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)

  At impossible speed, the arcanistric behemoth roared across the plain aimed for the fallen Moon-Lady, only to collide with Clo as she streaked down upon it out of the heavens, still ablaze like Lucifer: Struck the roof and bounced off, a stray firework scraping ’gainst stone, then arced smoothly ’round and came back down to land on all fours, clinging. With every star tattooed on her body manifesting seared pinholes of volcanic light, her clawed hands tore at the armour ’til battle-forged steel yielded to alien might — long strips peeled back same as hide would, torn edges glowing red with heat. The ironclad began to weave back and forth, yet maintained speed toward Ixchel, the ceiba forest, the walls of New Aztectlan beyond. More shells burst forth, borne on tongues of fire; explosions inked in unnatural hues of green, blue and purple mushroomed up out of the ceiba trees, setting off chain reaction shockwaves which shattered row after row of those black monstrosities.

  The push’s up and running again, praise Christ, Morrow thought, frankly amazed. As all the while, left writhing on the ground directly in the Ironclad’s path, Ixchel howled fit to burst — so loud it bruised the soul, shook the very dirt they stood on, and almost made it seem like she was about to pry the whole Crack’s lips open using just her voice alone.

  “Goddamn yes!” Carver yelled, dancing like a madman; Morrow didn’t doubt but that he’d have drawn his gun and sprinted to join the attack, had Morrow not seized his arm at the last moment to haul him ’round. Carver glared at him, furiously. “We gotta help him, Ed, for love of all — that’s the Captain out there!”

  “Captain’ll live or die on his own, with nought for us do about it — ’cept fall alongside him, things go bad as they probably will!” Morrow yelled back. “What we gotta do get out of here, soon as we can — find a place, Old Woman Butte, in Chaco County . . .”

  “Shit’d be the point of that, exactly?”

  “’Cause Chess Pargeter is there, the real Chess Pargeter. And if anyone can set this all to rights . . . that’d be him.”

  “Don’t know — ” Carver started, mutinously. But froze a second later as Berta Schemerhorne grabbed him from behind, threading one arm through his quick as any needle, without even a by-your-leave. Her other hand was already twinned with Eulie’s, knuckles locked, while Eulie herself slapped her free palm to Morrow’s forehead.

  “I do,” Berta told Carver, firmly. Then, to Eulie: “You read ’im, sissy. I’ll drive.”

  Aw, shit, Morrow thought, knowing what was coming. Then stiffened again, entranced once more, as the hex-girl sieved his memories with brutal speed, found Yancey’s sending, flung a tendril of power out through the link itself to track its source. He heard Carver’s gasp slide to a retch, poor bastard, and felt for him — with luck, they’d hopefully already be wherever they were going before his spasm had time to bring up more’n bile, though Morrow doubted he’d see that as much of a mercy.

  Got a lot to learn ’bout hexes still, son, even after the last few days — but you will, believe me. ’Specially given who-all we’re on our way to see.

  Thought faded and skipped as time itself seemed to bend, a suture looped and violently pulled between now and yet-to-be. After which — with a crack of torn air, plus a flash of light-in-darkness that folded the world like a poorly-painted scrim —

  — all four of them were gone.

  From the shorthand notes of Fitz Hugh Ludlow:

  As the she-demon rips open the Ironclad’s roof, locks and cables part — the third car is released! It tumbles away, breaking up; passengers and demon-girl go flying — the remaining two cars roar on, Capt. Washford still yelling orders from his mounted perch to crush the fallen Lady — yet all in vain, for the first threat comes once more! Flung high out of the wreck, she lands upon the foremost car, resumes her ravaging — armour plating tears like sodden leather — but the Ironclad bears down still upon “goddess” Ixchel, felled and helpless yet, until —

  Reverend Rook appears by his wife’s side! — a blasphemy, and they are gone! Over the pit where the Lady fell, the Ironclad thunders too late — yet there is still the forest, and the City’s walls — the guns continue firing — can the Ironclad still accomplish victory, before the she-demon guts it from within?

  A great swathe of armour rips back — Washford vaults to the roof, sword in hand, and runs her through! Valiant fellow, a credit to his race — but NO! His blade snaps like green pine, she plunges both claws through his belly — he drives her and himself forward, off the car, down in front of it, to — their deaths? His, at least. Oh, poor Captain Washford!

