A Rope of Thorns (4 page)

“Won’t get . . . a stitch more from me, Mister Pargeter. I’m done.”

“Oh, you got
that
right,” Chess snarled, pulling all the harder, ’til Glossing’s entire plump visage seemed about to cave in. “Question is—you want the end of it to go quick? Easy? Or anything Goddamn but?”

“
Cheh,
” Morrow said, warningly.

Too late. Glossing slumped, emptying himself into Chess in one foul gush. When Chess looked up once more his pupils blazed like lamps, slitted and triangular; a ghostly cat’s gaze, touched with Hellfire.

Across the street, doors were opening—citizens either stood frozen and staring or went scattering off to find guns, the Law, the nearest preacher equipped for a long-distance exorcism. At the sight, power crackled between each of Chess’s ten spread fingers, so sharp it made even him jump.

“And what’re
you
all lookin’ at?” He demanded.

“Cheh, I seh less go. Less juss—c’mon, now.
Go
.”

“We’re lookin’ at
you
, you hex from Hell!” Some brave soul yelled, meanwhile, before ducking back into the town’s one saloon.

“Damn straight; we heard your story, Chess Pargeter. Wrecking decent folks’ homes, destroying respectable businesses.”

As the only mundane combatant here engaged, Morrow could sympathize with their simple human outrage, even when a few started tossing horse-apples along with the abuse.

“Invert! Vandal!”

“For
his name shall be called Abomination,
and
his place made desolate
!”

“That a jacket, or a damn circus-rig?”

Above, the clear sky growled, like it was getting hungry. Chess flushed, furiously; jacked up on Glossing’s stolen juice, his own anger reached out wider, causing the shattered store-window glass to run and drip, mercurially refusing to merge with the street’s dust around it.

“You motherless bitches,” he said, the lightning flashing ’round his palms rising wrist-high. “Dare to quote the damn Bible at me—I’ve
had
that, from the best! So c’mon over here and try it to my
face
, you lily-livered—”

“
Chess
, fuh shissakes—”

Chess blew out a snarling breath, and shook his head. “Hold on,” he told Morrow, knitting his still-sparking fingers painfully in the bigger man’s shoulder.

And—they were gone, popped out and back into existence in a half-second, the town erased like blown-off mist. Nothing but empty rock, scrub and equally empty overhang of cloudlessness, sun the colour of a struck match.

Chess stumbled back a pace, then sat down, heavily, like he’d been gutted. Morrow collapsed on his side, hands automatically gone to his maimed mouth . . . only to find the raw hole plugged once more with a bare rim of new tooth—man-sized, smooth as china plate—poking up, impossibly, through tender flesh.

He wondered how long it’d take to grow out fully, and whether keeping himself drunk throughout would help or hinder the process.

“Crap,” Chess exclaimed, suddenly exhausted. “I left the Goddamn horses behind.”

That night, sparks flew upward from the fire only to die halfway, like lightning bugs with aspirations to be stars throwing themselves skyward, heedless of their own hubris. That last was a word Ash Rook had once taught Chess, Grecian in origin—idolators same as those Mex fools who’d once worshipped “Lady” Ixchel and her like, though with the added appeal of having apparently thought it a tad strange for a man
not
to lust after his own kind. Which made ’em a sight more worthy of respect than any One True God Almighty-worshipping Bible-thumper Chess’d ever met with . . . ’side from the Rev himself, of course.

Here, however, Chess felt a shiver at the very name, and grimaced. Just no getting away from Rook when the man’s betrayal ran all through him like a bruisy pain, far too fresh to touch directly.

Across from him, Chess saw Ed Morrow look up sharply, like he could hear what Chess was thinking. “You all right?”

“I look like I’m not?”

Morrow frowned. “All seriousness? Well . . . yeah.”

There were a fair few replies Chess might have made to that, but he well knew Morrow’d done nothing to warrant them, ’sides from offer him support in ways he hadn’t thought to ask for.

So he simply sighed, and answered: “Just tired, is all. How’s that tooth?”

“Better. Listen, though, Chess—that calling the Doc spoke on . . .you feel it too, don’t you?”

