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)

  Oh, and everything really was going now, eaten ’round the edges like a rag on fire—fast, fast. So Goddamn unremitting.

  It amazed Chess how he’d really believed, almost all along, that there was nothing he’d miss, leaving this world. Only the whole of it, you ass-stupid fool.

  Every bit, the living and the dead, and then some; hot sun on his back, the wind and the rain, full-out galloping into battle, feel of his guns in hand, a good hard fuck. Getting drunk—on absinthe, anger, blood. Stomping twice on some enemy’s face for good measure, and laughing while he did it; the sound of Asher Rook’s voice preaching, or Yancey’s, singing. Ed’s heartbeat under his cheek.

  Old Kees Hosteen ribbing him ’round the campfire, taking slaps just to stay close, and never faulting him for it. Just the way you are, and we all know that, Chess. God damn, you’re a mean little man.

  Friends.

  More than one by the end of it, yeah, and not all of ’em paid for in blood, or favours. Whoever would’ve seen that comin’, back in his San Fran gutter days?

  Ed’s face again, a-swim in the gathering darkness, struggling against his captors—was that raw pain on it for Chess, or because of him? He hadn’t ever looked to see anybody mourn over him, dead or alive. Hadn’t ever looked to care if they did, or didn’t.

  Yancey’d been snatched up too, now—pinned at the wrist by one man, the waist by another, grimly wrestling with a third over her firearm. Love’s woman swayed, mouth an open black wound in a pink-and-white mask, while that brat of hers screamed on. Between them, the long-limbed collapse of Sheriff Love had finally resolved itself into a heap of fresh meat, his zealot’s eyes gone blank and cooling, rolled to the sky. No one seemed to be paying all that great a mind to it anymore, considering; far more intent on Yancey, who they looked like they were fixing to rip apart, for having connived his doom.

  Which maybe explained why none of ’em paid any mind to the greasy blackness Chess saw—felt?—boil off Love’s flesh, seeping out through his gaping mouth, his nose, his ears, the very pores of his skin. The Enemy, shucking its busted-up cat’s-paw like a popped butterfly-bag and eddying Chess’s way once more, wrapping itself ’round him coil by loving coil ’til it was close enough to whisper through his skull, like it was a broken bone flute.

  My sister spoke truthfully. You are at the very end of your cycle—a sacrifice once more, bringing life out of the dead land but saving none for yourself. Your wound is one you cannot hope to heal.

  Noticed that, yeah, thanks.

  Yet I can save you, still. If you accept my help.

  Chess almost tried to laugh, but thought better on it. Oh, sure. ’Cause trustin’ some fucker offers you your life at the Reaper’s doorstep always works out so well.

  Do you want to die, pelirrojo?

  And now the laugh did bloom, painful-pleasurable as he’d expected—a firework bubble of spite crowding the rest out, if only for a mere half-second before it popped, spraying his insides with paraffin.

  Ask you that myself, he barely managed, ’f I only could.

  I know you would, little brother. Ah, how I do like you for it!

  So you’ve said, Chess said—all his anger suddenly gone flat again, exhausted by every last part of this yammer. Too tired even to turn away, assuming his abused body would’ve allowed it.

  The Enemy looked down on him, hole-eyes barely narrowed in a dust-black face—a death’s head reversed, if you could say that of someone who’d never died, or been born at all.

  Were this world once more the way she wishes, it told Chess, with a nod in still-hidden and time-locked Ixchel’s direction, no one like you would be allowed anywhere near my ixiptla. They gave me princes—youths raised to love me since birth, cultured, educated. Kings-to-be who yearned to die in my place, to have everything I gave them stripped away in an instant of awful ecstasy. To be shucked like corn, a red pain-flower, and rolled down the temple steps afterwards, one more corpse on a pile.

  They were idjits, then. Got what they deserved.

  Another nod. “Heretic!” they would have cried, and fought each other to the death to kill you for saying so. But I . . . find I somewhat agree.

  Chess felt the Enemy wrap him close, lift him up, effortless. Those vast no-eyes peering further into him, unblinking, ’til their empty expanse was all he had left to see.

  Now answer me, truly, before the end. Do you want what I offer?

