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)

  On every side, meanwhile, the not-exactly-newborn magicians’ city-state just kept on expanding, sharp and clean as cut paper, its patterns pulled from every possible sort of habitation. Charlie caught a glimpse of white-washed adobe walls like those of his family’s hacienda whizzing by on one side, giving way to a carved teak puzzle-box of a log cabin on the other; this slid by at a similar clip, replaced with first a full-bore Chinee pagoda with lacquered walls, then some sort of Moorish set-up with stained-glass tiles and gilded doors, a festival of bright-dyed silk tenting and flapping, slant-hung veils. Enough to make a man dizzy, all of it. After a moment or so, Charlie stopped trying to check back and forth and just kept his gaze trained steady on Chess—who hadn’t received an answer yet, and seemed to be getting sick of that particular state of affairs.

  “Hey!” he demanded. “You listenin’, or what? Anybody there? Or do I just have to start kickin’ in doors, once this merry-go-round of yours freezes up?”

  Another voice rang out then, echoing inside Charlie’s skull loud as a hangover, likewise coolly silver and touched all over with a sharpish, Celestial accent:

  Of course we are here, red boy—where else? Cease your bawling.

  “Enough with the ‘boy’ shit! I’m a full-grown man, just like you’re eighteen years’ worth of bitch. Now come on out here and say that, you San Fran jump-up.”

  Oh, I intend to. Stand still, you and that creature of yours, so that you do not injure yourselves in your ignorance, or anyone else. The city’s fulcrum is almost set.

  Creature? Charlie frowned. She talkin’ ’bout old eight-legs here, or me?

  Impossible to tell, let alone voice his offence in any way the disembodied hex-voice was likely to pay attention to—but here, again, he felt his spider-mount make as if to bolt, forcing him to pull back on the reins a bit more strongly than was usually merited, making the thing grow resentful. He dipped forward to ruffle its palps, willing it quiet, ’til he was soon enough rewarded with a cocked-head nudge—nearest thing these riding-size monsters could come to an affectionate gesture, from what-all he’d observed.

  “Songbird, I take it?” he asked Chess, under his breath, to which Chess just shrugged. Might’ve added more, ’cept that it was at that moment the last of Hex City’s pieces fell into place, causing the whole to go rigid, key turning in some immense lock. And then—

  —suddenly, they weren’t alone anymore. More like surrounded, by a full roster of the oddest folk Charlie’d ever yet seen . . . and considering how he and Chess had spent the bulk of their time together thus far, either chasing down Hell-spawn thrown out from Mictlan-Xibalba’s own crack or scooping up new-made hexes so’s to keep ’em from harassing poor unsuspectings, that really was saying something.

  Front and centre, naturally, were the fearsome Miss Yu herself—wrapped to the squint hazel glare in red brocade garb which only made her unnaturally bleached skin and old lady hair look all the paler—and her second-in-command, that trick-riding man-squaw Charlie’d heard so much on: Yiska, The Night Has Passed, all boyish and coppery, with one hand proprietorially laid on Songbird’s shoulder, the other on a horse-skull tomahawk stuck in her sash. Next to them on the left, meanwhile, stood a bountiful blonde in widow’s weeds and a sturdy man-child (aged about five years, perhaps) whose soft-featured face sported creepishly adult eyes, while the right-hand side was occupied by—in descending order—another Injun in full war-bonnet and another Celestial of normal yellow hue, both male, followed by a grim old Negress, a sweet-made Creole gal and a dark-haired miss with their arms interlocked, plus a soldier in Northern blues whose own skin was the shade of turned field-earth.

  All nodded to Chess, in their turn, who nodded curtly back, in his; they certainly did seem to know each other, at least to offer their respects. Fellow veterans of Pinkerton’s Hex War, Charlie could only guess, unable to keep himself from feeling excluded. For a minute, it was like he was back at Ed Morrow and Yancey Kloves’s table, watching the three of ’em jest and snicker together while he sat and twiddled his thumbs, then drank ’til he couldn’t even do that no more. Wasn’t as though any of ’em had chosen to shut him out, true, and yet . . .

  And yet.

  But Songbird was talking once more, which meant there was no earthly point in letting himself be relegated to pouting in the corner. Charlie turned his attentions from inside to out, therefore, and set himself to listen, carefully; better to know what Chess was getting them into, before he thought hard over whether or not he wanted to go along with it.

