ve met a time or two, yeah, and she likes me same as she probably likes how a dose of clap lowers her home-stable’s tone. So?”
Geyer sighed. “Well . . . as per their initial agreement, the Boss had been letting her sniff out other hexes to sign up or suck dry, most often the latter—but the Hex City Call interfered, drying up their lines of supply by sending all expressed witches and warlocks scurrying off toward Reverend Rook and . . . that other lady. But then Doctor Asbury began to manufacture copies of his Manifold, issuing them to ranked officers, each inside cases fit with a scale to match their readings to.” He flashed his own Chess’s way, netting little response. “Which means . . .”
“. . . they can do what they were jawing over when last we saw ’em, remember?” Morrow asked. “Hunt up them as could be hexes ’fore they have a chance to blossom, then raise ’em housebroke to leash and collar?”
Chess huffed. “So they got a passel of just-bled bitches like Little Miss Fuck-You-Hard on their side—what’s that to do with me? They don’t get in my road, they won’t get hurt; they do, then they will. Day I can’t get shed of a flock of witch-girls, you can lay my ass out and throw dust in my face.”
“It’s not only young ladies, Mister Pargeter—not by a long shot.” Geyer leaned forward. “That train of his . . . last Morrow and I stepped aboard, it was a regular steam-car made commonplace time, and now it can go from Chi-Town to Mexico in under three days. Doesn’t even need rails, nor an engine; it can go through a mountain, if that’s what’s on order. And you know how that’s done?”
“I don’t doubt but you’re gonna tell me.”
Morrow, now: “By rounding up folk who ain’t yet come to it wherever they run across ’em, Chess, and packing ’em away in its freight cars like cattle—men and boys, old and young, who’ve been lucky enough to dodge the rope Rook didn’t, or that battlefield harm old Kees Hosteen was talking about, back when the Yanks tried to make a Brigade out of new-minted hexes. Then they ask ’em if they want to serve their country, and if they say yes . . .”
His voice trailed away, run dry at the sheer horror of it, especially from a man he’d once admired. But Chess didn’t take the hint.
“They what, hexify ’em ’gainst their will? Poor damn babies. Bound to’ve happened sooner or later, and if they’re so dumb they still turn Pink after, then—”
Yancey sat upright, her final straw snapping. “Oh, let me,” she said.
Her hand darted forward, snaring Chess by the sleeve and pulling him so close it made him startle, like she came loaded with some particularly female complaint he might catch through sheer proximity. “Whoa, now! Just ’cause you and Ed been flirting . . .”
“Hush,” she said, severely, and kissed him on the lips.
Purest intuition, same as going skin-to-skin with Geyer had been, the night previous—but she couldn’t fool herself there was no small shred of payback in the gesture, either. If nothing else, it certainly shocked Chess silent.
Both their minds broke open, pulled right on back to Pinkerton’s conclave, together: so close-sat between the predatory trio of Asbury, Songbird, Pinkerton and Geyer’s memory-self it seemed insanity no alarm was roused. The former agent looked uppercut, dazed.
“But . . . these are citizens of our nation, sir, not enemy operatives; fellow veterans, some of them. I thought our charge was the protection of such innocents.”
Pinkerton’s dreadful maw quivered, as though striving (yet failing, miserably) to knit itself back together—and it shocked Yancey to realize how shocked Chess was by the sight, his unwitting handiwork made flesh.
“We are nane sae innocent as tae be sinless, from Eve’s womb on,” Pinkerton replied, shortly. “But what America stands on here, Frank, is the precipice of a far worse division than that which almost sundered us—one which must be avoided, at all costs.”
“I’m still not sure why that necessitates forcing the unprepared into custody, ripping them from wives and families, subjecting them to—”
“A cocktail of the same sacramental Weed Pargeter sows behind him, only,” Asbury assured him, “creating delirium, followed by a mere shadow-show of impending grievous bodily harm: threat of fire, or approaching bombardment . . .” Hastening to add, as Geyer gawped at him: “. . . and then, once the deed is achieved, sedation via heroin—a housewife’s cough remedy!—or gentle gastric lavage. It is done with all possible delicacy, Mister Geyer, leaving not a speck of permanent damage; we have no wish, or need, to go further.”
“Yet these medicament-aided vaudevilles of yours must ring convincing enough to make the change occur,” Geyer shot back, “which confirms the whole offensive matter as torture!”
Asbury reddened, from his collar up. “Our processes, however traumatic, allow these recruits to avoid such Mediaeval nonsense, sir! No more burnings, hangings or pressings, no more ‘spectral evidence’—no hysteric, misinformed massacres, in fact, such as that which lent Salem its legendarily ill name.”
Unable to restrain herself, Songbird giggled behind her fan, drawing Pinkerton’s roar. “Be still, both o’ ye!” To Geyer: “I must ha’ men around me I can trust, Frank, sincerely, and not worry over. If you canna play that part for me, then tell me now, and we’ll ha’ ye back Illinois-way on the instant.”
“I . . . that wasn’t my intent, boss, by any means. It’s simply . . .”
He shook his head, amazed, while Pinkerton merely shrugged. “Aye, it’s a conundrum—how tae comport ourselves as true Christians, gi’en what we deal wi’? We can’t do much tae hurry the lassies along, and setting one hex to make another is a witless errand, for they eat ’em right after, or at least try damn hard. Savages!” Songbird laughed again. “But the Professor here’s figuring a way tae keep ’em in line.”
And here things froze, a print-run newsbill settling from ink to image. Cutting out the middleman, since they were there already, Chess turned directly to Geyer’s shadow-self, and asked: “What’s he on about? Those grounding-wires the Doc uses to suck up magic?”
First Yancey’d heard of such a thing, but Geyer-of-the-past—perhaps somehow combined with his current self through hexological miracle, so that the “person” they spoke to was as much Geyer as its original?—nodded quick enough, like it was familiar business. “Says he can boil it down into a spring or cog and add it to the Manifold’s next generation, so’s we won’t even need the whole rigmarole with casting a circle or dispersing the result—just point and shoot, and the thing takes more the more your target tries to fend it off, ’til they run plumb dry.”
“For permanent?” asked Chess.
Geyer shrugged, blankly. “Asbury says magic’s a natural force, like gravitation, so no . . . every hex can take a charge of it, like running electricity through metal, which means it’ll build up again, eventually. But the rest of that stuff he talks of—build a machine that can extract magic, let alone store it so any normal man can use it, later on? That’s like sayin’ you can build an engine that flies to the moon, or a bombshell fierce enough to level an entire city. No, if the last century’s taught us anything, such foolery is the province of hexation alone.”
“So what broke you free of Pinkerton’s sway, exactly, and sent you chasin’ after me?”
Geyer looked down, abashed. “He sent me away with George Thiel, his second-in-command ’til then—doing work Pinkerton no longer trusts himself with, be it purging Weed or rounding up potentials. He feared Thiel’s loyalty was slipping, that the man intended to form his own Detective Service Agency, in direct competition to our own. So Pinkerton told me to ride along with him on a fact-finding mission up Bewelcome way, watch for my chance, and—when I saw it—act.”