A Rope of Thorns

by Gemma Files

  Pinkerton laughed, gooily. “I’ll concur with Mister Pargeter in one thing, Sheriff: God plays nae part in these proceedings. And so . . .”

  Faster than Chess would have believed such a bloated, heavy thing could move, Pinkerton’s bunched fist swung at Love’s jaw—only to slap cold into Love’s upflung palm, and stop. Green lightning billowed, backlashing into Pinkerton, who roared in agony; surprise flattened his already truncated visage into something truly ludicrous. As Love clamped down with all five fingers, the salt that was his substance flowing halfway up Pinkerton’s arm, his opponent’s mass began to shrink, collapsing. In turn, Chess felt that awful pull in his own guts, as Love’s dead essence drank up the power of Ed’s and Yancey’s blood with greedy delight.

  Instinct took control, prompting a near-fatal mistake: Chess flung out both his own hands, double gun-stance style, and spasmed as the power-drain’s ripping agony only redoubled. Love turned, slow as minerals forming—ground-salt rippling upwards along his body, coalescing into plates and spikes that sheathed him like whitish-grey slabs of armour, a lime-crusted stalagmite grown head-high in seconds—and smiled.

  “Foolish,” he remarked, probably to both of ’em. “Yet not unexpected.”

  This loss of contact seemed to snap their link; the lightning died, and Pinkerton dropped back onto his ass with a grunt. Chess buckled to all fours, gasping for breath. At once, every ounce of strength was gone from his limbs; it took all the effort he could manage to keep from simply falling flat on his face. He felt the ponderous, trudging steps as Love came closer, ’til two encrusted boots finally placed themselves before him. Even as he watched, their salt and the ground’s flowed into each other, eddying back and forth.

  If there was any sympathy at all in Love’s dead voice, Chess was deaf to it. “Here is your sin, Pargeter—all around you. Bitter shall be your portion.”

  Those too-long fingers passed over Chess’s face, stroking scratchily along his lips. A sting struck his tongue, and suddenly he was heaving so hard he couldn’t breathe. Black and stinking blood, sparkling with tiny crystals, splashed over the ground in a foul flood, hollowing him out. He spewed and spewed, vision darkening.

  It felt like another tornado, suction-rush tearing strength out of Yancey in hot spurts, each surge of weakness matching one of Chess’s. No sense to it, especially since the ragged bite she’d taken out of her wrist was already closing over, not losing near enough blood to provoke such a sense of shock. But this could never be about mere flesh; it was something in the place, working against her, sucking at her like a sink-hole. A quicksand of salt.

  She was on her knees before she knew it, fighting not to get up but to keep from keeling over, tongue ragged, tasting blood. So cold. Not in front of Love, she prayed. Don’t go letting him see you falter.

  And then Ed Morrow’s strong arm encircled her, warming her, if only for a second. He bent close, contorted face all a-blur, though she couldn’t tell if the water was in her eyes, or his. “Yancey, honey,” he whispered, “you gotta cut free of this, please.”

  She shook her head, waved a feeble hand at the knot of monsters triangulated upon each other, kitty-corner at all angles of Bewelcome’s disaster-emptied main square. “’M . . . part of it, like them . . . all together. Linked.” So clear to her now, the warp and woof strung between all three men: power, immediate and inevitable. A literally fatal web. “So maybe this’s . . . s’posed to happen.”

  “Not you.” It came through grit teeth. “Goddamnit, not you, too!”

  “Let it ride, Mister Morrow,” said Love, of all people, only his face still showing semi-human through a wealth of salten plate; he tossed his head at Chess, like he still had even one pigtail worth flapping. “She chose her end, by standing with this monster. It’s time for you to walk away.”

  Morrow said nothing; his face didn’t even change. But Yancey felt his decision, a punch to the heart—tried to grab at his arm, but slipped her purchase. At the same time, Morrow’s knife slashed down, twice over: once to rip the sleeve, once to lay open the big vein in the forearm. More blood, steaming fresh, to water this unholy ground.

  And what crop might yet grow, thus irrigated?

  He raised his voice, then, too—and Yancey knew she must be close to crossing over some final threshold, because it seemed she could hear other words beneath his, not even in English. Yet clear enough, for all that . . . clearer by far than the tumult gathering ’round her, massive swirl and grind of some salt-sandstorm looming up between sky and ground, blocking the sun so it shrank pinhole-dim.

