In his old age, Fos dreamt once more of the stone man on Sad Plain, a white Leicester moving like a living man, stone limbs swinging as he waded through the carpet of broken glass. He’d dreamt of this almost every night since Turtwurdigan claimed him, with only the oblivion of drink granting him a dreamless sleep.
In the dream, the Leicester-We-Forget was encased in marble flesh, intangible proof that Fos’s religion was true and his god was real. Only the stone god could safely explore that razor-sharp ruin, and it picked through the glass piles for months. The living statue worked both day and night, fossicking for something small, one piece of glass amongst a million others.
People came and begged him to stop, calling to him from the edge of the ruin. The burnt skeleton of the Boneman, who called him friend and pleaded for reason. Bertha the madwoman, who came only to curse and throw handfuls of glass.
Finally, Papa Lucy stood on Sad Plain, demanding that Leicester-We-Forget abandon this disobedience and return to his service. The white statue ignored the head of the Family and continued to sift through the ruins.
Papa Lucy disowned him, publicly and loudly, and declared John Leicester’s servants to be heretics and outlaws. Then the terrible sorcerer-god hurled many magics at his former ally. He used the Cruik to scour the plain with great waves of loose glass, and even ordered a squad of riflemen to shoot him dead. But the Leicester’s stone skin was impervious to these attacks, and soon Papa Lucy grew tired of this. He opened a magical door and left without a backwards glance.
Leicester-We-Forget continued his search, and one day the god held aloft a glass shard that shone gloriously: the final fragment of something beautiful and broken. Turtwurdigan.
Then, a flicker of images as the god entrusted this relic to his own faithful. Fos saw the faces of his ancestors, dozens of them, passing Turtwurdigan through the generations, until its internment under rock and stone.
Fos awoke from this frequent dream to the grumbling of his old bones, every muscle aching as he climbed out of his bedroll. Once more he looked on the hopeless scene and watched as his people hacked away at the rocks, trying to clear a path.
Almost every part of his plan had worked with precision. The water barons were still reeling from the surprise attack. Now, the faithful had enough water for a year or two, enough to sink wells and bores at their journey’s end.
Tilly was the latest Carpidian to pass Turtwurdigan’s test, and she led the way to their salvation at a new home. She could only describe it as a “Waking City,” but her description of the light-pillar confirmed his faith in her path.
A bleedthrough beyond anything they’d ever witnessed. Wealth beyond reckoning.
Lanyard Everett was a minor problem, but Carpidian had already sent a squad of gunmen to stalk him into the Waste, waiting for Spence’s signal. An ambush awaited the crooked folk. The outlaw may have guaranteed Tilly’s safety, but she held a treasure map in her head. More importantly, she was Carpidian’s only daughter, and he’d bargained her away like a goat.
“Should never have made a deal with a Jesusman,” he grumbled and limped over to inspect the works. Despairing at the lack of progress, he shook his head.
His plan did not take into account the manoeuvring of a water tanker through the narrow defiles of the outer Ranges. They’d made it a mile in before the lizard snagged it on a tight corner and wedged the metal cylinder into place.
“We fill up everything,” Fos shouted. “All the bottles, containers, hell, every piss-pan and tea set.”
A mournful procession waited by the valves, lugging away as much water as they could carry, drinking themselves sick, and even bathing in that gurgling flow. Fos looked at the stuck tanker for many long moments, considering what he’d given up to steal this much water, the sheer waste of leaving it behind.
He’d given up his daughter for this.
“Strike the valves,” he said bitterly. “Empty the whole damn thing.”
For a few brief moments, a gushing creek flowed down that bone-dry gully, the flood scaring the Rangewyrms and small rodents out of hiding. Just as quickly, the sun resumed its work. Within the hour, the cracked clay was as dry as it had ever been.
The homeless Leicesterites entered the Waste, a convoy of handcarts and bird-drawn wagons hundreds strong. Almost immediately one of the outriders spotted Spence Carpidian’s marker, scattered and broken. The crooked folk had made sure they wouldn’t be followed.
