A Rope of Thorns (39 page)

You should listen to her,
pelirrojo
, the Enemy advised.
For here is wisdom made only greater after death—and how I love you talking monkeys for this! You who remake yourselves, over and over, without any sort of ritual at all.

Chess shook his head, trying to clear it—stole a glance over at Ixchel, who didn’t seem to’ve heard the first voice at all. And saw Rook rock back on his heels just a scootch beside her, like he recognized them both.

Black, red, white . . . and one more, too, if I recall correct. But then that means there’s a Number Four, don’t it?
Chess thought.
The . . . blue, though damn if I know what he’s for. And him we ain’t seen, just yet.

The Enemy smiled at that, or seemed to. Hard to tell, with no real lips to cover all those teeth.

That is a fine city indeed you’ve made for yourself, my sister
, he said to Ixchel, shrugging northwest.
Though perhaps inexpertly founded, built as it is on sand. Do you yet recall the Doom that came to Tollan, for similar arrogance?

Now it was her turn to shiver a tad beneath memory’s lash, and Chess couldn’t claim it didn’t warm his heart to see it.

The blue Tezcatlipoca is Huitzilopochtli
, that other voice told him, meanwhile, soft as shifting dust.
He who was born from lightning in a ball of feathers, He Who Tore Apart the Moon. And his province . . . is war.

Ixchel drew herself up once more, pale and full, lambent as a lit corpse-lantern. Throwing back—
You lie, brother-son-husband, always; I am not frightened. You scheme and trick. What you cannot lay claim to, you wilfully destroy.

Mmm, and I create, too. Nothing comes from nothing.

Then build, with me. Build it all up once more—the right way. The way things were, and should be once again.

The Enemy looked her full in the face then, with what almost seemed to be—sorrow? Amazement? An odd sort of affection, the kind which endures long after everything else—all the more violent emotions—is finally burnt away. Chess knew it to look at, having seen it often enough in the Goddamn mirror.

Our time came and went, sister
, he said, gently.
Let gone be gone.

She shook her head, hair falling to hide everything even vaguely human about her. Replying:
No. This world will end, as all worlds do. What I have set in motion you cannot stop.

I do not propose to.

The fuck?
Chess thought.

Something kicked him ’tween the ribs, hard as a horse, making him suddenly so dog-tired over this hopeless slog of a conversation he wanted to weep out loud. These savage deities with their stupid rules, their endless high-button shoe courtesies! What was the Enemy fixin’ to do, jaw the bitch to death?

Rook’d probably tell him asking a god’s favour was best done on bended knee—but Chess somewhat doubted it, given the god in question. So he rounded on him instead, hands sparking green, all pretence at politeness torn clean away.

“Why’d you even come, then?” he demanded. “Just t’have fun at our expense? What kind of damn god you call yourself, exactly?”

Not yours, obviously. So if you wish to interfere, that is on your head, not mine.

“I’m any part of you, means it’s on your head, too. Or don’t it work that way?”

It does, and yet . . . what you must understand is that I do not care what happens, overmuch, one way or the other.

“And I do?”

Now, yes
.

Never was raised to . . . care for nobody
, his own voice murmured from memory, God alone knew how long a span of time previous—a year? Two? History folding back on itself, spindled at its core; how long ago since the camp and its gallows, the twister? Since the War itself ended?

Standing naked in the desert with nothing but his scars for finery, smiling like a fool as he let Asher Rook draw him close; feeling his dick slap up ’til it left a hot smear of juice on both their bellies, biting into the bigger man’s lip like he wanted to make a hole large enough to fit himself inside, and knowing the days of lovelessness were over, for good or bad. For
ever
.

“No,” Chess said, shaking his head, fighting hard to not cast a glance Ed’s way—or Yancey’s, either, damn it all. And knowing, as he did, the only one he was fooling was himself.

Here came Rook himself, meanwhile, looming in deliberate, voice rumbling low: “Deific help set aside entirely, though, strikes me there might be a way out of the Sheriff’s clutches yet, for everyone. You need a hefty jolt of hex-shock in order to shake free from that back-and-forth the two of you got goin’, not these drips and drabs that Ed and his lady friend can afford to spare you. Something so big it’s impossible to stop—or take back.”

