Papa Lucy & the Boneman

by Jason Fischer

  “They’ve picked everything clean,” he said.

  The Boneman heard a sound nearby, a snuffling far beneath them. Laying down by the lip of the shadow road, the Boneman inched forward to peer over the side and down to the silver ground.

  What was left of a man shuffled forward, a great bulk of white flesh almost the size of an elephant. Impossibly long arms stretched through the world veil, and the other ends could be faintly seen dragging through some forsaken Prime Realm.

  “It’s fishing,” Bertha said. They watched in horror as it plucked out a cow and fed the animal into the broad fold of its mouth. The Boneman remembered the disciples of Hesus, twisted from their frequent work in the Greygulf, and realised he was looking at the end result.

  He saw crude rips throughout the world veil where the misshapen figures plundered the other worlds. Lucy’s noble venture, the escape and the taming of this world between worlds, all had come unstuck. Now the custodians were the monsters, and the Boneman felt the thinness of the world veil, the damage caused by all the looting.

  Above the old terminus of Neville, a boil pulsated in the magnesium sky, a sore that threatened to burst. Whatever realm lay on the far side, it was forcing its way through the weakened world veil and into the Now. A violent and permanent connection would soon be joining two of the Realms, creating a gateway from one world to another.

  He made note of the location, as did Lucy.

  “Let’s get out of here,” the Boneman said with a shudder. “Quickly now.”

  They crept along the shadow road making for the safety of the portal. The glass in Lucy’s mirror began to bulge and struggled to rise from the frame to break free.

  “It’s Hesus!” Lucy said, a touch of hysteria in his voice. “He comes!”

  Husband and wife stumbled back into the Now, almost dropping the mirror in their haste. Nothing followed them through, but on the other side of the portal was a great shadow with no observable source. It flickered across the silver hills testing the old shadow road, then hunted elsewhere when it lost the trail.

  It was the outline of a human hand, enormous in proportion and moving with speed and grace, a vast squid of shadow. Just when the Boneman thought they were safe, the creature reappeared, rushing at them, slamming into the portal. In the split second before the impact, the Boneman caught a glimpse of a ragged hole in the centre of that palm, and a white legend beneath this. It read “BEFORE” in letters taller than a man.

  The shadow hand could not pass through, but the stone hoop snapped in half. The image of the Greygulf winked out and vanished altogether.

  Hesus had seen them, and set his first attack against the Family the next day. Something scared the Mad Millies out of their rude nests and hiding places, and as a single gibbering force they burst into that vast chamber of glass. Every last woman leapt into the gleaming abyss at a full run. The Boneman felt the moment that their miserable lives were snuffed out, bones breaking as they bounced from the crystal spans, plummeting into the depths of the earth.

  They were scared of this room, he thought to himself, looking over the edge. What called them in? What made them do that?

  He knew the answer.

  The second attack came in the Boneman’s old laboratory, now cleared of detritus. On a bench lay Lucy’s new body, a rough replica of clay that was fortified with animal bones and looted Taursi glass. They’d only been able to find the skull of some jungle cat, but it would have to serve.

  They were going to free Papa Lucy from the mirror by plucking his essence out of the Aum.

  The Boneman was attempting another form of Taursi magic gathered from the memory-glass in the temple below the house. The long-dead Taursi magicians had not crafted a loan body since time unknown, but their spirits still knew the art.

  It was exhausting work learning the alien magic on the fly. This was their third attempt at a receptacle for Lucy’s spirit. The remnants of the last two bodies were swept into a corner, a mixture of clay shards and burnt flesh.

  Bertha was trying to gently pry out the broken mirror shards with some old tweezers, her misshapen hands causing more frustration than success.

  “Let me do that for you,” the Boneman said.

  “I was once your teacher! Do you think me so useless?”

  “That’s not what I meant. Your hands—we just need to be very careful with that mirror.”

  “Yeah, watch those dirty great paws,” Lucy chimed in.

  “Shut up! Sol, if we had any sense we’d drop this bastard into the pit.”

  “We need him, Bertha! We are all in great danger!”

