A Rope of Thorns

by Gemma Files

  Yancey blinked, unsteadily. “That’d be your Ma.”

  “It would.”

  “Then why are you still alive?”

  “’Scuse me?”

  “Babies die, Mister Pargeter. Happens lamentably easily—I’ve seen it close up, twenty times or more. So . . . she’d really wanted you dead, you would be.”

  “That don’t mean nothin’ but she looked to cut her losses, make a return on the investment. Money always was the only thing that bitch ever held in esteem, just like the only useful thing she taught me was how high to charge.”

  The absinthe had wrapped her in cotton wool awhile, putting up a sugared screen between her and his more outrageous—effluences: half-heard thoughts, half-glimpsed memories. And now things were definitely starting to push up against that screen’s edges once more, to intrude ’emselves in at the seams, forcing Yancey to watch them pool and sharpen. That girl with hair like Chess’s, a fox-faced minx with ragged skirts and broken teeth, wavering back and forth at her mind’s keyhole between part-bloomed youth and early age . . . wreathed in smoke, doling out slaps and caresses, screaming hoarse-vowelled gutter abuse. Good lord, but she was just so present, yet and always, yammering at the corners, constantly bent on resizing Chess the outlaw back to Chess the kicked cur, the object of barter, the cold and lonely child.

  What kind of a mother acts in such a way? What kind of a man has that for a mother?

  “And she never loved you, ever.”

  “Gal, you didn’t know her, for which you should give thanks. She stabbed me in the neck one time, hoping I’d die bleedin’, after she already sold first crack at my ass to the lowest bidder. I’d go to kiss her, she’d spit in my damn face. And then I learned better.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t understand it.”

  “That’s your look-out.”

  Such a sleek little man, Yancey thought, to contain so large a load of high-coloured nastiness. She could all but taste his bile from where she sat, and it made her want to spit.

  “You ever wish it was different?” she ventured. “That she—that you—”

  “‘Wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up the faster.’ That’s what English Oona used to say, savin’ the Limejuicer tang.” But when he saw she was still intent on him, he snorted. “What’s it matter? Things are like they are; we act accordingly, or don’t.”

  “That sounds almost Biblical. Like something Sheriff Love might say.”

  Chess laughed again, harsher. “That Bible-belting son-of-a-bitch and me ain’t got nothin’ in common, as he’d be the first to tell you.” He cast her a piercing look. “So what, he’s on your mind? See him comin’, do you, in that crystal ball you call an idea-pan?”

  “I don’t have to. There’s but two names on his list, saving the occasional heretic, and we’re still between him and Hex City.”

  “Which works out well for you, since I hear you’re all for giving him another go-round. So I guess you’ll be wanting this one, too—for a matched set.”

  Before she could protest, he’d already slipped his remaining gun’s butt into her empty hand. The doubled weight was yet one more shock, though it also somewhat steadied her, like being fit for chains.

  “But . . . you’ll be left unarmed.”

  “Hardly. It’s a dirty joke, considering all that time I put in, ’cause turns out? I don’t need either of ’em. Never did.”

  He waggled all ten fingers in front of her eyes, making the air itself snarl and buzz. The sound was far-away lightning, or something raked almost to tearing—big and small at once, and far too close for comfort.

  “And I’m to be your back-up?”

  “You, Ed, that Pink in there: cannon fodder, more like, considering what the Sheriff and me got to throw around. Still, ain’t like you don’t want to be here, is it?”

  “No. But if you’re truly trying to convince yourself you don’t need us at all, why couldn’t you’ve just handed him his hat back in the Hoard? Without any extraneous help from us pitiful hexless folk, that is.”

  Again, she saw that weird appreciative flicker cross his face. For you sure do like to have your wounds pressed on, don’t you, Mister P.? Which only makes a sort of sense, seeing how they’re all that’s left of the man you thought you were. . . .

  “Also,” she continued, “I’d be pleased if you’d stop making grand ethical comparisons between us. ‘Instincts’ aside, the only man I’ve ever felt like killing is dead already.”

  “And you don’t think you could bear to give him company, it came to that? One way to find out.”

