by Gemma Files
Yancey let one corner of her mouth quirk up. The Marshal did sometimes let his chivalrous inclinations get the better of him, but he could usually be relied upon to be straight with her; too much the pragmatist to pass up any fresh perspective, no matter its origins. Which meant he’d tell her what she needed to know, sooner or later.
Yet another reason (as Pa kept on reminding her) it’d be so advantageous to find herself this nice young man’s wife. But she couldn’t think too long about that, in any great detail, or she might figure out exactly what affections she had for Uther, beyond the sadly practical.
By Mala’s own admission, there’d been a fair bit of flat calculation in her choosing Lionel Colder—a charming man with his own secrets to keep, who’d have little inclination to paw through his wife’s metaphorical lock-box. Whatever detachment she’d brought into the marriage-bed had long since vanished by the time Yancey was old enough to look for it, however. Her parents had loved one another deeply, by the end—a bond all the stronger for having been forced to grow steadily, rather than flare high and fizzle.
The Marshal, meanwhile, was solicitous, brave, fair set up for future prosperity. But the difference between his love and her parents’ was like a rope bridge set against an iron-girdered train track. Though both would get you over the gaps, one felt merely . . .adequate.
Nevertheless, she leaned forward, eyes crinkling. “Do I need to fret, Uther?”
“Can’t really say, as yet. The Weed has seemed to cut itself a path, though I don’t know . . .” He stopped. “Yancey? You all right?”
She shook her head, knowing the smile she’d worked so hard over must be abruptly gone. “Just realized there’s a whole other round of chores needs doing—gotta swap out the linens.” She stretched up on tiptoe to gift him with a brief peck. “I’ll see you tonight.”
“Yancey! Enough canoodling!” Pa was trying for a glare, but his voice held that slight crack she knew proved him more jocular than angry. With a wave to them both, she ducked her head and slid from the room, soon halfway to the second floor, where her true errand awaited.
Avoiding the hall’s creakiest boards, she eased her way down to the door of what Pa still optimistically insisted on calling the Bridal Suite—their largest bedroom, refurbished with an excess of lace doilies, fine quilts and pomanders. Certainly, the two guests who’d checked in a half-week back didn’t meet anyone’s definition of a honeymoon couple.
’Cept for their own, perhaps, she thought. And blushed for herself, at the very idea of someone of her tender age being well aware what that euphemism might mean.
A hotel was no fit place for a lady of true delicacy, she’d always heard. But then—from Yancey Colder’s point of view, safe was better than sorry. And to know was always safer, by damn far, than not.
Took one moment more for her to find the nerve she needed. Then she lifted one brisk fist to rap on the door—only to see it cracked open with unexpected abruptness, grey-brown eyes peering down hard at her through the narrow gap.
“Don’t need any towels,” growled the man, who’d given his name as “Chester,” on registration. (“Mister . . . Chester, that is. Senior.” “And your brother, sir?” “Well . . . he’d be Mister Chester too, ’course. Junior.”)
But Yancey, who could tell the ostensible irritation masked wariness, felt suddenly that much more confident.
“Not what I’m here for, sir. Would you let me in to check the levels in your oil lamps?”
“Would you go away, I tell you no?”
“Honestly? No.” Yancey didn’t smile, holding his hazel eyes with her own similar-coloured gaze. “Because, you see—I know who you really are, Mister Morrow. Both of you.”
At this, he just stared, open-mouthed. While she, in turn, indicated the unseen room beyond—along with its other, equally unseen, occupant.
“May I come in?” Yancey Colder repeated, patiently.
“Might as well,” Chess Pargeter replied, from inside.
Chapter Four
Five days back:
The dream took hold without warning—one moment Morrow was alone in his own skull, sunk deep in darkness and not missing all too much, so long as the pain in his jaw stayed gloriously absent. Next, however, he found himself sat up alongside Reverend Rook in one of a matched pair of chairs cunningly cobbled together from what looked—and felt, horribly—like bone: slim, slick, yellowed like ivory, bound haphazardly together with sinew and hexation alike.
