Chapter Eighteen
So the little warrior can care for someone other than you, my husband. Truly there is no end to wonders. . . .
Yancey felt the time-slip spell without suspecting what it was, planet jerking sideways under her like a crashed train and the shadows snapping around. It was enough to jolt her free of her daze, blood- and soul-loss admixed; she tried to push herself up, but couldn’t—Ed’s weight too much to move, weak as she was. But she could twist herself sideways, just enough to bring the field of battle into vision.
And saw Chess dropping to his knees, chest one tremendous wound, as more blood spilled down out of him onto Bewelcome’s salted earth than it seemed one human being should be able to hold. While his hands lifted high, red-shining, fingers streaming fresh tissue. . . .
Oh sweet Christ he didn’t he didn’t he DID!
“Oh, shit, Chess!” Ed bucked awake as well, fought to gain his feet and failed with no more strength left in him than her, though it didn’t stop him trying. “Chess, what the fuck—”
Beyond, Sheriff Love whirled and stopped dead, his pole-axed look near-comical. He had only a moment to stare before the ground whiplashed again under all of them, a crack of force and heat exploding outwards; it knocked Love yards backward through the air, coming down so hard his salt-armour shattered, shelling itself in chunks. Yancey and Ed themselves were tossed like toddlers on a blanket, slamming heavily onto the ground some feet apart, shocked stupid. Yancey blinked up, black spots bursting in her tunnelling vision, wondering why the earth under her back felt so strangely . . . soft.
Then the sky turned green.
Morrow saw Chess’s silhouette etched sharp against the light-cataract pouring through him, before the radiance blazed up too brig
ht to bear; shading his eyes with one arm, he braced the other on the ground, and felt it change: salt cracking, resolving itself to dust, and further. Until it became a moist brown soil, worm-full and slick, so rich it tingled.
Morrow jerked his hand back and saw fresh new grass boiling upwards, swallowing his palm print whole.
The green light was a warm wind stroking every inch of him, even through his clothes. Morrow yelled wordlessly as a spurt of burning pain corkscrewed through his arm, then turned to euphoric heat; viridian fire went crawling through the still-open sacrificial gash, sealing it over with pink new skin. The weakness washed away. Twisting, he saw Yancey sit up in another patch of spring-fresh foliage, goggling, as her own wounds’ slate was wiped similarly clean.
Following the blast’s path, grass bled outwards, ripping up through the salt crust and devouring it. The wave swept over Asbury and Songbird, leaving the China-girl’s leg suddenly straight and strong, the Professor’s cheeks blood-clean. Pinkerton, his hurts far less mundane, glowed fiercely alight a moment, as if lightning-struck, before the power sank inside; his often-altered form resolved once again to the mere man Ed remembered from that fateful train ride, two Novembers ago.
As for Love, meanwhile: white flakes and shards cracked off the Sheriff, crashing down, a snowstorm of grey and white rubble that uncovered flesh, skin, hair, patch by painstaking patch. The uneven pigtails Morrow dimly remembered from a pre-mortem sketch had given way to full, flowing locks: Love’s face, clean-shaven in its time-stopped revenancy, now bore a curly beard so matted it made Morrow’s own face itch to look at, while what semblance of clothes his undead salt-flesh presented had dissolved headlong, becoming mere rags and tatters. Before Morrow realized it, the transition was complete. Mesach Love stood reborn, gangly as a new colt—barefoot, bare chest heaving—amidst the wreckage, staring at his own long-fingered hands like he had no earthly idea what they could be.
And still Chess burned on, a verdant holocaust, pouring so much life into that ruined town it repaired every ravage it spilled over. Of the face-fallen statues choking Bewelcome’s town square, some cracked apart into shapeless piles, then flared up green, recapturing their original forms. Before Morrow’s stunned eyes, the salt literally burst off them and people emerged, staggering forth. Like Love, their clothes were frayed as if they had worn them all that time, hair and beards ridiculously overgrown, yet skin and eyes baby-clear. Cries of shock, wonder, joy began to rise. The eroded shapes of buildings sketched themselves anew in chartreuse lines, resuming their substance: beams and bricks, mortar-laid stone. Even those dwellings that’d been no more than canvas tents reared up, raised once more.
And all of it green-tinted in Chess’s backwash, but real, its own natural shades restored. Not a hint of salt’s awful greyish-white was to be found, anywhere.
The regenerative wave-pulse slowed, now, reaching the town’s borders, well outstripping the original zone of devastation. As it did, the green light faded, thinning, a reservoir nearing empty. Morrow turned back, squinting, trying to distinguish Chess’s form—only to catch sight of him just as he folded backward, collapsing bonelessly to the grass.
“Chess,” he whispered, lurching forwards. Strangers blocked his way, shouting questions; he shoved them aside. Some struck back in bewilderment and anger, and suddenly Morrow found himself seized by a dozen hands at once. He thrashed, grunting, too desperate for anger . . . until a woman’s voice rose above the crowd’s babble, so full of joy and anguish and disbelief it shamed everyone still.
“Mesach!”
“. . . Sophy?”
Yancey watched Sheriff Love push his way through, so tatterdemalion a figure she could barely connect him with his previous terrible aspect. Then his eyes lit on the one who’d screamed his name—a well-formed blonde with a dark freckle marking her wide brow, just off-set of centre, clutching a wailing, shawl-wrapped baby—and his face seemed to melt with joy.
“Sophy! Oh, my Lord Jesus, thanks and all praise be to Him and His Name—”
He ran to them, tails flapping, and seized them in an embrace so tight it seemed he meant to swallow them whole. They clung to each other, shuddering as they wept.
So young, Yancey thought, blinking away her own tears. I never saw how young he was. So young, so happy.
Like Uther was. Like I was too.
Still sobbing, Love’s woman pushed him back a bit, staring up into his face. “Mesach, how? How did all this, this . . .” She gestured vaguely round. “. . . come to be?”
Love hesitated, but was finally forced to admit, in all fairness: “Rook’s boy—Pargeter.” And turned away, to fix his gaze where Chess had fallen.
When Sophy Love saw what he was looking at, she actually screamed a little. Though the blood-sheet’s bulk had boiled away, fresh spurts still gouted, if ever more slowly and weakly, from the uneven V-shaped gash that traced Chess’s breastbone and ribs—one unhealing wound in this whole town. A mere man would have been long-dead already; in truth, Yancey could barely believe that even Chess could still be alive, let alone still able to rasp:
“Fuck. Fuh, fuh, fuh . . .”
Trailing off in another liquid burst of coughing, Chess tilted his head, eyes shifting to seize on Love’s approach. With Sophy at his side and the other Bewelcomers gathering adjacent, Love shook his head, slowly.