“You’re my best gun, Lanyard. You never lose it when they’re throwing glass and shit at you. Men die and I always got to press new recruits, but you ...” Gareth was rolling, sweaty drunk, the way he got when a job went well. Lanyard drank very little, knowing that part of his job was to guard this man. Focusing on work kept a man from thinking too much.
“You worth ten of them river bitches,” he said, glassy eyed sincerity. “I love you Lanyard, I do.”
“You don’t love anyone,” one of the taursi said. He was standing over them both, sharp spines puffing out aggressively. Lanyard already had the shotgun and a pistol out, covering the room. He could see the tip of a battle-glass, the sharp point pushing through the webbing of its hand.
He could see the tell-tale dull glow of the spines drawing the heat away from its body, knew the native was brewing up a batch of hurt. A taursi could cut up a man slow on the trigger.
“This one here, he only loves money. If things went wrong, he would leave you to die.” Lanyard agreed silently but kept pressure on the triggers. He was running low on ammo but no-one needed to know that.
“If you know who I am, you know you court strife,” Gareth laughed. “You touch me, a crew will wipe your people out.”
“You groggers already wiped my people out,” the taursi said. He backed down, quills lowered. Nodding once at Lanyard, the enormous creature returned to its seat and its drink.
He stood guard at the door when Gareth went to relieve himself. That was when the taursi made a quiet offer to Lanyard, and he wasn’t surprised. They’d only been testing him.
“We’ve heard whispers of what you are.”
“I’m no-one.” Always, the tired denial, eyes wary for a fist or worse.
“A dark day when we need to search out your kind,” the drunkest spiney said. “This was our land, till your dying man brung you lot here.”
“That’s not my problem. Be quick, Gareth returns.”
“We were sent for want of a jesusman. We have a witching fella what needs seeing to.”
They slipped some taursi glass into his hands, which he didn’t even look at. He left Gareth snoring that night, knowing the fat gangster would only pretend to be mad if and when he returned for more work.
They made good time through the scrub and then cut across the salt-flats, the taursi bounding along a path that Lanyard had trouble seeing in the dark. They slowed down for the man, he didn’t have the long sweeping dog-legs that they did.
Every few miles they passed a great mound of glass, tall like a termites’ nest. They were like beacons, great spires that lit the plains. There was no sense to these sculptures, he guessed they were for navigating but the natives wouldn’t talk about them. He was glad to pass them by, he gauged them to be the size of your average taursi and didn’t want to know much more.
Just before dawn they reached the camp. He could see the dim glow of much taursi glass, knew that this tribe hadn’t sold its heritage. He’d heard of wild taursi, pushed from the good land but still living the old ways. Perhaps was only these young ones what snuck grog beneath their elder’s snouts.
Lanyard didn’t speak taurse, but he knew some of their signs. He’d never seen a tribe like this before, a dozen different clan standards dotted the fire-ground. Their best clan glass glittered in the morning light, tied with long ropes of sinew along a cross-stave. He knew the patterns of knots meant something, like a calendar or something to do with numbers, but then again no-one cared about the natives save for what they could steal from them. A clan standard went for a small fortune in the towns, for streetlights and such.
“We’re a mob of leftover tribes, bits and pieces,” one of his guides said. “Them grog-men and the slavers have ruined the rest.” Lanyard had been both things and deemed it wise to say nothing.
They called for their elders in their sharp honking tongue, and they came out, suspicious and hateful of the man-folk the young taursi had brought to them.
“There’s a witching fella roaming our lands,” one of them said in halting man-talk. “We’ve sent our kin to drive him away, but none of them come back.”
“I’ll give you advice,” Lanyard said. “Move on. You got witch trouble, you leave or it will kill you.”
“No moving on,” the elder snarled. “You man-folk take all the good land. We got nowhere left but here.”
Lanyard gathered his thoughts, rolled a cigarette. He was running low on tobacco, but offered the pouch to the taursi. He was just being polite and knew they would decline, smokes making most taursi ill. They looked ridiculous when they tried, with a lit durry hanging out of that droopy snout.
“I can track the witch and find its home, so you can mark it and avoid it. No more than that, not for all your glass. Move on and live.”
“Why you come then?” the old one said. “You knew we got a witch. Most man-folk say, “they just stupid taursi, let them die”. Why you really here?”
He could have talked about a young lad he’d left to die in his place. Shame was a currency the taursi definitely understood, but Lanyard didn’t speak. He just put down the glass what they’d paid him with already and walked away. He heard them cursing him in their tongue but he didn’t turn around. When he was out of their sight, he checked his pockets. He had enough ammo left to do what needed doing.
~ * ~
He lay flat on a broad rock and looked like a denim gecko, an overhang shading him from the murderous sun that was already baking the salt-flats below. He’d felt enough signs to guess he was close.
There’d been the distant buzzing, like a mosquito was trapped in his ear. His teeth began to ache, just a little.
