Ed gasped in pain, and watched Freyr do the same—him in premature mourning over Yancey, the boy in real mourning for his family. But Missus Daughter must’ve felt worse yet, unlikely as that seemed; she covered her eyes with her hands, letting the wheel slacken further still, and sobbed outright.
I never . . . I would never. . .
’Course not, not if you knew. But she did, and didn’t say.
There was a beat, as the wheel slowed to a halt. Then—
. . . is that so?
Turning from sorrow back to rage with the flick of a hair, Missus Daughter heaved herself to her feet, catching the doorway’s “thread” in both hands, and yanked. Her spindle cracked across, spool releasing, severing what she’d already wound, which vanished in a malign puff. Ed saw the doorway’s outline start to unravel, one stile collapsing almost completely, sagging the rest from a rectangle into a drunken triangle. From beyond, powered by an icy blast, that horrible voice cried out—
Woman, no! You cannot turn me away, you dare not—
Oh no?
Your last child—I will eat him, woman, if I must wait a thousand more years! His blood on your head!
Drawn up full height, Missus Daughter sneered, somewhat magnificently. His blood on his head, she replied, from this moment on, as with all men; I set him free, to make his own mistakes. You do not know what I dare.
A second later, the doorway ate itself, closing fully. As though it had never been.
Ed looked back over to Yancey—that shade of her, anyhow—and bit his tongue to keep from crying out. For she was similarly all a-tremble, shading back and forth, occasionally fading to nothing. With the next slipped breath, it seemed as though she might blow away forever.
Got . . . someone with me, her voice said, dimly. Can you . . . see him? Missus Daughter nodded. He’ll . . . take those folk of yours home, if . . . you’ll allow it. You’ll . . . see them again, soon enough. . . .
Yes. I know, yes.
Wavering further yet: . . . okay, then . . .
Yancey’s “head” hung down, flower-drooping, light that made up her hair falling abruptly slack; Ed had to stop himself from jumping to her aid, not that he could’ve done much. Before he could, however, Missus Daughter had already reached up into the air, grasping onto—through, more like—a portion of Yancey’s spectral self.
Thank you, she said, simply. Now go, girl: your child comes. Be there to greet her.
(her?)
Something wafted up between them, like smoke. A portion of Missus Daughter’s hexation, or even her soul? Whichever, it surely seemed to help: Yancey sighed, solidified a tad—and went.
In the wake of her passing, Missus Daughter folded up, slumping back into Freyr’s open arms. He bent to hug her, pressing a quick kiss to the disordered top of her hair; she mumbled in his ear, something Icelandish, of the sort Ed wouldn’t’ve been able to decode even if he’d heard it aloud.
Freyr looked up. “She says, my Momma . . . you should go home, too.”
Ed nodded, and did.
So much faster, this time, through the snow and over the ridge—he could see his house (their house) the very minute he made it ’cross the hill’s spine and pelted hard towards it, panting like a schoolboy, never quite losing the awful fear that Yancey might not have made it back to her body, even with Missus Daughter’s help. . . .
When he broke through the door, however, Chess was mopping up the floor where Yancey’d laboured, red to either wrist. “Where is she?” Ed demanded, making Chess look up, sourly.
“In the damn bedroom, where’d you think? They both are.” Adding, as Ed rushed past him: “You’re welcome, by the by. And get this straight, Pinkerton man—next time, you two’re on your own: hire yourselves a live-in nurse, you have to. Hell, I’ll pay! ’Cause I am never doin’ that again.”
The words whipped away behind, trailing off into a grumbling monologue, like Chess knew full well Ed wasn’t even listening. Because there Yancey was, back in the white-faced flesh, all tucked up in bed with their scrap of a daughter screaming, red-faced, in her arms.
“I thought Oona, for her name,” she told him, when he finally broke off kissing her. “Oona . . . Cheshire, maybe. Those go well with ‘Morrow,’ right?”
“I heard that, goddamnit,” Chess yelled, from the kitchen.
Yancey twitched a smile, or the ghost of one. And: “What about Yrsa?” Ed suggested, hoping to make it widen. “Be a nice gesture, I s’pose—and I’ll bet you we see her and Freyr for First Foot, one way or t’other.”
