Papa Lucy & the Boneman

by Jason Fischer

  Sol, who was not yet the Boneman, liked to sit in on these classes if he was in the neighbourhood. It felt good to finally have another group of young sorcerers on the rise. He longed for the time when they would master their art and when they could have a vibrant academia, a legacy.

  Most of all, the brothers missed their fallen comrades, the friends and rivals who’d perished in the Crossing. A sorcerer’s life was a lonely one, and their cadre of five was stagnating of late.

  Hesus was the grit in the oyster, of course, but the less said about him the better.

  It was a long cry from the Collegia, that marvellous sky-city orbiting the world of Before. Here, they’d brought in anyone with a dribble of talent: riverboys and reavers, beggars and shepherds. The process was frustrating to Sol, who likened it to teaching a remedial class, but Lucy made himself a willing mentor to these accidental sorcerers. It was he who coaxed out their first awkward magics.

  “These are the Prime Realms, habitable by men,” Lucy said, “such as Before and Now.” He rearranged the symbols above him, an elaborate planetarium, and Sol smiled. He’d taught a few classes himself and found it just as easy to scratch out marks in the dirt with a stick.

  “Prime Realms connect via the Greygulf, and if you can tear a hole in a world veil, you can step from one to another as often as you like.” This was said lightly, of course, before the full consequences were known.

  “Above the Greygulf, it’s rumoured that there’s another realm, the Overhaeven. Certain energies can be detected in all of the realms, but we’ve not been able to find the source. A mystery, even in the Before.”

  Sol had wrestled with the Overhaeven theory for a full year, but he’d given up when Bertha came along. It seemed more profitable to shift his studies to the Underfog, even if necromancy was the sorcerer’s equivalent of taking up a trade. Good money in it, back before the breaking of the old world. Before their great escape.

  “The Greygulf rests on top of the Aum, the reflecting realm. Entered through mirrors and shadow. Most useful for long-distance communication, but I wouldn’t want to linger there long,” Lucy said with a shudder. “Terribly empty place.”

  “Below all of this is the Underfog,” and here Lucy raised the lower-most image, a landscape of mist riddled with standing figures.

  “Here is where the resonance of life ends up and the dead hold court,” Lucy said. He had their full attention as he discarded the other icons and stretched out the image of the Underfog like a mural.

  “It’s very dangerous to visit the Underfog. We still don’t know much about it. I figure a man’s ancestors are best left alone. There’s time enough to talk with them when you’re dead.” That was all he would say about the land of lost souls.

  The Academy was a great distraction, and Sol watched Lucy pour three decades of his long life into the institution. The apprentices became journeymen and then learned enough that they passed muster, though they fell far short of the standards of Before.

  Barely fit to mop the floors of the Collegia, this lot, thought Sol.

  Eventually, this average cabal of magicians grew in hubris and their greed overtook their awe. They tried to seize Papa Lucy, to prise out the rest of his secrets. Lucy destroyed them all in a single horrific night and never taught sorcery again.

  Papa Lucy was the most powerful of the surviving sorcerers and was certainly one of the leading lights back in the Before. Even he had visited the Underfog only twice, the last time on the strength of an old rumour.

  Lucy’s path took him through the now-tamed Greygulf, past the industry of the Hesusmen as they ferried the remnants of Before through to Now. They bowed to him of course, but Hesus was their true master. There was something odd about their movements, almost furtive. He briefly inspected the works and spoke with a somewhat nervous Neville, appointed by Hesus as steward and custodian of the Greygulf.

  Something’s not right about Neville, Lucy thought and decided to investigate later. He’d had enough of politics for some time. He had abandoned the Moot mid-session and vanished from his home the next day.

  Let Sol deal with buttons and bicycles. I’ve got places to be.

  Casting about on the shadow roads, Lucy found a likely place and dropped through into the Aum. There he spent almost a year assaulting the gates to the Underfog.

  Weakened and maddened from his sojourn in the dark Aum, Lucy slipped into the Underfog, the only living being to walk the land of the dead. This place was the only visible aspect of the afterlife, the gutter where the final residues of life lingered for a while. Where a soul went after that, no one knew, and none returned from whatever lay beyond the Underfog.

