A Rope of Thorns (Hexslinger 2)

“I never heard tell of Weed grown up that fast,” a fresh voice—Mister Mergenthal, Hoffstedt’s Hoard’s only butcher—piped up, nearer to the room’s back end, where Yancey had made sure the half-open door blocked Pa from any sudden view of her eavesdropping. “So . . . what’d y’all do?”

Frewer shrugged, hapless. “Might’ve come about from them hexes havin’ a shoot-out in the middle of Main Street, I s’pose, the day before—”

“Who and who?”

“One was Doc Glossing, the dentist, like I already said—not that most’ve us knew he was hexacious before that, at least not for sure. And the other was that new-turned ’slinger, Reverend Rook’s boy—”

Sheriff Haish scowled, and let fly into the spittoon. “Chess damn Pargeter shot up your town, and you didn’t think anything would come of it?”

“Well, he left, right after. So . . . no, we didn’t. Not like that, anyways.”

Pa frowned too, but refrained from expectoration. “Hold up, though. Pargeter’s a pistoleer only, I’d always heard.”

“Don’t know why the Doc would’a tried to take a pull on ’im in the first place, he wasn’t good for the effort. And believe me . . .” Frewer shook his head again, as though to clear it. “Seemed like Pargeter gave just as good as he got, in that direction.”

Haish blew out a breath. “Well, that ain’t good news. Damn little redheaded . . . creature was touched enough, back when he was only humanish. And how’d two mages get cleft together in the first place anyhow, even with one of ’em not yet at full effect? ‘Don’t meddle,’ my ass.”

The other conclavists looked each-to-each, equally unhappy. “Maybe it really is catchin’,” Mergenthal suggested.

“Highly unlikely, I’d think,” Pa began, in reply, colliding headlong with Haish’s: “Goddamn, man, shut your hole! Think we most’ve us all know a happy load’a horseshit, when we hear it. . . .”

“As it turns out—yes.”

Marshal Uther Kloves normally spoke so deadpan that most folks tended to suspect him of jesting, whatever he said. It was one of the things most endeared him to Yancey, but it did make for difficulty in terms of figuring out exactly where he was headed, in public addresses.

“I’ve had telegrams from all the other Territories,” he explained. “Utah, Colorado—far north as Wyoming, even west of the Colorado River. Always it’s the same: once the Weed gets a foothold, there’s only one thing makes it die.”

“Fire?”

“Blood.”

“Any blood?” Mergenthal said, his interest suddenly piqued—he’d his share of back-stores, after all, Yancey knew. And if perhaps there was money to be made . . .

Yancey could imagine Kloves giving that near-imperceptible little shake of his head. “Human. Fresh-spilled.”

A beat of silence, eventually broken by Pa, bewildered: “But . . . that don’t make any sense.”

“Hexation’s at the bottom of all this, Lionel,” said Kloves. “Don’t go holdin’ your breath, waitin’ for things to add up square.”

Someone else cleared their throat. “Well, they do say the Weed doesn’t usually grow up so fast as Mister Frewer tells of.” Incongruously light and pleasant, this voice, though Yancey thought she recognized it as belonging to the mysterious Mister Grey, a tall, youngish fellow just starting on a serious walrus moustache, who’d rode into Hoffstedt’s Hoard only a few days ago. “But that may indeed be overspillage from this hex-battle ’twixt Pargeter and—Glossing, was it? The blood part, however, that’s true. I’ve seen it. Bleed a cupped double-handful from, say, five or six folks, spill it over the Weed and it dries up to powder inside of three days.” He paused. “Even heard a few claim their soil was the richer for it, after.”

“That so?” Frewer’s mouth twisted, teacup slipping to thump the thick carpet, thankfully unbroken. “So all’s we have to do is offer up abomination, like the damn Philistines and Pharisees, and hey presto? Good Christ above, let that rumour fly free and folk’ll be pulling bad neighbours in off the streets, tellin’ ’emselves it’s better to cut one to save ten! You ever seen Weed-infected livestock, Mister?”

Yancey hadn’t—but recalled all too well accounts she’d read, sprinkled over every news-sheet the Cold Mountain Hotel received. A cattle drive coming up through Bisbee had stopped in the wrong place for the night; the cowboys had woken to find their thousand head staggering ’round like they had worms—kicking, falling, dying. And then, once the renderers arrived to do due diligence, they’d found turkey vultures scattered dead every which way, wings and beaks entangled with fibres . . . after which the first tentative cuts had loosed a flood of guts stuffed with Weed, whose blossoms raised themselves up like snails’ stalk-eyes to the sun, seeming to peer ’round for fresher prey.

Excise such places by fire, to the ground, then salt them over as Biblically prescribed, that was the common-held wisdom. Or wait for the government men to do much the same, under strict legality—but people seldom did. Most, like Mouth-of-Praise’s former citizenry, this ragged band of new-made refugees now shivering in Pa’s first-floor saloon-cum-parlour arrangement, simply fled.

“We had to burn near everything, in the end,” Mister Frewer said, at last. “’Fore it seeded. And since blood won’t bring that back, I don’t hold it’d do the rest of us any manner of good, to know we might’ve saved ourselves the trouble.”

A long tick of Pa’s desk clock passed, before Sheriff Haish spoke again. “Mister Frewer, just how many of your fellow townsfolk came with you, after the fire?”

“All of ’em, near as I figure. A hundred and twenty, thirty—fifty? We didn’t take no census.”

Kloves nodded. “Hard to fault you. All the same, Mister Frewer, we are going to have to talk this over somewhat. So, your kind permission . . .”

“Yeah—yes. ’Course.” Though stumble-footed, Frewer still made the door fast enough that Yancey barely had time to duck into the linen closet, reduced to watching him stagger back down to where the rest of his delegation waited, through the half-cracked door. Then, soon as he’d vanished, she counted herself safe to take up station outside Pa’s doorway once more.

“. . . can’t just let ’em in!” Hugo Hoffstedt, the tobacconist, was saying; a distant cousin of the town’s founding family, he was a coward and a snob, but wealthy. “Am I the only man here not a fool?”