A Rope of Thorns

by Gemma Files

  Except for Love.

  On the ground, aching all over, Ed Morrow came back to himself in a rush, slammed together once more by the whip-tail scorch of Missus Kloves’—Widow Kloves, now—desolate cry. For a split second, he thought on how it’d be to be made mateless and orphaned on the same damn day, and that supposedly reserved for celebration. How it’d feel to know it was your fault, too, for having brought the means of everyone else’s destruction in through the door and handed ’em ’round like any other guest, thinking your will alone could keep ’em from acting like curse-laden skeletons at your unsuspecting husband’s marriage feast.

  A split second only, not a hair more. After which he forced himself up, grabbed Chess ’round his drunken-lolling praise-junkie neck and growled in one ear: “Help her, Goddamnit, ’fore that crazy bastard does her like he’s done for the damn rest! It’s the least you owe.”

  Chess’s breath came huffing out visible, heavy with green-spiced vapour. “Don’t owe that bitch nothin’,” he snapped back, automatically. “Hell, I ain’t the one wants to get up under her skirts. You like her so much, maybe you should take a swing at that crusty bastard yourself.”

  “Tried that already, remember? You were there. Didn’t end well.”

  Before them, Love stood over op Missus Kloves, gesticulating like a premier Sensation Scene melodramatist: The Preacher Transformed, or, God’s Monster! While she, a mere slip of a thing in her green- and dust-stained wedding duds, simply glared at him past her husband’s corpse, grey eyes gone so hard you could strike matches on ’em.

  “Well, sir,” she said, with admirable haughtiness, “your work here seems done. Unless you’re fixed to kill me, too.”

  Love thought on that, then shook his head. “No,” he replied. “You knew what you did, but not why you shouldn’t, so I’ll trust God in his mercy to grant you time to reflect on your sins, and repent of them. For the nonce, therefore, I’ll let you live, for our great Father’s sake.”

  Missus Kloves drew her lips back, showing all her neat white teeth at once. And hissed at him, voice rage-thick, “My father is dead.”

  For just a tick, Morrow saw Love’s regained mask of sanity shudder, his leprous hands curl into claws. But with an effort, he appeared to thrust those impulses away from him, having already overindulged, to take the high road. Gave himself a species of all-over shrug, and turned away.

  Only to find Chess right there, his fingers already dug deep in the “lapel” of that salt-skin-memory mélange Love wore for a coat.

  “Time t’go, Sheriff,” Chess told him. “Just like the Marshal said.”

  That same no-explosion, a barely there toll struck on the world’s bell, and so Goddamn fast. Faster yet, every Goddamn time.

  Chess and Love were there, then Chess was back, like he hadn’t ever left. And Love?

  Gone, at last, if only in body. Not like Pa, Sheriff Haish, Mister Frewer—poor, stupid Hugo Hoffstedt, laid low, never to return. Or Uther.

  Yancey sat shivering in the street while Pargeter and Morrow, fellow architects in the destruction of everything she’d ever known, exchanged a look.

  So easy, she found herself thinking, too bone-tired to even be angry. It’d’ve been just that easy for him to dispose of Love all along, had he only wished. Or rather, had he thought to.

  Pargeter was still humming with whatever she and the rest’d poured into him, swaying slightly, stare glazed. It snapped in his already-green eyes, lifted his red hair, lent a greenish, motile tinge to his skin. His very sweat crackled, galvanized, in a way that both repelled and attracted. From the way Morrow stood, she could tell he wanted to touch him—and so did she, for that matter. To crawl into that fatal little man’s too-bright shadow and curl herself ’round his legs like a cat, for just as long as he’d be inclined to let her.

  There’s nothing left for me here, she thought, without any par-ticular emphasis. Not one single thing.

  No, the voice in her head agreed. You cannot stay. But . . . neither can he. For there is yet more damage to be done here, nonetheless.

  The Weed was almost entirely grass now, a jewel of fertility in a sore, parched land, not evil, but unnatural. And so long as Chess Pargeter was its anchor, it would only keep on spreading.

  Removing him, however, might at least—disarm it, Yancey supposed. The way pulling bullets from a gun made it a different sort of weapon.

  People would return. She owed them a place to rebuild that didn’t have him in it, or her.

