“Enjoy it while you can,” Jenny said, watching Seph grind at the tender shoots with his peg teeth. “I don’t know what I’m meant to feed you when we head north.”
It was a long trip to Carmel, that dust-locked scavenger’s town hidden deep in the Inland. The last known location of Lanyard Everett, the place where the Half-Dann had breathed his last.
“Got to beat the Dann there and turn up before all of his coin-riders and killers,” Jenny said. “Rest time’s over, horse.”
It was dangerous to stay on the tradeway. Much as the delay irked her, Jenny was forced to take the farmers’ causeways and wade across the paddies, cursing the irrigators. Seph took to the water with grace, his long brown legs chopping through the islands of rice.
The fertile delta land soon gave way to abandoned holdings, the irrigation channels collapsed and filled in. Soaked through, Jenny climbed back into the saddle and let the horse push through the dead farmlands.
She had asked her father why so many people left the land, but he wouldn’t answer, perhaps he couldn’t. These days, farmers clung to the Niven, and every year the yield was that little bit smaller, the fruit trees failing, crops soured and rotting in the field. Starving animals cropped on the native grasses and got sick. Lambing season brought horrors more often than lambs.
“One, two generations left, then we’re done,” her father said over his pipe when the kennelweed loosened his tongue and none else were around to hear. “People come to the Tower for answers that I don’t have, and they’ll come to you too. Mawson will go the way of the Inland, and then the last of the Cruik’s tribe will have become crooked. Man-eaters in our streets, a greypot on every corner.”
The bush was already reclaiming these old farms, the native plants smothering everything the settlers had brought into the Now. Once, Jenny was sure she spotted a Taursi in the scrub, but the spiky giant melted away, the treeline once more still, far too quiet. The silence of this place was beginning to scare her.
She was completely alone.
Jenny found the ruin of an old humpy, three daub-and-wattle walls still standing, chimney intact. There was a dead dog just outside of the doorway, a pack of cockatoos feasting on the carcass. She threw stones at them until they wheeled away screeching and vengeful. They were said to be cowards, but she held the pistol ready and shivered when she thought of them nibbling on the dog’s eyes.
Most of her matches were soggy from the trip across the paddies, but one precious flame caught the mess of leaves and twigs that soon crackled away in the exposed hearth.
Jenny spent the night there, lying in dirt in front of the fire. The saddle blanket was damp from horse sweat, but it was all she had to keep off the bitter cold. Seph shuffled around in the ruin, sleeping on his hobbled feet. Hunger gripped her stomach. She’d never gone without a meal in her life.
She had started her morning as the Selector’s daughter. Now she was a penniless criminal, an exile. A murderer. Clutching at her holy knuckle bones for comfort, Jenny cried until exhaustion took her, a dreamless slumber that was the only small kindness of her day.
She woke at dawn, half-frozen and sore from sleeping on the ground. Cracking her bleary eyes, she looked up to the roofless walls and started when she saw a pair of cockatoos perched there, quietly watching her sleep.
“Get lost!” she shouted, picking up a stick to scare off the scrawny birds. They took off in a flurry of feathers and screeching, sounding like a mocking laughter.
That was when she realised that she held the Cruik in her hand, that she’d been clutching onto it the whole night. Before burrowing in to try and get some sleep, she remembered leaning it against the far wall, as far from the door as possible. In the firelight, it seemed almost sinister, the hook of the ancient staff like the twisting neck of a serpent.
She remembered it had cast a shadow in the firelight that made her eyes swim, a watery ripple that didn’t match up to the shape of the staff. Jenny was still lying in the dusty depression marked out by her hips and legs, and hadn’t stirred once during her deep sleep. Sometime during the night, the Cruik moved into her hand by itself.
“Sweet Family save me,” she whispered.
She felt a slight humming in her hand, like the Cruik was hollow and filled with flies. With a shudder, she lay it on the ground and quickly backed away from it. She saddled Seph as fast as she could manage, keeping one eye on the relic. When she fiddled with the girth strap, the Cruik shifted in the corner of her vision, as if a snake slithered and coiled in front of the fireplace.
