A Rope of Thorns

by Gemma Files

  Chess bucked and writhed, but in his mind’s eye alone. He chewed at his own tongue ’til his teeth almost met, and still she rode him down through the storm, the rainbow’s black core, a cauldron of hissing dragonflies. Rode him ’til an ending of sorts lit up the hollows of their skulls, and all their eyes turned black.

  Motion through darkness, vertiginous downward plunge, and Yancey hit bottom at last. That dreadful female form had absented itself, along with the Reverend’s ghost; the two of them were left alone, nose to nose, and the weight of what she’d inadvertently done to Chess pressed at her chest like some massive iron bell’s clapper.

  “I’m so sorry,” Yancey said, eventually, knowing it made not a whit of difference. “I didn’t . . . I couldn’t’ve . . .”

  Thankfully, all Chess’s anger seemed to have fled in transition, leaving only gruffness behind. “’Course you couldn’t. Just don’t do it again—not without warning.”

  She hesitated, then ventured: “You must truly hate me.”

  That irritable spark flared up once more, though no longer directed her way; a flare of insight blooming, uncomfortable, undeniable. Snapping back: “Jesus, what for? You ain’t her, just ’cause you got a few of her particulars—ain’t my Ma, either. You’re—”

  —something different, the like I’ve never seen, with your clumsy-true aim and your high moral quackings. More akin to me than not, even folding in your choice of where to lay a roving fancy. Though he was with me last night, in the flesh, and don’t you ever forget it.

  More an ally than an enemy, in other words. One of the current gang, so tiny there was no point in either mistrust or rank, beyond the barest rudiment: Chess in front, the others behind, for protection—theirs, and his. Shedding blood in his half-deified name. Watching his back.

  Hell, even I can see that.

  Close as they were at this moment, the thought could’ve come from either, and still be just as true.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Night’s house rose everywhere. From horizon to horizon, the desert filled with its whisperings.

  To the west, a train powered by anguish rode ghostly rails, heading swift and sure for a certain hidden valley. Inside, its master dozed, sedated to a less immediate level of pain. His partners sat in the dining car, one watching the other throw a series of three coins over and over, noting down the results, which were—unsurprisingly—always the same.

  “Your divinatory scholars call this the I Ching, I believe,” Asbury said.

  Songbird did not bother to nod, let alone look up. “When Fu Xi first compiled them, the hexagrams were cast using a handful of yarrow stalks, but that method has been lost for centuries. The Han gave us coins instead, which serve.”

  “And the outcome?”

  The bleached girl-witch bent lower, studying the latest compilation of broken and unbroken lines. “Tui above, the joyous lake. Sun below, a gentle wind through the wood. Weakness outside, strength inside—a situation out of balance, extraordinary, dangerous. Such a condition cannot last; it must be changed quickly, or misfortune will result.”

  “I thought that was the path we were already embarked upon.”

  Her weak eyes flicked to rake him, visibly unfocused, yet too sharp too evade. “Did you? This is Pinkerton’s crusade, Professor, as you well know, though you raised no objection—but then again, neither did I. I keep my own counsel, with the Book of Changes as my advisor.” Colourless lashes drooping, as she quoted from memory:

  Nine in the third place:

  The ridgepole sags to the breaking point.

  Six at the top:

  One must go through water that goes over one’s head.

  Misfortune, but no blame.

  “Meaning?”

  “There are things more important than preserving one’s own life, so long as the right prevails.” She hissed through her teeth. “Ai-yaaa! Such foolishness. Yet the true reading is plain. If anyone is doomed to sacrifice himself to rebalance the whole, it will be English Oona’s son, not anyone sworn to our cause.”

  “Why cast these runes at all, then, if you see the future they speak of so clearly?”

  “Because luck can change, always; that is its nature. And always in more than one way.”

  Asbury nodded. “Indubitably. And yet . . . in a world containing both science and hexology, surely we have no need for such antiquated concepts as luck?”

  Obviously, Songbird did not feel this last observation worthy to be dignified with any sort of response. Instead, she let her red veil swing closed like a door, returning to her efforts; Asbury sighed, reaching for a fascinatingly appropriate yellow-backed dime novel he’d picked up at their last stop: The Salten Town, or, Outlawry Aplenty at Hex City’s Door!

