Papa Lucy & the Boneman

by Jason Fischer

  He’d been too eager to force the human way onto this strange new world. The early settlers were fast to break everything that didn’t accommodate the ways they’d been relearning, empty-minded farmers with a few tools and no memories from the Crossing.

  “We should have done the whole thing differently,” the Boneman said mournfully, skewering the creatures on a stick. Soon the flesh was sizzling over hot coals. It gave off the confusing waft of roasted chestnuts.

  “Alright, we need to talk about appearances,” Lucy said, his image made demonic by the reflection of the cookfire. “We’re going to need to lurk about in the river towns and find ourselves a boat. Can’t have you walking around looking like someone’s dead nanna.”

  “I’ve got the wig and the makeup,” the Boneman said. “I’ll get by.”

  “No, you bloody well won’t,” Lucy said. “Look.”

  A humid rain began to fall, pattering against the glass of the mirror. The Boneman felt the moisture wash down his face and understood what Lucy was saying. His makeup would run in minutes, exposing him as an unnatural freak, unhuman.

  And in the Riverland, it rained constantly.

  “You’re going to need some illusions. Bend the light, trick the eye,” Lucy said. “I know it was never your strongest suit, but perhaps I can help.”

  Lucy’s disembodied head thrust against the skin of the mirror, pushing as far out of the Aum as he could manage, and he spoke the words of form and light, named one thing as another. The Boneman felt the faint tickle as the magic washed over his flesh. He looked down to see his arm covered with skin, perfect down to every mole and hair.

  Then the false skin swam, slid off his limbs, became mist and then nothing. Lucy growled in frustration.

  “I can’t do anything in here,” the mirror man moaned. “All I can do is whisper in people’s ears and piss around with visions. Okay, watch carefully.”

  A breath of fog against the glass, and Lucy carefully scratched out a series of marks with an invisible finger. The Boneman recognised the marks for binding, a series of instructions for colour and tone, and, strangely enough, the sigil for iron.

  “Now follow this carefully. It’s just like doing a dot painting,” Lucy said. “Not as quick as the way I’d do it, but you should be able to manage.”

  The Boneman worked slowly, pausing only once to turn the meat on the spit. Repeating Lucy’s words and marks, he slowly painted sorcerous colour onto his fingertips, working downwards until he’d covered all of his hands with an imagined flesh. Using the whore’s hand mirror, he worked on his face, slowly daubing in his pores and freckles. Finally, the marks of iron and permanence.

  “Why iron?” he asked Lucy, shaky and exhausted. He was still a weak sorcerer, unused to magic after his long sleep.

  “Your hands just became a weapon,” Lucy said. “Plus, no one will be able to shoot you in the face. I’d recommend doing the same for your groin. You never know.”

  — 14 —

  It took several days to colour in the horse, and the Boneman worked during rest stops for several hours each evening. He disassembled the skeleton at night, and if anyone were to happen on his camp, they would have seen a handsome young man crooning into the severed limbs of some poor animal.

  “Are we going to Mawson?” the Boneman said as he worked on each thread of mane. The work was exhausting and particular, and he was beginning to remember why he’d left the illusions to Lucy.

  “Too big,” Lucy said. “Your little patch-up job isn’t perfect, and I’d hate for the bailiffs to pull us up at the dock.”

  “Too big? Mawson’s just a handful of slap shacks around the peat diggings,” the Boneman said. “Perfect place for us.”

  “Brother, you have been asleep for a long time,” Lucy laughed. “Trust me, Cape Baun is much safer.”

  The old Riders’ path petered off some days ago, and the Boneman was pleased to emerge from the thick belt of rainforest. He found the going much easier across the abandoned farms, skirting ruined settlements where he’d once cut official ribbons or met with petitioners unable to travel to the Moot.

  This far from the Niven, there was nothing to keep people chained to the land, and all they saw were the shacks of loners and outlaws who preyed on the tradeway between Mawson and Slanely. The Boneman quickly crossed the main road, not wanting to test his illusion just yet. They slogged across a boggy marsh. He hated every minute of it.

