A Rope of Thorns

by Gemma Files

  He caught his breath at the last words, whose meaning could not possibly be mistaken. And drew breath, intending to agree, out loud. . . .

  But before he could, a hand fell on his boot—small, strong, blue-tinged, gripping like a vise. He whipped round, just in time to see the “corpse” at both their feet gift them with a feral grin, eyes gone night-black, his every tooth an obsidian dagger.

  Morrow’s breath flew back out, so fast his throat felt raw.

  “Chess?” he managed.

  The thing shook its head, managing not even a bad imitation of humanity.

  “No more,” it replied.

  When Chess started to move again, Rook’s heart all but leapt haphazard in his chest, bruising it from inside. Yet the illusion was only momentary—and that terminal realization landed deep indeed, a barbed harpoon.

  No no no, that ain’t him at all, Goddamnit—

  Beside him, he felt Ixchel shake her head in sympathy, serpent-skirt set hissing. Indeed it is not, was all she said, mouth twisting like it was full of sour corpse-juice, puckered too fierce even to spit.

  The figure’s chest looked well-healed, like it’d never been rent at all, and the rest of him seemed similarly intact—spanking, horridly new: blood-red hair and beard, bright blue skin, eyes burning green, but with an iller light than any Rook had ever before seen, even in Chess’s most killing fits of passion. One that came from somewhere absolutely other.

  Both Yancey and Morrow were staring at him as well, apparently equally revolted, though Rook knew damn well that of the two, only the girl could possibly guess what she was looking at. Or . . . no, maybe not; they were joined at the hip and elsewhere, meaning her sight must be leaching into poor honest Ed through his skin, everywhere they touched.

  Which meant he knew exactly what she was saying when she blurted out, “Oh sweet Jesus, it’s . . .”

  Thrown bits of broke stone bells, landing like mines in all directions: each syllable was a blade, a club, a lit chunk of pitch. And even that gross vehicle Grandma’d fashioned for herself out of the thunder-lizards’ detritus, that stomping bone reliquary, had to stumble and shudder under the whole name’s dread weight.

  . . . Tezcatlipoca, Ixchel sighed in his ear, so close—so cold—her undead tongue crisped the skin of his lobe.

  Yes, sister.

  Those lips Rook’d once hung on, kissed and bit ’til they were sore as bruised fruit. The mouth that’d cursed him a hundred times over, first in jest, then deadly earnest. That skin, that face, that body—all of it Chess, Chess, and nothing like. A ghost-god’s puppet. A walking devastation.

  It turned its dead black eyes on him, now, and laughed at how he flinched.

  You yearn to break her hold on you, conquistador—regret your choices so sharply, back to the very beginning, that you might wish yourself hanged and rotten away to dusty bones, if only this one I wear still ran wild through the world. Yet here I am now, your lover reborn, to make all your dreams of freedom real . . . if you only break your oath to her and bow down to me, in her stead.

  Ixchel watched for his reaction, curiously incurious. And if his head-shake made her happy, he—in turn—did not care enough to want to know.

  “I might, at that,” he allowed, “you really were him. But you ain’t.”

  And here Ixchel laughed yet once more, icy-rippling as ever. You see, she told her Enemy, I chose well after all, when I made this man my mate . . . a traitor so far forsworn already he would never break faith again, at any price. Not even with me.

  One more smile greeted this proud assertion, dreadful as the rest. And yet—might that really be something else Rook saw underlying it, almost too dim to glimpse, the way even the dirtiest water still throws a reflection back?

  Perhaps, the Black Trickster replied, thoughtfully—crossed-bones king of Smoke and Mirrors alike, spreader of indiscriminate chaos. Then was gone, along with his blue-skinned Chess-body, completely as a rock dropped through the same stagnant pond-skin.

  “Nice to finally know what you really think of me, honey,” Rook told his awful wife, without rancour.

  To which she simply shrugged and snapped her fingers, summoning the chittering dragonfly swarm ’round them once more, and threw back: Am I to be jealous, knowing you have preferred your little warrior from the start? We are king and queen, husband. Our business is to conquer, to build, to rule.

