A Rope of Thorns (32 page)

And all at once, what sprawled before him was someone entirely other: slight and lean and masculine-flat, naked and seeping, bloody from head to toe. Chess Pargeter, splayed and betrayed, empty ribcage cracked open and spilling organs like a blood-eagled Viking’s, his absinthe-coloured eyes glaring green fire.

You son of a bitch, you went and left me behind.

Rook flung up his hands, gasping—then paused, half-expecting to hear laughter ridiculing such a foolish show of weakness. But Ixchel remained wrapped in breathless sleep, and there was no one else about to comment . . . not unless you counted ghosts like Kees Hosteen, who floated in the shadows just behind him.

Guilty conscience, Rev?
The old man’s shade asked, coolly.

Grimly, Rook forced himself forward, ignoring the commentary. He knelt before the altar, bowed his head, and murmured: “Suicide Moon, Lady of Traps and Snares, Your unworthy consort calls You home. Bestow upon those who crawl before You the gift of Your Presence.”

The response
this
drew was utterly familiar, not to mention expected: a dry, soundless snort.
She really
buys
this kind’a ass-kissing, from
you
? Really?

Not bothering to answer, Rook gestured him to silence, and genuflected again. “Mother of all Hanged Men, it is Your chosen son who calls You. Return, You who are also Tlazteotl, Coyotlaxqhui, Chalchiuhtlicue—”

An ague-clammy palm lay suddenly flat against his forehead, with no whiff of air to warn him. Rook froze. Standing above him, Ixchel smiled, her jade-flake teeth like thorns. “No need to stand on ceremony, my husband,” she murmured. “
For it is written that a man shall leave his family and cleave unto his wife, and they become one flesh
—”

“Please don’t.”

She laughed, that same silver, plucked-sistrum shiver which once haunted his worst nightmares. “Very well, then.” Her gaze swept to Hosteen’s ghost, where he stood at Rook’s side. “Who is it you bring leashed here before me, to do me worship?”

Hosteen, boggling:
’Scuse me?

Rook raised a pacifying hand. “Kees, be good enough to fill in Lady Ixchel here about all of Allan Pinkerton’s latest anti-hexological embellishments, would you?”

To her credit, the ghost-goddess listened silently while Hosteen did so, her barely inhabited skin giving off its usual icy glow, a lit corpse-candle. Allowing, finally: “But I fail to see how any of this should trouble me, or mine.”

“They’re on their way to Bewelcome right about now to test the damn thing out, probably on Chess. And from there, it’s just a hop and skip over to
our
doorstep.”

A boneless shrug. “He will defeat them. They have no notion of the forces they tempt.”

“Will he, though? ’Cause much as I hate to say so, darlin’, last time I looked he’d almost no notion of what he was juggling, either. And didn’t particularly want none.”

They both paused here, recalling in tandem Chess crying out in the wilderness, his dream’s desert:
Goddamn you both! I will
not
do what I won’t!

“But he
must
,” she said. “He is the Year-dancer, and the year is almost up . . . his very existence has shuffled the calendar, moving us too quick to stop toward the
nemotemi
, the Empty Days. That time when nothing should be done, because everything is possible.”

“Well, you
could
try just tellin’ him that, I suppose, and hope he jumps which way you want to push him.” She threw him a cold black stare, which he was pleased to realize he now found hilariously easy to ignore. “But lay that by. How goes it down below? Manage to invite any more of those relations of yours to join the fray on our side—dig up a few that’re awake, at least, anyhow? Or likely to become so?”

“Do not address me this way, Asher Rook.”

“But how
else
should I think to address you, honey? Intimate as we’ve become, like you just pointed out.” He returned her original smile, with interest. “So . . . they’re all a-slumber yet, is what you don’t want to cop to. Which, in terms of full-fledged gods currently in play, would leave it basically just you . . . and him. The Enemy.”

“As it has always been.”

“Well, in terms of steering Chess where he’s wanted, your God K has a hellacious head start already. So might be it’s time for us both to take a more direct hand.”

She nodded, a queenly dip of her back-sloped forehead, from which dead Miz Adaluz’s locks were creeping steadily back, restoring her original Mayan hairline.

“He must Become, completely,” she agreed, “and whatever help we can give him to do so will aid all three of us, in the end. Yet perhaps we should not discuss such matters of true import in front of your . . . pet.”

