PAPA LUCY & THE BONEMAN:
THE BOOKS OF BEFORE AND NOW BOOK ONE
Copyright © 2021 Jason Fischer. All rights reserved.
Published by Outland Entertainment LLC
3119 Gillham Road
Kansas City, MO 64109
Founder/Creative Director: Jeremy D. Mohler
Editor-in-Chief: Alana Joli Abbott
Senior Editor: Gwendolyn Nix
Media: Tara Cloud Clark
ISBN: 978-1-947659-88-9
Worldwide Rights
Created in the United States of America
Editor: Gwendolyn N. Nix
Cover Illustration: Steve Firchow
Cover Design: Jeremy D. Mohler
Interior Layout: Mikael Brodu
The first draft of Papa Lucy was funded by Arts South Australia in 2011.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or fictitious recreations of actual historical persons. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the authors unless otherwise specified. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
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To Kate, Logan and Lottie, you are my everything.
— PROLOGUE —
On the shore of a lake, a midden rose from the grit. A cairn of bone and shell could be seen for many miles, nothing more than a nameless curiosity to most. Over long centuries, travellers had added to this midden, stacking their sacrifices until the grave became a hill, the hill a shifting plain of death. Now, it only served as a landmark.
Over time, the purpose of this enormous shrine of bone was forgotten. Only the maddest or most fervent made the trip to this lonely place. Those who stayed reported bad dreams, an eerie feeling that the midden was calling to them, and always, the urge to climb into the grave, to burrow deep, deep into the bones.
Then the pilgrims stopped visiting altogether. Pilgrimages to Sad Plain became more popular, where the faithful gathered up shards of glass. They sliced at their feet and faces, wailing and petitioning the Family—Papa Lucy for protection, the Lady Bertha to curse an enemy.
Few came to call upon the Boneman.
So when the midden shifted, bones and rubble sliding and crashing into a cloud of fine white dust, there was no one to witness it. One whole side of the cairn collapsed, leaving the dome in ruins.
A naked man emerged from the midden, covered in centuries of filth. The woken sleeper clambered across the carpet of calcified shards. On shaky legs, he headed for the water’s edge and waded out into the soupy murk, sluicing the brine along his face and arms, washing away the thick crust that clung to his flesh.
This lake had been fresh water once, fed by streams from the nearby Range, and clear all the way to the sandy bottom. The fish had been plentiful here. He’d known many friends in the fishing villages, spent several pleasant summers hidden here. It had been his favourite escape from the intrigues of Crosspoint.
Now it was a place of desolation, of death fully realised. The water was still and stank of sulphur, its basin ringed with dried scum. The thick grass on the dunes had died off, and the sand drifted now, blowing through the burnt ruins of the old villages, holiday spots where he’d loved and laughed and walked as a man.
That was all before Sad Plain. They had all been injured that day, but none were struck so badly as he. The fiery kiss of the enemy had melted the very flesh from his bones, but he could not die. His blackened skeleton had stood firm when the fires guttered and he had walked on, the visible frame of his bones held together by nothing but his own dark magics.
His mastery over death was no easy thing to set aside.
His brother fallen. His wife swallowed into madness. All of their forces scattered and broken. He’d fought on alone. Allies turned foes, a city turned to shards, the world itself turning on them. The Mother of Glass. Only his skeletal shape stood firm, destroying the enemy when things were at their darkest. This broken sorcerer had been many things before Sad Plain, but ever afterwards he was known as the Boneman.
“It worked, brother,” he said out loud, his voice hoarse, his throat coated with a thick slime. The magic had taken centuries, and more death than he could imagine, but the flesh had grown back onto his body. He could feel the contours of his face, his shoulders and arms.
Smiling, he scrubbed furiously, the caked-on grot giving way to the vinegary brine, coating the still surface of the water with a spreading film of grease.
Then he saw it.
“No,” the Boneman whispered, rubbing at his eyes. Was he going crazy? He’d been aware throughout his internment, a clever mind bound in a dark place, each thought a decade in the making.
What he saw was real enough, and not his imagination. His arm had the shape and feel of the old limb, but it didn’t look right. The skin was see-through and rubbery, a translucent gelatine coating him from head to toe. Once he’d been olive-skinned, but now he was the colour of toffee.
Jellied organs, opaque muscles, all of his parts were present and working. But even now, after all this time, he remained an abomination. He was not fit to be seen walking the busy streets of Crosspoint.
He wept, and the tears were knives pushing through his eyes, long dormant tear ducts leaking across his face.
Is Crosspoint even there, still? he thought. What if I’ve slept through everything?
Wading through the lake, the Boneman pushed through the slick of scum he’d washed from himself. The lake water was too cloudy for the sunlight to penetrate, and once the ripples ceased, he could see his reflection quite clearly.
A skull stared up from the water. The bone was wrapped in the same smoky rubber as the rest of him, his jaw-bone and teeth clearly visible, a dark ladder of vertebrae feeding into the base of that terrifying visage. A jelly beak protruded from his nasal cavity, a nose perfect in every dimension save that it was see-through, as were his lips. His tongue was like a sea-slug, a clear thing darting out past his blackened teeth.