“Stop that,” she said shakily, looking once more on the hooked pole. For one long moment she was tempted to leave the thing behind, to stoke the fire once more and feed the Cruik to the flames.
Remembering the whispers of Papa Lucy, Jenny strapped the holy staff to the saddle. Seph did not seem to fear the touch of the Cruik, but it scared her on a deep primal level. She only hoped that it would be of use when she found the Jesusman.
The sun was already baking the moisture out of the ground, and a cloud of flies buzzed around the dead dog. Jenny remembered the look on the High Flenser’s face when she shot him and thought she was going to be sick. She couldn’t shake the image from her head and knew it would haunt her for all of her days.
“How am I supposed to kill another man, Seph?” she asked the horse as she led him along a faint track into the rainforest. “How does this save my father?”
Questions of theology and divine intervention were lost on the last true horse. Seph was more interested in snuffling at a stand of grass slick with dew. Jenny thought of hauling him away from the grass, worried about the horse’s belly. Some native grasses caused colic or brought on the foaming death.
“Ah, fill up then. It’s not like I brought your breakfast along.” At the mention of food, her own stomach grumbled painfully. She felt dizzy now, almost weak. Kneeling next to Seph, she ran her hands through the grass then licked the dew from her fingers.
“Father was right,” she told the horse. “I’m going to be dead inside of a week.”
The dew did nothing but wake her thirst. As they pushed into the rainforest, she kept her eyes out for a stream or a spring. She’d read about the crooked gangs of the Inland and how they dowsed for soaks. They sometimes dug up hibernating frogs from the clay, decade-long sleepers bloated with water.
It seemed ridiculous to be within a day’s ride of the Niven and be so parched. Jenny hated to think how thirsty the horse was. She wondered if he’d see the day out if they couldn’t find something to drink. She felt panic rise up in her chest, followed by a sense of injustice that a future Selector should die in the wilderness.
Even worse, she’d doomed this beautiful horse. How was she going to keep feeding poor Seph? Tears ran down her face at the thought of his bones bleaching in the sun. She was a privileged idiot, who had never so much as planned a long journey.
“I was never good enough to be the Selector.” She whimpered. “Can’t even run away properly.”
When the Cruik slid into her hand like the questing snout of a dog, Jenny was only a little surprised. The staff had wormed its way free of its bindings, but when she looked down at it, it was only a wooden pole, inflexible and firm.
Frowning, she pointed the staff forward, more out of instinct than art. Suddenly, she felt a presence in her head, a sense of direction that reminded her of how she’d navigated the darkest corners of the Tower, always knowing which way to go.
It was a spring, somewhere to the right of the faint trail. She could smell the chill iron of the water, see the tannic depths littered with leaves and debris. Jenny urged Seph into the undergrowth, and the horse soon picked up speed, nostrils quivering as it smelled water nearby.
The Cruik trembled in her hand, a pointing compass needle. It corrected their course whenever the horse stepped around one of the big trees or picked its way over runnels of shifting rock. As Seph clambered through a blind gully, she saw the faint trickle of water pushing t
hrough the slimy undergrowth and knew that they were close. Up ahead, there was an uncanny light that rippled against the rainforest canopy.
“Well, I’ll be,” Jenny said. A spring ran over the edges of a natural depression, and it was everything the Cruik had shown her. A glass spire jutted out of a cleft of rocks next to the water, glowing softly in the shade like a tall candle. Taursi work and incredibly old.
The water was clear and sweet as girl and horse drank deeply. After drawing in gallons of water, Seph wandered off to graze on the plants around the site, reins trailing as he sniffed for something good to eat.
Jenny lay the Cruik across a flat shelf of rock and looked into the spring. As the ripples ceased, she saw a layer of leaves and the tickle of sunlight from above coloured the water like weak tea. There was a deeper darkness that drew her eyes. Probably the roots of the spring for some underground river that ran through there.
Then, just as before, Jenny was pulled into the water, the spring rising around her vertically, and she passed through the membrane of reality. There was nothing but darkness and silence around her. Papa Lucy drifted out of the shadows, all smiles and whispers.
