Jenny knew she’d done the right thing. The Cruik was beautiful. The Cruik was perfect.
She’d loaded the pagoda with supplies, weapons and ammunition, and enough water to keep herself and the giant lizard alive. It had been tricky operating the winch and pulley by herself, but more experienced hands than hers took over to throw together a rig much more efficient than the one the Dann’s people had used.
Then, she’d left the dead to rot and went where her master told her to go. The Jesusman was going to the Waking City, and so was she.
One of her restless ghosts had been a lizard wrangler, so she handled the reins with expertise, driving the creature across the weird landscape. The Waste. She had a direction now, a point on the bare horizon that she could find with her eyes closed.
There were dangers here, creeping things that preyed on travellers and fools, but Jenny did not fear them. She shot them down from her vantage point, and the lizard snapped up the small night creatures.
She walked among the demons with the Cruik held high, and nothing could touch her. The staff was whole. She marvelled at its perfection, the grace of its curve, the heft of its shaft. The more sinister among the locals attempted to trap her mind, but she’d already been claimed by something much more powerful than they. Barely realising that she did it, she broke these old whisperers and drew them into the Cruik itself to feed them into its false house.
The staff relished being in the Waste and drank deeply from the thin spots in the world veil. What was left of Jenny noted with some bemusement the changes in the lizard, the way the gun became a permanent part of the creature, its ammunition belts now stretching out of a valve in the animal’s back.
The gun spat a hail of bones and sharp teeth at any who threatened them, and the creature grew with every mile and every meal. It had almost doubled in size.
Jenny Rider could still be mistaken for an olive-skinned Riverlander at a distance, but up close her skin was coarse, a dry sheath resembling bark. Now when the Cruik bled her, it was an amber sap that ran from her skin, not that it needed to feed from her often nor feed into her.
She was almost complete. Jenny faced the glare of the misbehaving sun undeterred and focused only on her prize. Whenever she saw Lanyard Everett in her mind’s eye, he was only an inconvenience, an interruption.
The Cruik hungered for the glass, for Turtwurdigan. For just a moment, Jenny’s fingers pressed together, her hands curving out as long wooden hooks. The staff itself was nowhere to be seen.
There was no time, no day or night, nothing but the relentless march towards the Waking City. She was so close to the edge of all things that the world seemed like a skillet, greased and steaming, light and form sliding around her.
Then, she found clarity in the madness. A cityscape lay before her, like she’d only seen in books. The Waking City, growing from the ground like a cement garden, its roots deep in the world veil, stretching from Now to Before and perhaps even further back.
Her eyes were keener than an eagle’s, transformed by the Cruik into perfection. She saw the Carpidian girl on a rooftop waving frantically.
Her nose was the nose of the Cruik, and she could smell Turtwurdigan: this great alien presence that demanded her obedience. It was old, and it had once been very powerful. But instead of fear, she felt a great hunger and the urge to suck at the buildings like bones, to draw out the marrow where surely the glass chatterbox thing was hiding.
Only then could she return home. Jenny was no longer sure if this meant Mawson or some other place that only the Cruik knew. The idea of home was close, so close that she ached for it.
Oh, my Father, she thought, and in her confusion, she was no longer sure if she meant the dying man by the river or Papa hidden in mirrors. They felt the same now, a promise to two father figures from a scared little girl.
“I will kill this bad man,” she muttered, clutching to that one goal, knowing that both home and faith were lost to her. “I will not fail you.”
Then she saw the Leicester-We-Forget, the white statue that marked out the bleedthroughs, always the first thing to come over. She saw another Leicester, and then another. They were moving, running for her, and then a tide of white figures was flooding out of the twisted metropolis, hundreds of white warriors coming to intercept her.
She aimed the big gun, now a thing of cartilage and steel, and the weapon sprayed a hail of bone and razor-sharp gristle, scouring away the outer rank of statues, grinding them into dust. And then there were more Leicesters, and the lizard barrelled through them, snapping them in half with metal-tipped teeth, sweeping them aside with cement-sheathed claws.
