Papa Lucy & the Boneman

by Jason Fischer

  “But I fought him just the same, beat him too,” Lucy continued. “Sent his stupid shadow-hand limping out of the Aum. Believe me, I knocked some truths out of that old fraud.”

  By witchlight he showed them how to defeat the barrier that kept them from piercing the world veil. From his prison in the Greygulf, Hesus had done his best to keep his old enemies trapped in the Now, constructing a powerful ward that had taken him hundreds of years to complete. The block was keyed to them specifically and almost impossible to untangle.

  Papa Lucy didn’t know impossible.

  “I’m disappointed in you both,” he said, forcing open the obstruction when they both pleaded exhaustion, amused at their inability to crack the ward. “It took me less than a day to break his little spell. You’ve had weeks and you didn’t even try.”

  “What happens now?” the Boneman asked, feeling the presence of the world veil once more. He’d greatly missed the convenience of the Greygulf, the skin that he could tear with his mind, opening doorways to other places.

  “I’m taking back my town,” Lucy said, his hands on his hips as he considered the walls of Crosspoint. “That’s what happens now.”

  Lucy tried the direct approach by standing before the closed gates, yelling at the guard, and demanding that they fetch the Overseer. Papa Lucy insisted that Crosspoint be turned over to its rightful owner: himself. The guards sent him away with a shower of stones and insults, laughing at his solemn vow that, yes, he was Papa Lucy returned from death.

  “I don’t know why you thought that would work,” the Boneman said, cloaked by Lucy in an illusionary skin. He took his brother by the elbow and led him away before he could unleash the marks of death and fire upon his tormentors.

  A far-door would let the sorcerers into the city, but this was not the return Lucy wanted by sneaking in like a robber. He wanted his grand entrance. He wanted to see the capitulation of the local ruler. The Boneman simply could not talk him out of it.

  Papa Lucy had made up his mind.

  “If I had the Cruik here, I’d smash that gate in and sweep them all from the battlements,” Lucy said through gritted teeth. His hand clenched as if gripping the shaft of his absent staff. The Boneman frowned.

  “The Cruik is bad news. Call back that poor girl of yours, your Rider, and we’ll find a way to destroy the damn thing. It’s time to let it go, Lucy.”

  “Do not speak to me about the Cruik.” Lucy scowled. “You don’t know.”

  They rejoined Bertha at their vigil point and made plans to take back the town. The Boneman spent hours at the old cemetery crooning at the dead and raising the corpses from the earth. He gave them false life and motion, and then led this shuffling force towards the open caravanserai.

  “No killing,” the Boneman warned, as the first screams were heard. The phalanx of mobile corpses had been seen.

  “I can’t promise that, brother. We’ll do what we must.”

  Once more he was bound to his brother with a mixture of love, self-hatred, and fear as he followed him into another bad decision. He could rationalise his brother’s behaviour in a hundred different ways and still come up with no real answers.

  If you weren’t scared of Turtwurdigan, would you still be here with him?

  It wasn’t a question he was prepared to answer, not even to himself.

  Chaos, shouting, and curses arose as the carousers and night scum found the walking dead in their midst. The Boneman’s shambling servants seized guns. Mounted on stolen birds and buggies, they broke open the slave pens and freed the prisoners, adding to the chaos. The dead were fearless and constant as they shrugged off the weapons of the caravanserai guards and dragged down the living with their bony hands.

  Lucy plucked men from the panicked crowd and broke down their will with nothing but a gaze and a mark. With their minds captured, he set these slaves to defending the sorcerers from the disorganised resistance.

  Bertha stalked through the canvas alleys, knocking down any who raised arms against her, calling the women out of hiding. She sought out those with the coal of madness within and fanned this ember into a full flame. She sang to them, lured them to her cause, and her new force came creeping out through the fires and chaos. Drunkards and whores, fortune-tellers and slaves, all were now Mad Millies—furious and fearless berserkers with the strength of three men.

