Papa Lucy & the Boneman

by Jason Fischer

  Raising a hand to rest on her forehead, he retreated when she snapped her teeth at him, snarling like a cornered dog. It broke his heart to see what she’d become, and he couldn’t feel much anger towards her. The theft of his house was a small injury now, a punk move from a forgotten life.

  “Look at us,” he said to Lucy. “Three monsters in a cave. What am I meant to do now?”

  “Fix Bertha’s mind. Get me out of this mirror. Kill Turtwurdigan. Really, Sol, you make too much of your problems.”

  “For once, Lucy, you’re actually right,” the Boneman said.

  Leaving the mirror man alone with his monstrous wife, he took a walk to gather his thoughts and contemplate his next move. The Boneman explored the entire complex, and not once did he need his electric torch. The Taursi had honeycombed the plateau with caves and galleries, carefully channelling in light and air through glass-lined tubes, in places buffed to a mirror shine.

  Did she realise exactly where she was planting her love-nest? he wondered, passing through a cave of glowing spires of neat ranks of glass taller than he was. They were the same as the lonely pillars found throughout the land, but these examples were preserved better and untouched by weather and the elements. They had been shaped into the vaguest suggestion of a hominid form, a trunk of crystal with the nubs of limbs and the bob of a head.

  A breath of wind passed through from somewhere below. The fluting wind pipes gave a faint musical note or something like a distant set of whispers.

  As the Boneman travelled through the abandoned structure, he heard the sounds of movement and felt the presence of the Mad Millies as they followed him. Perhaps twenty of them remained, the smallest fragment of Bertha’s terrifying army, once an immortal force to rival the Riders of Cruik.

  They made no move to approach him. Perhaps they were scared of his gun or of the way he had defeated their mistress. Smiling at the timidity of Bertha’s creatures, he continued his search. He was elated to unearth a cache of star-glass and a handful of spearheads. The hafts of the spears had long since rotted away, and he understood that this temple was incredibly old. It had stood on this island long before the time of people.

  Again, a long mournful note, and something like distant muttering. The sound sent a shiver along the Boneman’s arms, and he headed toward it, going deep into the bowels of the mesa.

  Following a wide gallery inlaid with star-glass, he came to a tall set of double doors, twin panes of smoky glass that were about thirty feet in height. The Taursi had no written language, nothing even approaching pictograms, but the doors were engraved with many strange images, eye-twisting shapes that were incomprehensible, a continuous arc of something that might have been writing.

  Overhaeven marks. No one had been able to interpret the tongue, and most serious scholars thought the occasional relic to be a hoax or the doings of some lost tribe. Only Hesus and a handful of his colleagues were game enough to suggest the obvious: that these were the leavings of aliens, of gods.

  One of the repeated themes in this frieze was the depiction of an object that might have been the Cruik, had it been a twisting serpent with a thousand feet. It did battle with a rank of terrifying beings, each one a cloud of hands and eyes. Then it hid from these foes and finally slid into a hole, defeated. Words and curses followed it into infamy or perhaps exile.

  Thin lattice-work peppered the glass doors, clever whistles and flutes that caught the wind. This was the source of the strange sound, and this close, it was a cacophony. The Boneman looked on the mad scene and knew that this door was something beyond even Taursi hands, an artefact of true alien beauty.

  “Who made this?” he whispered.

  He felt Bertha’s ragged servants hesitate and fall back. Whatever was on the other side of this doorway terrified them.

  The Boneman laid one hand on that perfectly smooth glass and pushed. The door swung open silently, effortlessly, and he stepped through the gap. He was in a cathedral of stone and glass, immense in size. Crosspoint would have fit into this single chamber with room to spare. From the ceiling far above, countless glass stalactites dangled, humming with a resonance that made his teeth ache. The Boneman stood on a slender crystal bridge. Warm winds buffeted him from below. When he chanced a look over the side, vertigo sent him scrabbling backwards.

  Honeycomb fluting ran down as far as he could see, and further still. If he fell from this bridge, he might never stop falling, not until he reached the hot core of this world.

