Nothing ’gainst it in Holy Writ that I can cite to the contrary, either — not specifically.
Grandma said, “We must close this fissure, that much is clear. But how, even with the red boy’s help?”
Songbird cleared her throat. “In Ch’in,” she offered, “our doctors say that sometimes a wound must be unpicked, in order to heal cleanly.”
Didn’t mean much to Sophy, on the face of it — or the others, outside of those two. But Grandma nodded, slowly. “I see your meaning — it gives me an idea, though we will have to wait until the red boy comes back up to try it, for it will require all our strength. And so . . .”
Songbird nodded. “So.”
She looked to Yancey, then. As, one by one, so did the rest of them.
Yes, Sophy realized. Because — just like her part in the Oath, guiding Gabe through me, this is something only she, of all of us, can do.
Yancey sighed, and nodded too. “Down again, then,” she said, to herself. “Always down.”
They hadn’t bothered to re-light the conjure-fire, since the light pouring from Songbird and Gabe — along with the harsher white radiance of Grandma’s unlocked power — cast all the luminance they could possibly need. Beyond it, forewarned, Yiska’s warriors stood in a further circle, with spears, knives and bows at the ready. Yancey couldn’t say she minded.
She sat cross-legged at the circle’s centre with an ally at every compass-point, feeling their varying degrees of power weave around her like a bridled cyclone, pulling the lips of the Crack farther apart than they’d ever before reached. A feeling of thinness, insubstantiality, coiled in Yancey’s gut; she had to breathe slow and even to steady herself, eyes tightly closed. On either side, the hexes blazed pyre-bright in her awareness, while Yiska and Sophy were blank spots, deep-rooted as rail spikes — different by faith, yet identically solid in their convictions. Yancey fixed each location in her mind, sensing their pull, the anchoring she counted on to call her home, if she happened to slip too deep.
Then, without ritual or hesitation — she was long past the need for either — she whooshed out her breath like a diver, and let go of the world.
That the plunge always felt “downward” was probably mere sophistry, since she’d never believed in the Underworld actually being under everything. But her dream-self, which thought in such terms, always held more power than her waking one, especially here.
Too quickly to reckon, Yancey’s sense of the others shot upward and away, receding with blinding speed; a thundering wind and a sickening weightlessness engulfed her, as though she’d flung herself off some impossibly high cliff. The first time, hurtling abyss-ward, she’d screamed her throat raw. Now she only clenched her teeth and held focus, falling.
Within moments (or hours), she felt the track she’d worn on previous descents closing ’round her, a tunnel burrowing between worlds. The fall became a slide, at first smooth, then painfully bumpy, ’til her feet touched down on something like rock: black, ice-streaked, biting with cold. Yancey cupped her arms ’round herself, and shivered. This was farther down than she had ever gone, and she was dismayed to realize that — like a hawk stooping on prey, and missing — she had lost the bird’s-eye sense of where Chess and Oona were, in the sprawling tapestry of deadlands. She’d come too close to the map, and could no longer read it.
The bleak, colourless terrain of the half-world spread out below her in all directions, falling away from the mountain peak on which she stood; above, the conduit connecting her to her body stretched upward, taut and humming. Reflexively, she touched Chess’s guns, or their memory, to confirm they still hung at her belt. Thus reassured, she sprang downward from ledge to spire to boulder, each step only firm beneath her feet because she willed it so. In minutes, she stood on the plain, casting about.
Nothing.
All the curse words she’d ever learned from Chess and Ed came spilling out, under her breath. Neither time nor geography stayed steady here, once you got out beyond where things echoed the living world, and while she’d known that, she’d still unthinkingly assumed her talents would somehow account for it — clearly a mistake. The very idea that, after everything they’d sacrificed and accomplished, she would find herself stymied by a simple inability to find that contentious creature at the vital moment . . .
Typical, Goddamnit. Typical Chess.
Turning in a slow circle until the mountains were once again at her back, she squinted hard, and still found nothing. Should she wait, or walk? Waiting made more sense by the odds — if Chess made it to this place at all, he would eventually start to climb — but she could barely stand the thought of coming so far to do nothing but stand still.
Yet however she stretched out her time, it was limited. Granted, she never tired down here, but her flesh still bore the weariness, up above; if she pushed herself too far, she would get no warning before her body’s collapse wrenched her back into a day-long blackout. And it might seem to take only minutes or days before Chess and Oona found their way here. That was, of course, even assuming they escaped the legions pursuing them, those maddened mobs of revenants she’d heard Chess call his Dead Posse. . . .
Yancey smiled, grimly. No, when it came down to sheer defiance, she somehow couldn’t believe Chess Pargeter would ever let himself be beaten. Again, she touched the guns that had once been his, palms atop their stocks; so strange, to take comfort from such death-dealing implements. Yet no stranger than the man himself.
With no heartbeat in her ears or breath to plume in the air, it took her some moments to realize that the darkness some ways out was moving — a man-shaped shadow, pacing steadily toward her. In an instant, she had both guns out and cocked, with a speed Chess might have applauded. Her fear she pushed to one side, wasting no more thought on it. These guns were real only because her mind made them real, made them work — would make them work. No matter what, or who, this foe proved to be, either; it was of the dead, and it was given to her to command the dead.
Then enough of the alien starlight outlined it to make the figure’s face visible. And Yancey straightened, grip slackening, ’til the guns almost fell unheeded from her hands.
“Uther,” she whispered — tried to whisper, anyhow, as breathlessness made the name a mere mouthing. But the man who’d been her husband, if only for less than a day, clearly didn’t need to hear his name to recognize it. He smiled, and opened his arms.
And she flung herself into them, straightaway, headlong. Childish as little Gabriel Love.
A bare parody of a true embrace, yet she clung fast anyhow, not wanting to face the truth of it yet, while every moment drove it deeper. Uther had held her before, even kissed her, though they had gone no further; she knew his smell, all the minor irregularities of a living man — scratch of his beard, sweat and stink, slight off-balance pressure of his left arm from an old knife-wound, ill-treated. Here with her now, he was solid and warm, yet she felt no pulse under her cheek. His chest did not move.
And as she slowly withdrew and looked up at him, even his face gave it away — the nascent crow’s-feet at his eyes, the tan of t
he New Mexico sun, the scattered faint pockmarks of a childhood bout with chickenpox . . . gone. He had been remade but not reborn, smoothed into a perfection found only in death.
“Oh, God,” she heard herself say, without meaning to. “I did love you, Uther. . . . I always will! But — ”
Uther’s reaction, however, was the last thing she’d expected; he threw his head back and laughed, then looked back down at her, still chuckling. “Oh, sweetheart, do you really think I need proof of your heart now, where we both are?” With a shrewdly raised eyebrow: “Or that it troubles me someone else could maybe make you happy . . . happier than I might’ve, even?”