  An expeditionary force of bailiffs came from the town to quell the sudden outburst of violence in the caravanserai. The lawmen were surprised and scattered, quickly overrun by the mouldering undead. Any survivors were mowed down under the dead-eyed calm of Lucy’s gunmen.

  The same guards who’d mocked Papa Lucy fled in terror as the gates were assaulted by a horde of madmen and monsters. They brought gunpowder forward, while the undead made a neat pyramid of fuel canisters at the door’s base. Lucy laid out the fuse himself.

  “I want you to remember that I asked them nicely,” Lucy told the Boneman, then set a match to the charge. They ran for cover as the night erupted into flame and noise. The thick beams of the gate ruptured.

  It took many hours of bloody fighting, and the barracks held out for some time. It pained the Boneman to see his old house burning, an entire wing crumbling under the explosion when a munitions dump went up.

  Using far-doors to coordinate the fighting, the sorcerers made light work of the town defenders. Shortly after dawn, the Overseer offered the surrender of the town. Papa Lucy accepted the corpulent official’s surrender, and then put a bullet into his face just to prove the point.

  “We go north,” Papa Lucy said. He slouched on the Overseer’s ridiculous throne, which he found hilarious. He drummed a tattoo on the imposing armrests with his fingers.

  “Why?” Bertha said. A tailor fussed over her terrifying body, nervously dropping pins and measuring tapes. She wanted a good set of clothes, but nothing fit her misshapen body. Even the biggest men’s clothes were too small for her.

  The Boneman did not blame the tailor for his nerves. It wasn’t every day that your customers were murderous conquerors, let alone ancient gods returned from legend. It made all of the Boneman’s interactions tiresome and he was thankful at least for his false face.

  Imagine how hard this would go if they could really see me, he thought wearily.

  “There’s something that I want up there, up in the Waste,” Lucy told Bertha. “Turtwurdigan knows, and Hesus knows too. But I’m smarter than all of them.” He tapped on his temple like a madman and refused to tell them any more than that.

  The Boneman sat behind a small table below the throne, and as usual, he took care of the details. It fell to him to meet with the terrified representatives of the conquered townsfolk and listen to their fawning and tentative attempts at furthering their own interests. He took inventory of items within the town, gathering everything that Lucy had asked him to find.

  “You know that the far-doors don’t work out there,” he warned his brother, continuing to work through supper. “If you want to bring an army into the Waste, it’ll need to make its own way.”

  “So get me bikes and birds, all of that stuff,” Lucy said, waving a hand to indicate that the subject was already boring him.

  “No, you don’t get to do that,” the Boneman said, throwing down his pencil with exasperation. “If you want my help, you tell me what we’re up against.”

  “Nothing to worry about. My little Rider is on her way, and she’ll get there before anyone else. She bears the Cruik, Sol, and the Cruik works for me.”

  “Hardly,” the Boneman sighed. “What’s in the Waste? Stop talking in circles.”

  “A Waking City,” Papa Lucy said. “A second chance.”

  A week after the Family strode out of legend and took back Crosspoint by force, the sorcerers left. Lucy installed a puppet leader and allowed his brother to make a handful of cosmetic changes to the laws and governance. The Boneman insisted on reviving the Moot, an authority to conduct fair elections in their absence.

  “No mo
re politics,” Lucy grumbled. “Let the merchants and bean counters sort it out. I just want a veto and to be bloody well left alone.”

  A great force set north following the pilgrim’s road. The Boneman had rounded up every working vehicle, every bird, camel, and lizard. Crosspoint was emptied on the word of the gods. Coin-riders were pressed into service, and the handful of remaining merchants were coerced into funding the expedition.

  “There’ll be an uprising,” the Boneman warned, but Lucy simply did not care. He kept looking north with impatience writ large on his face. Something else, too. There was a disturbing light in his eyes that might have been hunger or lust.

  Papa Lucy had his army, thousands strong with engines sending up a column of dust and exhaust smoke. Mad Millies shrieked and hollered, clutching to the sides of buggies driven by the undead. Ranks of Lucy’s mind-slaves kept the conscripts in line by riding the perimeter on motorbikes and watching for deserters through their elsewhere eyes.

