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)

  Must’ve been plain enough, though, for Yancey confirmed it by spinning a new thought-strand out toward Grandma, the ghost-hex only a squatting, shadowy bulk on the edge of this shared thought-space. Connection vibrated and pulsed in five directions at once, a harp-strung telegraph cable which sung high, almost painful, then broke.

  There is fire between you, and it is by your choice that two fires shall become one which is both, where before, one would only have endured in the other’s ash. Though obviously prompted by Grandma (Sophy could “hear” the Indian . . . Diné . . . words, lurking under the English equivalents their minds supplied), Yancey’s part in this choir invisible wrapped them all, heavy with invocation. You choose now to share a single fire, trust and understanding, a way of life. This fire will give you heat, warmth, food, and happiness. The new fire represents a new beginning, a new life. Let the fire endure for life, until Tódilhil, the Black Water Lake, separates you.

  Death do us part, Sophy thought. Lord Almighty . . . this is like marriage.

  Do you choose to share your fire, and forever after forsake burning alone?

  From Gabriel, only bewilderment: (Share?) Songbird too stayed still, body and mind unmoving, as if paralyzed.

  After a moment, Yancey repeated the question. Do you choose to share your fire, and forsake the solitary flame?

  Nothing. Nothing. And then —

  Yes. A sharp, jagged burst, its meaning nonetheless clear, while something else — some long splash of force, searing to look upon — reached out from Songbird toward Gabe, then stopped bare inches from his face, trembling with effort. Make him understand, Sophronia Love; you are his mother, he yearns to obey you. I cannot hold back for long. Make him answer, before I do as my nature urges.

  Now Sophy was the one frozen. For deep in Gabe’s thoughts, tangled with hers, she could feel his mind start on a horrifying slide from fear and confusion to outright hunger, a deep, greedy, brutish appetite wholly unlike anything any infant should be able to feel. He began to struggle, reaching out for Songbird’s power with his own, a crackling white tendril that burned icily, stabbing Sophy from breast to gut. If Gabriel touched Songbird’s power in hunger, they were lost, she knew — simply knew — and knew, as well, that there was no real way to explain, not in any way Gabriel could comprehend.

  Blindly, instinctively, she seized him, gripping his inchoate voracity the same way she’d grab his wrist to stop him trying to touch a candle: No! Not safe. Hurt. And then, though it tore her soul in two to do it: Like this.

  Sent pain in a burst, all her own worst memories distilled, and “heard” — felt — him howl, at the touch of it. Then flooded him with urgent love just a second later, until he yielded, unable even to imagine resisting Mama on something she wanted so; swerved him straight into Songbird’s grip with his mind wide open, a friendship-clutching hand rather than a bite-poised mouth. Thinking back, at the same time, as though his skull were her very own puppet-head: Yes, we agree, to everything. We swear to share the fire.

  (Yes.)

  Light burst over Tse Diyil, turning night briefly into day. The detonation of commingling power knocked Sophy backward out of mind-bond; she struck the ground with a horrified gasp. Christ’s name, she’d let go of Gabriel, dropped him! Furiously excoriating herself, she struggled back to her feet — to find Gabriel floating in mid-air, five feet off the ground, staring with wide eyes and a delighted grin at Songbird, as if she was the most wonderful toy he had ever seen.

  Songbird hovered likewise, airborne, opposite him; her blanket had fallen to the ground, revealing the tatters of the red silk gown she’d arrived in. But that gown was mending itself even as Sophy watched, spinning itself busily back into wholeness. She, too, wore a stunned smile, so unlike what Sophy knew as “her” that for a dazed moment, she wondered if this could really be the same girl. Some other albino Celestial, no doubt, come to take her place, and turn this whole affair into one giant jest.

  A sphere of blazing golden-green radiance surrounded she and Gabe, pouring a spring morning’s heat and light out onto the winter air. The conjure-fire had been blown apart, scattered to ash.

  Gabriel laughed, and flew at Songbird; she caught him with perfect grace, naturally as Sophy herself, and let him sling his legs ’round her monkey-style. Not sure if this was dream or nightmare, Sophy saw that Songbird’s fingertips were once more adorned in their former golden, talon-like sheaths, and that the power which glowed in her eyes was matched, hue for hue and force for force, in Gabriel’s. Petulant girl; sweet, harmless infant; both were gone, for the nonce. The twinned thing before her was something alien, and hideously strong. . . .