Jenny growled as slouch-hatted statues climbed all over the lizard and caught the edges of her pagoda. She cast them aside with her hook hands, plucking off stone heads and shattering marble limbs, and always howling, howling at the closeness of her prize.
— INTERLUDE —
Make no mistake, Lanyard. You killed me,” Bauer said, drizzling pan grease onto the split damper. “I am dead.”
“Do dead men eat?” Lanyard asked.
“An old habit,” he conceded, working on the bread with his stained teeth. The two men sat in an awkward silence, as if prentice had never killed master and this was just the latest of many cookfires.
The witches retreated to some distance, but even as they pretended to work on the nest, they watched and waited for a signal. It was strange that a pack of witches would defer to their sworn enemy, but not as strange as a man returned from death itself.
Bauer handed Lanyard the rest of the loaf. He bolted it down like a starved dog. The old Jesusman offered his naked apprentice a half bottle of scotch, good Before-Time stock. Lanyard snatched it out of his hands and drank it like water. He coughed, nearly gagging up his food.
“Go easy,” Bauer said. “You never could handle your booze.”
“Shut your mouth,” Lanyard said. Bauer shrugged and kept his own counsel while the younger man drank the rest of the scotch. He threw the empty bottle, and it smashed against the side of the witches’ eye-twisting nest.
“Still got that temper, lad,” Bauer said.
“Shut up!” Lanyard shouted. “You’re meant to be dead.”
“Yet here we are,” Bauer replied calmly. “Maybe we should talk about that.”
“Maybe I should kill you again.”
“Try, if you like,” Bauer said, preparing a billy kettle and completely unconcerned. Lanyard sat sullen, scowling as his master set about brewing a pot of tea.
All of his schemes, everything he’d tried to make of himself, it all came undone as that grey veteran once more sat across from him. Bauer paid him no mind, letting him sulk, as he tapped out an even measure of tea leaves into the water.
“Do you remember what I told you about the land of the dead?” Bauer said sternly, passing a hot tin of tea across the fire. Lanyard nodded. The drink burned his tongue.
“A sad place, where the souls go,” Bauer said. “Some linger a while, watching the goings on up here, but most don’t. It’s easier to let go and move on.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I’ve watched every wretched moment of your life, Lanyard Everett. Cheating, killing, trading in misery. Seems you’ve done your very best to be a disappointment.”
“At least I did something right,” Lanyard mumbled.
“You gave up!” Bauer shouted, startling him out of his self-pity. “I sniffed you out, plucked you out of a short and wretched life because you had promise. Potential. You can’t walk away from what you are.”
“I never asked you to save me!” Lanyard cried. “You did me no favour at all. I wish I’d never known this, known any of it!”
This was more or less word for word what he’d said by that old campfire, one last spit of hatred before a boy picked up a rock.
Silence, and the men nursed their tea, sharing the memory of a hundred similar disagreements. It hadn’t been the smoothest of apprenticeships. A coal spat the
n, and Lanyard stirred from his reverie. A dozen flies tracked about in the sweat on his back, drawn to his map of wounds.
“I’ve seen you dabble at your trade, boy. Killing the odd witch, stomping on the things that have no business being here. Good.”
“It’s kill or be killed,” Lanyard said. “I’m no Jesusman, not now, not ever.”
“Stop being so weak!” Bauer barked. “I sent many people to the other side, Lanyard, and they were all down there waiting for me. I beat them all, again, and then I beat anyone who looked at me funny. What’s your excuse?”
“How did you…” Lanyard pointed to Bauer as he struggled to frame the question. For a split second, Bauer’s features swam around on his face in the waxy manner of a witch. His cheek sagged slightly as if he’d just had a stroke. The change was hard to spot, but Bauer slumped and seemed to cave in on himself, like a candle slowly burning away into nothing.
“Found a way out, I did. Clawed my way up out of death and convinced the man in charge to send me back, even if only for a short time. My work,” he pointed at Lanyard, “isn’t done.”