“You have the Cruik,” he said softly. “I was right to trust in you. Clever girl.”
She was speechless and terrified. Back in the daylight world, she felt her body tremble. Once more she was face to face with the bogeyman of her childhood. Now, Papa Lucy was her master.
“This,” and here the image of the Cruik floated between them, “this will guide you to the Jesusman. You’ve seen how.”
She saw flashes of light in the dark place, images that appeared like lightning and were gone as quickly. The patchwork walls of Carmel, its stout gate wide open. A saltpan, broad and blinding. Two crooked women and a girl, standing in a nightmare landscape, a city growing around them.
“Visions I have gleaned from the Greygulf,” Papa Lucy explained. “Three places bound to Lanyard’s fate, and we know of one. Go to Carmel, and then the Cruik will lead you to your enemy.”
“Please. I don’t want the Cruik anymore,” Jenny said, pushing away at the image of the holy staff. It faded before her hands like smoke.
“This was my staff during the war,” Papa Lucy said, frowning. “I gave it to my Riders when my time was done, the greatest tool of sorcery ever entrusted by me. And what did they do with it? They stuck it in a great big statue and turned to farming and fucking. So, when I say that you will take up my Cruik,” and here Papa Lucy brought the smoky image of the object back, “I’m not asking. You will bear it.”
“My–my lord,” Jenny stammered. “I cannot do this for you. I’m not worthy. I killed the High Flenser in the middle of the Temple!”
“I’m glad you did.” Lucy laughed. “Children, aping the old ways, twisting our words, our instructions. None of them are my servants. None of them but you.”
She was filled with a sense of well-being. The fear fell away. Jenny felt Lucy in her head, moving things around and pulling out things the way a tinkerman worked on an engine. Back in the real world, she felt the Cruik wrap around her arm like a snake, the tip brushing against her face.
Jenny Rider let Lucy in and did not resist. Where there’d been hesitation, she now felt resolve and ruthlessness. She saw scenes of warfare flicker behind her eyes and saw herself wearing the hands of others long dead. All the knowledge she would need filtered into her, deep into her muscle memory. The Cruik pulsed as it changed her.
She felt competent, ready.
“You were right to kill that false priest. He got in your way,” Lucy said. She had the sensation of the god pulling out of her mind. “My champion, my Rider. Now go, and kill the last of the Jesusmen. I firmly believe in the tying up of loose ends.”
She woke beside the spring and decided that it was time she found herself a mirror.
Jenny rode the tradeway openly, resting the Cruik across the saddlehorn. The sense of supreme confidence she’d felt by the spring was slowly wearing off, but she no longer feared discovery.
A thousand voices danced in her mind, their whispers bubbling up from her subconscious. They whispered about the Before and the earliest days of the Now, and she saw their lives in flashes, their memories terrifying and strange. She knew they were there to teach her, and at first, she did not think to resist the passengers in her skull. Already, she sat straighter in the saddle and knew more about horsemanship than Barris could ever teach.
An hour of forage brought her enough bush-tucker to break her long fast, and she instantly knew what foods were safe and what were deadly. Examining her pistol, she saw the minor defects and knew that it desperately needed to be cleaned with a file and brush.
With every hour the voices quieted, until once more she was alone in her skull. Exhaustion replaced vigour, and she had a slight headache from Papa Lucy’s tinkering. Although the voices were silent now, she felt a collective presence pushing into her mind, a thousand weak hands beating against her will.
What happens if one of them breaks through? she thought. Does that dead person get a second life, get to wear me like a puppet?
Will I become a pestering whisper in the back of someone else’s mind?
This faint worry took the edge off her resolve, and Jenny wondered if Papa Lucy’s tinkerings were a temporary fix. She’d woken as a superwoman, but this bravado was fading by the hour.
On the third day of riding, the rainforest thinned to become scrubby plains. The Riverland gave way to the Overland, home to drovers and miners. For the first time in her life, Jenny looked upon the last band of good land, the stubborn growth that bordered the dust of the interior.
