A Rope of Thorns (Hexslinger 2)

Morrow felt a rush of something unfamiliar spill up from inside him, hot like bile, and only realized at the last possible instant it must be rage not on his own behalf, but on Chess’s.

“As for me actin’ Chess’s John the Baptist, or what-have-you,” he went on, refusing to be drawn, “I ain’t done all too much to spread that bloody gospel of yours as yet, if you’ve been watching.”

“Noticed that, yes.” A dark grin: “Feelin’ guilty?”

“Not as such. You . . . feelin’ mad?”

Rook fixed him again, longer this time, like: Not as such.

“There’s one or two things you can’t know, Ed,” was all he had by way of an answer. “And ’fore you ask, what I mean by that is—you can really only see half the show, from where you’re sat.”

Morrow’s heart stuttered, just a bit. “And Chess . . . how much can he see, exactly?”

Rook shrugged again. “More than he wants to, I’m sure. But less by far than he knows he needs to.”

Morrow took a deep breath, mind whirring like Asbury’s shattered Manifold. “What is it you want, Ash Rook?”

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Rook sighed, and suddenly the sky was black as his coat, star-studded, cold. Blue fire flickered like heat lightning along the horizon. “Something’s comin’, and nothing of mine, or my Lady’s. More to do with that Enemy of Chess’s, I reckon.”

Which one? Morrow thought, confused.

“’Course, for all you know, I could just be spinnin’ you more tales.” Rook spread his hands. “But like I said—ain’t as big a difference between the two of you as it used to be. Or all three of us, for that matter.”

From somewhere else, Chess Pargeter screamed out loud.

And here was where Morrow rocketed straight back up into the debatably real world, only to find it deformed by yet another nightmare. Across the dead campfire’s smoking blister, Chess thrashed and kicked beneath an undulating blanket of amorously seeking Weed that’d obviously followed them ’cross the desert, tracing Chess’s delicious spoor, and now snuggled against him from every angle, stroking him with its many tendrils. In far too many spots to count, Morrow saw its meaty red-green furls broken up with dull ivory bone fragments which must’ve swum up through the dirt to get there, drawn by a similar hopeful hunger. These fought against each other like puppies at the teat, desperate to bury ’emselves once more inside him.

“Jesus!” Chess cursed, his voice skewing frighteningly high, scrabbling them away with both fists while they leaped and snapped in successive waves, quotidian, inexplicable. “You filthy little bastards—Goddamn fucking magic! Motherfuck damn Hell shit-ass Christ!”

Without thinking, Morrow caught one of Chess’s flailing hands between his palms; he hauled ’til his shoulder popped, bracing his boot against the fire pit’s rock-set rim. At last Chess came slithering free with a juicy rip, right into Morrow’s embrace. The vine-bone mélange turned, seeking eyelessly, and swarmed its way after; when Morrow stomped a few of the tendrils into muck, the others hissed at him, spitting acid that made his boot-tips smoke.

Now upright, Chess had already slipped behind him, using the bigger man’s bulk as a shield. “Do something!” he demanded, as Morrow whirled and swore.

“Hell, you do something!” Morrow swung his duster off his shoulders and used it to lash at the Weed, whipping it back. “Make it go away, like before—”

“‘Begone’? That’s exactly what I been telling it! It just don’t damn well listen!”

And this, an amused voice said, inside both their skulls at once, is what your priest-king spoke of, little brother, when he warned you that you must learn a better way to deal with such matters or suffer the consequences . . . along with everyone else.

Who said that? Morrow thought. But Chess’s eyes had already flicked straight to the left, and Morrow followed them, automatically. To see something looming there in the dark beyond, born from it, birthing it—something grinning, bigger than a house, a pitch-smeared hulk whose brow leaked fire and mouth leaked smoke. Whose teeth, like the interior of the Rainbow Lady’s perforated head when Morrow’d shot her in the Moon Room, were a wailing forest of tiny red faces, generation on generation of those killed to keep her all-fired Blood Engine going.

Oh, this creature said, admiringly, so you can think. Then he does well to keep you by him after all, soldier.

Under its gaze, the Weed had pulled back, finally, and now lay cowering in a lop-shaped circle, all a-tremble like pilgrims at the Rock. Morrow swallowed, mouth suddenly so dry he could barely taste his own tongue.

“You . . . you’d be that Enemy the Rev was talkin’ ’bout, wouldn’t you?”

I would.

“Same one we call Satan, that it? Or is that somebody else entirely?”

The hulk shook its grinning, smoking head, just once, with surprising dignity.

I do not know this name, it told him. But you and I have met before, albeit only briefly; certainly, you have heard my progress through the dark, if nothing else. Remember? Like this.

It straightened, spreading great columnar arms and more, as the thing’s ribs swung back as well, charcoal-hued glass doors gaping wide into nothingness: the hole, the crack, a wound between reality and Hell. For a second it yawned, then clapped shut, a club smacking home against bone, hard enough to fracture.