The Hexslinger Omnibus

by A Book of Tongues; A Rope of Thorns; Tree of Bones; Hexmas; Like a Bowl of Fire; In Scarlet Town (Today) (epub)

  Now if he’d never met him, the Rev might still be right,

  But Pargeter, that red-head tramp, a-turned him from the Light.

  The Devil gave Rook magic, those mocking him were slayed—

  And thus the Rev was proved a hex, and stays one to this day.

  They scoured the state from east to west, a-robbing as they went.

  Good men they killed, their widows left, ignoring their laments.

  They took both trains and coaches, good folk were all appalled,

  And the whole town of Bewelcome, the Rev, he preached to salt. . . .

  What must his face look like, by now? Chess wondered, idly—some unholy mask, going on Morrow’s horrified look alone: raw meat and cut vines, bad things growing wild. He felt the glamour slip from him, part by part—saw those closest widen their eyes as he shimmered and shrunk, gaze greening up, reddening from tip to tail. Danger, his mind sang out, dangerdangerdanger—

  For them, Hell yes: danger aplenty. But not for him.

  He was beyond that, and knew it, every fibre lit up with some deep, abiding grin.

  “Wasn’t no joke,” he said, voice mud-thick, all uncaring who besides Ed might hear. “Not to me. And I ain’t no vaudeville-hall act. Laugh at me, it’s the last damn thing you’ll ever do.”

  Then: more fingers—not Ed’s, too small and soft by far—touched his. He wanted to peel ’em off, like leeches, or crush ’em, just to hear ’em squirt. But they slid down to encircle his wrists without trembling; his pulse hammered hard against them, a caged rat.

  “Then they won’t,” said Yancey Kloves, simply. “Not anymore.”

  ’Cause . . . I can do that.

  It was her wedding, after all.

  He swayed, pried his eyes open, but she was already gone, flitting through the crowd like a white-veiled wraith, as that damn refrain howled out all the louder:

  Ohhhh, the Good Lord wrote the Bible, Lincoln freed the slaves,

  But the Devil made Chess Pargeter to drag fools to their graves.

  He made him small and pretty, as bright as any pin,

  And set that red-head pistoleer to—

  “’Scuse me, gents. Excuse me!”

  Slipping her way betwixt musicians, one hip moving Toe-Tapper Joe aside so forcefully he lost his breath, Yancey waved an empty glass at the crowd, overriding their complaints with effortless cheer. “Can’t tell y’all how much it means to me, and Uther,” a doe-eyed glance at Marshal Kloves, owlishly a-blink at her from their table, “that y’all are having such a great time here! You’ve all been so kind and generous t’us, I wanted—” She hesitated; then her jaw firmed. “I wanted,” she went on in a quieter voice, “to sing you something, in return. A song . . . my mother always loved.”

  As time grows near, my dearest dear, when you and I must part,

  How little you know of the grief and woe in my poor aching heart.

  ’Tis blood I’d suffer for your sake—believe me, dear, it’s true;

  I wish that you were staying here, or I was going with you.

  I wish my breast were made of glass, wherein you might behold

  Upon my heart, your name lies wrote in letters made of gold;

  In letters made of gold, my love—believe me, when I say

  You are the one I will adore until my dying day.

  The blackest crow that ever flew would surely turn to white

  If ever I prove false to you, bright day will turn to night.

  Bright day will turn to night, my love—the elements will mourn.

  If ever I prove false to you, the seas will rage and burn.

  On this last line, she let her struck-silver voice soften and fade away. And in the instant of silence before the hall erupted in praise, Chess let out a long, shuddering breath; he felt dazed, exhausted. The pull of the mind-web was a stabbing pain through his skull.

  But Morrow’s grip eased, voice kindly once more. “You all right?” he asked, words pitched low, beneath the noise.

  “I will be, we can git, right this minute.” Chess brushed at his face, impatiently. “That’s always assuming you didn’t break my damn arm, tryin’ to hold me still.”

  “Very . . . pretty.”

  The harsh, low voice might almost have been Rook’s; for one gut-wrenching instant, Chess half thought it was, before realizing it entirely lacked Rook’s hypnotizing resonance. Yet it cut straight through the revel, sent the crowd spilling back over each other’s feet as its owner reared up, just suddenly present, in their midst.