Chess crossed his arms. “And just what the fuck am I supposed to take away from all this yammer, ’sides from you really do dote on the sound of your own voice? ’Cause frankly, I knew
that
already.”

Rook flushed, aura snapping like a whip. “Now, listen here—”

For once, however, it was Ixchel who put in, helpfully:
He means that it is blood alone which pays for blood, little god-king—true currency of all worlds, one which can never be devalued. Which is why you must let it to get it.

“Christ you ever stop t’hear yourself? You’re worse than a Goddamned fortune teacake.” To Rook: “What’s that s’posed to even mean?”

Rook shook his head, gently. “Darlin’,” he said, “. . . you
know
what it means.”

The answer seemed to pop out onto his tongue, sharp as any thrown stone, so painful-true it was almost like he didn’t even
need
that other voice to confirm his suspicions—though it sure enough did hasten to, all the same.

He means you must make sacrifice, red boy, as you were once sacrificed; choose someone you care for, to die in your stead. For only thus can this place be brought back to the way it once was, when your Sheriff Love was a man only . . . a man with a town, a wife, a son. A man who, because he was willing to die for them, might allow himself to be killed.

As though they both understood and approved Chess’s realization, Ixchel and the Enemy nodded, in unison. Their not-voices overlapping, the rise and fall of waves on some awful sea.

Jaguar cactus fruit, jade earthquake ball, repository of thought and blood alike. Red cornerstone of all houses, centrepiece of all wheels, turning. The key to the Machine.

Chess swallowed, throat choke-full of vile juices. “I cut out somebody else’s heart and that puts Bewelcome to rights—that the idea?” A beat. “Like who?”

Now it was Ixchel’s turn to shrug.
It hardly matters. All lives are forfeit, in the end.

Just as all lives are due to us, always
, the Enemy suggested, idly.
Or so we were always told—eh, sister?

I never saw you rush to repudiate those strictures
, she replied.
Not when your
ixiptla
mounted the steps at Tenochtitlan alive, playing his flute, to the adoration of all . . . and not when he came back down riding the high priest’s body, a mere skin suit with hands flapping loose at the wrists, his face a mask for glory.

The reality of it swelled up blunt behind Chess’s brows as that tumour’d killed one of Oona’s bunk-mates, back in San Fran—pushed her left peeper out ’til it near left the socket and she died raving, gaze permanently divided, each eye turned to a completely different pole. A thousand years of men just like him, cut down in their prime to keep these two greased and happy. Children girt with gold and chucked down wells to drown in the dark; gals kept virgin ’til the knife plunged in, a black glass blade their only lover. Once upon a time, their suffering would’ve made him chuckle, like the woes of everyone he’d killed in battle and the myriad more woes each death had sown in turn—weeping wives, desolate kin, mothers and fathers he’d never known, and spat on the very idea of.

But now he saw it straight on, for the dreadful tree it was: a tree of bones hung with flesh and watered on blood, growing up out of Mictlan-Xibalba’s sewer to breach this world’s skin and pull it wide, releasing every sort of horror.

This world’s a shit-pit
, he remembered telling Rook, too matter-of-fact to be sorry over it.
Just dogs fucking and killing, where the strong eat the weak and the weak get eaten. And for all that Bible of yours’s good for hexation-fuel, you know your own damn self how that “good God” you preached on’s nothin’ but a happy horse-crap lie.

Choose one to die, so Bewelcome could live. But which?

Songbird, her witch-wings clipped, lying in old Doc Asbury’s arms. Asbury, trembling like the rabbit-heart he’d always been, ’neath his hoity calculations. Pinkerton, or whatever monstrosity a dose of Songbird’s stolen magic had made of him. The slave-hexes who’d pulled his train, already run halfway to Hex City, if those
things
Chess’d called out of the canyon walls hadn’t done for ’em first; same for most’ve the Pinks, he reckoned, with what few still lurked amongst the rocks hardly worth his time.

Or Yancey, driven by revenge and sentiment alike, like he’d always been. The one thing in skirts he couldn’t call a bitch or a whore with a clear conscience, whatever
that
was.

