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“The hell — ?” was all he had time for.

Outside, the thunder cracked like God’s own whip, shaking Nazarene Hall to its foundations. And between them, on the table, a noise rose up that Morrow’d hoped never to hear again: ticking and chattering, magnified by fifty-odd. The Manifolds themselves, rattling like bees in a sack.

“. . . what?” This from the Reverend Catlin, still left off to one side, pathetic in his lack of pr

actical understanding. But the rest of them knew better.

“Hexation,” was all Sophy Love said, folding her little boy close. While Morrow just shifted back into fighting stance, one hand automatically going to his gun.

It’s on, he thought. And ran for the door.

CHAPTER FIVE

Atop Hex City’s southernmost ramparts with Fennig at his elbow, Reverend Rook looked down on a four-foot-wide bowl that had been made by hexation-gloved hands digging up the stone like wet clay, tossing it pell-mell over the edge to shatter. Then filled by bucket after bucket hauled laboriously up from the city’s wells — that part had to be done without magic, the man who’d designed it had told them, or the reflections it cast would be false, and therefore impotent.

The water must be a mirror, the mirror an eye, without flaw or artifice. It is known, barbarians. Everywhere, it is known! All civilized places, at least.

Have you truly no system of traditions here, in this empty pigsty of yours, this bone-kennel? Do you not at the least strive to educate yourselves, knowing no one else will do it for you?

The voice in Reverend Rook’s mind didn’t much sound like Songbird’s except in terms of tone — that damnable Celestial arrogance, a thousand years of Chinee witchery made literal flesh. For the Emperors and mandarins had done with both their ancestors what Auntie Sal’s Marse Followell had only dreamed on: in- and out-crossed ’em generation after generation like any other owned creature, culling their bloodlines for potential, power and amusement-value deformity — as pets and slaves, equally. Living weapons used ’til they broke, then bred again and again ’til their children outstripped them, or died trying.

And here he was now, the man himself — the Honourable Chu, squatting over that same pool like a snapping turtle. He was short and broad, black eyes narrowed, the water below him rippling in red circles as he stirred it with a handful of long yarrow stalks. With his frayed black cotton pyjama pants and callused bare feet, he looked most like what he’d once masqueraded as: a scholar reduced to beggary, escaping his inherited yoke by slipping on the uniform of a simple railway-labour coolie. One thing alone marked him out as maybe more — the tatters of a royal blue silk tunic, faded almost lavender.

When Chu spoke, threads of light writhed in that silk like the worms which had birthed it, showing him for what he was: New Aztectlan’s war-master, born of a culture with millennia invested in the arts of battle and hexation. No matter how worn the garment became, Chu never removed it, and answered no questions about how it had been ruined. But Rook, thinking back on his own black-covered Bible — long gone now — and of Songbird, so trapped in her sacred whore’s gilded red lacquer cage that the earthquake he’d called down on her must’ve seemed less a disaster than a freedom-spawning miracle, thought he could guess.

Next to Chu, another man crouched, taller and browner though equally broad, his cheekbones flat as copper axe blades. “See it yet?” he demanded, raking his long hair back behind one ear, while the beaded pectoral covering his chest rattled like an abacus. “Spinning its web, under the earth’s skin . . . there, and there. If you can’t, you must be going blind, old idiot.”

“There are no spiders here, fool. Only dragons, rulers of weather and water — Ying-lung, who brings rain and floods, whose name we have called every day this week. Will you never learn?”

“Day I need to ‘learn’ from you, yellow man, I’ll lay myself face down in this pool and try breathing water. Who was here first, uh? Your people, or mine?”

“More of mine left here than yours, you dung beetle, even with the quota. As for lying face down — that must’ve been the extent of your strategy, when the gweilo came. The sage Sun Tzu says, Confront them with annihilation, and they will then survive; plunge them into a deadly situation, and they will then live. When people fall into danger, they are then able to strive for victory . . . but he never met any Shoshone.”

“Oh, go eat a buffalo liver, you miserable creature.”

Chu replied, without turning: “Seeing there are fewer shaggy cows roaming these hills now even than Shoshone, that would be difficult. So, are you ready at last to assist me, or do you need yet more time to complain, like a woman?”

The Shoshone snorted, sounding somewhat like a buffalo himself. “Aiweape-ha,” he said, to the air. “Crazy person, wandering free. You’d think you had no family to look after you . . . oh, wait.”

Chu flipped water at him, without looking, which the Shoshone avoided effortlessly. The droplets fell on the pool’s dusty rim, smoking slightly, before resolving themselves like mercury, then sliding sideways to rejoin the rest.

“Think them dames’ll stop squabblin’ anytime soon?” Fennig inquired, watching the scene.

Rook sighed. “Probably not, without I tell ’em to.”

“Well, we I on a schedule, or so Herself says. Interesting, though, how she wants to tag along just now, when she never did before. . . .”

“Who of us knows her mind, really? And don’t say me, ’cause flattering though that might’ve once rung, these days you’d be wrong.”

Now it was Fennig’s turn to sigh, casting a glance behind him, to where his three women sat arm in arm, laughing, their legs hung a-dangle over the abyss. “Morts is all somewhat mysterious by nature, Rev,” he observed, as though Rook hadn’t already noticed, “no matter who, or how big the size’a their hex-bag. Believe you me, I should know.”

“‘Morts’?” Rook repeated, cocking a brow.

“Ladies, I mean. Females. Them as ain’t men — or she-hes, neither.”

Nodding, Rook looked down, recalling when he and Chess had stood atop that ridge outside Bewelcome, surveying it like Lucifer and Jesus with all the kingdoms of the earth laid out before ’em. It’d been a spectacularly deadish place back then, with points north and west a veritable painted desert of wild green shale and furze, points south and east a barren scree studded with long-dead sea creatures and shadowed by arroyos dried near to crumbling; what little Sheriff Love’s bunch had managed to wrest from the earth had come up small and mean, fed by rigid faith, paid for in the sort of blood that didn’t reap crops worth speaking of. Not much magic to be found, one way or the other.

Now the same area was soaked in it, and the landscape lay utterly transformed.