  As if sensing his mother’s terror, however, Gabriel abruptly wriggled, turning in Songbird’s arms ’til he saw where she stood, aghast — then leaped free, hurtling through the air to thud neatly into Sophy’s arms. They closed ’round him automatically, trained to respond to his weight, and he giggled, squirming against her. Might’ve been any given night when his cries woke her, with him lying there infuriatingly happy, cheered by sight of her dragging herself half-asleep to his cradle.

  “He is your son.” Even Songbird’s voice was different — calmer, more generous. She had drifted back down to ground a diplomatic few yards distant, hair eddying loose about silk-clad shoulders. “Though I cannot sense his mind as you do, the bond conveys — impressions, and this I know: he will never not be your son, Sophronia. He is simply . . . more than that, now.”

  At the sound of Songbird’s voice, Gabe wriggled about again, grinning at his new friend; Songbird smiled back. Beyond her, Yancey stirred with a groan from the heap she’d been knocked into, pushing herself up on her elbows.

  “It worked, then.” Coming as it did in the union’s wake, Yiska’s voice sounded discordant, almost unfamiliar; Sophy winced, then wished she hadn’t. But Songbird’s smile didn’t falter — instead, she revolved in place as on a spinning pedestal, arms spread, to show off the marvel of her restoration, and grinned yet wider when Yiska could not keep from gaping.

  “Ohé!” She said, at last, admiringly. “You are a sight, in your glory — better than ever, to my mind. I rejoice, to see you like this again.”

  Once more, Sophy watched a blush tint Songbird’s too-pale cheeks, bright and blotchy. “There are others to thank, for that,” she replied, at last. “And I . . . will endeavour to do so.”

  Yiska grinned her approval. “Now you are learning, White Shell Girl.”

  That same spark, leaping between them, might’ve lead to something more, if not for what next intruded: a huge black thing which breached the darkness beyond the circle, hurtling itself at Yiska’s back — glassy spike-ruff bristling, wolf jaws agape in a soundless snarl, and taloned ape-hands spread out to seize, rip, tear and gut. Wolf? Bear? Shock and disbelief slowed Sophy’s heartbeat to agonized hammer blows. She saw Yiska twist, bringing up her spear even as Grandma heaved up a gout of power, but both were too slow, caught unprepared, too late.

  Then: green-gold force lanced through the beast’s ribcage, pinning it in mid-air. The thing writhed and flailed, shrieks so harsh and high they near dissolved into a buzz, like some mad, dying wasp. Yiska reeled back, leaned on her own spear-shaft, panting. Grandma’s half-shaped hexing broke apart in her hands and dribbled, sizzling, all down her front, leaving smoking black tracks in its wake, though she appeared not to notice.

  Numb, Sophy followed the line of power back to its source and saw Songbird, aloft once more with hand outstretched, holding the beast transfixed with a single pointing finger. She seemed as surprised as anyone else.

  The green-gold aura surrounding her stretched to Gabe, wailing in Sophy’s arms with rage and fright; abruptly, as this rose to one single angry shriek, the light flared and the beast exploded in a thunder-crack of shards that sifted the ground like coal-coloured snow. Startled, Songbird thudded down and turned to blink at Gabriel, who buried his face in Sophy’s breast, still bawling. The green-go
ld light faded, leaving them all in the dark.

  It hit Sophy how close they had all just come to dying. Her knees buckled; she was just barely able to turn the collapse into a clumsy seat-taking, Yancey Kloves’ hand suddenly wedged ’neath one armpit to lever her down safely, though the cold ground’s impact still rattled her spine. She gulped, shivering, hugging Gabe hard as felt safe to. It’d just been so fast — only now did she see Yiska’s braves lunge into the circle, weapons drawn far too late, and useless, while shouted questions from the others skirled up too, as they came sprinting. Yiska’s answers were curt, and sounded disappointed.

