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)

  “Sheriff,” Chess named him, finally. To which the man gave but a single bow, grave as ever, bones creaking. And though those little-girl pigtails of his swung back and forth with the motion, infinitely ridiculous, Chess felt absolutely no impulse to laugh.

  “‘Private’ Pargeter,” Mesach Love — dead twice-over and double-damned as well, if present circumstances were anything to go by — replied.

  CHAPTER TEN

  By the time Bewelcome’s wounded and dead had been seen to, Ixchel’s conjured floodwaters had subsided and the soldiers of the Thirteenth had hacked exit passages out through the Weed-walls which the Chess-Enemy had (oh so thoughtfully) left intact around the town, it was well past midnight. Ill-lit darkness and roads flooded fetlock-deep in mud cost their horses near an hour getting back to the camp — Morrow wound up tying a drink-exhausted Asbury to his mount, letting him sleep most of the way.

  They passed the sentries at Camp Pink, many of whom still glared at Ed with suspicion, and found the plain canvas tent Pinkerton had assigned him near the camp’s south edge. Morrow tipped the Professor into one of the empty cots without waking him, only pausing to strip off his own mud-caked boots before collapsing onto another. Before he closed his eyes, he realized the storm’s dregs had finally cleared enough he could see the smoky lights of New Aztectlan’s pyramid-temple glowing dimly through the open entry flap, far to the west — a dim line of arcane flame fringing the sky, just above its guard-woods’ contorted shadows.

  Sleep was fitful, broken by dreadful flashes of memory: Sophy Love vanishing in a burst of light, the Manifold exploding in Catlin’s hand, Rook’s stunned look as Morrow’s shots went through his shields. The gleeful laughter of the thing wearing Chess Pargeter’s flesh. Which last vision led, sure as rainfall, to other memories, and an uncomfortable state of half-arousal that had him longing for Yancey to visit his dreams once more — as much simply to see her as anything else, though whatever approximation of the other they might be able to manage long distance would’ve also been dearly appreciated.

  But that particular benefice was not to be. Instead, the hand that fell on his shoulder next, shaking him awake, turned out to be broad, brown, callused — to belong to Private Jonas Carver. Who, to give him his due, looked profoundly ill-inclined to disturb Morrow’s repose, though he obviously wasn’t one to refuse orders.

  “Sorry to roust you so soon, boss.”

  “Any man who guards my back ’gainst hexation gets to call me Ed, Private.” Morrow pushed himself up and shoved his feet back into his boots, wincing as they squelched. “Pinkerton, is it? Command post?”

  Carver shook his head. “Not right away — says we gotta meet somebody comin’ in at the east perimeter, escort him to Command.” As Morrow buttoned his duster up, Carver’s eyes turned thoughtful. “Captain don’t like him, but Mister Pink do sure seem to know how to run a unit. He ever serve on a front line?”

  “Chief Union intelligencer, ’61 and ’62,” Morrow confirmed, while Carver picked up the lantern he’d brought. They ducked back out into the chill night air, making their way past cookfire pits, tents and bivouacs toward the camp’s east edge. “Helped guard Lincoln back in Baltimore, gettin’ him to his inauguration — there was a hex involved, I hear. Which would explain a fair bit.” He grimaced. “As for Captain Washford’s opinion of the man . . . well, I’ll tell you, Private — ”

  “Jonas, sir.”

  “ — Jonas — ” Morrow lowered his voice, prudently. “ — I’d think him a damn sight bigger fool than any of us should be if he found himself liking Pinkerton, right now. But long as our boss’s still giving sensible orders and the Captain knows how to take ’em, ain’t nothing we have to worry on.” Field dressing stations and triage tents had been put up on the camp’s east side, right where the dawnward edge of the plain on which Hex City sat rose into scrubby foothills, to give them enough room from the rest of Camp Pink that those uninvolved in surgery and the like could ignore — if never entirely escape — its near-constant racket. Just beyond, at the end of a trail leading out of those hills, two horses stood; Morrow squinted up at their riders’ faces as Carver lifted his lamp, and felt his squint become a scowl.

  “Mister Ludlow,” he said, without enthusiasm. “What exactly got you to ditch your comfy hotel bed in favour of a trip out here?”