  The footbridge terminated at an island of sorts, a platform supported on that flimsy lattice. The path was barely wide enough for two people to stand abreast. He shuffled forward, resisting the urge to drop to his knees and crawl.

  His hands dripped with sweat as he had images of skidding off into that terrifying drop. Slowly, he edged forward, and with his heart pounding, he climbed over the lip and stood on the island at the temple’s heart.

  A pair of crystalline Taursi stood as an honour guard with their spears crossing overhead. Passing between them, the Boneman shivered. The spiny creatures had transformed into glass; these were not carvings. The vaguest suggestion of their innards could still be seen, and the outline of their bones slowly melted away. There was just enough gristle and meat for him to glean the echoes of these warriors’ lives, and what he saw was nonsensical. They had lived a mixture of a physical life and as abstracts, those rarely glimpsed symbols the Collegia had observed gyrating around in the Overhaeven.

  The Taursi are from the Overhaeven?

  The glass-bound Taursi glowed gently with captured sunlight. Suddenly, the fallen spires littered across the Now made a lot of sense.

  Is this what awaits me? he wondered, glancing down at his own bones, wondering if they too would fade.

  In the centre of the island stood a quartz hoop, a semi-circle almost twenty feet in diameter. It was flanked by the ruins of similar stone bands, structures that had shattered long ago, leaving only jags and jumbled stone to show where they had once stood.

  In the middle of that surviving frame was an image like a painting that was crystal clear. Examining every side of this structure, the Boneman saw nothing but space, and from the far side, it was simply a hoop of empty stone that framed the bridge and the doors.

  His heart quickened as he stepped around to stand in front of the stone band. His hand passed through the world veil with no resistance. A portal, then, a doorway that led through to a landscape of mercury and silver. The winding road of shadow led away on the far side.

  The Boneman looked into the Greygulf, and wept with joy.

  — 16 —

  Well, I’m glad you’ve given up on all that Overhaeven stuff,” Lucy said, fixing Sol’s tie. “No future in studying it. Certainly no money.”

  This was the closest Lucy ever came to praising his new career as a necromancer. Sol suffered his brother’s last-minute adjustments with good grace, knowing that Lucy was just as nervous as he was. Once more, he tried to fight down Sol’s errant cowlick with the hair gel, but he soon gave it up as a lost cause.

  “You must be hung like a rogue elephant,” Lucy said. “Damned if I know what that girl sees in you.”

  “Me neither,” Sol admitted with a grin. The brothers waited in the empty registry. The celebrant quietly asked where all the guests were, and Lucy deftly changed the subject. Sol spent a quiet moment enjoying the view of the world below, the magnificence of the Collegia’s orbit taking his mind away from the butterflies in his stomach.

  “She’s here,” Lucy whispered, and he turned to see Baertha in a simple white dress, smiling shyly through her veil. John Leicester held her arm, grinning broadly as he led her down the aisle. A true friend, to stand in at such a time. The celebrant fumbled with the music controls, and a subdued bridal theme preceded their walk to the front dais.

  John gave Baertha to Sol, with hearty handshakes all round. Blood might have been thicker than water, but her entire family had condemned this wedding. It was good friends today or
it was nothing.

  “You look beautiful,” Sol said tenderly, and Baertha sniffed back a tear as she clutched his arm. The celebrant stopped mid-ceremony to check on her welfare, but she waved away his concern and insisted he continue.

  At the end of that brief rite, Sol Papagallo and Baertha Hann were husband and wife. He felt shabby in his rented clothes, embarrassed that he could not afford the wedding that Baertha deserved, but her sunbeam smile melted these concerns away.

  The Hanns were an influential family, captains of industry and long-time patrons of the Collegia. None of the invited guests had come to the wedding, out of prudence if nothing else. Sol was sad for his new wife, but understood this. Still, it pleased him to see one man lingering in the back row, openly defying the boycott.

  “It’s so good to see you,” Sol said, embracing his old professor and one of his dearest friends.

  “Wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” Hesus said.

