A Rope of Thorns (11 page)

“Town was nearing full already,” the girl went on, “and with Mouth-of-Praise’s flux set on top, we’re stuffed to bursting. Not to mention the Sheriff’s got constituents panicked Weed will set in any moment, so there’s patrols everywhere, eyes well-peeled for any hint of green and red, which makes trying to sneak out unnoticed probably a foredoomed endeavour.” She paused at the window, twitching the curtains close-to. “And so . . .”

Chess shrugged. “So? Your hootenanny goes off as planned or not, don’t mean a damn thing to me, little girl, or Ed, besides. Though you sure must play a mean hand of poker, given your skill at schemin’.”

Miz Colder fixed him, voice even, eyes cold. “I don’t believe you’ve cause to condescend to me, Mister Pargeter.”

Chess’s eyes narrowed, and Morrow jumped in again. “It’s, uh . . . it’s nothin’ personal, Miz Col—”

“Yancey.”

Morrow blinked. “Pardon?”

“Experiance, that’s my name. Yancey to my friends—or to those I share secrets with.” She gestured. “You were saying?”

“Yeah, Ed, what
were
you sayin’?” Chess turned Morrow’s way, mouth still set in that mean little knot. “’Bout to plead pardon from Miz
Yancey
for my manners?”

Morrow gritted his teeth. “Look, Chess here don’t deal too well with those of the fairer persuasion, in the main,” he told her. “Which might be ’cause, uh . . .”

“I know ’bout him and Reverend Rook, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“Um, well . . . good, but no. I meant ’cause his Ma was—uh—”

Here euphemism failed him, polite or otherwise.

Chess laughed outright. “Oh, don’t be shy, Ed; if this one’s smart enough not to choke on the word ‘queer,’ ‘whore’ can’t be far behind.” Abruptly, Chess was off the bed, backing Yancey up swift ’til her shoulders met the wall. “My thoughts on pussy aside, though, gal—just how you plan on workin’ this particular miracle, exactly? ’Cause I can make gold outta shit, these days, and I’m fairly stumped.”

Yancey had to moisten her lips. “A far larger glamour,” she suggested. “Same’s when you checked in, but bolder: hide in plain sight. Come as guests, then leave with the rest.”

Chess scoffed. “Or get found out and swung, whichever comes first.”

“Well, that’s where the hexation comes in, I’d guess.” Yancey stepped away from the wall, smoothing her blouse down, and the way the fabric tightened around her put a sudden dryness in Morrow’s mouth bid fair to confirm that Chess’s bed-play, however enjoyable, hadn’t entirely spoiled his original tastes. “Accounts of the Reverend’s exploits suggest he was capable of remaking whole towns, if he needed to—am I right in guessing you’re more than his match, in that direction?”

“I don’t recall him doin’ anything like that, and I was there. But yeah, for myself, I could probably cast up something damn enduring, long as it was simple.”

“All right, then . . . how ’bout you magnify the headiness of the spirits being served out—get ’em fuddled so extra-quick, extra-potent, the Good Lord himself could ride through on a white horse and they wouldn’t notice.” Her mouth slanted slightly, cutting a wry angle which came surprisingly close to some of Chess’s own favourite expressions. “I can assure you, you won’t have to exert yourself too strongly in order to end up with a full day’s head start, at the very least.”

“So your
plan
is for me to do all the work, in other words.”

“Why, yes, given you’re by far the more powerful, ’tween the two of us. Would that be too much of a problem?”

Sweet, tart, final: Chess goggled a half-instant at her, then couldn’t quite stop himself from exploding in more laughter—of a far more genuine variety, this time ’round.

“Oh, you really
are
somethin’,” he allowed, finally. “Must be some damn good friend of yours this lawman’s marrying, I suppose, for you to go to so much trouble keeping her bride-day blood-free.”

She already had one hand on the doorknob, but that turned her back, nodding. “Oh yes,” she said, “the very best imaginable. By which I mean myself.”

With no hint of preparation, it was like Morrow’s slap had been returned to him six-fold, and again, she seemed to know it.

For she paused, looking up from under her lashes—those clean grey eyes so deceptively mild, for the clockwork mind he now sensed lurked behind ’em—to say, lightly enough, “For all I’m the only one who knows what we’ll owe you, I’ll make sure my kin and kin-to-be welcome you kindly, Mister Morrow . . . Mister Pargeter. And I’ll expect to see you in the throng, tomorrow.”

