A Rope of Thorns (Hexslinger 2)

“. . . yes.” Joe gulped. “I could, uh . . . clear it out. . . .”

“Oh, don’t bother yourself.” Raising his voice, ever so slightly: “Reckon whoever’s in there’s probably heard I’m here, by now—and if they don’t got the sense to be gone by the time I’m at their door, I somehow misdoubt they would’ve been smart enough to cover their bill; good riddance to bad rubbish, is what I say.”

Up above, a great thump and scuttle, followed by the smash of a window wouldn’t open fast enough; Joe almost winced to hear it, now white to the very lips.

“Sure that’s so,” he said, finally. “Mister Pargeter.”

No call to scare the poor bastard like that, Morrow thought. It was an ill deed, unworthy of the Chess he thought he’d come to know, since Mictlan-Xibalba’s toils. And when Chess’s eyes swung his way, Morrow met his gaze full-on, refusing to call the words back. Adding in on top, as he did: And let’s see what you want to do about it, exactly, if makin’ yourself a fearful object’s so all-fired important to you right this very minute.

“Nothing” was the answer, apparently. Instead, Chess simply swung away and mounted those steps, bottle drooping from one hand, the other perched on his opposite gun-butt—so characteristic a pose it brought a moment’s salt sting to Morrow’s nose, throat clamping down hard in memory of the man Chess had once been, rather than the creature he’d become.

At his elbow, Yancey said, quietly: “He keeps splashing it out on every little thing takes his fancy, he’ll run through the rest of that power we bled into him back in the Hoard pretty quick—don’t you think, Mister Morrow?”

“But he’d still be a hex, wouldn’t he?” Geyer asked. “So perhaps the point is moot.”

“Still be Chess, either way,” Morrow agreed, slugging back his whiskey in one fiery swallow, and struggling not to cough his guts out. “Which is . . . no small thing, in itself.”

Yancey ignored the glass Joe’d laid in front of her, watching Geyer take a far more moderate sip from his. Then, waiting ’til he’d drunk it down, she said:

“I believe it’s past time for you to explain yourself, Mister ‘Grey.’”

The man squared his shoulders, as though preparing himself to step face-on into a high, cold wind. He took a breath, and began.

“You have to understand, Ed, Miz—Mister Colder—”

“Kloves,” Yancey reminded him. Thinking: You were at the wedding, after all.

“—by the War’s end, for those of us who’d watched him work, Allan Pinkerton was a mythic figure—a second Odysseus using guile in the best of causes, managing to winkle a good portion of the Union in Horse-wise through the Confederacy’s Trojan gates, even while the rest of the matter was decided on a battlefield basis. That’s why I signed up with the Agency afterwards . . . why most of us did, I believe.”

Morrow nodded slightly in agreement, possibly not even realizing he did so.

“When Mister Pinkerton went on the move, I stayed behind in Chicago, on Agency business,” Geyer continued. “Not hex-related, in the main. The methodical centralization and science of crime as applies to all cases, that was our credo, which served us well indeed, since few of the magically inclined who take to crime wreak much more damage than the normal run of criminal. What they do is impressive, yes, but never let it be forgot: they cannot conspire. That, in itself, cuts their efficaciousness down substantially.”

“And then?”

Geyer hesitated, as though still bound by the loyalties he was working hard to shuck.

“Professor Asbury, I reckon,” Morrow said. “That would be where things began to change. Am I right, Frank?”

“You are.”

This Professor, Geyer haltingly explained—not a bad man in his way, yet terribly single-minded—had been studying matters hexological at an Eastern university. He aimed to create a system of quantification which would allow him to distinguish the potentially hexacious before they came to full flower, and thus perhaps win them to the orderly side of things—create a matrix of nurture which would train them to accept mere human guidance, then set them as watchdogs upon their own kind. To use their natural hungers as a culling agent, in other words.

“Like cats on rats,” Yancey mused. “Or . . . no, too dissimilar—dogs on coyotes.”

Geyer shrugged. “If the dogs could pull fire from the air, or the coyotes bring inanimate objects to life and set them fighting amongst each other, then . . . I suppose so. It’s all somewhat beyond my ken, Miss—ter, me being but a humble ’tec. So while I won’t allow myself surprised to learn of Ed’s mission after the fact—how Asbury and Mister Pinkerton set him to infiltrate Reverend Rook’s gang, so’s he might take Rook’s temperature with that ‘Manifest’ of theirs—”

“Manifold, they called it; Asbury’s Manifold.”

“Thank you, Ed. It did surprise me, however—once reports began to filter up from Mexico, in the wake of that particular tangle—to receive a secret summons calling me into Mister Pinkerton’s presence. I took an express train to meet him outside of El Paso, then hopped tracks and transferred to his private railcar, the one he often conducts business from.”

“I know it.”

“Have you set foot there lately, though? Changed, Ed—terribly so.” A shadow hollowed out Geyer’s face. “Much like the man himself.”

Oh, enough, Yancey decided, abruptly; no matter how dear it cost Geyer to break his silence’s sworn bonds, she’d no more patience for this waffling. I need to understand this now, without annotation. So she shut her eyes, bolted the whiskey, laid but a fingertip on Geyer’s wrist, and—opened herself, wide.

(See it all, then, granddaughter. As he did.)