Here the fire gave a punctuational
crack
, as though some unseen wooden knot had suddenly flared through. Chess felt it ring straight through the space where his stolen heart should beat, Dentist Glossing’s stolen power galvanizing him with a current of pure arousal fit to make every last nerve pop at once, in similarly spectacular fashion; it
hurt
him so’s he had to forcibly restrain himself from grabbing poor Ed by both ears and shutting him up, mouth-first.

“Every night,” he replied, instead. “But I’m stronger than he was, Ed—so I don’t aim to go there ’til I’m good and ready.”

To which Morrow just nodded, sagely. And yet—

When’ll that be, exactly?
Chess heard him think, nevertheless, no matter how he strained not to. The way he “heard” almost every damn thing around him, these days: two girls strolling east as Morrow and he rode toward the dentist’s shop, one of ’em sorting cake recipes, the other wondering when she’d have to start tying her apron higher (and how fast she could catch herself a Joseph-husband, ’fore what she was cooking in
her
oven started to show). An old man cleaning spittoons on the lodge-house stoop, hoping that pain in his stomach was last night’s stew, not cancer. A muscle-bound farm-hand moving west to trade for feed at the general store, casting eyes on Chess’s backside with the same interest Chess would have shown his, had their positions been reversed.

Hadn’t been for all that yammer, Chess might’ve seen Doc Glossing for what he was at the outset. Which was bad enough, and explained why his natural urge to shun even smallish cities had grown so almighty strong—get him and Morrow back out under a clear sky with enough miles ’round him to see horizon in every direction, and Chess felt immediately easier, if not a damn whit safer. But then things would start going in the opposite direction, a telescope reversed; every particle of “empty” country growing porous-sharp, leaking information like water, leaching memory like chalk. And letting in a whole new flood of voices which settled on him locust-loud, showing him things he didn’t know how he knew, and didn’t
need
to, either.

Songbird scrying in a dish of mercury and fingering the scar he’d given her, bright red on her ghost-pale face. . . .

Some band of Injuns riding fast enough to raise dust, with a warrior at their head whose face he almost felt he
should
know, if only from someone else’s memory. . . .

Doc Asbury in his travelling laboratory, throwing lightning between two steel balls—Pinkerton in his private train-car, scribbling dispatches—faceless agents dispersed to the wind, carrying all Chess and Morrow’s particulars in their pockets—red Weed growing wild, constantly turning its many floral heads at once to search out Chess’s scent, and re-orienting itself accordingly. . . .

While deep underground, Mictlan-Xibalba roiled like a crock-pot, throwing up cracks and sickness . . . and to the north, that
city
grew: dark spires rising, mortared with spells and pain; Lady Ixchel looking down on it all, her empty face the moon set high above. While at her side stood an amused shadow, tall as some blood-watered tree.

This was how things had been for Asher Rook, Chess now understood—
just
like this, the entire Goddamn time. No wonder
he did them things he did, with all this forever poking at him, never letting him rest.

Across the fire, Chess could see Morrow fixing him slant-eyed, with what was getting dangerously close to outright pity. To prevent himself from punching him right in the stupidly sentimental face, therefore, Chess broke off conversation entirely and lay down, trusting the annoying bastard to eventually follow suit.

To sleep, however, was always to lay oneself even further open, the way healing and infection both cracked a wound beyond its own stitchery.

Chess’d never been much of a one for reading—could do it in a pinch, but never for fun. But the dream began with words spilling out into the air before him—silver-white on black, reversed, thorny-twisted in the Gothic style. They hung there glinting, a spray of flickery nails. And next came the voice, as ever: Rook’s rasping tones, echoing straight down into a man’s groin. Reciting, while Chess felt his unwilling gaze pulled along those floating letters—

. . . His cheeks are like beds of spice

Yielding perfume

His lips are like lilies

Dripping with myrrh

His arms are like unto rods of gold

Set about with chrysolite

His belly is like unto polished ivory

Set about with lapis lazuli

His legs are like unto pillars of marble

Set on bases of pure gold

His body is like unto Lebanon

Choice as its cedars.

—Song of Solomon,
5:13 to 5:15.

