A Rope of Thorns (40 page)

Beyond, Sheriff Love whirled and stopped dead, his pole-axed look near-comical. He had only a moment to stare before the ground whiplashed again under all of them, a crack of force and heat exploding outwards; it knocked Love yards backward through the air, coming down so hard his salt-armour shattered, shelling itself in chunks. Yancey and Ed themselves were tossed like toddlers on a blanket, slamming heavily onto the ground some feet apart, shocked stupid. Yancey blinked up, black spots bursting in her tunnelling vision, wondering why the earth under her back felt so strangely . . . soft.

Then the sky turned green.

Morrow saw Chess’s silhouette etched sharp against the light-cataract pouring through him, before the radiance blazed up too bright to bear; shading his eyes with one arm, he braced the other on the ground, and felt it change: salt cracking, resolving itself to dust, and further. Until it became a moist brown soil, worm-full and slick, so rich it tingled.

Morrow jerked his hand back and saw fresh new grass boiling upwards, swallowing his palm print whole.

The green light was a warm wind stroking every inch of him, even through his clothes. Morrow yelled wordlessly as a spurt of burning pain corkscrewed through his arm, then turned to euphoric heat; viridian fire went crawling through the still-open sacrificial gash, sealing it over with pink new skin. The weakness washed away. Twisting, he saw Yancey sit up in another patch of spring-fresh foliage, goggling, as her own wounds’ slate was wiped similarly clean.

Following the blast’s path, grass bled outwards, ripping up through the salt crust and devouring it. The wave swept over Asbury and Songbird, leaving the China-girl’s leg suddenly straight and strong, the Professor’s cheeks blood-clean. Pinkerton, his hurts far less mundane, glowed fiercely alight a moment, as if lightning-struck, before the power sank inside; his often-altered form resolved once again to the mere man Ed remembered from that fateful train ride, two Novembers ago.

As for Love, meanwhile: white flakes and shards cracked off the Sheriff, crashing down, a snowstorm of grey and white rubble that uncovered flesh, skin, hair, patch by painstaking patch. The uneven pigtails Morrow dimly remembered from a pre-mortem sketch had given way to full, flowing locks: Love’s face, clean-shaven in its time-stopped revenancy, now bore a curly beard so matted it made Morrow’s own face itch to look at, while what semblance of clothes his undead salt-flesh presented had dissolved headlong, becoming mere rags and tatters. Before Morrow realized it, the transition was complete. Mesach Love stood reborn, gangly as a new colt—barefoot, bare chest heaving—amidst the wreckage, staring at his own long-fingered hands like he had no earthly idea what they could be.

And still Chess burned on, a verdant holocaust, pouring so much life into that ruined town it repaired every ravage it spilled over. Of the face-fallen statues choking Bewelcome’s town square, some cracked apart into shapeless piles, then flared up green, recapturing their original forms. Before Morrow’s stunned eyes, the salt literally burst off them and people emerged, staggering forth. Like Love, their clothes were frayed as if they had worn them all that time, hair and beards ridiculously overgrown, yet skin and eyes baby-clear. Cries of shock, wonder, joy began to rise. The eroded shapes of buildings sketched themselves anew in chartreuse lines, resuming their substance: beams and bricks, mortar-laid stone. Even those dwellings that’d been no more than canvas tents reared up, raised once more.

And all of it green-tinted in Chess’s backwash, but real, its own natural shades restored. Not a hint of salt’s awful greyish-white was to be found, anywhere.

The regenerative wave-pulse slowed, now, reaching the town’s borders, well outstripping the original zone of devastation. As it did, the green light faded, thinning, a reservoir nearing empty. Morrow turned back, squinting, trying to distinguish Chess’s form—only to catch sight of him just as he folded backward, collapsing bonelessly to the grass.

“Chess,” he whispered, lurching forwards. Strangers blocked his way, shouting questions; he shoved them aside. Some struck back in bewilderment and anger, and suddenly Morrow found himself seized by a dozen hands at once. He thrashed, grunting, too desperate for anger . . . until a woman’s voice rose above the crowd’s babble, so full of joy and anguish and disbelief it shamed everyone still.

“Mesach!
”

“. . . Sophy?”

