“Quentin has showed his hand,” Jenny guessed, and Horace nodded, smiling weakly.
“The water barons are hurting from this, more than they’re letting on. If the Inlanders stop being scared of those thieves, they’re finished.”
Finishing her work, Jenny stood and dusted the woodchips from her shirt. She didn’t give a second glance to the mess on the floor as she gave the pipe to her father.
“Beautiful,” he said, admiring the dolphin set in wood, the stem its twisting tail. Flashing a lopsided grin, she refrained from hugging her father, knowing this would only pain him. As a servant brought his lunch, she slipped out of the room, waving off his insistence that she join him.
Not bloody likely, she thought. She grabbed a cold meat pie from the kitchens on her way out. The thought of the rank kelp soup and boiled offal that the physicians pressed upon her father made her stomach flip.
The Selector’s Tower was a glorious Before-Time building, almost completely intact. It was still in good condition some three hundred years later, and as near as anyone could figure, it was a vertical warren of homes from the Before, or what passed for a wayhouse in that golden age. The scale of the place boggled her mind, an imposing structure with nothing but slap shacks and piece-meal tenements to compete with its glory.
Each Selector added to the Tower. Her father replaced all of the fouled window panes with fine Taursi work. In his greatest triumph, his engineers pumped up enough water to fill what had once been an immense public bath, several stair-flights above the ground.
When I’m Selector, she thought, pushing out through the freshly greased revolving door, I will bring in a team of tinkermen and get the furnace working again. Or get them to find a way to make all the pipes and taps work. Those poor lads shouldn’t have to lug water kegs up the stairs.
Jenny stepped out into the muggy streets of Mawson, fanning her shirt as she picked her way through the slow mass of bicycles and birds and stumpy-teams hauling logs and cartloads of river slate. Barges loaded with grain lined the banks. Farmers from up and down the Niven waited to deposit their crops in the town silo.
Money made its way downriver, and Mawson sat in the mouth of the delta, catching all of this stray coin. Caravans left daily to take Riverland goods to the Overland and further, and to bring back the pickings of Inland bleedthroughs. Those sick of drought and the bandits arrived daily to trade freedom for a place in the crowded city.
As Mawson grew, so did the treasury of the Selector. When Horace Rider died, as he soon would, Jenny was going to be as rich as the proverbial Neville. The thought of her father’s fatal illness cast a pall on her good mood, and the hectic pace of Mawson didn’t make her smile as it usually did.
She would give it all away, everything, for one more year with her father.
Jenny climbed into a rickshaw and asked the pedalman to take her to the Temple. He recognised her and refused all payment.
“You should not be out here, miss, not without your guards and such,” he said, his accent giving him away as an Overlander. “There’s a lot of robbings, lot of new folk too.”
“This is my home,” Jenny said. “I’m not scared of anyone, and I certainly don’t need anyone to hold my hand. So let’s go.”
Pedals whirring, he weaved the contraption through the busy docks, avoiding the poor neighbourhoods full of recent immigrants and shoddy buildings. Lounging across the broad rear seat of the rickshaw, Jenny looked down at the city. She admired the view as the pedalman huffed his way up the great hill, frequently flicking a mosquito whisk against his sweaty back.
The Tower dominated everything, of course, but the size of the city was still impressive. Teams of workers hacked the mangroves back, and she saw more housing and infrastructure sites in the newly cleared land.
The town sprawled across the delta like an alien idea, nature itself resisting the works of the riverfolk. Beyond the press of buildings, the terminus of the Niven was still a wild place, a maze of waterways and peaty islets, with a handful of Taursi tribes still living there in the old way. Grog runners and slavers were known to trawl the delta, quick and quiet, wise to the ways of town patrols.
Out beyond the brown flow of the Niven was the shining sea. The river gave way to the bay, which was peppered with islands. Wild places, braved only by those keen to avoid the Selector and his laws.
If they’re mad enough to brave the sea and the things that swim in it, they’re welcome to their peace and quiet, Jenny thought. I know I won’t bother them.