  . . . depends . . .

  On what, little brother?

  Though he didn’t in any way need to, Chess made himself take a long, ragged breath. Not enough blood left in him to fill his mouth completely, but he felt it slick his dry tongue, leak to paint his lips ’til they matched his beard.

  And replied, out loud, his throat grating each word like it was rock-pile dust, “. . . can yuh gih me . . . my ’venge?”

  On who?

  With his very last bit of vim, Chess rolled his eyes ’til they all but crossed, snarling (inside his head): Your bitch “sister,” numbskull, and that snake she calls husband. Who the hell’d you think I meant? Wasn’t but halfway through the first sentence, though, ’fore he heard the Enemy chuckling again, as though he’d just made the second-best joke in all creation—which made him long to paste it one, and it laugh all the harder.

  That don’t bode well, he knew, mist deepening ’round him. Finding he could barely remember anymore what those words meant each on their own, let alone when run together.

  so do it then, Jesus, do it do it, while I’m still

  the end, this is it, no more

  going, going

  go

  Oh, yes, something said, at last, as he plunged downward, fingers straining helpless toward an infinitely retreating bottom he feared almost worse than death itself to reach. It would be my pleasure.

  Another pulse hit, bright blue this time: turquoise, robin’s egg, faience glass, bell-sounding water crashing on a white cliff’s brake. Trip-hammer hard. Ball-lightning bright.

  The hairs on Chess’s body seemed to crisp at its touch, skin flushing azure from head to toe; his eyes flooded with a black so deep everywhere he looked was midnight, while the creatures gathered ’round him lit up from within, instantly rendered messy clots of flashing bones and circulatory systems redone in yellow, green, bright pulsing red, faces shrunk to featureless blanks, indistinguishable absences. Each one of them perfectly substitutable for every other one, with no distinction made except as to their relative strength or weakness, the ease or difficulty with which they might be singled out, struck down, torn apart.

  Brother, wake. Brother, I call you forth.

  You who were the New Corn, now completed.

  You who were Red, now made Blue.

  You who are Lightning’s son, who sets One against Another.

  Adorned with Hummingbirds, fashioned from Amaranth.

  You who will Lead the Charge.

  A smoke-finger pressed down on either lid, heavy as corpse-coins. The Enemy’s breath hot and foul against his face, a slaughterhouse baptism.

  You who I name . . . Huitzilopochtli.

  His province is war, grandson.

  Bright, blinding: Chess coughed it out, but more welled up, shrinking what he’d always known as himself to a point, a speck, a tiny, vanishing seed. Something so small, it could only be made to be swallowed.

  Don’t I ever get to be myself again? he wondered, despairing.

  Teeth chattering in his mouth, abruptly sharp-filed as Ixchel’s own—but not green, not jade-flaked, he somehow knew. Black glass, a flock of itzapapalotl-wings flapped in unison, volcano-hardened, sharp enough to bite through sin.

  Sharp enough to tear a whole city’s throat out, however hexacious.

  The Enemy smiled back at him, its own teeth equal-razored. Told him, gently: Slee
p, little king. Your part is done; I will speak for both of us, from now on. Rest well, in the deep places, ’til I call you forth again.

  No way to fight it, not this far along. Nothing left to fight with—it’d seen to that, Goddamnit. But Chess tried anyhow, like it’d known he would.

  “You said . . .” he got out, as his lips went numb, “yuh . . . didn’t care enough ’bout what she was plannin’ . . . to try ’n’ stop it.”

  Mmm, even so.

  Black and blue, lids stroked closed, the ground opening up, swallowing him down. Crushing him, and everything around him, silent.

  All but the Enemy’s voice one last time, licking at his inner ear: Yet as you yourself have said . . . I lie. The same as every other god.

  And worse.

  Came a point, and quickly, when Ed Morrow just couldn’t fight his way any further toward what he suspected might be Chess’s body—too many Bewelcomers in between, jockeying to show the all-too-recent Widow Love they had her best interests at heart.