  “Nomatca nehuatl, ni Quetzalcoatl,

  (I myself, I, Quetzalcoatl,

  niMatl / ca nehuatl niYaotl,

  I, the Hand / indeed I, the Warrior,

  niMoquequeloatzin—atle ipan nitlamati . . . .”

  I, the Mocker—I respect nothing. . . .)

  “Tla xihualhuian, tlamacazque!—

  (Come forth, spirits!—

  tonatiuh iquizayan, tonatiuh icalaquiyan . . . .”

  from the sunset, from the sunrise. . . .)

  “in ixquichca nemi

  (anywhere you dwell

  in yolli / in patlantinemi . . . .”

  as animals / as birds. . . .)

  “in ic nauhcan

  (from the four directions

  niquintzatzilia ic axcan yez . . . .”

  I call you to my grip. . . .)

  “tla xihuallauh, Ce-Tecpatl,

  (come forth, knife,

  tezzohuaz titlapallohuaz—”

  to be stained with blood—)

  “Tla xihuallah.

  (Come forth.

  Tlatecuin.”

  Cross my path.)

  Without wondering how, she knew the words were pouring into Ed from elsewhere, and that he did not care. She felt the land beneath the salt rouse to Ed’s sacrifice with ten times the strength it had for hers—unsurprising, really; she’d spilled blood for spite and fury, to drive Chess into battle, while Ed’s had been for love and grief, out of a determination to save lives.

  (Balance, granddaughter.)

  The ground quaked, juddering them both painfully. Dull reports echoed, crack of dry ground, stone fracturing, snapping. With crashes like dropped clay pots, the salt cells binding the Pinkerton agents broke; to a man, they bolted, shouting as they fled.

  A wall of green thrust up, vine and Weed-tangle slamming through the valley’s topsoil. It blossomed in a perfect circle, tendrils twining frantically inward but unable to cross the salt-lip, straining to reach Chess ’til its overspill latched onto Pinkerton’s hex-train—probably the largest other source handy—and began drawing fiercely on its power. It swarmed monkey-quick over the carriages, kicking up sparks and bursts of lightning like a firework show gone all askew. The train shuddered and crunched down, its enchantment-driven wheels suddenly gone the way of all spells.

  All dignity forfeit, Asbury screamed like a colicky baby. In turn, Songbird let loose with a furious kettle-shriek, terror only thinly overlaid with anger. The force-grown crackle of leaves nearly drowned the Weed-flowers’ chitter, a flock of maddened birds intent on devouring whatever might be unlucky enough to lie in its path.

  Yancey felt Morrow pushing harder, pouring all of his determination to save her—and Chess—into the sacrifice. The potency at work painted everything in ghost-shapes; all she could do was knit her grip with Ed’s and haul all the harder, throwing a last whisper of thought Chess’s way: God damn you, you irritating little man, get up.

  No response—not audibly. But amidst the dead white glow of the salt, her spiritualist’s lens showed her Chess, bright green and red with blood, his shoulders shaking. And she knew that he was laughing.

  Seconds later, the entire Weed-mess let fly a mutual blast of pollen, every seed pod rupturing at once and hurling its cargo into Bewelcome’s air. Chess sucked in a deep gasp, swallowing it down like burning whiskey. Thus sustained, he plunged his hands down, tearing into the crust of salt, rendering b
loody meat-gloves of them in moments, though the hurt of it seemed to register only briefly before he found raw soil, and buried them to the wrists.

  As with the best of Chess’s black miracles, a soundless pulse went off in all directions, turning his whole skin the pulp-green of a cut stalk. Love’s remaining spear-pillars shattered under their own weight, while great gouts of crackling lightning came off the train’s locked boxcars; the wood split, heavy planks splintering like balsa, iron chains gone to rust and dust in an instant.

  Yancey couldn’t quite make out the figures who spilled from the wreckage—some alive, some grievously injured, some beyond all pain—but she knew what they were: hexes, trapped in some unimaginable way, kept from feeding on one another by Asbury’s black science and forced to drive Pinkerton’s train where he would, defying geography. Those who could rabbited fast as the Pinks before ’em, stumbling toward the mouth of the valley, earth still a-rumble beneath their feet: more screams rose up, weak with despair. Beneath them, pounding thuds, growing steadily louder. Nearer.

