A Rope of Thorns

by Gemma Files

  Hexes, beware hexation, he thought, intentionally misquoting Webster. Not a one of us worth the trusting, to our very marrow. Yet we still all go on hoping, like fools.

  Gods on earth, writ large or small, still scrabbling desperately for love or lashing out in hate, same as the humans they used for dogs, for toys, for kindling. Still steered ’round by their nethers, in whatever direction least suited logic.

  But as Chess had once remarked, on much the same subject: As for me . . . I’m certainly no exception.

  For a second, Rook shivered helpless in memory’s grip, feeling the print of Chess all along him like a scar. For damn if he couldn’t use the contentious little bastard right now—him, or someone like him.

  All around, the Blood Engine’s fires burned low and sullen, smoke-towers just rippling the horizon with heat. Oil lamps, candles and witch-fire alike dotted up and down the temple’s walls, outlining New Aztectlan’s spreading borders in a malignant melanoma of light. From where he knelt—the roof of an empty adobe hut on its easternmost border, built a scant few weeks back, by some now-dead Redskin mage—Rook heard this place others had come to call “Hex City” murmur like a giant complaining in its sleep, troubled by dreams.

  For lack of any better plan, he’d begun by drawing a charcoal circle, but that in itself had run the full extent of his preparations. Lack of the most basic training showing, yet again; with all his lore culled straight from the Old Testament and various gospels, what could he possibly hope to know of mystic sigils, names of power, sacred talismans?

  But then again, how much did any hex truly need such thespianish trappings? Will and skill, that was all any of it’d ever been based on in his experience, no matter how spectacular the result. Fortune’s favour, if not God’s.

  From an inner pocket, the Rev took a mojo bag much like that he’d once used to bind Ed Morrow; upended it into his palm, shook out a short-chopped, greying, mouse-brown lock and tossed it into the circle. A mental twitch of power was all it took to ignite the offering, rendering the immediate air acrid with burning hair-reek.

  “The hand of the LORD was upon me,” he murmured, as the smoke rose up and twined about itself, a snake trapped in its own coils. “And carried me out in the spirit of the LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley, which was full of bones. And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry.

  “Ezekiel 37, 2 to 3.”

  In a cavern under the ziggurat, Ixchel (or the mortal woman’s body she rode, at least—poor Miss Adaluz, that was) lay this very second cocooned in something part trance, part narcoleptic reverie. She had cast herself downward into dark water, as she did with ever-increasing regularity; seeking out the Sunken Ball-Court’s slimy deeps, to commune with those same relatives of hers she aspired to pull back up into the light. And all the while trusting implicitly in Rook to do her business and keep her safe, according him roughly the same contemptuous parody of respect accorded any given guard dog.

  Playing the part, he’d stood watch there a few hours, just to see what might happen. In sleep-death, her proud face slackened, she almost looked young enough to evoke an utterly unnecessary stab of protectiveness—but as attempts on her “life” by some of the city’s earliest and least willing converts had proven, she was all but impossible to harm, even if Rook had thought to try.

  Indeed, the longer she stayed embodied, more skin-out human she seemed, the more dangerous she became . . . her habitual lack of expression just one more mask, power boiling from her pores, that phantom cloak of dragonflies billowing behind her in a buzzing tide whenever she moved, so slow and stately, almost swimming. As though the desert air she cut through was black Mictlan-Xibalba-water, stagnant with a promise of plague.

  Sometimes she bled, without seeming to know that she did so. Enthroned beside her, he often saw it come and go, unremarked: blood beneath her nails or streaking from the corner of one eye or the other like tears, to paint the black spirals on her cheeks; liquid carnelian rimming her areolae, or hung from the dark nipples themselves like extra jewellery. Blood welling up from somewhere inside her, spilling down those strong brown thighs to dye her ankles, well hid beneath her Chalchiuhtlicue-aspect’s scaly skirt of writhing, hissing ghost-snakes.

  Of course, Ixchel’s vessel had been dead a good long time, at this point. So perhaps she was simply breaking the flesh down for parts, in anticipation of a second resurrection—soon-impending, at least by her personal calendar. And far more glorious.

