A Tree of Bones

by Gemma Files

  “Too scared to face me awake, that was all.”

  “Ha! You never scared me, you sumbitch, not even when you was hip-deep up in my business. Didn’t leave that much’ve an impression.”

  Chilicothe’s face shifted, lumpily; probably would’ve flushed, had he still had even a drop of blood to put toward the effort. “Pretend all you want, you little faggot bastard — I know better. Know damn well I hurt you, at least.”

  “For a minute or two, sure. But I’ve had worse.”

  Chilicothe’s shade lashed out, no doubt expecting things to go the same as up top, him still having a good foot and a half on Chess’s neat-made self. And Chess with no guns, plus no hexation to count on either, seeing how it seemed to vary in strength from spot to spot along this endless Hell-bound trudge.

  But screw all that. For though he’d stopped looking to get into fist-fights the same day he’d realized he’d never make six feet, Chess’d be gang-fucked (again) if he wouldn’t go down swinging.

  Before he could make his move, however — duck in under the bastard’s arm and hook him hard, maybe try to bust a rib, or just give him a good, swift punch to the nuts — Chess saw Oona come down on one knee, shoulders squared, rummaging through the snow. She came up with a sharp-splintered icicle roughly the size of some carved ivory Chinee dildo, and drove it straight into the back of Chilicothe’s calf, deep enough to judder. Then twisted it ’til he howled, so hard Chess swore he could hear the flash-froze hamstring snap.

  Chilicothe went down, face-first into Chess’s fist. It was a good jab, right from the shoulder, and Chess felt the man’s ghost-nose squish. The other two jumped to help, but Oona moved herself sidelong, hunching up to form a brake; one skipped over her like a thrown stone, went right into the other and carried him away down the hill in a flurry of thrashing limbs, snow-scree and bruises. Which left only Chilicothe behind, pinned as Chess stomped on him once, twice, whole chest coming down like a rotten wall, to where Chess thought he felt the fucker’s wizened heart go pop, a mojo bag of vile intentions.

  Chess spit down at him one more time, taking care to aim well. The result crackled mid-air and froze solid, falling dagger-style to embed itself a half-inch from the eye, then lodged and crusted over, bonding ice to skin. Chilicothe’s mouth dropped open, too shocked to yelp, as Oona made her blackening feet once more.

  “Better get while the goin’s good, I’d fink,” she suggested, throwing back her hair.

  “Maybe I ain’t finished yet.”

  “Suit your bloody self, then. But them rest over there won’t wait forever.”

  Chess nodded, and bent down just a tad further, not deigning to hold himself out of Chilicothe’s reach. “I never did scream, no matter how you tried to make me,” he reminded him, voice flat. “’Member that? How it took all three of you to hold me down long enough, which only showed me what kind’a cowards you were, not to mention stick-stupid. And why? ’Cause you let me live, you shithead.”

  Up once more, then, back on his feet; he turned his scornful eyes to the rest as his grin widened . “But Christ knows I do like it rough, too, so if any of you dead fools feel up for a second go-round, let’s get to it. I got nothin’ but time to kill.”

  Chilicothe turned his face to the ground. But the rest of the mob shifted forward almost like one, closing in; Chess saw ’em coming and shifted stance, ready to once more take up nonexistent arms.

  Well, there goes that bright idea.

  Oona, by his side: “Just couldn’t keep your bloody mouth shut, could ya?”

  “Aw, Ma. Thought you’d’ve known me better’n that, by now.”

  As they got closer, however, Chess angled away, so’s she wouldn’t see his smirk fail. Last time things’d gotten this bad had been outside Splitfoot’s, with Sheriff Mesach Love’s Weed-puppets making a shambly forward-march on him, Ed, Yancey, Geyer — yet once a deathblow freed the last shreds of leftover soul, there had been no will in the Weed-things’ eyes, no memory nor hatred. These revenants were equally dead, but every pair of eyes stayed stuck on him, brim-full with an aching need to punish.

  On pure reflex, he slipped past, pushing Oona behind him with one hand. Lifted the other, thinking it wrapped in blue-white threads of lightning, concentrating harder than he had at anything since he first took up the gun — then yelped as a slap cracked ’cross the back of his head. “Jesus shit, woman!” he roared, catching hold of the hand she still held high. “The hell’s this? Stop it!”