  Too quick to equivocate with, he steered her right-hand gun up, sighting it at one of Joe’s customers through the saloon window—a largish, shaggy man whose silhouette seemed so familiar that, addled as she was, Yancey felt a moment’s fearful clutch it might even be Edward Morrow. Chess wouldn’t allow that, though, would he?

  “Easy ’nough,” Chess said, his tone surprisingly convincing. “Child could do it. Just make certain you got a bead, and . . . pull.”

  “No.”

  “He’s nothin’ to you, Missus—nobody is. What folk you had’re all halfway to rotten, ’less them that’s left decided they weren’t worth the burial.”

  The inherent addendum, equally contemptuous, even in silence: I saw to that, with your conniving. The sting of it went from ear to hand and back up again, faster than telegraph-wires; before she’d formed the idea, Yancey saw her other barrel connect ’gainst his temple, tiny bone-thud impact dwarfed by the click of her thumbing the hammer.

  “Goddamn no, is what I said.”

  “Oh ho! Brave notion. And just what d’you think would happen, if you tried?”

  Now it was her turn to grin, just shy of a snarl. “Care to find out?”

  They traded glares, wind surprising cold around them, there in the noonday sun—’til a third voice intruded: “Hey! What the hell’re you two playing at?”

  Yancey’s heart did a rabbit-kick. Oh thank God, it wasn’t him. A beat after that—this being the first time she’d sighted the man since their last night’s . . . converse, in the flesh or out of it—blood rushed to her cheeks, hot and quick. Mister Morrow seemed a tad thrown himself, probably for similar reasons, while Chess noted the back-and-forth, approvingly.

  “Just making a point, Ed,” he said. “For what little that’ll help her, when the real shooting starts.” Adding, to Yancey: “’Cause we’ve at least established you’d shoot Sheriff Love or me, if only to prove you won’t shoot nobody else, on the off chance they’re guiltless. And also ’cause you’re halfway sure it wouldn’t do all too much, anyhow.”

  Son of a . . . Maybe I will let fly, just to wipe that smug damn look off his face.

  “I was beginning to like you, Mister Pargeter,” was all she allowed herself to say, at last. Which simply made him roll his eyes at Morrow, and grin all the more.

  “Your error,” he told her, coolly. “But keep the guns; I fancy the look of you with ’em, if only for amusement’s sake.”

  When he turned to go, however, Morrow grabbed his arm, hard enough he couldn’t. But it was Yancey he glared at, sending a fresh run of prickly heat from head to toe. “Out here playin’ Goddamn William Tell with real rounds for so long Joe had to tell me where you two were—and did you even once think t’tell Chess ’bout what . . . Grey . . . said, last night?”

  “You’re the ones share a mattress. Did you?”

  Morrow took it full force, blinking rather than flinching, while Chess, caught in the crossfire, looked one to the other like he longed to slap ’em both.

  “What about what he said?” He demanded.

  “You know how Pinkerton’s working with hexes already,” Geyer told Chess, all four of them up in the pistoleer’s suite—Morrow and Yancey arranged on chairs flanking Geyer, while Chess set up his usual back-and-forth pace in front of the window. “That hellion from San Fran to start with, Madam Yu, or Songbird—”

  “We’
ve met a time or two, yeah, and she likes me same as she probably likes how a dose of clap lowers her home-stable’s tone. So?”

  Geyer sighed. “Well . . . as per their initial agreement, the Boss had been letting her sniff out other hexes to sign up or suck dry, most often the latter—but the Hex City Call interfered, drying up their lines of supply by sending all expressed witches and warlocks scurrying off toward Reverend Rook and . . . that other lady. But then Doctor Asbury began to manufacture copies of his Manifold, issuing them to ranked officers, each inside cases fit with a scale to match their readings to.” He flashed his own Chess’s way, netting little response. “Which means . . .”

  “. . . they can do what they were jawing over when last we saw ’em, remember?” Morrow asked. “Hunt up them as could be hexes ’fore they have a chance to blossom, then raise ’em housebroke to leash and collar?”

  Chess huffed. “So they got a passel of just-bled bitches like Little Miss Fuck-You-Hard on their side—what’s that to do with me? They don’t get in my road, they won’t get hurt; they do, then they will. Day I can’t get shed of a flock of witch-girls, you can lay my ass out and throw dust in my face.”

