Seven Threads

by Jason Fischer

  “We’re not exactly sure,” the bull-god said. “Nameless hasn’t done it yet, and all we know is it’s going to be big. Made sense to punish him straight away.”

  “But you made him a no-one. That’s a bit harsh.” Imogen went as if to say more but sat down on the deck, spinning a badminton racquet in her hands. She’d shifted into a goth get-up, a nightmare of black and lace.

  Aurora Luca was onboard and very much alive, a mess of stitches, bruises and cuts. There was a loop of intestine hanging loose from a wound, and he picked and worried at it. Luca shied away from Raoul, only to continue moaning about “being replaced by a bloody bible-bashing robot.”

  Captain King James had been thoroughly infested by the ship. The captain’s hat had become a tricorne, and he paced the deck in finery that would make Napoleon jealous. He still had no features, but now sported a moulded plastic moustache.

  “Render unto Caesar,” he said again, pointing at Raoul’s horns. The ship just wouldn’t give up, even if its only mouthpiece could do nothing but quote the Bible.

  “No deal,” Raoul said. “You cheated me.”

  “But one of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear,” the ship said through the new Captain, and Raoul remembered the damage he saw on boarding. His previous escape had left a puckering wound in the side of The Cheerful Misogynist that would take years to close.

  They’d convinced the boat to take them to the house of Nameless. There was no love lost between Yahweh and this, the most sinful of boats, and it had some score to settle that not even Captain King James would speak of.

  The ship grew a trio of great zeppelins, each a rubber moon fastened to the deck by cables thicker than a man. The landscape passed in a blur but the wait was agonising, Raoul deciding that the rumours of the ship possessing an FTL-drive were just that. Still, it was quicker than far-travel.

  “Mighty son of Minos, what brings you to this pervert’s boat?” Lune purred from beside him. She’d sidled up to the prow where he gripped the railing, and gently entwined his arm. Raoul blinked and then she was holding air, he a few steps away. The best his magick could do while onboard.

  “Don’t, Lune. We’ve spoken on this.”

  “I don’t know why I’m surprised. You’ve broken every heart but hers,” Lune said, pointing at Imogen who was now playing quoits with a leather-bound gimp.

  “I’m not for mazes or any who build them,” Raoul said. “Be my friend if you will, but you’ll not bind me.”

  For a long minute they looked at the yawning distance ahead of them. The Cheerful Misogynist was about to blast through lands which were a mad blend of downtown Chicago, the Katherine Gorge and parts of an arctic tundra.

  “How do you posit that YHWH and Nameless are in cahoots?” Lune said.

  “Only Nameless kept the Old Ways in his head, hoarded every scrap of the One-Way-World he ever had. Yahweh could use that poor fool as a gateway, a focus.”

  “We expected war from the Lord of Hosts,” Lune said. “I helped to guard the waypoints when we closed the One-Way-World, but while we marked his mob of hang-tailed bullies none of us saw him enter.”

  “So it’s to be Yahweh, again,” Raoul said. “We crossed paths long ago, back when he took the Romans from me. From Mithras,” he corrected.

  “I thought he was meant to be the jealous god,” Lune laughed.

  “If I were Yahweh, I’d be heading to the house of Nameless. He thinks us trapped in the pocket-world, which gives him time to act.”

  “Yahweh won’t be able to bring it all forth,” Lune said, but Raoul could smell her uncertainty, the bitter beginnings of a strong fear. “Without a name, he’s nothing to bind it to.”

  #

  They saw the house of Nameless, slumped across the cliffs like the broken man who lived there. Some time back they caught the far-travel wake of Yahweh, and through a sticky field-glass that King James offered Raoul he could spot the broken god entering the front door.

  “Curse your sluggard of a boat!” Raoul said, snapping the glass closed. “Ram it! Bring the whole place down!”

  But there was enough vinegar left in the old god to keep the ship at bay. Try as it might, The Cheerful Misogynist was grounded, straining against Yahweh’s invisible hand.

  Raoul and the others were out, rappelling down ropes or gliding on dreamt-up wings. There were enough holes in Yahweh’s fence that they could slip through on foot.