  “You stupid bloody git,” Oona yelled back, and Chess almost let go, in shock; were those actual tears in her eyes, rimming green with red? Cold truly must be getting to her. “Tryin’ to play the ’ero, now an’ ’ere? Get us both stuck, for good? What’d I always tell you, eh?”

  “That’d be ‘Save yerself, ’cause won’t nobody else do it for ya,’ I’d think,” he mocked, vowels flat-mashing, Limejuicer style. Then pulled her hard back into his embrace, dipping to snarl, in one ear: “Yeah, well . . . I ain’t you.”

  Around them, that bitter wind keened yet higher, sent snow-ghosts sifting through the crowd, tearing each from each; but a slight twist more and it broke upward into a shriek, unbearably pitched, as though the sky itself had torn. The light collapsed, grey as grave mould. And in its wake, a twister touched down, ripped straight from Chess’s own memories — bomb-burst back-slap of Rook’s gallows resurrection, sending all them manning the trap one way and those still waiting to swing the other. Its fury had crushed him facedown into the mud even as the Rev came up rocket-fast, hemp necktie still a-flap ’round his raw neck.

  This one’s funnel speared straight down, locking to earth ’round Chess and Oona: half trap and half shield, capping a perfect circle no more than a yard wide, while solid-turned air smacked outward in all directions.

  In the real world, this was the kind of force would’ve torn men limb from limb, flung ’em hundreds of yards, to decorate the wrecked trees in scraps. Here, the Dead Posse mainly only lurched, ground backward, like mud-locked wagons hauled by straining men; a few busted free and rose up, splatting ’gainst the mountain’s hide. But it was enough. A path had opened — several. Now, all they needed to figure was which one led where, and take it.

  With a shrug, Chess banished the twister as though throwing off a mile-high coat fashioned from the Devil’s own storm-blown hide, and bolted straight into its tail, yanking Oona along after him. “Ma!” he screamed, above the roar. “The Call, where? Which damn way?

  “Dunno . . . can’t bloody see — !”

  Chess broke into a tripping run, following the base of the rock wall bounding the plain; Oona fell once, with a squawk, then righted herself and hiked his coat immodestly, matching him as best she might. Though the cyclone had stripped snow from the earth, carving a black mud track, more snow cascaded down from the peaks above, throwing up plumes so blinding white Chess was forced to shield his eyes as he ducked through them. Too close behind for comfort, he could feel the Dead Posse’s renewed pursuit in his boots, pounding up through the ground.

  He almost missed the gap; would have missed it, in fact, if a hand hadn’t thrust out from it at the last second, palm up-angled toward him, all but beckoning. Grab hold, its unseen owner seemed to say, though no voice spoke. Grab hold, and see where this takes you.

  He grabbed fast, felt a moment’s swooping relief when the hand proved at least as warm as his own, and did not resist as it pulled him into — through — the gap beyond, and Oona too.

  Once past the barrier, Chess stumbled to his knees, cold stone firm under his palms and shins. The lack of wind was a Goddamn blessing. At his elbow, Oona wept in pain, cursing her feet for their slowness in resuming their normal colouration. Sounded like she would’ve stamped, if she hadn’t figured that would probably hurt the more.

  The floor beneath was flat, expert-laid, of smooth but unpolished granite. As his breath came back in gulps, Chess looked up and ’round, taking in yet another passageway. Like all the tunnels before, it stre
tched on into the distance to a vanishing point teasingly set just beyond his sight, but these walls, this roof and floor, looked built. A faint light, cheerless and dusty, trickled through high slits, giving off no sort of shade to indicate its source. Silence weighted the air.

  In recessed alcoves set at intervals on each wall, men and women sat like stone — stiff and stock-staring off into the distance, at the floor, or their own folded hands. Might’ve been wax, but that Chess’s keen sight detected the faintest movement at chest height. Unlike the crowds of Seven Dials, their getup covered every time and place Chess had ever known — serapes, dusters, flash check trousers, denim and silk gowns, nought at all — plus dozens he didn’t, their skin, hair and eyes culled from every mix imaginable.

  No ropes or chains to bind ’em fast, no dust to suggest how long they’d sat; only the figures, the corridor. The silence.