  “And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord GOD, thou knowest.”

  Then again, what amused Rook most was how these offhand manifestations of hers now rang so interminably routine; for all he spent his days immersed neck-high in awful wonders, nothing disgusted or frightened him, for more than maybe a minute at a time. Which maybe explained why, for many of New Aztectlan’s other hexes, he was just as much a figure of sharp fear and odd arousal as she . . . more so, perhaps, given they saw him far more often and had more immediate cause to fear what he might do, in his “wife’s” unholy name.

  For her part, she liked him to play fist to her glove, though the laws he enforced all came straight from her cyanose lips. Telling him, more often than not:

  You know my mind, little priest-king husband, as is only fitting, since you are the lash I strike with, the mask I wear. My good right hand.

  Like Chess was to me, Rook thought, the person does for you what you yourself can’t see needs to be done. If I hadn’t done myself out of Chess Pargeter, he and I could’ve ruled this whole world, together. . . .

  Yes, if Rook had trusted him enough to bring him over from the beginning, or Chess had been able to grow beyond the limits of his own imagination without having to be pushed—why, they might have been twin mage-Presidents of America by now, with no deific aid necessary. ’Til they’d destroyed it, and each other, in the process.

  He will return, little king, Ixchel would say, were she awake enough to listen. You know this.

  Come back here to die, you mean.

  To die, yes. And live again. Perhaps adding, in that oddly softer way she sometimes had: I find I begin to miss him as well, if that is of help.

  Which he could rightly believe, given how important Chess had made himself to her plans. But knowing that wasn’t much of a comfort.

  From another pocket, Rook drew a smallish glass bottle. Atwood’s Jaundice Bitters, the raised letters blown down one side and up the other proclaimed: Moses Atwood, Cambridge Mass. He popped the cork, up-ended it and beckoned the curl of hair-smoke inside, an Indian rope-trick in reverse.

  “Thus saith the Lord GOD unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live. . . .”

  There, done—one more whispered word ’cross the neck and the cork went back in, sealed with a curse. The charm, wound up.

  “Ye shall live,” he repeated, louder. “And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the LORD.”

  The words of his mouth, a black-letter banner, spilled forth and up to roost like bats in the filthy twilight air. While something else took shape beneath ’em, man-sized in darkness: a far too familiar-aspected, scowling shade who, once coalesced, spoke just as gruff as ever, unimpressed by Rook’s diablerie on simple principle.

  And why don’t this surprise me, said Kees Hosteen.

  Rook had risen early, intending to walk back alone through Hex City’s streets in these birdsong hours, usually the only time of day he could expect anything close to a genuine block of solitude. But all planning aside, it just wasn’t to be.

  “Reverend.”

  Rook turned to find one Three-Fingered Hank Fennig, late of New York City, leaning up against a nearby house’s mud wall with his arms crossed (maimed left hand topmost, as befitted any southpaw) and regarding him over the rims
of his ostentatiously expensive smoked-glass spectacles.

  “Out early, ain’t ya?” he asked Rook, amiably enough.

  “Well, that depends. Don’t look to me like you slept too long yourself.”

  Fennig was a viperishly lanky young buck, and his shrug travelled the length of him without much effort, since he didn’t have breadth enough to interfere with the motion. “Oh, me? I ain’t yet been t’bed, as it happens. Thought I’d take the air, instead.”

  The glasses, Rook knew, were far more than an affectation; having seen Fennig in operation a time or two against similarly foreign challengers, he surmised his hexation worked directly with the eyes, thus necessitating some sort of shield—that the boy could see through people, or even into ’em, discovering exactly which flaws to press on in order to force a break.

  The results could be spectacular, as in the case of a provoking young witch from down Texas way—not an Injun, though certainly burnt brown enough to pass—whose elaborately coiled ’do had suddenly cut loose like an octopus knit from hair under Fennig’s direct gaze, then ripped itself from her scalp and gone foraging, leaving her to bleed out in the dust.