  Imogen was back to khaki’s and a t-shirt, and for some reason had the remote control for Raoul’s entertainment centre in her hand. Lune was passive, reining her aspects in till she needed one of them. Captain King James hobbled along, a plastic fop with nothing but a bunch of scripture in his head.

  They were through the open front door, and the cat/s bombarded them, a hundred toms from the size of a kitten to tiger size. They snarled and hissed and scratched until Lune brought forth Bast in all her awful glory. The cat/s disappeared into whatever shadows they could, slipping from the anger of their lady.

  “Puss is an Egyptian word,” Lune/Bast said. “They’ve never been allowed to forget me.”

  It would take hours to search the house, but Yahweh left a sour funk that Raoul could easily follow, a smell that spoke to his delicate nostrils of loss and lust, of spilled seed and dust.

  “The stairs of course,” and they were up and running, Raoul running his horns along the banister when the house itself sought to delay them. Then they were up in the den, and Raoul saw Nameless kneeling on the ground, his box of momentos tipped over and spread on the floor around him.

  “Be wary, Nameless,” Raoul said. “Your old master walks in your halls.”

  Nameless looked up at the minotaur, and Raoul saw the ripple, the signs of a limitless being that has hidden in flesh for too long.

  “Mute him!” he instructed Imogen, who thumbed the appropriate button on the remote control, but she was too slow. Yahweh spoke through the mouth of Nameless, and returned his name to him.

  The One-Way-World began to slowly erupt from his mouth, an obscene bubble of galaxies and sparkling nebula. Every muscle straining against that impossible weight, Raoul lifted Nameless, a floppy doll with eyes rolling, oblivious to the intrusion.

  “Call your boat,” he told King James. “Do it!”

  He could see the plastic mouth moving, but the words coming out were like treacle, mere sounds against a greater darkness. Raoul was being drawn into the maelstrom, the One-Way-World that was growing by inches.

  He dimly noted that Lune brought out the feared Durga aspect, and the trendy flapper outfit peeled away to reveal a three-eyed ten-armed killer, bristling with weapons. She was hacking away at the walls and one hand was contorted into a little-known mudrā, negating the very house beneath them. She wanted to put a blade through Yahweh’s throat but Raoul kept her at horn’s length, circling him protectively with his enormous arms. Injuring Yahweh at this point could mean the undoing of all things. No second chances, not even a One-Way-World to fester in. Nothing but oblivion.

  “The boat,” he cried through the treacle darkness, and when he saw Imogen it all made sense. Imogen had the remote held level, and was thumbing a button over and over. Raoul guessed it to be “pause” or “slow-tracking” or similar. Either way, Raoul hadn’t replaced the batteries for a thousand years, and they were only held in with duct-tape anyways. This wouldn’t work for long.

  Lune/Durga cancelled a wall of Nameless’s house into shivers of nothing, and slipping into her Diana skin she launched arrows at something in the distance. Each shot was an eternity as she nocked the arrow and drew it to her cheek, the same cheek that Raoul had kissed and nuzzled and made false promises to. She blinked as she was aiming, and set her tongue just so. Release, and the arrow slowly glided forward.

  She’s cutting a path for the boat, he realised, and even as the remote control finally failed and Lune/Diana was firing dozens of arrows per second, Yahweh’s fence shattered. Captain King James touched the tip of his tr
icorne with a plastic hand, and a moment later the enormity of the boat pulled alongside the shattered house.

  They were level with the tear in the hull, the evidence of Raoul’s escape that should be down near the ground. Raoul guessed what the boat was planning, and with no other choice he pitched Yahweh and Nameless through the hole. They fell into the guts of The Cheerful Misogynist, along with the growing seed that was the One-Way-World.

  #

  “Well, it’s a fetish boat, and the One-Way-World just happens to be Yahweh’s fetish,” Raoul said. “It makes sense to trap him there.”

  They were following the secret paths to Raoul’s house via far-travel, Imogen clutched to his broad woolly chest as his legs ate up the miles.

  “He’ll figure it out,” Imogen said.

  “Yahweh thinks he won, and who are we to tell him any different. Let him run his little play-world, I know I won’t bother him.”

  Imogen stared at him again, at the stub where his left horn was. It would take perhaps a hundred years to grow back, and he’d been halved in more ways than he cared to admit.