Oh, don’t mind me none
, Hosteen began, only to have her round on him in full terrible aspect, dragonfly cloak whipping out every which way, to fill the tomb with buzzing choir music.

“Silence, creature!” she snapped. “You have no right to insult me with speech at all, let alone so informally!”

If ghosts had shoulders, Hosteen would’ve been squaring his, fists rising like he thought the two of them were like to settle the issue with an all-out bar-brawl.
Silence your damn self, Jezebel! ’Cause with me, you’re pretty much none for none: I ain’t a hex, never took your Oath, and you already
got
me killed.

“If you truly believe yourself somehow outside my power simply because you are
dead
, old soldier—”

Rook interposed, smoothly. “Kees . . . consider yourself dismissed.”

The bottle appeared in his palm at a finger-snap, Hosteen’s hair-smoke coiling aimlessly inside. Immediately, his former friend’s sad imprint accorded it the entirety of his attention, like a pointing dog; Rook almost thought he could see the semblance of his grey mane rise, ruffling the way a vulture’s crest puffs in anticipation of something nicely rotten.

I can go now, that’s what you’re sayin’?
he asked, understandably suspicious.

“With my blessing.”

Keep it. But—if you happen to get the chance, tell Chess—

Hosteen stole a look back at Ixchel, who barely seemed aware he hadn’t left already. “Tell him what?” Rook prompted, gently.

A raft of emotions flickered ’cross the dead man’s face, all equally truncated. At last, he merely shook his head, and sighed:
. . . nothin’.

Rook cast the bottle down, heard it pop, and watched what little was left of his third-in-command blow out, a windless wind-gust, leaving nothing behind but those next uncertain steps along his future’s bleak road.

’Round and ’round it goes,
Rook thought.
Like a mill wheel ’cross the threshing floor. And the grain is ground into chaff, good and bad likewise, so one from the other is rendered indistinguishable.

“I’m thinking we might leave Three-fingered Hank in charge, while we’re both gone,” was all he said out loud, however. “Him and his ladies, that is. Makes for four pairs of eyes watchin’ our backs, ’stead of just the one.”

“As you see fit.”

“Should probably go up and tell ’em, then.”

“Yes,” she replied, utterly remote even as she reached for his hand, fingers cold as ever in this deep-set chamber pot of a place; rough with wear, slick with something he could only hope was sweat. One lavender fingernail seemed ill-set in its bed, peeling upwards, perhaps about to detach, so he covered it with his own lengthy index, fist engulfing all her stolen digits like a mitt.

My bed,
he reminded himself, repeating the words incessantly, a caltrop rosary. And folded her to him, allowing the hiss-winged swarm-cloak to carry them both away.

Yancey was well-braced to see Sheriff Mesach Love’s leprous salten face again, once she, Geyer and Morrow followed Chess down to the saloon’s front door. Yet she hadn’t at all expected what Chess did next, upon that threshold: stopped short, one hand thrown up, warning them all back—a former soldier’s gesture, ripe with uncharacteristic caution.

“You know how the Sheriff out there and me first met, Ed?” he said, not turning back, as contrast between harsh light outside and gloom within made a haloed silhouette of him.

Morrow hesitated, before admitting: “Read the Agency report, yeah. Like everybody else.”

Chess nodded, raising his voice to include Yancey herself—even Geyer—in the juice of the tale. “He was gonna lead a posse ’gainst us, which meant we had to set an example, so’s others wouldn’t get similar ideas. And me, I’d’ve just snuck in and killed the fucker, but Ash Rook wanted to make a production of the whole to-do, ’cause that’s how he’s bent. So I went along, like I always did. . . .” He paused. “Still, only now occurs to me—at least Love really
believed
what he preached back then, dumb bastard. Was more’n willing to die over it to defend his kith and kin, which’s pretty funny when you think about it, ’cause all of them was equal ready to die for
him
, too. That woman of his, who wouldn’t leave his side no-how, no matter what he said—got saltified the exact same way, God’s favour or no. And when she went down, she took their baby along with her.”

And I laughed at her, while it happened,
Yancey alone heard inside her head, Chess wondering over his own actions, as at a stranger’s.
Laughed at all three of ’em, like my sides were fit to split.