“You’re wasting your time,” Lanyard said. “Piss off and leave me alone.”
“I did all this for you, you damn knucklehead. Your education was never completed. Now, I don’t have very long, so clean yourself up and put these on.”
Bauer handed Lanyard a clean shirt and a pair of jeans.
“Things are about to get nasty, boy. The world needs a Jesusman and you’re the only option.”
Lanyard soon understood Bauer’s hold over the witches; each of them was branded with the mark of the Jesus, a simple B + N that most of them tried to hide and shift around to some unobtrusive part of their waxy skin.
“A witch is just a Jesusman gone bad, much like yourself,” Bauer said. “Easy enough to remind them of their old loyalties.”
The old man’s skin was taking on the texture of an orange peel. He was leaving little dribbles of himself as he walked around, faint smears of wax in the dust. This loan body of Bauer’s was crumbling fast.
“The bossman is watching, Lanyard, so get it right,” he said. “It was himself who sent me back, after I tracked him down and hollered at him some.”
“The Jesus?”
“Enough with the semantics.” Bauer grizzled as his face clenched. “The quick version is this. Certain folks have woken up who shouldn’t have, and an old argument is about to turn the Now into a cinder. You will stop this.”
Lanyard resented the return to his lessons, until Bauer knocked sense into him with a swift right hook. Ears ringing, Lanyard paid attention, and once he was past that first moment of his old fears, he was glad for the learning. He’d spent years with half a lesson in his head, not enough to deal with the wrong kind of visitor to the Now. Lanyard grumbled and dragged his feet, but he was secretly glad to round out what little he knew.
He finally learnt the greater marks of unmaking: a grid of names and sigils scratched into the earth. As he copied each one, Bauer scrubbed it out, and when he’d finished, Bauer made him write out the whole lot from memory.
“No, no, no!” the old man bellowed, cuffing Lanyard across the ears. “Do you think Papa Lucy is going to wait patiently while you remember how to write these? He’ll sing the life out of you and then piss on your sorry corpse.”
For practice, Bauer wiped the Jesus mark from one of his bound witches, and it leapt for Lanyard with hunger in its eyes. Lanyard sent the twisted monster to its death with nothing but word and a mark. His master nodded, offering a rare smile of approval.
“That gun was borne by the Jesusmen for almost three hundred years,” Bauer said. “My father carried it before me and his before that. You killed me for it. So, where the hell is it?”
“Crooked folk took it,” Lanyard mumbled.
“You got stupid is what I’m hearing,” Bauer said. “Oh well, can’t send you in with your bare hands and a smile. Come on.”
The growing witch nest sat on the edge of the salt flat facing out onto the Waste. It was a marker for the boundary of the safe lands, a lighthouse for anyone unfortunate enough to be out there wandering.
Not that a witch’s home is any safer than dying on the salt, Lanyard thought.
The two Jesusmen entered the nest, which was nearly completed. As they passed by the industrious witches, the ache in Lanyard’s bones grew. He felt the murderous urge with all of the old fears. Years ago, he’d been tortured by a witch in the Greygulf, and his hatred of their kind smouldered still.
“I’m letting them finish this because you will find it useful,” Bauer said. “Sad, misguided bastards. They started off on the right path, and then they got hooked on all that Before-Time junk that doesn’t bleedthrough right. Electronics, televisions, and what-not.”
They reached the centre of the nest, where all the power cables and fixtures led. Here was what Lanyard had been sensing—a tear in the world veil little bigger than a window. The edges were unbound and flickering, razor sharp.
“Quicker than the shadow roads. With this, they can just reach through to any of the realms, pluck out whatever they want. Stupid little sparrows. You, come here and work this thing.”
One of the witches put down its tools and slid across the floor in its graceful, greasy manner. The waxy man looked at the pair of them with barely disguised resentment and rubbed at the Jesus brand on the back of its hand.
“My boy needs kit. Guns and bombs and anything else he wants. Bring it all over.”
