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“You need to wake up now, honey,” Morrow was saying, unaware how he echoed Grandma’s words (while He called me honey! was all Yancey’s sleep-stunned mind could yammer happily, in return). “Something’s happened, and we’ve got to get on.”

At the same time, Geyer looked ’round, the hand he wasn’t currently using for Yancey’s support falling to his weapon. Telling Morrow: “Boots, good. You see her coat anywheres ’round? Her gun-belt?” To Chess, meanwhile: “Where’re your guns, by the by?”

“Gave ’em to her, this afternoon, for shootin’ so well. Don’t you boys talk?”

Yancey pulled herself further upright, shaking the last of her torpor off, along with Geyer’s grip. “Move on . . . why?” she asked Morrow. “It’s the Weed? Weed’s found us?”

“Somewhat worse.”

“Worse?”

But before he could elaborate, another voice intruded—from outside, borne on the roiling air, low and booming enough to mimic distant thunder. Sheriff Mesach Love yelling full-on into the wind, syllables breasting it like knives.

“Chesssss Paaaaaaargeter!”

Yancey staggered to Chess’s side, trying her level best to figure exactly what he was staring at, but the darkness defeated her. While he stayed right where he was, surprisingly unsurprised.

Remarking to her sidelong, with admirable calm—“Never did think it’d happen, back when notoriety was a fair trade for bein’ talked up in every bandit hole from here to Tlaquepacque . . . but I’m gettin’ damnable sick of the sound of my own name.”

Chapter Fifteen

Back in the War, Rook had known men from the Ozarks who boasted of those mountains’ caverns’ glories: pink and green crystals force-grown in silence, pools of icy milk-white water, great fluted columns of salt-crusted stone and ropes of glassy quartz. Blind fish whose luminescent guts pulsed visibly under their scales. Though Rook half-dismissed such tales as typical soldiers’ puffery, the images proved strangely persistent, prompting him to wonder what other beauties might lie underground, waiting to be discovered.

The meditation chamber Ixchel had dug out for herself beneath New Aztectlan’s temple-pyramid, however—six-levelled, in either mockery or reverence of Mictlan-Xibalba’s own interior path—revealed none of them. Having been told more than enough times how this journey’s stages were supposed to go, Rook could easily map it out in his head. The Dark House, then the Rattling or Cold House, the House of Jaguars, House of Bats. The Hot House. The House of the Razor . . .

But no. Only the first and fourth were in any way true—empty darkness, supernal stillness punctuated by the steady drip of water. A rough-cut stone room hung with flapping, rabid rodents who plumed up and outwards, chittering, every sunset.

From a corner of their bedchamber, you touched a certain brick and watched a portion of the wall ripple backward, stone flexing like a curtain. The stairs thus revealed spiralled ever downwards, for a long, long time. And at the bottom the passage wore on, the track of a giant worm through rock, ’til it ballooned into a hollow underlying the great ziggurat where a sourceless shaft of light whipped ghost-columns of dancing dust ’round Ixchel-Ixtab-Yxtabay, Lady Serpent-skirt herself, lying death-still atop a black obsidian slab. Rook’s breath hissed in his ears as he approached this altar, reflected off unseen walls—a wool-packed sound which reminded him of nothing so much as that other impossible place between worlds, the Moon Room. . . .

And all at once, what sprawled before him was someone entirely other: slight and lean and masculine-flat, naked and seeping, bloody from head to toe. Chess Pargeter, splayed and betrayed, empty ribcage cracked open and spilling organs like a blood-eagled Viking’s, his absinthe-coloured eyes glaring green fire.

You son of a bitch, you went and left me behind.

Rook flung up his hands, gasping—then paused, half-expecting to hear laughter ridiculing such a foolish show of weakness. But Ixchel remained wrapped in breathless sleep, and there was no one else about to comment . . . not unless you counted ghosts like Kees Hosteen, who floated in the shadows just behind him.

Guilty conscience, Rev? The old man’s shade asked, coolly.

Grimly, Rook forced himself forward, ignoring the commentary. He knelt before the altar, bowed his head, and murmured: “Suicide Moon, Lady of Traps and Snares, Your unworthy consort calls You home. Bestow upon those who crawl before You the gift of Your Presence.”

The response this drew was utterly familiar, not to mention expected: a dry, soundless snort. She really buys this kind’a ass-kissing, from you? Really?

Not bothering to answer, Rook gestured him to silence, and genuflected again. “Mother of all Hanged Men, it is Your chosen son who calls You. Return, You who are also Tlazteotl, Coyotlaxqhui, Chalchiuhtlicue—”

An ague-clammy palm lay suddenly flat against his forehead, with no whiff of air to warn him. Rook froze. Standing above him, Ixchel smiled, her jade-flake teeth like thorns. “No need to stand on ceremony, my husband,” she murmured. “For it is written that a man shall leave his family and cleave unto his wife, and they become one flesh—”

“Please don’t.”

She laughed, that same silver, plucked-sistrum shiver which once haunted his worst nightmares. “Very well, then.” Her gaze swept to Hosteen’s ghost, where he stood at Rook’s side. “Who is it you bring leashed here before me, to do me worship?”

Hosteen, boggling: ’Scuse me?

Rook raised a pacifying hand. “Kees, be good enough to fill in Lady Ixchel here about all of Allan Pinkerton’s latest anti-hexological embellishments, would you?”

To her credit, the ghost-goddess listened silently while Hosteen did so, her barely inhabited skin giving off its usual icy glow, a lit corpse-candle. Allowing, finally: “But I fail to see how any of this should trouble me, or mine.”

“They’re on their way to Bewelcome right about now to test the damn thing out, probably on Chess. And from there, it’s just a hop and skip over to our doorstep.”

A boneless shrug. “He will defeat them. They have no notion of the forces they tempt.”