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)

  Chess clapped, sardonic-slow, but his expression was unlike anything she’d seen before—surprise, amusement, genuine pleasure.

  “Always,” he said, “always check your weapon. You got no idea how many idjits couldn’t get that through their head, in the War—and believe me, under fire, that don’t pay.” He took the gun back and loaded it for her, deftly practiced, showing off how the cylinder ratcheted as each round socketed home. “I used to pack a loader for speed,” he said, “’fore . . . well, before.” He snapped it shut, slapped it back in Yancey’s hand. “Okay, no more tricks. Go wild.”

  Yancey closed her eyes, breathed deep. Then—without giving herself time to think—she raised the gun, sighted, braced herself, and bore down on the trigger with everything she had.

  The crack of the shot was louder than anything she’d ever heard, spiking straight through both eardrums like an awl. Wrist on fire, she screamed and staggered back, stench of cordite flattening her lungs. But she kept the gun up somehow, though her arm wavered crazily. And in the second before her eyes squeezed shut, she saw something she hadn’t expected at all—the bottle exploding, a haze of shards.

  Chess recoiled slightly himself, more at the scream. But as he straightened he saw the burst bottle, and clapped a hand to Yancey’s shoulder, bracing her ’til she’d got her breath back.

  “I suppose,” she managed, ears still ringing, “you’d call that . . . beginner’s luck.”

  “Sure. But some beginners are luckier than others.” He stepped back. “Now, let’s try again—without the ruckus.”

  By the time the last bottle was disposed of, Yancey’s arms burned equally—Chess had made her practise with both hands, together as well as separately. Her palms felt raw, ears humming tinnily, an acrid cordite stink permanently rooted in her nostrils; the growing heat had plastered her shirt to her back, pulling stickily as she moved. But the gun itself now felt disquietingly familiar. Chess soon stopped reaching ’round to adjust her arms, or pressing clinically upon her waist or shoulder to shift her stance, and the last three or four bottles—some of them not very large—had needed no more than one shot apiece to hit.

  Chess pulled his hat off, raking back his hair. “That was . . . halfway decent.”

  “Only halfway?”

  She’d meant the question honestly, and was startled to see a sudden grin split his beard, white on red. “Hell, Kloves—what’re you doin’, fishin’? I’ve seen blooded veterans couldn’t learn a new firearm quick as you just did.”

  Yancey looked down, trying to quash her feelings of absurd flattery, without much success. “It doesn’t seem a . . . demanding weapon, exactly.”

  “Yeah, but ‘seem’ is the word makes all the difference.” Chess sobered. “Standing targets on a range is one thing. When the lead starts flyin’, though, that’s somethin’ else entirely, and I’ll tell you this much for free: you got any foolishness in your head about ‘fair fights,’ put it right out, for good. Brawl starts, you’d best be ready to finish it—whatever it takes, fast as you can. ’Cause that’s how it goes, for such as us; womenfolk, I mean. And—”

  “—men . . . like you.”

  “Oh, I seen flat-out queers far more man-made than myself, missy, believe you me. Killed ’em, too, when they made the mistake of underestimatin’ me just because I have my habits writ large all over. Big don’t mean shit, if you ain’t prepared to either put one wherever’s handy and run, or put one in the head, and walk.”

  “Not sure that particular lesson’s going to come as easy as the rest did.”

  “Naw, you got the instinct, never fear. Anybody can learn gunplay, but the will to kill? That’s a whole other matter.” He examined her. “Then again, maybe it is that thing you got makes all the difference, after all. Like with me.”

  Yancey moistened her lips. “Uther . . .” she began, and swallowed. “He used to say talent was like a poker hand. No matter how good a draw you got, you still had to learn how to play it to make it mean anything.” She held up the gun. “This is yours, like it was forged with you in mind, and no other; I can feel the heft of it, all that time and skill and practice. And that you did all on your own, no matter what else you brought to the table.”

  Chess lifted that creepish-lit gaze of his, and fixed her with it. “How long you known what you are, gal?”

  Yancey let out a breath, remembering Mala—yet more hurt, older but somehow fresher, a pressed wound. “Most’ve my life, I reckon. Why?”

  “Know when I knew?” Without ceremony, Chess pulled his shirttails clear of his belted waist, showing where a scar wormed its way beneath his breastbone like some leprous smile, the whitish-pink of raw haddock. “When Ash Rook pulled my heart out through here and showed it to me, and I didn’t die.”

  “That’s when you knew for sure.”

  It was out of her mouth before she could think of calling it back, and Chess’s lips thinned at the taste of it. But they both knew it for truth.

  “Lesson’s over, for now,” he said, finally. “Have a drink with me.”

  “I don’t—”

  “You do today.”

  More absinthe, naturally. Chess pulled it from his pocket with a mountebank flourish, took a swig and held it out, clearly expecting Yancey to match him. With a sigh, she took a pull, then almost spit the result back out onto the glass a-sparkle at their feet.

  “My Lord,” she managed, choking down foul liquorice-moonshine dregs. “This is dreadful stuff! And you prefer it?”

  “Got to, eventually. ’Course, there ain’t all too many others ask after this particular swill. So that means whatever stock a place happens to have of it, it’s pretty much mine.”

  Yancey took a second shot and coughed, yet kept it down easier, this time; Chess grinned, like he relished the thought of changing her tastes. Perverse as a cat, she thought, knowing he’d pick up on it, and was rewarded by the grin becoming an outright chuckle.

  “Strategically thought out, on your part,” she said, at last.

  “So take another.”

  “Oh, I don’t want to deprive you.”

  “What of? I can always make more.”

  A near-unassailable argument, though Yancey suspected her faculties were already somewhat disordered. Above, the sun drew high and beat down bright, while wormwood’s mounting poison lent everything around her just the faintest rainbow tinge; “a lucid drunkenness,” some customer had once described the effect, when trying to sell her Pa on the idea of ordering a bottle or two. But given the difficulty of keeping its colour undecayed, not to mention the unlikelihood of cultivating a bohemian clientele in New Mexico’s wilds, he’d ultimately decided against it.

  In the distance, she saw a few of Joe’s regulars come wandering out to squint in the noontime heat, while others arrived on foot or by horse, glancing their way only briefly before recognizing Chess, and finding something elsewhere to stare at. A mixture of fear and embarrassment ’cross their faces made Yancey frown; the former she understood, and sympathized with. But the latter?

  “Might be they think I’m after what’s inside your pants,” Chess suggested, idly. “Or vice versa, which’d be even funnier.”

  “Little do they know.”

  “Ha! You got that right.”

  They both had a snicker, at the very idea. Yet when he looked at her again, she saw an ever-so-slight softening in his fierce stare—almost apologetic.

  “You know,” he said, “Ed might’ve misspoke somewhat, back in the Hoard. Bein’ raised up as whore-get means you don’t see nothing but women the first few years, and for all we’re made to follow after the same meat, I don’t despise your kind, as such—they just ain’t got much use for me, and I mostly return the favour.” He paused. “I did hate one woman, that’s true enough . . . but I loved her a good long time, ’fore I finally figured out she
hated me.”

  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 arra
nged 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 . . .”