A Rope of Thorns (Hexslinger 2)

“Now read your silly book, and do not dare to address me further,” she told him, dismissively. And returned to her endless scrying, flicking his offered jewellery aside like some errant lump of dung.

Blasted by headache, Yancey retired early, ostensibly leaving the men to hammer out some sort of accord, though she knew in her heart any immediate agreement on strategy was unlikely at best; two former Pinkerton men and a man who thought Pink-killing admirable sport made for bad bedfellows, even with one of ’em being exactly that.

Funny how huge this cramped room seemed, when empty. For a single heartbeat, Yancey wished Morrow was here to fill it up, then resolutely pushed all such imaginings away. He’s spoke for that way, she told herself, even if his natural bent sometimes takes his mind—elsewhere. And I suppose I don’t want to . . .

Impose? Come between them? Deprive Chess Pargeter of what few minor comforts his life currently held—that horror of a man, impossible and unpleasant, his irreverent soul packed full of sorrowful rage with no other method of surcease?

I do like him, more fool me, she understood, ruefully. My Goddamn error, indeed.

Easing her boots off with a sigh, Yancey sat back against the headboard, let her lids droop ’til all she saw was the veins decorating their backsides, and counted breaths like sheep.

Until: Granddaughter, a voice said—that same voice, bearer of bad news and good advice alike. We must talk.

When she opened her eyes again, red-purple light striated the dream-sky above like a bruise. Yancey got to her feet, soil gritty under her bare soles. All around, scree-lined slopes rose up to an edged ring of stone. The air was thin and dry, cool with altitude, though the earth still held the dying day’s heat. A harsh scent of ash scored each breath she took, underlaid with something fouler. At the centre of the bowl, the dead grey-black embers of a fire sat, and beside them, oh, beside them . . .

The Yancey of but days ago would have retched, and even now, she had to gulp down bile. Yet it was not the mere appearance of this ruined corpse that so revolted—albeit leathery and shrunken, it was less repugnant than the contents of most renderers’ carts. But the miasma magnified tenfold as she stared, coating her throat with tar and decayed fruit.

“It is a Hataalii’s murder you smell, granddaughter.”

Though the words were in no language she had ever heard, she understood them without effort. Yancey closed her eyes again; at once, the revulsion shrank sharply. “You’ve called me that for some time now,” she said. “And I’m mindful what courtesy you might mean by it, for which I thank you. But my mother was Mala Colder, born Mala Kiraly Lukacz, and though I didn’t have the pleasure of knowing her mother, I have no other. So, respectfully: use my name or any other title you please, ’cause I’m no kin of yours.”

She braced herself, not daring to open her eyes, ’til dry laughter filled the air.

The woman who stood unwavering on the crater’s edge, steady-balanced as if weighted, was both squat and unlovely: a frog-faced Indian squaw of no tribe Yancey knew—Apache, Sioux? Her long white hair stretched down to her belt in two slim braids; the shawl wrapping her was woven in complex, interleaving stripes of colour, sole bright thing about her, other than her black eyes’ predatory shine.

“And this,” she announced, to no one in particular, “is why this one may be worth the talking to.”

Smiling as she said it, but with nothing that looked like kindness. And the red-purple light of the sky clung to her, its power palpable as a forge’s heat.

This, too, a days-younger Yancey would have found near-paralyzing. But after Chess Pargeter, and Love, and the feel of her blood going into the Weed, a steel she had never thought possible had woven itself through her spine. She met the woman’s gaze without flinching. “All right. Now . . . who are you, really?”

The smile fell, a discarded mask. “Bilagaana dead-speaker,” the woman called her. “Why not make me tell you? You could, if you tried.”

It was true, and Yancey suddenly knew it, the way she always did. And though the rush of that certainty was dizzying, she held onto herself, hard.

“Yes. But why would I?”

A moment, then another; the woman’s scowl relaxed. “You would not,” she admitted, “since you are no Hataalii. For which I am thankful.”

Yancey’s eyes slipped back toward the dead fire pit’s awful companion. “That’s . . . yourself, lying there,” she said.

The woman spat. “What was left behind, after Reverend Rook betrayed me to his Anaye-wife. Ai, that I was foolish enough to be merciful! But he was a man in love, though not with her.” She folded her arms and shook her head, bemused. “And for all that men say women do foolish things for love, a lovestruck man will let the whole world burn, or burn it himself.”

Yancey thought of the scar underlining Chess’s breastbone, and fought down a shudder. “Love’s . . . not what’s between them, now, it seems.”

The woman sniffed. “Seeming is nothing; you yourself told that red boy as much, just today. Now—come up here beside me, dead-speaker. See what lies waiting.”

Yancey calmed herself with a deep breath, then climbed the loose scree of the inner slope ’til at last she stood perched on the top edge by the woman’s side, where she was surprised to realize herself a good few inches taller than her mysterious mentor. Then she looked out—eastward, since the sunset was behind her—and caught her breath.

Nightfall lay thick over the land, lights sparking up here and there, sadly separate. Slowly, Yancey realized she must be seeing for miles and miles, far beyond what the horizon should have permitted: Towns, cities, states, territories—near the entire West, maybe even far as the Mississippi. But this darkness was something more, Weed’s onslaught the merest surface froth of something far more corrupt.

Like rancid oil at the bottom of a mud-darkened puddle, Yancey could trace the currents of wrongness that eddied over the world. Within seconds, she had linked them back to their thickest points—the blurred, half-real edifices of Rook’s hex-town; the quake-flattened wreckage of Mexico’s capital, hundreds of miles south; and most of all, the salt-flat, white-glowing husk of Bewelcome. Black cracks pierced each place like broken cinders, producing a rushing vertigo in her stomach.

“Once, when things were not so pressing,” her not-grandmother said, “I would have wasted time—cajoled, flattered, offered instruction, as I did with Rook. But I have been longer than I expected fighting my way back from the Far Places

, and things are grown so bad it seems best to speak plainly, if only to avoid misunderstanding.”

“Likewise, and most decidedly,” Yancey said, unable to turn away from the horrid sight.