  Though Pargeter was already turning away, Morrow’s gaze stayed on Yancey, as she’d somehow trusted it would. And though a part of her rose against the idea of abandoning her husband of an hour’s cooling side so soon, there was no point in staying to mourn; Uther Kloves would be equal-dead no matter where she went. No betrayal, then, just a cold urge, a horrid practicality—the realization that wherever Morrow and his half-god master went, Sheriff Love was sure to follow.

  This is true, yes. You know it, granddaughter.

  Yes. Not to mention how she’d need to know how to kill, as well, by the time their paths crossed once more. And killing was something both these bastards knew, intimately.

  Painfully, she twisted already strained hips, raising herself to a clumsy crouch—at which point Morrow put out a hand to help, like the gentleman he no doubt hoped she thought him. Even now, with the wreckage of Pargeter’s passage all ’round ’em, and her birthplace flattened like a bug . . . she’d’ve laughed, if she’d had that left in her.

  “Thank you,” she said, and let him draw her up. To Pargeter: “We need to talk.”

  “Don’t see how.”

  “Don’t you?” Yancey showed him her hand, her arm; saw his nostrils twitch at the blood that still ran there. “Yes, you’re powerful enough right in this instant—but who’s to say you won’t need further reverence, in future? Can’t leave without what remains of your congregation, Mister Pargeter.”

  To which Pargeter just gave her a look: green sunlight through a magnifying lens, piercing, painful. “Don’t go affectin’ any concern for me and mine, girl. Think I can’t see the hate in you? I got time enough for one revenge only, Missus, and it ain’t yours.”

  Morrow scowled. “Chess—”

  “Not happenin’, Ed. She’d be a millstone ’round both our necks.”

  “We do owe her, Chess.” If Pargeter’s gaze was fire, Morrow’s was stone, utterly obdurate. “We brought this on her, in all its awfulness. As you damn well know.”

  “She brought it on herself. We’d laid low, left on our own recognizance—”

  “—Love might’ve turned up anyhow, and killed us both. Like he probably would’ve here, she hadn’t done that blood-trick of hers to save your ungrateful ass—”

  “—and if my aunt had nuts she’d be my uncle, Ed; that ain’t the fuckin’ point, nohow.” But the strange fire was fading, just a little, from Pargeter’s eyes. He pointed at Yancey. “You know where we’re going, what we gotta do; know what our odds are of livin’ through it, too. You really wanna put her ass up in the sling with ours? That what it means to you, to pay her back?”

  Morrow stared at him—then hauled him close and laid a full open-mouthed kiss on him, as much from desperation as desire. Yancey felt the tug of it in her own loins, sick with shame amidst all her loss; Pargeter fought to not react, albeit perfunctorily. But when Morrow released him, that stone-hard look hadn’t much altered.

  “I know,” Morrow said, softly. “So do it for me, or don’t.”

  Pargeter cleared his throat, then shrugged. Without warning, he seized Yancey’s arm, sending an invisible rash of prickling heat through her body; smeared blood and dirt powdered off into the air. And then the flush sank bone-deep and snapped her stiff and upright, a wind-filled sail—her eyes widened, fingers splaying, spasming. Green light leaked from her mouth.

  “Aw, hell—” Morrow‘s own big hand fell upon Pargeter’s, gripping as if to pull it away, but Yancey felt Pargeter’s power instantly
snap-surge across into him as well, a spark jumping gap between metal and flesh. The supernatural cyclone whirled compass-wide, dizzying and queasy; Hoffstedt’s Hoard shimmered, dissolving mirage-like, lost behind an undulating veil of power.

  Stop it! Yancey called, her mind and Pargeter’s abruptly merged, the way she’d never hitherto been able to with anyone but Mama; overrode his consternation completely in her haste, refusing to “listen.” Take us out of here, sir, now! Let whatever’s happening work its tricks elsewhere!

  This time, Pargeter didn’t even bother to argue, just let her rip: that same green blink, a cloth-wrapped hammer-hit, right ’tween the eyes. And then—

  —Yancey came down, jolted enough to stagger as the sere earth turned under her wedding slippers, all previous tumult-stink instantaneously whisked away as clean, cool air licked her face. Strong arms caught her in mid-plunge; disoriented, she allowed Mister Morrow to take her weight and gulped in deep, coughed out hard, stomach clenching painfully.