  Next: a shattering crash! Both Ironclad cars flip up and over, iron dice shook in a box — the Demon kneels, unmoved, where they made impact! To either side beyond her, the cars tumble and roll onward, ceiba trees smashed to dust, gaping paths of ruin — one reaches the City wall itself — IT EXPLODES! A pillar of hellish flame boils up to the sky, sickly-hued — Good God, the screaming can be heard from where I stand —

  — but here hot shrapnel whined by Ludlow’s ear fast enough to sting, slapping him back to himself just in time to realize his danger. No Pinkerton to shield him anymore, no Washford, either — he could not be behind the front line, since that existed no longer. His right hand ached, pencil death-gripped, its point worn almost to wood with the fury of his scribbling, while his other arm burned from holding telescope to eye. Yet even through tear-blurred vision, the last thing he saw through it stayed etched on his sight, a phantom forever threatening to turn real: that thing once known as Clodagh Killeen stalking back out onto the field of battle, hungry for yet more blood, a shard of Captain Washford’s sabre still lodged deep in its midsection like a mis-set unicorn’s horn.

  Ludlow had scribed upon battlefields before, observing close-hand the hell which mere mortals, unassisted, could wreak upon each other; had, on occasion, pronounced — like many an “educated” fool — that Man needed no hexes, devils or angels guiding him to be capable of the greatest good and the greatest evil. As he looked out on this devastation below, however . . . carnage worse than any cannonade; foul-smelling smoke reaching skyward from the ruined plain; unnatural fires burning wild through the ceiba forest; the wrecks of the Ironclad’s cars, still spitting sparks and smoke . . . and, worse than all, the lightning-eyed thing that moved through that ruin like a shark in chummed water, responsible for most of it, Ludlow realized, at last, what self-satisfied hubris his pronouncements had been. A foolish attempt to elevate, or perhaps denigrate, his own species — to place the average person on a level with actual gods and devils.

  With a practised speed learned on those same aforementioned battlefields, Ludlow collapsed and stowed the telescope, then stuffed pad and pencil in his shoulder-bag to scramble down the knoll’s backside. Cold, faintly damp scree skittered under his boots; he let himself slide down and came to a kneeling stop, then rabbited down the small arroyo below. If he remembered right, and his overwhelming terror hadn’t got the absolute best of him, this let out into a small river valley that in turn debouched onto the winding path covering some-odd miles back to Bewelcome.

  From a bank of scrub brush near the arroyo’s far end, however, two strong hands shot up and yanked him hard down, into cover. Ludlow gave out with a choked yell — then relaxed as the owner of those hands came into view before him: Frank Geyer, mud-stained and dusty, but seemingly otherwise uninjured. Doctor Asbury crouched beside, miserable-looking, though at least his eyes were clear. In one hand, he held a small brass orb, a fob atop whirring as it slowly spun.

  “Half-feared no one had made it out but myself,” Ludlow whispered. “Did you see the end of it?”

  Geyer shook his head. “No need to,” he said. “Couldn’t’ve gone well regardless, and I can only s’pose it didn’t. Now stay still, and listen.”

  Ludlow frowned. Something seemed off about Geyer’s voice; his own too, now he thought on it. As though they spoke in a stuffy, closed room — and the light ’round them lay far gloomier than it
should, for what little cover they had.

  “Sounds odd, don’t it?” Geyer explained, noticing his reaction. “You can thank the Doc here for that — it’s some sort of ‘suppressor,’ a hex-powered camouflage blind, for intelligence work. Upshot is, long’s we keep quiet and don’t move, he guarantees we won’t be found, ’less some poor bastard trips right over us.”

  “‘Found’? But who’s there left to fear would — ?” Ludlow began, then stopped. For something was approaching, from nearer than was comfortable and damned quick, to boot.

  Though he’d previously thought the dim rumbling he’d been hearing some mere after-echo of the battle’s chaos, now — as it grew ever louder, ever more rhythmic — he suddenly knew exactly where it was coming from, and cringed farther back under Asbury’s tenuous magical cover. Again, Geyer signalled him to keep his mouth shut, and he obliged, gladly.

