“Nothing for us here,” he said and headed back to his vehicle. He leant over the side and hauled Tilly upright.
“Will you behave now?” he asked, knife in hand. She nodded and he sliced her bonds.
“Take a good look at those other two. I hope you realise that I’m your best friend now,” he said. “Give me a direction to the bleed-through. No more fooling.”
Biting her lip, she scanned the horizon unsure. She looked down at her lap.
“Go on, talk to whatever it is you keep in your pocket,” he whispered. “I know you’re scared of it, but you should be more scared of Slopkettle there.”
Tilly pulled the rag bundle out of her pocket and carefully unfolded it on her lap to reveal a sliver of dark green glass the size of an arrowhead and knapped like flint. Lanyard thought it might be Taursi work, but it seemed older and different from the cutters and pretties that the spiky folk favoured.
The glass drank the sunlight, and there was instantly a deep voice, an alien babble in Lanyard’s skull. He staggered back, gripping the side of the car. He fought against this incomprehensible intelligence. A force pressed against his mind seeking access.
He saw it then, a great glow on the horizon and other pinpoints dotting that bleak vista like searchlights, small breaks in the world veil. But these were nothing to the great column of smoke behind them, a beacon somewhere near the edge of the Inland.
“Jesusman,” the thing said into his ear. Lanyard’s feet shifted in the direction of the towering smoke. He took one step and then another before Tilly threw the rag over the glass to starve it of light. The presence was gone, reduced to a faint babble coming from Tilly’s hands.
“Turtwurdigan likes you,” she said. She offered the bundle to Lanyard. He retreated, shaking his head.
“That should be buried in a deep dark hole. No, I won’t take your glass from you.”
A sharp screech behind him, and then another. Gog drew up to his full height staring at something in the distance, feathers puffed up in a threat display. The bird scratched at the clay with his murderous claws, and then hopped from foot to foot, beak raised to the sky, throat vibrating with a long, pitiful whine.
“What’s wrong with your bird?” he asked Dogwyfe.
“I don’t know!” Dogwyfe said, hauling on a hanging rein until the bird was still. Even then it hissed and burbled at an unseen threat. Shaken, the birdwoman quickly repacked their supplies into the bird’s netting. After his strange experience with the glass, Lanyard was all too ready to leave this place.
Lanyard threw himself into the buggy. He was reaching for the ripcord when Slopkettle called him over. She was madly pumping on the starting pedal, but the bike only emitted a tired chug.
“Bossman, there’s something wrong with the bike!” Slopkettle cried out. She hadn’t called him that in days, and he frowned at this suspicious show of respect.
“Leave it here. You ride in the buggy,” he said.
“We’ll be pushing that bloody thing tomorrow. We can’t leave the bike, not out here!”
Pushing her out of the way, Lanyard gave it a try, grinding down on the starter pedal with no result. There was a lick of fuel left in the tank and everything else seemed okay. Kneeling, he saw that the sparkplugs were hanging loose, and that was the moment that Slopkettle slammed the spanner against his temple.
Lanyard awoke bound to the bottle tree, his skull a firepit of pain.
He hung from an old pair of handcuffs, a long chain running between the manacles that stretched up and over a high branch in a triple loop. The hook bit deep into the flesh of the branch, a tear of piss-coloured sap running from the wound but never quite falling. There’d be no shaking that loose. The chain gave him just enough slack to slump against the great bulb of the tree but not enough that he could lie down.
“You’ve tied people up before,” he managed. Seeing that he was awake, Slopkettle beat him with a fury, breaking one of his teeth. He laughed ruefully and spat it out with a dribble of blood.
“Tickle me some more,” he said.
Slopkettle drew a sharp craft knife held together with duct tape and pushed out an inch of rusting blade. Tugging off his boots, she slowly sliced away his trousers, the seam parting easily for the keen little blade.
“I like to take my time with the special ones,” the flenser told Lanyard. She nicked him when cutting away the inside leg and licked at the spot of blood, madness in her eyes.