“You did him a terrible wrong, that’s true enough,” she agreed, out loud. Thinking back, at the same time:
And that’d be ’cause you’re a
bad man
, I reckon—selfish and angry and unforgiving, if not downright wicked. Though you’ve suffered, too, and pain makes us all human, more or less.

Yeah, well,
he replied, internally,
that’s the part ain’t debatable, like I told the Rev, back when he was moral enough to care. So I
still
don’t aim to debate it.

Adding: “Hell, gal, think I don’t know what-all I got to be sorry for? Used to be, though, I wouldn’t have cared; I miss that.”

“You can’t just not
care
—”

“
I
can. Could.” Here he finally turned, again seeming to address them together. “’Cause fact is, it don’t do any earthly good to feel bad over what the gun’s pointing at, when it gets to be time to draw. All that’ll ever do is get you killed, right along with the ones you pump a bullet in.”

Yancey drew breath to disagree, but Love already was bawling out his challenge once more: “Pargeter! You gone deaf or what, you heathen creature? Don’t cower there in the dark with your entourage—come face me on this cut-rate Megiddo’s field of battle, like the
man
you purport to be!”

“I’d tell you to come over here and say that,” Chess called back, “but . . . hell, guess I can probably screw you up just as easy, you stay right where you’re standing.”

And with that, he stepped free, shrugging his jacket back from his belt as he strolled into range: sheerest habit, both holsters being empty. While Yancey stepped straightaway out behind him, fast enough that Morrow and Geyer were hard-pressed to follow—only to halt, mid-stride, when she saw what Love had brought along with him.

“Lord God of Hosts and all his angels protect us!”

She felt herself stagger, caught up one more time by Ed Morrow’s welcome arm; clutched close to its warmth for comfort, finding none. Because—those figures arrayed ’round Love, just waiting—she knew them . . .
had
known them. They hung as if by hooks through the neck, all their weight dangling limp, blank eyes staring off to a dozen different quarters. And woven over it all, pallid flesh and dirty rigs alike—sewn through the muscle, covering bone where it showed, blossoming crimson pods at every cheesecloth-skinned joint—a net of Weed throbbed and knotted, a hundred thousand marionette cords grown thick and juicy, hideously animate.

Morrow tensed like he wanted to throw punches, but didn’t know where to aim. “Oh, you crack-walking son of Goddamn Perdition,” he said, in much the same tone Yancey’d just used.

Love simply shrugged, and spread his arms out wide—unconsciously cruciform—to encompass the army he’d brought along with him. Yancey’s eyes followed them as though magnetized, helpless not to recognize faces, along the way: poor Sheriff Haish’s remains, neck wound packed full of leaves that fluttered with each heave the Weed forced out of him, like soft green gills. Hugo Hoffstedt to his right, even worse—torn-off head held precarious atop his body, wobbling with each step, by tendrils wound ’round neck stump and skull alike. Mister Frewer, so cadaverous in life, now looked sucked almost dry; his head bobbed loose as well, seeming to float on a fan-like growth of fronds that strung ’emselves through jawbones and cheeks, rendering his entire brain-pan a ball balanced between invisible juggler’s fingertips.

Everywhere Yancey looked, yet another of her murdered wedding guests stood repugnantly upright, Hoffstedt’s Hoarders and Mouth-of-Praisers reforged by death into a more tenuous fellowship. On all too many of them, she saw livid slashes where they’d shed blood to feed Chess, far too late to benefit from their sacrifice. And finally, to either side of Love himself . . .

Both Yancey’s knees gave out, so quick she barely felt them go—but this time, she caught herself in mid-fall and drew up back up sharply, hands falling to what were now
her
gun-butts. Using her own rage as fuel, she gladly allowed it to eat her anguish ’til nothing remained but a genuine will to shoot ’til she could shoot no more, no matter
how
many bullets it took to put these apparitions down for good.

And then you, Sheriff. I’ll see you ground into parts so fine you poison the earth you stand on ’fore I allow any more of
this
disgusting offence ’gainst life itself, Goddamnit.

Her father, chest-hole thick with Weed that swelled and beat like a second heart; Uther, green filling out the grisly wounds deforming his half-pulped skull like a mask, right hand a sticky glove, hiding the hole Yancey knew had been blasted through it. He still wore the remains of the same suit he’d spoken his vows to her in.