by Gemma Files
But he’d been wrong about that in the end, like so much else.
Ripping his own empty chest open in the name of self-sacrifice — or pissiness, more like — aside, he sure hadn’t ever expected to find himself here again, buried alive in one more dark place beneath the world’s skin. The Sunken Ball-Court, the Place of Dead Roads, and now — this crap-hole, named by his Ma as Seven Dials for the same teetery column they stood beneath, from which seven streets radiated, all alike in the awful unending dark. Just a din of muck and yammer cut with a cacophony of clanks a-boom in the middle distance, like faraway ordnance.
Almost enough to make a man miss ’Frisco, Chess thought.
“Gone, that is, in London true,” said Oona, staring up at those looming dials. “Long ’fore I drew a breath, let alone got big enough to — ”
“ — screw your way clear?”
“That’s right. Always did fink yerself a cut above, though, didn’t you? Too good for the likes of anyone else.”
“Never claimed to be ‘good,’ woman, or anything like it.” Chess stuffed his hands inside his coat, trying futilely to warm them while wondering if the truly dead at least got to sleep; felt like he’d been up for days, maybe a week or even more. “Whatever I am, though, I know I’m a damn sight better than you.”
“What, ’cause you was born wiv that piece ’twixt your legs?” And that note, that sneering scorn, going straight to his gut. Fifteen years fell away. “All you are, old son, is lucky. Only wish to Christ you ’ad been born a girl, so’s . . .”
“So’s you’d know what best to charge, I expect,” Chess snarled.
Only to watch her spit, and snarl back: “No. ’Cause then I could’ve made you suffer like I did, just like, and not no different. The exact bloody same.”
“I suffered enough,” Chess said, turning his back. And strode on, boots clopping through the rain, with his spurs trailing a-scratch on the cobbles like a dead man’s fingernails.
Though he might have walked for hours, the stones underfoot did not change, and every wall looked like its neighbour; even the ceaselessly moving crowds had nearly vanished. So when the dry voice came back into Chess’s mind, at last, he was lonesome enough that he didn’t even flinch.
What do you plan to do now, red boy?
Leave this damn place. Kick your damn ass.
Laughter like a desert gust, sere and hot and swift.
You appear to have your work cut out for you.
Suck my dick, you spectral motherfuck.
Chess took a corner at random, followed by another, and another — then abruptly found himself back in the sundial column’s square, meeting Oona’s eyes yet once more, and clenching both empty fists at her smirk.
“Shouldn’t’ve given your irons away up top, you wanted t’stay armed,” she agreed, as if she could read his mind. “But then, you never could plan ahead for bollocks.”
“Stay the hell outta my head, bitch. Got more’n enough company in here, without I add you to the mix.”
A snort. “Ah, but ain’t nothin’ real but what you fink, down ’ere.” She jabbed a finger at his gun-poor belt. “Them guns of yours is gone ’cause out of mind, out of sight — and since you never gave nuffin’ away you still cared about, must be you don’t care no more, except for ’abit. But as for the rest . . . well, look at yourself.”
Grudgingly, Chess checked himself in the same muddy window he’d given up trying to stare through, not all so long ago: red beard well-trimmed to the touch once more, clothes their usual tailored purple. Hell, even a number of his scars’d been pruned away, though the curlicue strand under his jawline Oona herself had given him was still there — and as his fingers traced it, the knots binding his rage began to give way.
“Such a peacock, you are, same as you ever were. Such a gilded bloody prancer.” Oona clutched her shawl to herself, scowling. “And always the ’ardest done by, ain’t ya? Well, fink on this: bad as I was t’you, let alone myself, I never killed nobody.”
“Not for lack of trying,” Chess pointed out.
“Oh, I ain’t sayin’ that’s not true. But you, you’re the curse made flesh, little boy, ain’t ya? Everyfing you touch bleeds.”
The knots burst. Chess screamed at her: “You think I don’t know it?”
“I know you do. So what’s the remedy?”
Woman, he yearned to snap, if I knew that . . .
Before he could think of doing so, however, Oona’d already seized him by the coat, hands knit in his lapels. “All right, playtime’s over. You need to listen t’me now, you great whingin’ molly — ”
“Fuck I do!”