  But moments before the first of the escapees reached their goal, he came skidding to a stop, backpedalled frantically, urging those following behind off. Because of this concern for his fellows, or perhaps because he stood (all unknowing) on the edge of a sheer and sudden drop, whoever-it-was couldn’t see the monstrous shape which reared up right where his eyes had formerly rested ’til it darted its huge head down and bit him in half, snuffling him up like a dog with a bit of cheese.

  “What . . . ?” Morrow breathed.

  To each side of the valley’s entrance, great beasts pulled themselves free of the stone like downed birds from mud, aeons-dead bones clothed anew in flesh, albeit incomplete and rotting. Green fire outlined their eye sockets. A dozen of them? A score? Yancey felt their tremendous weight pound the earth beneath her. Reptilian, elephantine, creatures of an older sun, these thundering lizards hammered toward Bewelcome’s heart, their horns and teeth all set for Sheriff Love.

  Cool-headed to the last even when set in sorcerous mayhem’s path, Love took advantage of the rout to snatch up Pinkerton’s discarded pepper-box, discharging it straight at Chess’s face. But Chess merely opened wide and swallowed the shots down whole, not even bothering to gulp.

  “Lose more bullets that way, don’t ya, Sheriff?” he asked.

  “Oh, don’t dare mock me, you nasty creature. Sinner from a line of such, born gallows-fruit—”

  “All that, yeah; still not ashamed. So what’s your point?”

  A sigh. “Only this . . .”

  Love closed his eyes, bringing his fists together. His lips moved. Yancey could hear nothing over the beasts’ approach, but the words went straight to her brain: For one last jolt of strength I ask you, who have named yourself Chess Pargeter’s Enemy; be you angel or no, fallen or otherwise, I beg your favour. The prayer went tumbling into that void Yancey could feel yawn wide, beyond this world. . . .

  And something answered.

  Behind Love, above him, the air turned smoke-dark. A figure took slow shape, intangibly immense, shoulders wrapped in a mantle of blue fire. Its face remained featureless, for which Yancey, her skin crawling, offered devout thanks. Love bowed his head, letting this phantom form flow ’round him; his own seemed to blur and stretch accordingly, as though viewed through water. Until he towered erect once more, furiously large, long lines dreadfully magnified: Sheriff Love gone almost entirely, leaving some new creature entirely—neither the Enemy nor Love, but some obscene mix of both—to stand, swaying slightly, in his place.

  Then he lunged forward and dealt the creature leaping upon him a stunning blow that knocked it sideways, popping its jaw clean off. Yancey felt the punch in her own mouth—sheerest agony, though it meant she had nothing left with which to scream. So the undead creature screamed for her, ’til Love wrung its too-long snake-neck like a chicken’s. Some vital current of power snapped; the thing collapsed, disintegrating as it went, reverting to fossilized bone dust. Love did not stay still to watch. He spun, and charged another creature, seizing it by two of its three horns and forcing its nose deeply enough into the ground to suffocate it. Smaller monsters swarmed him; he shrugged them off, insultingly casual.

  Pinkerton lay curled into a foetal posture, shuddering spasmodically, jerking with each impact; Chess joined him, staggered with the shared pain of his grisly satellites. Ed, too, curled inwards—half-hiding Yancey, half attempting to hide himself in her, as his blood-loss finally exacted its price. It took all the little strength Yancey had left to lift one arm, touch his cheek.

  If this was the end, right here, no one could say they hadn’t fought it every damn step of the way.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The blows hurt, and then some. Chess could feel power torn from him with each new strike—but in a strange way, this was more bearable than anything that had gone before. One thing Oona Pargeter’s only son knew how to do was take a beating.

  So he let himself flex on the backhand, loosening his focus, and let his mind hiss like hot metal in the tempering quench, spinning his conjured pets ’round Love in a distracting flurry. He could draw this out, but to what point? No matter how much blood Ed and Yancey spilled for him, Love’s emptiness would eventually devour it all, choking down Pinkerton and him alongside; the man seemed made to be his natural undoer. Yet this here was the only place Love could be put down, or so that Sapphist Injun—Yiska—had claimed. If hexation wasn’t the answer, what was?

