Lanyard made a taper from wood and rags. Jesus-gun in hand, he poked through the bleedthrough, wary of distant eyes, hoping to find something that would keep Mutch in the land of light.
The torchlight showed melted and broken furniture. He kicked in doors too buckled to open, smashed windows with the butt of his gun. Everywhere the detritus of the Before. But there were no doctor’s kits, no shelves of drugs and ointments. He found music discs, baby clothes, shattered crockery, and more books than he’d ever read.
Lanyard gave pause when he saw a plastic horse figurine, one leg twisted slightly from the passage between worlds. It had a mane and tail of real hair, and was forever frozen in mid canter. He’d heard stories about these mythical creatures when he was a boy, toys for the rich back when they bred true. After a long moment, he put the figurine into his pocket.
He returned to the camp empty-handed. Dogwyfe continued her vigil, worrying at her braid with her ragged fingernails. The occasional curse word reached Lanyard as she railed against the gods.
Slopkettle came to his bed at a strange hour, swaying slightly on her feet. Her shadow passed across his face, and adrenaline kicked him into instant awareness. Snatching up his pistol, he threw the blanket aside, ready for her knives.
The flenser was nude and laughed at Lanyard’s reaction. She was whip-thin, with little feminine about her, the curves starved from her and worked into muscle. The dying fire cast deep shadows in her hip bones and ribs, and an elaborate whorl of scar tissue ran across her belly, the design spiralling from where a child had once been cut out of her.
She fell on him like water, and he responded. It had been far too long, and soon she was stripping his clothes off. She laid her hands on his shirt, but he gripped her wrists before she could tear open the buttons to reveal his Jesusman’s tattoo to the firelight.
“What about Mutch?” he said, hoping to distract her. She shrugged, looking over her shoulder to see Dogwyfe wailing and scooping dust into the air, letting it fall across her tear-streaked face onto the body of her dying husband.
“What of him?” she said. “He was just meat.”
The three outlaws gave the moon their cries of pleasure and grief. In the morning, Dogwyfe dragged Mutch’s cooling body into the bleedthrough, breaking one of the car’s windows and pushing the corpse inside the machine. She piled a cairn of bricks and junk over him, burying the car from sight.
“The meat’s no good for the greypot,” was all she said when she finished the grave, her hands dusty and rubbed raw. Slopkettle nodded at this breach of crooked law and helped set a fortune of books around the grave, dragging over lumber and fence palings. The women set fire to the whole lot to mark his passing and held each other while the smoke whipped into their faces.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” Tilly said to Lanyard. He was lashing gear onto the camel’s wicker saddle, including some small items he’d scavenged from the bleedthrough.
“He wasn’t my friend,” he said brusquely, regretting his tone when the girl frowned and turned away.
“Are we done with this savage’s funeral?” Spence said. “You’ll have signalled every outlaw in sight, lighting that pyre. We have to go.”
Lanyard nodded. There was a fortune at the end of this road, more than this scattering of crumbs, and enough to tolerate this miserable company. He spent much of the day imagining just how he was going to kill Spence Carpidian.
The buggy turned north and west, heading directly into the Range that marked the edges of the Inland. If they kept this course, Tilly would lead them directly into the Waste, the horror which hugged the civilised lands.
A knot of uneasiness worked through Lanyard’s gut. It was no fit place for people out there. Life was hard enough in the lands claimed by people, but this Range marked a boundary that few settlers were mad enough to push past.
Odd things lived out there, creatures beyond all sense of scale and even time. Beasts that had seen the settlers arrive and would see the last of them die under these unfriendly skies. Then there were the traps for the weak-minded. Waterholes that wouldn’t let you leave, tiny airborne seeds that sprouted beneath your skin and turned you into a walking plant, standing stones that spoke to men’s minds and drove them mad.
The sheer distance of the Waste was mind-numbing—more miles of badlands than anyone could hope to cross. And in far too many places, the veil between worlds was tissue thin. Lanyard did not want to go back out into the Waste.
Early one morning they stopped by the entrance to a pass, a narrow notch that led into the Range. There was a spring here, an island of fecundity in a barren scrub of yucca and kennelweed, and everyone filled their waterskins to bursting. There was no telling where the next lot of water was coming from.
