A Tree of Bones (Hexslinger 3)

Geyer smiled, slightly. “That’s what I told him.”

“Yes, yes,” Thiel replied, a touch tetchily, “and on more than one occasion, which is why I now owe you at least five dollars.”

“Only five?”

“Very well, then. Make it ten.”

They seemed quite the team, Morrow thought — easy in their back-and-forth, the way he and Chess had once been, at least during those initial days after Tampico, and he, Chess and Yancey still could be, as proven. Platonic camaraderie infused with just a hint of former intimacies on his part, a certain basic overlap of powers on hers.

Morrow cast his mind back, recalling what it’d been like to watch Chess pull this farm up whole and entire out of the Painted Desert’s hide, like he was unwrapping a buried present, while Yancey hung over his shoulder from behind, whispering directions in his ear: Husbanding it solely from dirt and imagination, sticking floor to frame to walls to roof, while the soil all ’round gave up its salt and let loose with a stream of fresh water, allowing all manner of small green things to commence to grow. Most wonderfully of all, Chess hadn’t appeared to resent her interference — had seemed to relish it, actually. As though he was so damn sick of thinking for himself, just for the nonce, he genuinely craved the idea of taking orders.

Knowing himself superfluous, Morrow had made sure to just stand back with his arms crossed, thinking that as the “normal” person in this equation, he basically had shit-all nothing to bring to the table. And expecting to hear Chess thinking back: Well, that ain’t exactly true . . .

But no — Chess was concentrated still on the house, tongue caught between his teeth, and Morrow felt a bit sad that maybe there was no spark left between ’em anymore; sad, followed by conflicted. What if Yancey heard, and got jealous? Jealous of what, though?

Really not all that mu

ch, ever, mutually satisfying fits of revelry aside — not when compared with Chess and the Rev’s operatically poisonous entanglement, its abyssal deeps and hypoxic heights, the bitter fruits sown and reaped. Which left a sting of its own, an unexpected wound, a lack that Morrow had never expected.

This display of creative power came hard on the heels of five days of complete sloth, an addled and sullen silence, during which Morrow and Yancey did little but keep close yet quiet, allowing Chess to suffer through his version of mourning undisturbed, if not alone. He sat with boots off and cross-legged, unwarily shirtless, squinting down where part of the Crack had lain while the sun beat him red — and though his tears had long since dried, a constant storm of dust rose and fell like civilizations in the hollow his stare carved before him: Restless, virulent, boiling.

Sometimes Morrow thought he could glimpse visions in that pit, peering at it over Chess’s freckled shoulder, or almost so. The black corpse-whip of Lady Ixchel’s hair, eddying over exposed bone; the gargantuan creep of Grandma’s spider; Hex City scarring the sky, a six-walled stone tumour. The too-calm face of Reverend Rook caught in mid-air, still falling.

So it went, until the morning Morrow woke to find Chess standing by his bed-roll with arms crossed, barefoot yet, but his fair flesh no longer quite as dangerously flushed.

“Thanks,” was all he could apparently think to say, finally.

Morrow rubbed sleep from his eyes. “No problem,” he offered. “Uh . . . care for a spot of coffee?”

“If all you got on offer’s the same shit I smelled cookin’ this last week, then no.”

A moment later, Yancey came yawning out of the tent they’d raised and stopped short, one eyebrow kiting, to register Chess up and about once more, none the worse for wear.

“Well,” she said, “I’ll go hunt us up some meat.”

“I’d help, you wanted,” Chess offered — and wasn’t that a surprise? Almost as much as the way he’d put it, quick and plain-spoke, without any sort of sting to the tail. “Ain’t had to eat for some long time, but . . .”

He spread his hands, a net of sparks flickering briefly from fingertip to fingertip, laced and trailing, at which Yancey just nodded, grown sadly used to the everyday miraculous.

“Might be you could cast a charm, bring the lizards a bit faster? Much obliged, if so.”

“All right.”

An hour after, arrayed ’round the fire Morrow had laid in their absence, they’d eaten stew in silence before Chess finally wiped his mouth on one cuff and said: “Well, seems those Hex City females want me on that council of theirs — sure ain’t ceased to bother me with layin’ out offer on offer for any sort of position might be to my liking, anyhow, this whole time.”

“I didn’t — ” Morrow started to reply, then stopped, as Chess tapped one temple: Of course, right. In there.

“That’d be mainly Yiska, I’d think,” Yancey observed. “Not Songbird, even now.”

Chess shook his head, almost smiling. “You’re right enough on that one.” His lip twisted further, flattening into something more grim. “Don’t matter much either way, though — I ain’t ’bout to lock myself up in some flying castle and run myself ragged strivin’ for the betterment of hex-kind, just ’cause them and me share some sort of kinship; never been sentimental that way, or any. Hell, if blood meant anything at all t’me, I’d be far more like to run off New York way and find that gal Oona said killed my Pa, if only to stand her a drink and shake her damn hand.”

“But you ain’t gonna do that either, I take it,” Morrow concluded. “So — ”

“What are you going to do, exactly?” Yancey inquired, with a touch of that old coolly practical hotelier’s savvy Morrow remembered from their first encounter with her, back in the Horde.

“Build y’all a house, I thought, for starters, and carve out a patch of good land ’round here too, for you ’n’ Ed to play your games on. As a small token of my appreciation.”

“Again, much obliged. Then what?”