts, spun all of a sudden with dry-rustling silken tassels. Ears whose ripe husks budded quick as grenades, golden-juicy fruit beneath aglow with an inner light that stunk so high of artifice it made Rook’s mouth fill with sour water.
“Take one,” she ordered. Rook did, gingerly. Even its weight felt wrong.
“Now eat.”
Rook bit savagely into the ear of corn, chewed, and was halfway through his second bite when the taste struck him at last — dust and ash, warm-slimy with decay. And as he choked down the third, the whole cob disintegrated in his hands, stalk curling over upon itself, shrivelling to the ground. Rook breathed deep, feeling his own stolen power flood back into him.
“That was never meant to be,” said Grandma. “Do you see, now? If I must steal from you to create a good thing, no matter how I try, I cannot make it stay. It cannot be other than it is — one grain of cornmeal in a new dress, sewn from dreams.”
Bread falling from the air, tasteless, unnourishing: Rook remembered. But the bad things you used your own — and Chess’s — power to do, all of them . . . those things stand still. The train, bisected. Bewelcome, in all its salt-slick glory.
Grandma reached down, prising up a rock to reveal the fossil which clung close beneath it, froze in mid-crawl, as though excreted straight from stone.
“Or this,” she said. “This slimy thing . . . something from the Fourth World itself, perhaps. Suck from you — ’til you sleep, or die, and I grow fat and drunk — and I might be able to make it creep, free to roam once more. But how far would it get, before it drowned in air it was never meant to breathe? Its time has passed. So I could feed you for years out here, grandson, just as I have kept myself fed — but never on corn, or sea-insects.”
“Not much of a miracle, then, is it?”
“Only gods do miracles, Asher Rook. Your own Book says as much.”
“And . . . we’re not gods.”
“Powerful, yes: Hataalii, born to Balance or un-Balance, to do right or walk the Witchery Way, perverting our own magic for profit. But we are not gods, and never could be.”
“There’s one I’ve spoke with, now and again,” Rook replied, slowly, “who might tend to disagree with you.”