“Make your bird dance again, my sweet,” she said to Dogwyfe, who hauled a little bone whistle out from under her leather jerkin. She emptied her lungs into it, and while it made no sound, it drove Gog crazy. Once more the bird capered and shrieked, feathers puffed out. The perfect threat display trained into the bird as a party trick.
“Your rooster is smarter than you,” he said to Dogwyfe. “At least he knows that someone is blowing on his whistle.”
“Shut up,” Dogwyfe said and spat on the ground. She snatched up a dirty pile of rags and rope that turned out to be Tilly, trussed up tightly and gagged with an old sock. As Dogwyfe tied her to the bird, the young girl shared a look of tired defeat with Lanyard and there was no fear in her eyes.
Yet.
Poor girl, left alone with this pair, Lanyard mused. The girl was one more failure for his list, perhaps his last.
Slopkettle neatly sliced away the buttons on his shirt but recoiled with a cry of alarm at his Jesusman tattoo finally revealed. The flenser stared at the forbidden ink, her face suddenly pale.
“You-you damn sorcerer. You have defiled me!”
Slopkettle stepped back and threw the knife to the ground. She walked away rubbing at her forearms and muttering. She held a hurried conference with Dogwyfe, who stared at Lanyard with shock.
“Hey Slop, how about one more for the road?” He laughed then broke into a coughing fit. The flenser stormed around the tree, howling up into the weird sky and cutting at her own arms with a short knife. Dogwyfe stood over him with her crossbow shaking nervously as she cranked back the string.
“Bad luck to spill the blood of a Jesusman,” she said as she pocketed the quarrel and released the tension from the string. “I won’t have this on me, I won’t.”
Forearms weeping blood, Slopkettle slumped down on the earth before Lanyard and pointed her bloody blade at him. A spatter of tears ran down the ritual scars on her young face. “I am sworn to cut skin for Papa Lucy. Now the Family will turn from me, but you? You are a dead man.”
For long moments the hot wind blew and the sun darted about like a slow firefly, but neither of the crooked women made a move to harm him. Then Dogwyfe gently lifted Slopkettle to her feet and made to lead the weeping flenser away.
“He’s not worth it, Slop,” the birdwoman said, an eye to the blistering heat rising from the plains. “Let this bloody Jesusman die in his chains.”
Slopkettle shook off Dogwyfe’s tender ministrations and approached Lanyard. She wiped her blood across his face and drew a sign on his forehead with the sharp edge of a fingernail.
“By the laws of Papa Lucy and the old rite of Cruik, I accuse and affirm you of heresy,” Slopkettle said. “Lanyard Everett, I sentence you to life imprisonment.”
She looked to the sky, to the Waste around, and gave a gruesome smile.
“I give you a day at best.”
Dogwyfe set the buggy on fire and threw the scraps of Lanyard’s clothing and kit into the flames. Tilly was a limp bundle lashed to the bird. She was next to the Jesusman gun that was wrapped in canvas and rope. A weapon too valuable to junk, too dangerous to leave.
“I’ll come get you, Tilly,” he cried out, and the women laughed. Tilly’s mouse-brown head rose for a moment, but flopped against the bird’s flanks, all strength and will gone from Carpidian’s child.
The crooked women left Lanyard chained to the bottle tree and did not spare him a backwards glance. Bird and bike became a distant speck, then a heat mirage somewhere near the horizon, and then nothing.
/> Lanyard woke from dreams of Bauer to see a Taursi standing over him and leaning on its glass-tipped spear. A female, her twin row of teats atrophied and scarred from an old litter. The giant startled when Lanyard moved, her coat of spines clacking and rustling.
The sun had already cooked Lanyard a bright red, and his throat was parched. The spiky native blocked the sunlight, and he peered up at her gratefully.
“Good hunting?” he asked, voice dry and failing.
“No,” she said. She squatted down, her crooked dog legs folding gracefully underneath her.
“Long way from your land,” he managed.
She shrugged as she idly scooped a handful of crumbling clay from around the roots of the tree. Her long snout danced about in her hand and drew the sand into her second stomach for future glass firing. Lanyard had cut enough Taursi throats to know that they had a second throat hidden in there, a neat little valve that sent the food one way and the grit another.
