Page 8

“Enough.”

“And by . . . ?”

“. . . the usual method.”

Songbird breathed in, hungrily. “Aaah,” she said. “I had hoped you would honour the traditions.”

“I’m a man what keeps his bargains.”

“Oh, not always, I think.” Songbird’s eyes flicked back to Morrow. “Perhaps you should send your friend away now,” she suggested.

Rook nodded. “Go find Chess for me, Ed, would you? You may’ve noticed how he tends to make himself some trouble to get into, whenever he’s riled.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll be back out in a minute.”

Morrow nodded as well, but found himself lingering — so obviously, even Songbird couldn’t fail to notice. She smiled, in a way that made Morrow’s hair rise like quills.

“He will be quite safe with me, Mister Morrow. After all, I am only a young maiden . . . no fit threat at all to the Reverend. What he does here, he chooses to. Yes, Asher Rook?”

“Yes.”

“Then . . . it is decided.”

She grabbed hold of the back of Rook’s head with both hands, so fierce and fast it made Morrow take yet another step back, rattling the screens’ slick-painted forest. This sly little thing with her sugar-stick bones, digging her golden claws deep in the Reverend’s hair, kissing him like she meant to suck out his very soul. Which she maybe might’ve, since he could see something pass between them, blurred and subtle, a sort of heat-shimmer that tugged at the corners where their two mouths met and puffed both their throats out like frogs’.

They prey on each other, Asbury had said.

Songbird gulped hard, and Morrow heard the Rev’s usual rumble become a species of moan that scared him more than anything else he’d seen thus far. He knew that Chess would’ve tried to do something about it and screw the consequences, had he only been in range. Perhaps that was why the Rev had taken pains to make so damn sure he wasn’t.

But that was Chess, and this was Ed, who didn’t love Reverend Rook at all — not more than his life, at any rate.

So all Morrow did in response was grit his teeth hard, stop his ears and take to his heels, shotgun snapping up like a third arm, already cocked. And left ’em to it.

CHAPTER FOUR

That dream again. How many had he had already — a seemingly infinite roster of dreadful variations, each just as grotesque as the next? How many would he have to?

This time, he sat at his Rainbow Lady’s left hand on a dais made from bones. Her dragonfly cloak spread out behind them both to form a living tapestry, each dim-brilliant wing aflash, their collective buzz a rising ghost-whine.

She laid her small hand upon his arm, murmuring: Even the dark world has its seasons, or tides. And this, Our Flayed Lord’s young man-skinning month, is one of our shallowest points . . . when the waters recede far enough to show the mulch beneath. The endless death-muck swamp from which all life can — and will, and must — be reborn.

Look down, little king . . .

Elevated far above the crowd, he saw the Sunken Ball-Court’s fetid playing grounds teem with competitors — all splendid athletes, once upon a time. But now they were sadly denuded parodies, skins black with putrescence, slipping and sliding back and forth over drained-pale flesh rendered vaguely pink again with strain.

The skull-rack walls rang with groans of effort. Some played half-blind, their eyeballs long since spilled out upon their cheeks on glistening strings; others pla

yed by sound alone, sporting necklaces cobbled together from their defeated opponents’ teeth, strung upon intestines.

Ixiptla, she called them. Even closer, her breath stirred his hair — but not rank, as he’d expected. Smelling instead of something fresh and green, a springtime scent, familiar enough to be doubly wrenching when re-encountered in this horrid place.

Ix-what? he asked, only to hear her rippling silver laugh, a many-layered chime of wind-blown glass.

Ixiptla, she repeated. Gods’-flesh. Sacred victims. How generously they spill their blood for us, even here! Playing out the old games, so they can serve themselves up to us like maize. For they have all been Him, in their time — all aspects of the Year-dancer, the Flute-player, best of all shared dishes. Xipe Totec, Our Lord the Flayed One, who breeds flowers from meat and flies from fruit, whose many deaths create and destroy the world.

Crashing up against each other with a rotten gasp of impact while their rucked hides bulged, flapped open along the backbone, to display a sudden flash of naked spine: calculated as a whore’s culottes, yet far more . . . intimate.