  Fitz Hugh Ludlow grinned, shrugging off lingering rain dampness by flapping his overcoat like a leathery set of wings. “Why, the story, Agent Morrow — the story, always! Your employer tells me we hover on the verge of victory and calls on me to scribe this history from an altogether new perspective, an opportunity I couldn’t possibly pass up, not and still call myself a journalist. For as you’re already well aware, we are making history here, are we not?” He turned that grin of his upon Carver, who did not return it. “Perhaps you’d also be persuaded to grant me an interview at some later date, Private? Tell my readers the day-to-day tale from behind the scene of freedom’s ongoing struggle, on the lines of battle drawn between new world and old?”

  Carver cast Morrow a narrow look, possibly unsure if he was being insulted, to which Morrow simply shrugged. To Ludlow Morrow said, coolly: “If you’re here to see Pinkerton we might as well save ourselves any further jaw; I’m headed that way already, anyhow. But one way or t’other, I’ll need identification from your friend here, ’fore he gets my safe-conduct — ”

  He broke off as the other man leaned into the lamplight, and it took all his effort to turn his initial surge of shocked delight into a mere one-cough throat-clearing.

  “James Grey,” Frank Geyer renamed himself, expressionlessly. He’d darkened his fair hair with some sort of medicamental slickum, combed it back and shaved off his moustache, which wouldn’t fool anyone who knew him that took more than a second’s look. But simple lack of expectation would probably keep anyone from actually doing so, long as Geyer avoided Pinkerton himself. “Mister Ludlow hired me as a guard, to see him safe ’cross the field. I’ll render up my weapons, if that’s obligatory. . . .”

  Morrow hesitated, aware it would look suspicious not to accept. Then again, he didn’t especially want to leave Geyer weaponless — not here, in what was now (to him) enemy territory.

  Before a decision was forced either way, however, the silence broke: that ever-present low moan from the triage tents suddenly spiralled upward, without warning, into an agonized yowl — and a shirtless man (another of Washford’s, Morrow could only assume, given his complexion) came staggering out into the night, eerie luminescence coating his high-yellow chest and back like paint but concentrating most brightly on the stumps of his arms, where the very skin bubbled alchemically. Some Paddy hex pressed into palliative care chased after him, arrayed in an oil-coat bloodstained near black that almost hid his collar’s dim shine and yelling, as he did: “Come quick as ye can, for all love — we got ourselves another one!”

  Hard upon both their heels came two more men dressed in the blue serge uniforms of Pinkerton’s vaunted “hex-handlers” — themselves hexacious, similarly collared, who’d opted to serve out their process capturing, collaring and policing other magickals. They grabbed the escapee and wrestled him to his knees, but not before his force-grown scar-tissue had already begun to split like seeding fungus, thrusting out tendrils of whitish-green muscle which twined ’round one another, fused, and grew molluscine suckers all along their lengths.

  Gaping at the sight of two uncontrollably flailing tentacles where his arms had once been, the first man twisted his head back to spit at his “doctor,” snarling: “Now look what you gone an’ done, you Goddamn potato-eater! Call yourself a medico? I ain’t signed up for this!”

  The triagist bridled. “Yeah?” he shouted back. “Well, I ain’t signed up at all, nigger — so if yeh think yez can do any better, I go on and invite yez, yeh ungrateful black bastard!”

  Carver had his gun out, automatically taking up stance in front of Ludlow, who had his pad out and pe
n already a-scribble, eagerly filing it all away. Morrow wasn’t completely sure who Carver’d start shooting at first, it came down to that, but the distraction itself posed an all-but-perfect opportunity to give Geyer what he no doubt wanted most, right now.

  “Tell me what you’re here for, so I can let you get to it,” Morrow ordered him, low, out the corner of his mouth.

  “Asbury,” was all Geyer replied, voice pitched at the self-same range.

  Morrow gave the most minimal twitch of a nod and jerked his jaw sidelong. “My tent, back there, past the fire pit — got a big All-Seeing Eye on the flap, marked ‘25.’ Hunker down when you get there; walk quick, but not too quick. Don’t stop.”