What hit Morrow like a knife through the gut, though, was the where of it all: a wide plain, acres in size, wheat rippling like a wind-tossed sea. At the far edge, Morrow knew, a zigzag splinter-board fence divided their lot from its neighbour; a tall man silhouetted against the sunset light was using the day’s last hours to continue scything there, slow and steady. Morrow felt the land’s faint slope under his feet, rising gradually to the three-roomed farmhouse and silo behind him. The air smelled of grain, woodsmoke, and autumn.
Rook breathed deep, smiling. Huge, black-clad, framed in jagged yellow bone, his very presence made a tangible hole. “Now this,” he said, “is a place for the righteous, Ed. No wonder you got so much do-gooder in you.” He leaned back, hands behind his head. “I wonder if you even know just how lucky you were.”
Morrow shut his eyes a second; he didn’t want to remember those chairs, or Rook, in this place. “Ain’t it strange,” he said, carefully, “how the friendliest thing you ever said to me comes out like you mean it to insult.”
Rook chuckled, deep in his throat. In the distance, unseen, Morrow’s father kept on cutting. “Well, well. Guess you ain’t quite so scared of me as you used to be, after all. How’s the tooth?”
Morrow’s hand went to his face, involuntarily. “This’s just a dream, ain’t it? So I don’t reckon it matters a damn what it’s like, here.”
“Dream world, real world—no border’s exactly what it used to be, given what’s passed. You’ve already seen how hard it is to hurt Chess now, and make it stick; well, stand by him, stay close, and that’ll be you, too. Can’t have the Skinless Man’s prophet kickin’ off premature from something as stupid as tooth rot, either, even hex-imposed.”
Morrow considered that. “So . . . nothing can kill me?”
“Chess could.”
“He’s had more’n enough chances to, he wanted.” Morrow faced Rook square on, no longer afraid. “Which means . . . he don’t. And he won’t.”
Rook shook his head, chuckling again. “Ed, Ed! And you the one who pointed out to me how Chess’ll do any damn thing at all, the moment he thinks somebody expects the opposite. Oh no, believe you me, ‘Agent’ Morrow—” The smile faded. “He will turn on you, sooner or later, like he does everyone else. Won’t even be able to stop himself.”
“I think that’s yourself you’re thinkin’ of, Reverend.”
“We’ll see.”
Morrow felt a rush of something unfamiliar spill up from inside him, hot like bile, and only realized at the last possible instant it must be rage not on his own behalf, but on Chess’s.
“As for me actin’ Chess’s John the Baptist, or what-have-you,” he went on, refusing to be drawn, “I ain’t done all too much to spread that bloody gospel of yours as yet, if you’ve been watching.”
“Noticed that, yes.” A dark grin: “Feelin’ guilty?”
“Not as such. You . . . feelin’ mad?”
Rook fixed him again, longer this time, like: Not as such.
“There’s one or two things you can’t know, Ed,” was all he had by way of an answer. “And ’fore you ask, what I mean by that is—you can really only see half the show, from where you’re sat.”
Morrow’s heart stuttered, just a bit. “And Chess . . . how much can he see, exactly?”
Rook shrugged again. “More than he wants to, I’m sure. But less by far than he knows he needs to.”
Morrow took a deep breath, mind whirring like Asbury’s shattered Manifold. “What is it you want, Ash Rook?”
Rook sighed, and suddenly the sky was black as his coat, star-studded, cold. Blue fire flickered like heat lightning along the horizon. “Something’s comin’, and nothing of mine, or my Lady’s. More to do with that Enemy of Chess’s, I reckon.”
Which one? Morrow thought, confused.
“’Course, for all you know, I could just be spinnin’ you more tales.” Rook spread his hands. “But like I said—ain’t as big a difference between the two of you as it used to be. Or all three of us, for that matter.”
From somewhere else, Chess Pargeter screamed out loud.
And here was where Morrow rocketed straight back up into the debatably real world, only to find it deformed by yet another nightmare. Across the dead campfire’s smoking blister, Chess thrashed and kicked beneath an undulating blanket of amorously seeking Weed that’d obviously followed them ’cross the desert, tracing Chess’s delicious spoor, and now snuggled against him from every angle, stroking him with its many tendrils. In far too many spots to count, Morrow saw its meaty red-green furls broken up with dull ivory bone fragments which must’ve swum up through the dirt to get there, drawn by a similar hopeful hunger. These fought against each other like puppies at the teat, desperate to bury ’emselves once more inside him.
