A Tree of Bones (Hexslinger 3)

“Not as I can ken.”

“And I’m s’posed to just take your word for it, am I?”

“’Ow many other choices you got?”

She had a point, there. But hell if it didn’t scrape Chess’s craw to have to rely on her sense of something so completely invisible, ’specially when she didn’t appear to be doing anything with it.

“Step aside,” he told her, shortly. And moved close enough to the brick to think he could taste his own no-breath, reminding him how long it’d been since he’d even pretended to eat.

“Punch our way through, maybe,” he said, more to himself than anything else. “Or — blow it down? The two of us together, should be easy.”

“Fink so, wouldn’t you?”

Chess swung ’round, immediately on guard, with steam beginning to wisp upward through his tight-clenched knuckles. “What’s that s’posed to mean?”

“Means ‘I don’t bloody know,’ is all. This place ain’t a shooting gallery — it was, you’d’ve already flown the coop long since, without any ’elp from me. So maybe each step of the way out’s less about ’oo’s got the sand to pound ’ard as it is gettin’ answers; finding the right path, not just the easiest.”

Her tone, surprisingly, rang convincing enough to make Chess flatten his palms against the wall, close his eyes and lean his head down, the stone rough but damply soothing ’gainst his throbbing forehead.

I’m no good with this shit, he wanted to say. Ain’t no book-smart intriguer like Rook, or even a Pinkerton-trained puzzle-solver, the way Ed had to be; my grand ideas at Hoffstedt’s Hoard came straight from little Miss Yancey’s brainpan, and they all went south quick enough, once Sheriff Love got involved. Shoot it if it stands and cut it if it runs, that’s my strategy’s extent. I can barely plan out my morning meals, let alone solve a Goddamn riddle designed to keep them that’s Hell-locked from making their escape. . . .

“I don’t know either,” he found himself admitting, at last, as despair lapped up over him.

To which she sniffed, and replied: “Then give up, why don’t you? Just like a bloody Adam! Well, it’s like I always said — ”

That phrase alone, however, was enough to sweep him away, borne off on a dirty tide of similarly bad advice. The wisdom of a life spent facedown, with only your own blood left to spit at the world that’d kicked you; Oona Pargeter’s rule-book, each chapter beginning exactly like the last, with these same, cheerless words: My Ma always said —

— Get the fawney up front. Never dish out what you can’t take. Don’t never beg; rave and curse, go down fightin’, ’cause them that folds easy gets the boot. Now get out o’ here, you skin-waste, and sing for our bloody supper. My Ma always said: What are you, a ponce? A bloody molly-coddle? Go cry to ’eaven and see ’oo answers, you flamin’ soft-arse nancy. My Ma always said: Nothin’ comes for nothin’ in this world, boy. Sell for as much as they’ll pay, and charge more, if you can. And if they won’t fork over, then do the only fing makes you different from me . . . and kill ’em. . . .

I loved her a good long time, missy, he remembered snarling at Yancey Kloves, when she’d pressed him. And then I learned better.

But he knew now, oh, how he knew — that he never really had.

“’Cause all men are dogs, huh?” he asked Oona now, out loud, voice deceptively even.

She nodded. “And pigs, and rats — vermin of all descriptions.” Then paused, eyes softening slightly: “But then, you ain’t really a man at all, are you? No matter ’ow you look.”

He almost thought she might’ve meant it for a compliment, of a sort. But even so, it made him snap upright once more, too angry to even reply ’til he’d took a deep breath, blew it out.

“Yes, I damn well am,” he told her.

“All right, then. Do what a man does, supposedly — look, and see. Your Pa was a bastard, but ’e knew ’is works, by God. So fink on it, ’cause it’s you this Call’s meant for, not me; might be it’s you needs to take a gander, wivout all your jaw, and ponder it through in ways I can’t. Bloody fink, for once!”

Chess’s hand throbbed, a literal phantom pain. He squinted down at the raw-scraped smear it left behind on the wall — only to watch light bloom from his palm. Oona’s shadow leaped up, towering on the bricks behind her with a sizzling power-crackle. And framing it, visible now under Chess’s personal footlight, three rough lines sketched out a brick rectangle, some open door backlit by the sun beyond.

At shoulder level, the red ghost of Chess’s blood still shone, the only true colour in this entire pocket world.

With more gentleness than he’d intended, Chess pushed Oona out of the way, stepping into her place; his glory-hand’s light faded, plunging the alley back into darkness. But now that Chess had seen the cracks, he couldn’t unsee them. He drove fingers along their length, scrabbling for the hidden catch or trip-switch, tearing his own no-nails. The pain galvanized him to punch brick over and over again, hooking it from left to right and back to left once more, as if trying to bust nonexistent hinges. His knuckles shredded, dripping blood hot enough to steam, which the fissures drank up in turn. And again and again he struck, smearing that blood along every inch, to what damn end he couldn’t’ve begun to reckon, even if you’d asked him.

Without warning, the wall’s blood-delineated portion simply disintegrated, collapsing with an outward-bellying whoof of dust and mica. Chess and Oona jerked back, shielding their eyes, and lowered their hands to see — nothing. A gap of absolute black, not even reflecting the chill gleam of Seven Dials’ rain. Yet Chess knew that darkness, down in his gut. Had glimpsed it before, inside the Enemy’s empty ribcage and the bottom of Her Goddamn Rainbow Ladyship’s grinning black eyes, as she stared down into his while riding him: the darkness of a crack in the world, the place where the light bled out.

Oona seized him by one hand, blood notwithstanding, and didn’t leave go. Chess’s throat felt like sand and glass when he finally spoke. “So . . . it’s in there, I guess, or stay here. Forever.”

Beside him, his mother’s too-young shape only nodded; didn’t need to turn to see it, not at all. Not with her shoulder’s muscle popping slightly and their no-pulses hammering in unison: her dead heart, his long-gone one.

> Chess closed his eyes, and groaned.

“Fuck it,” he said, finally. And leaped, pulling Oona with him.