Still unseen, Chess made a very familiar spitting noise at that suggestion, but kept his peace otherwise. Ed grinned himself, staring down at wailing Oona-Cheshire-Yrsa, who’d grabbed onto his cold forefinger; damn, but she had a grip on her! Not much of a surprise there, he thought, gaze drifting back up to her mother, who was watching him with eyes alternately love-full and exhausted.
“Talk about it later,” she replied, and let her lids drift shut.
THE END
LIKE A BOWL OF FIRE
A Hexslinger Tale
1869:
“Ghosts, huh?” Chess Pargeter remarked, sifting ashes between his fingers, while his bridled horse snorted and kicked the blasted ground. “Never did see one of those, outside of the Underworld.”
Charlemagne Alarid laughed. “You’re the only man alive could make that claim, I’ll bet.”
“Oh, don’t be so fast to judge. Woman I know back in New Mexico sees ghosts every day of her life—that’s her skill, her call, for all she ain’t a hex in full. Bony motherfucks come from miles around just t’jaw at her, like they think she can solve all their problems for ’em.”
“And can she?”
“Most-times, but not always. ’Cause there’s some bad deeds nobody can pay for but you.”
Charlie shrugged, glancing around. “Yeah, well . . . too bad she ain’t here, I guess. Though it don’t seem to me as how these ones’re big on talkin’, either way.”
The place they now stood—Chess on his own two feet with his horse left bridle-tied a few trees back, Charlie mounted up still—had once been called Peaty Hollow, back before the war, according to the folk who’d sent them this way. Now it was known variously as Burnt Bowl or simply “The Burn,” for obvious reasons.
“Might be haints, which case I don’t think you prob’ly can he’p, too much,” one stick of a man—might’ve just as easily been young, old or somehow both at once, going strictly by his dried-leather consistency—had informed them, chewing diffidently at a well-worn cud of tobacco while he did. “But th’ tale is, cain’t nothing’ and nobody stay up thar fer long—not since ’fore Surrender Day, when them Bluebellies scoured it out an’ put all they found t’the slaughter. Now ever’thang folks try t’raise in its place burns like-a-wise, no matter which side o’the line they stood.”
“So why’re you tellin’ me about it, exactly?”
“Thought might could be you could take a look as’n ya pass through, rememberin’ all we heard ’bout you, in them songs an’ such. Like maybe if it is a hex, you could talk ’em down, take ’em on with y’all, when y’all move on. Take ’em back t’that city o’yourn, t’leave all us God-fearin’ folk in peace.”
To this last, Chess had only snorted.
“Ain’t my city,” was all he’d said, out loud, by way of reply. But sighed nonetheless, knowing he’d probably have to do it anyhow, now that he’d been dumb enough to listen.
Now he scanned ’round, eyebrows knit and squinting hard, sniffing the air for any trace-scent of hexation, familiar as the sweat of his own pores. Smelled only turned earth and greenery seeping in from without the Burn’s rigidly demarked edges, sorrow and charred blood seeping up from under the fire-black crust from within. It was a sore place, not so much dead as suffering still, and angry with it.
Yet all the pain he felt here was simply part of Man’s allotted portion, as Reverend Rook might’ve said
, were he still upright enough to do so; wrapped it up in a Bible quote too, no doubt, all neat and pretty and sonorous. Which Chess still couldn’t bring himself to do, for all he suspected he’d probably absorbed enough of that God-botherer cant in his time to spit back a fairly good impression, if nothing else.
Thou wilt, thou shalt, thou art, etcetera. Hear and obey my Word, now and for ever. For that I AM the Lord thy God, Almighty, everlasting . . . (Or not.)
Wasn’t like Chess owed Ash Rook or that damn wandering state he’d helped to lay the foundations of anything, anymore, after all the blood he’d spilled to raise the latter up and lay the former down—not even the privilege of occupying his memory. In the end, after all was said and done, Chess had been left only Chess, as ever; roaming free, doing nothing he didn’t want to, ’less his instincts told him otherwise. . . .
Though, to be fair, that last in itself was a change, he supposed.
