The Hexslinger Omnibus
Page 91
“Christ on churches.” Oona tipped her head back, looking higher and higher, clearly seeing nothing. “We ’ave t’climb that?”
“We’re hexes, woman; sure we can figure out some other means of locomotivating, we have to.” Grinning, Chess looked to Hosteen. “You comin’ too?”
Hosteen swallowed. “You know where that’s goin’?”
“Not a clue. But I’m willin’ to bet you don’t want to stay here, any more’n we do.”
“Ain’t a question of ‘want’, so far as I can see. One way or t’other, though . . .” Carefully, Hosteen clambered down, dusting himself off. “I’m pretty sure this is far as I go.” At Chess’s double-take, he shrugged, almost sadly. “Got some time left yet t’do, Chess, and I know it. Like the Sheriff said.”
“Aw, shit — ” Covering up something he didn’t want to think on too closely with anger, as ever, Chess jumped down. “Don’t act like you believe some God-botherer’s gasbagging now! I’ve seen the shit waits back down there. You ain’t a bad enough man to deserve that.”
“Wasn’t that good a man, either.” Hosteen glanced back to the head of the trail they’d just climbed. “I got blood and suffering on my hands too, you know. We all did. Any of us try to stop the Rev ’n’ you, at Bewelcome? Did we say, ‘No more!’ afterward, or walk away?” He shook his own head, slowly. “In the end, we all gotta answer for what we done, no matter how much we might’ve thought we had t’do it, or didn’t want to — ’specially if we went on ahead and did it, anyways.”
Chess wanted to punch something — Hosteen, the wall between worlds, he didn’t know, as he somehow knew the older man could tell. But Hosteen regarded him still, unflinching.
“I shouldn’t have . . . treated you the way I did,” Chess said, at last. “You know. Triflin’ with your affections, and suchlike.”
Hosteen laughed. “Hell, I never minded too much! You were . . . precious to me, Chess Pargeter. More’n you know.”
“If that’s the best you had, Kees, then I’m sorry.”
Hosteen shrugged once more. “I ain’t.”
Gently, he took Chess by the right hand, shaping its fingers ’round Oona’s startled wrist before hoving in for a kiss, brief yet firm, smack dab on Chess’s surprise-slack lips. His breath still tasted of tobacco, though Chess could only assume he hadn’t smoked any since before his death. Funny how things clung, down here.
“You go on, the two of you,” was all Hosteen said, his gravelly voice rougher than usual — and pushed them lightly on, “forward” becoming up, the invisible column above flowering iris-bright into a wormy, vertical tunnel, close as any closet. A current took hold, breaking Hosteen’s grip; Oona gasped, hugging on monkey-tight, as the two of them lifted off.
So fast: a mere heartbeat, half a pulse more, and he couldn’t even see Hosteen walk away. Something fiddled beneath his ribs, sharp and new, a painful poke.
“Seems there’s a point t’givin’ it away, after all,” Oona said, shakily, into Chess’s throat.
“Seems like. Maybe you should’a tried it, every once in a while.”
A sudden, vertiginous rush, stomachs roiling, and their feet touched down once more; tunnel became path, similarly narrow, canted so steeply upward they had to half-climb, half-crawl. Oona disengaged, then started to slip, almost immediately — Chess scrambled backward, feeling for her hand again, and grabbed on hard, it being well dark enough no one else could catch him doing it.
“Don’t let go!” she squeaked, breathless.
“I don’t aim to,” he said. And set his feet to the path once more, the long and windy way toward . . . who damn well knew?
Good God, it seemed to drag on forever. Places, the “ceiling” and “floor” alike drew so close together they could barely move, except at the most painfully slow of paces — they wriggled like worms, chasing echoes. At first, these were simply a figure of speech, but as the journey wore on, they became more concrete: whispers yet too high to interpret, flittering like bats. Women’s voices, Chess had no doubt.
Yancey?
There was something lonesome in all-but-knowing himself the last man left standing in his own entire world, misbegotten as he’d always been made to feel. Looking back, young Missus Yancey Kloves was the sole female he’d ever had much in common with, after a point — that same point when cute tyke became scrawny, redheaded bastard, with a later side dish of thief, thug, rowster and (of course) You Goddamned Preening Queerboy.
Babies die, Mister Pargeter. She wanted you dead, you would be.
Gal, you didn’t know her, for which you should give thanks. . . .
