A Rope of Thorns (Hexslinger 2)

The tornado unspooled itself, dissolving as it went; where it touched down, the Weed mounded high about fallen revenants and Kiowa alike, trembled, then collapsed. Dead flesh shrank and withered, sucked dry in an instant. Within moments, the battleground was nothing but a sea of gently pulsing Weed, what few remains could still be spotted ancient-looking, as if left over from some long-gone, unremembered tragedy. Geyer stared first at it, then back to the air-hung rift which was only just beginning to narrow closed, with dreamlike slowness.

A rapid clattering canter brought Yiska and her surviving band to his side, jumping the Weed incautiously as though it were mown hay. Yiska looked down at Geyer, who—ridiculously enough—had to work like a demon to keep his eyes from wandering to those unstrapped breasts of hers, one brown nipple poking careless through a rent in her blouse.

“Feeling wounded, Pinkerton man?” she asked, in English hoarsely accented, yet crudely accurate. “Sad, I mean—to be abandoned?”

He shook his head. “Happy to be alive, more like.”

“Well, the sun has not set.” Yiska grinned, so broadly Geyer found himself smiling back. Then she, too, glanced at the rift. “To ride the Bone Channel leads to death, in our stories.”

“Always?”

“For someone. And yet—” the grin flickered back, lightning-quick “—there are few better ways to die than as legend.” She gestured at a horse which wandered off to one side, its rider lost. “Mount up, Pinkerton man, if you dare travel in bad company!”

Geyer hesitated. The impulse to follow was near-irresistible. But he had other duties, long neglected during this side trip with Pargeter’s haphazard crew, and now found himself freed—at last—to return to them.

You’re my friend, Ed, always, he thought. But you got friends of your own—and I think you maybe like ’em better than is useful, at this juncture, to the interests I seek to serve.

The choice weighed painful enough on him that he said nothing, but Yiska seemed to read his decision anyway. “So, and so, and so. Hiyaaah!” This last cry went over one shoulder, to the others; they yodelled back, and she kicked her mount forward, plunging straight into that ever-closing Hell-smile, seeming to vanish even before the darkness covered her. One by one, the others galloped after her, hooting and hollering and waving their bloodied weapons, like boys racing each other to the best sport in all the world.

As the last of them barely got through, the air knit itself closed, fading away. Geyer stood alone, shaking his head in wonder.

A strange age, he thought, that’s for damn sure. And only bound to get stranger.

Minutes later, he caught up with the wandering Kiowa steed, gentling until it seemed calm enough to mount—clumsily, without a saddle—and begin guiding it northward.

Chess and the others were borne by competing currents, snatched and mouthed, torn headlong from one moment to the frenzied next—then expelled at the other end as if shot from a cannon, plummeting face-down into Bewelcome’s town square. To every compass-quarter silent figures flanked them, hands upraised in unheard prayer, worn faceless and contorted. The wind moaned through broken walls, and a few sticks of what had once been the church where Sheriff Love hoped to preach his fiery Nazarene sermonage still flung, broken bone-sharp, to scratch at a blackened sky.

Yancey retched up a mouthful of salt. Beside her, Morrow crouched with both hands to his gut, like he’d just been nut-kicked by God’s own boot. But Chess lit feet-first, like the cat he so resembled, and found Love already planted likewise upright, as though he’d grown there. Which, in a way . . . he had.

“Okay, then,” Chess told him, trying to ignore the two idjits at his feet. “You ’bout ready to get it done? Or did you want to pray a bit, ’forehand?”

Love shook his head, neck grating slightly in its socket. And might have got around to answering, had a fifth—most unexpe

cted—voice not rung out, from an entirely different direction.

“Gennnnnlemehn,” it began, Scots burr blurred to the point of slurry incoherence. “’Tis main guid tae sheeee yeh, boath, e’en in thessse unforrrrtunate, ehhhh . . . ciurrrcumstances.”

Chapter Sixteen

Allan Pinkerton, self-elected king of all Diogenes Boys, stood at attention on his hex-powered train-car’s back deck, with Songbird at one elbow, Asbury at the other—having made far better time than Chess or Love, probably for lack of distraction. With his unseasonable fur coat buttoned high enough to mask the bottom half of his face and a short-nosed pepper-box revolver in one hand, he loomed like some Russian bear drilled to stand on its back heels: a bit unsteady, a bit ridiculous. Completely threatening.

Songbird, predictably, seemed to glean both thoughts at once, plucking them deft as any pickpocket from Chess’s ill-shrouded brain. And gave that crack-toothed little grin of hers, at his discomfort—same one made him want to slap her hard enough she’d lose a matching set of choppers on the other side, kiddy-moll or no.

“We have been waiting here for you, English Oona’s boy,” she told him. “This fool—” and here she nodded at Doc Asbury, who hung on Love’s and Chess’s every move with equal fascination, happy as a kid on Christmas, “—tracked you easily, plotting a course from that village you helped level. We did allow you some time to recuperate in between, at least . . . though, knowing you as I do, I do not expect gratitude.”

“Apparation,” Asbury murmured to himself, at the same time. “Transit of objects from one place to another, through willpower alone . . . but not within the confines of some Spiritualist séance, no. And across miles, not mere inches.”

Chess ignored them both, instead tracing the train’s path with his eyes—a long trail of parallel gouges, scoring the earth like giant twin fingers drawn idly across a child’s sandbox, which lead back from the vehicle across the white salt flat, the scrubby ground beyond, and out of Bewelcome’s canyon-set valley entirely. For all Chess knew, they led straight back to the Pinks’ home nest in Chicago itself, though he couldn’t see this floating nightmare rolling down some fancy Eastern city street. Under the train’s wheels, the gouge-tracks ended in sprays of sand and salt, pushed aside by some faint shimmer that twisted the eyes; the original wheels were still set inside, blurred as if by liquid glass. Chess’s skin itched, watching it; had a tone, like a chigger-whine gone so high it could only be felt, not heard.

Six cars, and none of them an engine: a passenger carriage, black Pullman dining car, plus four rust-and-brown boxcars, the latter three padlocked tight. Chess could feel the power packed dense within these, cramped as contortionists wedged into an impossibly small space, invisibly a-smoke with misery. Around the fourth, meanwhile, a full squad of armed and uniformed Pinks had deployed themselves, shotgun and rifle muzzles levelled steady. It said something for the sick and fevered menace that boiled around Allan Pinkerton, where he stood on the train’s caboose, that these men—Chess’s favourite prey from childhood on—were one of the last things he’d noticed.

A moment later, he realized, with so little dismay it was a shock in itself: Aw, hell. They look like Ed used to. He tried to summon the old hot hatred—a hundred tales of authority abused, slight well worth killing over—but felt it slip right through his fingers, and soon found that even that failure wasn’t enough to spur him on to new fury.

God damn, he raged to himself, don’t I get to keep anything I used to love doin’?!

All the frenzied activity and panicked flight, all that forward-seeking heat and dust and motion, all the destruction left behind, and this was all it got him, faced off like he’d been in that Tampico hotel room six weeks ago, with the exact same suspects: Pinkerton, the Chinee bitch-witch, that idjit tinkerer with his gadgets. And poor Ed for collateral, along with young miss Yancey—would one of ’em go down, like Hosteen had? Both?

This was different, though; bone and blood told him so. The light itself seemed scarred, imparting a skew to everything, making the salten ground under his feet ring fragile as a canvas scrim. All of it tilted somehow, threatening to tear clean through.