A Rope of Thorns (3 page)

The dentist drew himself up in turn, primly. “We take an
oath
, Mister Pargeter, the same as any other school of medicine. I aim to honour mine.”

Chess shrugged. “Guess we’ll see,” he replied, and went slamming out the back.

Morrow tried to angle himself so he could see the street—then let loose with a startled yowl as Glossing grabbed his head by the swollen jaw, moving it firmly back to the vertical.

“Quite enough of that,” the dentist told him. Adding, kind but strict, like a horse-breaker at work: “I’d rather have had a few more minutes setting time to give you, but this will have to do. Hold as still as you can, Mister Morrow.”

More cold metal wedged his mouth open. Morrow braced himself for agony as the pliers made contact with the bad tooth—but the only thing he felt was the featherlight stroke of soft fingertips on his forehead. A split second later, a warm, fuzzy, gluey feeling took hold, like thick treacle coating every nerve; the faintest pressure, for all that Morrow knew the grabbers and brace dug equal-deep. Glossing’s face, above him, was a blurred black featureless mask against the light.

This ain’t natural,
Morrow thought, stupidly.
More like . . .
super
natural.

Which meant—hexation. And hexation meant a trap.

Aw, crap.

Chess!
Morrow yelled, or tried to; least he owed him was a warning. But all that came out was a harsh rasp of breath, a bit too much like a death-rattle for comfort.

Glossing might have shaken his head—hard to tell, at this angle. “Save your strength, Mister Morrow.” His voice sounded like bubbles bursting in deep water, far away. “I guarantee my clients painlessness, but you’re far from the first to dislike the side effects. Silence really is golden, it seems, especially when fitting a man for gold teeth. Though I admit—” and here he let his own show, in a sly flicker of discoloured porcelain “—they’re seldom quite so lucky for me, either. Now, before I forget . . .”

He leaned in, twisted and yanked, hard—’til something gave with a wrench, snapping away with a dull, concussive string of throbs Morrow was thankful to barely feel. Glossing dropped the tooth into a nearby ceramic bowl, then turned to peer out the window, pliers still in the hand he used to shade his eyes.

“Yuh . . . y’r uh hhhex!” Morrow managed to gargle, through a mouthful of blood.

Glossing looked back at him with a raised eyebrow, nodded. “Yes. I do apologize for the impacted molar curse, Mister Morrow, but I couldn’t think of a better way to guarantee you’d pay a visit to my poor establishment.” Gazing out the window once more: “No point in sending anything similar Mister Pargeter’s way, of course; it’d’ve simply bounced off and come back in my own direction, no doubt rendered considerably . . . harder, for the journey. Now, let’s us just wait and see how my friend is doing. . . .”

He appeared not to notice as Morrow, summoning every ounce of effort, pushed himself up on his elbows in order to finally get his head above the windowsill. He spat all down his shirt-front, bright red, and squinted.

The streets had emptied with the first gunshot, though Morrow thought he could catch the occasional cautious head or pulled-low hat-brim lurking here and there. In the centre of the street, a pale, heavyset, rag-bearded man in filthy tattered buckskins snapped the fresh-loaded shotgun in his hands shut and turned slowly in place, his own gaze casting about fruitlessly.

“CHESS PARGETER!”
the man bellowed once more, abruptly, and Morrow felt a cold trickle in his belly. There was something innately . . .
wrong
. . . with the man’s voice, an odd disjunction which added an inhumanly thick echo to his monotonous, repetitive cry. As though he was literally unable to say anything other than Chess’s name—to form any other thought, let alone express it aloud.

But now the silence broke open again, a barrage of thunderous cracks, rapid as hammer blows. The yelling man staggered, buckskins bursting open in a blood-dust spray, as Chess strode up the street, emptying his revolvers into his back.

They ran dry once more; Chess holstered and struck a pose, looking smug. “That’s just what happens when you make free with a man’s name, and you ain’t even been introduced,” he hollered—then folded his arms, and waited to watch the man fall.

Which . . . he didn’t.

The realization came attached to a sound, strange yet familiar, spurring Morrow to turn his head. It was Glossing, chuckling in his throat; greedy, playful, instantly reminiscent of Rook—and Songbird. Songbird
with
Rook, pulling him down to her level and kissing him hard, sucking magic from him like a damn mosquito. Like it tasted so good she didn’t care whether she killed herself doing it, just so long as she got her fix.