“Where do we go, Fos?” someone asked, but he couldn’t answer. As they set up camp, they faced the enormity of the unbroken landscape ahead of them.
Tilly could be anywhere in that, he thought. If we wander around blind, we’re gonna die out here.
One of the lads brought Fos his favourite chair, and he sat on the edge of the camp, facing toward the razor-straight horizon. Clearing his mind, he tried to reach out the way he had in his youth when Turtwurdigan had favoured him.
There seemed to be the flicker of something strange, but it wasn’t a pillar of light. The sun got into his eyes and made them water. Whatever gift the Taursi spirit had given him, it had taken it away when he fell from grace.
A shout went up. A group of riders were coming out of the Waste, faint dots throwing up a dust trail. Those with guns knelt in a ragged line, but were relieved when they recognised their own people. It was the posse of gunmen sent to murder Lanyard Everett.
“Been riding around out here for days, bossman. There’s no trail,” one of them reported. “The dust just shifts around out here, doesn’t hold anything. They could be anywhere.”
“Keep looking,” Fos demanded. “Find my little girl.”
“Where’s the water?” one of the men demanded, but Fos would not say. With mutinous rumblings, the men shared out what fuel they had. The camp grudgingly parted with a handful of supplies for the posse.
“We’ll never see them again,” someone muttered within his earshot, and Fos privately agreed. They were all as good as dead, no matter what he did.
Then a flicker of movement, a reflection on the horizon, a pin-prick of light running from the horizon to the sky. Fos blinked and rubbed his rheumy eyes, wondering if they were playing tricks. There it was again.
For the first time in many years, Fos Carpidian had a religious epiphany.
“Bring out the statue,” he hollered from his chair. “And someone find me an axe. A sharp one.”
PART FOUR
— THE WAKING CITY —
— 19 —
Tilly could still feel the whispers of Turtwurdigan, faint but true. She didn’t need the glass to point the way and offered the direction without resistance. To defy the crooked women was to invite another beating.
She could see the Waking City before them, like a giant bonfire blazing on the horizon. The land was starting to look funny, as if the earth had forgotten how to be ground and was close to giving up and floating into the sky. Little hills rose and just as quickly sank back into the flatness, or burst like giant pimples, sending a scatter of earth and stone high into the air.
The Waste got stranger by the mile. The further they travelled from the settled lands, the more the sun misbehaved. Sometimes Tilly saw strange creatures standing in the distance, collections of limbs and heads that just watched them pass by.
It felt like they were the only island of normality, a bird and a rattling motorbike tearing across that nowhere land. She sat on the riding harness behind Dogwyfe. Her escape attempts had ceased the moment Slopkettle threatened to skin her feet down to the bone.
Every day the crooked women grew agitated, squabbling bitterly over minor things. Even Gog felt the tension, snapping at Dogwyfe whenever she fed him and drawing blood more than once. Slopkettle became obsessed with a grease spot on her hands and scrubbed at it with more of their drinking water than was necessary.
The flenser couldn’t clean it off. If anything, her attentions spread the grime across both her palms, grey stains reaching almost to her wrists. Convinced her moto
rcycle was leaking oil somewhere, she insisted they halt for about three hours while she stripped the bike down to parts and rebuilt it.
Dogwyfe spent most of these elastic days muttering to herself, reliving past injustices under her breath. The scarred woman yanked on her old braid until it seemed she would rip it out her scalp. Tilly kept absolutely still, fearing to provoke Dogwyfe into another swift back-hander.
Gog often glared back at his mistress with an evil eye, and the crooked woman spent a lot of time rapping him over the beak with the lead-weight knout. Tilly remembered the way the bird had ripped apart her uncle, so she kept completely still whenever he looked at her.
Some days into the Waste, Dogwyfe finally taught the bird to say his own name, and he repeated it ad nauseam with endless enthusiasm.
“Gog! Gog Gog!” he boomed in the middle of the night, startling them all out of their sleep. On the third night that he woke them, Slopkettle went for the bird with blades drawn. Dogwyfe drove her off with the whip, taking a bloody strip from the flenser’s forearm. Gog looked down on this interplay with a gleam in his eyes, croaking with mirth.
