A Rope of Thorns (23 page)

Useful, in potential,
a traitorous part of her whispered.
Now that I’m left to fend for myself in this world, robbed at gunpoint of all protectors, forced to choose ’tween bad and worse to get to what
I
need.

Oh, she was starting to hate that Satan-practical little voice inside, the one she couldn’t dare claim came from anywhere but her own fast-withering soul.

“Let’s get a move on,” she told both Pinkertons, and set her shiny hex-made boots back to the upwards path.

Often as he’d done business with the Rev’s contingent before, however, today Splitfoot Joe proved singularly uninviting.

“You get gone from here, Chess Pargeter!” he yelled from inside the saloon, while somebody else—more than one, probably—fired warning shots at them, out the barricaded windows. “You ain’t welcome no more, not after what you done here last!”

“Can’t think what
that
could’ve been,” Yancey whispered to Morrow, where they crouched behind a handy rock—and Morrow found he had to think a bit himself to reckon the exact cause of Joe’s antagonisms, given how many transgressions he’d seen Chess perform.

“Helped open up a doorway into Hell—
a
Hell, anyhow,” he set on, finally. “Oh, and brought the Pinks down on ’em, too; that’s all but a capital offence, ’round these parts.”

Her brows knit. “But—don’t they already know how you, yourself—”

“No, they don’t, and I’d be right pleased you didn’t enlighten ’em on that same fact, thank you very much. Frank too, I’m guessin’.”

Geyer nodded. “He’s got the right of it, ma’am. Tell, and our lives won’t be worth a plugged nickel.”

“Then my lips are sealed.”

“Much obliged.”

A yard or so away, Chess ignored all this—bullets popped off him like moths on a lantern, singed to powder in spark-showers, each one merely serving to spur his own ire higher. “That wasn’t even
me
, you fools!” he hollered back, hands on hips. “That was the damn
Rev
!”

“Same damn difference!”

Chess’s eyes blazed at that, literally; the glow was visible from where Morrow knelt. “
I
say there’s a difference, then you need to take me serious—’sides which, ain’t no way on earth you can stop me comin’ in if I want to, save for setting yourselves alight and hoping I don’t care to burn. So—what’ll it be? Me, or the fire?”

“Word is, you bring the Weed, too. What you got to say to that?”

“Not a—” Chess began, but Morrow waved him silent.

“Word’s right,” he said, rising to his full height. “I’ve seen it done: Mouth-of-Praise, Hoffstedt’s Hoard—all gone, wiped out, ’cause they didn’t take Chess serious. You already know what he can do; really want to make him
want
to?”

Silence ensued. Then the door clicked open and Joe himself peeped out, looking stricken.

“I got customers in there, Chess,” he said, half-apologetic. “
You
know how it is.”

“Not really,” Chess shot back, as he strode past him.

When those of Joe’s trade who could still walk straight saw Chess coming, they mostly cut loose and scarpered, leaving the place denuded but for a few dozing drunks. Joe knew better than to protest—just set ’em up at a table Morrow recalled as his “best,” while Chess paced and Geyer manfully fought down the urge to pull a chair out for Yancey, who did it herself.

“Whiskey all ’round, Joe,” Morrow called out, to keep the man occupied.

“Sure.” Rummaging behind the bar: “Truth to tell, them Pinks didn’t even stick around too long, not after that Chinee witch of theirs figured you all’d been whisked off to Mexico. Left a few here to wait, lest you somehow magic yourselves back ’fore they caught up with you, but then those got pulled out too, once the Weed started spreadin’. So there was my payment for lettin’ them badged-up fuckers in here in the first place, I guess.”

“Just can’t trust them Union types,” Chess observed, audibly disinterested.

“I s’pose so. Here’s your whiskey.”

Morrow tipped his hat, but Chess waved his away: “Not for me; you know what I like.”

“Uh huh, ’course,” Joe stammered. “Just . . . we ain’t got no absinthe on the premises; that stuff is awful expensive, and we ain’t had the trade to merit it.”

“Sure you do, Joe. Go look.”

And there it was, right to hand, when Joe bent down behind the bar to feel for it with shaking fingers: a smallish bottle, green as any blowfly’s back. He went to hand it over, then jumped a foot when it skittered ’cross the bar-top, leapt into the air, and slapped right into Chess’s waiting palm. The cork popped out with a dead man’s hand trigger-click, falling to roll, stickily, against the toe-cap of Chess’s right boot.