  The Boneman found a way to bring Bertha back, a sorcery known only to the dead Taursi. It felt like the memory-glass was twisting his mind to the breaking point, but he persevered. He gleaned the symbols, and the words that he needed were a guttural sound that felt wrong when pronounced by his human tongue.

  It was Turtwurdigan who had struck Bertha mindless, so it was somehow fitting that these obedient spirits offered up the key to her ailment. The memory-glass served any who called upon it, even though the Boneman was technically an enemy.

  He droned the words, contorting his hands into positions that human hands weren’t meant to assume. Bertha lay twisting and groaning in the spot where she’d been felled, surrounded by a circle of star-glass, the spearheads placed at the cardinal points.

  The spell was taxing him to the limit, but somehow he found the power moving through him, bypassing his burnt-out wiring, following some radical new pathway. He’d never known the Taursi to exhibit signs of sorcery. Using their method felt like stepping back into journeyman shoes, wrestling with a power that he barely understood.

  Turtwurdigan had pillaged Bertha’s mind in the crudest of ways, a battlefield sorcery that was more strength than subtlety. Now that the Boneman had the means to survey the damage, it was quite easy to see just what had been done to her at Sad Plain.

  Her scarred frontal lobes were a map to the other Realms, and it was not difficult to track down her errant mind. Parts of her ego and superego were still floating around in the Aum, while the greater part of her subconscious had been scattered in the Underfog, her thoughts dancing with the demons and ghosts. Much of her essence had passed over death’s final shore, leaving great holes in her mind. These parts were lost forever, and the Boneman had to work around these gaps, clumsily stitching everything back together.

  When clarity returned to her eyes, the Boneman was there to see it. Shaking, he fell to his knees, and the tenuous thread of the magic slipped away from him. He felt hollow.

  “Sol,” she said and then slipped into shock, all other words failing her.

  Bertha lay in catatonia for days, breathing shallowly, staring up at some point in the ceiling. She had taken water, but any food he gave her lay in her mouth like a foreign idea. He gave up for fear of choking her.

  Rummaging through the ruin of his house, he gathered a stack of mouldering rugs and blankets and a rusty pair of scissors. Once he had sharpened the scissors on a stone, he snipped away at her hair. He was forced to cut down almost to her scalp. She’d worn her bridal braids to the very end, even as she stood by Lucy’s side on Sad Plain. Bertha had been proud of her hair, and it felt almost criminal to shear away her womanhood like this.

  Her mane was riddled with spider nests, tangles of captured food and waste, and centuries of neglect. It all had to go. The Boneman took an armload of the clippings to the garden and burnt them. He retreated from the stink.

  She was too heavy for him to lift, so he bathed her on the cave floor, using rags and an ancient bar of soap to sponge away the filth. Once, he had longed to touch her just one more time, to relive the early days when their arguments could be eased that way, hard words giving way to love and laughter.

  Now, he had his wish, for all the good it did any of them. He scrubbed away the grime, washed the cobwebs and mud from her sour skin. Bertha’s blank face was a coat of crusts and scabs. It took an hour to clean the gunk out of her eyes, and her ears were another nightmare of wax and infestation. The bruises he’d landed on her were purple and black, and one of her eyes was puffy, almost completely shut.

  His blades were useless when he tried to pare back the yellowed talons on her hands and feet that had grown too thick to trim.

  Something that might have been a sacrificial vessel served as his wash bucket, and he emptied the glass bowl several times. Each load of spring water turned black within minutes.

  When he’d finished, she lay on the old rug, skin scrubbed pink. The Cruik had robbed Bertha of her petite dancer’s frame, twisting her into something less than a person. Her limbs were out of proportion, as if she’d been turned on a rack, and her face was pinched and long. The curves he’d mooned over in their Collegia days were almost erased, replaced by slabs of hard muscle, a sleek form that reminded him more of a greyhound than the woman he’d married.

  The Boneman’s amateur hair cut gave emphasis to her pointed skull. He swallowed, confronted with the depth of the change and her unwilling departure from humanity.