His eyes were the only parts of him that remained, soft and brown and witness to far too many horrors. It was all that had escaped the fires, perhaps the cruellest part of this curse.
Our enemy could not kill me, so she left me the means to see myself. To live as a monster forever, he thought.
So this is what it feels like to have won.
The Boneman shuffled back towards the shore. A chill wind blew across the lake’s surface. The raised goosebumps felt obscene as they ran along his see-through arms.
He felt cold, after feeling nothing for so long. The Boneman took stock of his new body, feeling all his other processes revive. His lungs wheezed, his coiled bag of guts squirmed, and his heart squeezed out a flow of whatever passed for blood in this jellied flesh.
A cloud, heavy with moisture and the colour of mustard, passed across the sun. He walked towards the ruined village as the rain broke, fat drops that stank of iron and stung his eyes.
The Boneman stepped around a handful of boats drawn up to the ruins, wood rotting and bleached bone-white by centuries of sunlight. The bottoms of all the boats were staved in.
Passing through a sand-choked door, the Boneman entered one of the huts. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw a tangle of nets and long man-bones, fat clusters of trinkets, and other homemade magic nailed to every available surface.
He puzzled out the charms, the patterns of colourful beads and knotwork. They tingled with failed p
otential and soured hope.
The Boneman spent the night in that forgotten place, alone with the cracked pottery and the ephemera of the long-dead family. Although the roof leaked and the wind howled through gaps in the battered planking, it was better than being out in the open. He found a flint stone and a heavily scratched striker that was probably older than the village itself. It seemed appropriate for him, so he kept it, making a fire to warm himself from the broken bones of the boats.
The sparks from the striker terrified him, and he cringed from the first lick of flame. He fought down the fear, fought down the memory of his flesh melting, running from his bones. He was cold, and this wasn’t just a fire, it was survival.
He did not sleep, having slept for far too long. He watched the play of shadows on the wall instead, and spent the stormy night with the company of ghosts and memories, anything to avoid thinking of what he was meant to do now.
The far doors were closed to him now, and so were the shadow roads. When the Boneman pushed at the fabric between the worlds, it felt…different. His will slid across the boundaries of the universe as though they were greased, and he could not get a grip upon them.
Other magics were harder to perform now. Moving a pebble a short distance with his mind left him weak and shaky. When he reached out to the rest of the Family, he heard nothing but the chill silence of the Aum, that mirror-land throwing back his words. It was the first act of an apprentice mage to bounce messages across that invisible realm, much like a child skips stones across water. By rights, he should have been able to easily reach into it, find word of his brother.
Something was keeping him out.
The sun climbed through the sky, baking the storm-soaked ground into humidity. The Boneman left the village and the dead lake forever. He looked back only once, to wonder at the scale of the midden his brother had built above him.
Cradling the flint and striker, the Boneman owned nothing else but his nudity and the growing hunger in his gut. He was terribly thirsty, but he was not foolish enough to drink from the poisoned lake water.
Be an ascetic, he scolded himself. It’s not like you actually need to eat or drink.
As the thought came to him, he wasn’t sure if this was true now. So many things had changed. Perhaps he had nothing left to him now but mortality, a second chance with a body that hadn’t turned out right.
The old lake road was pitted and overgrown with weeds, and he followed it back to the tradeway. A wayhouse had once stood there, strategically located on the route between Crosspoint and Langenfell. He remembered the small cluster of shops that serviced the holidaymakers, the taverna that raged all hours of the night.
During his slumber, he’d heard the faint whispers of pilgrims in the town, felt their essences trickle towards the midden. For a while, the visitors believed they slept at a safe enough distance, but too many of them visited the cairn, slipping into the bones and breathing their last. Soon, the wayhouse was abandoned, and the Boneman left alone in his tomb.
He walked through the cracked clay buildings, saw the field of sagging poles where merchants had once tethered horses and the big lizards used for haulage work. The taverna was still standing, and he spent a few minutes inside, nudging through the broken bottles and plates. He remembered bringing his wife here, the grand nights of cards, of philosophies argued until dawn, of friendships sworn and toasted to.
All of those people were dead now. He left that place quickly, the memories sitting bitter on his mind.
The Boneman sat cross-legged in the market square, where only the scars of old peg holes remained to show where the stalls had been. The sun beat down upon his bizarre body while he cast his mind outwards, looking for anything: a sign of civilisation, even a lone traveller who could tell him where the places of men were in this age—if they did not flee in terror when they saw him.
He found nothing but the rats in the ruins and other creatures roaming the hills about, native beasts thriving in the absence of the settlers. He called to them and even gave summons to a great serpent lurking in its nest, but he was too weak to seize control. They easily shook off the strange tickle in their simple minds.
Lip curling, the Boneman called for the rats. Soon a pair came before him, pale and sleek, eyes glazed, small rib-cages heaving rapidly. He snapped their necks clumsily and wondered how he’d go about eating them.