From then on the two women eyed each other murderously, and Tilly knew that only the promise of riches held off further violence.
This Waste madness hadn’t taken a hold in Tilly’s mind, but she was very scared and spoke only when one of her captors barked at her. She silently mouthed prayers to Leicester-We-Forget, praying that the white warrior would come and free her from captivity. She entertained notions of Father coming to her salvation with Lanyard the Jesusman at his side, the outlaw holding a smoking shotgun in one hand, and raising Turtwurdigan on high, calling on the spirit’s power.
He’s going to rescue me, she thought fervently, remembering the toy horse and the rough honesty of the man. He’ll get out of his chains and then he’ll come and save me, because he promised.
Then the girl slumped in the saddle, her head bowed as reality sank in. Lanyard Everett was dead now, black-tongued and shrivelled by the sun. Her father was lost, her people wandering. They’d never survive this eerie place.
No one was coming, and when the crooked women had their loot, they would slice her up for their greypot. Tilly faced her fate with detachment. Her final prayer was one of vengeance offered to any god who would listen.
I hope this awful place destroys these women, Tilly Carpidian thought coldly. I hope they never even see the Waking City.
Another nightmare: this time the memory of Nona Joan splashing around in the sacrificial trough. Tilly’s grandmother fought against her young hands, bucking and fighting for breath, going back on her promise to die quietly.
“Hold her down!” her father screamed, watching his old mother drown. Tilly cried as she pushed Nona’s head back under the water. She looked up and saw the lust in the eyes of her neighbours, the joy with which they welcomed yet another sacrifice.
Held aloft by the priest, Turtwurdigan caught the light then shone in her eyes. She’d been chosen, the first in a long long time. Tilly gritted her teeth and got on with the job. Nona always said she was a good, practical girl.
“I love you, Nona,” she said as the thrashing slowed and stopped.
Tilly woke, limbs stiff as she rose from the sack that served as her blanket. Gog had quietly killed an intruder sometime during the night, a nightmare of black tentacles and translucent wings. The bird watched her warily as it ripped into the corpse, munching with relish.
As Gog turned slightly to get at more meat, Tilly saw the latest horror and felt her stomach rebel. Dogwyfe sat slightly forward of the saddle clutching her bird’s neck like a zealous mother. Her face was pressed against the bird’s flesh. When Tilly looked closely, she couldn’t tell where the woman ended and the bird began.
Their flesh was melted together in a seamless join.
Then Dogwyfe opened her eyes and looked at Tilly with animal rage. The warped birdwoman worked her mouth noiselessly, frustrated by the loss of her voice.
Gog dropped his meal then looked at her askance. The bird’s muscles bunched, and Tilly took a step backwards, wondering if this awful mutant was about to leap up and tear her to pieces in this lonely place.
“Girl,” the Gog-thing said in a booming voice. “Stay.”
Tilly stayed.
She looked to where Slopkettle slumbered on the back of her bike and realised no help would be coming from that quarter. From the thighs down, the flenser’s legs were fused with the machine, and her snores were the quiet rumbles of the motorcycle’s engine.
Gog trotted toward her after his feast then knelt before her. What was left of Dogwyfe blinked furiously, unable to frame whatever it was she wished to say.
“Ride,” the bird burbled. “Now.”
Tilly climbed into the harness, noting how the wicker frame felt more like bone, the blankets something closer to fur. She wondered if she would end the day as part of this creature, a girl-tumour growing on a bird’s back.
Nestled in the middle of the birdwoman’s back was an oblong of canvas and rope that had been rejected by this new form, snagged on a bony outgrowth. Lanyard’s shotgun! Tilly carefully reached for it, sliding it onto her lap. When she fashioned one of the ropes into a strap and slung the bundle over her shoulder, Dogwyfe did not seem to notice.
A shame he ran out of bullets for this, she thought, with the image of herself blowing off Dogwyfe’s disturbing head. The gun was too precious to leave behind, and she held onto it like a talisman against the hope that the brutal man would fulfil his promise.
He might need it.
