A Tree of Bones

by Gemma Files

  “No signs of damage,” muttered Geyer. “With those Weed-walls up ’round Bewelcome, they probably just marched straight past. Langobard sure ain’t got the gumption to try stopping them.”

  “Or the manpower, or the arms,” Asbury pointed out. “Might they be here to reinforce Hex City, while retrieving their wayward citizens?”

  “They’re sure not ready for battle, with their pennants on parade.” Geyer squinted, thinking. “Wonder if Maximilian sent a hex or two of his own, maybe, to negotiate the Mexes’ release . . . could they see us, do you think, Professor? See whatever your device’s giving off, anyhow?”

  Asbury shook his head. “It is less a question of strength than of . . .

  frequency, rather, for lack of a better term; in this case, all the suppressor’s stored hexacious energies are directed inward.” He paused to give the fob another few twists, at which the whirring sped up again. “Though we would have to recharge it by siphoning hexation from another magickal source using my personal Manifold; so long as it runs, this field nullifies sound, warps most light around a certain radius, and entirely muffles all psycho-aetheric vibrations within. In other words, we simply register as being not here, or as good as.”

  Ludlow pursed his lips in a silent whistle. “Got a veritable magic shop in that bag of yours, don’t you, Professor?”

  Asbury looked almost ashamed. “Yes, well . . . if you tinker long enough, some advances are inevitable. But I must say — it does seem as though everything hexaciously powered is increasing in efficacy to a truly threatening degree, and that doesn’t bode well.” He bit his lip. “I do not much like to consider any future impact of the sheer aetheric destabilization these conflicts may have induced, Mister Ludlow. Indeed, I do not like to think on it at all.”

  It took more than an hour for the battalion — some thousand men or so, trailing followers and supply wagons — to finish moving by, after which Geyer made them wait another fifteen minutes, just to be safe. Then they set their feet to the path once more, muddying the Mexes’ tracks with their own. Without asking, Ludlow slung Asbury’s arm over his shoulders, ignoring the exhausted older man’s halfhearted protests. “Where to now?” he asked. “Bewelcome?”

  “Nope,” said Geyer. “Gonna meet up with Mister Thiel . . . and the Texicans.”

  Upside was about how Chess’d remembered it, from Down Under: full of discomfort and disarray, everything just that hair out of true — wind too cold, sun too bright, full to the gills with contrary motherfuckers who might slap you soon as kiss you, or shoot you without any kiss at all. Not to mention how there wasn’t one person within eye’s reach who hadn’t fucked with him at least once, and not in the enjoyable way, either . . . his second good friend in all this lousy world Yancey Kloves, sad to say, very much included.

  But for all that, even while he stood there squinting and shivering with the toll of his travels run through every part of him like a stain, he still felt as though he’d never seen anything so pretty as the same sun that pained him, the empty, windswept sky, the bone-coloured desert with its hidden varmints and disasters. That he’d never felt so Goddamn good in all his strange, short life as he did standing here weaponless and alone, barely able to recall what it was he thought he’d been doing when the Enemy’d tricked him into signing away his flesh and becoming yet another of that mirror-footed son-of-a-bitch’s four faces. None of it seemed to matter, just for the moment; he felt naked and new, a colt licked to full trembling height, teetering on un-shod hooves that might one day take him . . .

  anywhere, really. Any-damn-where, at all.

  Only wish Oona was here to share in it, he caught himself thinking, just for a moment. But he really must’ve been happy, for once — happy like he hadn’t been since the bad old days, the simple days, measured out in bullets or blow-jobs — because he couldn’t even bring himself to resent it.

  One moment only, barely half a skipped beat of his missing heart. And then — it was all sent sideways, stretched and pinched and twisting in a way that made him want to bend double, claw at the dust ’til his fingertips split, unsure if he’d see blood or bone or what, exactly: just the awful spectacle of his own flesh crumbling away, maybe, like chalk, never to be resolved.

  Oh God, oh God. Christ Almighty, not that I ever thought of You as such, ’cept to scream your name out in crisis and revel in the blasphemy . . .

  So swift had all this passed that Yancey was only now replying to his first question, repeating: “‘Where’s Ed?’ Might’ve hoped you’d be happy to see me, too, after all this while — though I s’pose time runs a bit different, down there.”