“Come out, you pale piece of shit,” he muttered, checking his gear again. The shotgun was ready, both barrels. He had a revolver and a newer gun that loaded from a clip, but these might not be much good. Still, a rain of bullets should give anything a moment of doubt.
He reefed out a pair of field-glasses from his battered satchel. They’d come through the shift from Before-Time with almost no damage, just a scratch on the left lens. Cost him a fortune, but worth every coin.
He thumbed the focus dial, and Lanyard could see a pair of taursi, hunting some small creature far below. They brought it down with battle-glass, and while they were busy skinning it the witch showed itself.
There was nothing Lanyard could do from this distance. He could only watch as a white shape loped across the ground with great mile-eating strides, unnaturally quick. The low buzz in Lanyard’s ear jumped to a painful screech, and then there was just the horrible vision of a great shifting shape eating the taursi alive.
A witch knew the right words, the ones to persuade the living to keep perfectly still while it ripped at their flesh. They would feel everything.
Lanyard Everett was no fool. He did not slither down from his hiding place, go charging across the open ground with guns a blazing.
It took hours, but the witch ate the pair spines and all, finally cracking the last bone open to get to the marrow. The pain in Lanyard’s teeth had been greatest by this spot, so he knew the witch had a lair in these hills. It wouldn’t be the true nest, just the crossing point. The witch would pass by, with a full belly and dull wits, and Lanyard would do his best to kill it.
He could see the witch clearly now, weaving as if drunk. It had the form of a great obese man, and then the pasty white flesh ran like wax until the witch was a dog whose belly dragged upon the ground, then it became a great fleshy cloud out of a nightmare that had trouble moving. It settled for wearing a man’s skin, and came lurching up the path. The pain grew, a dull ache in his bones as the witch approached.
The witch would only be thinking of sleep now, and so it didn’t see Lanyard waiting on the rocks above. The sun flashed on the barrel of the gun, etched with little signs of the crossing-man, words from another world.
Close now, and he leaned over the edge, tracking the witch. His fingers caressed the double-trigger, but there was a noise o
n the rock next to him. He swung the gun up but suddenly his skull was a firepit and noise filled his universe like a thousand screams as a second witch sang him into oblivion.
~ * ~
“Wake up jesusman,” one of the witches said. He knew without looking that they would have him in one of their nests, those grey spaces halfway between Before and Now. If he were awake they’d never have got him through the door, they needed him asleep for that.
“Yes wake up jesusman, we know what you are’ the other said. They spoke in a mixture of words and mind-raping thoughts that sounded like radio static and made his head throb. He was tied up, against something hard.
“You know nothing,” Lanyard said. They had him naked in the grey place and bound to something, and he could see both whens as if through filthy glass.
One witch ran a sharp stub of yellow fingernail across Lanyard’s chest, tracing the outline of his jesus tattoo. It would have been elaborate, but he’d abandoned it years ago, half-finished.
“Such beautiful ink, a shame to be left undone,” the witch sighed.
“We can’t find many of your kind in the Now,” said the other witch. It took the form of Gareth from his mind, wore it to make a point. “It is delicious to eat a misguided fool.”
“Most jesusmen found a way back to Before,” the witch touching him laughed. He dug his nails in hard, lifting skin. “They’re not welcome in the Now, are they Lanyard?”
“Neither are you,” Lanyard said. His arms were really beginning to ache, and then he realized. They’d crucified him.
“We’ve half a jesusman and eternity to play with it,” not-Gareth said. “What shall we do?”
“The tattoo,” the first witch said, maggoty flesh melting and reforming into the skin of Lanyard himself, not a mirror image but something crooked and wrong. “If it wants to wear a picture of the crossing-man, it needs finishing.”
“Fool! Shut your mouth.”
Terrified, Lanyard looked through the dirty glass separating Before and Now, wondering what they were going to do to him. Knowing that he would die here, and hard.
~ * ~
An age they kept him there, stuck between the wheres and the whens. Not-Lanyard and Not-Gareth were well-fed and did not need to hunt. From what Lanyard knew, they didn’t need to eat often, not till their world-hopping and phantasms drained them.
They visited every kind of torture on him, short of eating his flesh. He was violated, hunted in mazes conjured from nothing, made to confess his darkest secrets while screaming in pain.
They broke him down to nothing, he who wasn’t much of a man to begin with. Then, just to build up his hopes, they let him go. He took ten steps through the salt-flats, breathed in the clean fresh air of the Now, then they snatched him up, dragged him screaming back through the ether, back to their nest and the cross. This time they used spikes, not rope.
He flexed his fingers, whips of agony dancing around the spike through his palm. Touching the ragged wound, his fingertip was soaked in his own blood, and on his palm he made a mark he’d never meant to, a simple cross,
“Help me,” crucified Lanyard said, and was suddenly somewhere else. He was sitting by a cookfire in the middle of scrub, ten years younger and dressed in the patched manner of a crooked man. Bauer the old jesusman was sitting there, wearing the slouch-hat and poking at the little critter he’d killed for their supper.