But Chess hadn’t either — not really. Simply well enough to imagine her capable of better, having seen her dole out a rough parody of such to any damn jack had the fawney, all the while wondering why none of that act (however ripe its falsity) could ever come his way, apparently. Why he didn’t rate the lie’s effort, not even if he’d been able to pay for it.
Oh, she’d pet me some when she was drunk enough, but otherwise . . . like I wasn’t even there.
In the darkness, with what illusion of air they shared running thin, Chess found it increasingly hard to distinguish the bright, sharp young hex-to-be Oona he’d come to know since Seven Dials — a fair companion with more points of similarity than difference, her hair-trigger temper matching his own, albeit backed up with fists and whatnot rather than guns — from her past or future self, the greasy-haired harridan whose bony fists and poison tongue had crushed his childhood flat. And that old rage welled up acid, a carrion meal’s afterbirth, to scald his stomach lining, fill his lungs with spume he longed to vomit.
Her hand twisted in his, nails digging deep, and he had to force down an urge to kick her where it counted ’til she blacked out — to slam her face-first in the dust and grind, ’til her fine new skin was grit-torn and seeping. Leave her behind, lost and lorn without recourse in an awful, empty universe, and see how she liked that.
Her voice in one ear, hoarse to grating, at exactly the worst time. “You don’t ’ear that?”
“What?”
“Same bitch as before, I’ll lay odds, frowin’ more lines down like fish’ooks. Be nice if she could manage a bloody light, though, wouldn’t it? Some sort’a trail, so’s we didn’t ’ave to nose ’round in the dark like bloody meal-worms.”
Again, Chess’s anger sparked, a well-worn flint struck along its deep-grooved edge. “We ain’t privy to all that’s happening, up there — might be she has her reasons. Might be she’s working just as hard as us, for even less reward.”
Oona snorted. “I knew doss-’ouse cows could knock what was lost outta a petitioner’s own pocket, you asked ’em, so long as silver was involved. ’Oo is this ‘Yancey’ of yours, any’ow? What’s ’er claim t’fame, exactly?”
“Dead-speaker, Goddamnit. You never did listen.”
“I’m the only one can listen, sonny boy, ’cause for all your made-a-god airs, you still ain’t worth nothin’ for nothin’ don’t involve suckin’ cock or shootin’ other fools full’a ’oles. Tits on a bull, that’s what you are — what you’ll always be, now an’ forever more, world wivout end. ’Specially so if you can’t rouse yourself to bloody break us free of this damn place.”
“You shut your trap, you whore from Hell! I got more hexation in the tip of my faggot dick than you ever would’ve had if you lived to be a hundred-friggin’-ten, Columcille or no — ”
But here the skirling whine of that voice — voices? — came swooping back around ’em yet again, interrupting, so painful-molten pitched he could almost see the angles it carved into the darkness. And all at once, Chess knew what Oona’s plan was, if you could dignify it thus; the last act of a desperate woman in equally desperate straits, determined at least one of them should emerge from this choke-hold where they’d fetched up, only to lodge like they were caught in Time’s own craw.
“Hell, you’re tryin’ to goad me, ain’t ya? L
ike always. Get me riled enough to dump you here, thinking that’ll make me kick my own ass up through however long’s left to go. But . . . what happens to you then, Oona? Where do you end up, after I’m gone?”
And why should I care? Except how, stupidly — fucking moronically, to be exact —
He did, still. Same way as he always had.
Aw, fuck me.
A breath, through ragged teeth. His mother’s ghost slumped to rest her forehead ’gainst his shirt, where her cold mouth made a small, wet imprint, about the size of a broke half-dollar.
“It workin’?” she asked, eventually, without much hope.
“Not as such.”
She lay still there a moment, dead weight, like she was gathering her strength. And when she spoke again, a note rung in her voice he never remembered being there before — almost . . . maternal, he had to put a name to it.
“You gotta give me up, Chess. To move on.”
“I don’t ‘gotta’ do any damn thing I don’t want to — you of all people should know that, by now.”
“Then make yourself want to, you great git. ’Cause it’s ’ow it’s gotta be.”
Chess hissed. “Says who?”
“Your Missus Kloves, is ’oo. Been sayin’ it these last hours, or ’owever long, for all I knew you couldn’t make it out. And all I didn’t want to.”
