A Tree of Bones

by Gemma Files

Telegram transcript, sent from the desk of Frank Geyer to George Thiel, Yuma City, Arizona:

  GREAT NEWS STOP MIXTURE OF ASBURY’S SCALE MEASUREMENTS AND AUTOMATIC VIEWING HAS FINALLY LOCATED OUR FRIENDS STOP INTELLIGENCE CONFIRMS MAP COORDINATES STOP NO REPLY NECESSARY STOP MEET NEW MEXICO PREPARED TO RIDE STOP

  Ed Morrow was drawing water when the riders appeared: a mixed posse of former Pinks, plus some of Washford’s remaining men — not Carver, of course, who’d taken his honourable discharge and elected to go with Berta and Eulie when Hex City migrated once more. But Morrow thought he recognized most of them, even if he couldn’t necessarily put names to faces.

  “Want me to cover ’em?” Yancey asked, stepping up beside him, soft as a cat in those beaded hide slippers Yiska had parting-gifted her with. Her hair’d begun to grow back white ’round the scar left from Reverend Rook’s last wound-strike to her scalp, creating a lightning bolt effect that made her seem all entirely too piratical-rakish for such a tiny slip of a thing, and she stood with her coat-flaps twitched back and both guns exposed, hand just beginning to hover ’bout the one on her right hip — a pose which, once struck, minded him so strongly of Chess Morrow fair felt it rise in his throat, like a lump.

  “No,” he said, “don’t think that’ll be necessary. Look who’s in front.”

  The rest stood back, keeping a “polite” distance just far enough to render all parties equally safe from weapons fire, as once-Agent Frank Geyer and a smaller, greyer man Morrow could only assume must be the fabled George Thiel came cantering down. Geyer looked older himself, fresh marks of war still lingering from top to toe, an ache Morrow could well identify with. Thiel, slightly more distanced as he’d been from that crazy final rout, seemed more intact, yet far less easy to read.

  “Mister Morrow,” he began, without preamble, “don’t believe we’ve ever been introduced, though Frank here speaks highly of you — you and Missus Kloves, both.” A nod, in Yancey’s general direction: “Ma’am.”

  Yancey nodded back. “You’d be Mister Thiel, I reckon. Him Pinkerton wanted killed on grounds of disloyalty, back when.”

  “I would.”

  “Uh huh. And seeing you’ve apparently since been elevated to his old job, I’m not too surprised.”

  Thiel flushed slightly. “That . . . was never my intent, ma’am. Was the President himself who put this charge upon me in the Hex City debacle’s wake, making it all but impossible to refuse.”

  “Oh, yes. Still, it’s not as though either of you got anything out of not doing so, ’sides from control over the most powerful new branch of government since taxes were first levied.”

  Now it was Geyer’s turn to colour. “Missus Kloves! I beg you, if only for our old acquaintance’s sake — ”

  “I don’t recall that acquaintanceship having ever netted me much overall, Mister Geyer, beyond the rare thrill of being placed in harm’s way again and yet again. So no, neither of you are Allan Pinkerton, that’s true — but by God, I’d only hope you didn’t aspire to be. What is it brings you here, exactly?”

  “As you say, we work for the government, ma’am. Which, in turn, makes our motivation sadly difficult to explain to non-governmental — ”

  “Hadn’t noticed Ed garnering any battlefield commissions lately,” Yancey pointed out, “which puts him and me on pretty much common ground, as mere civilians . . . so from that angle, whatever you can’t tell me you can’t tell either of us, and vice versa.”

  “Yancey,” Morrow interjected, warningly, but she just rolled her eyes, and rightly so. For what was he likely to do about it, anyhow?

  I’m wrapped right ’round this tough little woman’s finger, close as any wedding band, he thought, without regret; closer, even. Tied tight as I ever was to Chess, too, though far more comfortably . . . and for most’ve the same reasons.

  All of the above, yes. And damnable pleased, in the end, to still be alive enough to be so.

  “Well, gentlemen, since you don’t actually seem inclined to threaten my . . . partner and me, I believe I’ll leave you to it — though this isn’t as large a ranch as some, I’m sure there’s honest work yet needs to be done. Shovelling manure, perhaps.”

