A Rope of Thorns (Hexslinger 2)

Morrow looked down at the dirt once more, then clambered to his feet a bit unsteadily, and paused to dust his knees, before replying: “This vengeance, then—would it apply to Missus Kloves, as Missus Love surely still desires, or be exercised for her, along with everything else?”

To his credit, Pinkerton didn’t lie—not right then, at least.

“Uncertain, as yet. So . . . are ye amenable?”

“. . . I am,” Morrow said, finally. And reached, shoulders squared, to willingly shake the best-known devil in the current angry mob’s affably outstretched hand.

Epilogue

Somewhere else, entirely:

Chess came to by slow degrees, marrow-cold, with something unfamiliarly hard—and wet, and rough, and dirty—incising his cheek. Opened his eyes on darkness and squinted just the same, like he expected that to be any help.

Hollow echoes all ’round him, a great sigh and clatter, congregative. The clop of hooves and grate of wheels over—cobblestones, was that it? Like he’d heard tell they had in New York, a layer of pavers set ’neath the usual street muck and sluiced clean every half-year, shallow enough to be dug up and thrown in a pinch?—plus a distant, mammoth thrum and clank of engines, furnaces burning black, throwing dirt up into the skies.

And now, eking through that stinking yellow fog he’d thought was just his eyes, a whole city street arrived: buildings dilapidated and promiscuously overhung, jammed hugger-mugger as a junk-fiend’s teeth. Half-glazed cataract windows staring down, where they hadn’t been shattered wholesale; stagnant gutters and hinge-fallen doors; a sketchy crush of humanity loitering or roaming, wreathed in grime, ignoring Chess in the grip of their squalor. Raggedy skeleton children ran free as roaches, relieving themselves indiscriminately.

I know this place, Chess realized, a slow hollow birthing itself in his gullet’s lowermost pit. For God alone knew he’d heard it described, a thousand times over—the worst of all possible bedtime stories, told by one who’d been born there, only to steal and screw herself passage to what she’d dreamed was a far more exotic continent.

But this couldn’t be that place, surely—not after the Enemy’d stuffed him into some infernal belly-hole, prisoning him inside whatever tiny outpost of the Sunken Ball-Court that betraying sumbitch of a deity carried under those swinging slatted ribs where his heart should be, from which to pluck and don the faces of the dead.

All of ’em are mine, no matter ’oo. And all of ’em find their way down ’ere to me, eventually.

Chess’s hands slapped leather, automatically; no guns, of course. Not even holsters.

“Hell, then, one way or t’other,” he said out loud, resisting the urge to shiver. “Must be.”

“The ’Oly Land, more like,” somebody corrected him, from perilously nearby. “Or Seven Dials, they calls it, up-town. But close enough.”

A woman stood on the corner, angled toward him with a sort of hunger, as though she’d been following his trail far longer than either of them could calculate. Her hair was a sodden red tangle, grim smile in a fox-sharp face, skin pallid even in darkness, an uneven thumb-print smear—and the voice, Christ Jesus crucified. That bloody, bleedin’ voice.

“Don’t you know me, then?” she asked. “For I do know you, believe me, no matter ’ow long it’s been. I’d know you anywheres.”

As she spoke, all the anger flowed out of Chess at once, blood from a cut throat; the hollow at his core had swelled so large now he felt empty, a mere shed skin. Unable to stop himself from replying, though he well knew the error of it.

“Yeah, I know you, all right . . . Ma.”

He said it tonelessly enough, bowing his head down, almost like he meant to pray. And watched “English” Oona Pargeter’s nasty grin widen steadily in return—almost comically so, albeit without a touch of genuine humour—’til she went the whole hog, and dropped him a mocking little curtsey.

“Oh, that’s what you fink, sonny,” she replied.