  They stood high on the side of a long and shallow valley, with stunted firs and sagebrush for a nearby tree line. The next slope’s centre was scored by a dry riverbed, low-set sun hanging mild above, sky speckled white as any hen’s egg: all of it clean of anything but dust and weed, empty of threat. All of it utterly, wrenchingly unfamiliar.

  “Where . . . ?” Yancey managed, eventually, but Morrow just shook his head.

  “Seems somewhat familiar,” he offered, at last. “But . . .”

  Behind them, still aloft, Pargeter hovered a foot above the ground for one vertiginous moment more, before starting at last to sink. He touched down bootheels-first and smoothed down his finery, wiping all hint of battle-marks away, before marching right past them both, making for the canyon’s narrow channel.

  “Well?” he asked, impatient. “Two of you comin’, or what?”

  “You . . . ain’t minded to rest?” Morrow called back.

  “No time, no need.” Pargeter snapped his fingers, sheathing them in lightning—checking he’d regained full control of his arcane faculties?—then snapped again, to banish it. “We’re in the hill country, near as not to Splitfoot’s; ten minutes should see us on their doorstep, well outta harm’s way. So let’s us stop dickin’ ’round, and—”

  But here he froze, reorienting: seemed to sideslip distance, suddenly back at Morrow’s side, both guns levelled. Morrow turned too, Yancey following after, as a lone figure stepped carefully from the scrub. Felt her jaw drop at the sight, unladylike.

  “Mister . . . Grey?”

  “Truth told? Not entirely.” The young man she’d known as Grey adjusted his hat and smiled, looking far beyond weary. To Morrow: “’Lo, Ed.”

  Morrow nodded back. Tonelessly: “. . . Frank.”

  Pargeter cocked both guns, probably pretty much for conver-sational emphasis alone. “Was you, wasn’t it?” he asked. “The extra weight I felt, comin’ out here. Didn’t even feel you grab on—how’d you do that?”

  Mister “Grey” indicated Yancey, with a wry smile. “Tryin’ to keep her from getting pulled along, mostly,” he admitted, “though that didn’t exactly take, I guess.”

  “Looks like.” The guns didn’t waver. “So—you know Ed and Ed knows you, but I don’t know you from sheep-shit; in my book, all that means there’s only one thing you can be. Care to prove me wrong?”

  Frank sighed, shook his head. “Think you well know how I can’t, Pargeter.”

  He locked eyes with Morrow, passing some silent signal; in return, Morrow took a deep breath, eyebrows canting in surrender. “Yeah okay, all right. Chess—Miz Col—”

  “Yancey,” she corrected, quickly, unsure she’d ever be ready to hear either maiden or married name again. “Call me Yancey, please . . . Edward.”

  Which last addition sent things rocketing straight into the realm of awkward-forward, not that Morrow let himself be seen to notice.

  “Yancey—allow me to introduce Agent Frank Geyer, of the Pinkerton Detective Service Agency. Sent here to bring us in, most likely.”

  Grey—Geyer—smiled again, this time more widely. “Not . . . entirely, no.”

  A pause ensued. Yancey glanced at her feet, just in time to see her wind-chased bridal veil go tumbling away along the canyon floor, smeared deep in bloody dirt, brief as some lost snow-ghost. And felt her past slip along with it, leaving her just another woman in a once-white dress.

  I have to be someone different now, she told herself, resolving not to let herself think too deep about the choices she had to make from this point on, lest she quibble to make them at all. Someone neither Pa nor Uther would recognize—me either, in days gone by. Do what I have to, in order to make sure that thing which laid them both low pays its dues. Fight fire with fire. So . . .

  Might as well start now as later, she supposed. If only for complete and total lack of any other option.

  “Well, then,” she said. “Better tell us all about that, hadn’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Geyer replied.

  Interstice

  Top headline in the Californian of San Francisco, for the first week of June, 1867:

  STARTLING NEWS FROM OVER THE BORDER!

  The Earthquake that Levelled Mexico City

  Has Also Derailed Partisan Siege Designed to Oust Mexico’s Hapsburg Emperor

  Offering Aid, Napoleon III’s Troops Return

  New Lease on Throne for Maximilian I

  “He, At Least, Has Not Forsaken Us”

  Still safely ensconced at their seat in Chapultepec Castle, from which the stately Paseo de la Emperatriz once issued forth, the Imperial couple—triumphantly reunited—announces intent to remain and govern the same country which lately threatened one of them with deposition & death.

