A Tree of Bones (57 page)

Drafted for Hexicas

To Be Entered Into by Mutual Agreement —

Annexation Impossible, President Johnson Admits,

“Since the Territory in Question cannot

be Tracked, or Even Entered,

Without Express Permission from Its Inhabitants.”

Spokeswoman Mrs. Love Maintains “All Hexicans

Consider Themselves U.S. Citizens,”

Even Though some have Sought Refuge from

American Laws or Mores.

“We Embrace All, Refuse None, Hex or No.”

December 25, 1867:

FIRST HEXICAN NOEL!

Christmas Festivities to be Held Throughout the City-State,

Though Attendance of Religious Component is Hardly Mandatory.

Yr. Humble Correspondent, for One, Will be There.

And from various January, 1868, editions of Bewelcome Township, New Mexico’s
Daily Letter
—

HEXICAS GLIMPSED OVER OWN RUINS

Tourists Making Pilgrimage to the Crater

Where this Devil-City Once Sat

Report “Great Light & Show, Fiery Clouds & Odd Noises” —

Say Hexes Alighted to Accept a Party of Varying Indians, Mennonites, Freed Slaves & Coolies

Before Transporting them Inside & Making Off.

Reverend Oren Catlin Petitions Thiel Agency,

on Behalf of Frightened Congregation:

“Can Nothing be Done About Such Intrusions?”

GEORGE THIEL’S ANSWER TO REVEREND CATLIN, VIA POST:

Pres. Johnson’s Instructions on Matter Clear Indeed —

“Hexicas, as Sovereign Area, is To Be Left Alone.”

SUSPECT HEXATION?

Whether in Yourself or Others,

This Former Scourge may now be Converted

to a Badge of Honour

Earned in Governmental Service:

Therefore, if Seeking Registration or Forced Expression

through Asbury’s Proven Process,

Citizens are urged to Contact their local

Thiel Agency Field Office at Once.

OUR NEW NEIGHBOURS

In Wake of Hexicas’ Relocation and the
Rainbow Lady’s Toppling,

Those Mexican Blood-cultists not Repatriated Across Border

Have Opted to Stay, Buy Farms, Work Land.

Claim Mrs. Love Told Them: “My Husband’s Town is

Home to any Who Wish Solace.”

Rev. Catlin: “Can They Be Called True Christians?”

A Vote Taken at Nazarene Hall to Resolve this Issue

Would Seem to Prove Yes:

Yeas win over Nays, 47 to 13.

WEEDING COTILLION

Science Confirms It: Red Weed Keeps Our Lands Arable!

All Those Wishing to Contribute to our Moat’s Feed and Care

Are Therefore Directed to Assemble and Donate.

Cotillion Begins at Sun-down, with Prayers
(Rev. Catlin, Presiding);

Medicos in Attendance to Treat Wounds;

Food, Drink and Dancing to Follow.

FINE ARACHNORSES, NEW-BROKE

An Assortment of these Inestimable Creatures, Locally Bred,

Are Now Available for Purchase at Luffy’s Stables:

Since All Survived the Season, they are Tough & Active —

Good Spinners, Faster Than Horses, Very Cheap.

In Interest of Public Safety, Mister Luffy Cautions that

only Seasoned Riders Need Apply,

and “Remember to Feed them Much Sugar, Often, or Face Mutiny.”

(Those Unhappy with their Mounts should Note that the

U.S. Army is now Paying Top Dollar

for Arachnorses and Riders with Night Travel & Climbing Experience, to be part of new Spider Cavalry Units.)

Telegram transcript, sent from the desk of Frank Geyer to George Thiel, Yuma City, Arizona:

GREAT NEWS STOP MIXTURE OF ASBURY’S SCALE MEASUREMENTS AND AUTOMATIC VIEWING HAS FINALLY LOCATED OUR FRIENDS STOP INTELLIGENCE CONFIRMS MAP COORDINATES STOP NO REPLY NECESSARY STOP MEET NEW MEXICO PREPARED TO RIDE STOP

Ed Morrow was drawing water when the riders appeared: a mixed posse of former Pinks, plus some of Washford’s remaining men — not Carver, of course, who’d taken his honourable discharge and elected to go with Berta and Eulie when Hex City migrated once more. But Morrow thought he recognized most of them, even if he couldn’t necessarily put names to faces.