  “Chess . . .” Oona whispered. And Christ, he thought, uncharitably. Can I never have one damn minute to myself, a minute to stop and fucking pause?

  He turned, too exhausted even to sigh — and wound up looking straight into the face of the one person he’d genuinely never thought to find down here, in all his ramblings . . . but who else could it possibly be, really? Considering how recently he’d been thinking of him?

  “Sheriff,” Chess named him, finally. To which the man gave but a single bow, grave as ever, bones creaking. And though those little-girl pigtails of his swung back and forth with the motion, infinitely ridiculous, Chess felt absolutely no impulse to laugh.

  “‘Private’ Pargeter,” Mesach Love — dead twice-over and double-damned as well, if present circumstances were anything to go by — replied.

  CHAPTER TEN

  By the time Bewelcome’s wounded and dead had been seen to, Ixchel’s conjured floodwaters had subsided and the soldiers of the Thirteenth had hacked exit passages out through the Weed-walls which the Chess-Enemy had (oh so thoughtfully) left intact around the town, it was well past midnight. Ill-lit darkness and roads flooded fetlock-deep in mud cost their horses near an hour getting back to the camp — Morrow wound up tying a drink-exhausted Asbury to his mount, letting him sleep most of the way.

  They passed the sentries at Camp Pink, many of whom still glared at Ed with suspicion, and found the plain canvas tent Pinkerton had assigned him near the camp’s south edge. Morrow tipped the Professor into one of the empty cots without waking him, only pausing to strip off his own mud-caked boots before collapsing onto another. Before he closed his eyes, he realized the storm’s dregs had finally cleared enough he could see the smoky lights of New Aztectlan’s pyramid-temple glowing dimly through the open entry flap, far to the west — a dim line of arcane flame fringing the sky, just above its guard-woods’ contorted shadows.

  Sleep was fitful, broken by dreadful flashes of memory: Sophy Love vanishing in a burst of light, the Manifold exploding in Catlin’s hand, Rook’s stunned look as Morrow’s shots went through his shields. The gleeful laughter of the thing wearing Chess Pargeter’s flesh. Which last vision led, sure as rainfall, to other memories, and an uncomfortable state of half-arousal that had him longing for Yancey to visit his dreams once more — as much simply to see her as anything else, though whatever approximation of the other they might be able to manage long distance would’ve also been dearly appreciated.

  But that particular benefice was not to be. Instead, the hand that fell on his shoulder next, shaking him awake, turned out to be broad, brown, callused — to belong to Private Jonas Carver. Who, to give him his due, looked profoundly ill-inclined to disturb Morrow’s repose, though he obviously wasn’t one to refuse orders.

  “Sorry to roust you so soon, boss.”

  “Any man who guards my back ’gainst hexation gets to call me Ed, Private.” Morrow pushed himself up and shoved his feet back into his boots, wincing as they squelched. “Pinkerton, is it? Command post?”

  Carver shook his head. “Not right away — says we gotta meet somebody comin’ in at the east perimeter, escort him to Command.” As Morrow buttoned his duster up, Carver’s eyes turned thoughtful. “Captain don’t like him, but Mister Pink do sure seem to know how to run a unit. He ever serve on a front line?”

  “Chief Union intelligencer, ’61 and ’62,” Morrow confirmed, while Carver picked up the lantern he’d brought. They ducked back out into the chill night air, making their way past cookfire pits, tents and bivouacs toward the camp’s east edge. “Helped guard Lincoln back in Baltimore, gettin’ him to his inauguration — there was a hex involved, I hear. Which would explain a fair bit.” He grimaced. “As for Captain Washford’s opinion of the man . . . well, I’ll tell you, Private — ”

  “Jonas, sir.”

  “ — Jonas — ” Morrow lowered his voice, prudently. “ — I’d think him a damn sight bigger fool than any of us should be if he found himself liking Pinkerton, right now. But long as our boss’s still giving sensible orders and the Captain knows how to take ’em, ain’t nothing we have to worry on.” Field dressing stations and triage tents had been put up on the camp’s east side, right where the dawnward edge of the plain on which Hex City sat rose into scrubby foothills, to give them enough room from the rest of Camp Pink that those uninvolved in surgery and the like could ignore — if never entirely escape — its near-constant racket. Just beyond, at the end of a trail leading out of those hills, two horses stood; Morrow squinted up at their riders’ faces as Carver lifted his lamp, and felt his squint become a scowl.

