“Maybe, maybe not. They’re not like us, as you may’ve already figured — but some things are gonna change, no matter what. ’Cause he come up the same way we all did . . . and he sure didn’t come up alone.”
Chess made as though to snap a harsh line back, but something gave him pause. He looked down again, instead, sagging slightly, like the air in his lungs’d gone stale.
Quiet, he said, “He told me I . . . was him, now. One sort of him — or half, at least. ’Cause you fucked up in the makin’ of me, just like I said.”
“That’s right.” Rook leaned closer, Morrow straining against him as he did — the resultant motion subtle at best, though Rook seemed to consider it significant enough to fight for. And heard his own voice drop even further, as Rook finished: “But . . . you don’t have to be.
“For here we have the key to write you a new gospel, Chess,” came the words, out of Morrow’s mouth. “Every god needs a prophet. Every crusade, a messiah. John to Jesus, Stephen to the Apostles. She showed me how to make you something I didn’t have to kill, or be killed by . . . and we’re gonna show her that just ’cause she and her kin want back in, don’t mean we’ll leave the world to them without a fight.
“Make the common folk fear him, as much — or more — as they’ll fear those who come in his wake, Ed.” And as the world blurred out to black, Morrow thought he saw Rook’s face swim up to hang before him, dark eyes deep and burning. Chess, the graveyard, the faraway wailing of the cracked world, all were gone. “Spread the word of the Skinless Man, that the only way to save themselves is to let blood in his name. Draw it in a bowl, tip it out the front door, circle the house. Tell them what will happen to any as says no. Spill your worst nightmares on their heads — then tell them to pray that’s all they endure. Or the Skinless Man will end them in ways no man can even think about and stay sane — let alone know yourself responsible for.”
Rook did not smile, but the awful intention in his eyes was threat enough. “Then by the time her kind have returned for good, every hex and every soul they might’ve claimed for their Machine will be already marked as ours, instead — and they’ll have to either accept their place under our rule, or go back to the Hell they built themselves. Forever.”
So caught up in his vision was Rook that, for a moment, Morrow’s vocal cords slackened. He managed to draw in a rasping breath.
“And you think Chess’ll do all this — let this all be done, in his name — just on our say-so? ’Cause you made him a god?” Astonishingly, he found a hacking laugh of his own. “Ain’t the way any god I know’s supposed to act.”
Rook blinked. Then he returned the laughter, a dark, smoky chuckle. “Well . . . knowing him the way we both do, Chess ain’t too likely to be a god of love, is he?”
And that last was so crazily, hysterically, absurdly true that Morrow found himself laughing right along, while the darkness washed away into the graveyard’s dust-choked dimming sunlight — and Chess stared at him in furious horror, hearing two voices echo from one throat.
“I’m right Goddamn here, Goddamnit!” he shouted, at the both of them.
The final absurdity was enough at last to bust Morrow free of Rook’s waning spell. He staggered, caught himself. Shook his head as Rook’s influence boiled off faster than black tar cooking. “Two of you stuck together at the hip and such, for how long?” he gasped. “Plighting your troth for all the world, play-actin’ the part of two souls in one body, or a heart torn in half reunited. And . . . in the end, Reverend, after all you’ve seen and done — you don’t hardly know that little fucker at all, do you?”
Switching mid-word to thought, without meaning to, it all crashing out of him in one great wave hurled up against the thinning black cloud of Rook’s shadow.
Chess Pargeter. Who’s never done what anyone wants, for any reason, if he could help it — anyone but you, Rook. Chess, who’s never been no man’s tool and no man’s toy — but yours. Chess, who’s only ever played the fool for love, and only back when he didn’t dream there even was such a thing. But now he knows better. Because . . . you taught him.
Chess tilted his head a bit at that, those poison eyes musing. “You maybe need to get on back to ‘your’ woman, Reverend,” he said, without much heat. “That’s what I think. ’Cause we all three of us know just how pissy she can get, when things don’t exactly go her way.”
He raised his hand in distinct imitation of Songbird, a backhand salute, to push every last trace of Asher Elijah Rook from Morrow’s bruised soul.
Just past where Bewelcome glinted, Rook snapped back to himself, aching but whole. He touched a hand to his mouth, still feeling the trace of Chess’s kiss on Morrow’s lips.
“Is it done, husband?” Ixchel asked, from behind him — a dark figure on a darkening landscape, sky already shading down to dusk, hanging back with a strange courtesy. Willing to wait at least a few beats more for him to . . . commit himself, he supposed, given the gravity of what they were about to set in motion, and all.
“I believe so,” he answered. “One way or t’other — he’s coming.”
She came up behind him, rested her forehead against one shoulder blade, inhumanly affectionate. “He shall come. He has no choice. All this was fated a thousand years before your births. Are you ready to prepare him the Way?”
“As I’ll ever be,” he replied, at last. And felt, rather than saw, her smile.
She took his hands in hers as he turned to face her, fisted them together in profane prayer, and began to chant. Within moments Rook heard himself echoing her as the spell enveloped them, aligned them, before unfurling itself, parasol-wide, across the land. Power fanned out from Bewelcome’s salt-flat ruin in a hundred directions at once.
Down ley lines, the invisible currents of power running through air and soil. Along the rails of the Pacific Overland and its tributaries, near two thousand miles of steel. Through the continental copper mesh of Western Union’s telegraph lines, chattering with Morse code. The spiderweb reached out all ’round them, lighting up, a silvery-glint net cast over half a continent to catch — their own kind, gathering and weaving together any who fell somewhere between those strands.
Sending out the impulse: Come. Come seek out Ixchel, the Mother of Hanged Men. Come stand before Her priest-king, to offer up your service. Come to build the First City of the Sixth World — the world of wonder, the world of power. Come, and join New Aztectlan.
Not every mark would prove receptive, obviously. Songbird and Chess, at the very least, would fight the call as hard as possible, and Rook didn’t doubt that they’d succeed.
Many others either wouldn’t try, or would try and fail — and then they’d end up here, lost and delirious, throwing themselves headlong into the famous Machine’s endless suck-hole. As many as necessary, for Ixchel-Ixtab-Yxtabay-and-all-the-rest’s purposes.
Yours as well, Reverend, supposedly. Yours as well.
For leagues on every side, the wires hummed and sang, lit and clicked. We call this category of crime “lightning-theft,” Rook told her, without moving his mouth. Means commandeering telegraph wireservice without payin’ for it — committing bank-fraud, or suborning fools to commit it for you, under duress. It’s a Federal offence.
And this, predictably, she found more amusing still — though he couldn’t quite figure if her hilarity was sparked more by the ridiculousness of the charge, or the insanity of having one centralized government, supposedly, to reign over a hundred thousand separate territories that’d barely each support a law of their own.