Yancey watched Sheriff Love push his way through, so tatterdemalion a figure she could barely connect him with his previous terrible aspect. Then his eyes lit on the one who’d screamed his name—a well-formed blonde with a dark freckle marking her wide brow, just off-set of centre, clutching a wailing, shawl-wrapped baby—and his face seemed to melt with joy.

“Sophy! Oh, my Lord Jesus, thanks and all praise be to Him and His Name—”

He ran to them, tails flapping, and seized them in an embrace so tight it seemed he meant to swallow them whole. They clung to each other, shuddering as they wept.

So young,
Yancey thought, blinking away her own tears.
I never saw how young he was. So young, so happy.

Like Uther was. Like
I
was too.

Still sobbing, Love’s woman pushed him back a bit, staring up into his face. “Mesach, how? How did all this, this . . .” She gestured vaguely round. “. . . come to be?”

Love hesitated, but was finally forced to admit, in all fairness: “Rook’s boy—Pargeter.” And turned away, to fix his gaze where Chess had fallen.

When Sophy Love saw what he was looking at, she actually screamed a little. Though the blood-sheet’s bulk had boiled away, fresh spurts still gouted, if ever more slowly and weakly, from the uneven V-shaped gash that traced Chess’s breastbone and ribs—one unhealing wound in this whole town. A mere man would have been long-dead already; in truth, Yancey could barely believe that even Chess could still be alive, let alone still able to rasp:

“Fuck. Fuh, fuh, fuh . . .”

Trailing off in another liquid burst of coughing, Chess tilted his head, eyes shifting to seize on Love’s approach. With Sophy at his side and the other Bewelcomers gathering adjacent, Love shook his head, slowly.

“What you did, Pargeter . . .” he said.

Chess’s face contorted, sneer and snarl at once. Spraying blood down his chin, he spat.

“Dih’nt . . . do ih . . . f’
you
,” he replied.

And then, the light went out. Chess’s head relaxed, horribly slowly, to one side. His limbs spasmed, insectile, locked in death’s final jitter.

“
CHESS!
”

Yancey twisted again, finally spotting Morrow where he lunged against a dozen Bewelcome men’s strong arms; struggled and bucked, to get only a punch in the gut for his pains. Another man struck him on the back of the head, open-palmed, yelling: “Let him rot, the little bastard! You know who that is, stranger?”

“Better than any of you ever will, motherfucker!” Morrow shouted back, thrashing. It got him another slug, this time ’cross the face.

Sophy Love, her initial shock gone, ignored it all, continually tracing her husband’s face, as if unable to keep from touching him. “Seemed—forever, an eternity. Like I was dreaming, save I couldn’t wake. What’s happened, Mesach?”

Love held her by both shoulders, smile boyish-wide. “You’ve been restored, girl; He saw you through, like I said He would. You were always so strong in your faith, Sophy—stronger than me, by far, and that’s what saved you. Saved all of us, to be together again at last.”

“Sheriff Love?”

Perhaps it was the almost toneless diffidence of the question that disarmed him; Yancey would never know if Love might’ve reacted more warily to anything louder. Simply that as he turned to face her, on sheerest reflex, she lifted one of Chess’s Colts—and put a shot neatly through his bare chest, just below the breastbone.

Yet again, Love plunged to fetch up on one knee, supplicant; Sophy shrieked, dragging a wail of fright from her babe along with howls of shock and fury from the watching crowd, all of which slid over Yancey like water off tarred canvas. Without haste, she walked to where he knelt, and placed the other gun against his forehead.

“Draw,” she said. Knowing full well he had nothing left to do so with.

Love gasped, paralyzed as his followers seemed to be, utterly aghast by the situation’s impossibility. Then the shock in his eyes gave way, like seasons turning over: Yancey saw fury, then memory, guilt, regret. Eventually, at the last, a bitterly sad acceptance.

“’S fair,” he managed. “Wasn’t . . . the True Lord at all, who aided me. I knew that. But since . . . I got what I wanted, I’ll . . . pay the price . . . gladly.”

“Glad or sorry, I don’t much care.” The coldness inside her had eaten everything, leaving this one last task to complete. “Goodbye, Sheriff.”

She pulled the trigger.

Yancey’s final bullet went in at an angle, came out the same way—took half of Love’s nice new skull along with it, from what Chess could glimpse. He’d’ve liked far more to see it done closer up, and taken his time enjoying the view. But he felt his spirits lifted just a tad by the shot’s echo, that oh-so-familiar refrain.

