A Tree of Bones (Hexslinger 3)

“. . . good, I guess . . .”

“All right, then. Stand back.”

Using one lit finger to carve with, Chess doodled what looked like one of Songbird’s Chinee sigils on the wall behind, big enough to bake pies on. “This’ll be my eye when I’m gone,” he told the barkeep, hoping the idea sounded more likely than not. “What it sees, I see; show it something I don’t like, and I’ll be back. You probably don’t want that, I’m thinkin’.”

“No sir, Mister Pargeter.”

Emerging into the noonday sun, Chess turned to unhitch his horse, and found another animal tied up next to it: a stallion, black as Ch

arlie Alarid’s hair and almost as stupidly big, already rigged out for hard travel.

“This’d be yours, I expect,” Chess said, as the kid stepped up behind him.

“Told you I was leavin’.”

“You did say something of the sort.” Chess swung up onto his own ride, popping the rope free with one hand, then shaking it to atoms with the other; he could call it back anytime he wanted, and it’d interfere with the reins. As Charlie mounted up as well, Chess touched the horse with a single spur, nudging it to turn, telling him: “Hope you don’t think travelling in the same direction means we’re together, as such.”

Charlie laughed, a music-touched sound, rhythmic as his own fretwork. “We’ll see. That thing you did in there, though — it actually work?”

“Hell, no; I ain’t got the sort of time to spend monitoring them that’s bound to hate our likes, let alone the inclination. Nice design, though, ain’t it?”

“It is.”

“Scary, too. That ought’a do somethin’, if only for a little while.”

“I somewhat think you were the scary part, Mister Pargeter. But Bud should recall the threat a good long time, if nothin’ else.”

They made good time back to that sign Chess had passed coming through, where Charlie reined in a moment, casting a side-eye back toward town — thinking on his folks, perhaps, and how he might not ever see them again. Time was, just the basic implication anyone could have kin they didn’t wish dead would’ve made Chess want to bash their stupid brains in, but not now. Another change.

Yet once again, Ed Morrow came into his mind; big Ed sweating beneath him on that first night at Splitfoot Joe’s, eyes gone wide and white as a half-broke horse’s, while Chess fisted their hands together and slid down his length with a holler, sure nothing on earth mattered as much but that too-happy place where the two of ’em would end up in just one — hump — more. ’Cause I don’t care to think on it no more, and you’re gonna get me so’s I can’t, without a shred of regard for the other party’s feelings. Like every other time he’d pulled that same trick on so many other men, none of whose faces he could even vaguely recall, let alone their names . . . all but Rook, and Ed.

Poor old Kees Hosteen, too, who’d cleft to him in the face of mocking indifference, only to die for his partiality just as surely as Chillicothe and his pals, or the Lieut, or that Pink Chess’d had his first gun off. Or all of Bewelcome township, for the grand sin of insulting Chess’s taste in bed-partners; all of Hoffstedt’s Hoard like-a-wise, excepting Yancey and Geyer, for the equal-grand sin of siding with Chess against Bewelcome’s own Sheriff Love, when that crusty gentleman came calling.

Sit there eyein’ me up like you never saw nothing prettier, Chess thought, his own gaze straying automatically back to Charlie’s own sizable form, wrapped in bad fashion thought it might be. If you knew me at all beyond my fame, you wouldn’t want to come anywhere near, for fear of being pulled down like undertow. Or then again, maybe you still would; maybe you’d just come running the faster, dick in hand. ’Cause from what I’ve seen, you somewhat like things dangerous.

“That smile for me, Mister Pargeter?” Charlie called over; Chess hissed again, and shook his head. Incorrigible, that was the word he’d heard the Rev use, way back when — when he’d still thought Rook a good man to the core, an up-stood man-mountain set adrift ’mongst killers and rogues, with his thread-worn Bible quotes and his odd ideas about . . . everything, really. Before he’d finally found out better.

Only now did it occur to Chess, though, that there was probably always at least a shred of that man left in Asher Rook, deep down — had to’ve been, seeing what things came to, in their final throes. Same shred that’d dug itself inside Chess somewheres dark and set in to breed, eventually producing the person who’d kept on shocking himself with his own capacity for self-sacrifice. For that might be credited to Rook as well, along with Ed, and Yancey. And Chess himself, too, in the end.

Even me.

“Think a lot on yourself, don’t you, Mister Alarid?” Chess asked the man in question.

“Aw, why so formal? You could always call me Charlie. And me, I could call you — ”

“Gettin’ a bit ahead of the game, ain’t you?”

“You tell me.”

“Oh, I will,” Chess said, coolly. And turned his horse toward the sun, so the glare would block the fact that he couldn’t quite stop himself from smiling, yet again.

Hell really was murky, like the Bard had claimed; that was one funny thing, amongst so many. Though the fact that it resembled Asher Rook’s earliest dreams so little was also fairly amusing, for certain values of same: a dry, sere, awful place for all its deep darkness, like the inside of an oven never quite brought to full heat, and different from Mictlan-Xibalba’s clammy climes as lava was from dirt.

Not the same, and not a dream, either. Forever, too, or so the rumours claimed. He was prepared to believe it.

In the end, heat aside, Rook’s Hell had proven less the classic Baptist endless cook-kettle he’d always heard about than that Bead-rattler Saint Theresa’s vision of a place of absence where God turned His face away, weeping on sinners’ betrayal, and the sinners suffered thereby, as much as for any other reason. But being him, God’s face — one he’d never seen, any more than he’d heard His voice, no matter how much of His Word he’d back-spouted to his own venal ends — wasn’t the one which he found himself fixed on most.

All places bordered each other, down here. He felt them pluck at the edges of this private Inferno, begging pride of place. The Ball-Court, where Ixchel and her smoky brother lay coiled ’round each other, sunk back into torpor, plus a thousand thousand other places sown all ’round the globe, equally terror-wonderful. Where Anansi and Suu Pwa the Dust Devil, Crow and Rabbit and Sedna, Tiamat and Marduk, the Old Sow Who Eats her Farrow had devolved into an equally primal morass, along with pagan martyrs and Christian saints alike — Hypatia and Catherine, both of Alexandria; witches and possessees, witch-hunters and exorcists, workers dark or light, all trading in the same mythic substance. All of whom had begun as human, once upon a time; most of whom had been sacrificed to some idea of the divine and became divine in turn, at least temporarily. All of them, quite probably, hexes.