  “Sol—” Bertha began, and then the mirror suddenly shattered, a cloud of slivers erupting from the frame and up into her face. Bertha staggered away from the bench, bloodied and gasping.

  “I saw him, I saw,” she babbled. He set to work with the tweezers picking the sharp glass out of her face and hands. Thankfully none of the glass was lodged in her eyes.

  “What did you see?”

  “In the mirror, it was the hand. Hesus! He got Lucy, and then he saw me. He came for me!”

  The skeleton man held the twisted woman for a long moment, and they cried together. They were broken by time, misshapen and lost, and now an old enemy had taken Lucy. They were no longer Baertha and Sol and they were somewhere far beyond love, but grief took them in readily enough.

  Mustering his courage, the Boneman knelt down and gathered up the pieces of Lucy’s mirror. He felt old then, defeated. If Lucy can fall, we’re all finished. Turtwurdigan wins.

  We’ll never leave this island.

  Then, he saw it. A piece of mirror no bigger than his thumb, a sliver from the top corner. Within it, turning and dazed, was the battered face of Papa Lucy.

  “He lives,” he said, astonished. “Lucy’s alive!”

  Jarred out of her sorrow, Bertha took the shard and snapped it in half with her strong hands. She slid the two shards into the clay face, in place of the eyes, and drew the mud down, sealing them in under a crude pair of eyelids.

  The next part of the procedure was taxing, an old blood rite designed for a different species. Using his knife, Sol pressed marks into every inch of the mud form, a bird-claw scatter that resembled the marks from the glass doors. Overhaeven marks, three symbols carved in a repeated pattern. He slavishly printed this into every inch of the mud body, not understanding the meaning of what he wrote.

  Bertha smeared her own blood all over the clay, rubbing her opened wrist up and down the limbs, then soaking the face until crimson pools forming over the false eyes. The Boneman droned on, head thrumming, Taursi words falling from his tongue with difficulty.

  The clay grew warm and then hot. The trail of Bertha’s blood sizzled. The dummy’s damp flesh had dried out within minutes. Deep cracks ran all over the torso and up and down the limbs. They brought out new clay and water to work it, with more blood to maintain the sorcery. The strange marks needed constant attention because the pattern was frequently interrupted by the sluice of clay and blood. Even their sweat obliterated the occasional sigil.

  They worked for days, lighting fires to work through the night. Bertha learnt enough of the rite to give her husband a rest. The Boneman took turns slashing his skin to sprinkle his own strange life fluids onto the loan body.

  He pressed on through the doubt and exhaustion. Would the magic fail? Would it kill them all? Would a loan body made to Taursi design reject the essence of a human?

  Their stock of fresh water was running low, and he didn’t know if he could leave Bertha for long enough to fetch more. She teetered weakly over Lucy’s intended body, droning on and digging her claws into the clay belly, hoping for some reaction.

  The Boneman soaked a cloth in the bottom of their water pail and ran it across the crumbling clay on the carved man’s face. He worked at the facial features, kneading the nose into shape. He felt a twitching underneath his hands. Something moved under that layer of clay.

  “The knife! Quick!”<
br />
  Working delicately, he slid the blade into the corner of one eye and drew the steel across. The lids separated then blinked. Beneath them lay a perfectly formed eye. It swivelled about, staring, its iris shrinking from the streaming sunlight.

  “It worked, Bertha,” the Boneman cried. He freed the other eye, opened the clay nostrils and the plain slit of the mouth. Papa Lucy took a breath, and then another.

  — 17 —

  Hard days are coming,” Lucy said to the others. “People don’t believe us, and they’re all going to die. So forget them.”

  The five sorcerers held counsel in a rented room, down on the planet’s surface. Baertha’s family had chivvied and driven them out of the Collegia, a concerted campaign backed by all of their funds and influence. The Hanns threatened to cut off many endowments and scholarships and threatened the High Council with political embarrassment and legal injunctions. They even found a way to end the tenures of Hesus and John Leicester out of nothing but spite.