The Temple was a broad-shelled library from the Before, its dome only slightly warped from the bleedthrough. Marble columns held up a lofty roof. Words in some dead language were barely visible along the lip of the portico: the gilding had worn away and the inscriptions were dull from centuries of monsoonal weather.
“I will wait for you here, miss,” her pedalman said as he pulled into the ranks of rickshaws and bird carts. “These other folks will rob you blind.”
“Thank you,” she said and pressed a scrip note into his protesting hands. “No, no charity, I saw you pedal up that bloody hill. Take my damn money.”
She joined the throng of worshippers milling about in the entrance and was glad of the spring shower that washed over her face, cooling her down in the press of people. One of the attendants recognised her on the steps, and despite her protests over any special treatment, he hustled her in through a side entrance as the service began.
The interior glowed from a hundred well-placed skylights, but the bookshelves were gone now, replaced with seats. One whole wing was given over to dense blocks of elaborate mausoleums, an undercover necropolis littered with candles and shuffling mourners.
The interior of the cupola was painted with several scenes from the faith, depictions of Papa Lucy and Bertha, stories of the old war. Jenny loved the fine details of this large frieze the most: Jesus, the foul betrayer, trampled underfoot at Sad Plain; the Boneman lurking on the battlefield, giving solace for the fallen; Bertha exhorting her Mad Millies, a tide of shrieking women charging into the fray.
Certain figures had been painted out of the frieze, clumsily replaced with other artwork or blended into the background. Her father told her the truth of this: Leicester-We-Forget had once figured prominently in the Family canon, until a schism in the faith occurred some years back. Those who prayed to the white statues were not quite heretics but more a weird splinter cult, tolerated only for their ability to sniff out bleedthroughs.
In the centre of the Temple floor, the original mezzanine was expanded into the fighting pit of rote, dug deep and lined with sand. The mundane fights had been on earlier, pure gladiatorial meets with no religious significance, but now the sand was freshly dressed, combed into perfection.
Down the steps and out onto the sand came the Eminents Three. These high priests dressed and spoke as the Family. Their oversized masks reflected the jolly laughter of the Papa, the deep scowl of Lady Bertha, and the Boneman, who did not speak in this ritual but aped about, a skull-faced figure that got underfoot and drew laughter from the congregation.
“Long bound be the Jesus,” Jenny chanted, along with those around her. “Death to the bitch of Sad Plain, cutter of feet, mother of lies. All glory to the Family, who trod Third-Word-Again into glass.”
Jenny left sometime during the blood rite, not wanting to see the condemned criminals dressed in the fashion of the old Jesusmen and bled out in the name of the Family. Leaving the congregation, the Selector’s daughter found a quiet corner where she sat with her arms around her knees on the stoop of an elaborate sepulchre.
Her eyes raised to the painted dome, Jenny prayed fervently. She asked the Family for something, anything to keep her father alive. She heard the squeals of the suckling pig, the modern substitute for the boy child of rite. The Eminents gave grim pronouncements in the name of the Cruik as they tore a finely tailored set of man-clothes from the squirming beast. Finally, there was an awful shrieking as the High Flenser peeled the lif
e from the pig.
She smelled the sizzle of the cooking flesh. Communion was almost ready.
Once more, the gods gave her no word. Perhaps their voices were small, drowned out by the howling congregation. Perhaps Jenny Rider wasn’t worthy enough to be graced with an answer. She left the Temple in tears. The pedalman kept his silence as he returned her to a world of privilege, to the tall house of a dying man.
The Over-Bailiff paid her father a visit. The moustachioed lawman delivered a fat sheaf of papers to the Privy Moot. The long table was empty but for the two men and Jenny, Selector in all but name now. At the head of the table was the mirror-backed chair of the Papa, an empty seat for an absent god, who oversaw all the decisions of his servants.
The old chair always unsettled Jenny. She had once sat in Papa Lucy’s seat on a dare when she was a young tomboy running wild with the sons of guards and cooks. That night, young Jenny had experienced the Bad Dream for the first time, a smiling man whispering to her from a dark place.