She nodded over at Chess, who returned the favour, if begrudgingly. As though impressed, in the end, by his own inability to scare her—or her inability to
be
scared, even under such trying circumstances. And she was gone a second on, with a switch of skirts, a rustle of petticoats, the discreet click-to of door meeting jamb.

Chess looked back to see Morrow’s mouth hung far enough open to catch flies, making him laugh yet one more time, long
and
loud.

“Oh
ho
,” he said. “Well, well.”

Morrow drew himself up, shrugging it off. “Well
what
?” He demanded.

“Might be you got sorta sweet on her, all those days I was sleepin’ it off.”

“Wasn’t
that
long, and you know it. ’Sides which . . .” Morrow coloured. “Well,” he wound up, “that wouldn’t make a lick of sense, if so. Would it?”

Chess shrugged, glancing over at the dresser drawer where his belt and guns lay hid; Morrow saw his fingers quiver, palms itchy like he ached to hold ’em, if only for practice—or comfort, of a kind.

“Rarely does,” he replied.

Night fell lead-heavy, uneasily abrupt, as though the sun might never rise again.

Hoffstedt’s Hoard lulled itself to sleep by degrees under its darkness, murmuring slumberous, a beehive awaiting the morrow’s stick. Elsewhere, the world’s newer terrors came clambering up through Mictlan-Xibalba’s widening crack: Songbird’s dog with human hands, sweatless empty men made from the wood of the coral tree, their wives carved from the chalky cores of bulrushes. Small female gods swarming in the moon’s darkness, like gnats; weeping women giving birth to jade-scaled monsters at the crossroads. Eddies of all kinds, flurrying back and forth across the desert—blood mixed with mud, poisons breeding. The drought which precedes a flood. Ash, falling from the sky.

And salt, too, snaking through the desert toward Hoffstedt’s Hoard—hotly calcinate, scorching to the touch, turning sand to glass. Salt, flowing from one more creature’s whitened footsteps like an awful road, drawing ever closer.

This glistering vision paused at the town’s limits, found a likely enough spot, knelt to make its prayers. Then settled in, to wait.

Yancey Colder’s wedding went the way those things mostly did, from what little Chess had gathered on vague scattered report. Her and Kloves stood up before a mixed congregation in the clapboard-walled church, local preacher officiating, checking his Bible every few words—not even a pale shade on how impressive Ash Rook’d once loomed, intoning verse from memory, voice a crack-less iron bell. The vows went by in a babble: cleave together, sever never—have and hold, faithful always, by God’s grace, amen. Y’all take each other? Ring, kiss; done.

After, a crew of hotel workers hauled the pews back against the wall while others brought out tables bearing platters of cold meat, soup tureens, battered but polished pewter tankards brimming with ale, plus bowls full of sliced fruit in so much spirit Chess could practically smell it from here. Lionel Colder went ’round pumping hands like he was getting paid for it, ’stead of the reverse. Though Chess and Morrow stood a bit back from the press, they still caught him on the swing-by; Chess made sure his hand was where Lionel’s glamour-fuddled mind put it—his hex-guise as “Mister Chester Jr.” being a foot taller, to make him match with Morrow—and let Yancey’s Pa wring it back and forth with a will.

“Lovely, wasn’t it?” he burbled.

Ed, creditably grave: “Sure was, Mister Colder. Same’s I’d like my own to go, one day.”

Lionel looked to Chess, then, like he expected further support for this judgement, and Chess tried to give it him. “Very . . . likely so, I’d guess,” he hazarded, at last.

Lionel thanked him kindly enough, blinking an odd look out of his eye—but moved on fast, and didn’t look back.

“What’d you have to say
that
for?” Morrow complained.

Chess hissed through his teeth. “I don’t know, Ed—’cause this’s the one and only time I ever seen this done, in my entire life?” He folded his arms, glowering over at the punch-bowls. “Or maybe it’s just ’cause I got a job to pull that’d go a fuck of a lot smoother without me bein’ badgered all up and down each side while I stand here tryin’ to figure out how it works, in the first damn place.”

Ed took the hint and shut up, though Chess suspected he’d be hearing more about this later. But even that small irritation was almost too much of a distraction, right now.

Last night’s boasts to Miz Colder (Missus Kloves, that was) aside, however, this was the very first working Chess had ever chosen to do, deliberately—a harder task than it seemed it should be, at least for him.