  Geyer nodded, already in motion. “Agent,” he said, and was gone, as the shouting match between the squabbling hexes — collared and new-flowered — erupted into the heat-shimmer flare of power battening on power. Even as Morrow recoiled, the monstrously warped Negro soldier grabbed both handlers with one tentacle each and began slamming them together, each impact producing a burst of St. Elmo’s Fire and acrid lightning-smell. The ersatz medico tried to haul him off and got a vicious backlash ’cross the face for it, sending him spinning to the mud, magic-drawing metal collar he’d hauled from a pocket gone flying.

  Carver swore with the despairing viciousness men used to mask grief, and shot his fellow soldier in the back of the knee; the man crumpled, howling, joint ruined. Before he could rise again the medico was on him, snapping the collar home. The new-made hex went limp, tentacles splayed out to either side like severed lengths of ship-cable.

  Ludlow stared, agape, for once seeming to have completely forgotten his notes. “Good . . . God,” he said presently. “Is this kind of happenstance typical of procedures, here?”

  “Typical ain’t a word we use much, hereabouts,” Morrow replied. “Let’s go, Mister Ludlow. Mister Pinkerton’s got no love for waiting.”

  Trudging on toward the camp’s centre, it belatedly occurred to Morrow how Geyer’s mission here might be to poach Doctor Asbury’s services and person completely; according to intelligence, his new partner Thiel had made no great secret of wanting to spoke Pinkerton’s wheels however he could. But with so many Pinks (real and honorary) all crowded around — not to mention that brutal hangover the Professor had been assiduously courting, the last few days — he saw no possible way for Geyer to accomplish that goal, at least not now.

  More likely Frank simply wanted a word with the doc, which might well be a more productive course; not only was Asbury’s faith in Pinkerton near its lowest ebb, but his current state would render him an audience both captive and suggestible. By his own drunken testimony, the man was already more than half-convinced any value in his knowledge had been far outpaced by the damages wreaked by its abuses — and his appreciation of Asbury’s undeniably effective hex-killer shells aside, Morrow was hard put to disagree. “Harnessing the power of hexation” lost a lot of its appeal, as a concept, when you daily saw the people producing said hex-force shoved headlong into those harnesses.

  Inside the hastily erected log longhouse which served as Pinkerton’s command post, the lamps were always on, supernaturally bright; Morrow shaded his eyes as he led Ludlow inside. A long oak table stretched out in the chamber’s centre, covered with maps, reports, rosters, equipment lists and logbooks. A larger map, tacked to the wall, showed Hex City and Camp Pink faced off across the plain and Bewelcome in its southward valley, while scraps of coloured paper pinned here and there traced the patterns of troop movement. At the sight of an iron-bellied cookstove blazing with heat, Ludlow went for it with a moan of relief, rubbing his hands dry before the open grate.

  From behind the inner door Morrow could hear voices: Pinkerton’s Scots baritone plus a basso profundo he recognized as Captain Washford’s, and a third whose timbre — for no obvious reason — raised Morrow’s hackles. After a brief staring match with the two Pinks standing guard at the inner door, who finally moved far enough aside to let him gain access, he rapped on it twice, without announcing himself.

  Pinkerton broke off. “Edward!” he called, with horrid jocularity. “Come in, come in — leave Mister Ludlow out there for the nonce, if ye would? Secure matters first!”

  In some ways, Pinkerton’s love of petty hex-tricks was worse than Reverend Rook’s had ever been; never needing to ask who was at a closed door was only the mildest instance of such showing off. A symptom of his hexation’s unnatural provenance, or merely how he would have always acted, given enough power? Morrow disliked to dwell on it. So he stepped inside, instead — only to stop and stare gawkishly as Ludlow had, minutes before.

  The inner chamber, dark as the outer was bright, was lit only by an eerie grey-green fungal glow spilling from the spectral image hovering in mid-air before him: A clean-shaven man’s head and shoulders, broad-nosed, with receding grey hair brushed back from high temples and eyes so deep-set they seemed mere pits. Below the elegantly cravated neck, the image trailed away into writhing streamers of mushroom-coloured smoke which led back to the gaped and drooling mouth of an old white-haired woman slumped unconscious in a chair; its fulgor illuminated Washford, standing at stiff attention, and Pinkerton, pacing back and forth.

