Papa Lucy & the Boneman

by Jason Fischer

  The army rolled out, pushing north for Sad Plain. The old ruler of Hislott Plains jogged behind the convertible, naked and chained. Only the Boneman’s insistence that they spare the man gave Lucy pause. He laughed and set the man loose three miles down the road.

  “If you can’t see why this is hilarious, I just feel sorry for you,” Lucy said.

  Begging off from travel in the convertible, the Boneman claimed the need to perform maintenance sorcery on his undead cadre. A lie, since they’d walk until the sorcery ground their bones into powder. He breathed a sigh of relief as Lucy roared off into the distance, fat wheels kicking up a shower of dust and small stones.

  Flagging down Bertha’s truck, Sol climbed up into the flat-bed. His wife lounged against the back of the cab, her stylised dominatrix uniform slightly ridiculous when viewed this close. The outfit that Lucy had designed for her showed off the Cruik’s ruinous touch to full effect, her scars and twisted flesh on full view.

  The Boneman travelled nude at his brother’s request, and he understood why. Lucy needed monsters for generals and terror for a flag. It was all a grand statement, the end result of a carefully considered plan.

  “Lucy’s gone too far,” he said quietly, clutching the side panels as the truck bounced along the track. Bertha nodded.

  “We need him, Sol,” she said. “Any army we can get, any way he can get it.”

  “Expedience is no excuse,” the Boneman started, and then drew up short. The small army they’d taken to Sad Plain made little difference. Riders, Mad Millies, John’s stone soldiers, all of them had been swept aside when Turtwurdigan woke.

  He shivered and wished for an army twice the size. When he remembered the Mother of Glass and her fiery kiss, he found that he could overlook Lucy’s methods.

  Bethel was an atrocity.

  As Papa Lucy’s horde approached, the faithful came out in force with pilgrims and local missionaries lining the tradeway for almost a mile. The town existed to service visitors to Sad Plain, and the imminent appearance of the Family, gone for so long, brought out the makings of a grand procession. Those who were on pilgrimage counted themselves extra lucky; they’d come to look upon the holy site, and the gods themselves were paying them a visit.

  The huddle of shacks and wayhouses was decked out with bunting, the richest wayhouses bringing out their finest strings of Taursi glass, shining stars that tinkled in the faint breeze. Pilgrims smiled expectantly as the convoy neared, while some gibbered and wailed. Every order of religious mania was on display. Some spilled blood onto the road, while others left scripture books and pamphlets across the tradeway, the better for the gods to walk upon.

  As the first vehicle approached, replica Cruiks were held up high. Rose petals rained on the tradeway for the Lady Bertha. These were imported from the Riverland at great cost, but the pilgrims dumped them heedlessly, packet after packet, the air soon filling with petals and dust.

  “I can see her!” someone said, and the maddest of Bertha’s acolytes whipped themselves with wire whisks, drawing blood and flies.

  “The Papa! The Papa is here!” somebody else screamed, and a car emerged from the dust. It was a thundering Before-Time machine, riding low to the ground, all fins and rust. Standing in the front of the car, one foot on the steering wheel, a man grinned, resting a big gun across his shoulders.

  “Papa Lucy!” the pilgrims screamed. Their god smiled broadly at this fervent treatment. Then he levelled the gun and squeezed the trigger.

  The screams of ecstasy became cries of agony, the keening of lost seagulls as the wounded and terrified ran for their lives. Lucy drove forward patiently, taking care to strafe both sides of the tradeway. He signalled his followers to chase runners into the desert and finish everybody off.

  Nobody survived the Family’s first visit to Bethel. When they left, there was nothing left of the place but the blackened scars where buildings had once stood, and the tradeway that made for Sad Plain like an arrow.

  After Bethel, none of the soldiers were game to test the patience of the slick sorcerer. Desertions stopped entirely, even as the suicides climbed. But death did not release them from service. The recently deceased were hauled back from the Underfog, their bewildered spirits tucked back into their cold bodies. The Boneman insisted that they rise, take up their guns and spears, and keep on walking.

