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)

  Easier said than done, though, he suspected. Since this one’s faith was so pure it all but sparkled, even under these circumstances.

  “Ma’am,” he addressed her. “As you know, I knew the Sheriff briefly, in both his guises. Are you sure he’d really want you to risk your life, let alone his only son’s, by staying here?”

  She met his eyes straight on, without fear. “In the town my husband founded? Where else would I go, Mister Rook?”

  “Well . . . many places. There’s a seat left open amongst us, for example, for every outcast.” And here he indicated Berta, Clo and Eulie, just settling down behind him. “My intelligencers inform me you’re scorned, accorded not even half the respect you merit — but we’ve more women than men in our councils, Missus Love; hell, we’re ruled by a Lady, and a most powerful one. We’d grant you authority fitting your mettle.”

  “You’re ruled by a devil in woman’s shape, whose laws designate any without witchery in your city as no better than slaves . . . though even those with witchery seem like as not to wind up on her altar, sooner or later.” Switching her uncompromising glare to Fennig and the girls, she continued: “Those in Satan’s service meet only one end, however long it takes: They’re eaten by their master, body and soul. Are you sure you’re all far too useful ever to be made a meal of?”

  Clo’s eyes flashed. “Ye little limb!”

  Berta and Eulie, meanwhile, had turned their mutual attention on Catlin, who was scuttling backward with hands flung up, calling (predictably enough) on Leviticus, 20:27. Eulie gave a girlish laugh. “Cute, ain’t he, sissy? Like somethin’ off a band-box!”

  “A real wedding cake swell, all right — doll-faced little fake priest, playing at toy soldiers. But we’ve no time for diversions, do we?”

  “Just as well . . . for him.”

  Sophy blinked at Clo, just noticing her condition. “God Almighty in Heaven, you foolish girl, did you actually bring yourself out on a mission of war while great with child?” The surprised indignation in her voice was so sharp that Clo actually flushed, putting one hand over her bulging stomach as if to guard it, even as her temper touched up the higher; her hair lifted, lighting from inside, with greenish St. Elmo’s fire.

  “And what’s that there in your own arms, woman?” she snapped back. “Fine place for a mite like him, on the very line of battle!”

  “The Lord is my buckler, sorceress, just as He was for Mesach — Gabriel’s, as well.”

  “Oh yes? An’ it’s my man can see where best t’make that buckler crumple, he only cares to look for it; can’t ye, Hank Fennig? Well?”

  But Fennig, after staring Missus Love up and down, just shook his head. “Can’t see a thing, not where she’s concerned — there’s somethin’ in the way. Though as to whether it’s divine in origin . . .”

  “It is.”

  “. . . she’s covered. Looks like the ball’s back in your court, Reverend.”

  Sophy nodded. “If your business is with me in primary, then let be done, and go. You and yours are not welcome here.”

  “Unwelcome, in the very town of Bewelcome itself? Some might call that a hypocrisy, ma’am.” Folding his arms, Rook cocked his head to one side, “Tell me, though, for I’m curious . . . do your Mayor and your new Reverend — hell, anybody in this town, save those keeping silent out of loyalty — happen to know how you and the Sheriff weren’t actually married yet, as such, the first time somebody killed him?”

  Sophy Love coloured, furiously, and though Langobard — who’d finally managed to sit up — seemed too flummoxed to grasp anything of what he’d just heard, the little band-box preacher whipped ’round to shoot her an absurd glare, so offended it made Rook want to laugh.

  Face bright red but voice icy calm, the Widow wrapped her child — who seemed to register her agitation, his sobs skipping an upward key — yet closer, and replied: “We were bound in God’s eyes, as you well know, having seen inside of Mesach’s head. But perhaps such distinctions are lost on the faithless.”

  “Without doubt. But then again, God don’t really get a vote, come election time — you either, I’m guessin’. So . . .”

  From behind Rook, by that heap of splinters where the town hall’s threshold had once lain, a third voice intruded. “Whatever you’re ’bout to say next, Rev, I’m fairly sure Missus Love don’t want to hear it. And that’s why I’d step away from her, if I was you.”

  It was a deep voice gone somewhat flat with all too rational fear, yet steady as any soldier’s under fire, and Rook smiled to hear it.