Slopkettle pulled alongside the bird, a creature of flesh and steel, her right hand now fused to the throttle. The bikewoman snarled a wordless query at her, her voice a whining motor. Arm trembling, Tilly pointed in the direction of the bleedthrough, and the plaintive note ceased.
The two changelings abandoned their campsite, left all their belongings and supplies to be swallowed up by the wilderness. The bird-thing and the bikewoman burnt a tireless trail across the Waste. They refused to pause to let Tilly relieve herself. She wondered if they had the ability to remember the reason for their journey. She puzzled over what drove them onwards.
What use do these freaks have for treasure?
She noticed more changes over the day, like how Dogwyfe pushed further into Gog’s neck. Her face was rising towards the base of the bird’s skull. Slopkettle seemed to relish her new life as a machine, her face resting in the centre of the handlebars, chest and belly slowly sinking into the fuel tank.
The sun dropped from the Waste sky with its usual brute finality, and only then did the mutated women halt and allow the girl to rest. The Gog-thing watched over her intently, while Slopkettle slowly circled the campsite on guard. Her headlights pierced the perfect darkness, scattering the handful of curious predators drawn by Tilly’s smell.
She woke to see that Dogwyfe had taken over the bird entirely. Her face stretched out over the bird’s own, scarred cheeks wrapped around the base of the bird’s beak. A pair of long arms now dangled from the animal’s chest, marked with familiar tattoos. A thick braid of wiry hair cascaded down from the bony crest.
Slopkettle was still racing around the campsite, but now the bike-thing resembled a person-shape with spinning wheels for feet. Her chest was a throbbing engine and her arms were a mixture of steering forks and handlebars.
Oversized knives and sharpened wrenches hung from a fan belt, an imitation of her old bandolier. Above this, the flenser’s grimy face was framed in a helmet of pipes and fuel lines.
The plaintive notes of engine sounds came again from Slopkettle, followed by Dogwyfe’s demand for “Place. Where.” Tilly pointed in the direction.
They reached the site of the bleedthrough on the third day. This part of the Waste was as unremarkable as the rest of it, but Tilly felt an enormous pressure here and could almost hear the slow groan as two worlds rubbed together. All around her Turtwurdigan’s marker glowed, painting the Waste golden from t
he earth to the sky.
“Here,” she told Dogwyfe, who slowed to a trot and then stopped, chest heaving. The birdwoman regarded Tilly with suspicion along the length of her beak. Her forward facing eyes weren’t sitting quite right on the bird’s head, and this new creature seemed myopic.
“I mean it. The bleedthrough is here.”
Slopkettle skated alongside, engine purring, and asked Dogwyfe a question in her new machine tongue. The birdwoman hissed back, scratching at the ground like a chicken. Tilly watched anxiously as she clutched the horny ridges where the riding frame had been.
Then she saw it. The ground stretched out to a point, elastic and pliable, but eventually it snapped underneath the pressure. Sliding out of the earth like a tooth, a white figure rose, perfect in every way.
A Leicester. Tilly watched in awe as the land birthed a god. The white warrior supported by an enormous cenotaph: LEST WE FORGET, it began. It listed hundreds and hundreds of names. Honoured sacrifices.
Tilly had spent her entire life in Carmel, the city of statues, but never had she seen such a perfect example of the Leicester-We-Forget. It was twice the height of a normal man, and its features were not marred or warped. It was perfect down to the last button on its shirt. Tilly slid out of the saddle, unnoticed by Dogwyfe as she made for the cenotaph. The monstrous women ignored her, quailing and muttering in the face of this miracle.
Turtwurdigan had led her true, shown her the way to the Waking City. Tilly felt the rumbling of the earth as the bleedthrough began. Kneeling on the lower steps of the marble shrine she wept, praying and burbling and shaken to her core.
Through a cloud of marble dust, she looked up to see the Leicester moving, stone imbued with the motion of flesh. The marble soldier inched downwards, using the ornamental carvings on the bottom pillar as finger and toe holds.
“My lord,” Tilly whispered, rising and backing away with fear. The Leicester regarded her impassively, a stone spider that crept towards her, towards the ground.
Papa Lucy & the Boneman Page 24