  Chess swallowed, or tried to; his mouth was so dry, he could barely taste his own teeth. “Yeah, it does, but . . . I am, really. It just . . .

  feels like . . .”

  He felt himself droop and cursed it, but couldn’t stop, wobbling on his pins like a chloral-drop drunk — saw her grey eyes widen as she took in the extent of his ruin and felt her seize onto him by both shoulders, holding him from collapse. Behind her, the others stepped closer, keen to help. “What’s wrong with you?” she demanded. “Are you — hurt, somehow? What can I do?”

  “Don’t know,” he managed. “An’ . . . don’t know that either, or that. I feel — oh, shit.”

  Now he really was ground-bound, bones gone all slippy, braced to hit with his eyes shut and maybe roll (or sprawl, at best), to minimize the damage. But a fresh grip intruded, keeping him upright: Yiska’s mannish fingers, knitting fast with his own. Meantime, Songbird’s gunpowder-flavoured Chinee magic twined ’round shoulder down elbow to wrist and right back up the same path on Chess’s side, a dragon-scaled glove bolstering strength and channelling energy which warmed, probed, stung as it searched him for answers.

  Yancey checked his sweaty forehead. “Why’d you ask about Ed?” she demanded. “Why right then — right now?”

  “Dunno . . .”

  “Well, think, Goddamnit. If you’re not too sick to swear you’re well enough to reason, so far’s you’re able.”

  “Screw you, Missus,” he told her, with a surge of black temper, which at least made her smile. “Yeah, there you go,” she said, with some affection. “Now spill it, ’fore you pass out.”

  “I just . . .” On instinct alone — hell, it’d worked so far — Chess rummaged down deep, cleared his mind as far as he could, and trusted the words to come on their own. Which is how he was surprised to hear himself saying, eventually —

  “Ed — and you — you’re the only things I feel . . . tied to, anymore — like I’d dust up and blow away, otherwise. Feel like I need him, is all — need you both, here, together. That make any sense?”

  “More than you know, red boy,” Grandma rumbled, from behind him. “But then, this is no great mystery, given you know so little.”

  “Oh, thanks for that, rock-pile,” Chess snapped back, and quivered all over from inside to out, feeling horribly like he was going to puke, pass out . . . or fade clean the fuck away. For the first time since the War he recalled his past soldiery to mind — not the guns-and-killing part, but the code that made it okay to lean on a comrade when you knew you couldn’t stand — and leaned on Yancey that way now, stifling his humiliation. Took deep breaths, for all he still didn’t really feel a need to breathe, until the nauseating feeling that he might see the ground through his own boots at any second faded, if only by a touch.

  “So what the hell is wrong with me?” he asked, to keep himself from looking down to check. “You gals botch the resurrection? Not to blame ya, if so; Rev himself never had the balls to try pulling that one off — ”

  “Chess,” said Yancey, and he found himself shutting up — as surprised by his own vague shame as by her voice’s steely command, not loud, but final.

  “Resurrection is for dead things,” Grandma replied, “and you are not a ghost; the Smoking Mirror repaired your flesh when he possessed it, so it lives yet, even without you inside it. If you had ever learned spir
it-walking, or any Hataalii skills at all, then you would have some control over your current state. As it is, you have neither any place prepared in this world nor an empty vessel to return to. You must be anchored if you wish to remain here, especially while the Crack remains open.” As Yancey, Songbird and Yiska exchanged looks, her voice became acid: “Do you doubt me? Who knows more of such things, amongst us?”

  “Only you, Spinner,” Yiska assured her.

  “Well, then.”

  Chess scoffed. “Who was s’posed to tutor me in these skills of yours, exactly — Ash Rook? There’s your answer on that one: fucker tried to kill me and this’s the result, so everything I’ve learned since’s been on the run, like always.”

  “Yes, and given how much damage you did while running, I would have expected you to know more, at the end of it. But it seems we are both fated to be disappointed.”

  Songbird grimaced, but when she spoke, her voice was calmer than Chess’d ever heard it before — enough so he’d’ve rubbed his eyes, if he hadn’t somewhat feared that’d scrub ’em away like chalk marks. “This bickering is neither here nor there,” she said, “and beneath us as well, even him. What must we do?”