  At the sight, Chess’s mouth went dry, and stayed that way. Like he’d swallowed a mouthful of salt.

  The man—whom nobody had seen enter—was tree-tall, broad-shouldered but lankier than either the Rev or Morrow, skin a-gleam with an ill patina like dried sweat, or hoarfrost. His hair made a crusted fringe, one short pigtail still left hanging; his torn and threadbare clothes were streaked with the same white that cataracted his eyes clear across, leaving him only the pinpricks of pupils to see through. And on his chest, where a lawman’s vest once might have hung, the cross-cut icicle remains of a six-pointed tin star gleamed sharp.

  That’s not him, though; ’course it’s damn well not. Man’s dead, I saw it done. It . . . It just can’t be.

  “But, even so—” The figure lifted a lengthy hand Yancey’s way, forefinger poised to shake, officious as any preacher. “—I’d far rather you’d let the other song reach its due conclusion, Missus.”

  Yancey, near as white as her own dress, swallowed hard. Yet managed, without visible qualm: “I . . . I don’t hold with taking requests without some prior acquaintance, sir.”

  “No?” Impossible to tell, given his voice’s ruin, if the question held any true amusement for him. “Then let me be known: My name is Love. . . .”

  Sheriff Mesach Love, that was, as the gasp rippling through her wedding party confirmed; decorated Bluebelly war hero, gentleman born, his privilege shelved in favour of church-raising and homestead-building. Mesach Love, who’d been dealt a fate suffered by none since Lot’s wife—widower to a murdered wife, father to a murdered son.

  Late, in short, of Bewelcome township.

  “. . . and I have come a long and tedious way to seek out either Reverend Rook or his creature, Pargeter, recitation of whose life’s works you so sweetly interrupted here—having sworn, no matter which of them I found, to deliver final judgement upon him.”

  At this, Kloves stood out—laid one hand on Yancey’s arm, while the other sought for and found one gun-butt, sure as Christmastime.

  “Even supposing you’re who you say,” he began, “might be your misfortune’s got you all turned around. I’m Marshal for the jurisdiction; this is my wedding feast, and that’s my wife you’re speaking to. If the Rev were anywhere hereabouts, let alone his fancy-boy, I’d know it.”

  Love narrowed his praise-burnt eyes, and set his bitter mouth. “I smell them, Marshal.”

  A shrug. “I’ve no easy answer to that. Except to suggest how, sorry to say . . . might be your nose don’t work too well, these days. Given all that’s happened.”

  “That so?”

  “It is.”

  “Hmm. S’pose we’ll have to see, then.”

  Here Love made only the smallest of gestures—a brief figuring, equal-fit for blessing or curse. But a tremor ran party-wide at the mere sight of it, as though the very dust beneath came skirling at his call; not hexation, but the faint echo of some power far more oblique, implacable, sere. “God’s will” writ small, and bent to another’s service.

  “O Lord God,” the undead intoned, laying his skeletal palms together, “to whom vengeance belongeth; hear me now, in Jesus’ name, amen. O God, to whom vengeance belongeth, shew thyself.”

  Chess heard the Rev read along, behi
nd his eyes. Saw the words all but cast up and glinting, black sparks on bright:

  Lift up thyself, thou judge of the earth: render a reward to the proud.

  LORD, how long shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked triumph?

  . . . Shall the throne of iniquity have fellowship with thee, which frameth mischief by a law?

  “Psalm 94,” Morrow whispered, eyes shut, his head half hung down—bent to Love’s yoke, like he was more afraid of some damn quotation than the man’s own black-miraculous spectacle.

  But Kloves, unswayed, replied: “I want you gone, ‘Sheriff.’ Back to your own place. We’ve no need of you here.”

  “And I want Pargeter, or Rook. Give ’em to me, I’ll move on. If not . . .” Love smiled, grimly. “They gather themselves together against the soul of the righteous, and condemn the innocent blood,” he said, to no one in particular—yet his voice wrung ever more horrid, ’til women clapped hands over their children’s ears and a few weak souls doubled over, baptizing the floor. “But the LORD is my defence; and my God is the rock of my refuge. And he shall bring upon them their own iniquity, and shall cut them off in their own wickedness; yea, the LORD our God shall cut them off.”