“Aw, that’s horseshit. We bulled our way past enough of this crap together before — just have to push harder, is all. Don’t let it divide and conquer. Ain’t come all this Goddamn way dragging your dead ass behind me just to give up now, Goddamnit — ”
“It ain’t givin’ up. It ain’t. You just . . . Jesus! Why you always gotta be so bloody difficult?”
“Look who’s talkin’.”
Wanted to turn, so they could at least play at being able to see each other, but the rock wouldn’t let him; all these tonnes of earth, these stones and dead things, these endless years of debris and garbage, pressing down unflinching ’til he felt his not-skin bruise, his not-bones bend and start to crack.
It’ll squash me flat, is what it’ll do, like a wheel-popped roadside toad. Christ, will there ever be an end to this, to us? Or is where we’ve gotten ourselves to yet more of Hell again, over and over, writ meaner and smaller every time?
Seemed like Oona felt it too, for she could barely draw a full breath before managing, her words thin: “That girl in New York, Mina Whittaker’s ’er name . . . ’eard ’e give ’er a son too, before she did for ’im. Mose Whittaker, the Widowmaker’s get. ’E’d be your brother, I s’pose, by ’alf measures at least.”
“Why’d you tell me that?”
“Fought you might want to know. For after.” Another strangled gasp. “Why . . . bloody . . . not?”
Sure. So now’s when you let it slip, right when it won’t net you anything to hold it back.
The scar along his jawline crawled as though it was on fire, tracing the path of her yen hock; he could almost remember the look in her eyes when she’d done it, lashing out like a one-clawed cat, trapped into one more move to make him change or run or both, anything but stay and die in that sty she knew would be her tomb. The tears he’d thought drug-addled rheum shone on her cheeks, colour feverish-high already: the germ ripening in her every cough, long before blood began to flow.
Best I could do for you, so I done it — I ain’t proud. And don’t tell me you wasn’t glad enough to ’ave good reason to ’ate me, in the end.
“Guess I did ruin your life, in a way,” he said, slowly, into a mouthful of dirt. “Though I still don’t think you had t’let me.”
“Fanks, ever so. What sort of apology d’you call that, then?”
“Better’n you rate, taken all in all. ’Less you disagree.”
“No point to it. Is there?”
Not really, no.
Chess reached back, pinched arm straining ’til he thought it might crack its socket, and felt for what he hoped were her fingers. Nothing seemed where he’d left it; the tunnel might’ve been a hand’s-width or a straw’s span, some sort of hexacious illusion snaring them like tar while the walls stretched stars-high on either side. Was there even a floor?
Nail touched nail, the barest scratch of horn. Followed by something soft on the pad of his index . . . lips?
Don’t do this to me, old woman.
Still, it rallied him, at least. With his last shred of effort, he ground out, before heaviness forced his mouth shut: “Ain’t all that much forgiveness in me — you made sure of that. But what there is, you got. Now . . .”
. . . time to get off my damn back, for good and all. Go where you’re goin’. Stay there.
“Oona Pargeter, I dismiss you,” he said. And shut his eyes.
She fell away behind him — tore a patch from him with her passing, hole linked to hole, momentarily open enough to let the dark on either side shine through. But he had no time to allow himself regret.
Chess came up punching, as if through a membrane, a bag, the same too-small, fetid and unspeakably hot channel which once let him loose on the world. Another audible snap, like bones baked in a fire — and then finally, finally —
— he was over that last stile, up through the world’s crust, out at last. Crouched panting under a roiling marine sky, at the base of what he vaguely knew to be one of that old squaw Grandma’s sacred places. A circle of people stood arrayed ’round him, to almost every quarter. Grandma herself in her bone-dust reliquary; that war-painted he-she Yiska, The Night Has Passed, with horse-jaw tomahawk upraised in one fist and that crimson-clad bitch-witch Songbird’s pallid hand held gentle in the other. A scattering of men as well, withdrawn to a respectful distance, their bows held ready.
Beneath his feet, as he rose, something shifted unsteadily; he glanced down, just to confirm what it was — a crevasse big enough to thrust your hand into, cracked on either side like salt-stung dead man’s lips — before cutting a hasty two-step and scrambling alongside, to much firmer ground.
“Mister Pargeter,” a familiar voice cut in, from behind him, “welcome. Been waiting on you quite some time now — mighty glad to see you could accommodate, eventually, considering how hard it was to send you down directions.”