  “Must’ve come through right at the moment the Oath took,” Yancey managed, voice raw, staring into the dark. “Might even be the Oath itself brought it through — that the burst of power widened the Crack, or something like.” Looking up, to Grandma: “We were all so ritual-took we’d have missed the Last Trump, probably . . . but I can’t think how else it got by you.”

  “Do not flatter, Experiance Kloves. Even one so old as I does not always sense everything, immediately.”

  “Mmmm, and the eddies of the ch’i still swirl in disturbance,” Songbird agreed, conjuring a marshlight sphere between her palms, illuminating her frown of concentration. “There may be more on the way, requiring vigilance from all. We have been undeservedly lucky.”

  “In more ways than one,” Yiska murmured, smiling. To which Songbird looked down, unmistakably pleased, and Yancey grinned again.

  For a moment, only — a wholly uncharitable one — Sophy’s thoughts went back to Chess Pargeter and his Reverend, Leviticus 18:22, and everything similar. But . . . if whatever had grown up between these two ladies was somehow helping Songbird to find her place in the world, she felt unqualified to resent it; they already were unnatural, after all, to begin with. A bit more wouldn’t hurt, probably.

  Nothing ’gainst it in Holy Writ that I can cite to the contrary, either — not specifically.

  Grandma said, “We must close this fissure, that much is clear. But how, even with the red boy’s help?”

  Songbird cleared her throat. “In Ch’in,” she offered, “our doctors say that sometimes a wound must be unpicked, in order to heal cleanly.”

  Didn’t mean much to Sophy, on the face of it — or the others, outside of those two. But Grandma nodded, slowly. “I see your meaning — it gives me an idea, though we will have to wait until the red boy comes back up to try it, for it will require all our strength. And so . . .”

  Songbird nodded. “So.”

  She looked to Yancey, then. As, one by one, so did the rest of them.

  Yes, Sophy realized. Because — just like her part in the Oath, guiding Gabe through me, this is something only she, of all of us, can do.

  Yancey sighed, and nodded too. “Down again, then,” she said, to herself. “Always down.”

  They hadn’t bothered to re-light the conjure-fire, since the light pouring from Songbird and Gabe — along with the harsher white radiance of Grandma’s unlocked power — cast all the luminance they could possibly need. Beyond it, forewarned, Yiska’s warriors stood in a further circle, with spears, knives and bows at the ready. Yancey couldn’t say she minded.

  She sat cross-legged at the circle’s centre with an ally at every compass-point, feeling their varying degrees of power weave around her like a bridled cyclone, pulling the lips of the Crack farther apart than they’d ever before reached. A feeling of thinness, insubstantiality, coiled in Yancey’s gut; she had to breathe slow and even to steady herself, eyes tightly closed. On either side, the hexes blazed pyre-bright in her awareness, while Yiska and Sophy were blank spots, deep-rooted as rail spikes — different by faith, yet identically solid in their convictions. Yancey fixed each location in her mind, sensing their pull, the anchoring she counted on to call her home, if she happened to slip too deep.

  Then, without ritual or hesitation — she was long past the need for either — she whooshed out her breath like a diver, and let go of the world.

  That the plunge always felt “downward” was probably mere sophistry, since she’d never believed in the Underworld actually being under everything. But her dream-self, which thought in such terms, always held more power than her waking one, especially here.

  Too quickly to reckon, Yancey’s sense of the others shot upward and away, receding with blinding speed; a thundering wind and a sickening weightlessness engulfed her, as though she’d flung herself off some impossibly high cliff. The first time, hurtling abyss-ward, she’d screamed her throat raw. Now she only clenched her teeth and held focus, falling.

  Within moments (or hours), she felt the track she’d worn on previous descents closing ’round her, a tunnel burrowing between worlds. The fall became a slide, at first smooth, then painfully bumpy, ’til her feet touched down on something like rock: black, ice-streaked, biting with cold. Yancey cupped her arms ’round herself, and shivered. This was farther down than she had ever gone, and she was dismayed to realize that — like a hawk stooping on prey, and missing — she had lost the bird’s-eye sense of where Chess and Oona were, in the sprawling tapestry of deadlands. She’d come too close to the map, and could no longer read it.