Jenny had awoken near dawn, dressed, and poled a barge across the harbour. A fisherman had pulled up alongside her and shook her by the shoulder. She had no memory of leaving her bed or sneaking out of the Tower. The next night, she woke to discover herself in an alley halfway across town, a squirming rat in her hands. She had been about to bite into its neck.
As time passed, just looking into a mirror was enough to set her off. On waking, she would find herself in a different place with no memory of how she got there. In the Bad Dream, she was always party to a long and involved conversation, the words of which drifted into fuzz when she opened her eyes.
It was an awful childhood, full of secrets and terror.
She became very religious. Jenny resolved that when she came to her rule, she would have the mirror chair covered with a cloth. She once stood in front of it with a hammer, but fear stayed her hand. Fear of the thing behind the glass.
If I break the mirror chair, will I let it loose?
The whispering dreams had stopped in her adolescence, but she had feared mirrors ever since.
The Over-Bailiff was still discussing the problem of the Half-Dann’s murder, and she made herself pay attention to the matter at hand. Ever conscious of the way the mirror chair tried to attract her eyes, she looked to her father instead, drawing strength from his presence. He was a wise man, locked inside a failing body, and soon she would have to face the mirrors on her own.
“The Dann is sure to cause us grief. Best learn what we can of his son’s killer,” Horace said. With an eye to the Selector’s incredibly swollen fingers, the Over-Bailiff peeled the pages apart for him, laying them out in a tarot of infamy.
“Lanyard Everett, late of Quarterbrook. Inland scum. Came to our notice nine years ago. We strung up the rest of his mob, but he must have been tipped off. Left Mawson with the coin-riders snapping at his heels.”
“He lived here?” Jenny asked.
“Briefly, miss. Grog-running, slaving, general mayhem. He did a spot of toe-cutting for Gareth March, until that mean old dog swung from a rope.”
“I remember March,” Horace said. “Bad man. I pulled the lever myself.”
The next page the Over-Bailiff laid out was a sketch, a purple mimeograph of an old wanted poster. Lanyard Everett had a thin face, hard mouth downturned at the edges, thick stubble and a lank lick of hair on his forehead. His cold eyes stared out of the page. Jenny shivered.
“Everett is known to lug around the kit of a Jesusman,” the Over-Bailiff said. “Witnesses spoke of his shooter, big old gun crawling with Jesus marks. Makes no sense for a scoff-law to carry a gun like that.”
“Is he a Jesusman?” Jenny asked, pushing the paper away from her with the point of a finger.
“Apparently he killed the Jesusman who owned it, one of the last. But a man doesn’t bear that mark without a reason. We’ve still got a standing order to shoot this man on sight.”
“He’s a fool if he steps anywhere near a town,” Horace said. “The law is the law, and carrying this mark means death.”
One fat finger brushed against the forbidden mark, writ large below the wanted man’s face: B + N. A heretic’s mantra, Before and Now.
“If he had any sense, he’ll melt back into the bush and that will be the end of it,” the Over-Bailiff said. “The Dann will never find him, and I won’t waste my men on this farce.”
“As for Fos Carpidian, he’ll be dead within a week,” the lawman continued, scooping up the sheaf of yellowed documents. “The water barons will bleed that town to get their water money, drop for drop. Best we stay out of it, Selector.”
“I agree, Ronnald,” Horace wheezed. “This whole thing is bad news. Jesusmen!”
Jenny could not get the image of the Half-Dann’s killer out of her head. She knew that grim purple face would haunt her dreams. She looked up at the mirrored chair and felt the hairs rising on the back of her neck.
Someone’s watching me.
Jenny kept a suite of rooms at the very top of the Tower. They were her father’s, once, but he had not been able to climb the stairs in many years. The elevator had worked as recently as seventy years ago, with a team of lizards hauling on a rope to lift the box, but now the mechanism was seized up. The elevator car would not budge, no matter how the tinkermen greased the gears and stripped them apart.
She could do all fifty floors in less than twenty minutes, half of them at a run. The Selector’s daughter was lean and fit from years of stairwork, and she knew every inch of the air ducts, the little crawl spaces behind the amenities, even the elevator shafts, navigating the oily ladders by feel alone.