  “It’s a hard life you lead, for one so young,” he said, as though to himself. “All . . . this. Were you not—” Here he glanced up again and hesitated, finding her dim gaze returned to him, even more off-putting than before. “—what you are, I mean,” he finished, weakly.

  “Were the sky not blue, perhaps, or the moon and sun exchanged? Old fool! What should I do, play with dolls? A hundred generations went to make me. I am a warlord born—an empress reduced to a brothel figurehead, sold alongside peasant girls in a muddy pigsty. More than match to any full-grown American sorcerer. So what matter, if I rail against time’s cage on occasion, or find myself intemperate?” He saw her fingers flex and tremble in their gilded sheaths, perhaps with the effort expended to not hex him silly.

  “Please—I meant no insult.”

  Songbird sniffed, suddenly cool and remote once more. “Gweilo go-se shifu, elevated undeservedly by cleverness—you have not substance enough to insult me. In the Forbidden City, they would have made a eunuch of you.”

  “And we have made you a whore. Is that so preferable?”

  “We each use the other for our own ends—you give me shelter from Reverend Rook’s accursed Call, and I lend power, as needed. If that counts as prostitution, I am hardly the only whore in this compartment.”

  Asbury flushed. “Nevertheless,” he went on, doggedly. “I am not unconscious of your position’s injustice. I sought only to offer you freedom, or the best version of it I can give; a kind you may not yet have contemplated, perhaps.”

  “What . . . freedom?”

  Diffidently, Asbury placed a Manifold upon the table where the coins of the I Ching yet rested. Beside it, he laid a delicate bracelet made up of a dozen interwoven rods; its metal looked like silver, but the dull clank it made on wood lacked silver’s chime, sounding somehow dead. Songbird narrowed her eyes further, as if both objects might be scorpions disguised by glamour.

  “You know the latest iterations of my device can drain away the hexaciously gifted’s accumulated power,” Asbury said, tapping the Manifold. “But this—” his hand moved to the bracelet “—is the next step. By donning the guard, composed of the same alloys that ground thaumaturgical forces, the hex’s affinity is blocked—he no longer draws in such forces to replenish himself, nor feels any hunger to do so, nor provokes such hunger in other hexes. With one simple bracelet, he can deny altogether the responsibilities of a never-asked-for burden.” He leaned forward, urgent. “You’d be free both of the Call and of any obligation to us. Without your power, Mister Pinkerton will have no need for you, and you could return to—well, wherever you want. San Francisco, far Cathay . . .”

  Songbird lifted her gaze. “And this ‘guard’—is it always made so, removable at will?” Her voice went softer yet, a silken rope noose-coiled. “Or are other forms of it yet more . . . permanent?”

  Asbury grew pale, stammering: “But surely, you see there are those of your kind who cannot be permitted . . . who are not . . . safe.”

  But here he broke off, realizing that thin squeaking he heard was her nail-sheaths grating against themselves.

  “Old man,” she said, “take care how you speak to me, or to any other ch’in ta, for that matter. I do not want your pity, or your ‘h
elp.’ Your devices mean nothing to me—less than nothing. For even if they do what you claim they will, it cannot be made permanent.”

  “I beg to differ—”

  “Beg all you wish. Do you truly think you can cure this sick world, wracked to its very core, by ‘curing’ me? I have a part to play, like the spider, the wolf, the carrion crow. And because I know this, because I am not stupid enough to deny it, I am already so far beyond your grasp that you should truly be afraid. Just think how much further even than that such as Chess Pargeter, Reverend Rook or his Lady of the Long Hair must be!” She smiled, revealing kitten-teeth. “Especially so, since—on your employer’s orders—we now travel toward them, rather than away from them.”

  Asbury swallowed. “You’re at risk too, then, as much as we, if not more. For all three will be hungry, when we arrive.”

  “Yes. But I, at least, will either conquer or die, doing what I was meant for. And you will not deprive me of my chance to do either with this manacle of yours, unless you wish to be cut a hundred times in a hundred different ways: denied xiao by ling-shi, both in this world and the next—all the next worlds, from Mictlan-Xibalba up through each and every one of the Ten Thousand Hells my amahs promised me.”