  The bleak, colourless terrain of the half-world spread out below her in all directions, falling away from the mountain peak on which she stood; above, the conduit connecting her to her body stretched upward, taut and humming. Reflexively, she touched Chess’s guns, or their memory, to confirm they still hung at her belt. Thus reassured, she sprang downward from ledge to spire to boulder, each step only firm beneath her feet because she willed it so. In minutes, she stood on the plain, casting about.

  Nothing.

  All the curse words she’d ever learned from Chess and Ed came spilling out, under her breath. Neither time nor geography stayed steady here, once you got out beyond where things echoed the living world, and while she’d known that, she’d still unthinkingly assumed her talents would somehow account for it — clearly a mistake. The very idea that, after everything they’d sacrificed and accomplished, she would find herself stymied by a simple inability to find that contentious creature at the vital moment . . .

  Typical, Goddamnit. Typical Chess.

  Turning in a slow circle until the mountains were once again at her back, she squinted hard, and still found nothing. Should she wait, or walk? Waiting made more sense by the odds — if Chess made it to this place at all, he would eventually start to climb — but she could barely stand the thought of coming so far to do nothing but stand still.

  Yet however she stretched out her time, it was limited. Granted, she never tired down here, but her flesh still bore the weariness, up above; if she pushed herself too far, she would get no warning before her body’s collapse wrenched her back into a day-long blackout. And it might seem to take only minutes or days before Chess and Oona found their way here. That was, of course, even assuming they escaped the legions pursuing them, those maddened mobs of revenants she’d heard Chess call his Dead Posse. . . .

  Yancey smiled, grimly. No, when it came down to sheer defiance, she somehow couldn’t believe Chess Pargeter would ever let himself be beaten. Again, she touched the guns that had once been his, palms atop their stocks; so strange, to take comfort from such death-dealing implements. Yet no stranger than the man himself.

  With no heartbeat in her ears or breath to plume in the air, it took her some moments to realize that the darkness some ways out was moving — a man-shaped shadow, pacing steadily toward her. In an instant, she had both guns out and cocked, with a speed Chess might have applauded. Her fear she pushed to one side, wasting no more thought on it. These guns were real only because her mind made them real, made them work — would make them work. No matter what, or who, this foe proved to be, either; it was of the dead, and it was given to her to command the dead.

  Then enough of the alien starlight outlined it to make the figure’s face visible. And Yancey straightened, grip slackening, ’til
the guns almost fell unheeded from her hands.

  “Uther,” she whispered — tried to whisper, anyhow, as breathlessness made the name a mere mouthing. But the man who’d been her husband, if only for less than a day, clearly didn’t need to hear his name to recognize it. He smiled, and opened his arms.

  And she flung herself into them, straightaway, headlong. Childish as little Gabriel Love.

  A bare parody of a true embrace, yet she clung fast anyhow, not wanting to face the truth of it yet, while every moment drove it deeper. Uther had held her before, even kissed her, though they had gone no further; she knew his smell, all the minor irregularities of a living man — scratch of his beard, sweat and stink, slight off-balance pressure of his left arm from an old knife-wound, ill-treated. Here with her now, he was solid and warm, yet she felt no pulse under her cheek. His chest did not move.

  And as she slowly withdrew and looked up at him, even his face gave it away — the nascent crow’s-feet at his eyes, the tan of the New Mexico sun, the scattered faint pockmarks of a childhood bout with chickenpox . . . gone. He had been remade but not reborn, smoothed into a perfection found only in death.

  “Oh, God,” she heard herself say, without meaning to. “I did love you, Uther. . . . I always will! But — ”

  Uther’s reaction, however, was the last thing she’d expected; he threw his head back and laughed, then looked back down at her, still chuckling. “Oh, sweetheart, do you really think I need proof of your heart now, where we both are?” With a shrewdly raised eyebrow: “Or that it troubles me someone else could maybe make you happy . . . happier than I might’ve, even?”

  Yancey would have flushed, if she could’ve, but Uther laughed again, and folded her back in. “Morrow’s a good man, in the end,” he told her. “Sometimes a little too prone to give in to lesser evils out of fear of greater ones, but you could do well with him, like he could, with you.” As she stared: “Yes, we know. We see more than we can ever tell, Experiance. And though you’ve got a mighty strong sight in you, you’d better take care never to think you see everything there is to see.”