  “Your old lady really let herself go, Sol.” Lucy laughed. The Boneman resisted the urge to kick the mirror, covering it with the filthy washcloth instead.

  He turned to see Bertha regarding him, half-raised on one elbow. She shivered and drew an old blanket over her nudity.

  “How long?” she asked in a croaky voice.

  “A long time,” he said. His mind raced. There had been a million things he’d wanted to say to her. It felt like a hundred lifetimes ago. Accusations, pleas for reconciliation, words of apology.

  Here, at the end of all things, he couldn’t think of a single thing to say to her.

  “You found me,” she whispered. “You came.”

  He nodded and knelt down by her side. He patted her shoulder awkwardly, but held back, unsure if he should hold her or if he could even stomach any intimacy with this monster.

  “Come closer,” she said. “Let me see your face.”

  He leaned down until he was close to her broad mouth, and she raised her claws to his cheeks and his nose.

  “Not this. Your real face.”

  She pinched her claws tightly and pulled, whispering gently as she snagged the sorcerous skin and yanked it like a thread. The illusion unravelled, revealing his skull and the visible tangle of his vertebrae and jawbone.

  Bertha undid his cloak and pushed the fabric aside, exposing the ribcage, the shivering organs, and everything that was his second body.

  “Look at us,” she said, wheezing and sobbing, somewhere between laughter and tears. “Look at what we are now.”

  Lady Bertha and the Boneman stood in the crystal room looking into the portal. Something was also blocking her access to the world veil, and she could not open a far-door. This was their only way off the island.

  In her fugue state, she’d kept a little of her sorcery, but the relevant mind-muscles had atrophied from centuries of disuse. The best she could manage was to craft a crude dress using her magic to break the jungle plants down into hemp. She wrapped the cloth around her like a sheath of coarse felt, holding everything in place with a weak mark of binding.

  If they found trouble in the Greygulf, magic would be no help. The Boneman checked the bullets in the gun. He studied Bertha’s impressive new frame and felt some comfort when he considered her claws and remembered the ease with which she’d thrown him across the room.

  “We go quickly, in and back again,” he said, gesturing to the portal. “Hesus might be in there watching for us.”

  “Where is John Leicester?” Bertha asked. “We could use his guns and his soldier-magic
.”

  “John went over, after the battle. He’s with Hesus now.”

  “Oh.”

  Lucy protested as they brought his mirror close to the portal. He’d been remarkably quiet since the return of Bertha, a rare moment of wisdom given the history between them all. Bad blood held in check by the gravity of their situation.

  He’d be mad to say one word to her, the Boneman thought. With her temper, she might stamp his mirror into dust.

  As peaceful as it was, it was very awkward. Bertha was pensive, perhaps due to the return of her memories. The reunion of these sorcerers had been a long time coming, and now they were acting like strangers.

  If we start remembering we’re family, it’s going to end in blood.

  “Leave me here,” Lucy begged, his three images dancing around in the broken mirror. “If you bring the Aum into the Greygulf, this whole thing will shatter into powder. I’ll be done for.”

  “Your prison is just a window, not the Aum itself,” the Boneman said. “C’mon Lucy, you taught me that. You’ll be fine.”

  Bertha and Sol stepped through the portal, cradling the mirror between them. A sensation ran across the Boneman’s face like walking through a wall of still water, and then they stood in the Greygulf, their feet upon a cracked and abandoned shadow road.

  “What happened here?” Bertha whispered.

  Fires burned across that nitrate geography, fat columns of smoke punctuating the skyline. A distant bustle of figures lingered around a tear in the world veil, their shouts and screeching cries faint in the distance.

  Sol and Bertha travelled the shadow road for many long minutes taking in the desolation around them. The last time the Boneman had visited, the Crossing was in full swing, an orderly progression of goods shifting over from Before to Now.

  This time the industry of Hesus and his followers had given way to something else. Instead of the dangerous wilderness they’d braved in the Crossing, the Greygulf was a desolate wasteland, a land of slag pits and ashes.