A Rope of Thorns (Hexslinger 2)

And—they were gone, popped out and back into existence in a half-second, the town erased like blown-off mist. Nothing but empty rock, scrub and equally empty overhang of cloudlessness, sun the colour of a struck match.

Chess stumbled back a pace, then sat down, heavily, like he’d been gutted. Morrow collapsed on his side, hands automatically gone to his maimed mouth . . . only to find the raw hole plugged once more with a bare rim of new tooth—man-sized, smooth as china plate—poking up, impossibly, through tender flesh.

He wondered how long it’d take to grow out fully, and whether keeping himself drunk throughout would help or hinder the process.

“Crap,” Chess exclaimed, suddenly exhausted. “I left the Goddamn horses behind.”

Chapter Two

That night, sparks flew upward from the fire only to die halfway, like lightning bugs with aspirations to be stars throwing themselves skyward, heedless of their own hubris. That last was a word Ash Rook had once taught Chess, Grecian in origin—idolators same as those Mex fools who’d once worshipped “Lady” Ixchel and her like, though with the added appeal of having apparently thought it a tad strange for a man not to lust after his own kind. Which made ’em a sight more worthy of respect than any One True God Almighty-worshipping Bible-thumper Chess’d ever met with . . . ’side from the Rev himself, of course.

Here, however, Chess felt a shiver at the very name, and grimaced. Just no getting away from Rook when the man’s betrayal ran all through him like a bruisy pain, far too fresh to touch directly.

Across from him, Chess saw Ed Morrow look up sharply, like he could hear what Chess was thinking. “You all right?”

“I look like I’m not?”

Morrow frowned. “All seriousness? Well . . . yeah.”

There were a fair few replies Chess might have made to that, but he well knew Morrow’d done nothing to warrant them, ’sides from offer him support in ways he hadn’t thought to ask for.

So he simply sighed, and answered: “Just tired, is all. How’s that tooth?”

“Better. Listen, though, Chess—that calling the Doc spoke on . . .you feel it too, don’t you?”

Here the fire gave a punctuational crack, as though some unseen wooden knot had suddenly flared through. Chess felt it ring straight through the space where his stolen heart should beat, Dentist Glossing’s stolen power galvanizing him with a current of pure arousal fit to make every last nerve pop at once, in similarly spectacular fashion; it hurt him so’s he had to forcibly restrain himself from grabbing poor Ed by both ears and shutting him up, mouth-first.

“Every night,” he replied, instead. “But I’m stronger than he was, Ed—so I don’t aim to go there ’til I’m good and ready.”

To which Morrow just nodded, sagely. And yet—

When’ll that be, exactly? Chess heard him think, nevertheless, no matter how he strained not to. The way he “heard” almost every damn thing around him, these days: two girls strolling east as Morrow and he rode toward the dentist’s shop, one of ’em sorting cake recipes, the other wondering when she’d have to start tying her apron higher (and how fast she could catch herself a Joseph-husband, ’fore what she was cooking in her oven started to show). An old man cleaning spittoons on the lodge-house stoop, hoping that pain in his stomach was last night’s stew, not cancer. A muscle-bound farm-hand moving west to trade for feed at the general store, casting eyes on Chess’s backside with the same interest Chess would have shown his, had their positions been reversed.

Hadn’t been for all that yammer, Chess might’ve seen Doc Glossing for what he was at the outset. Which was bad enough, and explained why his natural urge to shun even smallish cities had grown so almighty strong—get him and Morrow back out under a clear sky with enough miles ’round him to see horizon in every direction, and Chess felt immediately easier, if not a damn whit safer. But then things would start going in the opposite direction, a telescope reversed; every particle of “empty” country growing porous-sharp, leaking information like water, leaching memory like chalk. And letting in a whole new flood of voices which settled on him locust-loud, showing him things he didn’t know how he knew, and didn’t need to, either.

Songbird scrying in a dish of mercury and fingering the scar he’d given her, bright red on her ghost-pale face. . . .

Some band of Injuns riding fast enough to raise dust, with a warrior at their head whose face he almost felt he should know, if only from someone else’s memory. . . .

Doc Asbury in his travelling laboratory, throwing lightning between two steel balls—Pinkerton in his private train-car, scribbling dispatches—faceless agents dispersed to the wind, carrying all Chess and Morrow’s particulars in their pockets—red Weed growing wild, constantly turning its many floral heads at once to search out Chess’s scent, and re-orienting itself accordingly. . . .

While deep underground, Mictlan-Xibalba roiled like a crock-pot, throwing up cracks and sickness . . . and to the north, that city grew: dark spires rising, mortared with spells and pain; Lady Ixchel looking down on it all, her empty face the moon set high above. While at her side stood an amused shadow, tall as some blood-watered tree.

This was how things had been for Asher Rook, Chess now understood—just like this, the entire Goddamn time. No wonder he did them things he did, with all this forever poking at him, never letting him rest.

Across the fire, Chess could see Morrow fixing him slant-eyed, with what was getting dangerously close to outright pity. To prevent himself from punching him right in the stupidly sentimental face, therefore, Chess broke off conversation entirely and lay down, trusting the annoying bastard to eventually follow suit.

To sleep, however, was always to lay oneself even further open, the way healing and infection both cracked a wound beyond its own stitchery.

Chess’d never been much of a one for reading—could do it in a pinch, but never for fun. But the dream began with words spilling out into the air before him—silver-white on black, reversed, thorny-twisted in the Gothic style. They hung there glinting, a spray of flickery nails. And next came the voice, as ever: Rook’s rasping tones, echoing straight down into a man’s groin. Reciting, while Chess felt his unwilling gaze pulled along those floating letters—

. . . His cheeks are like beds of spice

Yielding perfume

His lips are like lilies

Dripping with myrrh