  He spotted the beginnings of a new town set on a rise, a circle of stonework, the shell of a town hall. It had been abandoned as a bad idea, with most of the stonework already carted away by the locals.

  “We stop here,” the Boneman said, exhausted to his core. The horse was almost complete, but he could not think straight, let alone polish the illusion. He let the skeleton fall with a clatter, a pile of fresh-looking limbs, the brown eyes in its face still gazing on him warmly.

  He was just lighting the fire when he heard the distant crack of a rifle with the answering pop of pistols. Lucy insisted on watching, so the Boneman picked up the mirror and sat on top of the half-finished wall.

  The sun was setting upon a scene of anarchy. A group of bailiffs were surrounded on the tradeway, an army of highwaymen firing upon them from all sides. A buggy was burning, and birds darted back and forth, scratching at each other like giant roosters.

  “Lucky we missed that,” Lucy said. “Say what you will of my Riders, they’d have made short work of those scum.”

  “And then bled the wretches for your damn staff,” the Boneman said. “That’s not justice.”

  Lucy merely chuckled, watching intently as the forces of order were butchered. Soon it was dusk, and the burning vehicle lit the night. Figures danced around it, and the distant strains of drunken singing reached their small camp.

  “This is the world we have made, brother,” the Boneman said, sliding down from the low wall with a groan. His muscles were locked up. He staggered over to their fire, carefully tending it so the flames did not climb too high. He lay down beside it and was asleep in seconds.

  He dreamt of that night at Sad Plain, the moment when their little family made common cause against an old friend. Lucy was at the forefront, a changed man hurling unimaginable magics at the foe. An ancient city destroyed just to prove a point, and then the mad chaos as Hesus unleashed his disciples who were twisted from their time in the Greygulf.

  John Leicester fell, and climbed into stone, and never came out.

  The Cruik was taxing Lucy’s considerable willpower, despite the brass demons he’d bound it with. He didn’t have the strength to finish Hesus and used the last inch of his life force to push their old friend into the Greygulf and bind him there.

  It took the battle at Sad Plain for Sol to finally beg Bertha for help, but she went to Lucy—a final betrayal. Already the Mother of Glass had poisoned her mind, and she crooned wordlessly. She regarded Sol with a vacant stare as she cradled his wounded brother.

  The Cruik lay just beyond Lucy’s outstretched fingers, and only now did it call to Sol, begged him to pick it up. It promised him the strength to defeat this enemy, to set things right. To fix the damage his brother had done and to undo the effects of his world-shattering pride.

  He looked at the powerful construct for a long moment, then took a step towards it. Then he saw the shrivelled body of his brother and the mad gibbering of Bertha. He turned away from the staff, ignored its pleas and threats.

  At the end of that terrible day, only Sol stood, alone amongst the dead and fallen, treading through a landscape of shattered glass. He looked up into the terrible face of Turtwurdigan and woke in a cold sweat.

  Cape Baun was smaller than the Boneman remembered. The whaling town had once been a bustling place, with ranks of scarred ships offloading their catch. If you wanted to go to the islands, some captains were willing to brave the sharks and eels for the right price.

  Now, the whalers were long gone. The only ship in sight was a rotting hulk in dry dock. S
mall boats dotted the still bay like a scattering of leaves. Fishermen were unwilling to slip beyond Lady Bertha’s broad chain. The Boneman smiled when he looked upon her old work; he remembered the day she gave Cape Baun a sliver of safety.

  “This year, the sharks took five of my ships, one of them inside the breakwater,” Bertha said. He pictured her as the too-serious darling of the Collegia, the rich girl who’d walked away from everything to follow Lucy’s venture. “It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing.”

  I miss you, the Boneman thought, smiling sadly. It was better to remember her that way, not as the vacant creature from Sad Plain or the unhinged harridan eaten away by the Cruik.