Adding:
That’s you, Chess, sin and ruinous doom incarnate. And quite the prettiest thing I ever saw in my whole life, too—before,
or
after.

Chess saw the sky peel away in front of him all at once, present becoming past with one quick rip, like lifting a scab—thrusting him back from this moment to that, from dream to memory, right into Rook’s fond embrace. The two of them set up in front of some roadhouse cheval-glass, Chess perched on Rook’s lap while the Rev hugged him hard from behind, curled into the bigger man’s all-enveloping heat like a purring cat; stripped almost to his skin, with proof of desire pushing hard out the front of his small-clothes as he let Rook puppet him ’round, one hand grazing up through the red-gold fleece of Chess’s chest to tweak at a nipple even as the other sank steadily lower, always travelling the other way . . . widdershins, counterclockwise. The broad and pleasant road to Hell.

For He hath made every thing beautiful in his time; also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from beginning to end.—Ecclesiastes,
3:11
.

Chess frowned.
Wouldn’t be puttin’ a spell on me, would you, Reverend?

Aw, now, Chess. Would I even have to?

Probably not
, Chess realized, already defeated.

And even though just recalling how he’d once loved the man now sickened him . . . to have Rook’s hands back on him, even in a dream . . . hell, it shortened Chess’s breath. Made his chest’s hollow squeeze like the bastard’s fist was thrust deep inside, Rook’s phantom pulse beating hard enough to light the both of ’em up like fireworks.

Missed you, darlin’,
Rook rumbled, into his neck.
You miss me?

Not . . . as such.

Liar.

Well, you’d know, wouldn’t you? ’Sides—you got
her
.

A dark laugh as answer.
Oh, now, don’t sell yourself short. Maybe
she
missed you, too.

You fuckin’ son-of-a—

But Rook just stroked him, grasping at all Chess’s most betraying spots—thumb and forefinger skinning the swollen head of Chess’s cock, callused palm slicking briskly up and down, clever and inescapable. Chess arched, cursing his own response.

Uhhhh, shit, God fuckin’ damn. . . .

Yeah, that’s it. Just . . . like . . .
that
.

And now Rook too seemed caught up on the same wave of sensation, the same damnable trap—panting a bit himself, unable to quite keep from grinding against Chess’s body. Both hands kept equal-busy, with one dipping lower still—right into the sweaty nest of him, to probe at its leisure for that oh-so-familiar entry-point.

Chess gritted his mental teeth, bit his equally mental lip.
You really think this is goin’ to go that way, after all you done? Please.

Rook laughed again, muffled into the sweaty nape of Chess’s neck.
Still fussed over my methods—I understand that. But I do believe you’ll thank me for it later.

Hell I will!

Hell you
won’t
. You uncivilized, rude, improvident young man.

Improvident—that mean selfish?

Rash, thriftless, not providing for the future. Which you don’t much, do you?

Hell, no. I’ll be dead long ’fore I gotta worry about that.

Into Chess’s ear, a hot breath chased with a gentle bite:
Not if I can help it.

And now you think you got me
well
in hand, don’t ya?
Chess thought, anger and desire messing with each other all through him, the way laudanum could be used to cut liquor.
So he raised his chin to pin Rook fast with a backward glance, felt the Rev huff in quick, and smiled just a touch at the rush of power that reaction afforded him:
See? Still got it.
A quarter-turn more and they were staring straight at each other head-on, without the mirror to mediate; Chess felt it like a touch of fever, mildly vertiginous.

But then the whole scenario slid sideways, as it so often did in dreams, ’til Rook and Chess stood together on a balcony overlooking what Chess could only think must be Rook’s new home. All around reared up buildings slapped together from rock, mud and magic, black and strangely shaped; smoke billowed up from a hundred chimneys, limned in heat-shimmer. The sky was the colour of sugared absinthe.

So,
Rook “said,” weirdly sociable.
Since you don’t seem all too eager for my regular blandishments . . . here we are.
He swept one hand out, leaning back ’gainst the balcony’s oddly sharp railing, its wrought iron curlicues reminiscent of those Chess had seen on row house verandahs.
Gaze upon New Aztectlan, o pilgrim, and wonder.