Joe looked like Morrow felt, to see it. Even the Rev in his heyday had never spilled power ’round with such casual aplomb, wasting it on absolute nothings, for the mere pleasure of seeing how such a spectacle disturbed the non-hexacious.

Chess gave the bottle a pull, then licked his lips, pink cat-tongue faintly green-tinged. “Well, I’m for bed,” he announced. “Best room’s still at the top of the stairs, ain’t it?”

“. . . yes.” Joe gulped. “I could, uh . . . clear it out. . . .”

“Oh, don’t bother yourself.” Raising his voice, ever so slightly: “Reckon whoever’s in there’s probably heard I’m here, by now—and if they don’t got the sense to be gone by the time I’m at their door, I somehow misdoubt they would’ve been smart enough to cover their bill; good riddance to bad rubbish, is what I say.”

Up above, a great thump and scuttle, followed by the smash of a window wouldn’t open fast enough; Joe almost winced to hear it, now white to the very lips.

“Sure that’s so,” he said, finally. “Mister Pargeter.”

No call to scare the poor bastard like that,
Morrow thought. It was an ill deed, unworthy of the Chess he thought he’d come to know, since Mictlan-Xibalba’s toils. And when Chess’s eyes swung his way, Morrow met his gaze full-on, refusing to call the words back. Adding in on top, as he did:
And let’s see what you want to do about it, exactly, if makin’ yourself a fearful object’s so all-fired important to you right this very minute.

“Nothing” was the answer, apparently. Instead, Chess simply swung away and mounted those steps, bottle drooping from one hand, the other perched on his opposite gun-butt—so characteristic a pose it brought a moment’s salt sting to Morrow’s nose, throat clamping down hard in memory of the man Chess had once been, rather than the creature he’d become.

At his elbow, Yancey said, quietly: “He keeps splashing it out on every little thing takes his fancy, he’ll run through the rest of that power we bled into him back in the Hoard pretty quick—don’t you think, Mister Morrow?”

“But he’d still be a hex, wouldn’t he?” Geyer asked. “So perhaps the point is moot.”

“Still be
Chess
, either way,” Morrow agreed, slugging back his whiskey in one fiery swallow, and struggling not to cough his guts out. “Which is . . . no small thing, in itself.”

Yancey ignored the glass Joe’d laid in front of her, watching Geyer take a far more moderate sip from his. Then, waiting ’til he’d drunk it down, she said:

“I believe it’s past time for you to explain yourself, Mister ‘Grey.’”

The man squared his shoulders, as though preparing himself to step face-on into a high, cold wind. He took a breath, and began.

“You have to understand, Ed, Miz—
Mister
Colder—”

“Kloves,” Yancey reminded him. Thinking:
You were
at
the wedding, after all.

“—by the War’s end, for those of us who’d watched him work, Allan Pinkerton was a mythic figure—a second Odysseus using guile in the best of causes, managing to winkle a good portion of the Union in Horse-wise through the Confederacy’s Trojan gates, even while the rest of the matter was decided on a battlefield basis. That’s why I signed up with the Agency afterwards . . . why most of us did, I believe.”

Morrow nodded slightly in agreement, possibly not even realizing he did so.

“When Mister Pinkerton went on the move, I stayed behind in Chicago, on Agency business,” Geyer continued. “Not hex-related, in the main. The methodical centralization and science of crime as applies to
all
cases, that was our credo, which served us well indeed, since few of the magically inclined who take to crime wreak much more damage than the normal run of criminal. What they do is impressive, yes, but never let it be forgot: they cannot conspire. That, in itself, cuts their efficaciousness down substantially.”

“And then?”

Geyer hesitated, as though still bound by the loyalties he was working hard to shuck.

“Professor Asbury, I reckon,” Morrow said. “That would be where things began to change. Am I right, Frank?”

“You are.”

This Professor, Geyer haltingly explained—not a bad man in his way, yet terribly single-minded—had been studying matters hexological at an Eastern university. He aimed to create a system of quantification which would allow him to distinguish the potentially hexacious
before
they came to full flower, and thus perhaps win them to the orderly side of things—create a matrix of nurture which would train them to accept mere human guidance, then set them as watchdogs upon their own kind. To use their natural hungers as a culling agent, in other words.

“Like cats on rats,” Yancey mused. “Or . . . no, too dissimilar—dogs on coyotes.”