  “Sol! Point me at the docks,” Lucy said from the horse, stirring the Boneman from his reverie. He unwrapped the frame and panned the mirror to take in the whole town. The Boneman took care to linger on the empty docks and crumbling warehouses that he’d personally written into the town plan, the houses crumbled into ruin and left where they’d fallen. The broken hulks of ships, the hulls stripped for housing and firewood.

  No barbarians here. Just economics and despair.

  “Well, shit on this,” Lucy said. “We need a boat.”

  “Where is Bertha?” the Boneman asked directly.

  “She had a place,” Lucy finally admitted, looking towards the sea. “Out there.”

  “Oh.” The Boneman felt the twinge of an old wound, fought the bitterness back. He was surprised by the rawness of this emotion, given what had happened since that old betrayal. The land of his memories was a much different place, where his friends were all alive and whole with honest ambitions as they carved out a new world with their own powers, within their own limitations.

  It didn’t seem worth chewing over that old injury, given the grind of time and everything that had occurred since Sad Plain. Despite everything, despite his own addictions and shortcomings, Papa Lucy had come through for him in the end and tried to make things right in his own ham-fisted way.

  “Chin up, old boy,” Lucy said. “You were a good sport then. Be a good sport now.”

  Half-starved dogs followed their passage through the rotting outskirts of the town, the cheap weatherboard homes were no match for time and the coastal weather. The Boneman led the illusory horse through the rubbish strewn streets, towards the fragment of housing that bore signs of shoddy maintenance, smoke curling from the chimneys. Only the barest crescent of homes remained, twenty or so dwellings facing the dock.

  Cape Baun had been a grand proposal, a place from which to launch naval expeditions to search for new lands. The Boneman had put his plans before the Moot, and he’d allowed for a population of up to ten thousand, which was a conservative estimate.

  Now there were no stevedores, no captains, no doomed ships loaded with surveyors and settlers. A fishing village huddled inside the corpse of one of the largest settlements in the Now.

  The Boneman felt eerie wandering through the outer ruins. Civic buildings had gone to rot, pulled apart for building materials. Parks were overgrown with native scrub, and the streets themselves were buried beneath a few centuries of dirt and neglect.

  Sol was surprised how much he mourned the failure of his great plan.

  “There, that place looks like a taverna,” Lucy piped up. “Quickly now. We’ve gotta get a boat, even if it’s full of leaks.”

  The thought of Turtwurdigan lent speed to his feet. The Boneman pushed away the feral dogs with a simple mark, sending them whimpering into the ruins. Man, horse, and mirror emerging from the old town surprised the handful of people fixing a net beneath their sagging porch.

  If this was Cape Baun’s taverna, it was a sorry one, a place of sack windows and outer decking stained with the grease of a thousand fish.

  “You’ve got a horse,” one of them said, a lank haired boy with several teeth missing. The fishing folk stood, net forgotten.

  “I’m after a boat,” the Boneman said nervously. The fishermen ignored him, stepping forward slowly. They hadn’t drawn their sharp fish knives yet, but they could be on him in moments.

  “The Selector’s daughter nicked off with that horse,” the boy said, pointing to a wanted poster tacked to the wall, the purple image of a girl. “Big reward.”

  “That’s not true,” the Boneman said. “This is my horse.”

  “Only one horse left in all of the Now, and that’s him.” An older man grunted. “Bucephalus, the Last True Horse. Where’s the girl?”

  They stepped forward, but before they could seize him, the Boneman leapt onto the dead horse’s back and willed it to run. The skeleton galloped away, and the Boneman clung to its spine as best he could. He felt a pinch as the shifting vertebrae snagged his inner thigh.

  The villagers gave chase for a short distance, and one of them threw a stone. When the horse outstripped them, they stopped in the street to stare until they passed from sight.

  “You could have told me that all the horses were extinct,” the Boneman said furiously.

  “I don’t take notice of the details,” Lucy said from the mirror. “That was always your thing.”

  The Boneman found the Temple in the ruins of old Cape Baun, one of the first holy sites they had raised to themselves. His portico was still dedicated to Lord Sol the Goodface, the religious “handle” he’d used in the years before the Boneman persona defined his legacy. The sepulchre offered up the bones of many a drowned sailor, unfortunates knifed in the dark, and every kind of death a port town offered.