Spence was arranging a marker of stones, the signal for their kin following with the water tanker. Lanyard sidled to the waterhole, empty skins draped over one shoulder. Tilly was there, splashing water onto her face. She’d pulled off her shoes and stockings and squelched her toes deep into the mud.
This close to her, he felt the itch of the witches’ silver lands, their hidden realm that Bauer named as the Greygulf. He had no doubt the girl could sniff out the thin spots, but wondered if she knew what was on the other side, watching her, ready to step through.
“Be careful,” Lanyard told the girl, pointing up. “Cockatoos.”
She looked up to see a cluster of the birds, like a bunch of overripe plums dangling from the gum tree directly above her. She shuddered, stepping back quickly. One of the birds cackled, ending with a gleeful warble.
“They won’t hurt you if you don’t make any loud noises, but I wouldn’t want to be here alone,” Lanyard said. “I’ve seen a flock take apart a grown man. Stripped him down to bone in under an hour.”
The girl looked at him with wide eyes. Lanyard failed in his attempt to crack a friendly smile.
“Just a joke,” he said. “They only eat dead things. Cockatoos are too stupid to hunt anything themselves.”
“That wasn’t very funny,” Tilly said quietly.
“Sorry,” Lanyard said, dipping his waterskin into the spring when he saw that one of the townsmen was watching him. “I don’t talk to many kids.”
Tilly waited while Lanyard filled his skins, sloshing the mud from her toes at a respectful distance. When he finished, he slung the full skins over one shoulder. As he passed by the girl, he fished the plastic horse out of his pocket and offered it to her.
“Here. I found this in the bleedthrough. You can have it.”
“Oh, I love it,” she said with a grin, plucking it from his grasp. She turned the toy over in her hands and quietly popped it into the front pocket of her smock before any of her companions could see.
Lanyard wondered at the other thing in her pocket, the shiny pretty wrapped up in the rag. It could be a bauble or keepsake, but she seemed scared of it back at the bleedthrough, stuffing the bundle back into her pinafore like it was a hot coal.
“You’re smart, kid. See you,” Lanyard said, passing by Spence as he returned to his group. The big man made to stand in Lanyard’s path, but Lanyard brushed past, touching the brim of his stolen hat in a mocking salute.
“Don’t you bloody talk to her, you crooked mongrel,” Spence shouted, but Lanyard kept walking, the ghost of a smile tugging at his lips.
“Making friends?” Slopkettle said back at their camp. Her face was tight as she trimmed her nails forcefully with a short blade.
“Just enemies,” Lanyard said. “Mind your fingers there,” and sure enough she took off a sliver of skin. Lanyard took Slopkettle’s hand, and a smile fought its way onto her face as he gently kissed away the trickle of blood.
— 4 —
The pass was still cold, the sun yet to cook away the shadows from last night. The small caravan negotiated the tight turns, motors growling and echoing along the hollows and hidden places.
Gog had little trouble with the tangled path, overgrown and blocked w
ith rocks in places. Lanyard’s sure-footed camel trudged forward undeterred by the rough terrain. The buggy bounced over the low-lying rubble as nimbly as Slopkettle’s motorbike, but more than once they were thwarted by fallen slabs of stone cracked from extreme heat and cold. The Leicesterites were forced to halt, cursing as they cleared a path with picks and shovels.
“Bend a back,” Spence snarled, but Lanyard ignored the man, watching the pass instead. As the sun crested the eastern lip of the pass, the walls began to pop. Somewhere behind them yet another sheet of rock gave way and crashed.
A noise to the left and a thin dribble of loose stone pattering against the canyon floor. His pistol already up and tracking, Lanyard drew a bead on a lone Taursi. The creature was watching their passage from a high shelf of slate.
Standing taller than a man, the Taursi wore a coat of clacking spines, sweeping back from its forehead and dangling past the small of its back.
A word he might have used was echidna, but he’d only heard it in Before-Time dreams, and so he kept the name tight.