Further searching revealed a knife half eaten by rust and a musty old rug that he turned into a poncho by cutting a hole for his head. While looking for more wood to feed his tiny cook fire, the Boneman saw something behind a stable that drew him up short.
A light horse cart, wearing the decay of decades, not centuries. The tyres were flat, the rubber tubing cracked, but there was plenty of junk in the wayhouse. He might be able to fix this. The cart was in good shape, and it wouldn’t take much to get it rolling again.
A skeletal horse was still fitted to the harness, the long bones scattered, the broad bridge of its spine still held together by dried sinew. A faint stain on the paving stones showed where its throat had been cut.
A sacrifice, then.
“They left you here for me,” he whispered. He stroked the long horse skull and felt the history of the bones, the dry marrow telling him that yes, the horse was obedient, that it had died in confusion and pain.
A further communion with the remains gave the Boneman a flicker of insight into the master’s actions. He felt the kindness of the man, the love and regret that forced the knife blade so many years ago. He guessed the killer of this horse to be a devout man, intent on his final destiny. There’d been no malice meant to this animal, and he was simply destroying his means of escape should all courage fail.
“It’s okay now,” he told the large skeleton. “It’s going to be okay.”
In sleeping, the Boneman had lost most of his magic, but this one thing remained to him. Death was his, and in this strange second life, the sorcerer could still hear the whisper of life that ran in bones. The trick was in knowing how to speak to these off-casts of life and just what to say.
Always with compassion, he thought.
One of the dead rats had its nest in the rubble of a wheelwright’s shed and offered up this knowledge to the Boneman, even as its tiny carcass roasted on the spit. And only with the direst of need. They’ve earned their rest, and it’s cruel of you to disturb it.
Nobody was there to see when the Boneman set off from the abandoned outpost, the horse cart limping along on ruined wheels.
Between the shafts of the cart, still strapped into the mouldering harness, the horse skeleton ran tirelessly, hauling the Boneman along the old tradeway. The vertebrae flexed and rolled before him, the ribs swaying slightly as four ivory legs pounded the ground in a clumsy canter.
Each bone touched its neighbour, reminded by the Boneman’s gentle insistence of the connections the pieces had held in life. The horse-form held true, even though the sinew and tissue were mostly gone. A scrap of mane fluttered from the long skull.
A spirit inhabited these bones, an essence brought back over from the Underfog, the realm on the edge of death. Either the horse itself had returned or something else that was willing to wear this frame, obedient and desperate to take one more step in the land of life.
Wrapped in rags, driving a monster down a forgotten road, the Boneman found his situation absurd. He needed to find his brother, the mightiest sorcerer this world had ever seen, but had no idea of where to look.
He pressed on, shaking the reins to urge more speed from the dead horse. He won’t be too hard to find, the Boneman reasoned. Papa Lucy has a way of standing out.
PART ONE
— THE FAILED APPRENTICE —
— 1 —
Lanyard Everett was alone and halfway towards dead. He limped out of a dry sea, barely noticing when his boots stopped grinding against the crust of salt. He kicked up plumes of red dust with each step.
Behind him lay a vastness of white, stretching to the fuzz of
horizon and beyond that for untold miles. The saltpan had become his entire world, blinding him with every pass of the sun, and the ground seemed to glow during the chill of night.
His tracks led back to murder, to the ruined seed of a town, to an enemy who taunted him in his dreams. His master would have stood resolute against that nest of monsters, but Bauer was long dead. Lanyard’s education was half-finished at best.
He’d been overwhelmed, driven out.
Lanyard crossed into the Inland, leaving dead seas and defeat behind him. He hauled a wind-car, sails limp in the still air, the tube frame bent and buckled and its wheels no longer rolling true. He’d stripped the seized-up motor from its housing behind the driver’s seat, dumping it to reduce weight, which made no difference if the wind didn’t blow.
He’d lost count of how many days the air had been still. The sun did its best to bring him down, and a makeshift scarf, torn from a strip of sail, brought some relief to his face and neck.
A shirt worn to grey, a ragged pair of pants, and boots that wouldn’t see another mile. Lanyard owned nothing else but the shotgun strapped to his back with a leather cord.
Every inch of the stock was carved until the etchings were halfway towards being a book. Pictures and words and marks that not even Lanyard understood. An iron base-plate was a later addition, fastened on with bolts, nails, and screws.
Both of the shotgun barrels were etched with words that went deep into the steel. Most of the script was filled with oil and dirt now, obscured or worn, but Lanyard knew enough of what they meant, enough to know that the gun was holy and very old.
What remained told the story of the bound man, of the Crossing, of promises made and things to come. These teachings were outlawed now, and the signs and marks brought death in all of the towns.
Lanyard Everett killed a Jesusman for this gun. One of the last. Bad luck had dogged him ever since, but he wouldn’t lay down the brute of a shotgun…or perhaps it was bound to him now, forever his by blood and betrayal.
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