  As she sauntered away, Thiel raised his eyebrows, and whistled. “That’s some lady you’ve yoked yourself to there, Morrow. I’d want to stay on her good side, if I was you.”

  “Still should, if you’re smart. Now — since I believe you two probably have a piece to say, you might want to go ahead and say it.”

  Geyer nodded. Asking, without further preamble: “Have you seen Chess Pargeter?”

  “Since Hex City removed itself from mortal ken? Or since he brought us here?”

  “So, all this was his work,” Thiel said.

  “Who else?” Morrow wondered, logically. “I’m a simple non-magickal, and Yancey’s skills don’t run to fashioning her wants out of thin air. What is a bit creepish, though, is how fast you found us.”

  “Surely you didn’t think you’d stay undetected.”

  “Hoped so, but frankly? No. What drew your eyes?”

  “The fact this place didn’t exist, and then it did — that alone argued hexation. But that it appeared paperwork and all made me believe perhaps Missus Kloves was also involved in the planning stages, if not in their execution.”

  Morrow leaned back against the well’s adobe brick lip, feeling his old hurts begin to pain. “Chess accounts himself her friend as much as he’s mine, so . . . might be. Tell you straight out, I ain’t privy to all they get up to.”

  Chimes alerted them to Yancey as she came back ’round the other side of the house, brushing up against the wind-caller hung above its porch. She didn’t wave while she passed by, just shut the door on them, decisively.

  “Do you know where he went?” Thiel demanded, undistracted.

  “Nope.”

  “Would you tell us, if you did?”

  “Am I constrained to answer?”

  “Not sure how we’d constrain you, exactly, without force — which, by the by, we’re unlikely to use, you being a hero of the barely averted Second Schism, and all.”

  “Then no.”

  Geyer smiled, slightly. “That’s what I told him.”

  “Yes, yes,” Thiel replied, a touch tetchily, “and on more than one occasion, which is why I now owe you at least five dollars.”

  “Only five?”

  “Very well, then. Make it ten.”

  They seemed quite the team, Morrow thought — easy in their back-and-forth, the way he and Chess had once been, at least during those initial days after Tampico, and he, Chess and Yancey still could be, as proven. Platonic camaraderie infused with just a hint of former intimacies on his part, a certain basic overlap of powers on hers.

  Morrow cast his mind back, recalling what it’d been like to watch Chess pull this farm up whole and entire out of the Painted Desert’s hide, like he was unwrapping a buried present, while Yancey hung over his shoulder from behind, whispering directions in his ear: Husbanding it solely from dirt and imagination, sticking floor to frame to walls to roof, while the soil all ’round gave up its salt and let loose with a stream of fresh water, allowing all manner of small green things to commence to grow. Most wonderfully of all, Chess hadn’t appeared to resent her interference — had seemed to relish it, actually. As though he was so damn sick of thinking for himself, just for the nonce, he genuinely craved the idea of taking orders.

  Knowing himself superfluous, Morrow had made sure to just stand back with his arms crossed, thinking that as the “normal” person in this equation, he basically had shit-all nothing to bring to the table. And expecting to hear Chess thinking back: Well, that ain’t exactly true . . .

  But no — Chess was concentrated still on the house, tongue caught between his teeth, and Morrow felt a bit sad that maybe there was no spark left between ’em anymore; sad, followed by conflicted. What if Yancey heard, and got jealous? Jealous of what, though?

  Really not all that mu
ch, ever, mutually satisfying fits of revelry aside — not when compared with Chess and the Rev’s operatically poisonous entanglement, its abyssal deeps and hypoxic heights, the bitter fruits sown and reaped. Which left a sting of its own, an unexpected wound, a lack that Morrow had never expected.

  This display of creative power came hard on the heels of five days of complete sloth, an addled and sullen silence, during which Morrow and Yancey did little but keep close yet quiet, allowing Chess to suffer through his version of mourning undisturbed, if not alone. He sat with boots off and cross-legged, unwarily shirtless, squinting down where part of the Crack had lain while the sun beat him red — and though his tears had long since dried, a constant storm of dust rose and fell like civilizations in the hollow his stare carved before him: Restless, virulent, boiling.