Chess, back over his shoulder, running headlong to Rook’s rescue:
Don’t you know nothin’ ’bout hexes, fool? They can’t take just a
little
—

Morrow fair felt his balls clench as he watched Glossing raise his free hand, fingers twitching, a puppeteer pulling strings. Thought, helpless:
Shit—move, Chess, move—

Chess saw that the stuff gurgling from the man’s exit wounds wasn’t blood, but some horrid, blackish goop, a second before the shotgun came up. His eyes widened.

With a yelp more of surprise than fear he dove to one side, not quite fast enough, and spun as the blast caught the barest edge of his shoulder. He howled in pain and hit the ground hard, scrabbling in the earth for something, anything to throw. The gun centred on Chess, and sickness crawled up Morrow’s throat as the trigger tightened—

In sheer, futile defiance, Chess snatched up a handful of grit and hurled it, snarling. Only to see the stones multiply and fracture in mid-air, become a howling jet of razor-edged shards flashing from Chess’s palm to burst against the gunman-thing’s front, like the deluge from a perforated water tank. Rotten buckskins and pallid flesh peeled back from the thing’s body, sending it staggering backward. The shotgun fell from one disintegrating hand, flipping to discharge again as it hit the ground—right up into its former owner’s groin.

Stunned, Chess made the mistake of letting his own hand drop. At which point the earth-jet instantly ceased, leaving the truth laid bare most awfully.

The body beneath those buckskins had never been human; did not even
look
human, now. By the low-slung hips, black mouldy fur and short thick legs, its bottom half seemed mostly bear. The long wavering spine and deep ribs looked like the remains of a powerful bull’s, while the arms . . . scaly and undersized, their gloved-over paws’ “fingers” actually long nails made for digging, hovering foreshortened up around the creature’s belly. A lizard? Armadillo? Only the head bore any resemblance to a human’s, though slackly mask-like, and that was spoiled by the weird letters incised—black and smoking—on its white brow.

Glossing pressed his fingers to his mouth, looking absurdly dismayed. Then his rabbit-eyes tightened; with another subtle gesture, he sent the corpse-amalgam lumbering forward, ready and willing to crush by sheer weight what it had failed to shoot dead.

But Chess had the measure of his foe now, and this was hardly the first dead thing he and Morrow had dealt with. So as it approached he dropped below its clumsy swing and spun, planting a spurred heel square in the thing’s knee. The rotten joint burst, bones snapping; gravity took over and brought the thing down to the ground hard—

—and Morrow’s head was abruptly crystal clear, while Glossing was doubled over, clutching his own knee, screaming.

Before the dentist could recover, Morrow had already flipped himself off the couch, cursing as he crashed to the floor—the numb-spell was still on him, crawling back up his body even as Glossing regained his senses. He quick-humped toward the door and down the front steps, out into the street with Glossing on his heels. Yelling, as he did: “Cheh! Issa doc! Hessa hex—damn thing’s ’is puppet! Glossinssa
hex
—!”

White pain burst through Morrow’s head, blinding him; abruptly, he found himself on his back, insect-scrabbling with all four limbs at once. Glossing drew back his boot for another kick, face distorted in a snarl of rage—then buckled once more, grabbing his side as if knifed. Morrow rolled his head, just barely able to glimpse how Chess threw kick after kick into the thing as it twitched feebly on the ground. With each one, Glossing shrieked again, crumpling until he too lay helpless in the dusty street, barely able to watch as Chess dragged the whole huge, stinking mess of his creation over to him by one swollen leg.

Kneeling, Chess traced an invisible line from the thing’s letter-carved skull through the air, ’til his hand made contact with Glossing’s chest. So intent was Chess’s gaze that Morrow was fairly certain he wasn’t even noticing the small black shotgun pellets steadily work their way from his wounded shoulder, vanishing in tiny puffs of flame before they could even hit the ground.

“This,” he said to Glossing, hand moving like it was following a rope Morrow couldn’t see. “Little silver string—that’s how you make it dance, huh?” Without waiting for an answer he rose, then stamped down hard between puppet and puppeteer, like he was snuffing a fuse. Glossing groaned. The dead thing stopped moving. Chess stared at it, sick fascination plain on his face. “What the hell
is
that thing, anyway?” he demanded. “What do you even call it?”

Pain and dread had drawn Glossing’s face tight; his grim smile made him look like someone else entirely. Again, Morrow was reminded inexorably of both Songbird and Rook. “He’s . . . my friend. The proper word is golem. But I call him—
Emmett
.”

