A Tree of Bones

by Gemma Files

  “Berta? I see you, acushla. Now stay still!”

  The girl — Miss Schemerhorne, the files named her — nodded, and shut her eyes.

  All at once, the air seemed to twist ’round her, lariat-style; a black whirling strand of wind and dust lashed down, falling neat into one hand as any rope flung to some drowning man. Skilfully, she whirled her forearm in the cyclone-cord to wrap it tight, then leaped; it caught her up and bore her high into blackness, beyond the range of sight.

  Prone in the mud, Washford’s soldier stared up after with eyes gone silver dollar-sized, their already vivid whites set in stark contrast with a face the same shade as Bewelcome’s freakishly arable new earth. “You all right there?” Morrow asked him, gently.

  The man shook his head first one way, then the other — a cleansing shake, chased with a grim nod. “Me? Hell, I’ll be fine enough if you gimme a slug an’ a minute, or maybe just a slug, t’wash the taste of that damn thing out my mouth. I’m workin’ for the Kingdom, sir, like all the Captain’s people; ain’t got time to die.” He pushed himself to his feet as thunder boomed once more and retrieved his well-worn bummer’s cap, canting it so icy rain would splash off what little brim it had left. “Gotta wonder, though — are these the End Days come to pass, way some say? Fallen angels walkin’ the Earth, Devil’s children like that gal there runnin’ wild?”

  Getting up cost Morrow more than he’d thought it would, so much so he had to spend a few hacking breaths fighting not to cough up a lung before he could reply. To say this weather didn’t agree with him was understating things substantially, considering how it’d left him with a gasping ague that all too often kept him from what little sleep he could afford, and his bad joints — the knee, particularly — in near constant misery. “Might seem that way, I’m sure. But you can take it from me, Private — Private . . . ?”

  “Carver, sir. Jonas Carver.”

  “. . . good to know you, Carver; Ed Morrow’s my name.” If Carver’s eyes widened further still at this disclosure, Morrow affected not to notice. “All spectacle left off, these folk’re human as you or I, and a bullet will drop them, so long’s you catch ’em with their guard down.”

  “That ain’t all too easy, from what I seen.”

  “No, sure ain’t. But it can be done.”

  The two men exchanged a species of grin, equally wry. Briefly, as he watched Carver start to reload, Morrow thought about telling him what Doctor Asbury’d promised him those fresh shells in his own gun might be capable of, if put to the test. However, he decided against it; there was no time, and the risk of false hope was too high.

  “Seems like thankless work on the face of it, I know,” was what he said, instead, scanning the mud for any trace of his Manifold’s empty casing — ah, and there it was, right by his boot-heel; he knelt again to snag it, then heaved back up, with a painful huff. “But Christ knows, we in the Pinkerton camp’re all glad enough to have you backin’ us up.”

  Around them, the rain pelted Bewelcome township ceaselessly, unseasonably, much as it had almost since the morning after Chess Pargeter’s sacrifice and Sheriff Mesach Love’s murder — too cold by far for fall, let alone for summer, and hard as a bruising kiss. Behind this latest tempest, meanwhile, Allan Pinkerton’s endless assault on Hex City ground on: rocket-trails of spells and spell-passage alike could be glimpsed ’cross the sky like ball lightning, throwing off icy sheets of green, blue, purple which wavered groundward; just like every other night this week, the earth shook intermittently too, probably from shelling. Above, even the traitor moon — Rook’s dread wife’s symbol, through which popular rumour had it she could spy on whatever luckless creatures slept beneath — hid its face at the sight of such rough work.

  On every side of the rut-puddled cow trail the Bewelcomers claimed was called Love Avenue, the land was now all torn to hell with constant skirmishing, an indiscriminate churn of muck where nothing grew but the Red Weed that came in the Enemy’s wake, and graves. And the rain, unnatural itself, brought far more natural threats in its wake: fever, rats, plus a palpable fear of flash-flooding through nearby canyons, producing an artificial river strong enough to wash the whole village itself away.