  “It is not fair what my family has done to you!” Baertha protested. “If you were up at the Collegia, you could get someone to listen to our proposal.”

  “We lost that battle,” John said. “We’re fighting a bigger war anyway.”

  The Papagallo brothers had given up on fighting the might of the Hanns. A newer problem had arisen, nothing less than the world ending. Neither science nor sorcery had the answer. Nothing had the power to avert the inevitable—apocalypse, the imminent extinction of humanity. And only a handful of days remained to address it.

  Worldwide, the power stations were overheating and could not be shutdown. Every street corner had one, a golden glass tower that powered everything from homes to transport. The larger stations powered industries and kept orbiting sky-cities like the Collegia from crashing down to earth.

  These stations gathered magical energy from the Overhaeven, that misunderstood and distant realm. For centuries it had been a safe power source that freed up the world to pursue arts, culture, and sorcery. Now, it was their doom, glowing merrily across the globe.

  Every attempt to tamper with the power network was speeding up the meltdown. There were no optimistic predictions, and as near as anyone could calculate, it would melt the entire planet’s mantle into slag. No survivors.

  Sol had seen Lucy spending hours at the power stations around the city, face pressed against the golden glass, pouring his own magic into that stored within each station. Whatever he tried to do didn’t work, and he’d already pivoted to another plan.

  While billions wasted their final hours watching for the first signs of the end, these five outcasts worked around the clock. Lucy had stumbled across the solution—one that the Collegia was ignoring—even in those last panicked days. A great exodus. A crossing.

  He’d found humanity a new home.

  “I have my concerns,” Hesus said. “We don’t know enough about the Greygulf to cross it safely.”

  “Yes, it will be brutal,” Lucy said, a kind hand on Hesus’s shoulder. “Perhaps deadly. I’m hoping your new recruits will help the people cross safely.”

  “Don’t forget the sheep,” Sol said. “Cattle, horses, dogs, pigs, chickens. We need a viable livestock population.”

  “Ever the practical one, my brother. Perhaps you could raise some of the dead to become our farmhands,” Lucy said. He was met with laughter from the others. Sol took it in good nature. His was a working man’s industry after all.

  “So Lucy, how did you find this place?” Baertha asked.

  “Luck, really. The other Realm is lining up with ours, briefly. It can support life. The rest is up to us.”

  “About that. The two worlds don’t quite mesh up,” John Leicester said, aligning two sheets of tracing paper. “I’ve sent through probes, but they don’t all match. See, the patterns are all wrong.”

  A clear map of their present continent showed the topography and the locations of towns and cities. The other map was bare, with only the hint of a coastline, a mountain range, the tentative sketchings of a watercourse. The world veil was thick, and details were hard to come by.

  Five probes were sent through the Greygulf, but the results were scattered. The destination points came out as a tangle in the destination world.

  “There’s no point in doing this, not if people will starve in the wilderness.” Lucy thundered. “We need machines, food, resources. I don’t care how the goods come over, but find a way.”

  “It’s going to be hard to bring things over once we make the crossing,” John admitted. “But I’ve found a way to locate population centres and make it easier to bleed the items through.”

  He dumped a handful of photos on the maps, several shots of war memorials, obelisks, stone plinths, and slouch-hatted warriors in stone and bronze, holding eternal vigil.

  “One in every town,” the soldier mage said with a smile. “I’ve got my people out there now marking as many of these as they can get to. Get a fix on one of these statues from the other world, and you’ve hit paydirt. Then, it’s just a matter of reeling everything in.”

  He mimed the action of a fishing rod frantically bringing in the big one. The sorcerers chuckled.

  “Lest we forget,” Baertha said with the flash of a smile, putting aside the photos. They quickly moved onto other matters. The logistics of this venture were staggering. There was no time to waste on pleasantries, not when millions of lives were at stake.

  Papa Lucy looked like he’d been baked in a kiln. Steam rose out through the cracks in his casing of mud. Working frantically, Lady Bertha and the Boneman chiselled him loose and peeled away chunks of earth.