Geyer shrugged. “If the dogs could pull fire from the air, or the coyotes bring inanimate objects to life and set them fighting amongst each other, then . . . I suppose so. It’s all somewhat beyond my ken, Miss—ter, me being but a humble ’tec. So while I won’t allow myself surprised to learn of Ed’s mission after the fact—how Asbury and Mister Pinkerton set him to infiltrate Reverend Rook’s gang, so’s he might take Rook’s temperature with that ‘Manifest’ of theirs—”

“Manifold, they called it; Asbury’s Manifold.”

“Thank you, Ed. It did surprise me, however—once reports began to filter up from Mexico, in the wake of
that
particular tangle—to receive a secret summons calling me into Mister Pinkerton’s presence. I took an express train to meet him outside of El Paso, then hopped tracks and transferred to his private railcar, the one he often conducts business from.”

“I know it.”

“Have you set foot there lately, though? Changed, Ed—terribly so.” A shadow hollowed out Geyer’s face. “Much like the man himself.”

Oh, enough
, Yancey decided, abruptly; no matter how dear it cost Geyer to break his silence’s sworn bonds, she’d no more patience for this waffling.
I need to understand this
now
, without annotation.
So she shut her eyes, bolted the whiskey, laid but a fingertip on Geyer’s wrist, and—
opened
herself, wide.

(
See it all, then, granddaughter. As
he
did.
)

Yes,
Yancey breathed back to that never-too-far phantom instructor, as the saloon’s ruckus slowed to a drone—the very pocket of time she sat in popping forth like a cog, and slipping between ticks of the Pinkerton’s pocket-watch, an oiled key in a sprung lock.

And then, with truly frightening ease, she was
there
, abruptly. As him.

Male from head to toe, the centre of her gravity abruptly upward-shifted, and baking in the railcar’s too-close air; she felt sweat drip down the runnel of “her” spine, soaking a patch at the waistband of “her” trousers so vehemently, she could only hope “her” belt was wide enough to cover it. The place was kitted out with all sorts of unfamiliar fripperies, reeking of ether and alcohol over not-faint-enough blood-stink, same as any more immobile sickroom. Chinese lacquer screens set up everywhere narrowed perspective ’til the fine gas sconces themselves seemed scarlet-tinged, while velveteen-print paper muffled the rhythmic clatter vibrating up through the floor, and unseen vistas rolling by outside the curtained windows played light off shade in ever-changing patterns.

Three figures occupied what space was left open, besides Geyer himself. A mild-faced old man with wandering eyes—Asbury, presumably; a frail girl wrapped in stiff brocade propped on a throne-chair twice her size, her half-blind porcelain face a malign doll’s, veiled under the same deep red as her shot-silk draperies—
Songbird, they call her,
the voice put in,
little caged queen, maimed and poison-full since birth.

And there in the back, someone Geyer knew well enough his heart leapt to greet him, for all he no longer looked a bit like his old self: Mister Allan Pinkerton, first of all Agents, looming massive even in repose, the ill effects of too much good food and too little activity swelling his already large form to cartoonish proportions.

A veritable twin for those infamous lithographs of Tweed,
“she” thought, without recognizing whose face passed through Geyer’s mind,
all bloat. My good God, boss—how could you ruin yourself this way?

Even as the idea formed, however, it was derailed, horrifically. Pinkerton moved forward into what passed for the light, allowing “her” to see what now passed for his face.

“I’m main glad ye could come, Frank,”
this object said, its voice one thunderous beehive snore—Scots accent rendered parodic, r’s rolling like cannonballs. “Yuir rate of travel did ye no damage, I trust?”

Geyer swallowed his shock, with a dry click.

“No sir,” he said. “Haven’t been out of Chi-Town for some time now, as you know. It was . . . restful.”

The gaping tear laying Pinkerton’s jawbone almost open showed a high, wet rim of teeth through his cheek’s fine-flayed meat, a fascinatingly awful image. Was it creeping
from
his lip’s furled, necrotic sneer, or
toward
it? And that knot of sickness pulsing at its apex, half bruise, half tumour—had that once been his
ear
?

“Ye’ll wonder how I manage tae keep mysel’ shaved, I suppose,”
Pinkerton said, noting Geyer’s attempt to not react with dry humour. “Well . . . no’ very well at all, as ye can see.”

Yancey felt something hot on “her” own face—more sweat, if she were feeling kindly. Or simply an understandable response to the startling notion that Pinkerton’s unkempt tangle of mutton-chops, beard and moustache might hide further damage still.