  Tall grass, acres of reed, vast stretches of burnt stubble—the geography of the Underfog was far from fixed. Lucy fought through cities of thorn and swam through rice paddies where nothing grew.

  Demons walked in the mist, the spirits of creatures that defied explanation. If theory was right, other worlds touched onto the Greygulf, worlds uninhabitable by men, or where the world veil was too thick to pierce. But everything ended up here. These unapproachable worlds could be studied by proxy in the Underfog, their dead inhabitants quizzed.

  Lucy did not come for academia’s sake. He had nothing to prove when packs of malicious revenants came for him. He sent them on to their final rest and combed the mist asking only one question:

  “Where is the Cruik?”

  It took every magical device he’d saved from the Collegia days just to survive his journey. He siphoned every lick of power out of the rings, wands, and brooches he’d stolen, and still it wasn’t enough. Sometimes, he caught a flicker of movement in the corner of his eyes, only to realise it was a hairs-width sliver of his own soul stepping away from his body and fading into the mist.

  Not once did he doubt himself, not even when a dread beast wounded him grievously.

  Bertha and the others rarely crossed his mind, but he often thought of Sol. The thought of his earnest brother drove him on more than his ambition did. If he was ever going to return to face Sol’s clucking, poe-faced sanctimony, he sure as hell wanted something to show for it.

  The Cruik was his current obsession, but if what he guessed was true, it was the means to a most magnificent end. Every wrong thing he’d done, everyone he’d screwed over, all of it would be washed away with his greatest act of magic.

  “It will be worth all this spooky bullshit,” Lucy barked, scaring off a family of spectres.

  On the fifth year of his search, he spent a month with the Half-Buried, a monastic order that had found a way to permanently reside in the Underfog. Mummified with oils only found here, the souls were half buried in the dark brown soil, their top halves bound to a brace, free to talk and sing amongst themselves, to share wisdom with their visitors.

  This repository of knowledge was astounding, but it didn’t interest Lucy. He asked for the whereabouts of the Cruik. At first the Half-Buried tried to put him off and persuade him to go back to his own world.

  “Find a woman, walk in the sunlight,” they whispered. “Forget the Cruik. It is beyond you.”

  Papa Lucy was furious that they dared to deny him. He pressed them further, visiting all manner of torment upon the Half-Buried…but they only answered him in vagaries or omission. When he began work on a great and terrifying magic—the means to uproot the entire order and force them on to their final doom—one of the monks broke.

  “There is one last shore, at the furthest edge of the Underfog. There you will find the Cruik, lingering on the edge of Death itself.”

  The journey to the boundary of life was a long and perilous one, and it took him almost ten more years to reach the desolate beach. Time enough for the Underfog to bleach his soul and drive him half mad.

  The shore was a litter of grit and shattered stone, waves of black water smashing at it relentlessly. The ocean beyond was the deepest black that reached to the sky, curving up until it brushed against the sepia heavens above.

  “S
o this is death,” Lucy said. The draw of the water was almost irresistible. He longed to strip off his clothes and leap into the dark foam, to let the water take his cares and pains away.

  He frowned as he made the marks of clarity and warding, and the morbid urge passed. As his senses returned to him, he saw the fat tendril of the black water questing towards him, brushing against the rocks like a worm. Another mark and a word of unmaking, and Death’s tendril collapsed, soaking the stones beneath it.

  Lucy walked on, searching, calling upon the true sight, even scanning that wretched place with a pair of binoculars. All the while Death called to him.

  Finally, he saw his prize in the distance—a skinny shape that barely stood out against the fury of the black ocean.

  The Cruik. A hooked staff, resting on the tip of a pointed stone at a perfect vertical. It was so close to the breaking waves that the deadly spray washed against it. Lucy saw several of the reaching tendrils dancing around in the water…but they held back, as if afraid.