It had the long drooping snout running down its wrinkled face, the one that made the half-tame town lurkers look vaguely ridiculous, wearing man pants, snuffling at grog and cigarettes with their long alien mouth.
This Taursi was wild though, a nude hunter with a small animal in one hand, limp and half-skinned. It leaned on a spear with a thick glass head, brilliant in the rising sunlight.
In the face of a drawn gun, it suddenly drew its quills, puffing up to near double its size, a threat display that could become a real threat in less than a heartbeat.
The Taursi had a second gut that held only sand, and the workings within it to turn this into glass, sharp and sure. The Taursi’s quills glowed red-hot by drawing the heat away from the Taursi’s body as it brewed up a batch of glass. Jags pushed out through the scarred glands along its forearms.
In a previous life, Lanyard had been a grog-runner and a slaver, and knew that even one Taursi could cut up a bunch of people in moments. He remembered many tense encounters on the river delta, watching the treelines next to people he didn’t trust, waiting for the whistle of battle glass slicing through the air from these creatures indigenous to this land of Now. Keeping an eye on the angry Taursi above, Lanyard slowly holstered his pistol, keeping his hands out and empty.
Slopkettle took Lanyard’s lead, reaching forward to switch off her rattling motorbike and keeping perfectly still. Dogwyfe kept one hand to Gog’s bridle. The bird became skittish when it caught scent of the Taursi, who were the ancient hunters and bridlers of its kind.
Spence swore when he noticed the Taursi. At his urging, the townsfolk dropped their tools and grabbed for their rifles. Tilly looked up, wonder and fear on her face.
“Shoot the damn thing!” Spence shouted, but the spiky creature was already gone. After a long moment of scanning the top of the pass, the townsfolk renewed their efforts in clearing the path, frantically prying stone and shale out of the way.
“Don’t rush,” Lanyard told the men, easing his camel forward. “At least a dozen Taursi are watching us right now. You won’t see them, so don’t look. If they meant us dead, we’d be dead.”
“We die, your fortune dies.” The Leicesterite blustered as he directed his fury into splintering a large slab with a crow bar. “Keep a better watch, man-eater.”
Lanyard dipped into his nearly empty tobacco pouch and rolled a thin cigarette. Allowing Gog to slump to a rest beside the bike, Dogwyfe clutched at her braid with white knuckles and said something quietly. Slopkettle talked with her briefly, low words that made the birdwoman chuckle. They looked at the town men for a long moment, and the flenser absently brushed at her sash of knives.
“Enough whispers.” Lanyard barked and the two women jumped apart.
“If you’ve got time for chitter-chatter, you’ve got time to bend your backs.”
They muttered at the instruction but did not defy his rule. From camelback he watched Slopkettle and Dogwyfe straining at their task, cigarette smoke slowly wreathing his head. When he saw Tilly watching him from the buggy, running the toy horse along her arm, he threw her a droll wink.
The pass opened onto bleakness without end, with nothing before the tiny group but open land and an egg-white sky. The Waste.
They halted here, ate a muted lunch in the face of this impossible distance. Lanyard tethered the camel near the mouth of the pass, and it tipped over rocks with its feet, pouncing on a pale Rangewyrm when it found one hissing and coiled.
Spence and Tilly walked a short distance from the group. The big man gripped her by the elbow, shaking her about as he told her something. The girl did not fight his grip, and shuffled to keep up, her head low. Lanyard felt his hackles rise at the sight and was surprised by his reaction.
She’s not your problem, he told himself and tried to believe it. He wondered how any kid could still be so pure when this rotten, hungry world demanded nothing but survival and strength.
Tilly doesn’t belong here, and neither do I, he decided. If I have to kill her, I’ll make it quick.
Tilly crouched on the ground, peering into the little parcel from her pocket. Lanyard felt it again, a pinprick through the world veil, the barest hint of chatter from the other side.
And then, silence. Gathering up the scrunched rag and dousing that weird glimmer, Tilly pointed in a direction, then pointed again after Spence turned her around a few times.
“Kid’s sniffed out that bleedthrough like a meat-mutt,” Slopkettle said at Lanyard’s elbow, watching the girl’s slender arm point like a compass needle, unwavering in the direction. Lanyard had become so absorbed in Tilly’s connection with the Greygulf that he hadn’t heard the flenser approach and sidle up to him like a ghost.