  A groan, a whimper—the crowd lurched all at once, aching to cut and run. Chess wondered, for a timepiece’s barest half-tick, if he shouldn’t let whatever was pending happen—he’d survive, almost certainly. But Ed’s fists were closing, like he thought to throw punches at a man Death itself had spit up whole, and Kloves obviously meant the same. And Yancey cast Chess a single beseeching, lash-cut glance.

  Goddamn all “good” people, Chess thought, with a sigh.

  And let his glamour go altogether, with a plaster-rip wrench. In its wake he stood himself once more, purple-suited, to sneer back at the gaping faces which ringed him:

  Yeah, take a look while you can; here I am, life-sized. Small-made, still, but that don’t matter none. As you will see.

  Sheriff Love might have his God, as always. Yet Chess had learned a thing or two ’bout gods himself, in the interim.

  “No Heaven for you, Sheriff?” he enquired, conversationally. “And such a fervent sumbitch, too! You want me? Here I am.”

  Two guns to the Marshal’s one, and a hand on either. Chess grinned at Love, mean as ever, ’til Love grinned back—equal-nasty in his own God-bothering way, and wide enough they could hear his salt-glazed jaw hinges crack.

  “So you are, after all,” he replied. “Praise Him!”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Mister Frewer gave a slow blink. “By God,” he said, finally, “if that ain’t Chess Pargeter. Been there the whole time, I’d suspect.” A pause. “Think Mister Chester knew it, all along?”

  That Grey fellow replied, “Reckon so, if that’s Chester over there; man’s really named Ed Morrow, who used to be a Pinkerton.”

  Hugo Hoffstedt said, “Sheriff, Marshal—oughtn’t you to do something, here? ’Fore—”

  “You got any real kind of plan of attack on offer, Hugo, do feel free t’let it slip,” Sheriff Haish shot back. And Uther, hand gone automatically to the empty place at his belt where his gun should hang, just blew slowly out through his nose—a bull, matador’s cloak new-sighted, composing itself to charge.

  In that instant, Yancey came painfully closest to loving him outright more than she ever had before. He’s good, she told herself, fiercely, and that’s the simple truth. Probably better than I deserve, given . . .

  Given how sadly complicit she was in what was happening—was about to happen.

  Back stiff, she made herself look past to Lionel, who stood there gaping. “I shook his hand,” he told her.

  “I saw, Pa.”

  “Took it right in mine, and shook it, hard. Asked him how he liked the wedding.”

  “I know, Pa—I was there, same as you. Saw it all.”

  Her eyes slid back to Uther, guilt ably disguised as fright—or maybe not, since it wasn’t like she wasn’t verging on terrified, though not on her own behalf. So many people, such a small space, and all of ’em here on her say-so. All of ’em in danger due to her secret glee, now most securely fled, at having known what no one else did—of managing to avert, alone, a menace nobody but her even saw was there, in the first place.

  Oh, it was true what the Good Book said: Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. Facing Pargeter down had been frightening, but for all the little man’s posturing, he was still human at his core; no different from dealing with the belligerent drunks she dealt with every night’s end, no matter how off-puttingly careless he was in letting his power over-slop itself. Whereas Sheriff Love had been a righteous man once, or so folks said—but Yancey could barely stand to look at what was left of him: this glassine shell of ill-will that crackled as it moved, reeked like spoiled meat cured in hatred . . . by God, it was enough to make her stomach heave.

  They cut a strange pair, posed before the company in pure dime-novel gunfight stance: Pargeter, stood up slim and straight in his purple livery, red-gilt hair lifted like burning corn, and an indefinite blackness a-hover ’round all his edges. About Sheriff Love, meanwhile, clung something white as paper, or leprosy—remorseless, comfortless. A hollow luminescence whose outermost edges tangled with his opponent’s to breed something equally grey, debriding the world’s God-given colours to dust and ash around them.

  As Pargeter bristled, Love stood blanched and granular, dead skin slippy over a raw martyr’s bone-mask. His eyes—so drily pearlescent they ate light—barely seemed to narrow against the hex-pistoleer’s green glare, as though too well-burnt by God’s own regard to find any other more than momentarily inconvenient.