Or Ed.

Turning a cold eye on Rook, and thinking:
’Cause that’s who you meant to point me toward, right, Ash? The tool that turned in your hands, lived long enough to cleave to someone else right in front of me, so you think jealousy’ll make me yearn to settle his hash. Which I might, if him and her weren’t the only living souls who ever helped me for no gain at all on their part, only loss and heartbreak. Who’ve stuck with me when no one else would . . . and why?

Goddamned if I know. Which must mean, in the end . . . it doesn’t much matter.

So simple, from one breath to the next: he saw things as they were at last, unimpeded by lust or hate, like everything else had dropped away—everything. Even himself.

Especially
himself.

Chess looked at Rook, whom he’d once loved and did still, to his eternal foolishness; the two outrageous figures flanking him, one human-sized, the other anything but—remnants of one bloody age, turned harbingers of another. And as he did, it came to him how they all of ’em
deserved
to be defied, their grand plans laid waste to. Hell, they needed to be took down and knocked out loaded, laid so low they’d never get back up again.

Should be possible, too. ’Cause if their power and Love’s power and his own power really were just different brands of the same . . .well, Chess probably might not be able to kill
them
, any more than he’d been able to kill the Sheriff, no matter how diligently he’d tried.

But this much I do know: I can for damn sure kill myself.

“Oh, fuck all y’all,” he told Rook, sighing. “Think I’m gonna save myself at someone else’s expense, just ’cause
you
tell me it’s the only way? Like you know me so damn well? If you still think that, after all you’ve done . . . all both’ve us have done . . . then maybe we never really knew each other at all.”

Rook took what Chess remembered as a heartbeat to compose himself. “C’mon, darlin’ . . .” he began.

“No,
you
come on. Think I can’t surprise you? Watch this.”

He missed Hosteen’s knife, almost much as he missed the old Hollander himself. It’d’ve been so easy, that way: blade’s metal would only feel cold for a moment while crossing his throat, edge so sharp the sting would be rendered something faint, faraway, forgettable. And then the liquid heat would explode out and down as Chess closed his eyes in relief, savouring the triumph.

Still, it was like his hands knew what to do. Slip down, slide in, reach far as you can go . . . haul hard enough to prise the whole breastbone up like a lid, with a horrid, gelatinous crack, to let what little was left inside come spilling out.

He saw Ixchel and the Enemy both close their eyes at the same time—mouths hung open, tongues teeth-caught—while his precious blood went up like February firecrackers wrapped ’round with sweaty dynamite. Saw Rook go down on one knee with both arms out, mouth forming a mammoth
No, God, Chess, NO!
, and wanted to laugh out loud. But his mouth was blood-stoppered; his teeth ground together, frenzy-caught, gnawing into his own tongue like they’d been designed to tear it out by the roots.

All I wanted was my heart back again
, he couldn’t stop himself from thinking.
That’s
all
, Christ shit on it.

Such a weak-sounding whine of a final idea, given who it came from.

We all want something, grandson
, that other voice said, without a shred of comfort.
Now sleep.

So Chess Pargeter closed his eyes at last, feeling the pulse of a spell too vast to be undone bear him away, bodily, in every direction at once.

So the little warrior
can
care for someone other than you, my husband. Truly there is no end to wonders. . . .

Yancey felt the time-slip
spell without suspecting what it was, planet jerking sideways under her like a crashed train and the shadows snapping around. It was enough to jolt her free of her daze, blood- and soul-loss admixed; she tried to push herself up, but couldn’t—Ed’s weight too much to move, weak as she was. But she could twist herself sideways, just enough to bring the field of battle into vision.

And saw Chess dropping to his knees, chest one tremendous wound, as more blood spilled down out of him onto Bewelcome’s salted earth than it seemed one human being should be able to hold. While his hands lifted high, red-shining, fingers streaming fresh tissue. . . .

Oh sweet Christ he didn’t he
didn’t
he DID!

“Oh, shit, Chess!” Ed bucked awake as well, fought to gain his feet and failed with no more strength left in him than her, though it didn’t stop him trying. “Chess, what the
fuck
—”