  “You’re still on the books,” he’d say mournfully, patting the reanimated soldiers on the shoulder. “Sorry.”

  It taxed him to raise so many, but soon the murdered pilgrims lurched along behind the main body of the army, weapons pressed into their dead hands. Lucy enjoyed the irony of these pilgrims honouring their vows of “undying service,” and overrode his brother’s objections.

  Less than a day’s travel brought them to the holiest site in the Family faith, the location of that ancient and most terrible battle. It had been an empty city once, a place of glass and light, an oddity in a world where the inhabitants were nomads and did not build anything beyond the rudest of structures.

  The Boneman remembered the day that Hesus stood in Lucy’s way, denying him passage and defying the warrant for his arrest. Unable to best his old friend with sorcery, Lucy used the Cruik to break the nameless city out of spite and frustration. The glass fell for miles, raining down upon Hesus. Thousands were sliced into ribbon, including John Leicester.

  Then, Turtwurdigan woke.

  The Boneman couldn’t look upon this glittering prairie without terror seizing his heart. He wanted to cry, he wanted to throw up. He’d walked into this place a man and left it a charred and broken monster.

  Bertha placed a heavy paw on his shoulder and squeezed gently. She shook slightly, the memory of her wounds no less than his.

  Lucy bade the horde to stop at the very edge of Sad Plain, not wanting to risk their wheels on that carpet of shattered glass. Not even the lizards would enter. It was folly to walk in. The thickest boots would be shredded within the first mile.

  Nothing to see in there, the Boneman thought. It’s just a wreck now, the place where someone finally told Lucy that he couldn’t do something.

  Papa Lucy stood on the hood of the convertible, and the megaphone gave a little squeal as he brought his voice to most of the army. Others repeated his words or guessed at what their new leader was saying.

  If the conscripts could not hear his address, they pretended they could, shuddering whenever his blank-faced servants drifted through the ranks.

  “Thanks for coming, friends,” Lucy said, his face flush with bonhomie. “Can you hear me down the back?”

  A general murmur rose matched by the moans of the undead and the cackles of the Mad Millies. Lucy laughed. The Lady Bertha and the Boneman stood next to the car on display for the troops.

  Lucy spoke. “Now, you’re probably wondering why we stopped here. It’s a bit out of our way, but I wanted you folks to see this place.”

  He gestured at the field of sharp glass, interrupted only by the occasional jag of a shattered column, the low remains of walls poking out of the sea of shining wreckage. Thousands of tonnes of broken glass, left where it had fallen. If there were treasures here, they were inaccessible.

  Papa Lucy’s ultimate display of sour grapes.

  “This wasn’t always called Sad Plain. I gave it that name after what happened here. It used to be an old city, a beautiful place of glass and mystery. Natives had a name for it, and it stood for thousands of years.”

  More silence. Lucy looked across the petrified gathering, as if watching for raised hands and questions. Nobody living and sane made a peep or even dared to cough.

  “I broke that city, just to prove a point. And I’d do it again,” he said, looking evenly at Bertha and his brother.

  This is for our benefit, the Boneman realised. He doesn’t need to address the troops. He just doesn’t care.

  “We’re going to cross the Waste now, boys and girls. I can’t promise that all of you will get there in one piece, but life would be
boring if it was safe, right?”

  Bertha shifted restlessly, scratched at the bristle on her shaven scalp. The Boneman looked down at the complex interplay of his body, at the body that Turtwurdigan had cursed him with. He was committed to this course of action. He was as culpable as his brother the tyrant.

  “There’s a Waking City, right on the edge of all things. An amazing place, towers of glass and steel. All sorts of goodies that could make a smart man rich. But here’s the thing: I’ve been rich. It doesn’t make you happy. And there’s no point preserving these fragile places just because they’re old. This here,” he said, once more indicating the ancient scene of destruction, “this is progress. It’s a beautiful thing.”

  Papa Lucy climbed down from the car, patting Bertha with familiarity. Then he wrapped an arm around his brother and leaned in close. A young rake embracing a monster, immortal brothers from a long dead world. And the Boneman felt his distrust melt away and knew that he’d follow this maniac to the literal ends of the earth.