  Again, she met his eyes, and it was all he could do not to recoil from the sight. For now they were crimson as the veil that hid them, solidly, from sclera to pupils—Mars doubled, a study in vermillion. Until, having received the response she must have wanted, she blinked, and they returned to “normal.”

  “Now read your silly book, and do not dare to address me further,” she told him, dismissively. And returned to her endless scrying, flicking his offered jewellery aside like some errant lump of dung.

  Blasted by headache, Yancey retired early, ostensibly leaving the men to hammer out some sort of accord, though she knew in her heart any immediate agreement on strategy was unlikely at best; two former Pinkerton men and a man who thought Pink-killing admirable sport made for bad bedfellows, even with one of ’em being exactly that.

  Funny how huge this cramped room seemed, when empty. For a single heartbeat, Yancey wished Morrow was here to fill it up, then resolutely pushed all such imaginings away. He’s spoke for that way, she told herself, even if his natural bent sometimes takes his mind—elsewhere. And I suppose I don’t want to . . .

  Impose? Come between them? Deprive Chess Pargeter of what few minor comforts his life currently held—that horror of a man, impossible and unpleasant, his irreverent soul packed full of sorrowful rage with no other method of surcease?

  I do like him, more fool me, she understood, ruefully. My Goddamn error, indeed.

  Easing her boots off with a sigh, Yancey sat back against the headboard, let her lids droop ’til all she saw was the veins decorating their backsides, and counted breaths like sheep.

  Until: Granddaughter, a voice said—that same voice, bearer of bad news and good advice alike. We must talk.

  When she opened her eyes again, red-purple light striated the dream-sky above like a bruise. Yancey got to her feet, soil gritty under her bare soles. All around, scree-lined slopes rose up to an edged ring of stone. The air was thin and dry, cool with altitude, though the earth still held the dying day’s heat. A harsh scent of ash scored each breath she took, underlaid with something fouler. At the centre of the bowl, the dead grey-black embers of a fire sat, and beside them, oh, beside them . . .

  The Yancey of but days ago would have retched, and even now, she had to gulp down bile. Yet it was not the mere appearance of this ruined corpse that so revolted—albeit leathery and shrunken, it was less repugnant than the contents of most renderers’ carts. But the miasma magnified tenfold as she stared, coating her throat with tar and decayed fruit.

  “It is a Hataalii’s murder you smell, granddaughter.”

  Though the words were in no language she had ever heard, she understood them without effort. Yancey closed her eyes again; at once, the revulsion shrank sharply. “You’ve called me that for some time now,” she said. “And I’m mindful what courtesy you might mean by it, for which I thank you. But my mother was Mala Colder, born Mala Kiraly Lukacz, and though I didn’t have the pleasure of knowing her mother, I have no other. So, respectfully: use my name or any other title you please, ’cause I’m no kin of yours.”

  She braced herself, not daring to open her eyes, ’til dry laughter filled the air.

  The woman who stood unwavering on the crater’s edge, steady-balanced as if weighted, was both squat and unlovely: a frog-faced Indian squaw of no tribe Yancey knew—Apache, Sioux? Her long white hair stretched down to her belt in two slim braids; the shawl wrapping her was woven in complex, interleaving stripes of colour, sole bright thing about her, other than her black eyes’ predatory shine.

  “And this,” she announced, to no one in particular, “is why this one may be worth the talking to.”

  Smiling as she said it, but with nothing that looked like kindness. And the red-purple light of the sky clung to her, its power palpable as a forge’s heat.

  This, too, a days-younger Yancey would have found near-paralyzing. But after Chess Pargeter, and Love, and the feel of her blood going into the Weed, a steel she had never thought possible had woven itself through her spine. She met the woman’s gaze without flinching. “All right. Now . . . who are you, really?”

  The smile fell, a discarded mask. “Bilagaana dead-speaker,” the woman called her. “Why not make me tell you? You could, if you tried.”

  It was true, and Yancey suddenly knew it, the way she always did. And though the rush of that certainty was dizzying, she held onto herself, hard.

  “Yes. But why would I?”

  A moment, then another; the woman’s scowl relaxed. “You would not,” she admitted, “since you are no Hataalii. For which I am thankful.”

  Yancey’s eyes slipped back toward the dead fire pit’s awful companion. “That’s . . . yourself, lying there,” she said.