  Whatever I can do to help move this creature where he can do no more harm, I will, Yancey found herself thinking. Even if I have to take Pargeter’s side against him to do it.

  The very idea made her breath catch. But she knew it for truth, inescapably, as such sudden insights always proved to be.

  Christ Almighty. This curse of a “gift,” always showing a thousand terrible things converging, but not one damn hint of which way to turn in order to throw ’em off. She’d’ve passed the weight of it on gladly to anyone fool enough to ask, were it not still the only weapon she had: weak, inaccurate, impossible to control. The proverbial knife to a gunfight.

  How in Jesus’s name can I hope to save them, any of them? I can’t even save myself.

  Which was when another voice, softer-than-soft, came licking at her skull’s insides, offering this advice: Not for the present, no. But you know these guests of yours, little dead-speaker; good folk in the main, strong, and capable of much. If given opportunity, the right sort of push . . . might they not save themselves?

  Yes, she thought, not knowing who she answered. Deciding, on her father’s soul and marriage-vow alike, to believe it—or act like she did, at least, ’til experience proved her right.

  In front of her, at the same time, the stand-off played on—and whatever else he was, that mean-mouthed Mister Pargeter sure didn’t seem to lack for courage.

  “What say we take this outside, so nobody has to get hurt?” he suggested, back-shifting to balance on his heels, as though this whole unnatural paradiddle were little more than the prelude to a simple bar-fight. “This bein’ a house of God, and all.”

  Love made a dry sound, half-hiss, half-snort. “Hadn’t known you to be quite so particular, in previous circumstances.”

  “Yeah, well—that was with your people, you’ll recall. And considerin’ they’d all just finished kickin’ the crap out of me, I think I showed undue restraint.” This, Love didn’t even deign to answer—just stared, his awful eyes level, prompting Pargeter to continue. “The rest . . . your wife, and such . . . that wasn’t even my idea, anyhow. Was strictly the Rev’s doin’, all of it.”

  “You know yourself
how that’s an arrant lie.”

  “Not back then, I didn’t.”

  Love’s gaze went sliding right overtop the outlaw’s head, to some far-off place beyond. “And what earthly good does knowing that fact do me now?” he asked, of no one visible. “Though it does beg the question—where is your whoremaster, exactly, ‘Private’ Pargeter?”

  “Rev and I had us a falling out, sad to say.”

  “Ah.” Love nodded, sagely. “Most sodomitical liaisons end likewise, I’d think.”

  “Oh, wasn’t over that. But tell me, Sheriff, now we’re all caught up: how’s it happen you come to be upright again, exactly?”

  “Through God’s own bounty.” He spread his long arms, palms lifting to the roof. “An angel appeared, and told me he had been sent to intercede, on my behalf. Me.” An awestruck smile stretched the preacher’s face, making salt powder down from his mouth corners. “For all my many missteps, my sins unforgiven, because I had further work to do upon this earth . . . I was spared. And sent back.”

  Pargeter thrust his thumbs through his belt, cocked his head. “Mmm. Sure it was God who made that particular call, Sheriff?”

  Love took the implication full-face, producing a blank, inhuman immobility more terrifying even than Pargeter’s killing grin. While, at the same time—

  “You thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?” Uther murmured, to Sheriff Haish.

  “How I’m just about to shit my britches?” Haish replied, just as low, eyes still fast on Love and Pargeter.

  To which Uther opened his mouth again, to elaborate, only to hear Yancey chime in, before he could: “Long as they keep intent on each other, now might be a goodish time to start getting folks out the back.”

  This brought both men swivelling to scrutinize her, with Lionel a close third. “There’s nobody can say my girl’s not smart,” her Pa observed, at last.

  “Nobody damn well better try,” Uther agreed. And crushed her briefly to him, searing her lips with what was only their second kiss thus far, but might well be their last.

  Morrow didn’t know where best to put his eyes—on Love, that awful object? Chess, obviously poised to draw, making Morrow’s fingers itch for the feel of his own shotgun? Or the Marshal and his lady, who seemed to be using this pause to lay a few plans of their own?