Chess turned, braced for the sight of her already: small and slim, her dark hair braided in two long ropes ties with beaded leather, Injun-style. She wore almost the same rig he’d made for her out of her wedding-dress, save for those skin slippers she must’ve gotten raiding Yiska’s wardrobe. Looked a bit more sunburnt, a tad older . . .
but hell, that was all right.
She’s alive, that’s the important part — not drilled through the head by Mesach Love’s woman, or swung like I thought she might be. And that’s halfway more’n I can say, even now.
Speaking of whom, now: Christ, if that wasn’t not-exactly-Missus Love herself standing back yet further, on Yancey’s left hand. And holding that boy of hers in her arms as well, with hex-light spilling up from his forehead in a new-grown war bonnet, a guttering twenty-candle crown.
Biggest damn hen party he’d attended since leaving ’Frisco, one way or the other . . . and looking at Yancey Kloves, all Chess could think of to tell her was that he’d never in all his life seen anyone he was more glad to meet up with, Rook included.
But still, when he opened his mouth, the very first thing which fell out was — instead —
“. . . where’s Ed?”
BOOK THREE: THE SIXTH WORLD
November 15, 1867
Month Fourteen, Day Eight House
Festival: Still Quecholli, or Treasured Feather
Day Calli (House) is governed by Tepeyollotl, Heart of the Mountain: Jaguar of Night, lord of echoes and earthquakes, so vast that the spots on his coat are said to represent the stars in the sky. Even though Tepeyollotl is a variant of Tezcatlipoca — sometimes called He Who Rules Us All, in his most threatening aspect — Calli is nevertheless considered a good day f
or rest, tranquility and family life, best spent cementing relationships of trust and mutual interest.
By the Mayan Long Count calendar, however, Day Eight Calli’s primary influence is that of Mictlantecuhtli, Lord of the Dead — a terrible skeleton shown dressed in strips of bark paper, with bulging eyes and a gaping stomach through which the liver, home to the spirit, may be seen hanging. Associated with nighttime animals such as the owl, the bat and the spider, he is also the Fifth Lord of the Night, and ruler of both the tenth day (“Itzcuintli,” or Dog) and the tenth month (“Tecpatl,” or Stone Knife).
As befits the weapon used to carry out human sacrifices, Tecpatl symbolizes moments of grave ordeal, predestined trials and tribulations — good times to test one’s character, yet bad times to rest on one’s past reputation. Cutting through falsehood like its own blade, Tecpatl warns that the mind, like the spirit, must always be kept sharpened, so it can reach the very marrow of cosmic truth.
From the archives of the Western Union Company, Telegraph #67-8155, sent November 14, 1867, stamped as delivered same date:
WESTERN UNION
PDA FWDSTN NA-1 LONG PD=ALBUQ NM DEL 14 10:39PM [1867 NOV 14 11:22 PM]
FITZ HUGH LUDLOW= :MR G THIEL=
URGENT EXPEDITE ARRIVAL STOP P HAS DETERMINED ON DIRECT ATTACK UPON PRISM URGED BY NEW ALLY T-CAT STOP I DEEM ALLY MOST DEEPLY UNTRUSTWORTHY STOP MR GREY YET UNABLE TO ESCORT GOOD DOCTOR TO NEW POSITION STOP ATTACK PLANNED FOR 15TH TOMORROW STOP PRIVATE ACCESS TO CAMP TELEGRAPH LIMITED BUT WILL DESTROY MESSAGE RECORD HERE STOP URGENT REPLY SOONEST STOP MAINTAIN PROTOCOL STOP FHL
From the Western Union archives, Telegram #67-81594, sent November 15, no delivery stamp:
WESTERN UNION
ALBUQ NM LONG PD=PDA FWDSTN NA-1 DEL 15 01:14AM
EDITOR IN CHIEF= :FITZ HUGH LUDLOW=
MATERIAL UPDATES RECEIVED STOP REGRET IMPOSSIBLE TO PROVIDE ADDITIONAL STAFF SUPPORT AT PRESENT STOP REASON TO EXPECT LARGE PRESS CONTINGENT ARRIVING FROM TWO REPUBLICS NEWSPAPER WITHIN 24 HRS STOP OPERATIVES FROM LONE STAR GAZETTE DETACHED TO PROVIDE BALANCE STOP EXPECT THEIR ARRIVAL SAME TIMEFRAME STOP FACILITATE THEIR OPERATIONS HOWEVER POSSIBLE STOP REITERATE TO GREY IMPORTANCE OF ASSIGNMENT STOP GODSPEED FITZ STOP