  The woman spat. “What was left behind, after Reverend Rook betrayed me to his Anaye-wife. Ai, that I was foolish enough to be merciful! But he was a man in love, though not with her.” She folded her arms and shook her head, bemused. “And for all that men say women do foolish things for love, a lovestruck man will let the whole world burn, or burn it himself.”

  Yancey thought of the scar underlining Chess’s breastbone, and fought down a shudder. “Love’s . . . not what’s between them, now, it seems.”

  The woman sniffed. “Seeming is nothing; you yourself told that red boy as much, just today. Now—come up here beside me, dead-speaker. See what lies waiting.”

  Yancey calmed herself with a deep breath, then climbed the loose scree of the inner slope ’til at last she stood perched on the top edge by the woman’s side, where she was surprised to realize herself a good few inches taller than her mysterious mentor. Then she looked out—eastward, since the sunset was behind her—and caught her breath.

  Nightfall lay thick over the land, lights sparking up here and there, sadly separate. Slowly, Yancey realized she must be seeing for miles and miles, far beyond what the horizon should have permitted: Towns, cities, states, territories—near the entire West, maybe even far as the Mississippi. But this darkness was something more, Weed’s onslaught the merest surface froth of something far more corrupt.

  Like rancid oil at the bottom of a mud-darkened puddle, Yancey could trace the currents of wrongness that eddied over the world. Within seconds, she had linked them back to their thickest points—the blurred, half-real edifices of Rook’s hex-town; the quake-flattened wreckage of Mexico’s capital, hundreds of miles south; and most of all, the salt-flat, white-glowing husk of Bewelcome. Black cracks pierced each place like broken cinders, producing a rushing vertigo in her stomach.

  “Once, when things were not so pressing,” her not-grandmother said, “I would have wasted time—cajoled, flattered, offered instruction, as I did with Rook. But I have been longer than I expected fighting my way back from the Far Places
, and things are grown so bad it seems best to speak plainly, if only to avoid misunderstanding.”

  “Likewise, and most decidedly,” Yancey said, unable to turn away from the horrid sight.

  The woman sighed. “I have sent dreams to my own tribe’s dead-speakers, but they are too far away to be helpful. Still, they in turn have sent emissaries to their nearest enemies, reminding them we share a common foe—worse even, in its season, than your kind has been to us, ghost-face girl. A threefold menace, each branch sprung from the same tree of bones: the Weed, and who it follows after. The risen city, and those who rule it. The crack, and what comes out of it. All bent to one abominable purpose.”

  “To destroy us?” Yancey guessed. “Or . . . everything?”

  “Grandma” shook her head, sharply. “Merely to thrust this world on toward the Sixth would not appease she who drives this monstrousness, or serve her ends. She wishes to undo a destruction—force time itself backward to restore what she remembers as her followers’ glory, before your people meddled in their affairs.”

  “My people?”

  “Those who overcame the Mexica—steel hats, she calls them. Los conquistadors.”

  “Um—conquistadors were Spanish, I believe.” At Grandma’s look: “But lay that by. . . . This’d be Reverend Rook’s ‘Rainbow Lady,’ I take it?” She’d almost said the name outright, but stopped in time, remembering Ed’s palm making harsh contact with her jaw to keep a similar name from possibly summoning its owner. Though what lingered was not the pain of the blow, but the stricken look in his eyes, immediately after.

  Grandma spat. “She thinks herself fit to overturn Balance, who is nothing but a shed snakeskin of venom and folly. And for that, she has loosed such horrors upon the world. . . .”

  She seized Yancey’s arm, pointed at the throbbing void centring Bewelcome’s whiteness. “It has reached further down now, to the Ball-Court’s lowest levels. Past the Mexica host, presided over by Mictantecuhtli and his fleshless lady Mictecacuihuatl, into the realm of One and Seven Death and all their nightmares.” Grandma’s voice fell into a mesmerizing rhythm, and with each name, images flashed before Yancey’s eyes—too quick to be truly seen, too ghastly to forget. “Jaundice Demon and Skull Sceptre, who cause the flesh to sicken and fall. House Corner, his sharp teeth bared. Lord of Rubbish and the Stabbing Lord, who attack from the blind side. Packstrap and Wing, whose victims die struck from above on the roadway, alone, with the dark wind blowing past.