A Rope of Thorns (Hexslinger 2)

The woman sighed. “I have sent dreams to my own tribe’s dead-speakers, but they are too far away to be helpful. Still, they in turn have sent emissaries to their nearest enemies, reminding them we share a common foe—worse even, in its season, than your kind has been to us, ghost-face girl. A threefold menace, each branch sprung from the same tree of bones: the Weed, and who it follows after. The risen city, and those who rule it. The crack, and what comes out of it. All bent to one abominable purpose.”

“To destroy us?” Yancey guessed. “Or . . . everything?”

“Grandma” shook her head, sharply. “Merely to thrust this world on toward the Sixth would not appease she who drives this monstrousness, or serve her ends. She wishes to undo a destruction—force time itself backward to restore what she remembers as her followers’ glory, before your people meddled in their affairs.”

“My people?”

“Those who overcame the Mexica—steel hats, she calls them. Los conquistadors.”

“Um—conquistadors were Spanish, I believe.” At Grandma’s look: “But lay that by. . . . This’d be Reverend Rook’s ‘Rainbow Lady,’ I take it?” She’d almost said the name outright, but stopped in time, remembering Ed’s palm making harsh contact with her jaw to keep a similar name from possibly summoning its owner. Though what lingered was not the pain of the blow, but the stricken look in his eyes, immediately after.

Grandma spat. “She thinks herself fit to overturn Balance, who is nothing but a shed snakeskin of venom and folly. And for that, she has loosed such horrors upon the world. . . .”

She seized Yancey’s arm, pointed at the throbbing void centring Bewelcome’s whiteness. “It has reached further down now, to the Ball-Court’s lowest levels. Past the Mexica host, presided over by Mictantecuhtli and his fleshless lady Mictecacuihuatl, into the realm of One and Seven Death and all their nightmares.” Grandma’s voice fell into a mesmerizing rhythm, and with each name, images flashed before Yancey’s eyes—too quick to be truly seen, too ghastly to forget. “Jaundice Demon and Skull Sceptre, who cause the flesh to sicken and fall. House Corner, his sharp teeth bared. Lord of Rubbish and the Stabbing Lord, who attack from the blind side. Packstrap and Wing, whose victims die struck from above on the roadway, alone, with the dark wind blowing past.

“And in their company, neither leading nor following, something that has been here already for longer than we dream—enjoying their progress, pointing them the way—”

Yancey felt it in her gut, a landed punch. “The Enemy.”

“We know him by many names, dead-speaker, and sometimes he seems to care for us, if only because we keep him busy. But in this form he is the Trickster without care—the King who Eats Himself, playing his flute on a staircase of human skulls. And this crack he keeps open will be the root his Bone Tree grows from.”

So what does any of that mean? Yancey choked back the urge to yell. As Grandma’d said, the hour was getting late—terminology hardly mattered, considering it all sounded equally bad.

“Why don’t you tell Mister Pargeter all this,” she asked, instead, “seeing he’s the only one might be able to do something about it?”

“Because he cannot hear me—will not, perhaps. He is a stubborn fool.”

“I can’t disagree.”

“So it is, when a man hates his own mother—the earth opens up under his feet, one way or another. Women live in your warrior’s blind spot; he cannot see them, or see them coming. How else do you think the Rainbow Lady was able to take his man even as he lay beside him, right out of his very bed? How was she able to make him come panting at her call, though it goes against his very soul to do so?”

I do wish you hadn’t made me remember that, Yancey thought.

“Suppose he’d say . . . ’cause she’s ‘a damn hex-god,’” she replied, out loud. “’Cause she’s not like you or him, or Reverend Rook, either.”

“No. She is exactly like him, and me, and every other of our kind—puffed up with stolen blood, writ large, gone bad. For whatever she and her Enemy are now, they were once as I . . . as you, even. And though she refuses to see it, her time is already done; what she and Rook have worked with Rook’s little killer proves as much. Gods sleep within us all, waiting to be prayed alive. And gods can kill other gods.”

She turned to fix Yancey with one eye, head cocked like a carrion bird’s. “You, meanwhile, the red boy needs, along with his travelling companion—that one man who stayed with him for friendship’s sake, even after knowing what he really was. Which is why he begins to mistrust you both, as he fears anything which might make him weak.”

Yancey frowned. “He isn’t, though. He’s crazy strong.”

“Tell him that, then. Make him even stronger. Or he will drive you both away, and ensure all our dooms.”

She turned once more to the horizon, where Hex City cast its weird light upwards, deforming the stars behind. “Something is happening there, in that city Rook’s perfidy helped her build. I did not see it coming, while still in my body; it was as yet hidden in time’s creases, even when looked at through the weave of Changing Woman’s own loom. But now I am bodiless I see my vengeance is less important than the seed these two have sown. Properly nurtured, it will benefit all Hataalii, no matter their blood . . . and therefore, though it galls me to say so, it must be preserved.”

“Now you’ve lost me, ma’am.”

The old squaw hesitated, as though she almost feared to speak the words. “In that place,” she said, at last, “we—hexes—can work together.”

“That . . . just doesn’t happen.”

“Nowhere but there, dead-speaker. Do you understand me?”

And here Yancey took her own pause, jaw set, frankly afraid to admit that she really didn’t.

“So you need us kept together,” she said, instead. “Is someone coming to help us? One of your—Hataalii?”

“Hataalii? No. None could stay close to your red boy now, without risking death-duel. Yiska, the one my people sent to, would be a full medicine woman already, if only she could give up her love for weapons—born Diné, but she rides with the Na’isha of late, since all is fallen into confusion. A spirit-talker, like you in some ways . . . in others, not.” She pointed out over the plain, now gone completely black. “She and her band travel quickly, but they do not have the capacities your red boy does. Expect them soon.”