“Want me to cover ’em?” Yancey asked, stepping up beside him, soft as a cat in those beaded hide slippers Yiska had parting-gifted her with. Her hair’d begun to grow back white ’round the scar left from Reverend Rook’s last wound-strike to her scalp, creating a lightning bolt effect that made her seem all entirely too piratical-rakish for such a tiny slip of a thing, and she stood with her coat-flaps twitched back and both guns exposed, hand just beginning to hover ’bout the one on her right hip — a pose which, once struck, minded him so strongly of Chess Morrow fair felt it rise in his throat, like a lump.

“No,” he said, “don’t think that’ll be necessary. Look who’s in front.”

The rest stood back, keeping a “polite” distance just far enough to render all parties equally safe from weapons fire, as once-Agent Frank Geyer and a smaller, greyer man Morrow could only assume must be the fabled George Thiel came cantering down. Geyer looked older himself, fresh marks of war still lingering from top to toe, an ache Morrow could well identify with. Thiel, slightly more distanced as he’d been from that crazy final rout, seemed more intact, yet far less easy to read.

“Mister Morrow,” he began, without preamble, “don’t believe we’ve ever been introduced, though Frank here speaks highly of you — you and Missus Kloves, both.” A nod, in Yancey’s general direction: “Ma’am.”

Yancey nodded back. “You’d be Mister Thiel, I reckon. Him Pinkerton wanted killed on grounds of disloyalty, back when.”

“I would.”

“Uh huh. And seeing you’ve apparently since been elevated to his old job, I’m not too surprised.”

Thiel flushed slightly. “That . . . was never my intent, ma’am. Was the President himself who put this charge upon me in the Hex City debacle’s wake, making it all but impossible to refuse.”

“Oh, yes. Still, it’s not as though either of you
got
anything out of not doing so, ’sides from control over the most powerful new branch of government since taxes were first levied.”

Now it was Geyer’s turn to colour. “Missus Kloves! I beg you, if only for our old acquaintance’s sake — ”

“I don’t recall that acquaintanceship having ever netted me much overall, Mister Geyer, beyond the rare thrill of being placed in harm’s way again and yet again. So no, neither of you are Allan Pinkerton, that’s true — but by God, I’d only hope you didn’t aspire to be. What is it brings you here, exactly?”

“As you say, we work for the government, ma’am. Which, in turn, makes our motivation sadly difficult to explain to
non
-governmental — ”

“Hadn’t noticed Ed garnering any battlefield commissions lately,” Yancey pointed out, “which puts him and me on pretty much common ground, as mere civilians . . . so from that angle, whatever you can’t tell me you can’t tell either of us, and vice versa.”

“Yancey,” Morrow interjected, warningly, but she just rolled her eyes, and rightly so. For what was he likely to do about it, anyhow?

I’m wrapped right ’round this tough little woman’s finger, close as any wedding band
, he thought, without regret;
closer, even. Tied tight as I ever was to Chess, too, though far more comfortably . . . and for most’ve the same reasons.

All of the above, yes. And damnable pleased, in the end, to still be alive enough to be so.

“Well, gentlemen, since you don’t actually seem inclined to threaten my . . . partner and me, I believe I’ll leave you to it — though this isn’t as large a ranch as some, I’m sure there’s honest work yet needs to be done. Shovelling manure, perhaps.”

As she sauntered away, Thiel raised his eyebrows, and whistled. “That’s some lady you’ve yoked yourself to there, Morrow. I’d want to stay on her good side, if I was you.”

“Still should, if you’re smart. Now — since I believe you two probably have a piece to say, you might want to go ahead and say it.”

Geyer nodded. Asking, without further preamble: “Have you seen Chess Pargeter?”

“Since Hex City removed itself from mortal ken? Or since he brought us here?”

“So, all this
was
his work,” Thiel said.

“Who else?” Morrow wondered, logically. “I’m a simple non-magickal, and Yancey’s skills don’t run to fashioning her wants out of thin air. What
is
a bit creepish, though, is how fast you found us.”

“Surely you didn’t think you’d stay undetected.”

“Hoped so, but frankly? No. What drew your eyes?”

“The fact this place didn’t exist, and then it did — that alone argued hexation. But that it appeared paperwork and all made me believe perhaps Missus Kloves was also involved in the planning stages, if not in their execution.”

Morrow leaned back against the well’s adobe brick lip, feeling his old hurts begin to pain. “Chess accounts himself her friend as much as he’s mine, so . . . might be. Tell you straight out, I ain’t privy to all they get up to.”

Chimes alerted them to Yancey as she came back ’round the other side of the house, brushing up against the wind-caller hung above its porch. She didn’t wave while she passed by, just shut the door on them, decisively.

