The Hexslinger Omnibus

by A Book of Tongues; A Rope of Thorns; Tree of Bones; Hexmas; Like a Bowl of Fire; In Scarlet Town (Today) (epub)

  Within the hour, that shirt had been trash, torn off by the man who’d been his first customer. The pain had been coring, but the memory of what he could look like with enough coin, and left to his own devices — the charms others would spend on, given opportunity — had been almost worth it.

  Chess glanced again at Oona’s body, brow furrowed. He’d expected . . . more, somehow; satisfaction, if not glee. Or was this flat numbness a species of peace, in itself? He’d never had much hands-on knowledge of the phenomenon.

  Three times I wrote you off as dead, bitch, he thought. Once when I left Songbird’s opium den, knowing the undertakers was on their way; once when Rook told me he could kill you for me, and I told him to go ahead if he wanted . . . and now. And at no point, I only just now realize, did I ever really start to believe it.

  He turned away, pushed himself to his feet, and picked a direction at random. Any path that’d lead away from this column, and his mother’s corpse beneath it.

  Hadn’t gone ten yards, though, ’fore an earsplitting crack rang out; light flashed behind him like a thunderbolt touching down and he spun, dropped battlefield-ready to one knee, arm already up to protect himself from shrapnel.

  Panting, he slowly lowered his sleeve back down. The circular pattern on the cobblestones, charred and steaming now as rain struck home, did look something like a lightning strike. Scattered over it was a slurry of burnt and torn rags, frayed on every edge as if burst apart from inside — and not all of it fabric, either; Chess recognized that yellowish hue, that raddled texture. Nausea kneaded his guts. He pulled his gaze upward, with effort.

  She stood in the centre of the blast, naked and pale, girl-slender again — not quite his same height or make, being curved at hips and breast with red hair rain-plastered back over a narrow fox-face, thatching the junction of her legs in a slightly darker triangle. And when she smiled, her teeth were crooked yet but there, bright, sharp and clean — porcelain, almost, like the whites of those green, green eyes. . . .

  “I’ll be Goddamned and go to hell,” Chess Pargeter said, out loud, knowing exactly how stupid those words must sound. But Oona’s new-made grin just widened, almost to her back molars.

  “Come now, lovey,” she replied, voice a silver bell soaked in sour wine. “Nuffin’ comes from nuffin’. Didn’t fink you was the only ’ex wiv my name, did you?”

  More damn fool me, Chess thought, for thinkin’ there’s any part of me don’t have her thumbprint on it already. For thinkin’ I was special.

  “Okay, then,” he said. “Let’s damn well hear it.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The night before she’d dreamed Ed Morrow held her in his arms again, warming her all over, and counted herself lucky. But in the morning Yancey Colder Kloves woke cold and stiff as usual, eyes narrowed against the unforgiving sky as it rose purple over what Grandma and Yiska called Tse Diyil, Old Woman Butte, a massive outcrop of stone stacked in concentric rings jutting up from sand and furze that cast its shadow on a seemingly endless series of lava drifts making their way from horizon to horizon, uneven as some badly laid road.

  I hurt, she thought, too much in pain generally to be more specific, even if she’d wanted to. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do that in life, one day, ’stead of always touching with only our minds? Or would that really be too much to ask, considering the circumstances?

  Beside her, Songbird stirred, unhappily. “You think too loudly, innkeeper’s daughter,” she muttered. “This is what comes of some talent and no instruction.”

  “That’s really the way you feel about it, then maybe it’d be best to stay out of my brainpan.”

  The Chinese girl-hex hissed. “I would if I could, believe me! Waaah, chi-shien gweilo, cho ya-de, cao ni zu zong shi ba dai . . . to think I find myself stranded here, caught between two savages and a long-nosed ghost — I, who am the product of a thousand years of breeding! It is not to be borne, this disgrace.”

  While Yancey thought back, each syllable pitched uncharitably loud, since she now knew Songbird could hear her: Yes, yes, you great bleached baby.