  Papa Lucy approached the Cruik. He was so fixed on the staff that he slipped in the shale and cut his knee badly. Limping on, he stood before the curved pole, marvelling at its simple elegance, his eyes drawn to the proportions of the staff, the turn of the shepherd’s hook.

  Shuffling forward, his skin burned from where the deadly spray touched it, but he paid this no mind. He licked his lips and reached out for the object of his long search.

  “It’s perfect,” he breathed.

  When Papa Lucy stumbled back into Crosspoint, wasted and filthy, almost twenty years had passed. He greeted people in the street as if he’d never left, and returned to his house.

  He evicted the factor who’d seized it ten years ago for non-payment of debts. Swearing everything from a bloodied nose to an injunction, the man fell silent when he saw the sorcerer’s dead stare, his grip upon that disturbing hook. The factor left with no further argument after uprooting his extended family from every wing of the manse. In their haste, they left nearly everything behind. Lucy ferried their belongings out into the courtyard with invisible hands.

  Sol stepped out of a far door just as his brother set fire to the lot. He took in the wear on Lucy’s face, the first signs of grey hair above his temples. Most of all he noticed the way his brother lovingly caressed the shepherd’s crook by his side.

  “You’re getting old,” he teased. Lucy gripped the staff tighter as he scowled.

  “My house stinks like merchant. Why did you let some cabbage seller take my house?”

  “No one knew where you were, Lucy, and you left a lot of bills behind. The Moot gave your estate to that man. The law is law.” Sol watched the bonfire for a long moment, disturbed by the mad glint in his brother’s eyes.

  “There’ll be trouble,” the younger brother continued, but Lucy scoffed, tipping another flask of grain fuel onto the fire.

  “Laws are nothing,” the prodigal magician said. “All this squabbling over coin, over politics? We’ve forgotten who we are, brother, what we are capable of.”

  “You passed beyond my sight,” Sol said softly. “We all thought you were dead.”

  “I’ve seen death,” Lucy said. “It’s nothing. Just water and darkness.”

  As gaudy furnishings and the beloved toys of the factor’s children blazed, the brothers stood in companionable silence. This brutal eviction was not the worst thing Lucy had done, and Sol loved him so much that he would overlook almost anything and make excuses even as his brother pissed in the punchbowl.

  He stole a glance at Lucy’s new staff and could feel the gravity of the thing. The way the light touched it made it look too real, more present than anything had a right to be. Their shadows were firm, but the dark line running away from the staff was wavering, indistinct.

  “I do not like the look of your walking stick, brother,” Sol said.

  “This is the Cruik,” Lucy said by way of explanation and added nothing further. They’d both heard the rumours back in the world of Before of a construct that held powers beyond reckoning, the means to unlock all of the realms. A construct that would mould its bearer into something approaching a god. Many sorcerers had braved the Greygulf hunting for the Cruik in all of the Prime Realms. None had returned.

  Sol felt the tickling whisper as the spirit within the staff reached out to him, tested his defences. Then the brute force withdrew. It was as if it had found him…wanting.

  “Do you know what you are doing, Lucy?” Sol asked. “Take it back to where you found it. That thing is dangerous.”

  “Not as dangerous as me,” Papa Lucy said, and in the intimate company of his brother, his mask of bonhomie slipped. He regarded the Cruik with a grim satisfaction, and Sol felt afraid.

  This was a long time ago, before they’d raised temples to themselves, before the madness of Sad Plain. In those days, Hesus only opposed Lucy in the Moot, John Leicester still called himself friend, and Turtwurdigan slumbered in the ground.

  Today, a monster led a dead horse along a track, once a patrol route for the Riders of Cruik, now overgrown and forgotten. Papa Lucy swam in his mirror, cackling and driving the Boneman onwards.

  “C’mon, Sol,” Lucy laughed. “I’m dying to drop in on the old lady. I wonder how Bertha’s been keeping herself.”

  The Boneman gritted his teeth and urged the skeleton horse onwards. Some worrisome cracks were beginning to appear on the horse’s long thigh bones—the first sign that his servant was failing.