“Jesus!” Chess cursed, his voice skewing frighteningly high, scrabbling them away with both fists while they leaped and snapped in successive waves, quotidian, inexplicable. “You filthy little bastards—Goddamn fucking magic! Motherfuck damn Hell shit-ass Christ!”
Without thinking, Morrow caught one of Chess’s flailing hands between his palms; he hauled ’til his shoulder popped, bracing his boot against the fire pit’s rock-set rim. At last Chess came slithering free with a juicy rip, right into Morrow’s embrace. The vine-bone mélange turned, seeking eyelessly, and swarmed its way after; when Morrow stomped a few of the tendrils into muck, the others hissed at him, spitting acid that made his boot-tips smoke.
Now upright, Chess had already slipped behind him, using the bigger man’s bulk as a shield. “Do something!” he demanded, as Morrow whirled and swore.
“Hell, you do something!” Morrow swung his duster off his shoulders and used it to lash at the Weed, whipping it back. “Make it go away, like before—”
“‘Begone’? That’s exactly what I been telling it! It just don’t damn well listen!”
And this, an amused voice said, inside both their skulls at once, is what your priest-king spoke of, little brother, when he warned you that you must learn a better way to deal with such matters or suffer the consequences . . . along with everyone else.
Who said that? Morrow thought. But Chess’s eyes had already flicked straight to the left, and Morrow followed them, automatically. To see something looming there in the dark beyond, born from it, birthing it—something grinning, bigger than a house, a pitch-smeared hulk whose brow leaked fire and mouth leaked smoke. Whose teeth, like the interior of the Rainbow Lady’s perforated head when Morrow’d shot her in the Moon Room, were a wailing forest of tiny red faces, generation on generation of those killed to keep her all-fired Blood Engine going.
Oh, this creature said, admiringly, so you can think. Then he does well to keep you by him after all, soldier.
Under its gaze, the Weed had pulled back, finally, and now lay cowering in a lop-shaped circle, all a-tremble like pilgrims at the Rock. Morrow swallowed, mouth suddenly so dry he could barely taste his own tongue.
“You . . . you’d be that Enemy the Rev was talkin’ ’bout, wouldn’t you?”
I would.
“Same one we call Satan, that it? Or is that somebody else entirely?”
The hulk shook its grinning, smoking head, just once, with surprising dignity.
I do not know this name, it told him. But you and I have met before, albeit only briefly; certainly, you have heard my progress through the dark, if nothing else. Remember? Like this.
It straightened, spreading great columnar arms and more, as the thing’s ribs swung back as well, charcoal-hued glass doors gaping wide into nothingness: the hole, the crack, a wound between reality and Hell. For a second it yawned, then clapped shut, a club smacking home against bone, hard enough to fracture.
Unfolded, in a gust of freezing wind; clapped shut: whoosh-crack! Whoosh-craaack!
He had heard this before: in a Tampico hotel room, heralding Rook’s appearance in the mirror before Morrow went in to face Chess. But no, even further back still—that shuttery pounding, a massive wood-slat heartbeat keeping time all the way up from Mictlan-Xibalba, dragging what he’d thought was Chess’s denuded corpse up through that endless tunnel, the cold, wet, impossible dark.
Aghast, Morrow suddenly realized why the feel of the power boiling off this thing was so familiar. He twisted to stare back at Chess. “Rook wanted to make you into . . . into that?”
Partly only, little meat-thing, to both your benefits. The Enemy gestured at Chess. For this is the aspect of mine which loves to breed, to grow, to make things rise out of life and death alike. It loves, as well as hungers. It kills, but with a smile. Everything yearns for its embrace.
An almost diffident stroke along Morrow’s instep made him jerk, provoking a squawk. Under cover of the Enemy’s presence, the Weed had inched its stealthy way back toward the object of its adoration, now massed ’round him and Chess both to near a foot deep. Noticing almost simultaneously that he was once more surrounded, Chess cried out again, and started dancing, crushing the red blossoms wetly beneath his boot-heels while Morrow whipped his duster left and right.
Insulted, the Weed set up a general hiss. A stray shard of bone raked the back of Morrow’s hand, spraying blood; he cursed it, volubly.
Over Morrow’s shoulder, meanwhile, Chess yelled back, irreverently: “Goddamnit, then—if I’m part’a you, or you me, get off your bony ass and help us! Or was that all bullshit, too?”