  “Surrender your weapons!” one of ’em howled at Yancey, close enough to sluice a bit of Sheriff Love’s bright blood-spray off her cheek with his spit, where she stood holding a double-draw stance on what had to be fifty or more opponents. “C’mon, woman—we’ll make it quick! Can’t expect to just stroll into town, shoot down the man founded it and stroll on out the other”

  “You shut your mouth!” she threw back, voice froze near to cracking. “A year or more you’ve been salt—maybe things ain’t all they seem, ever think of that? He knew what he’d done, and said so!”

  Another shout, bristling with insult on the dead’s behalf. “Sheriff Love was a great man, you outlaw harlot—a man of God! ’Spect us t’believe that could ever change?”

  “Why should I care what-all you think?”

  “Because you claim to be a widow, wife to a murdered man, like me . . . and if the one means something, so should the other. Don’t you think?”

  Sophy Love stood there, dry eyes riveted to Yancey’s face. Hugging her boy to her with both arms as he fretted and wept, and gone so white-to-the-lips pale herself, she might as well have been rendered salt again.

  “A pity we can’t ask him to confirm your tale, though, ma’am,” she pointed out. “Seeing how you were the only one close enough to hear this . . . confession of his, beforehand.”

  Yancey swung a muzzle toward Missus Love’s face. “You calling me a liar?”

  “I don’t know what to call you, frankly.”

  Yancey shrugged, looking far more Chess-like than Morrow’d hitherto given her credit for. “Good enough,” she said. “No need for us to be friends; my business here’s done. So you’d best get out of my way, for I will keep on shooting—didn’t come all this distance to swing on any tree but the one outside my father’s hotel, if I aim to swing at all.”

  “You may not have much choice in the matter,” Sophy Love replied. To which Yancey gave a singularly bitter laugh.

  “I’ll put a ball in my head myself, ma’am, it comes to that,” she assured her.

  Morrow didn’t know if he believed her, yet suspected Missus Love did—and he’d lost what little liking he’d ever had for taking chances. But he’d been seized far too securely to interfere. Even the panic thudding through his heart was lead-heavy with exhaustion, and with Chess gone, there was nowhere to turn for a hexacious escape, either.

  So he closed his eyes, took the deepest breath he could, and howled his former boss’s name as loud as he had left in him: “Mister Pinkerton!”

  It was strong enough to quell much of the noise, though it left Morrow gasping, and the rest of the outcry died away into mutters of confusion as Pinkerton sauntered up. In his wake came Asbury, surprisingly hesitant, while Songbird sat motionless where she’d fallen, not even bothering to lift her parasol. Beneath her unbound white mane, her porcelain face had already begun to redden.

  For all his comparative undress, Pinkerton bore himself like a king, and Morrow recognized the aura radiating off him—whether born of his ordeal like other hexes, or stolen via Asbury’s science, Pinkerton’s hexation was beyond denying now. He made him a genial nod, then folded his arms, in such a way as to brook no opposition.

  “Wi’ the Sheriff dead,” he asked, “who speaks for this township?”

  More or less as one, the crowd’s eyes turned to Sophy. “Sophronia Love, sir,” she said. “And you, of course, would be Allan Pinkerton, of the renowned Detective Agency.”

  “Charged with keeping law,” Morrow interjected, “in those parts where civilization has not yet grown to custom. Law, and justice—a proper court, and a proper trial, and an advocate. To speak for the accused.”

  Pinkerton’s mouth twitched. “And am I right tae guess who ye’d have in mind to speak for, Edward?” He looked back to the crowd, taking in Yancey and her guns, Love’s and Chess’s fallen bodies. To Sophy, with some regret: “Missus Love, though I well ken ye’ve no taste tae hear this, it must be said. Yuir husband was . . . no’ undeserving of his fate.”

  “No, I don’t believe that. My Mesach was a good man—a kind man—”

  “The kindest turn most brutal, given a sufficiency of suffering.” Pinkerton glanced at Chess’s body, lying in its massive, drying bloodstain. “God knows Pargeter dealt out pain wi’ a free hand, before and after turning hex. By reports, yuir husband caught up to him in this young lady’s home town—” he nodded at Yancey, who didn’t move, “—and left quite the field of desolation in their wake. Making her actions, in return, wild justice . . . but justice, naetheless.”

  The crowd was silent. Yancey stared at Pinkerton. Morrow held his breath.