  In silence, the three of them watched the long-predicted Mexican battalion’s first outriders move past the arroyo mouth, mounting toward the plain. A sea of red, white and green Mexican flags, Habsburg’s gold-crowned eagle and black griffins prominent in its centre, waved from bayonet blades atop rifles proudly held erect by red-coated cavalry officers; infantry in paler blue coats followed behind, fusiliers marching with rifles over shoulders. All the men wore broad-brimmed black hats, while a few of the officers sported tall beaver-helms good enough for any Beefeater in London.

  Some of them were Carlotta colonists, Ludlow had no doubt — fled seceshes in favour of slavery, done up in their new country’s finery. But from this distance Mex and American blended all together, and he didn’t exactly feel like taking a closer look, just to find out which was which.

  “No signs of damage,” muttered Geyer. “With those Weed-walls up ’round Bewelcome, they probably just marched straight past. Langobard sure ain’t got the gumption to try stopping them.”

  “Or the manpower, or the arms,” Asbury pointed out. “Might they be here to reinforce Hex City, while retrieving their wayward citizens?”

  “They’re sure not ready for battle, with their pennants on parade.” Geyer squinted, thinking. “Wonder if Maximilian sent a hex or two of his own, maybe, to negotiate the Mexes’ release . . . could they see us, do you think, Professor? See whatever your device’s giving off, anyhow?”

  Asbury shook his head. “It is less a question of strength than of . . .

  frequency, rather, for lack of a better term; in this case, all the suppressor’s stored hexacious energies are directed inward.” He paused to give the fob another few twists, at which the whirring sped up again. “Though we would have to recharge it by siphoning hexation from another magickal source using my personal Manifold; so long as it runs, this field nullifies sound, warps most light around a certain radius, and entirely muffles all psycho-aetheric vibrations within. In other words, we simply register as being not here, or as good as.”

  Ludlow pursed his lips in a silent whistle. “Got a veritable magic shop in that bag of yours, don’t you, Professor?”

  Asbury looked almost ashamed. “Yes, well . . . if you tinker long enough, some advances are inevitable. But I must say — it does seem as though everything hexaciously powered is increasing in efficacy to a truly threatening degree, and that doesn’t bode well.” He bit his lip. “I do not much like to consider any future impact of the sheer aetheric destabilization these conflicts may have induced, Mister Ludlow. Indeed, I do not like to think on it at all.”

  It took more than an hour for the battalion — some thousand men or so, trailing followers and supply wagons — to finish moving by, after which Geyer made them wait another fifteen minutes, just to be safe. Then they set their feet to the path once more, muddying the Mexes’ tracks with their own. Without asking, Ludlow slung Asbury’s arm over his shoulders, ignoring the exhausted older man’s halfhearted protests. “Where to now?” he asked. “Bewelcome?”

  “Nope,” said Geyer. “Gonna meet up with Mister Thiel . . . and the Texicans.”

  Upside was about how Chess’d remembered it, from Down Under: full of discomfort and disarray, everything just that hair out of true — wind too cold, sun too bright, full to the gills with contrary motherfuckers who might slap you soon as kiss you, or shoot you without any kiss at all. Not to mention how there wasn’t one person within eye’s reach who hadn’t fucked with him at least once, and not in the enjoyable way, either . . . his second good friend in all this lousy world Yancey Kloves, sad to say, very much included.

  But for all that, even while he stood there squinting and shivering with the toll of his travels run through every part of him like a stain, he still felt as though he’d never seen anything so pretty as the same sun that pained him, the empty, windswept sky, the bone-coloured desert with its hidden varmints and disasters. That he’d never felt so Goddamn good in all his strange, short life as he did standing here weaponless and alone, barely able to recall what it was he thought he’d been doing when the Enemy’d tricked him into signing away his flesh and becoming yet another of that mirror-footed son-of-a-bitch’s four faces. None of it seemed to matter, just for the moment; he felt naked and new, a colt licked to full trembling height, teetering on un-shod hooves that might one day take him . . .

  anywhere, really. Any-damn-where, at all.

  Only wish Oona was here to share in it, he caught himself thinking, just for a moment. But he really must’ve been happy, for once — happy like he hadn’t been since the bad old days, the simple days, measured out in bullets or blow-jobs — because he couldn’t even bring himself to resent it.