“Never could understand you, Mister Everett,” the dead man said. “You coveted my stuff so much you bust my head open with that rock,” and crooked Lanyard saw the jagged stone in his own hands, seconds before being covered with brain and bits of skull. “If you’d asked, I’d have given you everything I owned.”
“Where am I?” Lanyard asked, dropping the stone.
“Oh, you’re still in that grey place, two witches tormenting you. You’re just paying an old man a visit. You made the mark of something you don’t believe in, but make the mark you did.”
“The jesus?”
“Enough with the semantics. You have perhaps a few moments before your hosts discover you’re not in your head.” He hoisted up the shotgun, threw it to Lanyard who caught it. The weapon felt real, cold and mean. “You need to bring this to the grey place.”
“Send me back. I’ll deal with them.”
“The gun’s not real, just a shadow of a dream,” Bauer said. “You need a mark to get it to you.”
“I already made the mark,” he said, confused.
“Not enough. You need to somehow make this,” Bauer said, poking the fire a little more. With his free hand he popped open his shirt studs, revealing the jesus tatt on his leathery chest. The ink was of a bleeding man bound tight, hands clenched into fists but for his pointer fingers, one to left, the other the right. BEFORE and NOW were writ under each hand.
“You need a true image of the lord of the crossing, and only that will open a way for you.”
“Why are you helping me? I killed you.”
“You went gunning for a witch, not for coin or even to save yourself. You’re following the rules and that makes you a jesusman. Like it or not.”
Then the scrub was gone and Lanyard was back in the witchs’ nest. They knew he’d been somewhere else, and they brought the hurting to him worse than ever.
~ * ~
They broke him over and over, till even those base creatures grew tired of such games. They meant to eat him, a failed jesusman, munch his marrow in that nowhere land. Lanyard had lost all novelty for them, and they grew hungry.
“Enough of this,” Lanyard wheezed, before they could maul him where he lay bound. He was starting to die the slow death, every breath an agony as his weight pulled against the slivers of iron driven through his palms. “You mean to eat me, then do it, but at least give me a belt of grog. The good stuff, so good you’ll even taste it as you gorge on my gizzards.”
They laughed at this, and Not-Lanyard gave a solemn bow. “A final request it is then,” he said. They set to searching the Before-Time for a grog-shop, and he knew they’d be some long moments breaking through the dirty glass of this between place. He saw them pilfering often from the various whens, like bower-birds.
His right arm taut and trembling, he made a clumsy fist, pushed forward. The spike slid through his ragged palm, grating against the little bones and making him moan in pain.
When he’d been bound only with a loop of hemp, he’d been picking at a long sliver of wood on the wooden cross-beam, slowly working it loose. He snapped it free now, saw that it had a long jagged end. Perfect.
The witches were concentrating on their thieving, had torn a narrow hole into the Before-Time. Not-Gareth was pushing a waxy tentacle into a shop, reaching for a bottle of scotch. He’d need to be quick.
Lanyard stabbed his stomach with the sharp splinter, biting down on his lip so he wouldn’t cry out. He tried again, breaking the skin. With agonizing slowness he made a shallow cut, tracing the broken outline of his tattoo. It bled like a bastard, and he found it hard to guide the cut where it had to go. He completed the outline on his torso, crude but a true enough mark.
Bauer had spoken of the crossing-man, the jesus who’d dragged his mindless followers through this grey nothing place and was still in between somewhere. Lanyard finally understood, himself stretched out between the Before and the Now, and reached into the Now with his free hand.
All his kit, left out in the sun. Clothes, torn to shreds.
The gun!
Not-Gareth turned from its thieving to see that he’d freed an arm, and came running, the grog forgotten. The last thing it saw was the double-O of the shotgun, and then Lanyard drove eternity out of the witch with one thunderous round. Not-Lanyard lunged for him with lightning speed, and Lanyard fired the second barrel. His shattered hand was aching, and his aim wasn’t true. He only wounded it, and the witch crawled from him, shrieking and cursing him and trying to open a door to somewhere else.
“Come and eat me!” Lanyard cried, struggling with his le
ft hand. He pulled it free from the spike, and then fell sideways like a sack of stones, feet still tied to the main shaft of the cross and his legs twisted together painfully. They’d wanted his feet intact for hunting him, did not drive a spike through them for authenticity.
He tore the rope free with his fumbling bleeding hands, even as the witch used the last of its strength to tear a hole through the dirty glass. It crawled for freedom, gibbering and changing shape and looking at Lanyard with terror in its eyes. He limped across the nest, put his naked foot across something that might have been the witch’s neck.
“Put you down, like the dog you are,” Lanyard said, hefting the empty gun by its hot barrels. He hammered the life out of the witch, and then some.
The Year's Best Australian SF & Fantasy - vol 05 Page 6