“Does it have a second arsehole?” one of his old bosses had asked over a slit throat, a moment before Lanyard put the same blade into the man. A job was a job, but respect was always important.
Respect wasn’t exactly friendship. You could respect a venomous snake, a deadly sandstorm, a Taursi at an execution.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. Each breath was more difficult, and his eyeballs were cooking in their sockets.
“You done my auntie’s mob a favour, many years ago,” the Taursi said, clearly uncomfortable with the man-tongue. “Drove off a witching fella what was killing them.”
“I’m calling in that favour,” Lanyard said, rattling at his chains. “Set me loose.”
“No. We’re not to interfere with your man laws. Not ever.”
“Why did you come?”
“I came to honour you, Lanyard Hesusman,” the Taursi said, using the much older title. “I will wait with you while you die.”
Lanyard knew that this Taursi would do as she said. She would not harm him, would not help him, and merely meant to observe his imminent passing.
He made a lunge for the spear, which the spiky native simply moved out of his reach. “Get stuffed,” Lanyard croaked.
The heat made the foul trickle from the pipe look good, even knowing it was bleedthrough and not safe to drink. His chains wouldn’t quite let him reach, so he did not even have the dignity of dying with the bloat from bad water.
“Drink,” he begged the Taursi, but his honour guard would not share a drop with him. A near-full waterbag sat at the top of her clay and reed basket, but she moved it underneath a flour stone, out of sight. A small kindness to not mock him with its closeness.
“Man laws,” was all she said and settled back to watching him die. He wondered how the creature had travelled here, how she knew where to find him. The Taursi rarely braved the madness of the Waste but had been known to travel fast when needed, to go missing when slavers or bailiffs hunted them.
Only grog and greed had destroyed this people. They were the superiors of the settlers in every way but for that of cruelty.
“The Taursi have a special relationship with the Greygulf, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they knew some of the shadow roads,” Bauer once told a young Lanyard. “Now, they’re a broken lot. Their great civilisation was on its last legs when we came here, but you wouldn’t know it now. We stole bloody everything.”
The prentice Lanyard pressed his master on the topic of Sad Plain, but the old man never spoke of it.
Dusk brought a little relief from the brutal kiss of the sun, but Lanyard wondered if he would survive the night, nude and chained. The Taursi set to drawing out a star-glass, honking and groaning as she forced a curlicue of molten glass from the glands on her arms, working it rapidly with scarred grey fingers. Her quills puffed out, white-hot as they drew the heat away from her body, and then the work was done.
“No stars, no moon here,” the Taursi said. “This will help.”
Lanyard watched through failing eyes as the little sculpture drew in the last of the sunlight, and when the sun gasped its last, the star-glass shone clearly, the only wink of light on the dark plain.
Beyond that moon-bright circle, Lanyard heard the sounds of visitors, a dozen tiny breaches in the world veil, creatures passing back and forth and feeding from each other in the darkness.
With his toes, he scratched out what wards he knew, but nothing came close that night. The Waste seemed to know he was defeated and left him to his grisly demise.
The deadly chill of the night was a pleasant warmth now, and he drifted, lost in memory, disconnected from the pain of his dying body. This was his reward, the end of a life lived hard, and very soon it would all be over.
“You don’t die today,” Bauer said into his ear, and Lanyard flinched, awake and hurting. His Taursi guardian was leaning close to check his breathing, a kindly sadness in her eyes.
He struck, snatching at her wrist, pulling himself to his feet with the last of his strength. Even as the spines pierced his skin, he wrapped the slack of his chain around the creature’s throat, and her curses became a phlegmy gurgle.
He sat down, fast, and the chain became taut, his weight an immovable anchor on that iron noose. The Taursi sliced at him with glass, kicked at him with her spurs, but soon enough she was still, the black needle of her tongue sagging from her snout.
Lanyard snagged her spear with his feet, the weapon dropped and forgotten by the surprised Taursi. He clumsily brought it up to his bound hands and jammed the broad glass spearhead into the handcuffs where the small key was meant to go.