So he closed his eyes, wiping away everything but the cold clarity of the moment, thinking, as he did:
You were right
and wrong, Ash Rook, like always. This
ain’t
a gun, and I don’t aim to treat it as such. But one thing you did teach me ’bout hexation. It comes out the way means most to a person, no matter who. You and your Bad Book, Doc Glossing’s Jew-homunculus—all in how you, and they, was raised up. What you learned, deep down. What’s
you.

Well, I never knew too much: killing, fucking, shooting, drinking, etcetera. But I do know how to hook somebody’s eye, like I know what it feels like to drown your own mind in something—liquor, smoke, fleshly pleasures. So let’s slap ’em together, see what’s like to happen. . . .

It was less like taking aim down a barrel than throwing a glance some man’s way ’cross any given tumult, casting deep, ’fore reeling the poor sucker in. Chess’s favourite recreation, once, aside from killing—and he had to admit how it still made him a bit stiff himself, even now, just thinking on it.

Shrouded in the false face he’d patterned after Ed’s own, Chess meandered through the crowd, spinning a cloud of invisible spider’s-webbery out through the top of his skull. He could feel it latching on to everyone he passed, too, linking brain-pan to brain-pan; by the time he’d covered the church, the pressure of some twelve-score minds on his was a tangible ache. But . . . it’d worked, Goddamnit, in spite of everything. He
had
them.

The sensation itself was a wonder, too. Same as the way he’d somehow always known where everybody else was in a throw-down, he only now realized, but raised to a whole new order. He could barely resist the impulse to flood those strands with power, take hard hold of ’em and
yank
. Make all these petty, tiny people know just who they had amongst them, so’s they might render him his due
reverence
.

But here Chess paused to breathe deep, checking to make sure he’d tied no similar thread to Ed, or to Yancey, and warmed himself again with that little self-congratulatory jolt. Best to keep his eyes firm on the road, lest it lead straight into the Rainbow Lady’s own meshes, where Chess would be trapped by his own blunderings like any other foolish insect.

Then, down those thought-strands, he carefully dripped his memories like hot wax on a candlewick: absinthe’s sour tang; Oona’s eye-watering opium pipe-stink; ether’s blissful lassitude, from those rare occasions a Confederate sawbones had drugged him up; the twitchy punch of good chaw. Spreading, fading, dissolving like ink in water as Chess kept up a gentle but inexorable pressure, casting slow darkness over the whole.

All’s he’d needed was to fire up, by just a smidgen, a place in their brains most of ’em were already hightailing toward at best speed anyway.

The drinks flowed free, and all ’round, an ungodly mess of a hobbledehoy boiled up: every man present spouting frippery to anything in a skirt, with those same skirts batting their flirtatious eyes and cooing ’til Chess fair ached to yell how money should change hands already, before he puked outright. But then, he supposed this ridiculousness was just how “normal” folk comported ’emselves, when struck by the urge to revelry; just too bad for him he’d no one to share that opinion with aside from Ed, who’d no doubt try his best to talk him out of it.

And that, right there, was where he felt the Rev’s loss worst once more, an unset bone. He wasn’t drunk enough yet for it not to discomfit him, and unlikely to become so, if he wanted to stay fit to do his part.

Over at the table’s mid-point, Miz Colder as was—Missus Kloves now, he reminded himself—caught him looking, and gave him a brief smile before turning back to her cunt-struck bullock of a brand-new husband.

Thinking as she did, knowing damn well he’d be able to hear:
Your patience’s laudable indeed, Mister Pargeter; I’m very sure it costs you something, to sustain. Yet soon enough, you and Mister Morrow’ll be on your way, unnoticed—all you have to do is just let ’em all get good and snookered, and they’ll mind nothing on the morrow but that they had the world’s best time. And even if any of ’em
were
to figure out who-all they might’ve missed capturing, later on, the hangovers alone will make ’em think twice about coming after.

So thank you, for that. Thank you for not bringing my home down around my ears, or sinking us all hip-deep in Weed. I sure do appreciate your restraint, seein’ how hard—how unnatural—it is for you to practice. . . .

Meant no insult by it, either. It’d be uncharitable to think so.

When’d
you
ever reckon things by their charity, though, darlin’?
the Rev whispered to him, a lick deep ’cross his inner ear, hot and honey-slow.
Woman’s got you tied up tight, doing her will like a dray-horse. That ain’t the Chess
I
know.

Just shut the fuck UP, you house-size sumbitch,
he shot back.
I’ll do what I like, and like what I damn well do. Like Goddamn always.