  “Naw, sir,” Carver continued, yanking Morrow back from his reverie. “My troop an’ me, we’re glad to be here, never you doubt that. When we heard the witch-folk was slavin’ folks on top of everything else, even after the War seemed to leave all that over and done with . . . well, none of us was too keen to leave the job half done. Though I can’t lie — there was a few here ’n’ there said how turnabout might be fair play, once we heard they wasn’t just puttin’ the chain on Negroes, this time.”

  He followed this remark with a look, cool and level, as though assessing whether or not Morrow would take offence. But Morrow was far too tired to bother, even had he been so inclined.

  “How they do it’s called layin’ a geas,” he said, turning to limp into the wind; Carver followed along, seemingly genuinely interested. “It’s a sort of a spell, goes without saying, but a love-working, more’n anything else — kind that hooks ’em deep and ties ’em tight, makes ’em want to come, and want to stay.”

  “That don’t beat all.”

  Morrow shrugged. “Well, they got a fair bit of practice doin’ it by now, since it’s how the Rev and Lady Ixchel bind ’em to themselves, and the City. Only makes sense they’d start to tinker ’round with it after, I guess, the hexacious being who — what — they are.”

  And then there are the others who come and stay, those bound by something deeper, Morrow thought, but didn’t add. For far too many of the Hex City host, blood tied tighter than magic: men following after wives, women after husbands, children all too aware that having a hexacious sire or dam would ruin their name no matter what, even if it later turned out the power didn’t breed true. Like the girl last month he’d watched dump whole buckets of lime off New Aztectlan’s North Gate wall, six years old if she was a day and pale-faced with effort, teetering on the barricade in a tight-tied pair of ladies’ high-buttoned boots. She’d paused to giggle at the way the Pinks below scurried, rabid to avoid burning their skin or eyes — ’til somebody (he still didn’t know who, and hoped he’d never learn) had pocked her straight through the forehead with a long-range rifle.

  Oh, the Rev might’ve planted the first seed and Dread Moon-Lady Ixchel made it grow — sure and foul, like a cancer — but Hex City was only half theirs now, maybe less. Others had built it up since and would die to maintain it, without being asked, let alone compelled.

  Yet it would fall, if Pinkerton and the rest of the compact had their way: the Agency, Bewelcome, Washford’s brigade. That was their task — to make it so, or die trying.

  “But like you saw, the Manifold can break any chantment, you happen to get a strike home with it in hand — ah, crap.” Having flourished it out only to drop it again, Morrow bent to scoop it back up; Carver peered at it over his shoulder, wincing when another lightning flash showed the broken glass face and sprung gears inside.

  “That’s one of ’em, huh? Doc Hex’s Manifold?”

  “One of the original models, believe it or not — was, anyhow.” Morrow stuffed the useless item back in his waistcoat; least it wouldn’t be galling him with its obsolete clatter, anytime soon. “Where you headed?”

  Carver wiped rainwater from his face. “Captain sent me to scout southward. All activity’s been to the north; he had it in mind might be a distraction.”

  “Good thought, but wrong approach.” At Carver’s half-raised brow: “Washford’s thinking like an officer facing others, Private; Rook’s a hex, leading hexes. We’ve already seen how they move, in ways we sure as hell can’t stop ’em from going — all’s we can do is try and predict where they’ll light down next, and be there waitin’. Which means, if this was a distraction, it’d be from . . .” Morrow cut off, like he’d been slapped. “Oh, shit.”

  “Sir?”

  Morrow weighed his options, mind bu
zzing. “Private, I can’t trump Captain Washford’s orders, but I can tell you where you’re really needed to intercept the enemy.” More lightning roared past above, screams drifting back from what would have been the township’s limits, had the posts once indicating it as such not been either washed or blasted away. “Does your boss trust your judgement? And if he does, do you trust mine?”

  Carver’s jaw clenched. “Lead the way, Mister Morrow.”

  They pounded down the next swampy half-mile. As always, war’s affray made for ghastly accompaniment, all the more so for those eldritch elements woven among the usual tumult of gunfire and dying men’s shrieks. To their left some invisible creature gave out a wounded minotaur’s bull roar, while from elsewhere there came the sizzle of fried bacon fat cut with a monstrous rattling hiss and ponderous, slurping footfalls thudding hard enough to be felt. Half of it, Morrow suspected, might be nothing but sheerest illusion, yet no less deadly to terrified, armed men, for all that.