  “Won’t be doin’ much of any of that, he does what he said and lays his wrath down on us, like at . . . what was that place?”

  Tollan, City of Jade. They insulted him, and paid dearly for it.

  “Like Sodom and Gomorrah. Or . . . here, when me and Chess were through with it.”

  And look what has happened since. She wrapped him up, digging her bony chin into one collarbone’s curve, so sharp it was like she aimed to piece him through. All wounds may be reversed, no matter how deep, if blood enough is shed to pay for it.

  “So you say, but here’s what I see: the only other one of yours in all creation you’ve managed to shake awake, coming to knock our gates down with both guns blazin’. How’s that anything but bad?”

  Oh, husband. You must learn to trust me, eventually.

  And before he could reply, she enshrouded him completely, flapping her hands—like bleached-blind bats—to flutter them both away.

  In the wake of such outright insanity, Yancey and Morrow clung fast together, too shook to move. But then, all of a sudden, Grandma’s suit was yelling something at Yiska—and before they could wonder what, with a yelp of acknowledgement, the Navajo-turned-Apache had already swooped in to grab Yancey up out of Morrow’s arms and boost her ’cross her saddle, then take off for the hills at full gallop, crew at her heels. It all transpired so damnable swift, Morrow couldn’t’ve hoped to draw a bead after any of ’em, even if he’d still had a gun to do it with—so he was left spot-rooted, howling after Yancey, as she went out of sight.

  “Hold on, girl, hold on! I’ll come for you, I swear on a stack of Bibles—I will find you, Goddamn it all to Goddamn fuckin’ hell—!”

  In the opposite direction, meanwhile, Songbird—still dazed from her ordeal—came to just in time for that lumbering dustpile to scoop her up, kicking poor Doc Asbury aside like trash, and go barrelling after Yiska and company; she was borne away likewise, weakly flailing. Soon, there was nothing left behind but tracks, the Chinee witch’s screams echoing away into the night.

  “Yancey!” Morrow yelled out again, in despair. And fell to his knees, head bowed, expecting nothing but a bullet for his pains—well-deserved, wherever it might come from.

  Above, the sky stretched out blank, an endless darkening bruise; the wind blew cold, ruffling ’round Bewelcome’s reassembled edges, and he thought he could hear the stealthy steps of its returning citizens, none of whom he figured wished him well. But Ed Morrow stayed right where he was, not even bothering to sigh over how just how badly his life—already precarious—had gone, in these last few seconds, to complete and irretrievable shit-pudding.

  If Chess was still here—the real Chess—he’d’ve made sure it turned out right, somehow, he found himself thinking, foolishly certain. Knowing full well just how insane the very idea of that belief would’ve struck him, just a scant year or so past.

  “Aw, pull yuirsel’ together,” Pinkerton said, briskly, from behind him. “For there’s no sight quite as wracking as a grown man gone womanish when there’s work tae be done in Justice’s cause, and vengeance aplenty tae be taken, along the way.”

  Here their eyes did meet, at last, with a flinty little spark—and Morrow was somewhat startled to find his former employer rendered either once more human or mostly so, as though the stolen hex-fire were already draining from his veins. Even that accent of his seemed considerably less accelerated, the man himself re-sized to fit Morrow’s memories of him, from the days when both had held each other in good opinion.

  “Thought it was me you wanted to wreak justice on,” he said, “not so long back.�
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  “Did I say that?” Pinkerton asked, with a shrug. “Well . . . might be I overspoke, a trifle. For war’s on its way, and we’ll need every last man standing tae make our assault—and courage in battle washes all clean, or so they say, no matter what mistakes a fella may have made, previous.”

  Morrow looked down at the dirt once more, then clambered to his feet a bit unsteadily, and paused to dust his knees, before replying: “This vengeance, then—would it apply to Missus Kloves, as Missus Love surely still desires, or be exercised for her, along with everything else?”

  To his credit, Pinkerton didn’t lie—not right then, at least.

  “Uncertain, as yet. So . . . are ye amenable?”