  The band had been squatting for weeks in a spattering of caves hollowed from the butte’s side, telling time by the sun dagger’s track as it eked its way across the spiral petroglyphs carved into three separate south-facing sandstone slabs. They’d made their way to this refuge sidelong, now hiking, now riding — and occasionally using what Yancey had come to call the “punch-a-hole” method, with Grandma and Songbird pooling their resources to move instantaneously from one place to another. A vortex would gape open in the air — the “Bone Road” Yiska had travelled to meet them at Bewelcome — and they’d all plunge through it. Grandma in her bone relict-suit, shaking the ground with each creaky step; Songbird eddying along behind just a foot or so up off the ground, jerked like a kite by one long sleeve; Yiska and the rest of her bravos on horseback, taking the jump at a steeplechase gallop and ululating as they did, while Yancey clung on for dear life with both white-knuckled hands ’round the Diné boy-girl’s hard, flat waist.

  Each such trip, however, began with Grandma and Songbird going at each other like cats in a bag as they argued points of procedure. The shamaness’s ghost would loom threateningly above her spindly little companion, berating her for not yet being fully recovered from whatever damage Doctor Asbury’s bracelet had done her, while Songbird in turn clenched her delicate hands (their clawed golden finger-sheaths long since removed, relegated to Yiska’s saddlebag) and scowled as though contemplating evil she obviously felt still ill-equipped to deliver.

  “You have bad habits,” Grandma told her, “this is your trouble! And being stronger than your teachers has not helped to break you of any of them — it has only made you slow to regain your power, because you so much fear being weak.”

  “Unlettered barbarian, old mountain sow — you, who could not read your own spells, even if you knew how to write them down! What do you think you know that I, educated by Imperial tutors, do not?”

  “Better than you, not-yellow yellow girl, especially here on my people’s land, where my people’s ways work best. You let an old man rob you of everything, gambling he was too entranced by your helplessness to take advantage; I brought myself back from the dead.”

  Songbird’s face screwed up, pale gaze full of poisons. “Not entirely.”

  “I balance on the threshold, yes. Will you be the one to push me one way or the other?”

  The question seemed to take Songbird aback, which might have been the point — the China-girl was still enough of a child to be much more tractable when thrown off balance. As the silence stretched on, however, she narrowed her eyes at the giant bone-puppet carrionette, waiting in inhuman stillness. Yiska and her riders watched too, keen attention in their eyes setting Yancey’s nape hairs a-tingle.

  “Perhaps I will not have to,” Songbird said, at last. While Yancey exerted herself to rein in a shudder, as her mother’s words came back: It behooves us to know how to spot them, the hexes — so we can run the other way.

  And I should have, shouldn’t I? she thought, watching the two work their castings in synchrony, prying open the Bone Road’s door once more. Should’ve told someone straightaway I knew Chess for who he was, or else never spoke to him — or Ed — at all; it’s sheerest hubris I didn’t, considering the cost. Just . . . couldn’t stand not having a hand in my own fate, I s’pose.

  Now here she was, a killer herself, by commission as well as omission. A maker of orphans and widows, just like Chess, and Mesach Love, too.

  Was it such a crime, to refuse the place that the world had made for you? And was the price of that refusal, ever after, to never find any other place for yourself at all?

  She still hadn’t found an answer to either question, but then again, pondering them over while stuck on Tse Diyil probably wasn’t helping matters much. Though the sheer age and silence of this place would have been exhausting by themselves, for anyone, from the ve
ry moment Yancey had touched the butte’s topsoil, shallow over stone, she’d also known that there was far more to reckon here than simple history. The air atop the upthrust megalith smelled of a lightning strike; when she took off her boots, the rock itself tingled beneath her bare feet, seeming to hum.

  Like Bewelcome, in other words, this too was a thin place — another point on the endless “Crack” in the world that Grandma was always going on about. And even though she now knew just as well as any hex how often things mystical had to be understood more poetically than literally, Yancey had to admit she’d still half-expected it to be some kind of physical chasm, a tangible rift in the earth. It wasn’t until reaching the butte that she’d finally understood the sheer scale of the damage, a winding, miles-wide line of hexacious force which bestrode the land from north to south.