Giving mutinous whisperings to its fellows, the witch worked the controls, feeding more power into the device. It looked like a moonshine still hooked up to a tableful of gadgets, computer parts, and a cracked television. It was half science, half sorcery. Lanyard felt an agonising tickle as the witch opened a tear directly into the Before and pushed its waxy limb through into that dead world.
Without full power, the witch’s capacity to search the Before was limited, but the creature stumbled across a small cache of weapons, a gun-rack in somebody’s home. It plucked out a pair of pistols, a long rifle, even a wickedly sharp bowie knife.
“Now, watch carefully,” Bauer said as he showed Lanyard the making of the marks and what phrases to write with the etching tool. It took them many painstaking hours but soon the guns were marked with pictures and words in the same way as the old shotgun had been, making them much more than just weapons. Lanyard marked the knife himself, and Bauer judged it a success.
“I sure hope you get to tickle Bertha’s ribs with this,” Bauer said, turning the knife over in his disintegrating hands. “What a rotten bitch.”
“This is Turtwurdigan,” Bauer said, throwing the cloth back over the chattering glass and silencing it. “Taursi spirit, here long before we were. Going by the tellings of the old Jesusmen, she was the greatest of our allies back in the war. Mad as a meat hook, though.”
Mere days later, Bauer was almost completely gone, a runny candle spreading out, his trunk sinking into the goopy mess. Only his shoulders, neck, and head remained coherent.
The witches lurked around the light of the campfire watching carefully, waiting for the old man to pass. Lanyard wondered how long the protection would last and whether their loyalties would continue once Bauer passed over into his final death.
Lanyard had spent years angry at his master, and under the weight of his guilt, he’d never mourned the man. Now that Bauer was dying his second death, Lanyard realised how much this man had loved him. He had clawed his way out of death just to give him what he needed to do his job.
Of course, they never spoke of love. Nothing but gruff instructions from the master, and sarcasm and sulking from the student. The old man was tough and still demanded everything from the scrawny boy he’d saved.
“You get to that big bleedthrough, that Waking City,” Bauer demanded, his face starting to run. “Hitch a ride with a spiky native, nick a bike, but whatever you do, you get there quick.”
“What am I meant to do, then?
” Lanyard asked.
“Kill ’em all,” the drooping man burbled. Then he finally spoke to Lanyard about Sad Plain, about what he needed to do.
Swallowing a little, Lanyard put the last fragment of Turtwurdigan into his new satchel, handling it like a hot coal.
He knelt by his master’s side, keeping watch as the man crumbled until only a face peered out of a wax puddle.
“One more thing, boy,” Bauer whispered, and Lanyard leaned in closer.
“You should be ashamed of yourself running away from this lot. Finish the job.”
Then Bauer was gone, his strange second life at an end. Lanyard heard the quiet creep of witch feet, the static of their thoughts as they closed in on him. He knew then that Bauer was repaying like with like, that the marks binding the witches had just expired.
No kindness from the old man, no words of forgiveness or inspiration, nothing but a kick in the arse, and the hope of a violent and lonely death.
Then, the rush, the low howl as a score of hungry witches came for him. The sleek iron snouts of his pistols cleared leather. Lanyard Everett stood firm against his enemy, calling up mark and word while his holy guns barked vengeance.
PART THREE
— THE FAMILY —
— 13 —
It’s easier to think of the realms as if they’re a deck of cards,” Papa Lucy said. “Or a sandwich.”
A small group of students lounged around in his solar. The apprentice sorcerers were recruited into Lucy’s latest great idea: the Academy. Lucy paced the room as a series of icons floated above his head, each picture representing one of the known realms.
“Most of the realms can be reached. Difficult, but not impossible.” He boomed the same loud voice he used indoors or out, whether wenching or hosting the Moot. He gave the impression of transparency, though he kept more secrets than anyone. Everything about the man was lurid, a calculated distraction. He could lie—had lied—but you would love him while he did it to you and make excuses for him even as he robbed you.
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