  Lucy laughed with wicked delight as his brother raised the dead, when once he’d scolded Sol for working in the corpse arts. Sol had pursued the career as a way to fund his marriage, dissuaded from Overhaeven studies by Lucy, who’d gone after his fancy with unusual venom. Even then he’d continued gibing and undermining, but this was his standard volume of scorn.

  The corpse arts had never been a particular passion for Sol Papagallo. It was mostly a second choice driven by circumstance and discouragement.

  I wonder why Lucy pushed me away from Overhaeven studies? the Boneman thought.

  Now the Boneman led a shambling group of corpses through the streets. He had reminded the green-tinged bones of how they were connected and how they should move as a body. He’d been respectful as always, gently laying out the corpses for his work.

  “I didn’t want to wake them,” the Boneman said through gritted teeth. “But we need that boat.”

  “If you do something well, just do it.” Lucy chuckled.

  Just before dusk, they made their reappearance by the taverna. The Boneman had unravelled the horse’s fictitious flesh and rode the crumbling skeleton into view, his own shirt completely unbuttoned to reveal his hideous innards.

  The villagers took one look at the walking dead and fled for their lives. The screaming fisherfolk took to their boats and paddled madly for the breakwater. Cape Baun emptied in less than a minute.

  “Damn it,” the Boneman muttered. “They took all the fishing boats. There’s nothing left.”

  There was a sudden cracking sound, and the horse lurched to one side. The thick femur was split in half and another rib fell. The horse shuddered, barely held together by necromancy.

  “Oh, my sweet horse, you poor old thing,” he said soothingly and climbed down from the skeleton. “What have I done to you?”

  Swiftly removing the mirror and all his belongings, he sang the life out of the dead horse and let it finally fall into bones and dust. With a gesture and a word, he let the former residents of Cape Baun pass back over. The corpses fell as their spirits returned to the Underfog.

  “Trust you to let the help leave work early,” Lucy mocked.

  “You have no sense of gravitas,” the Boneman replied. “It’s right to treat servants with respect.”

  “Absolute rubbish. They’ve chosen their station in life.”

  “They’re not even alive. I don’t think your rational egoism argument applies to the undead,” said Sol.

  “We are the
gods of this world and you quibble about these skeletons?”

  “Please, just be quiet.”

  “Are you—you’re burying that dead horse? Why?” asked Lucy.

  “Because it deserves to be treated well.”

  “At least use magic to do it. You are a Papagallo and you disgrace the family name whenever you touch a shovel.”

  Despite Lucy’s exasperation, the Boneman took the time to bury the horse in a bare vegetable garden. He laid the skull down on top of the jumbled bones and patted the soil down firmly. He could still see the reflection of the horse as it had been in life: a beautiful beast.

  “Are we done here?” Lucy asked.

  “I cannot believe you let the horses die out,” the Boneman finally said. “You’ve done a lot of crummy things, but there’s a new one for your list.”

  He sat with the mirror on the dockside watching the sun set across that murderous sea. The Boneman was frustrated that this long journey had come to a dead end.

  “I’m going to have to face Turtwurdigan alone,” he said. “With an idiot in a mirror for company.”

  “Don’t give up, Sol. We’ll steal a boat in Mawson,” Lucy said. “It’ll have to be a riverboat, but it might make it.”

  The Boneman was about to remind him of the thirty-foot eels when he caught sight of the shark-scarred hulk, decades removed from the water. He laughed out loud, relieved.

  “Our kind hosts did leave us a boat. I can fix it.”

  “That old wreck? We’d be better off swimming.”

  The Boneman called back his army of bodies, grumbling and frustrated by their brief rest in the Underfog. He spotted the bloated body of a shark snagged on the outer edge of the breakwater. It took almost a hundred dead pairs of hands to haul the enormous predator over the rocks, but then it was over and simple enough to push the corpse through the water where the world’s last necromancer could use it.