  “Web of the Spider,” Yiska had called it early on, one night around the cookfire. “Warp and woof of Changing Woman’s loom. Bilagaana Rook’s witch city lies on it, as does the salt-man’s Welcome-town reborn, and this place too — even the Mexica capital, that place your red boy wrecked when he first came up. It is all the same.” She’d snorted then, not unkindly, at Yancey’s appalled look. “What, dead-speaker? Did you think our task would be as simple as finding some big rock, and stuffing it into a hole?”

  “. . . no.”

  “Oh yes, you did — you bilagaana all think that way, just as the White Shell Girl’s people think in circles, devious as coyote. But if things were so easy we would not need both of you, nor the Spinner as well.”

  “If it’s all the same, then . . . why here, ’stead of anyplace else?”

  Yiska shrugged. “There has always been much power here, a spiral that hides us from Rainbow Woman’s sight; it should help the little ghost to heal, too, if she ever unstiffens her pretty neck enough to accept the Spinner’s counsel. Just as it helps the Spinner stay . . . in Balance.”

  Was that the exact right sense of the word, though? Yancey’s gift might help her understand much of the Na’isha tongue, but some concepts still eluded her.

  “Besides, here we have long sight and fresh water, game to hunt if we are sparing. And most of all, here it should be easiest to send out the Call,” said Yiska.

  “Call . . . to who?”

  Yiska had only stared steadily at her, not needing to make her thoughts loud, or think at all. Yet “saying,” nevertheless: You know who.

  The Chaco Wash flowed northward within walking distance of the butte’s foot, running unseasonably high and fast. Yancey went to bathe there most mornings, not letting the water’s increasing frigidity as months wore on deter her from her ritual cleansings — and “ritual” was the proper word. They had become a touchstone, a reconnection with the flesh, a grounding, calming process which washed away most — if never all — of the bone-deep weariness of her work.

  For similar reasons, Songbird performed her own set of daily ablutions, though usually much later on and in hiding, with water Yiska brought her. Unused even to dressing without help, she had at first tried to beat her embroidered red satin outfit clean against the cavern walls until it began showing signs of wear and tear, at which point she’d given up, and gone silent and filthy. When Yancey tried to help she’d spat at her, claiming that when she regained the full extent of her magic, she would punish all interfering white ghosts accordingly.

  By mid-July, a month into their stay, the realization she still wasn’t yet strong enough to reweave her outfit from its own decaying components — and didn’t seem likely to recover such strength anytime soon — finally sank Songbird into despair, prompting Yiska to take charge. The war-shamaness began to bring presents, some probably traded for on provision-gathering trips, others made, with painstaking skill: a pair of deerskin breeches and gartered leggings, neatly stitched, to replace her worn-through pyjama-pants; moccasins beaded in red and white, with rawhide soles; even a “squaw-dress” woven on a blanket loom with sides and shoulders laced together, leaving room for armholes and a poncho-style neckline. A full blanket, once added overtop, made for far better shading than Songbird’s original scarlet silk wedding veil — and provided a stylish accoutrement, too, ’specially when fringed with a hundred pierced abalone shell slices that rattled as she walked, announcing her queenly tread.

  At first, the hex-girl greeted these overtures with grumbling, sarcasm . . . what sounded to Yancey like outright insults, for all she was careful to keep to her own language for those. But as time wore on, persuaded that tolerating Yiska’s aid was her only hope if she wanted to stay presentable, Songbird finally allowed the woman to touch her long enough to braid her white hair back into two tight plaits, then coil and pin them into a bun at the back of her head, protecting her delicate nape. She settled into the game, appearing to accept such tribute as her due. Adopted a murmuring, musical tone, gave compliments, even favoured Yiska on occasion with an occasional flirtatious glance from under bleached eyelashes.

  These gifts were a form of courtship, as all involved well knew; hell, Yancey recalled receiving much the same treatment from (the late) Marshal Uther Kloves, though his love tokens ran to colourful store-bought frippery, the kind her Pa’d probably assured him all young maids dreamt on. He’d hoped to gain her hand in the bargain, with her heart following somewhat after — not quite the same sort of outright transaction Miz Songbird was no doubt used to from her time on San Francisco’s Gold Coast, but not so very far away from it as Yancey might’ve once been comfortable to think, either.