Beside him, Charlie sat high in his saddle, even more so than his six-foot-plus frame usually merited. Before they’d left Arizona for parts North-East, being the fashionable young spark that he was, he’d traded his big black for one of those stylish new arachnorses bred from the corpse of Old Woman Butte’s giant spider-beast. While biddable enough, it was a damned creepish sight, and fair made Chess’s skin ruck just to ride along in concert with—skittish, silent, all its many eyes turned in different directions at once, poisonous mandibles clicking hungrily. His horse didn’t like it much either, which was another reason Chess had dismounted, hoping some much-needed distance would calm the animal down far enough to make it less of a distraction than it had been thus far. Already, he’d spent far more time on their journey than was strictly comfortable stroking peace into his sturdy little mare, rather than paying attention to the road itself.
“You need to keep that thing from my line of sight, ’fore I lose my concentration,” Chess warned, as the spider shuffled its eight claw-feet in the charred dust. But Charlie just laughed, reaching down to scritch its coarse fur ’tween the head-bumps, like it was some bull-sized dog.
“King hex Chess, who used t’be a god, feared of something cut wholesale from hexation’s cloth—that’s some joke, ain’t it? Hell, you were here when these were set loose on the world, is what I heard; I’d think you might be used to ’em, by now.”
“That’s right, I was, and you weren’t; I saw what-all they’re capable of, up close. So stop treatin’ it like it likes you, or thinks on you at all, if it even can think—beyond oh, there’s that two-leg sticks himself to my back on occasion, gives me sugar and kicks me so I go this way or that, I mean.”
“Aw, this gal’s all right. I think she is somewhat sweet on me, in her way.”
“I don’t see how you could prove any such thing, one way or the other.”
“We’ll see.”
At that, Chess huffed, and looked away—only to start a tad, when he realized there were wan, edge-of-transparent faces peering down on them out of almost every nook and cranny, every vacant eye-socket window. Though little was left of what he took to be Burnt Bowl’s original buildings, there were vague sketches of what might’ve once been dwellings or places of business here and there, partly fallen brick walls and scorched chimney-pots with broken bellies like howling, toothless mouths. Even one entire half-house, torn at the cross-seams like badly dried plaster with its backside caved in and moss growing up over the rest: a mass of green blurred ’round black sticks, all thick-tangled in vines and creepers whose little star-shaped flowers smelled sweet-sick at once.
As Chess watched, one of these yawned wide, enticing a bee to land, then closed over it stickily as it tried desperately to tug itself free once more, legs fast-glued to the pistil—sure yet slow, one bright petal at a time, like it was enjoying the bee’s frenzy too much to hurry. The stink of impending insect death made Charlie’s arachnorse seem to sniff the air, for all it had no nose to speak of, making Charlie’s shoulders rise in return; one hand fell to his gun-butt, maybe checking it was still there. “What’re you lookin’ at?” he demanded, of Chess.
“You can’t see ’em?”
“Know goddamn well I can’t, goddamnit. We ain’t that alike.”
“Mmm. Well . . . looks like that old man was right on the first if not the second, is all I’ll say for now. ’Cause ‘haints’ it sure does seem to be.”
The faces were blinking out now, one by one, only to reappear almost immediately at considerably closer vantage, as the rest of Burnt Bowl’s former citizens came eddying up out of the ground or seeped from between the trees, nude and shamed and angry in their insubstantiality. Chess turned his back on Charlie as they began to close in, letting his own hands drop to where the guns he’d given away had once hung—those fine, equal-making Colts he’d gifted to dead-speaker Yancey Colder Kloves, back before the Hex War with Allan Pinkerton even caught fire, to protect her from more palpable threats than her calling usually brought her within range of.
She’d be good to have along with us, right now, he thought, just for translation purposes, if nothing else—or maybe even back-up, things get a little hotter. ’Cause seein’ I can see ’em, things must already be pretty damn bad, in the first place.He spread his fingers, letting a tiny spark and snap of greenish lightning flicker between them like webbing, just to make the point that he wasn’t completely without weaponry. Heard Charlie swear as his spider-steed drew back fast enough to startle, rearing slightly, so it was balanced on its back four legs with its foremost two canted up, ready to strike.