“ — shut the ’ell up!” She slapped him, hard enough to shock; from the tone of her hiss it’d hurt her as well, but Chess barely noticed. Her screaming face pressed huge ’gainst his, plus the sting of flesh on flesh — how could it still terrify him? Chess Pargeter, killer of hundreds, hex and god alike?
“Ain’t but one way t’leave any place you comes into feet-first, boyo,” she continued, unheeding, “an’ you ain’t doin’ that wivout me. Look at these last few years on your own go-by, and just try an’ tell me different. Every choice you got ’anded you made a dog’s breakfast of. What makes you fink findin’ ’ell’s back door’ll go any better?”
Chess moistened his lips. “Difference is,” he managed, at last, “this time, if nothing else — I can sure as hell shut you up.”
“Sonny boy, I’d like to see you try.”
No you don’t see, bitch, Chess thought. But you Goddamn will.
“All right,” he said, out loud. And threw his hand up, palm out, same way he’d done at least a score of times since Rook had made him something more than human, flinging open the floodgates to rain down a tide of greenish-red Flayed Lord power ’pon her.
Nothing happened.
Chess’s gut froze, skin crawling agonizingly, as if bracing itself to be stripped away once more.
“See?” Oona whispered. “No guns. No witch-tricks. Not even a bloody knife left over, wiv a blade the exact size o’ your Johnson.” Leaning close in, to put her wormy lips right beside his ear: “Just gotta do fings up close ’n’ personal now, and take your chances, like the rest us. But that’s a gamble you ain’t ’ad t’risk in some long time . . . and if you can’t kill no more, then you’re nuffin’.”
“Might be I don’t need to kill you, just to stop your damn tongue.”
“Ooh, la! Listen t’you, fancy boy. ’M I s’posed to be impressed? Very well, yer ’ighness — I’ll just drop you a curtsey, shall I? As befits your bloody station.”
Which she did, bobbing ridiculously, and adding a pantomime air-kiss for emphasis. At the sight of which, that knot behind his jaw jumped, sparking — sheer revulsion gave way, bursting into rage the way flashpaper touches off dynamite. Without thinking, he reared back and pasted her one, with all his strength behind it.
Torque set her neck sidelong, so hard it cracked outright — was that her jaw he heard go, in one mutton-bone crunch? At the same time, something flew from between her lips in a bloody spume-haze: her own tongue tip, severed on contact, ground like chuck between two uneven rows of grey teeth.
Oona hit the cobbles face-first, then propped herself back up on both elbows, shaking her bruised head. And grinned a wide, red grin, blood painting her chin.
“Oh, I fink you can probably do better than that,” she spat out. “Can’t ya?”
Chess got up. “Let’s see,” he replied, and kicked her, full in the stomach.
This is your mother, fool, some voice in his skull’s back cavity warned him, like he couldn’t’ve figured that out himself. So what? he snapped back at it, kicking her yet again even as she doubled over, one spur raking ’cross her gasping cheek. What-all’s that s’posed to mean to me, exactly, given the little it ever seemed to mean to her?
Oona’s ghost jackknifed on the filthy stones at his feet, eyes level with his toes. Her hair fell down like a veil. And Chess loomed over he
r, poised to give fresh hurt for a lifetime’s worth with righteous rage still filling him tip-to-toe with gall, a lifetime of spoiled seed suddenly come to crop.
She gave you life, is what, the voice said, simply. Kept you alive, when she could barely keep herself.
Chess shook his head, eyes suddenly blurred. ’Cause she needed a whipping boy, someone to take it all out on.
You were all she had.
Fancy that. Must’ve been why she sold me, right? Why she drove me away with both hands, screamed the shame of what I am at me in the street, stuck a knife in my Goddamn neck?
You came out of her . . .
Like a turd, yeah. Again, fuckin’ so?
She’s half of you, Chess.
Wasn’t for her, you’d be —
Somebody else, entirely.
Whose was that damn voice, after all? Not Rook, not Yancey. Not even Ed, reasonable as it sounded. No one he knew. And yet, and yet, it seemed so very . . . familiar.
Oona had turned over on her back, coughing wetly. She tried to hump herself away, dress a rag sweeping the rain-slick cobbles; Chess set one boot’s sole on her flat chest and pushed down, pinning her. “You stay here,” he ordered.