He pushed hard, and something gave way. One more push and the cuffs sprang open, the mechanism destroyed.
Lanyard stood shakily then pushed the dead Taursi out of his way. He left her there and wondered if the Waste would send something to feed on her corpse. He gathered up the spear and staggered to the native’s travelling basket, fumbling for the waterskin with hands that didn’t seem to belong to him.
He forced himself to stop drinking while his brain screamed for more. He’d heard of men swapping one death for another, drinking more water than their gut could fit, and far too quickly. He picked up the star-glass and made a slow circuit of the campsite in the hope that Slopkettle and Dogwyfe had left something behind, some scrap he could wear to ward off the cold.
Spence’s buggy was still smouldering so he warmed himself by the hot metal for a moment, poking through the ashes with the spear. Everything was burnt. All he found was the scrap of a boot that was leather cracked and blackened.
There, by the trickling pipe, snagged on a rusty tangle of rebar, fluttering in the night breezes, was Fos Carpidian’s slouch. Wheezing with laughter, Lanyard wore it for all the good it would do him and wondered at the picture he presented, bloody and naked but for a hat.
Casting about for tracks, he found the place where Dogwyfe had pounced upon Tilly, the churn of dust where little feet scuffed and dragged against the pull of the larger woman. Nearby, Lanyard found the plastic horse he’d given the girl, ignored as the junk it was. With a heavy sigh, he knelt to pick it up, and stopped.
She’d propped the toy against the rag bundle, and the glass within whispered weakly to him. Turtwurdigan begged him for daylight, for blood and rote. By the melted horse, Tilly had used a stick to scratch into the clay the letters B + N.
The mark of the Jesus. The girl had left him a gift.
— 6 —
Lanyard crept into the ashes of the burnt-out buggy, soaking up the last scrap of warmth left from the fire. Breaking his fast on the Taursi’s stock of meat and mealie bread, he waited for the sun to rise. The star-glass failed close to dawn, and he threw the dim trinket into the pitch black, the pads of many small feet fleeing from the loud crash as it broke.
Sunlight. He rose to greet it with stiff joints, every inch of him cold to the touch. No tracks remained for him to follow, as if no one had ever passed this spot.
“I will find you, Tilly,” he swore as
he reached into the basket to touch the plastic horse.
After marking a circle of protective signs, Lanyard carefully sat within its boundary. Leaning out over the sigils, he unfolded the scrap of cloth with his spear tip. Instantly, the cacophony boomed in his mind, a skull-splitting static as the ancient shard of glass drank at the sunlight.
His protective circle nearly useless, it took all of Lanyard’s willpower to fight off the spirit that dwelt within the glass. Once more he looked upon the small nicks in the world veil, the glow of the bleedthrough, and the smoking column behind him, where the glass insisted he go.
Obey! it whispered, probing into the deepest parts of his mind, searching for a way to wear him as a puppet. Obey Turtwurdigan!
“No,” he said as he threw the cloth back over the glass, starving it of light and reducing it to a whispering menace. He knew where Tilly was heading now, if she could keep the direction in her head without the glass. That was enough.
Climbing to his feet, he took up spear and basket, and he trudged naked through the day. He could be dead by sunset, but at least he was alive and free. Futile as it was, he meant to track his treacherous comrades, walk away a rich man. Free that poor kid before she ended up in a cookpot.
He made it barely a mile down the road when he felt the signs, so strong that he almost passed out. Something was coming. Before him, the air stretched taut, the tell-tale shimmer like a heat haze. He could see the outline of a pair of hands grabbing at the world veil and ripping it apart like a flimsy shirt. A tear began to open that hovered above the slithering bike tracks and the trail of the bird.
“No, you dirty bastards,” Lanyard moaned. He’d put thousands of miles between him and his hunters, but they’d finally found him, naked and broken in an endless stretch of nothing.
A witch slid out of the hole, wax-fleshed and grinning. Then another wearing a Leicester form as a jape. A third, lesser witch shifted between the shapes of a dog and a little boy.
Papa Lucy & the Boneman Page 7