  Sometimes Morrow thought he could glimpse visions in that pit, peering at it over Chess’s freckled shoulder, or almost so. The black corpse-whip of Lady Ixchel’s hair, eddying over exposed bone; the gargantuan creep of Grandma’s spider; Hex City scarring the sky, a six-walled stone tumour. The too-calm face of Reverend Rook caught in mid-air, still falling.

  So it went, until the morning Morrow woke to find Chess standing by his bed-roll with arms crossed, barefoot yet, but his fair flesh no longer quite as dangerously flushed.

  “Thanks,” was all he could apparently think to say, finally.

  Morrow rubbed sleep from his eyes. “No problem,” he offered. “Uh . . . care for a spot of coffee?”

  “If all you got on offer’s the same shit I smelled cookin’ this last week, then no.”

  A moment later, Yancey came yawning out of the tent they’d raised and stopped short, one eyebrow kiting, to register Chess up and about once more, none the worse for wear.

  “Well,” she said, “I’ll go hunt us up some meat.”

  “I’d help, you wanted,” Chess offered — and wasn’t that a surprise? Almost as much as the way he’d put it, quick and plain-spoke, without any sort of sting to the tail. “Ain’t had to eat for some long time, but . . .”

  He spread his hands, a net of sparks flickering briefly from fingertip to fingertip, laced and trailing, at which Yancey just nodded, grown sadly used to the everyday miraculous.

  “Might be you could cast a charm, bring the lizards a bit faster? Much obliged, if so.”

  “All right.”

  An hour after, arrayed ’round the fire Morrow had laid in their absence, they’d eaten stew in silence before Chess finally wiped his mouth on one cuff and said: “Well, seems those Hex City females want me on that council of theirs — sure ain’t ceased to bother me with layin’ out offer on offer for any sort of position might be to my liking, anyhow, this whole time.”

  “I didn’t — ” Morrow started to reply, then stopped, as Chess tapped one temple: Of course, right. In there.

  “That’d be mainly Yiska, I’d think,” Yancey observed. “Not Songbird, even now.”

  Chess shook his head, almost smiling. “You’re right enough on that one.” His lip twisted further, flattening into something more grim. “Don’t matter much either way, though — I ain’t ’bout to lock myself up in some flying castle and run myself ragged strivin’ for the betterment of hex-kind, just ’cause them and me share some sort of kinship; never been sentimental that way, or any. Hell, if blood meant anything at all t’me, I’d be far more like to run off New York way and find that gal Oona said killed my Pa, if only to stand her a drink and shake her damn hand.”

  “But you ain’t gonna do that either, I take it,” Morrow concluded. “So — ”

  “What are you going to do, exactly?” Yancey inquired, with a touch of that old coolly practical hotelier’s savvy Morrow remembered from their first encounter with her, back in the Horde.

  “Build y’all a house, I thought, for starters, and carve out a patch of good land ’round here too, for you ’n’ Ed to play your games on. As a small token of my appreciation.”

  “Again, much obliged. Then what?”

  “Christ on a three-dollar cross! You’re damn hard to please, missy; anyone ever tell you that?”

  “Oh, one or two. Though far less than the choir who’ve told you the same, I’d reckon.”

  They locked glares a long moment, anger-lit green to mock-mild grey, before both snorted and looked away once more, caught on the mutual ragged edge of laughter. And in the aftermath of his conjuring, stew re-heated, Chess told Morrow: “Can’t put it off any longer, Ed; my ride’s almost here. Come morning, you won’t see me for some long time — but then again,” he nodded at Yancey, “this one can probably fill you in on all my bad deeds now and then, what with those dreams of hers. And I don’t doubt we’ll meet again, eventually.”

  Again, Morrow felt that hollow clutch in his stomach-pit, impossible to deny or explain. “Seems likely, yeah,” he replied.

  “So . . .”

  “. . . so.”

  They stood there a moment, both glancing elsewhere, studying the rocks and dirt (and fresh grass, sod, bare beginnings of a garden, that tree Yancey’d placed for shade over by the well) as though either thought they might be likely to offer advice on how best to continue. Yancey herself hung back by the fire, leaving them room enough for whatever demonstrations they felt were appropriate in her presence, though Morrow had the odd feeling that even if she absented herself entirely she’d probably be able to “hear” them anyhow, no matter what distance she might take herself off to.