  “Surprised our infant metropolis holds any interest for you at all, considering where you’re from,” he told Fennig, drawing nearer.

  Another shrug. “Oh, it’s got a rustic charm, and these Territories is a prime place for them as likes to brawl, in general. A rowster could live easy here, once the cobbles was laid down and the jakes-house row finally decided upon for sure, ’stead’a every man-jack just shittin’ where he pleases.”

  “And not even kicking dirt over it, after,” Rook agreed. “But I somehow misdoubt you’ve come to discuss the state of New Aztectlan’s sanitation with me, Henry.”

  They strolled back together, Fennig with both hands kept carefully in his pockets, to defuse any appearance of threat.

  “Back home, Rev, I’m what’s called a Bowery B’hoy,” he explained, as they rounded first one corner, then the next, “with my born ’legiance t’wards the Glorious Know-Nothin’ Order of the American Eagle—Nativists, they likes t’name ’emselves, and pound down hammer-hard on any damn dirty immigrant sons of bitches wants entry t’their streets. ’Course, what a year or two out here’ll teach you is, we all of us come from somewheres else.”

  “Go on.”

  “So . . . due to circumstances don’t bear goin’ into, here’s where I find myself. And never before in all my life have I made my bed near so many other magickals, for fear of constant challenge—not that there ain’t none of that either, mind. What interests me, though, is how what there is seems mainly by rote, from habit, not necessity.”

  Rook turned on his heel, his own eyes narrowing, thinking: Smart fellow, this—someone worth the cultivating, perhaps, if his motives might only be clarified. Or the using, anyhow.

  Dangerous too, of course. But then . . . dangerous men were, ofttimes, the only kind of any worth.

  Ah, God, he missed Chess. Like half his guts were gone.

  “Gift horses and mouths, is what comes first to my mind,” he replied, casually. “For myself, I know I’m right grateful to live someplace I don’t need to scrap any more—’less I feel like it, that is.”

  Fennig gave a little nod. “True and fair. Hell, I spilled my claret and said your words quick as any, didn’t I, when you and Her told me to?” A sudden flickering grin, cut with another sly, sidelong glance. “Still, it does strike me that—well—maybe things could go further, down this new road you’ve opened up.”

  “How so?”

  Fennig paused, maybe thrown by the directness of the question, and gave it some thought.

  Then swept one long arm in an arc, encompassing the whole of Hex City in at once, and began—“Like I said, we all of us come from elsewheres—all heard the Call of this place and answered it, to our costs; a long, hard road, full of toil and tribulation. And in return . . .gained entrance here, this town, a place where for the first time any of us’s heard of, we can share space without drinkin’ each other dry: outcasts and devil-spawn, the suffered-not-to-live. A place we can damn well call home.”

  Here Fennig turned to Rook full-on, eyes literally glowing; his smoked lenses, twin glass-sheathed lantern wicks, swum brim-full of bright blue light. “So why ain’t we takin’ more care in the building of it, is what I want to know? Why ain’t we puttin’ all our gifts together now we can—make something that’ll last long after we die, ’stead of dryin’ up and blowin’ away?”

  Rook raised an eyebrow, impressed despite himself. That anyone had finally asked the question at all was occasion enough; that it was this man was genuinely surprising.

  “Bear in mind, Hank, never was a hex born took easy to another tellin’ him what to do—which is why I don’t foresee many folk signing up for latrine duty, sad to say. Still,” he looked around, “city don’t run itself, that’s for certain.”

  “No.” Fennig narrowed his eyes at Ixchel’s ziggurat, as if measuring it. “Seems like she ain’t quite taken that into account.”

  “That’s my lady wife you’re talkin’ about, New York.”

  “Apologies, Reverend; I’d never get ’tween a man and his mutton.” He visibly rummaged for the next few words, fitting ’em carefully together. “And yet—there’s none’a the rest of you comes from a city upwards of two thousand strong, am I right? ’Cept maybe for her, an’ I don’t think she was the one had administration of it, or wanted such. That’s why she’s got you.”

  “Ain’t all that many of us, either.”

