A Rope of Thorns

by Gemma Files

  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, co
nsidering; 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.

  Another nod. “Heretic!” they would have cried, and fought each other to the death to kill you for saying so. But I . . . find I somewhat agree.

  Chess felt the Enemy wrap him close, lift him up, effortless. Those vast no-eyes peering further into him, unblinking, ’til their empty expanse was all he had left to see.

  Now answer me, truly, before the end. Do you want what I offer?

  . . . depends . . .

  On what, little brother?

  Though he didn’t in any way need to, Chess made himself take a long, ragged breath. Not enough blood left in him to fill his mouth completely, but he felt it slick his dry tongue, leak to paint his lips ’til they matched his beard.

  And replied, out loud, his throat grating each word like it was rock-pile dust, “. . . can yuh gih me . . . my ’venge?”

  On who?

  With his very last bit of vim, Chess rolled his eyes ’til they all but crossed, snarling (inside his head): Your bitch “sister,” numbskull, and that snake she calls husband. Who the hell’d you think I meant? Wasn’t but halfway through the first sentence, though, ’fore he heard the Enemy chuckling again, as though he’d just made the second-best joke in all creation—which made him long to paste it one, and it laugh all the harder.

  That don’t bode well, he knew, mist deepening ’round him. Finding he could barely remember anymore what those words meant each on their own, let alone when run together.

  so do it then, Jesus, do it do it, while I’m still

  the end, this is it, no more

  going, going

  go

  Oh, yes, something said, at last, as he plunged downward, fingers straining helpless toward an infinitely retreating bottom he feared almost worse than death itself to reach. It would be my pleasure.

  Another pulse hit, bright blue this time: turquoise, robin’s egg, faience glass, bell-sounding water crashing on a white cliff’s brake. Trip-hammer hard. Ball-lightning bright.

  The hairs on Chess’s body seemed to crisp at its touch, skin flushing azure from head to toe; his eyes flooded with a black so deep everywhere he looked was midnight, while the creatures gathered ’round him lit up from within, instantly rendered messy clots of flashing bones and circulatory systems redone in yellow, green, bright pulsing red, faces shrunk to featureless blanks, indistinguishable absences. Each one of them perfectly substitutable for every other one, with no distinction made except as to their relative strength or weakness, the ease or difficulty with which they might be singled out, struck down, torn apart.

  Brother, wake. Brother, I call you forth.

  You who were the New Corn, now completed.

  You who were Red, now made Blue.

  You who are Lightning’s son, who sets One against Another.

  Adorned with Hummingbirds, fashioned from Amaranth.

  You who will Lead the Charge.

  A smoke-finger pressed down on either lid, heavy as corpse-coins. The Enemy’s breath hot and foul against his face, a slaughterhouse baptism.

  You who I name . . . Huitzilopochtli.

  His province is war, grandson.

  Bright, blinding: Chess coughed it out, but more welled up, shrinking what he’d always known as himself to a point, a speck, a tiny, vanishing seed. Something so small, it could only be made to be swallowed.

  Don’t I ever get to be myself again? he wondered, despairing.

  Teeth chattering in his mouth, abruptly sharp-filed as Ixchel’s own—but not green, not jade-flaked, he somehow knew. Black glass, a flock of itzapapalotl-wings flapped in unison, volcano-hardened, sharp enough to bite through sin.

  Sharp enough to tear a whole city’s throat out, however hexacious.

  The Enemy smiled back at him, its own teeth equal-razored. Told him, gently: Sleep, little king. Your part is done; I will speak for both of us, from now on. Rest well, in the deep places, ’til I call you forth again.

  No way to fight it, not this far along. Nothing left to fight with—it’d seen to that, Goddamnit. But Chess tried anyhow, like it’d known he would.

  “You said . . .” he got out, as his lips went numb, “yuh . . . didn’t care enough ’bout what she was plannin’ . . . to try ’n’ stop it.”

  Mmm, even so.

  Black and blue, lids stroked closed, the ground opening up, swallowing him down. Crushing him, and everything around him, silent.

  All but the Enemy’s voice one last time, licking at his inner ear: Yet as you yourself have said . . . I lie. The same as every other god.

  And worse.

  Came a point, and quickly, when Ed Morrow just couldn’t fight his way any further toward what he suspected might be Chess’s body—too many Bewelcomers in between, jockeying to show the all-too-recent Widow Love they had her best interests at heart.

  “Surrender your weapons!” one of ’em howled at Yancey, close enough to sluice a bit of Sheriff Love’s bright blood-spray off her cheek with his spit, where she stood holding a double-draw stance on what had to be fifty or more opponents. “C’mon, woman—we’ll make it quick! Can’t expect to just stroll into town, shoot down the man founded it and stroll on out the other”

  “You shut your mouth!” she threw back, voice froze near to cracking. “A year or more you’ve been salt—maybe things ain’t all they seem, ever think of that? He knew what he’d done, and said so!”

  Another shout, bristling with insult on the dead’s behalf. “Sheriff Love was a great man, you outlaw harlot—a man of God! ’Spect us t’believe that could ever change?”

  “Why should I care what-all you think?”

  “Because you claim to be a widow, wife to a murdered man, like me . . . and if the one means something, so should the other. Don’t
you think?”

  Sophy Love stood there, dry eyes riveted to Yancey’s face. Hugging her boy to her with both arms as he fretted and wept, and gone so white-to-the-lips pale herself, she might as well have been rendered salt again.

  “A pity we can’t ask him to confirm your tale, though, ma’am,” she pointed out. “Seeing how you were the only one close enough to hear this . . . confession of his, beforehand.”

  Yancey swung a muzzle toward Missus Love’s face. “You calling me a liar?”

  “I don’t know what to call you, frankly.”

  Yancey shrugged, looking far more Chess-like than Morrow’d hitherto given her credit for. “Good enough,” she said. “No need for us to be friends; my business here’s done. So you’d best get out of my way, for I will keep on shooting—didn’t come all this distance to swing on any tree but the one outside my father’s hotel, if I aim to swing at all.”

  “You may not have much choice in the matter,” Sophy Love replied. To which Yancey gave a singularly bitter laugh.

  “I’ll put a ball in my head myself, ma’am, it comes to that,” she assured her.

  Morrow didn’t know if he believed her, yet suspected Missus Love did—and he’d lost what little liking he’d ever had for taking chances. But he’d been seized far too securely to interfere. Even the panic thudding through his heart was lead-heavy with exhaustion, and with Chess gone, there was nowhere to turn for a hexacious escape, either.

  So he closed his eyes, took the deepest breath he could, and howled his former boss’s name as loud as he had left in him: “Mister Pinkerton!”