  “Hello, Ed,” he said, turning to greet his former employee, who looked about the same, if wetter. Beard no longer neat-trimmed, his muttonchops bristled, almost reaching his duster’s collar; rain sprayed from shoulders and hat alike, while Rook and the others stayed bone dry, safe within their intersecting power-bubbles.

  “Heard you got reinstated,” Rook said. “Pinkerton see fit to forgive you your many sins?”

  “Probationally.”

  “Ah, yes. That do sound like the Law, don’t it? For they sometimes feign to forgive — but never forget.” Eyes homing in on the vague flash of grey barrel-metal, then, he asked, “Ain’t a gun you got there, though, is it? I only ask out of concern for your health, which prompts me to warn you how those don’t work too well, on me. Or could that be something the Professor over there dreamed up?”

  “It might.”

  “You don’t say! Tested it out, as yet?”

  Morrow swallowed, sights kept admirably steady on Rook’s midsection. “Nope. But I’m favouring trial by fire, right about now.”

  “Enough,” Sophy Love chose that same moment to interject, drawing herself up. “God alone knows my fate, Reverend. If this be my day and hour, then it will be His decision — not yours. And while you may have the power, you will never have right on your side, for that too is His to apportion.”

  “Little lady, what makes you think there is any right?”

  “If you truly believe that, sir, then strike me down this moment and do not hesitate; I fear no judgement. You?”

  Fennig’s brows raised. “Stargazer’s got sand, ain’t she?” he muttered to Rook, who merely shrugged; the quality of Missus Love’s courage had never been in question, at least for himself. Still, while her willingness to throw her own life away might have no limit, did that willingness extend equally to others’ lives? Like, for example —

  “Your day and hour, maybe,” Clo Killeen put in, unexpectedly completing the thought. “For a Jaysis-jabberer like yerself, I’m sure that’s of no moment. That boy of yours, though — ”

  — young Master Gabriel —

  “ — how would he feel about bein’ bargained away with only Heaven’s promise as a get-out, if he was old enough to know better?” As Sophy’s face whitened: “Don’t tell me you haven’t thought on it, woman.”

  “That’s none of your concern.” But Sophy’s free hand had clenched to a fist, and she turned her body in blind reflex, shielding Gabe as best she could. Clo grinned, as lightning flashed above with the rolling boom of field cannon.

  “All right, then, since logic doesn’t seem to appeal . . .” Rook raised his voice, through the thunder. “Look out there, Missus Love! See what’s comin’, and ask yourself if you wouldn’t rather remove you and Gabe from its path.”

  He flung out one long, black-clad arm. All heads swerved together, as though magnetized. And there on the horizon, just where the canyons gave out onto what had once been flood plain, Rook watched the clouds and rain alike twitch apart, one huge, liquid curtain. To reveal —

  — Ixchel, Lady of Traps and Snares, the Goddess of the Rope, suspended there between sky and earth like Juno enchained. Looking genuinely eerie in the storm’s shifting light, an icon shadowed with tarnish like gangrene, lambent skin slightly fallen in over the moon-sharp points of her black-spiralled cheekbones, her chin, the sunken orbits of her eyes. Somehow visible in clear detai
l to them all, despite rain and distance; as angels and saints were said to be, in legends. Yet not even the reaping angel of Egypt’s firstborn could seem so dark as this.

  The new preacher muffled a tiny squawking sound; Asbury’s jaw dropped and Langobard gaped. Sophy’s face slackened in the first thing resembling true fear Rook had ever seen from her. In her arms, Gabriel screamed on and on. Even Rook’s hexmates were silent — Fennig audibly swallowed, and Clo crossed herself in what must be sheer childhood habit, the gesture giving Rook a sudden pang. Only Morrow did not turn, though he tightened his eyes near to slits, as if fighting the pull with everything he had.

  “Did you really think,” Rook asked Sophy, “if I decided this job was big enough to come in on myself, that she wouldn’t come in on it with me?”

  “As I’d heard, was you she once trusted, to do her dirty work.”

  “Oh, that’s still true, in the main. But actually, it was her idea to pull Bewelcome back down, in the first place — let many waters quench Love, in literal as in figurative, and make a clean sweep. And in this, as in all things, we are her creatures.”

