A Rope of Thorns (Hexslinger 2)

Jaguar cactus fruit, jade earthquake ball, repository of thought and blood alike. Red cornerstone of all houses

, centrepiece of all wheels, turning. The key to the Machine.

Chess swallowed, throat choke-full of vile juices. “I cut out somebody else’s heart and that puts Bewelcome to rights—that the idea?” A beat. “Like who?”

Now it was Ixchel’s turn to shrug. It hardly matters. All lives are forfeit, in the end.

Just as all lives are due to us, always, the Enemy suggested, idly. Or so we were always told—eh, sister?

I never saw you rush to repudiate those strictures, she replied. Not when your ixiptla mounted the steps at Tenochtitlan alive, playing his flute, to the adoration of all . . . and not when he came back down riding the high priest’s body, a mere skin suit with hands flapping loose at the wrists, his face a mask for glory.

The reality of it swelled up blunt behind Chess’s brows as that tumour’d killed one of Oona’s bunk-mates, back in San Fran—pushed her left peeper out ’til it near left the socket and she died raving, gaze permanently divided, each eye turned to a completely different pole. A thousand years of men just like him, cut down in their prime to keep these two greased and happy. Children girt with gold and chucked down wells to drown in the dark; gals kept virgin ’til the knife plunged in, a black glass blade their only lover. Once upon a time, their suffering would’ve made him chuckle, like the woes of everyone he’d killed in battle and the myriad more woes each death had sown in turn—weeping wives, desolate kin, mothers and fathers he’d never known, and spat on the very idea of.

But now he saw it straight on, for the dreadful tree it was: a tree of bones hung with flesh and watered on blood, growing up out of Mictlan-Xibalba’s sewer to breach this world’s skin and pull it wide, releasing every sort of horror.

This world’s a shit-pit, he remembered telling Rook, too matter-of-fact to be sorry over it. Just dogs fucking and killing, where the strong eat the weak and the weak get eaten. And for all that Bible of yours’s good for hexation-fuel, you know your own damn self how that “good God” you preached on’s nothin’ but a happy horse-crap lie.

Choose one to die, so Bewelcome could live. But which?

Songbird, her witch-wings clipped, lying in old Doc Asbury’s arms. Asbury, trembling like the rabbit-heart he’d always been, ’neath his hoity calculations. Pinkerton, or whatever monstrosity a dose of Songbird’s stolen magic had made of him. The slave-hexes who’d pulled his train, already run halfway to Hex City, if those things Chess’d called out of the canyon walls hadn’t done for ’em first; same for most’ve the Pinks, he reckoned, with what few still lurked amongst the rocks hardly worth his time.

Or Yancey, driven by revenge and sentiment alike, like he’d always been. The one thing in skirts he couldn’t call a bitch or a whore with a clear conscience, whatever that was.

Or Ed.

Turning a cold eye on Rook, and thinking: ’Cause that’s who you meant to point me toward, right, Ash? The tool that turned in your hands, lived long enough to cleave to someone else right in front of me, so you think jealousy’ll make me yearn to settle his hash. Which I might, if him and her weren’t the only living souls who ever helped me for no gain at all on their part, only loss and heartbreak. Who’ve stuck with me when no one else would . . . and why?

Goddamned if I know. Which must mean, in the end . . . it doesn’t much matter.

So simple, from one breath to the next: he saw things as they were at last, unimpeded by lust or hate, like everything else had dropped away—everything. Even himself.

Especially himself.

Chess looked at Rook, whom he’d once loved and did still, to his eternal foolishness; the two outrageous figures flanking him, one human-sized, the other anything but—remnants of one bloody age, turned harbingers of another. And as he did, it came to him how they all of ’em deserved to be defied, their grand plans laid waste to. Hell, they needed to be took down and knocked out loaded, laid so low they’d never get back up again.

Should be possible, too. ’Cause if their power and Love’s power and his own power really were just different brands of the same . . .well, Chess probably might not be able to kill them, any more than he’d been able to kill the Sheriff, no matter how diligently he’d tried.

But this much I do know: I can for damn sure kill myself.

“Oh, fuck all y’all,” he told Rook, sighing. “Think I’m gonna save myself at someone else’s expense, just ’cause you tell me it’s the only way? Like you know me so damn well? If you still think that, after all you’ve done . . . all both’ve us have done . . . then maybe we never really knew each other at all.”

Rook took what Chess remembered as a heartbeat to compose himself. “C’mon, darlin’ . . .” he began.

“No, you come on. Think I can’t surprise you? Watch this.”

He missed Hosteen’s knife, almost much as he missed the old Hollander himself. It’d’ve been so easy, that way: blade’s metal would only feel cold for a moment while crossing his throat, edge so sharp the sting would be rendered something faint, faraway, forgettable. And then the liquid heat would explode out and down as Chess closed his eyes in relief, savouring the triumph.

Still, it was like his hands knew what to do. Slip down, slide in, reach far as you can go . . . haul hard enough to prise the whole breastbone up like a lid, with a horrid, gelatinous crack, to let what little was left inside come spilling out.

He saw Ixchel and the Enemy both close their eyes at the same time—mouths hung open, tongues teeth-caught—while his precious blood went up like February firecrackers wrapped ’round with sweaty dynamite. Saw Rook go down on one knee with both arms out, mouth forming a mammoth No, God, Chess, NO!, and wanted to laugh out loud. But his mouth was blood-stoppered; his teeth ground together, frenzy-caught, gnawing into his own tongue like they’d been designed to tear it out by the roots.

All I wanted was my heart back again, he couldn’t stop himself from thinking. That’s all, Christ shit on it.

Such a weak-sounding whine of a final idea, given who it came from.

We all want something, grandson, that other voice said, without a shred of comfort. Now sleep.

So Chess Pargeter closed his eyes at last, feeling the pulse of a spell too vast to be undone bear him away, bodily, in every direction at once.