  This had better be worth it, the Boneman thought. Only the fear of Turtwurdigan kept him silent. If they wanted to survive the return of this old enemy, they needed every gun. He rode in a shuddering convertible next to his brother, his skeleton exposed to the light of day. As Lucy saw it expedient to travel openly, he had taken away the Boneman’s false skin to “remind these folks of what we are.” He had even convinced Bertha to shuck her new dresses and wear a horrible outfit of leather and metal.

  We’re meant to be the good guys.

  A handful of shadow-roads brushed against the Waste, but the ways were old and the path too dangerous. The sorcerers might survive the short-cut through the Greygulf, but it would strike their forces dumb and strip their minds, leaving them helpless.

  So they went the long way, a rumbling horde thousands strong. Crooked mobs fled before the dust and the rumble of engines. They passed many empty holdings, torched and abandoned. Word had got out about the devastation at Crosspoint, of Papa Lucy’s peculiar brand of mercy.

  Lucy seemed to relish his newest incarnation as a feudal warlord. The convertible had been the pride and joy of the dead Overseer, a rusty sedan with fat tailfins and cracked leather seats. Lucy revved the engine constantly, heedless of how much fuel it was burning.

  The sorcerer wore a leather jacket and sunglasses, his hair slicked back with gel. A big pile of guns slid around on the back seat, and he occasionally fired a round into the air, whooping through a megaphone as he fish tailed the car up and down the column.

  “No point sneaking in,” Papa Lucy confided to his brother. He smoked a kennelweed pipe, lounging back against the deep seats and steering the car with only his sorcery. “Gotta let ’em know we’re coming.”

  — 18 —

  The Collegia lurched, a sickening spectacle captured by the last of the journalists still filming. The world watched in shock as the university fell out of the sky, the magic that fixed it in orbit sputtering and finally failing altogether. The glorious sky-city was nothing now but an enormous hunk of glass and cement, a meteor that struck the eastern seaboard like a fist.

  After two cities were wiped from the map, the orbital hotels and luxury resorts began to drop, fiery bombs raining from above. The last structure to fall was the Hann-Slatter Observation Platform, a flimsy structure set at the upper limits of orbital sorcery. The handful of Overhaeven researchers burned up on re-entry, leaving nothing but dust to signal the end of humanity’s hold on the sky.

  The end was here.

  Lucy was Luciano Papagallo then. His face ran with sweat as he pushed his will against the rubbery world veil. The Greygulf was tantalisingly close, but nobody had ever attempted to open such a large door. Only the occasional sorcerer had the strength to breach that terrifying boundary between all the Realms.

  Lucy intended to open a passage for thousands of people, most of them non-sorcerers. It was madness, an impossible bending of the physics of space and time. It was pure Lucy.

  His dearest friends joined the assault. A handful of Collegia sorcerers added their strength, defectors who’d left the fruitless talks to cast in their lot with the disgraced Papagallos. In those final days, Lucy had been everywhere talking to the press, bothering politicians, speaking at rallies. Soon, the Hanns could not contain him any longer.

  He was determined to be heard, and now he had a movement behind him, enough resources to attempt this mad action. It was a desperate roll of the dice, but also a chance where there was none.

  The air began to feel like jelly. Every movement took a gargantuan effort. The sun shivered and fractured, black lines webbing on its surface. It slowed, then became still, dim and fading. Sol felt the magic begin to fail then, and the sorcerers started dropping dead as their bodies collapsed under the strain of this last great undertaking.

  An hour, perhaps less, and it would all be over. Humanity had bled this world dry, and now it was shrugging them off like a bad idea.

  “Wait,” Sol gasped, holding the spirits of these dead sorcerers back, preventing them from slipping through the world veil. The spirits of the newly dead wailed, denied their release.

  “We need more,” he told John Leicester, who nodded mournfully. Leicester understood what was required. He stalked through the panicked crowd, gun chattering as he slew their panicked followers. The soldier-mage worked to a ruthless calculation, murdering one from each family, focussing on the old and the weak.