Maybe it’s your voice, fool. Ever thought that?
“I . . . I got . . . nowhere else t’be,” Oona managed, and gradually Chess realized her hacking spasms had curdled back into some parody of laughter. “Go on, son. Drink your fill. Used to tell you that, when you was on the tit.” Her head lolled from side to side. “’Urt me bad as you want, long as you want. Don’t make no difference, not t’me.”
To me, or you. Or nobody else neither, accordingly.
What sort of shit-heap life would somebody’ve had to live, he wondered, if even death held no possibility of change?
And with that thought, all Chess’s simple rage swelled to something far beyond fury: something vast, something brilliant. So pure it almost felt like mercy.
He knelt, cupping Oona’s head in his hands, almost tenderly.
“How ’bout this, then?” he asked. And twisted, hard.
Afterward, he sat still there beside her body, letting the cold rain plaster clothes to skin, a second sodden hide. He knew she wasn’t really “dead,” obviously, considering where they were, but by God, it’d seemed the only way to shut her up . . . and since it seemed to’ve worked, he wasn’t about to question his own logic.
Without knowing why, he found himself recalling the first hot wash Oona had ever bought for him, alone; whenever they could afford to previously, she’d always opted for cold and gone in with him to save coin. That day, she’d sent him to the brothel’s tub-room by himself, water steaming already like it was set to boil laundry; he’d stood chest-deep in the great copper upright, with soap and a tin mirror set handy, so smooth you could actually see yourself undistorted, to a point. And new clothes to put on, after. The shirt had been white, not purple, but he’d buttoned it clear to the collar and smiled at his reflection, proudly.
Within the hour, that shirt had been trash, torn off by the man who’d been his first customer. The pain had been coring, but the memory of what he could look like with enough coin, and left to his own devices — the charms others would spend on, given opportunity — had been almost worth it.
Chess glanced again at Oona’s body, brow furrowed. He’d expected . . . more, somehow; satisfaction, if not glee. Or was this flat numbness a species of peace, in itself? He’d never had much hands-on knowledge of the phenomenon.
Three times I wrote you off as dead, bitch, he thought. Once when I left Songbird’s opium den, knowing the undertakers was on their way; once when Rook told me he could kill you for me, and I told him to go ahead if he wanted . . . and now. And at no point, I only just now realize, did I ever really start to believe it.
He turned away, pushed himself to his feet, and picked a direction at random. Any path that’d lead away from this column, and his mother’s corpse beneath it.
Hadn’t gone ten yards, though, ’fore an earsplitting crack rang out; light flashed behind him like a thunderbolt touching down and he spun, dropped battlefield-ready to one knee, arm already up to protect himself from shrapnel.
Panting, he slowly lowered his sleeve back down. The circular pattern on the cobblestones, charred and steaming now as rain struck home, did look something like a lightning strike. Scattered over it was a slurry of burnt and torn rags, frayed on every edge as if burst apart from inside — and not all of it fabric, either; Chess recognized that yellowish hue, that raddled texture. Nausea kneaded his guts. He pulled his gaze upward, with effort.
She stood in the centre of the blast, naked and pale, girl-slender again — not quite his same height or make, being curved at hips and breast with red hair rain-plastered back over a narrow fox-face, thatching the junction of her legs in a slightly darker triangle. And when she smiled, her teeth were crooked yet but there, bright, sharp and clean — porcelain, almost, like the whites of those green, green eyes. . . .
“I’ll be Goddamned and go to hell,” Chess Pargeter said, out loud, knowing exactly how stupid those words must sound. But Oona’s new-made grin just widened, almost to her back molars.
“Come now, lovey,” she replied, voice a silver bell soaked in sour wine. “Nuffin’ comes from nuffin’. Didn’t fink you was the only ’ex wiv my name, did you?”
More damn fool me, Chess thought, for thinkin’ there’s any part of me don’t have her thumbprint on it already. For thinkin’ I was special.
“Okay, then,” he said. “Let’s damn well hear it.”