  “Not yet,” Fennig shot back. “But more hexes than ever dwelt in one place, more every day—and not hexes alone, either. You know a lot of ’em come in on the very edge of turnin’, and them’s the ones bring along sweethearts, kids. There’ve been others gone out to roust farmers and crafters from any town they can find, bind ’em into service. Hell, who d’you think’s working the crop-plots, out where the Lady’s gussied up the soil? My guess, we got two or three normal folk for every hex—and that’s as like as not to go up, not down.” A deep breath. “Pretty soon, the way we’ve been goin’ on won’t be halfway good enough, any more. And when that day comes . . . well, might be you need to delegate. Might be . . . we can even afford to trust one another.”

  He hesitated, considering Rook’s impassive expression. “For now, at least,” he added.

  Rook thought it over. In silence, they turned down what had become, by default, Hex City’s “Main Street”—a broad laneway run straight east from the open square before the ziggurat, so the knife-wielders at temple’s peak looked direct into the sun each dawn. Its course was kept empty by something between divine decree and curse—any hex who thought to raise up a structure too near the road found himself suddenly struck down, all forgings collapsed to dust and glitter. Whether he lived long enough after to recover was dependent on Ixchel’s mood, once the case was brought before her.

  No matter how ruthlessly she policed her processional, however, the Lady was utterly indifferent to what might spring up just beyond. So instead of epic bas-reliefs and exotic marketplaces, canals to feed the farms beyond or elegant garden-set homes, New Aztectlan resembled some unholy mix of every foreign poor-folks’ quarter Rook’d ever seen, infused with the wrecked, would-be grandeur shared by all too many Confederate towns during the War’s dying days. But better and worse than both, because . . . well, look at who’d built it.

  A transparent cube, walls, floor and ceiling all grown from something Rook thought might be actual diamond, with a twirling ribbon of multicoloured light spinning endlessly inside, was home to a barber-surgeon who used his keen-edged fingers for scissors and scalpel. A popular groggery-saloon boasted a façade as grand and glorious as any Parisian vaudevillery’s—’til you passed at an angle and glimpsed it for what it was: parchment-thin, kept upright by hexation and nothing else, with a clumsy thing of sap-weeping planks hid behind. The domed brown blister kitty-corner ’cross from it was, Rook knew, a brothel
run collectively by a half-dozen young women who’d masked their true talents in whoring, safe from priest or lawman alike, ’til the Call brought them here. Now they’d carved themselves a fresh business-domicile right out of the earth, with utter disinterest for stylish considerations; those in search of witch-pussy would just have to eat a peck of dirt, or go wanting.

  And the general store where the fruits of raids and conjurings were offered for purchase seemed at first glance like a longhouse cabin, ’til a closer look showed every bark-clad log fused smoothly with its neighbour, stumps sprouting green leaves and threading knotted roots down into the earth. Scattered among the larger buildings, like warts on a toad’s skin, were huts housing anywhere from one to a dozen citizens: those who’d staked a claim but didn’t have enough power, as yet, to claim more territory.

  It was all so unimaginative, Rook thought, with a spasm of disgust; even the most ostentatious displays were mere peacockery, mundane vanity writ larger, not deeper. As if the only thing these people could think to do, given power and freedom most could only dream of, was to ape the lives they’d left, substituting trade in raw magic for gold or cash.

  “Right mess, ain’t it?” Fennig commented, with disturbing acuity.

  “Old habits, I s’pose,” Rook allowed.

  “Womenfolk like routine.” Fennig glanced sideways at Rook’s raised eyebrow. “Ain’t you noticed, Rev? Near three of every five hex-workers in this town’s of a feminine nature.” He shrugged. “Plain sense, you think about it—power comes to a woman with her first bleeding, but only t’one of us if we’re hurt near to death. Bound t’be more of them than us.”

  Fire blazed in Rook’s memory, silent and searing: a haystack beneath a ladder upon which a poor boy with one square pupil was bound, his skin blackening, mouth open in a wail so soundless even the sparrow-marking God had not answered.