  “. . . I am,” Morrow said, finally. And reached, shoulders squared, to willingly shake the best-known devil in the current angry mob’s affably outstretched hand.

  Epilogue

  Somewhere else, entirely:

  Chess came to by slow degrees, marrow-cold, with something unfamiliarly hard—and wet, and rough, and dirty—incising his cheek. Opened his eyes on darkness and squinted just the same, like he expected that to be any help.

  Hollow echoes all ’round him, a great sigh and clatter, congregative. The clop of hooves and grate of wheels over—cobblestones, was that it? Like he’d heard tell they had in New York, a layer of pavers set ’neath the usual street muck and sluiced clean every half-year, shallow enough to be dug up and thrown in a pinch?—plus a distant, mammoth thrum and clank of engines, furnaces burning black, throwing dirt up into the skies.

  And now, eking through that stinking yellow fog he’d thought was just his eyes, a whole city street arrived: buildings dilapidated and promiscuously overhung, jammed hugger-mugger as a junk-fiend’s teeth. Half-glazed cataract windows staring down, where they hadn’t been shattered wholesale; stagnant gutters and hinge-fallen doors; a sketchy crush of humanity loitering or roaming, wreathed in grime, ignoring Chess in the grip of their squalor. Raggedy skeleton children ran free as roaches, relieving themselves indiscriminately.

  I know this place, Chess realized, a slow hollow birthing itself in his gullet’s lowermost pit. For God alone knew he’d heard it described, a thousand times over—the worst of all possible bedtime stories, told by one who’d been born there, only to steal and screw herself passage to what she’d dreamed was a far more exotic continent.

  But this couldn’t be that place, surely—not after the Enemy’d stuffed him into some infernal belly-hole, prisoning him inside whatever tiny outpost of the Sunken Ball-Court that betraying sumbitch of a deity carried under those swinging slatted ribs where his heart should be, from which to pluck and don the faces of the dead.

  All of ’em are mine, no matter ’oo. And all of ’em find their way down ’ere to me, eventually.

  Chess’s hands slapped leather, automatically; no guns, of course. Not even holsters.

  “Hell, then, one way or t’other,” he said out loud, resisting the urge to shiver. “Must be.”

  “The ’Oly Land, more like,” somebody corrected him, from perilously nearby. “Or Seven Dials, they calls it, up-town. But close enough.”

  A woman stood on the corner, angled toward him with a sort of hunger, as though she’d been following his trail far longer than either of them could calculate. Her hair was a sodden red tangle, grim smile in a fox-sharp face, skin pallid even in darkness, an uneven thumb-print smear—and the voice, Christ Jesus crucified. That bloody, bleedin’ voice.

  “Don’t you know me, then?” she asked. “For I do know you, believe me, no matter ’ow long it’s been. I’d know you anywheres.”

  As she spoke, all the anger flowed out of Chess at once, blood from a cut throat; the hollow at his core had swelled so large now he felt empty, a mere shed skin. Unable to stop himself from replying, though he well knew the error of it.

  “Yeah, I know you, all right . . . Ma.”

  He said it tonelessly enough, bowing his head down, almost like he meant to pray. And watched “English” Oona Pargeter’s nasty grin widen steadily in return—almost comically so, albeit without a touch of genuine humour—’til she went the whole hog, and dropped him a mocking little curtsey.

  “Oh, that’s what you fink, sonny,” she replied.

  TO BE CONTINUED in A TREE OF BONES

  About the author

  Gemma Files was born in London, England and raised in Toronto, Canada. Her story “The Emperor’s Old Bones” won the 1999 International Horror Guild award for Best Short Fiction. She has published two collections of short work (Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart, both Prime Books) and two chapbooks of poetry (Bent Under Night, from Sinnersphere Productions, and Dust Radio, from Kelp Queen Press). A Book of Tongues, her first Hexslinger novel, won the 2010 DarkScribe Magazine Black Quill award for Small Press Chill, in both the Editors’ and Readers’ Choice categories. A Rope of Thorns will be followed by the final Hexslinger novel, A Tree of Bones.

  Find out more about her at http://musicatmidnight-gfiles.blogspot.com/.