A Tree of Bones (Hexslinger 3)

As though everything at once were commanding, or perhaps pleading: O you who die to live and live to die, gods and monsters — victims, killers, magicians of every world, together — kill yourselves, now, while you still can. Make the sun and moon come up, make it all afresh, anew. Start over, while you still can.

And do it now. Before it is too late.

Though Sheriff Love — Chess still couldn’t think of the man without his former title, for all he doubted the dead got to hold onto such things — stretched up as lean and tall as ever in his familiar dusty black, the rest of the lawman’s aspect was a strange cross-breed of the last two times Chess had seen him: hair caught back up in those two shortish ear-locks, parted severely and braided at the bottom, while his faith-hollowed face still bristled with that shaggy year’s growth of beard Bewelcome’s un-salting had gifted him, groomed only minimally (with fingers, perhaps), and honest-to-Christ knotted to keep it up out of his way.

What he looked most like was one of those old-time preachers whose Word Rook had liked to cite, back under the Lieut’s command–Preparers of the Way sent out into the desert to await God’s view-halloo, fed on honey and locusts, harassed by titty-shaking devils. Like those left behind in War-Heaven, however, Love bore the marks inflicted by his last go-out with lamentable clarity. That powder-burnt hole in his temple, for example, cracks starring out all ’round, with what rougher-yet damage the bullet had made coming out on the opposite side no doubt well-hid beneath his mane.

“Hadn’t looked to see you here,” Chess told him, studying for its traces — and vaguely recalling, as he did, how that might well have been the exact same thing he’d said to him when they’d met up at Yancey Kloves’ wedding, all that time ago . . . or not so much, maybe. Hard to Goddamn tell, down here.

But the Sheriff didn’t seem to notice. “Where else would you have thought to find me, ‘Private’?” He answered. “Judgement, once met, is swift, and terrible; when released from the flesh, all men resolve to their proper places, and stay there long as the Lord deems fit. Though, that said . . .” He looked Chess up and down. “. . . you obviously haven’t exactly resigned yourself to whatever fate He threw your way. Have you?”

Chess raised a brow. “You expected any different?”

“Given your nature? Not really, no.”

“Huh. V

ery . . . Christian of you, I guess.”

Nearby, Oona — frostbit feet miraculously returned to their normal hue — straightened up, buttoning Chess’s jacket closer about her, and tapped one hand impatiently on her still too-much-revealed thigh. “So ’oo’s this, then?” she demanded, of Chess. “’Nother of your God-botherer fancy-men?”

Chess almost spat, at that. “Hardly,” he managed.

“Well, I’m not likely t’know, am I?”

“You sure ain’t. So why don’t you keep your mouth shut and let me get my bearings, after which we’ll move on?”

Oona made a huffing noise, and tossed her red hair like a colt. The Sheriff, on the other hand, regarded her at first with interest, then outright startlement.

“Pargeter,” he said, at last, “is . . . that a woman?”

“What gave it away?”

“I — hadn’t known you to keep female company, is all, aside from Missus Kloves. And I know she isn’t yet in our same situation.”

“Yeah, and how’d that be, I wonder? No, wait, I got it . . . God told you.”

Too much fun entirely, almost, to twit this great fool, now he’d recovered his vaunted reason and charitableness along with his salt-free skin. And yet — Chess had to admit it didn’t bring quite the charge it once might’ve, under different circumstances. The stakes were just too high, too immediate, to be worth indulging himself over something so . . . petty.

“God doesn’t speak to me,” Love said, at last. “Not any more. Not — yet, anyhow.”

To which Chess had no earthly idea what to reply, in all frankness. So they simply stood there a minute, glancing elsewhere, ’til Oona finally put in, “I’m ’is mother, in case you was wonderin’.”

Again, Love gave half a moment’s face-slapped double take, before rallying himself. “Really,” was all he replied.

Yeah, really. Think I dropped out of the air full-made, preacher-man, or came up a-bloom from perdition’s own root?

The usual quick connective spark between those words buzzing ’round Chess’s skull and his own sharp tongue, however, seemed to have gone fallow, making it lie surprisingly quiet in his mouth.

Indeed, he had to rouse it somewhat to simply say, in return:

“Sheriff . . . I’ve been thinking on this a good long time. . . .”

“Do tell.”

“Rook did you wrong at Bewelcome, and I helped. That-all at Hoffstedt’s Hoard, though — that one’s on you.”

“I know it.”