  “Knowing well how little interest you have ever shown in this place,” the girl told Chess, with regal coolness, “you may assume our invitation was not sent without purpose; we have thus far been well able to solve our own problems, now that the Oath allows us to work together. But now we are presented with a challenge whose solution calls for . . . outside intervention.”

  Chess stared back, unimpressed enough he barely bothered to raise a brow. “Do tell,” he said, at last, sounding as though he’d rather she not.

  “It is . . . a complicated matter I speak of, obviously—one not easily explained, or—”

  “—or you’d’a got it put to bed already, without involving me at all: figured that much already. So since that’s the part ain’t no goddamn mystery, let’s just move on, shall we?”

  Songbird flushed. “You will not take such a tone with me, Chess Pargeter! I am Hex City’s elected representative, head of our council—”

  The older Chinee man chuckled. “Zhen shì nà yàng ma?” he asked, of no one in particular, to which his Injun companion nodded and the young boy giggled, making Songbird colour further.

  The Negress set hands to hips, with a snort. “‘Elected’?” she repeated. “Never took no vote that I recall, not during the Separation, an’ not after. An’ just as well for you, girlie, since it ain’t too like we’d’ve held with you settin’ yourself up on a pedestal above the rest of us, considerin’ how you wasn’t even here from the start.”

  “Ai-yaaah! If you took issue with my claims to the position, Sal Followell, perhaps you should have voiced it sooner, instead of squabbling in front of outsiders . . .”

  “P’raps it didn’t make no never-mind what-all you chose t’call yourself ’til you brought this one back in to put on airs for, him an’ his spider-ridin’ fancy-boy. But now you have, don’t mean we gotta stand by and take it.”

  “These titles are mine by right, by experience. And since no one has ever said otherwise, at least until now—”

  “It’s a debatable point, that’s true enough,” the blonde woman agreed, while the kid—her son? Which would most probably make her Missus Sophy Love, Charlie assumed, and him dead Sheriff Love’s boy Gabriel, youngest-expressed hex on record—just kept on laughing. “Though right this very moment might not be the best . . .”

  “Want me to just come back later, when you got this all settled?” Chess asked, helpfully.

  Yiska hissed through her tongue. “Ohé, fool—since you and the White Shell Girl are equally determined to be difficult, as ever, I will move things on, before we all die of old age. The reason we called you here, and only you, is—”

  “Somebody’s dead,” the Bluebelly soldier put in, having apparently also reached his own patience’s limit. “A hex, by hexation. Which the Oath itself says none of these magicos is s’posed t’be able to use on each other, an’ walk away after.”

  Yiska nodded. “You see our difficulty.”

  Chess sat still a moment, absorbing this. Then breathed out a long, annoyed huff through his nose and swung himself from the saddle to stand with hands on hips, glancing back up, his poison-coloured eyes narrowed against the glare.

  “It’s a head-scratcher, all right,” he said. “A real puzzle. But let’s get one thing straight, seein’ I ain’t no ’tec: you need me, in specific, ’cause of—?”

  Now it was Songbird’s turn to snort, a thing she did expertly. “Because you ne
ver took the Oath, fool. And thus, you . . . can do . . . what we cannot.”

  “Whatever necessary, to resolve this,” Yiska agreed.

  Chess sighed again. “Fuckin’ great,” he said, without enthusiasm.

  The body lay where Charlie could only guess it’d fallen, untouched except for whatever spell’d been laid on it to keep it from rot—a gesture Charlie certainly appreciated, since (according to the soldier, whose name proved to be Jonas Carver) that’d maybe been a week ago. As a result, instead of a bag of gas and bloat riddled with worms, what they faced still looked mostly like a woman: doll-pretty, early middle-age, with half her thick russet hair done up in ringlets while the rest fanned out in a messy bird’s nest of floor-dirt, disarranged by the force of her fall. She sprawled against one wall of her room, a dark-panelled chamber that seemed a weird cross between high-society parlour, performer’s Green Room and tinkerer’s work-lab—fine-carved cushiony furniture and framed theatrical playbills alternated with tall shelves of heavy, dog-eared books and a long table of ointments, scribbled-on papers, disassembled gears and gewgaws. Over this last, opposite the body, a starburst of black scoring streaked the wall, cracking the panels to the pitted clay beneath; the wood seemed to be peeling back from the scores, almost dissolving away, like acid or termites’d got at it. Glass shards lay puddled underneath, winking silver in the chamber’s gloom.