  “A fair deal,” Raoul said. “The ship hid you for fifty years, so they get one horn.”

  They stood at his front door now, and as Raoul reached for the key Imogen snatched it out of his hand, with a speed that was suspiciously reminiscent of Lune. She tucked the key into a fanny-pack that she had suddenly decided was cool.

  “I want you to help Nameless,” she said, gamely blocking the minotaur from his house. “You’ve punished him enough. It’s wrong to leave him stuck in that boat with Yahweh, the pair of them dreaming over a seed of a world. Or a universe, or whatever.”

  “It’s what they both want,” Raoul sighed. “Neither of them want to be here, surely we owe them this small kindness.” Imogen was defiant, but even she could see reason and fished out the chunky brass key, the one that could open the Great Library at Alexandria as well as a Starbucks in Melbourne.

  He unlocked the door and jerked it open, but instead of his filthy apartment he could see a great frothing sea, and perched on a murderous wave was The Cheerful Misogynist. He could make out Lune’s dummy on the prow, holding up a yellow curve that was his horn.

  Raoul slammed the door shut.

  “I wanted to move anyway,” he said.

  Gunning for a Tinkerman

  Lanyard was gunning for a tinkerman.

  The hunt had taken him from Overland to Inland, an endless sunburnt landscape that made his eyes swim and attention wander. The only trees were those that hugged the dead watercourses, hoping for a big rain. Everything else was dust and twisted stone.

  A strong wind punished his sails, and the rusty tube-frame shook under the strain. The wheels of the skiff churned up the fine dust and threatened to become airborne. Lanyard played the cords like a puppet-master, bringing in one sail while steering with his free hand.

  Rounding a sharp bend in the tradeway, he saw it and swore. He yanked up the sails, hauling back on the choke-stick for all he was worth.

  It was a grandfather of a serpent, curled up in the middle of the track. The snake had brought down the telegraph line, as they sometimes did when they were hungry or lazy. It knew people would come to fix the damage in a day or two, and waited with a patience honed by decades of blistering Inland summers.

  The snake came for him, head low to the ground, drove forward, faster than a man could run, and it was all Lanyard could do to leap clear before its great coils were crushing the skiff. The tubular frame squealed under that immense force, and the wind-cart tipped over as the snake poured towards the man.

  Sixty feet of muscle. Scales bigger than tea-saucers. Great fangs that could pierce an engine block. It rose up above him, ready to strike. In that final panicked moment Lanyard saw it had great gleaming slits for eyes, angry orbs which had seen a hundred years or more. It had been here before the settlers, might be here when the last of them died under these unwelcome skies.

  Lanyard had a revolver out and squeezed the trigger quicker than thought, sending thunder into that death’s head, rolling aside as the snake drove its fangs into the dusty earth. He got lucky and shattered one of those eyes into jelly. Another bullet into its tail as it fled, wounded, over the lip of the dry watercourse that hugged the tradeway.

  He saw it slip up the other side of the dead creek, slithering into the bush and Lanyard knew he should chase it, make sure it was dead. Folks told tales about the snakes of Inland, that they were vengeful and crafty. He’d bled it, and it might follow him now, come for him some quiet evening. Perhaps it already waited up ahead, wrapped around an overhanging gum tree, ready to drop on him as he passed underneath.

  “I’ll take your other eye, grandfather,” Lanyard called out, his heart pounding and nerves shot. Groaning against the weight of the motor mounted behind his seat, he pushed the skiff back onto its wheels. He had to leave, now.

  The skiff rode on old bicycle tires, one of which the snake had bent out of shape. It was more than Lanyard could fix with his bare hands, but when he hoisted the sails and released the chock-stick it all seemed to work.

  A hot wind punched at his sails, and he rolled along the road at a terrifying pace. He shot past a rusty sheet of tin nailed to a tree, painted to read “BEWARE OF SNAKES”.

  “Good advice,” he said.

  #

  He hadn’t always been a hunter of men, and in a time he preferred to forget Lanyard Everett was once prentice to that most despicable of characters, a jesusman.

  Bauer was an old man when he sniffed Lanyard out, one of the last to walk openly under signs that brought death these days. Back then Lanyard was little more than a wretch on the wrong side of crooked, with his ribs showing and only the hope of a short and pointless life before him.

