A Rope of Thorns (Hexslinger 2)

My sister spoke truthfully. You are at the very end of your cycle—a sacrifice once more, bringing life out of the dead land but saving none for yourself. Your wound is one you cannot hope to heal.

Noticed that, yeah, thanks.

Yet I can save you, still. If you accept my help.

Chess almost tried to laugh, but thought better on it. Oh, sure. ’Cause trustin’ some fucker offers you your life at the Reaper’s doorstep always works out so well.

Do you want to die, pelirrojo?

And now the laugh did bloom, painful-pleasurable as he’d expected—a firework bubble of spite crowding the rest out, if only for a mere half-second before it popped, spraying his insides with paraffin.

Ask you that myself, he barely managed, ’f I only could.

I know you would, little brother. Ah, how I do like you for it!

So you’ve said, Chess said—all his anger suddenly gone flat again, exhausted by every last part of this yammer. Too tired even to turn away, assuming his abused body would’ve allowed it.

The Enemy looked down on him, hole-eyes barely narrowed in a dust-black face—a death’s head reversed, if you could say that of someone who’d never died, or been born at all.

Were this world once more the way she wishes, it told Chess, with a nod in still-hidden and time-locked Ixchel’s direction, no one like you would be allowed anywhere near my ixiptla. They gave me princes—youths raised to love me since birth, cultured, educated. Kings-to-be who yearned to die in my place, to have everything I gave them stripped away in an instant of awful ecstasy. To be shucked like corn, a red pain-flower, and rolled down the temple steps afterwards, one more corpse on a pile.

They were idjits, then. Got what they deserved.

Another nod. “Heretic!” they would have cried, and fought each other to the death to kill you for saying so. But I . . . find I somewhat agree.

Chess felt the Enemy wrap him close, lift him up, effortless. Those vast no-eyes peering further into him, unblinking, ’til their empty expanse was all he had left to see.

Now answer me, truly, before the end. Do you want what I offer?

. . . depends . . .

On what, little brother?

Though he didn’t in any way need to, Chess made himself take a long, ragged breath. Not enough blood left in him to fill his mouth completely, but he felt it slick his dry tongue, leak to paint his lips ’til they matched his beard.

And replied, out loud, his throat grating each word like it was rock-pile dust, “. . . can yuh gih me . . . my ’venge?”

On who?

With his very last bit of vim, Chess rolled his eyes ’til they all but crossed, snarling (inside his head): Your bitch “sister,” numbskull, and that snake she calls husband. Who the hell’d you think I meant? Wasn’t but halfway through the first sentence, though, ’fore he heard the Enemy chuckling again, as though he’d just made the second-best joke in all creation—which made him long to paste it one, and it laugh all the harder.

That don’t bode well, he knew, mist deepening ’round him. Finding he could barely remember anymore what those words meant each on their own, let alone when run together.

so do it then, Jesus, do it do it, while I’m still

the end, this is it, no more

going, going

go

Oh, yes, something said, at last, as he plunged downward, fingers straining helpless toward an infinitely retreating bottom he feared almost worse than death itself to reach. It would be my pleasure.

Another pulse hit, bright blue this time: turquoise, robin’s egg, faience glass, bell-sounding water crashing on a white cliff’s brake. Trip-hammer hard. Ball-lightning bright.

The hairs on Chess’s body seemed to crisp at its touch, skin flushing azure from head to toe; his eyes flooded with a black so deep everywhere he looked was midnight, while the creatures gathered ’round him lit up from within, instantly rendered messy clots of flashing bones and circulatory systems redone in yellow, green, bright pulsing red, faces shrunk to featureless blanks, indistinguishable absences. Each one of them perfectly substitutable for every other one, with no distinction made except as to their relative strength or weakness, the ease or difficulty with which they might be singled out, struck down, torn apart.

Brother, wake. Brother, I call you forth.