  A voice came back to him then, brimstone-hoarse, once beloved, warning: Magic ain’t a gun, Chess. Can’t treat it as such, or it’ll blow up in your hand.

  Power he had in spades, so it wasn’t that. What he needed was knowledge.

  He didn’t bother trying to form clear words; couldn’t’ve kept them together under this sort of pressure, anyhow. Instead, he flicked a sharp mental slap ’cross the inside of Asbury’s temples, hard enough to bust his hysteria. Minds met—Chess had a dim sense of labyrinthine lattices, incredibly complex, though choked with terror and confusion—and the clash threw up a memory: the Tampico hotel room, where Songbird’s and Asbury’s different expertises combined to trump Chess’s dead-god mojo hand.

  As predicted, Asbury seized on the idea, a lifeline in a drowning sea. Spinning, he shouted: “Miss Songbird, listen; this is simply the same magic you once countered, writ larger, all connected—and therefore it can be stopped, if the circuit be broken somewhere . . . anywhere!”

  “Foolish old ghost!” she shouted back, shield-muffled, her halo gone thick to stave off flying bone shards. “I would as soon be able to stop the Yang-t’se in full flood! Why should I even try?”

  Asbury hesitated, ’til his eyes fell on Pinkerton’s fallen form. “Because you’re the only one who knows how—and you’ve taken Mister Pinkerton’s money.”

  Songbird closed her eyes tight—then lofted herself yet still further up, as Love round-housed the last of Chess’s whatever-they-were so hard it exploded. Twisting to face Chess direct, he heard her start to chant, and froze, like she’d pulled his key out: a high, atonal keening, incomprehensible to Chess, whose Chinee ran rudimentary at best. As her pale hands sketched ideographs on the air, red robes swirling about her, Chess saw patterns rise through their folds, arcane embroidery coming to light like flaws on a blown coal: Black dragons, silver phoenixes, silk-trapped and squirming to be free.

  Love pointed up at her. “Keep back, you pagan necromancer!” he hollered. “I’ll brook no interference in my—aaaagghh!”

  He broke off, mid-tirade, as the shadow-shapes on Songbird’s robes suddenly all came free, swooping down on him in a gouge-happy swirl of talons, spilling powdered salt like blood. As he beat at himself in annoyance, batting her fetches away like so many mosquitoes, Songbird’s incantation was already complete. She spread her fingers wide, and shook the resultant spell-net out over the whole battlefield at once.

  Memory possessed Chess again, lighting him up from the inside: crouched at Ma’s
ankle in the red lantern-lit dimness of Laugh-Laugh Sally Yee’s, watching two Chink zither-players “duel” by tossing phrases back and forth, each adding a bit more flair to the last improvisation: one repeating the other’s notes in perfect reverse, each pitched to be a precise harmonic counterpart of the other. And between the two, audible only in the echoes, a single pure note resonating, more felt than heard—the exact midpoint, caught between mirrored melodies.

  Good call; he threw the thought her way like Hosteen’s knife. Get him right ’tween the eyes for me, and hard—and don’t stint just ’cause you’ll be getting me on the backstroke, neither.

  Ai-yaaaa! As if I would. And the instrument in question is a gu zheng, you garbage-eating dog of a whore’s crotch-dropping!

  Won’t get to paste me good ’n’ proper ’til you’re done with him, though, will you? So just hush up for now, you pompous bitch, and keep on with what you’re doin’.

  I will, if you let me!

  As Songbird’s spell slid stiletto-smooth into the magic-flood torrenting from Chess to Love, he heard that same tone once more. Two patterns meeting, one reversed—matching and cancelling like ripples, flattening each other out. The current collapsed with shocking speed, and stayed pinned down—a cessation of pain so sudden, it dizzied. Love actually fell to one knee, while Pinkerton blinked and slowly uncurled, his once-monstrous face now only slack and jowly and old, beard and hair gone white as Songbird’s own.

  Chess, meanwhile, found his balance, glancing over at Ed and Yancey. Have to be fast, ’fore the storm’s eye passed over. Should he try to reach her, plant an order so deep she thought she’d come up with it? Might still be possible to save ’em both—

  Too late, red warrior-boy, yet another mental voice told him—not Yiska’s, though similar. Older, and far more knowing.