  “That’s nothing to boast on, Reverend.”

  “Ma’am, I don’t disagree.” Rook sighed, suddenly sick of this game. “You and I know that even such a deluge as this won’t end this town completely, not so long as its people have you to look to, for inspiration to rebuild — so I’ll make no more false offers concerning your life.” He willed more power into his shields until they blazed, looking to fend off whatever attack Morrow might mount in return. “Instead — surrender, let us end you clean here. I’ll guarantee young Gabriel grows up safe and sound. Swear it on my power itself, if you wish it — and there’s more happens when a hex breaks an oath than you know.” He extended his hands to either side; Fennig took one, Clo the other, their force-bubbles bleeding together into a single crackling halo, hissing with rain-steam. Behind Clo, Berta and Eulie put their hands on her shoulders, adding their strength to the moil.

  On the horizon, the raindrops around Ixchel turned to swarming dragonflies, their buzz rising up in a deadly drone even through the thunder; light rippled beneath her, horizon turning fluid. And below that, a rumbling, more felt than heard.

  Rook held Sophy’s gaze with his own. “Missus Love. Please.”

  If she’d reacted differently, Rook was to think later — turned to rage, broke in pleading for Gabriel’s life, or tried at the last to bargain or persuade — he might’ve acted faster. But Sophronia Love only cuddled her screaming baby close, stroking Gabriel’s head. Face calm with a serenity he had never known, she looked up over his head, dismissing Rook entirely.

  “The Lord is my shepherd,” she began, quietly, yet bell-clear. “I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me — ”

  “Stop it!” It was Clo shouting, angrier than Rook had ever heard her; startled, he felt the sudden nauseous shift of power through his gut as her fury wrenched control of the conjoined hexation away. “Shut your hole, ye Protestant hoor! Shut it!”

  “ — beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: He leadeth me in the path of righteousness for His name’s sake — ”

  Above the prayer, Clo screamed on. “I’ll have your tongue out by the roots, yeh rotten mab!” The power spit and flared, sliding out of Rook’s grip entirely, as Fennig, Berta and Eulie all shouted unheard pleas. “I’ll wear your guts for garters! Stop that!”

  “ — though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me; Thy rod and they staff, they comfort me — ”

  Clo drew back her hand, then flung everything all five hexes had gathered at Sophy Love in a single roaring blast — but in the instant before it struck, light burst outward from Sophy’s arms, enveloped her and vanished into nothing, taking her with it. The fire blew through the empty stage, sending Langobard sprawling and the preacher diving to either side, leaving only a broken pile of smoking planks in its wake — but nothing of either mother or child. Clo’s scream took on a new note of cheated indignation.

  Rook had enough time to think, I . . . didn’t do that! before three thunderous cracks of shotgun shells shattered the Irish gal’s howling. Lulled by the same automatic disdain for gunfire they’d all learned long since, he turned to slap Morrow down, just a hair too slow — and saw Fennig twist away, narrowly avoiding death as his specs blew off his face in a burst of wire and smoked-glass shards. A second shot whined past Rook’s ear like a hornet. He felt the third shot before he heard it, first punching straight through his own shields, then in a searing slice across his shoulder.

  A skirling shriek cut through his brain: distant Ixchel, sharing his pain through their bond, blind with the hot hate Rook himself was too stunned to feel. Instead, he flung the crudest hex possible in Morrow’s direction, sending chairs and benches scattering, but Ed hurled himself backward, out into the rain and the dark. A buzzing surge of amazed, shocked delight caught from Asbury, of all people, washed over Rook at the same moment, resolving spark-fast to some sort of psychic memory echo, perhaps from Morrow’s experiences in Tampico.

  As any wire of iron or steel grounds the galvanic energies of lightning, or similar phenomena, so a certain alloy of silver, iron, and sodium in its metallic form serves to ground magical energies where they manifest, conducting them away to discharge harmlessly. . . .

  Flipping, magic-lantern-like, to another image: Asbury on the war-bought train depot platform earlier that day, handing Morrow a small box of gleaming shells. These are experimental, Agent, too expensive as yet for mass production. But they should pierce any conjured barrier, though the side effects of disrupting particularly powerful castings may be somewhat . . . unpredictable. . . .