  “My wife and I, children of Mexico in our hearts, have determined not to desert her in her time of trial,” the former Austrian Arch-Duke claims. “Indeed, this lamentable recent influx of hexen-kriegskraft from our beloved adopted land’s distant past serves as reminder that the original War for Mexican Independence was led by Martin Cortes, son of Hernan Cortes and La Malinche, against the privileges of the conquistadors. Thus we must remain ever vigilant as Christians, seeing how our sins return again & yet again.”

  Those historically educated amongst our readers may recall that Chapultepec was once a summer retreat for rulers of the Aztec Empire, which itself gave birth in turn to Hex City’s fabled “Rainbow Lady,” the savage so-called goddess at whose feet most of the recent damage may be laid (with, we are sad to say, an American-born hex’s foul connivance). Our sources inside the Imperial court claim that cultish shrines have sprung up where only lightly Catholicized peasants, conflating her heretically with Our Lord’s own mother, go to spill blood in her name, by the bucket-full . . . often with such violence that fresh hexes arise in the wake of these orgies of witchcraft-influenced false penitence, only to then rampage through the devastated zone anew.

  Of former President Benito Juarez and his ally Porfirio Diaz, once at the head of a rebellion intent on impeaching & executing his Excellency, little has been heard since the capitol fell. But Maximilian once more extends an offer of truce & amnesty if both will swear public allegiance to him & his heirs, the young Princes of Iturbide & Marzan. Meantime, the Emperor has renewed his alliance with Napoleon III of France, and offers any ex-Confederate soldiers who care to emigrate southwards the shelter of the Carlotta Colonies, should they value freedom from Union rule more than their loyalty to these re-United States. . . .

  From the same issue:

  STRANGE WEATHER, INSECT PLAGUES

  Whole Towns Throughout Arizona, New Mexico Rendered Unfit for Habitation

  Migrants Head our Way, Seek Shelter & Occupation

  A SECOND GOLD RUSH TO BE EXPECTED?

  Californios Braced for New Upswing of Crime & Competition

  Authorities of San Fran & Environs: “Anti-Foreign Laws in Place for Good Reason”

  Plus—from the busy pen of transplanted Ne
w Yorker Fitz Hugh Ludlow—this travel-account from what is quickly becoming America’s most hotly disputed area of interest:

  BLACK PILGRIMAGE

  A Frightening True-to-Life Tale of

  One Man’s Journey by Stagecoach Across the Painted Desert, Within Close Sight of

  HEX CITY!

  Magicians Received from All Quarters, with

  More Arriving Every Day

  Our Readers’ Pressing Enquiries Answered:

  Where Do Its Denizens Come From?

  How Many Live There Already?

  May Their Influence Be Avoided?

  BOOK TWO:

  EMPTY DAYS

  June 2, 1867

  Month Six, Day Eleven Movement

  Festival: Etzalcualiztli, or Meal of Maize and Beans

  This festival honours Tlaloc, Chalchiuhtlicue and Quetzalcoatl, all of whom are somehow identified with wind and rain. The drought is over—waters rise, and life begins anew.

  The Aztec trecena Mazatl (“Deer”) is ruled by Tepeyollotl, yet another form of Tezcatlipoca. But by the Mayan Long Count calendar, day Ollin (“Movement”) is governed by Xolotl, the Twin Shapeshifter, Lord of the West and Double of Quetzalcoatl. Though identified with sickness and physical deformity, he nevertheless accompanied Quetzalcoatl to Mictlan in order to retrieve the bones from those who inhabited the dead world of the Fourth Sun and create new life from them, thus repopulating our present world, that of the Fifth Sun.

  This is a day of the purified heart, a moment when human beings may best perceive what they are Becoming. A good day for transmutation, which arrives like an earthquake.

  Chapter Nine

  Black shapes outlined in spectral fire under a darkened sky, the air itself rent and somehow sparking, set abuzz like galvanized metal; it’d been a lamentably long time since “Reverend” Asher E. Rook felt the necessity of “casting” a spell, per se. Yet here he was, knelt down in the shadow of that first step-sided black ziggurat his dear, dread Rainbow Lady had raised up out of the cracked Arizona earth, which now formed the very heart of New Aztectlan—quoting his long-burnt Bible from memory, and hiding his perfidy in plain sight.