  “Let me think,” Grandma growled.

  “Yes, let us both,” Yiska agreed. “For I think you already know — ”

  “Be quiet, granddaughter!”

  “No.” Yiska stepped in front of Grandma. “The time for that is over, Spinner: decide, or do not. This is what you would tell me.”

  The hulk stood there silent a long moment, looming over her, a landslide waiting to happen. “Very well, then, come here,” it said, at last. “Let us speak on it further.”

  Their subsequent palaver — conducted quietly, in their own language — seemed to go on far longer than it had to. Luckily, Yancey’s shoulder was small but warm, surprisingly hard with new-grown muscle. What’d they had her doing out here? Chess’d have to remember to ask, whenever they next got time for impractical conversation.

  Even as he thought this, however, he felt that same ripple of unreality sift those approximations he was using for bones, frighting him with the idea that he might fall through her supporting grip at any moment. So he spat, and eked out: “Didn’t mean to . . . horn in on your territory, gal. With Ed, and all.”

  “What?” She blushed like the flower-faced innocent she’d been, not so long back. “Oh, I think we’re all three pretty equally entangled at this point, don’t you? What with him your priest and me your priestess, I mean.” Adding, lower: “Actually, I think might be that’s why you got such a longing for him, all of a sudden. You need us both, to shore you up, just like before.”

  “By cuttin’ on yourselves, you mean? I don’t — ” He grabbed himself by the mental scruff and shook, hard. “There’s other ways,” he said, finally.

  “Like what?”

  Chess snorted. “Oh, hell if I know, woman! Just seems like there’s likely to be, and you’d know better’n me ’bout it anyhow, wouldn’t you? Like every-damn-body.”

  Instead of snapping back in return, she smiled again. “Now, this is more like what I expected. That you’d roll out of Hell like you were getting out of bed, see me and scowl, and say: ‘Took you long enough.’”

  Chess managed a half-grin of his own, and agreed. “’Cause you did, that’s for damn sure. But much as I couldn’t see nor hear you down there, I already know the whyfore of that.”

  “In that Oona told you, you mean.”

  His brows knit. “Saw that, too, huh? Well, ’course you did . . . sent her to me in the first place, whispered advice in her ear. Two of you must’ve had some deep discussions, knowin’ I couldn’t listen in.”

  “We might’ve, at that. You jealous, Mister Pargeter?”

  He suspected she was twitting him, and felt a strange stab of pride not only that he could identify such japery, but that it didn’t make him want to punch anyone, when he did.

  “A little, Missus Kloves,” he said, at last. “But only that. She and me still ain’t friends, as such.”

  Quite some change from the horned-up rake and ramblin’ boy who’d put a bottle upside Sadie Whoever’s head and left her to die on a dirty saloon floor, over the grand sin of flirting with “his” duplicitous hulk of a man. For a second, Chess almost wanted to slip back down into Hell and apologize to the poor little bitch, which rocked him back yet further, as though the “him” he’d always known was peeling away by degrees, shedding like skin. What could possibly be left underneath, after, when every bit of scar was finally gone?

  “That’s a sad story,” Yancey told him, all humour suddenly gone from her voice. To which he shrugged, as best he could, and said: “It’s a sad world.”

  Which, by God, they both well knew for nothing but truth.

  But here were Grandma and that man-gal of hers stepping over now, finally done with their parlay. The rock-creature shook her massive-jawed head, with a noise like bones grinding, and told Yancey: “So, it is decided — you must bring your other half here, that soldier Morrow, if he yet lives. Then you and he will keep this one from losing sense of himself, until we get him to where he and the Smoking Mirror may confront each other.”

  Yancey sighed. “After which?” ”

  “They will fight, and this working will reach its end, one way or another.” Grandma looked down on Chess, haughty as a thing with no eyes to narrow or nose to sneer through could be. “I hope you prove worth all this effort, red boy.”

  “Didn’t think so already, why’d you bother bringin’ me up at all?”

  “Because we all have parts to play. I know it — and now, so do you. Do not fail.”

  Chess scowled. “I don’t know you, woman. Might be you sure as hell don’t know me.”