  “Enough,” Sol gasped and let the restless spirits go. They rushed forward in one mass, their essences hitting the world veil together. The thick skin between the worlds shivered then gave way as these dead wriggled through, seeking a path into the Underfog and eventually Death.

  “Yes!” Lucy said through gritted teeth. He used this momentum to force open his own doorway in the universe. A great ragged wound in the world veil opened onto a landscape of silver and dusk. The Greygulf. Lucy took a moment to shore up the edges of this portal, and then he was through, fires blazing as he battled with the guardians of that alien Realm.

  Helping a dazed Baertha to her feet, Sol joined the panicked throng, nodding when saw Hesus nearby. His old professor led the small rearguard of failed students and journeymen sorcerers. Overhaeven theorists, mostly. Hesus had found others in the last few months, volunteers who responded well to his tests and exercises.

  They called themselves the Hesusmen, and at first this group was an endless source of amusement for Lucy. Now, these people held firm and kept their calm as the bubble of safety shrank. They got the last of the people through and kept order as the livestock and supplies were funnelled into the sorcerous gate.

  “Go, Sol,” Hesus called out, even as the outer edges of the rearguard collapsed, twitching and choking as their bodies betrayed them. “Don’t wait, just go.”

  Then there was the lunacy that was their trek through the Greygulf. Demons prowled those strange roads, pouncing on the unwary. Creatures that were all teeth and eyes feasted on the terrified fugitives. There was murder in that dim world, but Lucy led from the front, driving away the darkness with fire and pushing through to their new home.

  On later reflection, Sol realised this was the only noble act of Lucy’s long and sordid life. Of course, Lucy milked it for all he was worth.

  A contingent met Papa Lucy’s horde before the gates of Hislott Springs, first of the Inland towns. A trio of Family priests grovelled in the red dust, and a sweating dignitary offered him the mayoral chain, a twist of car badges and other bleedthrough gewgaws.

  Word had gotten ahead, even though they had felled every telegraph line they came across. Half the town fled for their lives, while the remainder gambled on the Family’s mercy.

  “Well, this is more like it,” Lucy said, shrugging into the symbol of office. “This means no one has to die.”

  He walked back to his car, then paused. He turned on his heel and pointed to the priests.

  “Except for them,” he told his blank-eyed followers, who stepped forward with blades and shooters drawn. The cler
ics begged and wailed and called upon Papa Lucy’s mercy. One of them broke and ran. They died just the same. The old ruler of Hislott Springs looked on this blood price in mute terror. He agreed rapidly when Lucy told him it was a bargain.

  “Burn the temples and shrines,” he told Bertha. After a moment of indecision, she sent her Millies through the open gate, her chattering madwomen pushing past the terrified townsfolk.

  “What? Don’t look at me like that, Sol,” Lucy scolded. “I’m rethinking our religious aspirations, is all.”

  “I thought the Family rote was supposed to be our legacy,” the Boneman said. “Precepts and edicts, in case the laws ever failed.”

  “We’re warlords now,” Lucy said. “People won’t respect piety and handwringing.”

  “So disband the temples. Killing priests! It makes you—I don’t even know what you are anymore.”

  “You read that scripture. They twisted our words.”

  “I thought you liked being a god.”

  Lucy gave no answer except an infuriating smile. A tendril of smoke climbed above the walls, and then the awful cries, a chorus of animal screeching as the Millies murdered someone.

  The Boneman oversaw the reprovisioning of their forces as they emptied the larders of Hislott Springs to starvation levels and seized a brace of birds. It would all be needed, every last crumb. Anyone fit to point a gun was press-ganged into the sprawling army and squeezed into the trucks and buggies.

  Lucy gave the mayoral chain to the first person he saw, a young boy he swore into office at gunpoint. The law books were brought to him for inspection, and after a quick rifle through the pages he burned the lot, already bored by the process of annexing a friendly town.

  “Goodbye then,” he told the frightened townsfolk through his megaphone. “Be good.”