Little Missus Kloves served out her apprenticeship and joined the fraternity of shoot-to-kills, blooded herself in anger, leaving the table well-set for a nice long dinner of revenge served cold. Not too shabby, for some chocolate-box flit in skirts probably never expected to get ten miles out from that dust heap we found her in.

As though Chess hadn’t been just as much the death of that damn place, in far more direct fashion than even Sheriff Love himself. But it didn’t much matter now, he reckoned; enough that he knew the truth, and owned it. Wouldn’t be long, either way.

Oh, and everything really was going now, eaten ’round the edges like a rag on fire—fast,
fast
. So Goddamn unremitting.

It amazed Chess how he’d really believed, almost all along, that there was nothing he’d miss, leaving this world.
Only the whole of it, you ass-stupid fool
.

Every bit, the living and the dead, and then some; hot sun on his back, the wind and the rain, full-out galloping into battle, feel of his guns in hand, a good hard fuck. Getting drunk—on absinthe, anger, blood. Stomping twice on some enemy’s face for good measure, and laughing while he did it; the sound of Asher Rook’s voice preaching, or Yancey’s, singing. Ed’s heartbeat under his cheek.

Old Kees Hosteen ribbing him ’round the campfire, taking slaps just to stay close, and never faulting him for it.
Just the way you are, and we all know that, Chess. God damn, you’re a mean little man.

Friends.

More than one by the end of it, yeah, and not
all
of ’em paid for in blood, or favours. Whoever would’ve seen
that
comin’, back in his San Fran gutter days?

Ed’s face again, a-swim in the gathering darkness, struggling against his captors—was that raw pain on it
for
Chess, or because of him? He hadn’t ever looked to see anybody mourn over him, dead or alive. Hadn’t ever looked to care if they did, or didn’t.

Yancey’d been snatched up too, now—pinned at the wrist by one man, the waist by another, grimly wrestling with a third over her firearm. Love’s woman swayed, mouth an open black wound in a pink-and-white mask, while that brat of hers screamed on. Between them, the long-limbed collapse of Sheriff Love had finally resolved itself into a heap of fresh meat, his zealot’s eyes gone blank and cooling, rolled to the sky. No one seemed to be paying all that great a mind to it anymore, considering; far more intent on Yancey, who they looked like they were fixing to rip apart, for having connived his doom.

Which maybe explained why none of ’em paid any mind to the greasy blackness Chess saw—felt?—boil off Love’s flesh, seeping out through his gaping mouth, his nose, his ears, the very pores of his skin. The Enemy, shucking its busted-up cat’s-paw like a popped butterfly-bag and eddying Chess’s way once more, wrapping itself ’round him coil by loving coil ’til it was close enough to whisper through his skull, like it was a broken bone flute.

My sister spoke truthfully. You are at the very end of your cycle—a sacrifice once more, bringing life out of the dead land but saving none for yourself. Your wound is one you cannot hope to heal.

Noticed that, yeah, thanks.

Yet I can save you, still. If you accept my help.

Chess almost tried to laugh, but thought better on it.
Oh, sure. ’Cause trustin’ some fucker offers you your life at the Reaper’s doorstep always works out so well.

Do you
want
to die,
pelirrojo
?

And now the laugh
did
bloom, painful-pleasurable as he’d expected—a firework bubble of spite crowding the rest out, if only for a mere half-second before it popped, spraying his insides with paraffin.

Ask you that myself
, he barely managed,
’f I only could.

I know you would, little brother. Ah, how I do like you for it!

So you’ve said
, Chess said—all his anger suddenly gone flat again, exhausted by every last part of this yammer. Too tired even to turn away, assuming his abused body would’ve allowed it.

The Enemy looked down on him, hole-eyes barely narrowed in a dust-black face—a death’s head reversed, if you could say that of someone who’d never died, or been born at all.

Were this world once more the way she wishes
, it told Chess, with a nod in still-hidden and time-locked Ixchel’s direction,
no one like you would be allowed anywhere near my
ixiptla
. They gave me princes—youths raised to love me since birth, cultured, educated. Kings-to-be who yearned to die in my place, to have everything I gave them stripped away in an instant of awful ecstasy. To be shucked like corn, a red pain-flower, and rolled down the temple steps afterwards, one more corpse on a pile.

They were idjits, then. Got what they deserved.