  Lucy shook, bouncing on the bench like a landed fish. His new skin was burnt in places, angry marks that mirrored the etchings from the broken mud case. As the Boneman shook his brother by the shoulders and called out his name, the eye-twisting sigils began to fade, leaving him with the fresh skin of a newborn.

  Bertha dashed the last of their water across Lucy’s face and he sat bolt upright, gasping, staring at nothing. They wrapped him in rags, massaged his perfect limbs, and slowly brought him out of the shock.

  The second birth of Papa Lucy was a success.

  He didn’t say anything that first day, but he took their water and food willingly and stood when he had the strength. He tested the new body by walking all over the ruined house and the temple beneath, his young man’s legs managing all of the stairs with no effort.

  The Boneman looked upon his brother and felt the old jealousies returning, the feeling that Papa Lucy led a charmed life. In his new body, Lucy could have passed for twenty, a man in the first flush of his youth. His face was young, unlined, the same handsome features that dropped countless knickers in his salad days.

  The Boneman turned to see Bertha contemplating Lucy’s new body, her own monstrous face unreadable.

  “It’s just not fair,” she finally said, looking down at her twisted hands. Sol patted her taloned paws with his own monstrous hand then watched as she wrapped her fat fingers around the visible interplay of his small bones.

  “I’m sorry, Sol,” she said. They watched from a distance as Papa Lucy attempted calisthenics in the garden, nude and grinning.

  “I’ve waited hundreds of years to hear you say that,” the Boneman said, and smiled his sad skeleton smile.

  “I could blame the Cruik, blame you—hell, I could even blame him,” she said, nodding towards the laughing sorcerer. “But it was me. I was always in here, even when things went crazy, when—when it happened. I did it.”

  “It’s okay,” the Boneman said. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  They sat in a comfortable silence and kept a peaceful vigil on the front stoop of their first house. If the Boneman kept his eyes closed, he found that pretending came a lot easier, the fantasy that they were still young, a beautiful couple with nothing but potential and promise ahead of them.

  Then he opened his eyes to realise they were two monsters huddled in a ruin with their marr
iage as dead as the old world. And they remained in the service of the greatest monster of all.

  Later, Lucy joined their simple dinner at the newly built table with a smile. He’d been gone for hours, wandering somewhere beyond his brother’s sorcerous gaze. He offered no explanation as to his whereabouts.

  “Here, try this,” the Boneman said, knowing better than to ask his brother anything when he had that look in his eye. Lucy picked at a plate of native greens, boiled and pulped into something approaching food, dosed with as much salt as they could find in the storerooms. It tasted nasty, but it wasn’t poisonous.

  The Boneman had learnt some new tricks from the memory-glass and had used them to join fallen branches into furnishings. He had moulded the separate pieces together into a new whole, flattening bundles of sticks into planks. The joins were stronger than anything a nail or dovetail joint could provide, and he was proud of the results.

  “You’re planning on staying?” Lucy scoffed, looking at the house. Bertha and Sol had spent hours cleaning the rooms, fixing the windows and doors where possible. The curtains were crudely ensorcelled hemp similar to their clothes.

  “We can’t leave,” the Boneman said. “The boat’s broken and the portal to the Greygulf is beyond fixing. We’re stuck.”

  “Might as well get comfortable while we wait for Turtwurdigan to kill us,” Bertha said morosely, crunching down on the charred flesh of some dead animal. Lucy smirked as he pushed his crudely fired plate away.

  “No imagination, either of you,” Lucy said. “We’re not stuck here, and damned if I’m going to sit around and watch you play house.” Lucy stood up and unravelled his hemp toga. Beneath this he wore a t-shirt and denim jeans, clean and new. His feet were clad in a comfortable pair of sneakers, and a shining pistol hung from his belt.

  “We’re leaving. Now.”

  Sol and Bertha stared at him in shock, their rude meals forgotten as Papa Lucy opened a far-door.

  “Hesus has changed. He’s something else now,” Lucy said. He led the way through the far-door, and in one instant they left the distant island to set foot on the mainland. The three sorcerers stood on the scar of the original Crossing overlooking the slums of Crosspoint.