  Pinkerton shrugged, continuing: “Yet . . . tae deal such opens one tae receive it, also, and she’s more than old enough to answer for her own deeds.” He turned to Morrow, spread out his hands, mimicking Pontius Pilate’s classic gesture. “She’s a guid enow lass I’m sure, Edward, but she’s nane of mine.”

  “And that’s the end of it? Walk away, leave us both to swing—?”

  “Oh, I said nought of leaving you here, Ed.” Back to the Bewelcomers, voice battle-captain loud: “This man is mine—and though his crimes require no less judgement, I claim that privilege for myself, as his employer and commander. Does any here dispute me?” The question was bland enough, but Pinkerton lifted one hand as he spoke, allowing it to flicker with bluish-green were-light—cold and searing—which stilled any further protest. “Then I ask ye to release him to my custody.”

  “I won’t be threatened in my own home, sir,” Sophy Love replied, admirably uncowed. “Especially not by a man who claims to represent these United States’ government, while at the same time wielding Satan’s might.”

  “As ye say, madam. It’s I who’s the law’s due representative, even here. While ye’re but a lawman’s widow—new-made, tae be sure, and tragically. But without any real power, except what public sympathy may deed ye—temporal, or otherwise.”

  Another flash, no doubt designed to punctuate his argument. Instead, it sent whispers spreading throughout the crowd behind her, equally mutinous: Pinkerton’s a hex? When’d that happen? Are we t’be plagued with these creatures forever?

  Sheriff would’ve seen to it we wasn’t, he hadn’t been cut down, by her over there. Which makes him just as guilty, that other Pinkerton man, for bringin’ her here in the first place.

  Morrow looked to Asbury, desperate for any further aid, but the old man only shook his head; his will was broken, at least momentarily. Back to Yancey, whose frozen fury had finally begun to melt, revealing fear beneath; no immediate solution there, either. Begging might not help, but it was all he had left—and for her sake, he was not too proud to do it.

  “Mister Pinkerton,” he began, “please. Missus Kloves doesn’t deserve—”

  “There’s blood on her hands, Ed
; the price is clear.” Pinkerton came closer, lowering his voice. “Now, if you dinnae wish tae swing alongside her, you’ll come right quick, wi’ nae more struggle.” But here a frown knit his brow; he straightened, turning, toward something only he could see. “And what in hell’s own name might this be?”

  Morrow felt the rumble before he heard it, and looked up—just as, on the far side of the open square, the air ripped apart like a torn silk scrim to expel a cold, wet gust of wind, a sodden northern night-storm’s air. With a yodel of alien song, a whole platoon of copper-coloured riders poured through the black gash—arms presented, arrows nocked, with an immodestly open-vested Apache shamaness at their head.

  Yiska.

  Some woman—not Missus Love—cried out from the crowd’s backside, like she was seeing the Last Days ’emselves dawn bloody, red skies and all: “Savages? Oh great God Almighty, what next?”

  A fair enough question, Morrow recognized, though he knew himself sadly inoculated against the miraculous these days, whatever stripe it was.

  Yiska reined in her horse with a yip and a flourish, almost at Pinkerton’s feet; he stared up at her, arms pugnaciously re-crossed. Even to the uninformed eye, they certainly seemed to know each other.

  “‘The Night Has Passed,’ is it?” Pinkerton said. “Bad day in a bad few years tae go raiding, I’d think—and a damn strange place tae target, too. Unless ye knew somethin’ we nane of the rest of us did, in advance.”

  Yiska shrugged. “Only that when two gods fistfight, things are not often left the same, in their wake.” Her eyes narrowed, appreciatively. “But then, you are not quite what you were either, are you—you who I last saw in the second Naahondzood, the Fearing Time, after we helped win that War of yours for you, only to be driven from our homes like cattle.”

  “Ye’ve come back since then, I see—gathering in force, armed tae the teeth, as the Indian Act forbids.”

  “I see no Agents here but yours, bilagaana. And you are but a hex new-made, if that.” She sniffed, then wrinkled her nose. “Ah, chah! Not even. A sham Hataalii, stuffed with stolen might. I am more fit to wield it than you, fool.”