  “I know her,” Charlie said, after a moment. “That’s Lenamarie von Grafin, the operateuse; got herself shot by a crazed devotee at her stage-door, and bloomed up on the spot. Took out half a city block on either side, too, turnin’ everything to crystal and glass and such—that’s why they made her leave Chicago, even after they’d given her the key to the city just a day before.”

  Chess shrugged. “S’pose all them penny-papers you read are worth somethin’, after all.” Then asked Yiska, as he knelt to look closer: “How long’d she been here?”

  “Since last year—eight full moons.”

  “Rose up fast, too,” the Creole gal on Carver’s right—Eulie Parr, formerly one of dead Hank Fennig’s three Missuses—supplied. “Last time the council opened a seat up, she got in that same day, pretty well without interview. She had charm.”

  “Yet charm is nothing without the power to back promises up,” Songbird all but sniffed.

  “Don’t disagree, Miss Yu. Just sayin’ how Lenamarie had both.”

  Chess studied the diva’s corpse like he thought it might speak, he just came at it right. “So no one’d want her dead?”

  “Don’t reckon you could say that, exactly,” said Carver. “But no more’n anybody else here.”

  “She bring anyone in with her?”

  Eulie nodded. “Her daughter, Jorinda—she’s thirteen, a natural; had her blood at twelve, so we know she ain’t hexacious. And then there’s her boy, Hansi, born at New Year’s. Him we don’t know ’bout yet.”

  “Her boy by who?”

  “Oh, that’d be Mister Lobbel, who brought her and Jorinda up here in the first place. People are already sayin’ he might’ve had some part in it, but I can’t see that—she had him deep-hooked, so far in love he’d’ve laid down and let her walk on him like a rug. Though . . .” She hesitated, head shaking slightly once more, as if trying to dismiss some thought through sheer motion.

  “What?” Chess demanded.

  “. . . it’s true enough how he did kill her the once, already,” Eulie finished, reluctantly.

  Turned out that Mister Lobbel—Friedrich—was the same man’d dealt Lenamarie what they both thought was her death-blow, only to see her express instead. Like loving a Phoenix, Charlie thought, and shuddered; at least he’d chosen to be with Chess. Hell, Charlie was the one’d pursued him, in the beginning, dreaming swoonily on what it’d be like to bed the starry centrepiece of so many tall tales and ballads, only to be amazed when Chess had given way—though thinking back, it probably hadn’t proved too much of a hardship for him, not with the highly pleasurable range of interests they shared in common.

  I ain’t set to scout this world for fellow mis-mades, Chess had warned him, the night they first fell into each other’s grip. No more’n I'm bent on their education out of my own heart’s goodness, seein’ I don’t got any. I’m Chess Pargeter, boy—either do what I like and like what I do, or that's the damn end of it. Had myself turned inside-out for love the once already, bad enough to make sure I ain’t ever gonna let that happen again. . . .

  No, very likely not, particularly seeing the man who’d taught him that hard lesson was dead, since Hexicas first flew. And Charlie hadn’t begrudged Chess his stance, not at first; the general perks of double-harness travel were far too nice entirely, spats and spells aside. Yet he did find himself wondering, sometimes, just what he might’ve been entitled to out of the arrangement, had Chess still had anything soft left inside him to give away. . . .

  Still and all, Chess’d never lied—not then, and not later. So whatever fables might’ve come into it, Charlie knew, he was the one’d told ’em to himself.

  “I loved her,” Lobbel told Chess, face gone hollow-eyed and jowly with sleepless mourning, like an ailing dog’s. “Why would I not? She forgave me everything.”

  Chess sauntered ’round the von Grafins’ sitting room, passing casually behind the sofa where Eulie and Jonas had—courteously but firmly—plumped Lobbel down. “That’s harder for some than others, ’specially when you’ve pumped a bullet in ’em.” He glanced at Charlie, who gave the minutest shake of his head in return. The man hadn’t cringed from the fearsome Pistoleer behind him, as most of the guilty and a fair few innocent tended to do; spoke for the likely truth of his grief, or at the very least his shock.