  One moment only, barely half a skipped beat of his missing heart. And then — it was all sent sideways, stretched and pinched and twisting in a way that made him want to bend double, claw at the dust ’til his fingertips split, unsure if he’d see blood or bone or what, exactly: just the awful spectacle of his own flesh crumbling away, maybe, like chalk, never to be resolved.

  Oh God, oh God. Christ Almighty, not that I ever thought of You as such, ’cept to scream your name out in crisis and revel in the blasphemy . . .

  So swift had all this passed that Yancey was only now replying to his first question, repeating: “‘Where’s Ed?’ Might’ve hoped you’d be happy to see me, too, after all this while — though I s’pose time runs a bit different, down there.”

  Chess swallowed, or tried to; his mouth was so dry, he could barely taste his own teeth. “Yeah, it does, but . . . I am, really. It just . . .

  feels like . . .”

  He felt himself droop and cursed it, but couldn’t stop, wobbling on his pins like a chloral-drop drunk — saw her grey eyes widen as she took in the extent of his ruin and felt her seize onto him by both shoulders, holding him from collapse. Behind her, the others stepped closer, keen to help. “What’s wrong with you?” she demanded. “Are you — hurt, somehow? What can I do?”

  “Don’t know,” he managed. “An’ . . . don’t know that either, or that. I feel — oh, shit.”

  Now he really was ground-bound, bones gone all slippy, braced to hit with his eyes shut and maybe roll (or sprawl, at best), to minimize the damage. But a fresh grip intruded, keeping him upright: Yiska’s mannish fingers, knitting fast with his own. Meantime, Songbird’s gunpowder-flavoured Chinee magic twined ’round shoulder down elbow to wrist and right back up the same path on Chess’s side, a dragon-scaled glove bolstering strength and channelling energy which warmed, probed, stung as it searched him for answers.

  Yancey checked his sweaty forehead. “Why’d you ask about Ed?” she demanded. “Why right then — right now?”

  “Dunno . . .”

  “Well, think, Goddamnit. If you’re not too sick to swear you’re well enough to reason, so far’s you’re able.”

  “Screw you, Missus,” he told her, with a surge of black temper, which at least made her smile. “Yeah, there you go,” she said, with some affection. “Now spill it, ’fore you pass out.”

  “I just . . .” On i
nstinct alone — hell, it’d worked so far — Chess rummaged down deep, cleared his mind as far as he could, and trusted the words to come on their own. Which is how he was surprised to hear himself saying, eventually —

  “Ed — and you — you’re the only things I feel . . . tied to, anymore — like I’d dust up and blow away, otherwise. Feel like I need him, is all — need you both, here, together. That make any sense?”

  “More than you know, red boy,” Grandma rumbled, from behind him. “But then, this is no great mystery, given you know so little.”

  “Oh, thanks for that, rock-pile,” Chess snapped back, and quivered all over from inside to out, feeling horribly like he was going to puke, pass out . . . or fade clean the fuck away. For the first time since the War he recalled his past soldiery to mind — not the guns-and-killing part, but the code that made it okay to lean on a comrade when you knew you couldn’t stand — and leaned on Yancey that way now, stifling his humiliation. Took deep breaths, for all he still didn’t really feel a need to breathe, until the nauseating feeling that he might see the ground through his own boots at any second faded, if only by a touch.

  “So what the hell is wrong with me?” he asked, to keep himself from looking down to check. “You gals botch the resurrection? Not to blame ya, if so; Rev himself never had the balls to try pulling that one off — ”

  “Chess,” said Yancey, and he found himself shutting up — as surprised by his own vague shame as by her voice’s steely command, not loud, but final.

  “Resurrection is for dead things,” Grandma replied, “and you are not a ghost; the Smoking Mirror repaired your flesh when he possessed it, so it lives yet, even without you inside it. If you had ever learned spirit-walking, or any Hataalii skills at all, then you would have some control over your current state. As it is, you have neither any place prepared in this world nor an empty vessel to return to. You must be anchored if you wish to remain here, especially while the Crack remains open.” As Yancey, Songbird and Yiska exchanged looks, her voice became acid: “Do you doubt me? Who knows more of such things, amongst us?”