The Enemy cocked its head, unmoved. Perhaps . . . I only want to see what you will do.
“Aw, you useless son of a bitch—”
So childishly outraged, so flat-out helpless and just plain fed-up; how young Chess was, after all! More stuck on his own idea of himself than even the Bible-bound Rev had once been, before the drop. And here, as if summoned, came that rumbling voice once more, lapping at Morrow’s inner ear: Spread the Skinless Man’s word, Ed, ’fore perdition takes hold. Tell folks the only way is to . . . let blood. In his name.
Well, Morrow thought, abruptly calm, as he looked down on his spurting cut. No point wasting a perfectly good wound.
Chess was still ranting on, scraping the Weed from arms and shins. “—damn Rook, damn men, Goddamn GODS, you ain’t none of you worth a shit in a sandstorm! Fuck all y’all!”
My power does not yet flow directly into this world, little brother, said the Enemy, grinning horribly. Anything I do will only widen the crack between our worlds further. It widens, even now.
“Well, that ain’t—” Chess spat, bit at a tendril. “—my fault!”
No fault at all, merely fact. How much of this world must die, however, before you allow yourself to care?
“This world’s a shit-pit anyways! So it burns now, or it burns later—what’s the damn difference?”
Morrow laughed, the sound wild and startling enough to silence even Chess’s fury; the pistoleer stared at him, as Morrow turned his way. “No difference at all, right? So why not save it, just for fun? Might as well hang for a sheep as for a lamb, Chess—saviour or destroyer, you’re still Chess fuckin’ Pargeter, so shut this down. While you still can.”
Ah, but nothing comes for nothing, the Enemy pointed out. Were you truly never taught to pray correctly?
I was, at least, thought Morrow grimly. And held out his wounded hand to Chess, canted sidelong, to let the blood flow even more freely.
Chess blinked, bewildered—until he saw the Weed recoil, writhe, twisting toward Morrow as the blood fell upon it, turning brown even as it thirstily drank of the crimson moisture. Some curre
nt of self-destructive desire seemed to ripple through the green strands, up along Chess’s skin and straight into both his eyes; a hot green pulse went thought-quick from iris to iris, the kill-flash’s distant cousin.
Then Chess grabbed Morrow’s hand and fastened his lips to the wound, sucking like a babe at the teat.
The Enemy made a deep, rattling sound, laughter’s furthest cousin. Man’s dew, juiced from bright heart’s fire, it mused, in far too familiar fashion. Aaahhh, precious blood, so flowery. So—
(bbbbeeeaaauuuutiful)
Morrow grimaced. It hurt, but not badly; what was worse was that sense of pulling, like Chess had grabbed a loose thread of his very being, unravelling him compulsively. It couldn’t be hex-power he was gulping at, not from Morrow—something far more vital, perhaps? Less easily renewed?
Or was this stinging, slimy feeling nothing but Morrow’s own fear and disgust writ large, a swarm of insects set crawling on his soul’s tender places?
Weakness invaded him; not fatigue, or blood loss . . . more like dread, or despair. A deep, dizzying urge to crumple up and hide his head, to—
—fall on your knees, lowly dog, grind your own face into the dirt in worship. As is only proper before the Night Wind’s red aspect, He By Whom We Live, We Are His Slaves—
It took everything Morrow had just to stay on his feet. But whatever was being taken, it was working; Chess’s frenzy had faded, the writhing Weed settling to the earth. The two swayed now almost in rhythm, as if equal-drunk on the same thing.
Me, Morrow thought. Drunk on me.
Asbury’s voice in his head, half-imagined, half-recalled, pedantic as ever: No, Mister Morrow. Drunk on sacrifice freely offered, all “gods’” only true food. For even the Almighty can save no soul without that soul’s consent.
A wave of power, half-visible, similarly green, suddenly rippled out from Chess, and the mound of red-flowered Weed collapsed, flattening in every direction. Chess released Morrow’s hand with a small belch, lips crimsoned, eyes a-glow like candled glass. He licked greenish saliva roughly along Morrow’s wound, sealing it shut in one hot stab; favoured Morrow with a look up through his lashes and a goony, purring little smile, a cat stroked from every side at once.