  Determined to outpace the pandemonium, he turned down a side lane, Carver on his heels, heading for Bewelcome’s main meeting hall — and just as he did, the sky itself exploded, seeming to crack in half and hammer down, blowing the building’s roof apart. Morrow flung himself sideways into Carver, flattening them together as lethally sharp, still-burning fragments pincushioned the mud, hissing into puddles around them. Fire and smoke billowed up, high as Babel’s tower. The hall’s front doors burst open to expel the citizens who’d sheltered within, who fled, screaming.

  Shielding his eyes with one arm, Morrow squinted through the black spots in his vision, gut clenched in dread. More to come, he well knew it. Like always.

  Seconds later, a whole new torrent of words — silver-black and sparking, writ in crabbed Bible print, their capital points sharp as just-forged ironwork — began to fall through the clouds toward them like burning debris, touching their upturned faces with an awful light. And they’d’ve been considerably harder to read had an all-too-familiar voice not been heard rasping along, while the demonic text spiralled down:

  Woe to the crown of pride, to the drunkards of Ephraim, whose glorious beauty is a fading flower, which are on the head of the fat valleys of them that are overcome with wine!

  Behold, the Lord hath a mighty and strong one, which as a tempest of hail and a destroying storm, as a flood of mighty waters overflowing, shall cast down to the earth with the hand . . .

  And the glorious beauty, which is on the head of the fat valley, shall be a fading flower, and as the hasty fruit before the summer; which when he that looketh upon it seeth, while it is yet in his hand he eateth it up.

  Isaiah 28, one to four, Morrow thought, numbly. And watched the next disaster take shape, clear as the Devil’s own hand. Five more black tornado-strands, a figure clinging to the end of each, whip-striking down through the torn roof. Three were women, one heavily child-laden; one a slim young man, gangster-fashionable, his eyes hid behind smoked-glass spectacles and clutching a cane, the digits on his scarred left hand having been violently reduced to two fingers and a thumb.

  Hank Fennig and his ladies, the full complement, which was surely bad enough, by any standards. But then there was that house-huge fifth figure — one Morrow hadn’t seen in almost half a year, but would recognize ’til the day he died, and maybe after. He went clad in black, a preacher’s frayed collar round his neck, and under that collar was a scar — the hanging rope’s kiss, his dreadful lady’s marriage token. Painful toll paid for his passage from faithless secesh preacher to hexslinger, outlaw, administrator supreme of all New Aztectlan.

  Yeah, that’s right. And now . . . now, we’re well and truly fucked.

  Morrow hauled Carver back upright, spitting mud, clapped him on the shoulder. “Get to Washford!” he bawled, over what he suspected were both their equally ringing ears. “Tell him the Rev is here, Private! Reverend Rook is here!”

  Carver’s eyes widened; he saluted, turned, and ran.

  Morrow swallowed, wishing with all his heart — disloyal as he knew the impulse was — that he could go with him.

  SEVEN DIALS: ONE

  This is where the Gods killed themselves, to make the sun and the moon come up.

  Chess remembered.

  His first time — down here below everything, where the blood-fed calabash bloomed and bone dust and black water mixed to breed a nightmare river of mud — he had stumbled through stinking water, naked in all senses of the word, goaded by pain inside and out.

  He remembered the Enemy peering down at him off that wall of skulls, white eyes crinkled in a pitch black face, amused by the dim, obsidian mirror image of Chess’s flayed agony, drawling —

  Ah . . . not sweet sister Ixchel’s ixiptla, after all. Who does that make you, then, little king? Little sweetmeat?

  And him, snapping back in turn through all-nerve lips, each word a fresh spray of red: Chess Pargeter, motherfucker; you really ought to’ve heard of me.

  That Hell was wet he’d known already, through hard experience. But not how dirty things could be when coal and other infernals were involved. The well-earned grime of a hard day’s ride was only dust and sweat sometimes cut with blood, half inconvenience, half seasoning. Here, all things bore a layer of ground-in scum, each touch leaving black smears; the walls ’emselves seemed dingy, porous, weeping grey.

  So Goddamn cold.