Charlie reined up hard, kneeing the thing back down. “More ghosts? Where are they? Anything I can—?”
“All ’round, and no. But like I said one time already, keep that slimy-mouthed sumbitch of yours off’a me when I’m workin’, Charlie, or I won’t be held responsible,” Chess threw back, without turning.
“She’s female, goddamnit! I’ve said it enough times!”
“Yeah, what-the-hell ever. How can you even tell?”
Turned out, ghosts didn’t seem to like arachnorses any better than mares did, and weren’t all too impressed by magickal display. As the phantom crowd grew denser in number, if not in heft, Chess felt a bare suggestion of heat rise along with them, faint but threatening; the soil under his boots began to shiver and shift, more ash-bake than true dirt, like it was fixing to shed itself. Here and there it grew lighter in hue, too, glowing like a blown-on coal—and where it did, Chess saw the air above start to warp, forcing a shimmer like desert haze, too dry for smoke.
Fuck with this, he thought; he’d be a fool to let things go further, not when he knew he had options. And dug his heels in, reaching down with that inner sense he didn’t have to struggle to cultivate anymore, feeling ’round beneath the ground for any sort of handy moisture: Water to fight fire with, if push came to shove. A well, a creek, any sort of artesian spring . . .
“Naw, Mister,” a voice said, warningly—human, cool and fake-sweet as the bug-eating blooms above—from far nearer by than Chess was comfortable with, given he hadn’t noticed the speaker was even here ’til just now. “Wouldn’t try that, I was you.”
But: “Says who?” Charlie shot back, before Chess could. “Really should show yourself outright, you want to give advice—I mean, that’s just friendly. Don’t you think?”
A smirk to these next words, so clear Chess could fair hear whoever-it-was’s lips crinkle. “Oh, I certainly do. An’ since I like t’think myself at least as hospitable as two trespassin’ cuts o’ strange flesh, all done up in fancy-dress . . .”
Here a girl drew the half-house’s lower net of vines across like a curtain to shrug herself free of the undergrowth, same little grin still in place: just as ill-fed and stunted as everyone else they’d met thus far, yet she wore it far better, falling more on the side of fine-boned and pale rather than skinny and pallid. Her water-straight hair fell to her hips in two plaits, light striking a shade from it that seemed now bleached, now brazen; she was dress
ed in what must’ve been the sad remains of moth-eaten hand-me-downs from at least three different kinfolk, long since washed free of colour and thin enough to drape immodestly, not to mention back-lit to show every inch of her slim little body like Salomé’s veil.
As she stepped out to meet them, meanwhile—either completely fearless or shamming so, well enough to seem contemptuous—Chess watched a grim young man flicker into being behind her, palpable only in his wroth, glaring down at them both over her shoulder like he was daring ’em to try making moves on her. For a moment, Chess felt like assuring him he and Charlie really weren’t that way inclined . . . but then his natural orneriness welled up once again, and that moment passed, unremarked. After all, given where he’d spent much of the last year, he sure hadn’t come all this way to be stared down by any garden-variety dead man—’specially one who probably hadn’t even been to Hell as yet, let alone and back.
“Don’t think she likes your taste in fashion none,” Charlie told Chess, keeping his eyes on the girl. To which Chess answered, keeping his own fixed hard on that contentious-looking ghost-boy: “Yeah, well—most don’t, far as I’ve found. But seein’ it ain’t their business, I try not to feel all too insulted about it, ’less I have to.”
The girl heard, but didn’t stop smiling. “Whar you boys from?” she asked.
“California,” Chess said; “New Mexico,” Charlie cut in with, at almost the same time, tipping his caballero’s hat with an easy charm that almost made Chess snicker. But the girl, who’d maybe caught a hint of where Charlie’s proclivities actually lay, seemed less impressed than amused.
“Travellers,” she said. “Well, well. Don’t git too many, ’roundabout these parts.”
“Wouldn’t think so, given how hard an upwards slog it is to get here. And you, ma’am—this your home?”
The Hexslinger Omnibus Page 111