  Once upon a time — and not so long past, either — Chess might’ve tried to kiss him goodbye; once upon a time, Morrow would’ve let him, or even kissed him first like he had at Grandma’s camp, back by Old Woman Butte. But for reasons he wasn’t quite sure of, that seemed impossible, now . . . and it seemed as if each knew it.

  “Was thinking I might make myself useful, believe it or not,” Chess told him, left hand habit-braced on that same side’s empty holster. “Put myself to work extirpating the Weed where it runs rampant and ain’t being fed, since it was grown for my benefit, or hunting down whatever weird objects might’ve been left behind — orphaned out of Mictlan-Xibalba, y’know, when I finally got the Crack closed for good. Then again, I’ll bet there’s a parcel of hexes new-made out there, once the dust died down; might track them down too, while I’m at it. Stop ’em from harassing simple folks or eating each other, then tell ’em how they got a place to go if they want to, where they won’t have to do either.”

  Here he trailed away, as though slightly embarrassed to listen to his own pretensions to redemption, the laughable idea that Chess damn Pargeter should ever want to do a lick of good here and there, in between the usual range of shooting, riding and fucking. That at the grand old age of twenty-six or so, after watching his first and only love fall into Hell’s maw and staving off at least one apocalypse thereby, he might’ve actually changed a bit — gotten older, if not substantially wiser. Grown up, if only a bit.

  “That sounds good, Chess,” was all Morrow could think to say, while the sorrow of Chess’s losses pricked at his heart. “Both things, I mean. All of it.”

  “Yeah? Well, good. Sounds plumb crazy when I say it, to be frank, so if you don’t think it is, then maybe . . .”

  Chess let himself trail away, then, and smiled. Not a grin, whether gleeful or fierce or bitter; not a snarl disguised, either. Just there, a simple play of muscles, innocent enough to wound. The smile of a far less complicated man, one who hadn’t died twice, or been twice reborn. One who’d never been any sort of a god.

  “Never had no daddy, as you know,” he said, at last, “and nobody ever told me to call him by that name, either, ’less he had coin to spend. But I’m fine with that, for I did have friends, in the end; one false as Confederate dollars, and one true-damn-blue.”

  Morrow swallowed. “I hope I know which was the camp I fell in.”

  “Well, damn, Ed . . . by this time, I’d hope you did, too.”

  And suddenly Yancey was there as well, having made he
r way across from the cook-pit without either of them noticing, as good a fake Injun as ever wore moccasins. Laying her hand on Chess’s arm, friendly and just a bit possessive, to say: “I’d hope I might’ve made for a third, Mister Pargeter, man or no.”

  Chess hissed through his teeth. “Woman, please. You know

  you do.”

  A horse took him away before dawn — Morrow’d feared it might be one of those small(ish)-sized spiders, but apparently, Chess hadn’t been feeling all that adventurous. One way or the other, by the time Yancey woke he was long gone, and she and Morrow sat together to watch the sun come up over their new homestead: hexation’s bounty, payment perhaps for being the two people in all of Chess Pargeter’s life who’d only given, never taken. Or just two pals, Goddamnit.

  Later, freed from the restraint they’d felt in Chess’s presence, they finally consummated their affections for what had to be — strange as it was to say it — the very first time, at least in the flesh. And held each other afterward, close and tight, until they slept.

  But now, Thiel’s voice brought Morrow back to the matter at hand.

  “Am I right in assuming Mister Pargeter was offered a place at Hexicas’ pyramid-head, but gave it up untried — preferring to stand alone, as ever?”

  “Well, he sure ain’t there now, so I’d think that part’s pretty public knowledge.”

  “Yet he’s still a power to be reckoned with, even stripped of his former godhood.”

  “Nothin’ you could do to stop him, he turned against you. Nothin’ I could do to stop him either, in point of fact, if that was your grand plan — like I said, I don’t know where he is, to begin with. And like Yancey already intimated . . .”

  “. . . neither of you’d feel all too much obliged to pull his reins, even assuming you could,” Geyer filled in, with another glance at Thiel.

  “That’s right.”

  “Hmmm,” Thiel said, with no particular emphasis, and no hint of what he might mean by it, either.

  Geyer glanced at him, then back at Morrow. “Remember what Pinkerton always feared, Ed?” He asked. “That if hexes could combine, they’d rule the world in a decade?”