“Do you know where he went?” Thiel demanded, undistracted.

“Nope.”

“Would you tell us, if you did?”

“Am I constrained to answer?”

“Not sure how we’d constrain you, exactly, without force — which, by the by, we’re unlikely to use, you being a hero of the barely averted Second Schism, and all.”

“Then no.”

Geyer smiled, slightly. “That’s what I told him.”

“Yes, yes,” Thiel replied, a touch tetchily, “and on more than one occasion, which is why I now owe you at least five dollars.”

“Only five?”

“Very well, then. Make it ten.”

They seemed quite the team, Morrow thought — easy in their back-and-forth, the way he and Chess had once been, at least during those initial days after Tampico, and he, Chess and Yancey still could be, as proven. Platonic camaraderie infused with just a hint of former intimacies on his part, a certain basic overlap of powers on hers.

Morrow cast his mind back, recalling what it’d been like to watch Chess pull this farm up whole and entire out of the Painted Desert’s hide, like he was unwrapping a buried present, while Yancey hung over his shoulder from behind, whispering directions in his ear: Husbanding it solely from dirt and imagination, sticking floor to frame to walls to roof, while the soil all ’round gave up its salt and let loose with a stream of fresh water, allowing all manner of small green things to commence to grow. Most wonderfully of all, Chess hadn’t appeared to resent her interference — had seemed to relish it, actually. As though he was so damn sick of thinking for himself, just for the nonce, he genuinely craved the idea of taking orders.

Knowing himself superfluous, Morrow had made sure to just stand back with his arms crossed, thinking that as the “normal” person in this equation, he basically had shit-all nothing to bring to the table. And expecting to hear Chess thinking back:
Well,
that
ain’t exactly true . . .

But no — Chess was concentrated still on the house, tongue caught between his teeth, and Morrow felt a bit sad that maybe there was no spark left between ’em anymore; sad, followed by conflicted. What if Yancey heard, and got jealous? Jealous of what, though?

Really not all that much, ever, mutually satisfying fits of revelry aside — not when compared with Chess and the Rev’s operatically poisonous entanglement, its abyssal deeps and hypoxic heights, the bitter fruits sown and reaped. Which left a sting of its own, an unexpected wound, a lack that Morrow had never expected.

This display of creative power came hard on the heels of five days of complete sloth, an addled and sullen silence, during which Morrow and Yancey did little but keep close yet quiet, allowing Chess to suffer through his version of mourning undisturbed, if not alone. He sat with boots off and cross-legged, unwarily shirtless, squinting down where part of the Crack had lain while the sun beat him red — and though his tears had long since dried, a constant storm of dust rose and fell like civilizations in the hollow his stare carved before him: Restless, virulent, boiling.

Sometimes Morrow thought he could glimpse visions in that pit, peering at it over Chess’s freckled shoulder, or almost so. The black corpse-whip of Lady Ixchel’s hair, eddying over exposed bone; the gargantuan creep of Grandma’s spider; Hex City scarring the sky, a six-walled stone tumour. The too-calm face of Reverend Rook caught in mid-air, still falling.

So it went, until the morning Morrow woke to find Chess standing by his bed-roll with arms crossed, barefoot yet, but his fair flesh no longer quite as dangerously flushed.

“Thanks,” was all he could apparently think to say, finally.

Morrow rubbed sleep from his eyes. “No problem,” he offered. “Uh . . . care for a spot of coffee?”

“If all you got on offer’s the same shit I smelled cookin’ this last week, then no.”

A moment later, Yancey came yawning out of the tent they’d raised and stopped short, one eyebrow kiting, to register Chess up and about once more, none the worse for wear.

“Well,” she said, “I’ll go hunt us up some meat.”

“I’d help, you wanted,” Chess offered — and wasn’t
that
a surprise? Almost as much as the way he’d put it, quick and plain-spoke, without any sort of sting to the tail. “Ain’t had to eat for some long time, but . . .”

He spread his hands, a net of sparks flickering briefly from fingertip to fingertip, laced and trailing, at which Yancey just nodded, grown sadly used to the everyday miraculous.

“Might be you could cast a charm, bring the lizards a bit faster? Much obliged, if so.”

“All right.”

An hour after, arrayed ’round the fire Morrow had laid in their absence, they’d eaten stew in silence before Chess finally wiped his mouth on one cuff and said: “Well, seems those Hex City females want me on that council of theirs — sure ain’t ceased to bother me with layin’ out offer on offer for any sort of position might be to my liking, anyhow, this whole time.”