  “We’re not meant to be here, in the Now,” the jesusman confessed to his new prentice. “Seems the Lord of the Crossing took a wrong turn. Or else this dust-bowl was his true destination, and a grander joke than I can understand.”

  Lanyard nodded, hating the man. This proved to be the first of many disappointments.

  #

  Lanyard knew that Thomas Cobbler, the tinkerman, was in this district, paying visit to the rough holdings that somehow existed between the towns.

  The winds died off perhaps ten miles down the road, and the skiff rolled to a gentle halt. The flippant Inland weather had stranded him in the middle of nowhere, sails limp in the sticky air.

  With a worried eye to the bush Lanyard checked the motor. He unscrewed the fuel cap, saw that the little tank was bone-dry. He had a flask of grain fuel and poured in about three-quarters of what he had, the trickle of liquid smelling something like rotgut moonshine mixed with kerosene.

  Some folks drank the stuff, drunks who didn’t mind going blind. When they got that desperate they were already dead.

  The motor caught on the third try, coughing and belching blue smoke. This skiff was a marvel of scavenger engineering, bits of this and that cobbled together with spit and string. He threw the lever that connected the drive-chain, and the whole thing lurched forward.

  “Don’t die on me,” he pleaded, watching for the snake; the motor chugged away. He knew that one day soon it would seize up, like all Before-Time stuff did.

  Lanyard opened the throttle a little and made good time. He drew in all the sails, all but the tiny fore-sail which he watched for signs of fuel-saving wind.

  There was a holding up ahead, some mad townsman keen to gamble against nature. The homestead was a shabby patchwork of corrugated iron and rust, ringed by rail fences which kept in a handful of sheep and the beginnings of a barn and stable. Some starving chooks scratched at a handful of feed scattered across the dead ground.

  Lanyard steered the skiff from the tradeway and up to the shanty, passing a boundary of stones painted blue to stand out against the cracked red earth. That meant this place was protected by town-law.

  He cut the motor and pulled back on the chock-stick till
the wheels locked. Stepping out of the skiff he walked up to the shack, hauling a pistol out of his pocket which he held against the side of his leg.

  A fella who must have been the farmer came out the front door, waving the business end of a rifle at him. His free hand had a dog by the collar, a half-breed native mutt which strained forward, slavering and growling. A bite from such could kill a man the slow way, his tongue black and back arched, throat scraped raw by desperate fingernails.

  “Bugger off,” the man said, swallowing nervously. “Nothing here for you.”

  Lanyard said nothing, just eyeballed the settler.

  There was a wobbly windmill missing a vane, filling the silence with rusty squeals as it span madly, herald to an angry black cloud rolling in from the south. A line was strung out from the verandah, clothes pegged to it, shirts billowed like sails. A basket had been dropped to the ground, spilling linen onto the dirt where the ants crawled all over it. Probably left there by the farmer’s sheila, likely some leathery old tart who’d seen too much sun. She’d be hiding inside the hovel, fearing any stranger if she had sense.

  “You give me honest answers, I’ll leave you be,” Lanyard said. “I’m looking for a tinkerman, Thomas Cobbler.”

  “You find him, you send him here. The record player won’t work, and me motorbike’s seized up again,” the farmer said. Lanyard tapped the gun against his leg impatiently.

  “Look mate, I don’t have time to muck around. Where is Cobbler?”

  “You gunna kill him?”

  Lanyard said nothing.

  “You must be some sort of fool, mister,” said the man. “You can’t touch him. It’s town-law.”

  Lanyard could see the man measuring the odds, waved the pistol to scare some sense into him.

  “He’s at The Folly. His windfarm,” the man added. “You won’t miss it, great mess of windmills stuck on a hill about fifty miles north. No water there worth boring for, but he’s the tinkerman not you nor I.”

  Lanyard bartered with the settler for grain-fuel, swapped him a pouch of tobacco for enough to get him to the windfarm. All the while their guns were out and the mongrel snarling where it had been chained to the verandah post. Lanyard carried a sloshing jerry-can back to the skiff and casually topped up the tank, figuring if the farmer meant to shoot him he’d have done it by now.