  “Ah, but I do, little killer. I have seen you through your man’s eyes, and often. Your white man with a Book, cause of all this trouble, supposedly on your behalf. Because he could stand neither to lose you nor give up his magic, desiring to . . . what is your bilagaana phrase? ‘Have his cake, and eat it’?”

  “What’s she talkin’ ’bout?” Chess demanded, of Yiska.

  She shrugged. “It is an old idea — that two Hataalii who wish to live together may do so, but only at the cost of their power. Rook might have done it before you ever had cause to know what you were, let alone what you might have been. But because he would not brook becoming less, he made you more . . . too much for Balance, unBalancing everything.”

  “Yeah, well — I never asked him to do any of that, Goddamnit. That was all his idea . . . his, and hers.”

  “Yes,” Yiska agreed. “And she would have just done something else, the Lady of Snares and Traps, even had your Reverend refused her; this too is true, though my Grandmother is loath to admit it.” Her eyes turned to Songbird, afloat and silk-shrouded, shimmering sweet in all her white-on-red finery, and Chess watched in surprise as a mere sight of that sharp-tongued harridan made Yiska’s lips curve — let alone how Songbird’s eyes dropped to see it, blanched cheekbones pinkening.

  “Besides which,” Yiska continued, softer, “I can sympathize with him, foolish though Asher Rook may have been, in the moment. I think we all can, being drawn most fiercely to our kind, like any other animal.”

  “Not to mention how we now know things were gonna change, no matter who did what,” Yancey put in, drawing a nod from Missus Love.

  “Missus Kloves has it a’right,” Sophy Love said, considering her boy, who was amusing himself by sucking on one paw and making dust-mites dance like fireflies ’round his own head, hexaciously lit up in a hundred different colours. “This vow of yours, Christian as it sounds in theory, was overturned long since by the Hex City Oath — and given what we achieved last night, Miss Yu and Gabriel stand living proof. No point in harrying Mister Pargeter over things he couldn’t’ve known or things Rook claims he did to benefit him, rather than pursuing charges ’gainst him for all the bad he’s done outright.”

  Which put her on his side,
strangely enough, even after everything — or maybe not; hard to tell, even when they weren’t discussing stuff that’d probably happened while he was still pulling himself up through Hell’s asshole. The whole thing made Chess’s skull ache, notwithstanding, though that was good too, in a way: proved he still had one, at least.

  “You ladies just go on an’ settle things amongst yourselves,” he heard himself say, shakily, once more fighting to keep upright. “Don’t . . . worry ’bout me. I’ll juss wait it . . . out . . .”

  Then he plunged forward, this time into Grandma’s massive, lumpish arms, their sharp yet crumbly edges bruising him all over as she hoisted him. Telling him, inside his head: Hush, fool. Take some of my strength, while the dead-speaker does what she must, with White Shell Girl and the salt-man’s widow’s help.

  Chess flopped in her grip like a fish, squirming ’til he fell back, betrayed by his own weakness — reduced to using harsh language, for lack of any better weapon. Aw, save your “fool” you damn squaw-monster, ’specially since you never do put yourself out to learn folks’ proper names, do ya? What is that, some sort’a Injun thing?

  A curl of alien laughter licked through him, excoriating even as it soothed — part of the service, possibly, since he did almost immediately feel a touch better. You are a wonder, Grandma admitted, reluctantly, while she rifled his mind with equally impolite “fingers,” leaving nothing untouched. Insulted by everything, always ready to fight; you revel in it, a beast in constant heat. No wonder the Enemy chose your shape to make War in, after the Lady sent you sowing death-in-life all along the Crack’s length.

  Hey now, bitch, keep outta there! That stuff’s private.

  With a shoulder hitch, Grandma indicated the others, gathered back ’round that fire of theirs and raising a veritable storm of hexery as though they was spinning gold from straw in the old tale. Songbird and little Gabriel Love took centre place, with Yiska on one hand, Yancey the other, and everything going straight over into her like braided lightning. She was opening herself up, calling out to — Ed, he could only think, though he couldn’t catch the words ’emselves, and felt a quick, silly surge of jealousy at the way the very idea of seeing Morrow enfleshed was making her flush.