The road was strangely familiar, the landscape expected with every turn. She found herself expecting towns and wayhouses in certain places, only to find ruins or nothing at all. A new wayhouse stood by the burnt remains of another, the replacement a miserable looking place of bleedthrough planks and tin. A pair of filthy children stood by the tradeway watching Jenny approach, slack-jawed at the sight of the horse.
“You can pat him if you like,” she told them, and they approached cautiously. Seph suffered their enthusiastic touches with quiet grace as he lapped away at the bird trough. Jenny slid out of the saddle and took a short wander to stretch her legs.
I wonder what I can trade these people for something to eat, she thought, looking at the mean little wayhouse. They’ll send me packing or try to buy the horse. Fat chance.
Overhanging the tradeway, a dead gum tree served as the local message post. Letters and bills hung from nails, some of them weathered and faded. Town law punished the theft of mail with a broken hand, and the second offence meant the loss of that hand. Message posts were often corseted with letters for the dead or the absent, and these hung in place until the paper rotted.
Jenny saw the notice driven into the tree with a fresh copper nail, and her heart sank.
Now she was the one with a mimeographed picture, a purple sketch on a wanted poster. They’d done a reasonable job of depicting her, the bailiff’s artist no doubt copying from one of her recent portraits.
WANTED FOR MURDER, HORSE-STEALING, SACRILEGE, it read across the top. Below her picture, the block text continued. JENNIFER RIDER, SELECTOR’S DAUGHTER. KILLED THE HIGH FLENSER, STOLE THE CRUIK. RODE NORTH ON BUCEPHALUS, THE LAST TRUE HORSE.
ARMED AND DANGEROUS.
It then named a staggering figure for her capture, which made her purse her lips.
There was movement from within the stockade, and a trio of men stood just inside the gateway, one holding a wood axe by his side. They muttered darkly, as if daring themselves to approach the woman on horseback.
There’d be no hot meals here.
“Time to go,” Jenny said, climbing into the saddle. The kids moaned their disappointment. Hauling on the reins, she dug her heels into Seph’s flanks and left the wayhouse behind her, a dozen sets of eyes watching the passage of the rare animal.
A telegraph line flanked the tradeway, a sagging
wire that connected Crosspoint with the Riverland towns. Her poster was nailed to every tenth pole, condemning her to anyone passing this way.
An hour’s hard ride brought her to the bill poster, one of her father’s men wearing his Mawson greys. He was tacking up another poster when he heard the thunder of Seph’s hooves, and his eyes went wide when he recognised the Selector’s daughter. He scrabbled into the saddle of his bird and whipped it into a run. Posters flew out of his open satchel, littering the tradeway with a dozen images of her face.
“Faster, boy,” she said to Seph. She pictured bailiffs on the hunt and herself in a hangman’s noose. These posters could not be allowed to reach Crosspoint.
Horse and bird pounded along the tradeway, and the riverman looked over his shoulder fearfully. He aimed a speargun at her, an inner tube stretched over a wooden stock, and sent a barbed quill singing past her ear.
The old Jenny might have felt terror, but the passengers in her skull were no strangers to being shot at, and so she was only annoyed instead. Closing in on the loping bird, she passed over the revolver to haul out the Cruik instead. This man was only doing his duty, and she didn’t want his blood. She just wanted to pull him out of the saddle and tie him up on the wayside. Then burn all of the posters.
The one-sided race was over in moments, the horse easily outstripping the bird. As Seph pulled alongside, the bird wove across the road, screeching with panic in the face of such an alien creature.
The riverman was trying to reload the speargun when Jenny reached out with the Cruik, hoping to snag an arm or loop it around his waist. A slight shifting in her head made her feel the rising presence of one of Lucy’s ghosts, the sensation that she was wearing another pair of hands.
The Cruik hummed in her grip. It felt like a natural extension of her arms, a curved finger that weighed almost nothing. She struck out like she was snagging a fish with a gaff pole, and the hook caught the man by the throat.
She saw the Cruik shift slightly as the wood closed most of the way around the man’s neck. Choking, he dropped the speargun and clutched at the band of wood with both hands.
Papa Lucy & the Boneman Page 12