CHAPTER TWO
The night before she’d dreamed Ed Morrow held her in his arms again, warming her all over, and counted herself lucky. But in the morning Yancey Colder Kloves woke cold and stiff as usual, eyes narrowed against the unforgiving sky as it rose purple over what Grandma and Yiska called Tse Diyil, Old Woman Butte, a massive outcrop of stone stacked in concentric rings jutting up from sand and furze that cast its shadow on a seemingly endless series of lava drifts making their way from horizon to horizon, uneven as some badly laid road.
I hurt, she thought, too much in pain generally to be more specific, even if she’d wanted to. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do that in life, one day, ’stead of always touching with only our minds? Or would that really be too much to ask, considering the circumstances?
Beside her, Songbird stirred, unhappily. “You think too loudly, innkeeper’s daughter,” she muttered. “This is what comes of some talent and no instruction.”
“That’s really the way you feel about it, then maybe it’d be best to stay out of my brainpan.”
The Chinese girl-hex hissed. “I would if I could, believe me! Waaah, chi-shien gweilo, cho ya-de, cao ni zu zong shi ba dai . . . to think I find myself stranded here, caught between two savages and a long-nosed ghost — I, who am the product of a thousand years of breeding! It is not to be borne, this disgrace.”
While Yancey thought back, each syllable pitched uncharitably loud, since she now knew Songbird could hear her: Yes, yes, you great bleached baby.
The band had been squatting for weeks in a spattering of caves hollowed from the butte’s side, telling time by the sun dagger’s track as it eked its way across the spiral petroglyphs carved into three separate south-facing sandstone slabs. They’d made their way to this refuge sidelong, now hiking, now riding — and occasionally using what Yancey had come to call the “punch-a-hole” method, with Grandma and Songbird pooling their resources to move instantaneously from one place to another. A vortex would gape open in the air — the “Bone Road” Yiska had travelled to meet them at Bewelcome — and they’d all plunge through it. Grandma in her bone relict-suit, shaking the ground with each creaky step; Songbird eddying along behind just a foot or so up off the ground, jerked like a kite by one long sleeve; Yiska and the rest of her bravos on horseback, taking the jump at a steeplechase gallop and ululating as they did, while Yancey clung on for dear life with both white-knuckled hands �
�round the Diné boy-girl’s hard, flat waist.
Each such trip, however, began with Grandma and Songbird going at each other like cats in a bag as they argued points of procedure. The shamaness’s ghost would loom threateningly above her spindly little companion, berating her for not yet being fully recovered from whatever damage Doctor Asbury’s bracelet had done her, while Songbird in turn clenched her delicate hands (their clawed golden finger-sheaths long since removed, relegated to Yiska’s saddlebag) and scowled as though contemplating evil she obviously felt still ill-equipped to deliver.
“You have bad habits,” Grandma told her, “this is your trouble! And being stronger than your teachers has not helped to break you of any of them — it has only made you slow to regain your power, because you so much fear being weak.”
“Unlettered barbarian, old mountain sow — you, who could not read your own spells, even if you knew how to write them down! What do you think you know that I, educated by Imperial tutors, do not?”
“Better than you, not-yellow yellow girl, especially here on my people’s land, where my people’s ways work best. You let an old man rob you of everything, gambling he was too entranced by your helplessness to take advantage; I brought myself back from the dead.”
Songbird’s face screwed up, pale gaze full of poisons. “Not entirely.”
“I balance on the threshold, yes. Will you be the one to push me one way or the other?”
The question seemed to take Songbird aback, which might have been the point — the China-girl was still enough of a child to be much more tractable when thrown off balance. As the silence stretched on, however, she narrowed her eyes at the giant bone-puppet carrionette, waiting in inhuman stillness. Yiska and her riders watched too, keen attention in their eyes setting Yancey’s nape hairs a-tingle.
“Perhaps I will not have to,” Songbird said, at last. While Yancey exerted herself to rein in a shudder, as her mother’s words came back: It behooves us to know how to spot them, the hexes — so we can run the other way.
And I should have, shouldn’t I? she thought, watching the two work their castings in synchrony, prying open the Bone Road’s door once more. Should’ve told someone straightaway I knew Chess for who he was, or else never spoke to him — or Ed — at all; it’s sheerest hubris I didn’t, considering the cost. Just . . . couldn’t stand not having a hand in my own fate, I s’pose.