  Meanwhile, he saw that Ixchel had already let loose the flood, sending waters pouring down the valley and racing across the plains. Rook heard screams rise up from the townsfolk outside, frozen where they stood while doom came thundering down upon them, and felt Ixchel’s rage like his own, inhumanly ancient, monstrously deep.

  Remove yourself, little kings and queens, for this city ends now — now that they have dared to thwart My wishes, to strike at My high priest.

  Not a moment’s concern in that sending, though — no care for him, for Fennig or the girls, for how close they had all come to death. As Berta went to support Hank while Eulie staggered under Clo’s weight, pulling her back from the stage, Ixchel stayed safe inside her vortex, not reaching out even a tendril to pluck them from harm’s way. Simply trusting they would save themselves, or deserve their own deaths.

  Join me in the heavens, therefore, to watch our vengeance.

  Rook fought down the pain with a groan and flung out his power to seize all the others at once, hauling them up into the sky: ten yards, twenty, thirty. High over Bewelcome’s rebuilt steeple, the five hexes clung to one another, watching the massive torrent boil and roar toward the town, and then splash upward, slamming into a barrier that ripped out of the earth on all sides in a single thick wall of hot-pulsing life like a vast bank of flayed muscle encircling Bewelcome, guarding it. More great slabs of the stuff — the Red Weed, Rook realized — slapped upward like giants’ hands, sending massive gouts of water into the sky to arc over the town, spraying wide and harmlessly. And in the town square beneath, another crack of lightning revealed a figure Rook knew had not stood there a scant second before, a figure he could barely see and yet knew in an instant, without needing to: small, slim, hair fire-touched in the hissing light as it looked up, grinning.

  Chess —

  “REV, LOOK OUT!”

  Fennig’s yell came too late — a huge surge of water had already struck the group, knocked them all spinning sideways, snapped apart. Rook saw poor Clo slam heavy into the church’s steeple, breaking bones and wooden beams alike, even as instinct told him to break his fall by grabbing at the air itself. He hit the town square’s mud in a roll, breath knocked from him with a thud, and lay sti
ll a moment, fighting for his wind. Then rolled over with a grunt of effort to find Fennig kneeling by him, face oddly young and naked without his specs.

  “Henry! You harmed?” At Fennig’s headshake: “Then what in God’s name happened? Was it you smote the Widow, before Clodagh could?”

  “Not me and none of us, ’cause wherever she’s gone, she ain’t been harmed — I’d’a seen, she was!” Grabbing Rook’s shoulders, the younger man leaned in close: “That boy of hers, though — I saw him flash as it happened, like bottle lightning.”

  “Meaning?”

  “He’s a hex.”

  Jesus! That young? Could it even happen? Well, Clo’s belly shot out sparks whenever she got going. . . .

  But here solid, squelching footsteps broke Rook’s daze as Morrow strode to them, shotgun levelled. Certain now of its efficacy, his eyes were steel-hard. “Rev, Mister Fennig — stand down, if you please.”

  Rook looked round. From the wrecked main hall, the young minister — Catlin, his name was, Rook now recalled hearing — and Asbury had emerged with Langobard balanced between ’em, that New York fop with his notepad right behind, still scribbling. Catlin had purloined the mayor’s Manifold, which was chattering in his hand, frenzied by the hexation hanging thick in the air. Around them, blue-coated soldiers had materialized, all of them Negroes; their guns were levelled too, though Rook felt confident only Morrow bore a weapon of any import. One of the soldiers might’ve been that same young man he’d seen fleeing at Morrow’s side, just before they’d ripped the hall’s roof off. Beside him, a taller officer wore the epaulettes and stripes of a Union captain: Washford, Rook remembered from the intelligencers, Isaiah Washford.

  The young soldier whistled, admiring Morrow’s work. “Like to get me one of those shells, sir, you got any spares goin’ beggin’.”

  “You’ll have to talk to Doc Asbury ’bout that, Private Carver,” said Morrow.

  Gathering what dignity he could, Rook slowly regained his feet. “Gentlemen,” he said, in his deepest voice, “the Professor’s devices notwithstanding, you still cannot hope to resist my Ladyship’s power. . . .”