  Marriage for money’s not but one step away from outright whoredom, in my opinion, Chess Pargeter had told her in the desert outside Splitfoot’s, just before she’d pasted him one ’cross the chops. Back then, it’d seemed like deadliest insult; now it just rang like wisdom, hard-won, hard-worn.

  According to fled Pinkerton Frank Geyer, Yiska had a reputation for being “like” Chess — a lover of fellow women just as Chess’s own urges leaned only to other men, which suggested a fairly good idea of what the martial squaw hoped to gain from whatever bargain she and Songbird might negotiate. Seeing them together at close quarters, however, Yancey found she wasn’t so sure. Her own upbringing hadn’t kept her overly innocent, after all. Lust she knew, well enough to recognize, but love as well, in several varieties.

  “This Old Woman in the rock we squat on,” she heard Songbird say now, sponging herself clean with the remaining length of her veil, while Yiska leaned on guard against the canyon wall, carefully angling her gaze to keep the girl’s modesty intact. “Is that this Changing Woman of yours, the . . . Ash-da Nah-lay?”

  Yiska shook her head, black mane swinging. “Asdzaa Nadleehe, Three Ages in One, the woman who is transformed time and again — this is somewhere she watches over, yes, like all thin places. But Tse Diyil’s Old Woman is another thing entirely, to be feared, not worshipped. Almost Anaye.”

  “A ghost, then.”

  “Perhaps. When I was young, my grandfather told me no one was allowed on top of the butte, or even allowed to lean against its sides. A long time ago, they used to say a lady lived there, called She Who Dries You Out. Every so often she would go to a nearby canyon and fill her jug with water, then carry it back. Sometimes, she would take a man up to the top of the butte with her. Next morning, her beauty would be gone; she would be old and ferocious, very hungry. The man would be tied up in the sun, dry and dusty, and when he asked for water she’d piss into a bowl instead, telling him to drink it. Soon the man would make his way back down the butte, get thin, and then die.”

  “Ah, so she is a jiang-sh’i, beautiful suck-blood demon: a corpse who never withers, with only its lower soul remaining. We also tell this story, but better.”

  “Since Ch’in stories are always better, uh?”

  “You are learning, barbarian.” Done with her toilette, Songbird squeezed out the last of the water, tucking her silks away once more into her narrow bodice. “And was she very dark, this Drying Lady in your grandfather
’s tales, the way you and your men are — like something carved from wood, or cast in copper? Do you still fear to meet her, having disobeyed his advice and occupied her home?”

  At this, Yiska smiled, wide enough to show her eyeteeth. “In fact, I had always heard that she was fair, White Shell Girl,” she replied. “Like the moon, or a cow’s hide without one flaw, brushed until it shines. And no, I do not fear to meet her, or her reflection. I dream on it.”

  Songbird sniffed. “Thus proving only that you are as foolish as I have always thought.”

  “One more idiot barbarian savage,” Yiska replied, nodding, “in a nation of long-nosed ghosts. Is that the way this song goes?”

  “You have said it, not I.”

  “You are the one who says it over and over, trying to make it hard for me to like you. But when have I ever let that stop me?”

  With a hiss, Songbird snatched up her blanket, wrapped it so as to leave only her eyes visible and flounced forth, striding into the morning sunlight with her fringes all a-jangle. Yiska just stood and watched her go, still smiling.

  “Has trouble with saying thanks, that one,” Yancey spoke up, after a moment, “and more trouble yet with feeling grateful. Or needing someone.”

  “I have noticed.”

  “Seems to me she got raised to think pretty much every way people deal with each other is just . . . business. People like that — they don’t tend to treat any kind of affection too gently. They can be hurtful, whether or not they mean to be. And very hurtful, when they do mean it.”

  “Is it the little ghost you describe, dead-speaker, or your friend the red boy?”

  “How you think I came to figure this all out?” Yancey shot back. “Songbird’s got way too many scars for a girl as young as she is, and she’s way too used to power. This . . . she . . . isn’t safe for you, ma’am. Or any of the rest’ve us, something goes awry.”

  The Diné woman’s smile went lopsided. “If I liked only safe things, the track of my life would not run where it does. All I know is that some wounds cannot heal, if left on their own.”