  “Just a little longer, friend,” he whispered, and the horse picked up the pace. The Boneman didn’t relish the idea of carrying all of his baggage or the treasures Lucy looted from his own crypt. Besides, the mirror was too cumbersome to lug across the countryside.

  Lucy thought he knew where Bertha had gone, but he delighted in keeping his brother in suspense, indicating the paths he should take without enlightening him in regards to the destination. They hid once from a drover and his dogs, watching from within a tall stand of mushrooms as the drover bullied his sheep towards their miserable fodder.

  “Look at us, frightened of a bloody shepherd,” Lucy chuckled. “Time was I’d have had him peeled and dancing with nothing but a word.”

  “Be quiet,” the Boneman said. If they were discovered, more might come, and he knew he couldn’t move fast enough to avoid the birds and bikes in a fevered hunt for a monster.

  They made a quiet camp that night, somewhere just north of the boundary between the Overland and the Riverland. The Boneman didn’t risk a fire, even though he shivered. At least he was spared the sight of his dinner running into his stomach and through his gizzards. He could not help but peek at the workings of his new body, and for once was grateful to eat in the dark.

  “Clever girl!” Lucy exclaimed. His mirror was propped against the skull of the disassembled horse. “She did it! She went and got it!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My little pigeon, my mirror friend. She’s got the Cruik! A new Rider!”

  “What?” the Boneman said. “You didn’t destroy the Cruik?”

  Lucy just laughed.

  “It’s evil,” the Boneman said sadly. “Those poor fools never knew what they rode under.”

  “I tell them some pretty lies, and they enlist willingly enough. I never forced anybody to take up the Cruik.”

  “You were mad to form your little army of monsters, and you’re doubly damned for bringing some poor girl into it.”

  “Turns out there’s still a Jesusman.” Lucy muttered in the dark glass. “Figured my champion could use a helping hand.”

  “The Cruik will twist her inside out,” the Boneman said, holding the mirror by the edges and wanting to shake it. “We should have buried it underneath a thousand tonnes of stone. It nearly killed you, Lucy!”

  “Seems you didn’t hear me, Sol,” Lucy said. “A Jesusman is out there and free. Even after all the pogroms, everything I did to wipe out that foul tribe, somebody is still bearing his mark.”

 
“Let it go,” the Boneman sighed. “Hesus is gone. We won, brother. Why even bother with some hold out fanatic?”

  “It only takes one,” Lucy said bitterly. “I want that bastard dead.”

  They came to the tangled forests of the Riverland. The old patrol route had been almost obliterated by time and the marching undergrowth. The dead horse plodded onwards, occasionally shedding a sliver of bone. The fractures were getting worse. A wide crack had appeared across the skeleton’s nose.

  I should let it pass over. This is cruel, the Boneman thought, but he kept the horse skeleton together, urged it onwards even as the sorcery ate away at it. It reminded him in many ways of his favourite horse, a placid beast from the days when the horses bred true. Horse riding had been a pleasant escape from the grinding reality of government. His animal had demanded nothing more than food and kindness.

  The native vegetation of the rainforests was alien yet beautiful in its own way. Towering trees grappled overhead strangling each other in the slowest of duels. Small creatures held court in the undergrowth, and the Boneman called out a pair of sleek grass-eaters for his own supper, stilling their hearts with a murmur.

  “That could be poisonous,” Lucy called out from the glass. “No point carking it over your tucker.”

  “I’ll take the chance,” the Boneman said as he filleted out the oil sacs and spurs. None of the beasts they’d brought over from the Before could graze on the native forage, and bush-meat was a dicey proposition at best.

  It seemed somehow just that the Now was winning the fight against settlement, pushing away the farms and wiping away the scars of the canals. The Boneman wondered if they’d been right to tamper with this world so much.

  It was easier to clear a field for cattle than it was to butcher local stock, and while initially friendly, the Taursi were quick to retaliate when the settlers hunted in their traditional grounds.

  When he’d made laws and directed the public works, the man who’d been Sol Papagallo had fallen into expediency more than once. Clear that field. Move on that tribe of Taursi. Kill off any two-headed calves and keep it quiet.