  “We’re going to cross the Waste and find this Waking City. And when we do, we’re going to destroy it.”

  That night was a reconciliation of sorts. Lady Bertha and the Boneman coupled under starlight, their strange new bodies coming together in frustration and perhaps fear. But the rhythm was wrong, and their love too wounded to kindle anything approaching warmth. It was a big mistake.

  They stared up at the carpet of stars, dissatisfied, emptier than when they’d sought each other out.

  “Lucy’s not telling us everything,” the Boneman said.

  Bertha said nothing, her eyes were dark reflections of the guttering campfire. She hitched the blanket up higher, cutting him out, shielding her broken body from his eyes.

  “Doesn’t this bother you?” he pressed her.

  “Of course it bothers me,” she snapped. “We’re going to die out there.”

  Lucy had been gone for hours, stepping through the world veil without explanation. His excursions into the Greygulf were a nightly thing now, and he always went alone. Only now did the Boneman feel safe enough to tryst with the remains of his wife. He didn’t know what he feared worse—discovery or the inevitable mockery. Perhaps Lucy would even find it fitting. Monsters seeking out their own kind.

  “I need to know something. About the time when you—when Lucy—”

  “What?” she said, voice low and wary. An old argument lay just beneath the surface, one that neither was ready to resurrect. The Boneman bit back his accusations and sought calm.

  “Did Lucy tell you anything about the glass city? What it was before Sad Plain?”

  “Oh,” she said, with something approaching relief. “He told me some things, but I was confused. The Cruik was already deep in–in here.” She tapped her temple.

  “Lucy never told me the reasons behind the arrest warrant, he just waved his damned stick and demanded my obedience. And Hesus—we were his oldest friends. He did his best to kill us!”

  The Boneman looked up at the stars, an old bitterness gripping his soul. There’d been no words between the brothers on that fateful day, no discussion beyond the reading of the warrant. War was a foregone conclusion.

  “I used to adore that man, Baertha. I still don’t know why they quarrelled. Why did Hesus stop Lucy from entering the glass city?”

  “Because Lucy found out that the whole place was a gateway,” she whispered. “Hesus started a war to make sure it stayed shut.”

  — INTERLUDE —

  Fos Carpidian was almost seventy years old now, and his mind was slowly failing with each passing season. These autumn years ate at his memories like locusts, but he remembered the day he met Turtwurdigan with complete clarity.

  Fos was born into a time of poverty, and the faithful hadn’t sniffed out a bleedthrough since long before his birth. Times were tough for the nomadic followers of Leicester-We-Forget, and Fos’s earliest memories were of hunger.

  The townsfolk scorned them and called them statue-lovers or worse. Leicesterites were refused entry into the towns, forced to beg for scraps at the gate, drifting throughout the holdings and wayhouses in the search for work. Fos spent his formative years in an overcrowded tent, beaten by the other urchins whenever they stopped at a caravanserai.

  He first saw the glass demon on his eighth birthday. The faithful met in the Inland at a grand gathering of all the families. They’d braved the crooked men and the dangers of the Drift, but enough of the elders were here now to hold quorum.

  Fos was brought out with the other children, one from each of the old families. They were paraded around a ring of Leicesters, these portable gods allowed to inspect the candidates. The old words were said, a prayer from the old Before-world that spoke of memory and finding. Of sacrifice, and the blood of the brave spilled to protect the whole of the tribe.

  A group of men pulled apart a stone cairn with crowbars and chisels, breaking away the mortar. A bronzed Leicester marked this place, set aside with great reverence as they tore the shrine apart.

  A slouch-hatted priest plucked an old tobacco tin from the base of the cairn, and the others took care not to stand too close. The first child was called forward, a little boy of perhaps five.

  Face painted pure and thick, the minister leant in close and put one hand on the boy’s shoulder. The boy was shaking, blinking back his tears.

  The minister said something quietly. The boy shook his head and made to run. A man from his family held the boy still, perhaps his father or an uncle. The priest leant in again with the tobacco tin, and the boy trembled, a wet patch spreading on his shorts.