None of this compared to her love for the penthouse. At the Tower’s tip, she was higher than anything else in Mawson. Jenny could see the gas lights and star-glass lanterns laid out, neat squares in the messy sprawl of the new neighbourhoods.
Best of all, no one came up here to bother her, unless it was actually important.
When she had taken the penthouse as her own, the servants puffed and sweated as they lugged all of her favourite furniture up here in stages. An obscenely massive four-poster bed dominated the suite, ringed by record players and silent televisions, the best items scavenged from the bleedthroughs. Her mother’s old dressing table was covered with stacks of dirty dishes. There was a hoop where a mirror had once sat, but she put a poker through it one morning.
Mirrors bring whispers.
Rummaging through the detritus of a spoiled childhood, Jenny pulled out the items she needed for high prayer. A bag of ox-tail bones for rolling. A ceremonial stiletto with a howling woman inset in ivory. A bowl for water, in place of a looking-glass. Her well-thumbed volume of scripture, margins jotted with her own thoughts and theories.
The fly-leaf was covered with sketches of the whispering man, as best as she could remember on waking. Knowledge is armour, her younger self had written in a sure hand.
The doorway to the roof was sticking, the wooden frame buckled from centuries of rain and humidity. With the application of a boot, the hatch squealed open, and she climbed up into the night. With only the moon and stars for company, Jenny laid out the accoutrements of faith then sat cross-legged before them.
Stuffing a pipe with a mixture of kennelweed and tobacco, she lit it from the low flame of her oil lamp. She drew back on the mellow blend and let the smoke feed into her lungs, bringing on a tickling cough that left her light-headed.
She began by emptying the bag of bones. Each was meant to represent a human knuckle, the old rote. Apparently in the Inland, man-bones were still used by the savages and scoff-laws. Jenny had made this set herself by etching the symbols deep into the cow bone.
“Boneman, show me the wisdom of the dead,” she intoned. Pricking her thumb with the stiletto, she smeared the bones with blood, making them dark in the low lamp light.
“Lady Bertha, show me the truth of hearts, my own and others.”
She passed the bones through the water bowl to wash off the blood. A da
rk swirl formed in the water, the beginnings of a clot, dancing and turning.
“Papa Lucy,” she said reverently, “show me the wisdom of the Greygulf. Show me how to keep my father alive.”
With one hand to the curling pages of her scripture book, Jenny cast the bones. She saw symbols of travel, duty, and hunting. Another cast presented vengeance, glory, and the death of another. Her third cast gave fire, the finding of something lost, and the knave’s cross, an incomplete mark meant to represent the Jesus without honouring him.
Always, she got the Cruik as the fourth bone: the mark of a hooked stave, symbol of an old order. Her family had sworn with the Riders of Cruik, an uninterrupted chain going back almost to the Crossing. Her father had said the words as a boy but hadn’t ridden a bird in years.
Horace never pushed the family tradition onto his only daughter, and they had an understanding. He was going to be the last one to bear that weight, and she would be a Rider in name only.
The scripture gave her nothing useful. These combinations were ambiguous at best. She looked deeply into the bowl of water, wondering if she should try the rote again. She felt her gaze drawn into the depths, the sensation that her mind was being dragged out of her body.
Jenny gasped as she was pulled down into a dark valley, water towering around her on all sides, and then she was through the water, through a barrier between the world she knew and a world of darkness, black and complete.
It was the half-remembered place of her nightmares.
A smile on a blurry face bobbed towards her in the gloom. Jenny felt her bladder give way back in the world of flesh, but here she could do nothing, not even turn away.
“I miss our talks, girl,” the smiling man said, broad lips drawn wide, tongue curling against those perfect teeth. His face was that of a man with a garrulous booming voice, but something about this place muffled him. His words travelled the darkness as whispers.
“Let me go, spirit,” Jenny stammered. “In the name of the Family, I command you to let me go.”
“But this is what you wanted,” the blur-faced man whispered, smile broadening. “You followed rote and you wanted an answer. Well, I am here with your answer.”
Papa Lucy & the Boneman Page 10