  Then — the image moved, eyes sliding sideways to Morrow, face frowning, like any living man’s. Its lips shaped words; a fraction of a second later, the dim, muffled voice he’d heard before slid buzzing from the comatose woman’s larynx. “Agent Edward Morrow? Former companion of Chess Pargeter, notorious outlaw and catamite?”

  Morrow was bemused to realize he needed only a little effort to find his own voice. Perhaps he really was becoming inured, or at least simply too numb to shock further.

  “Mister President,” he said, managing a short nod.

  “Mister Pinkerton tells me you’ve referred to me as a fool and a double-crosser, on previous occasions,” said President Andrew Johnson’s ectoplasmic factotum, its plummy North Carolina drawl rendering the harsh words oddly mild. “Well, I’ve been called far worse; there were rumblings of impeachment from the Judiciary, before this latest storm blew up. Let us agree, then, Mister Morrow, that if I raise no issue with your past choices, you shall raise none with mine — are we understood? Good,” it finished, without waiting for an answer. “As it happens, you were right when you told Mister Pinkerton I wished no new war with Mexico. Sadly, the damned Carlotta colonists have stirred up vindictive sentiment at Emperor Maximilian’s court, railing about the suffering Mexican inhabitants of this ‘Hex City.’ Backed by a faction of discontented Texican seceshes, there is daily clamour for another invasion of these States. This must be avoided at all costs.”

  “Of course, sir,” said Morrow, not sure what other response to make.

  “Glad you agree. Mister Pinkerton is of the opinion that the single best way to forestall the Hapsburg would be to simply destroy Hex City soon as may be, expelling or putting down its Mex-folk at the same time, thus depriving Maximilian of any ‘mission of mercy’ casus belli — ”

  “ — and replacing it with a cause of true revenge,” Washford interrupted, no longer able to hide the anger in his voice, “plus a populace even more ready to fight. Mister President, have we really sunk so low as to plan the eradication of a whole town of United States citizens, solely to toss some Spanish adventurer-tyrant a political bone?”

  Again, the Presidential image — while still hanging stationary — slid its no-eyes over to Washford, whose presence it almost seemed to have forgotten.

  “I do apologize for offending your fine sensibilities, Captain Washford,” it said, after a moment’s consideration. “Must admit, I hadn’t thought you set quite so high a stake on the ideal of citizenship . . . until, of course, I recalled exactly how recently you and your men had attained that very state. Yet as you well know, with great gains come great debt, not to mention great responsibility. Your Brigade has served our mutual nation well, undeniably, and benefitted from that service. It would be s
uch a shame to let all that fall by the wayside now, merely on a point of personal protocol — to violate your oath as a soldier and your honour as a gentleman by refusing a direct order from your Supreme Commander, thus potentially opening all the men under your command to a share in your own disgrace.”

  Morrow thought of young Private Carver in the room outside, whom the War had theoretically rendered free (by virtue of his uniform, and the authority it vested in him) to walk shoulder to shoulder with men of any other provenance — share a joke or take umbrage at a slight, carry weapons into battle and strike back if provoked, without fear of unjust retaliation. “Finally” free, he might have said, if asked — but was it really so? Or was that freedom merely momentary, doomed to vanish the moment their current struggle ceased, whether won or lost?

  One way or the other, Morrow suspected, the Carlotta colonists couldn’t be the only Americans, former or present, who found themselves tempted by the idea of the old order’s return. Change was frightening, by nature . . . and for opportunists like Johnson, such basic human weakness was an all too easy thing to play on. As Washford himself, by his origins’ nature, well knew.

  “Yessir,” Washford replied, brown face gone once more inscrutable. “I’ll leave you two, then, shall I? Now I know how things are.”

  Pinkerton smiled. “Well, if you wish, Captain — but believe me, yuir input is always welcome.”

  “Oh, I believe it,” Washford lied, barely glancing the big boss’s way. “Fact is, though, we got a raft of things need doing over on my side of the camp, ’fore the next assault. You could keep me in the loop as to what you and the President decide is best, however, I’d be grateful.”

  “Ye’ll be the first to know,” Pinkerton assured him; “second, anyhow. Right after Mister Morrow here.”

  “Much obliged.” Without so much as a glance back, Washford brushed past, shutting the door firmly behind him.