  “It’s not only young ladies, Mister Pargeter—not by a long shot.” Geyer leaned forward. “That train of his . . . last Morrow and I stepped aboard, it was a regular steam-car made commonplace time, and now it can go from Chi-Town to Mexico in under three days. Doesn’t even need rails, nor an engine; it can go through a mountain, if that’s what’s on order. And you know how that’s done?”

  “I don’t doubt but you’re gonna tell me.”

  Morrow, now: “By rounding up folk who ain’t yet come to it wherever they run across ’em, Chess, and packing ’em away in its freight cars like cattle—men and boys, old and young, who’ve been lucky enough to dodge the rope Rook didn’t, or that battlefield harm old Kees Hosteen was talking about, back when the Yanks tried to make a Brigade out of new-minted hexes. Then they ask ’em if they want to serve their country, and if they say yes . . .”

  His voice trailed away, run dry at the sheer horror of it, especially from a man he’d once admired. But Chess didn’t take the hint.

  “They what, hexify ’em ’gainst their will? Poor damn babies. Bound to’ve happened sooner or later, and if they’re so dumb they still turn Pink after, then—”

  Yancey sat upright, her final straw snapping. “Oh, let me,” she said.

  Her hand darted forward, snaring Chess by the sleeve and pulling him so close it made him startle, like she came loaded with some particularly female complaint he might catch through sheer proximity. “Whoa, now! Just ’cause you and Ed been flirting . . .”

  “Hush,” she said, severely, and kissed him on the lips.

  Purest intuition, same as going skin-to-skin with Geyer had been, the night previous—but she couldn’t fool herself there was no small shred of payback in the gesture, either. If nothing else, it certainly shocked Chess silent.

  Both their minds broke open, pulled right on back to Pinkerton’s conclave, together: so close-sat between the predatory trio of Asbury, Songbird, Pinkerton and Geyer’s memory-self it seemed insanity no alarm was roused. The former agent looked uppercut, dazed.

  “But . . . these are citizens of our nation, sir, not enemy operatives; fellow veterans, some of them. I thought our charge was the protection of such innocents.”

  Pinkerton’s dreadful maw quivered, as though striving (yet failing, miserably) to knit itself back together—and it shocked Yancey to realize how shocked Chess was by the sight, his unwitting handiwork made flesh.

  “We are nane sae innocent as tae be sinless, from Eve’s womb on,” Pinkerton replied, shortly. “But what America stands on here, Frank, is the precipice of a far worse division than that which almost sundered us—one which must be avoided, at all costs.”

  “I’m still not sure why that necessitates forcing the unprepared into custody, ripping them from wives and families, subjecting them to—”

  “A cocktail of the same sacramental Weed Pargeter sows behind him, only,” Asbury assured him, “creating delirium, followed by a mere shadow-show of impending grievous bodily harm: threat of fire, or approaching bombardment . . .” Hastening to add, as Geyer gawped at him: “. . . and then, once the deed is achieved, sedation via heroin—a housewife’s cough remedy!—or gentle gastric lavage. It is done with all possible delicacy, Mister Geyer, leaving not a speck of permanent damage; we have no wish, or need, to go further.”

  “Yet these medicament-aided vaudevilles of yours must ring convincing enough to make the change occur,” Geyer shot back, “which confirms the whole offensive matter as torture!”

  Asbury reddened, from his collar up. “Our processes, however traumatic, allow these recruits to avoid such Mediaeval nonsense, sir! No more burnings, hangings or pressings, no more ‘spectral evidence’—no hysteric, misinformed massacres, in fact, such as that which lent Salem its legendarily ill name.”

  Unable to restrain herself, Songbird giggled behind her fan, drawing Pinkerton’s roar. “Be still, both o’ ye!” To Geyer: “I must ha’ men around me I can trust, Frank, sincerely, and not worry over. If you canna play that part for me, then tell me now, and we’ll ha’ ye back Illinois-way on the instant.”

  “I . . . that wasn’t my intent, boss, by any means. It’s simply . . .”

  He shook his head, amazed, while Pinkerton merely shrugged. “Aye, it’s a conundrum—how tae comport ourselves as true Christians, gi’en what we deal wi’? We can’t do much tae hurry the lassies along, and setting one hex to make another is a witless errand, for they eat ’em right after, or at least try damn hard. Savages!” Songbird laughed again. “But the Professor here’s figuring a way tae keep ’em in line.”