  Through the glass pane, so muck-crusted it looked like a rotting grave cloth stretched flat, he was still somehow able to see the looming column beyond. Crowned in sundials set shimmering in the constant soft downpour, its shadow reached out in every direction at once, like one of those blood-daubed stone images of Tezcatlipoca Chess had glimpsed before, in other visions.

  K’awil, “God K,” Night Wind, Possessor of the Sky and Earth, We Are His Slaves. He who in red, white, blue and black aspects fuels every part of the Machine. Red Xipe Totec with his nude eyes flaring, facing the east . . . blue Huitzilopochtli gathering lightning from the south, so bright he cannot be looked on directly . . . white Quetzalcoatl rising from the west like a feathered vision-serpent, drawing blood from his own penis to bring the last dead world’s bones back to life. . . .

  The steel hats heard how my brother refused human sacrifice, red boy, the Enemy’s voice told him, without warning. They thought to twin him with their White Christ, claiming him as proof that fate brought them to our shores. As though he did not already have a twin of his own! But then, they rarely kept quiet long enough to learn the truth of things, even when they claimed to be interested.

  Chess felt his empty hands flex and looked down, yearning for gun-butts to fill ’em, let alone a target to train ’em on. Couldn’t’ve known he’d drowned at least one of those other dead worlds himself, I guess, he thought back, and outta pique with you, no less. Or do I got it wrong? ’Cause, you know . . . when you tell me this shit, can’t say as how I’m always listenin’.

  No. But if such observations distract, then I will leave you here, red boy, to your own devices . . . all alone.

  And then there was only silence, once more.

  So now he sat ensconced in the snug of some particularly rancorous varmints’ drink-groggery — called the Clock-house, he’d been told — watching the human tide eddy past. All ’round him, stinking ghosts spat and fought and roistered, so many that Chess could see the bilge-water which passed for whiskey in the phantom glass he gripped tremble with their movements. They jabbered as they elbowed ’round each other, Limejuicer voices shapeless and hoarse as crow-caws, blank gazes never quite meeting.

  And all without a word thrown his way, staring right on through him, like he wasn’t even worth the hip-check needed to squeeze by.

  No Ed to keep him company down here, in his despond. No Rev. No widowed Yancey Kloves, even, that calm grey gaze of hers just a lid ill-set over a hate as hot as his own. Only Chess’s own limping thoughts, slow as freezing, while he sat and shivered amidst the throng, utterly unmarked on.

  Why can’t I feel
Ash Rook, at least? Always could, before.

  Like an absence, a wound, that was all. A fallen God-botherer-shaped hole.

  ’Cause he thinks you’re dead, is why, something told him, shortly — not the Enemy, though equally unsympathetic. Maybe even grieves you, in his fashion. But clever as he is, he saw you die and somethin’ else rise up wearin’ you like a coat; knows it was all his fault, too, if he’s halfway honest with himself. That’s got to leave a mark.

  And everybody else?

  There damn well isn’t “anybody else” down here. Just you and the dead folks, and him, and — her.

  “Talkin’ to yourself again, I see,” “English” Oona Pargeter’s shade observed from where she sat, a few arms’ lengths past where his elbow rested — just beyond reach, yet far too close for comfort.

  “Yeah, well, might be I got friends you ain’t privy to, woman,” Chess shot back, “which’d be a sight more’n you could ever claim.” A grin, gap-toothed in her raddled face, was her only answer. “Ain’t you got some other place to be?”

  “From the look of fings, I’d guess not.”

  If he had one last straw left, this was it. Chess threw back his chair and shoved his way out onto the cobbled streets outside, where he couldn’t even muster sufficient dismay worth snarling again to find Oona already standing there in the rain, waiting for him.

  Fuckin’ perfect.

  You really ought to’ve heard of me, he remembered telling Tezcatlipoca, his first time in Hell. I mean, seein’ how you’re the Devil himself.

  And now that very phrase rang in his ears yet, mockingly, as proof of his own naive assumption that every bad thing in every bad place existing should surely be aware of him by name or reputation. Worst moment but one in Chess’s entire life and he’d been so certain he was still somebody’s nightmare, Goddamnit, a skeleton strung with lit nerves tearing ass through the underworld, undebatably bad and unrepentant with it, too. With a cocked gun fisted in either raw-meat-on-bone hand, ready to fire at will.