  “Mister Ludlow,” he said, without enthusiasm. “What exactly got you to ditch your comfy hotel bed in favour of a trip out here?”

  Fitz Hugh Ludlow grinned, shrugging off lingering rain dampness by flapping his overcoat like a leathery set of wings. “Why, the story, Agent Morrow — the story, always! Your employer tells me we hover on the verge of victory and calls on me to scribe this history from an altogether new perspective, an opportunity I couldn’t possibly pass up, not and still call myself a journalist. For as you’re already well aware, we are making history here, are we not?” He turned that grin of his upon Carver, who did not return it. “Perhaps you’d also be persuaded to grant me an interview at some later date, Private? Tell my readers the day-to-day tale from behind the scene of freedom’s ongoing struggle, on the lines of battle drawn between new world and old?”

  Carver cast Morrow a narrow look, possibly unsure if he was being insulted, to which Morrow simply shrugged. To Ludlow Morrow said, coolly: “If you’re here to see Pinkerton we might as well save ourselves any further jaw; I’m headed that way already, anyhow. But one way or t’other, I’ll need identification from your friend here, ’fore he gets my safe-conduct — ”

  He broke off as the other man leaned into the lamplight, and it took all his effort to turn his initial surge of shocked delight into a mere one-cough throat-clearing.

  “James Grey,” Frank Geyer renamed himself, expressionlessly. He’d darkened his fair hair with some sort of medicamental slickum, combed it back and shaved off his moustache, which wouldn’t fool anyone who knew him that took more than a second’s look. But simple lack of expectation would probably keep anyone from actually doing so, long as Geyer avoided Pinkerton himself. “Mister Ludlow hired me as a guard, to see him safe ’cross the field. I’ll render up my weapons, if that’s obligatory. . . .”

  Morrow hesitated, aware it would look suspicious not to accept. Then again, he didn’t especially want to leave Geyer weaponless — not here, in what was now (to him) enemy territory.

  Before a decision was forced either way, however, the silence broke: that ever-present low moan from the triage tents suddenly spiralled upward, without warning, into an agonized yowl — and a shirtless man (another of Washford’s, Morrow could only assume, given his complexion) came staggering out into the night, eerie luminescence coating his high-yellow chest and back like paint but concentrating most brightly on the stumps of his arms, where the very skin bubbled alchemically. Some Paddy hex pressed into palliative care
chased after him, arrayed in an oil-coat bloodstained near black that almost hid his collar’s dim shine and yelling, as he did: “Come quick as ye can, for all love — we got ourselves another one!”

  Hard upon both their heels came two more men dressed in the blue serge uniforms of Pinkerton’s vaunted “hex-handlers” — themselves hexacious, similarly collared, who’d opted to serve out their process capturing, collaring and policing other magickals. They grabbed the escapee and wrestled him to his knees, but not before his force-grown scar-tissue had already begun to split like seeding fungus, thrusting out tendrils of whitish-green muscle which twined ’round one another, fused, and grew molluscine suckers all along their lengths.

  Gaping at the sight of two uncontrollably flailing tentacles where his arms had once been, the first man twisted his head back to spit at his “doctor,” snarling: “Now look what you gone an’ done, you Goddamn potato-eater! Call yourself a medico? I ain’t signed up for this!”

  The triagist bridled. “Yeah?” he shouted back. “Well, I ain’t signed up at all, nigger — so if yeh think yez can do any better, I go on and invite yez, yeh ungrateful black bastard!”

  Carver had his gun out, automatically taking up stance in front of Ludlow, who had his pad out and pen already a-scribble, eagerly filing it all away. Morrow wasn’t completely sure who Carver’d start shooting at first, it came down to that, but the distraction itself posed an all-but-perfect opportunity to give Geyer what he no doubt wanted most, right now.

  “Tell me what you’re here for, so I can let you get to it,” Morrow ordered him, low, out the corner of his mouth.

  “Asbury,” was all Geyer replied, voice pitched at the self-same range.