I deserve a knife in the back, he thought.
“Papa Lucy does not smile upon this place,” the flenser continued. “Nor upon the company we keep. We eat with this lot long enough, the Papa will think we’ve become statue lovers too.”
“Money makes a lot of sins go away,” Lanyard said.
“Says the man in the heretic’s hat.”
Slopkettle followed Lanyard back to the camp, their footprints the only thing marking the dust on the clay. Lanyard wondered if the flenser would ever consider a heart-binding and whether being her groom would keep him alive a bit longer.
He looked to where Dogwyfe was struggling to feed and water the unruly Gog and decided that brides still had braids. It was only a matter of time before the truth came out, and if he continued his tryst with Slopkettle, she would spot his inkings sooner or later.
If the flenser was insulted by the followers of Leicester-We-Forget, she’d certainly carve out the eyes of a Jesusman.
She has to die.
The flenser laughed as the camel plucked another Rangewyrm from its nest. The serpent hissed and struck at that leathery face to no effect.
Spence hollered at them to break their camp and move. One of the townsfolk set to laying another marker for Fos Carpidian, this one with a broad arrow of stones, perhaps ninety degrees west of their true heading.
“Clever,” said Slopkettle, dragging her bike next to the sign. When the buggy pulled ahead, she quickly scuffed out the stones with her feet, kicking the marker into a meaningless scatter.
“Slop and I been talking, bossman,” Dogwyfe said, Gog dancing alongside the camel and hissing. “We don’t need them statue-kissers now.”
“No one out here but us and that lot,” Slopkettle added. “They’ll make their move soon, you know they will. We kill ’em first, right now, and we take the girl for ourselves.”
The buggy slowed and stopped, and Spence was leaning over the back, hollering obscenities at their crooked escort. Their hesitation was being noted.
“So you’ve been talking,” Lanyard said, face thunderous as he chewed over the words.
The crooked women were silent, but Dogwyfe’s face spoke volumes. The moment of his overthrow was coming, and soon. But
right now he was ready for them, and the sorcerer’s gun lay across his saddle horn with its promise of thunder.
“I’m still your bossman,” he told them. “If we’re going to do this, we do it my way. We’ll need everyone out on the Waste, you’ll see.”
Soon the ruddy line of hills was swallowed by the horizon, and there was nothing but Waste in every direction. The bare landscape was peppered with curiosities, and Spence steered them clear of each one.
“Don’t look at anything, don’t touch anything, and if something talks to you, you run and run,” the big man bellowed. Spence wore his own slouch hat now, and the Leicesterites shared around a pot of white face paint, perhaps hoping for divine protection in this strange land.
Ambitious homesteads dotted the Waste this close to the border. All ruins now, but some had been partially rebuilt into the suggestions of dwellings, empty frames of cattle-bone and clay. The yawning gaps of doors and windows stared at the intruders from the south. Lanyard could not shake the feeling that these abandoned houses resembled skulls with something sinister lurking inside each one, willing them to enter as they passed.
They gave a wide berth to a ring of what resembled people, preserved in weathered sandstone, that stood around the crumbling remains of an enormous sandstone horse, as if in supplication and worship.
As the whispers of these stone people reached the convoy, Lanyard felt the strength of their entreaties, the suggestion that he should drop everything and go stand in the circle with them, just for a moment.
The horse spoke then in a voice that was half the clapping of a great bell, half the breaking of crockery, and the entire party was drawn in, beasts and all. Spence fought it and failed, sweat running down his face as his hands moved on their own, steering the buggy towards that alien voice.
As a prentice Jesusman, Lanyard had encountered one of these spirits with Bauer, who taught him that these interlopers were stuck between the Now and the Greygulf, and were desperately hungry.
With the last of his willpower, Lanyard clumsily made the sign that stilled the stone horse’s tongue and whispered the word that made the binding stick. With their willpower restored, the motley group fled north, engines whining, running the beasts as fast as they could bear.
Papa Lucy & the Boneman Page 5