  And here things froze, a print-run newsbill settling from ink to image. Cutting out the middleman, since they were there already, Chess turned directly to Geyer’s shadow-self, and asked: “What’s he on about? Those grounding-wires the Doc uses to suck up magic?”

  First Yancey’d heard of such a thing, but Geyer-of-the-past—perhaps somehow combined with his current self through hexological miracle, so that the “person” they spoke to was as much Geyer as its original?—nodded quick enough, like it was familiar business. “Says he can boil it down into a spring or cog and add it to the Manifold’s next generation, so’s we won’t even need the whole rigmarole with casting a circle or dispersing the result—just point and shoot, and the thing takes more the more your target tries to fend it off, ’til they run plumb dry.”

  “For permanent?” asked Chess.

  Geyer shrugged, blankly. “Asbury says magic’s a natural force, like gravitation, so no . . . every hex can take a charge of it, like running electricity through metal, which means it’ll build up again, eventually. But the rest of that stuff he talks of—build a machine that can extract magic, let alone store it so any normal man can use it, later on? That’s like sayin’ you can build an engine that flies to the moon, or a bombshell fierce enough to level an entire city. No, if the last century’s taught us anything, such foolery is the province of hexation alone.”

  “So what broke you free of Pinkerton’s sway, exactly, and sent you chasin’ after me?”

  Geyer looked down, abashed. “He sent me away with George Thiel, his second-in-command ’til then—doing work Pinkerton no longer trusts himself with, be it purging Weed or rounding up potentials. He feared Thiel’s loyalty was slipping, that the man intended to form his own Detective Service Agency, in direct competition to our own. So Pinkerton told me to ride along with him on a fact-finding mission up Bewelcome way, watch for my chance, and—when I saw it—act.”

  “Back-shoot the fucker, in other words.”

  “I said: ‘Given provocation?’ To which he replied: ‘Provocation’s a thing can always be decided upon, after.’”

  “Wouldn’t expect any better, from the same man had agents dress like ghosts to scare a nut-house confession from Alex Drysdale.
”

  “No, no.” Geyer shook his head fiercely. “That was justice, however rough. But how could I follow his orders after that, knowing he held a loyal man’s life in such disregard? Worse still, when I broke the bonds of silence to warn George, he was unsurprised—he’d known it was coming, and made his plans accordingly. Fly north and east, back to the government, and tell them first-hand what hay Pinkerton’s been making of his authority . . . convince them how vitally important it is not just that Hex City be overthrown, but that Pinkerton not be its conqueror, lest he use such victory as an excuse to seize power for himself.”

  “Shut up,” Chess ordered him, turning back to Yancey, who braced herself. “As for you—that was a dangerous game you just played, missy. Last woman who kissed me . . . well, turnabout is fair play, or so I’ve heard. . . .”

  Before she could ask what he meant, it was his lips on hers, tongue tracing the seam in one hot, abrasive lick. The charge of it broke outwards, sweeping Geyer, Pinkerton and the rest clear, and what followed came as a series of blood-tinged blinks, viler than anything Yancey’d ever dreamt on: all limbs and motion, a serpentine coiling, pinned hands and feet, imposed desire and vivid rage co-mixed. Chess lay trapped in its midst, prone and horrified; a looming man-tower she could only assume was Reverend Rook stared down on his humiliation, purring, with horrid affection: Soon be over, darlin’. Just let her have her way.

  At the very centre of this storm, meanwhile—his tormentor, the cyclone’s bride. The aforementioned Lady.

  Her real name is Ixchel, Chess told Yancey, dispassionate. While his own memory-self, bound fast as Leviathan, struggled against her toils with everything he had, only to prove it wanting. Thinking furiously, with the only part of him left free: Oh, I’d kill you right now if I could, scatter your bones and dance on ’em, in a fuckin’ instant. Bite your lips off, bitch. Rip out your lyin’ tongue, and hang it for a party favour. Just kill and kill and kill—

  And her, nodding, black hair ’round his face like a curtain, funereal flag of some overthrown nation. Thinking back, in vaguely amused return—If you could, yes. Yet you cannot; you are made for this, little ixiptla, my husband’s husband. It will happen.