  “Ah: you are thinking of yourself and the Reverend Rook, perhaps?” Lobbel shook his head. “There is no comparison. Lenamarie flowered immediately, and looked straight into my head, when she did—this is how she knew I had no ulterior motives, beyond loving her to such distraction that it hurt me to know she existed in this world without caring for me as much as I did for her.”

  “And I’m s’posed to believe she was fine with that?”

  “I was insane; I know that, now.” Lobbel stared down at the leather-woven bracelet on his wrist, turning it over and over, distracted. “And she . . . she cured me. Reached her hands down inside and bound us together at the soul, inseparable. I would have done anything for her.”

  “How d’you feel ’bout it today, though?” Charlie asked, while Chess paused, and saw Lobbel shoot him an oddly startled glance, like he was surprised to realize anyone else was in the room—any other non-hex, that was. For all he really should’ve known better.

  Because there’s still a whole world out there full’a people like you and me, mein Herr, Charlie thought, uncharitably, and the fact you don’t see ’em on the regular anymore don’t make that any less true. Hell, that’s probably where you’re gonna end up again, now your meal-ticket’s gone—if you're lucky—so maybe you better just start resignin’ yourself to the idea, learnin’ to talk with your mouth again, ’stead of waitin’ for folks to rummage ’round in your head. Or face the consequences.

  But: “Yeah, how do you feel?” Chess chimed in, giving Charlie a swift flush of pride in his own cleverness, to’ve formed such an inquiry in the first place. To which Lobbel replied, eventually—

  “Empty.”

  —and shuddered as the words left his mouth, like he was surprised to find himself the one saying ’em, their betraying taste bitter on his grief-struck tongue.

  “They look at me like I’m your pet,” Charlie complained to Chess, distractedly pacing the quarters old Missus Followell had assigned them while his lover sprawled back on their bed, “’cept worse, ’cause I’m the sort you fuck every once in a while, and everybody knows it.”

  “They ain’t all that way, Charlie,” said Chess, staring up at the ceiling.

  “Enough of ’em, though. This the way it was, five years back?” />
  “Hell, I don’t know! Only time I was ever here before, I wasn’t . . . me. Which makes this my first time in Hexicas too, damnit.”

  “Fine, but at least they’re like you, which is more’n I got. And you’re—”

  “There’s nobody like me, you idjit.” Chess rolled to sit upright. “Told you that the day we met, Charlie Alarid: just ’cause we share some tastes don’t make us the same, which means I sure ain’t kin to these-all, just ’cause they’re hexes. Hell, I got more in common with plain old human man Ed Morrow and his table-rapper wife than I ever will with Songbird and her crew.”

  “Uh huh. And don’t you go outta your way to make sure I know it, too.”

  Chess narrowed his eyes at him, and sighed. “Christ Almighty, you really are young.”

  “You’re thirty at most, if you’re a day!”

  “I guess that’s true. And you know how old I was when we first met? Maybe one year older than you are now.”

  Difference was, though, and Chess didn’t even have to say it—by the time the fabled Red-head Pistoleer’d turned twenty-five, he’d been whore-boy and sharpshooter alike, a blooded soldier and proven killer. Lieutenant and consort to Asher E. Rook, the original hexslinger’s template; sacrifice to one dead god, then reborn as another and made meat-sack puppet to a third, after killing himself to redeem the town of Bewelcome from its salten fate. Some of which had likely been fore-ordained by the manner of his blood and birth, spit out as he’d been from “English” Oona Pargeter’s witchy business, let alone his own blatant disregard for personal safety—but the rest, that was on Chess alone. Chess, who never would’ve not been perversely “special,” even pared back to the barest nub of inherent queerness, vigour and bile.

  And Charlie, with as many years under his high-set belt? A reasonable shot, a fair hand at spider-taming and able to defend himself ably ’gainst non-hexacious comers, too, though not forever, and not without damage. But that last part he’d learned mainly from Chess himself, so when you got down to it, the thing for which Charlie’d probably be best known all the rest of his life—come what may, from now on—was having had his dick inside that same contentious sumbitch’s ass from time to time . . . undeniably to both their pleasures.