As the name echoed thickly in the air, Chess and Morrow both found their eyes snapping all unsummoned to those four alien letters on the monster’s skull; caught and held by black power, mouths agape, as the thing suddenly reared back up. Behind the word, a thunderous, brazen sound, like sheeting shook off-stage at the theatre—as though each letter had been embossed on the air.

Whether the spell was actually so strong it affected them both—or Morrow was just inadvertently sharing Chess’s senses again, through whatever connection Rook had bound upon them—they could all see it, now: A web of black cable strung from golem to hex, then leading back from both of them into the far distance, stretching across miles, toward—

“Rook,” breathed Chess. “That house-sized sonofabitch.”

On the floor, Glossing coughed. “I lie down every night,” he rasped, “with
that
sunk deep in my dreams, calling me; I rise up every morning knowing Reverend Rook’ll give me all the power I could ever want, if I only sign away my soul and follow it to its conclusion. And the best joke of all is, it isn’t even
me
he wants.” His eyes burned. “It’s
you
.”

“No, doc.” Chess shook his head. “This ain’t my doing.”

“But it
is!
” Glossing pushed himself up slightly, trembling. “Every hex between here and the Mississippi’s been bleeding power like a stuck pig for weeks, all so your ‘good’ Reverend can bring us to help serve
you
! He says he’ll make us gods, but he’s just one more like you, like me—all he wants is
food
, and
I will not be his meal!
”

Here he flung out a hand, grabbing for Chess’s; the power flare between them was so bright, hot and immediate that Morrow cringed back with a yell, hands over his eyes. He felt the sickening pulling even in his own gut, the nauseating wrench of power being sucked away, and knew it must be a thousand times worse for those who had power to lose. Chess’s startled cry was a shrike’s, so full of rage and pain it made him want to both cringe and weep.

Then—fury, red and sizzling, as the blazing stream reversed itself so suddenly that Morrow felt it rush right up into his throat: a gag, a noose, fit to strangle and choke. And saw Chess’s eyelids flutter just a tad, at the taste of it, hot and fresh, like heart’s-meat done up sizzling, straight from the spectral grill.

With dread Lady Ixchel’s voice crooning alongside, an ill refrain, from the darkest depths of Morrow’s memory:
Jaguar Cactus Fruit, so flowery, little husbands. So precious. So . . .

(beautifulbeautifulbeautiful)

“Often as you claim to’ve been in consort with Rook,” Chess told the dentist, “don’t seem like you quite got the bulk of the message. I ain’t just
any
hex, to be sucked dry and dropped. I’m
different
.”

Glossing gave a bitter laugh. “Oh, you’re that, all right.”

He waved at “Emmett” one more time, like he couldn’t help it; it jerked forward, growling. But Chess just shot again, as if by way of reply—off-hand, without even looking. The final spell-bullet exploded out of Chess’s barrel, all bat-wings and squid-legs, writhing and snapping. It ripped the golem’s face right off, revealing a perforated horse’s skull whose long jaws were set with dog’s choppers underneath.

“Naw, I don’t think so,” Chess said. “’Cause for all you got some fancy tricks indeed, you
still
ain’t hex enough to mess with
me
.”

Glossing gulped and tried to scuttle, arm flopping hapless, like he’d momentarily forgotten he and Chess were still holding hands. And Chess gave a mean, familiar predator’s grin at the sight, gripping so hard his knuckles flared up white—drew in even
harder
, as though he meant to drink every last drop of the fat little man up through a rye grass straw.

It was sad, in its way—for both of ’em. Chess Pargeter, battle-proven killer of men, reduced to a child stepping on ant-hills. Doc Glossing, reduced to meat.

The dentist hissed, a near squeal. Then went all at once a-droop, overwhelmed and withering—a popped pig’s bladder.

“So powerful,” he gasped, giving way. “
So
strong, and yet . . . you don’t know anything. Not a
damn
thing. Not even . . .”

An unintelligible mutter followed, resolving itself into: “. . . was right, ’bout you . . .”

At this, Chess’s eyes—already lit up with the surplus—literally snapped and flared. “
Who
was? Rook—that deathless bitch of his? Goddamn
Songbird
?” The man just shook his head, defeated, taking refuge in silence. “
Tell
me, shithead! I’ll yank your soul out through your eyeballs, see if I don’t!”