“Go on, Kees,” Chess said, feeling an odd surge of affection toward them both. “Don’t mind her.”
The old Hollander sighed. “Missus Kloves says you’re t’go far as you can, climb up ’til you can’t see the top of things, and then she’ll find you.”
“We’ve already been climbing a while.”
A shrug. “Well, I can only suppose there’s more to go. But as to how much, damn if I know.”
“That’s . . . quite the riddle.”
“All you got, though, ain’t it? So I guess it’ll have to do.”
Once more, they walked on in silence, covering what seemed an interminable distance, ’til at last the way began to slope upward, first shallowly, then steeper. Dark peaks rose slowly, scoring the skyline ahead like teeth. The rocks grew craggier, crowding ’til they had no room to slip beneath either Chess’s boot-soles or Oona’s bleeding feet. Stepping wrong, she went down on one knee with a strangled groan, only to rise up again with Chess pulling on one wrist, Hosteen the other.
“Might be one of us should carry you,” Hosteen said, to which she shook her head and spat, not ungratefully.
“I’m in me prime, son,” she scoffed. “Back at the very ’eight of strength and ’ealth. Day I can’t stomach a trawl like this, you can lay me out an’ frow dirt in my face.”
“You promise?” Chess muttered.
For his jibe, Oona punched him in the biceps, knuckles twisting painful — after which they laughed, long and loud, while Hosteen stood there amazed.
“Jesus,” he said, at last. “You two.”
Aw, you love it, Chess was about to say — a mean little man and the bitch who made him; what’s better entertainment than that? Except it was that exact moment when the Dead Posse’s tumult rose up again, ululating hoarse and rage-filled from one compass-edge to another, causing Hosteen himself to flatten ’gainst the rising cliff face like it was a battlefield trench wall. “Shit’s that?” he hissed, feeling for his own no-longer-holstered gun.
Chess warned him silent with a headshake and a finger-corked shush, and was happy to see himself obeyed. He stared ’round, scanning what was left of the horizon, while Oona wrung his hand. “You see ’em?” she asked.
“Not yet . . . but they’re comin’. I feel it.”
“Me too, God piss on it,” she said, softly.
Those furious phantom hoofbeats rising up through the “earth,” rumbling like the Enemy’s Fifth World gone to quake and ruin. Following the sound’s echoes, Chess managed to sight in on what he thought might be their hunters, a blurred, shadow-black, vast roil of movement only barely perceptible by the shear and swirl of the dimly gleaming grass around it. And — something else as well, dragged twisting in their wake, a piece of snared prey scraped along the unforgiving terrain, twisting in its harness like a steer. Chess didn’t need a clear view to know who that probably was.
“Think they got the Sheriff with ’em,” he told Oona.
“What the ’ell for?”
“’Cause they ain’t got us, and that’s his fault, in their eyes. Now shut up, and let me — ”
“Gettin’ mighty tired of being told that, boy,” Oona growled. “You were the one said t’me, ‘You a ’ex, or ain’tcha?’ Never occurred to you I could back you up? Or is that only for when you got no other choice?”
Chess drew breath to shout, only to be interrupted yet again, this time by Hosteen. “Chess, if she’s anything like as strong as you were, or even the Rev — ”
“She ain’t,” Chess snarled back. “But then again, down here, neither am I. Nothing Goddamn takes in this place.” He kicked a rock in frustration, peevish. “Like goin’ fist to fist with Love all over again — everything I threw at him, he just soaked up. How the hell do you beat something you can’t hurt, Kees?”
“You never did like to deke around a fight, I recall. But we did it, sometimes, when the Lieut told us to — built blinds to hide in, took the bluebellies unawares. Ain’t there no way to do something like that?”
“Shit, I dunno. The one time I did try a glamour, the whole thing backfired on Ed’n me.”
“That’s why you need me, then,” Oona said. “’Cause if there’s one thing I ever ’ad any knack for, it was glamour.” As if to demonstrate the concept, she sidled up, toying with Chess’s top shirt button, fair cooing in one ear: “’Less the ’igh and mighty Private Pargeter’s too proud to take aid from ’is mother, that is. . . .”
So wrong, on every level. But Chess was used to her tricks, even if Hosteen wasn’t. He caught her wrist and smiled back at her, their lips furling just alike, grim and charmless.
“Hell, I’ll take it, all right,” he replied. “But it ain’t gonna be no one-way thoroughfare. I ask and you give, on damn command. Fair enough, Ma?”
“Fair enough.”
If Ash Rook had been there, he’d’ve had a whole page of Holy Writ to trot out, quoting high and low ’til the dim air sparkled with hanging print, and reality itself warped to fit his words’ likeness. For Chess, however — and Oona too, assuming she’d kept hold of her hexation long enough to develop such technique — the mechanics were far rougher, silent and deep, wrenched up from within like the bloody flux.