  The priest opened the tin. Something within the box burnt with an impossible light, like they’d trapped a sliver of the sun. The boy stared at the glass fragment, transfixed, his small mind overcome. He began to rave and scream, frothing at the mouth, legs and arms kicking.

  Only the headsman’s axe silenced the awful screams. They painted the family’s Leicester with the boy’s lifeblood. A weeping woman was already chiselling his name into the holy list, “IN MEMORIAM.”

  The next child was brought forward, a girl just shy of her teens, knock-kneed and weeping. Again, the glass drove a child mad, and she was given to Leicester-We-Forget.

  Then it was time for the Carpidians to offer up their own. Fos was pushed forward, weeping and protesting. It took two of his uncles to hold him still, to pry open the eyes that he squeezed tight. The men looked away as the box was opened.

  Fos looked upon the glass shard nestled inside the beaten-up tin. Every facet of the crystal drank deeply of the sunlight and reflected it tenfold. It was painful to look upon, but he felt it then, the strange probing at his mind, the feeling that a stranger was inside his skull ripping at his thoughts.

  “Obey! Obey Turtwurdigan!” it demanded, and young Fos nodded his head rapidly, whimpered that yes, of course he would obey. The glass seemed pleased by this, and the pain subsided. At Turtwurdigan’s urging, Fos plucked the glass from the tin, the glow of the shard bleeding out of his little fist.

  He stood, and the congregation murmured with amazement. He ignored this commotion, seeing another overlay to the world he’d always known. Everywhere, pillars of light reached to the heavens, thin and broad, near and far.

  The demon that called itself Turtwurdigan begged Fos Carpidian to search these locations for something that it needed. He promised to do this. As the creature retreated from his mind, the glass splinter dimmed and he gently replaced it in the box.

  “That way.” He pointed with unwavering accuracy towards the nearest bleedthrough. For the first time in over a decade, a statue was found, a Leicester of exceeding purity.

  The presence of Turtwurdigan seemed to bring everything through much faster and cleaner than the wild bleedthroughs folks sometimes stumbled across. A fragment of an old neighbourhood bled through into the Now, the melted buildings containing enough treasure to feed the entire tribe for weeks.

  Fos led his people to many riches, and then
Turtwurdigan showed him the biggest bleedthrough yet—an entire town pushing at the boundary of this world, about to burst like an ugly boil.

  The folk of Carmel owned this land. A family of miners grown rich on tin, they’d come here in the hope that the plateau contained metal ore. Firm believers in Papa Lucy, they were known for turning away the Leicesterites. It was decided by the elders that this fledgling town must be taken by force.

  Many of the Leicesterite faithful died in the siege, but soon Carmel’s flimsy walls fell. The town was theirs. Fos watched as his uncles torched buildings, raped, and murdered.

  Within a week, the bailiffs came from Crosspoint demanding the blood price, prepared to massacre the heretics over this slaughter. The lawmen arrived to see a bleedthrough field beyond reckoning and the tribe hauling countless riches out of the warped ruins.

  The blood price was met with interest, and the proper bribes were paid to the Overseer, who assured his colleagues in the other towns that this annexation of Carmel was legal and just. Word got out about the riches just laying around Carmel, and the riverlords sent an army to seize the Leicesterites’ wealth. They were met with a large force of fresh coin-riders and a wall three times as thick as the one the faithful had toppled.

  Times were good for many years until the bores in the plateau ran dry. The water barons crept north with greed in their eyes, and they murdered the town slowly.

  Turtwurdigan scorned Fos Carpidian, demanding that his servant ride out and seek a distant bleedthrough on the furthest edges of the Waste. It had finally located the one thing it had been hunting for. It insisted that Fos make good on their original bargain.

  By then, Fos was an old man, less than fervent and comforted by the thickness of his walls. The crooked mobs of the Inland were more numerous than ever, and he was scared to venture anywhere beyond a day’s ride.

  The spirit in the glass cursed the man and finally refused to show him anything else. Turtwurdigan lay silent and morose for almost thirty years, and then Tilly came along, the final fruit of Fos Carpidian’s withered loins.