Papa Lucy & the Boneman

by Jason Fischer

  The earth shook as a forest of glass and steel arose, every angle perfect, every windowpane clear and bright, structures of impossible size, great buildings that loomed far overhead and made her dizzy to look upon.

  A city, awoken.

  She heard the screech of Dogwyfe and the stuttering roar of Slopkettle. Tilly looked down to see her captors run, pursued by dozens of Leicesters. Even now, more statues rose from the split in the earth, leaping down from their plinths and hefting their stone guns.

  One moment, the plain of salt was flat, uninterrupted. Then a twist of shadow, a vertical slit parting just far enough for a Taursi to slip through. It stood there for a long moment, one foot still resting on the shadow-road until it decided that none were watching.

  The spiny creature walked along the edges of the salt flat, piercing the thick crust with its spear. Frogs slumbered underneath the salt, fat with water as they lay waiting for the once-in-a-decade rains.

  On the shore of that dead sea, the witch’s nest smouldered, half-melted and sagging. The wind was slowly driving the witch-stink away, and the Taursi decided it was once again a safe place to hunt. Curiosity drove it close to the wreckage of the camp, and it picked through the site, as all Taursi did when the invaders gave up on a place or were driven out.

  The Taursi turned over smouldering tin with its spearhead, sniffing at the burnt flesh of a dead witch. There was bread here and a tin of flour. Putting these into its basket, the creature searched for more items to trade for grog.

  The Taursi’s bushcraft was good, but the fires dulled its senses, and it didn’t smell the man hiding underneath the charred pile of blankets and rubble. Bursting out of the mound, Lanyard leapt onto the native and beat it senseless with his rifle stock.

  He bound its hands together up to the elbow, making sure that the glass-glands on its forearm faced inwards. Lanyard had worked for the groggers and slavers so he knew all of the natives’ tricks. The creature woke with a start then tried to run, but the leather hobble pitched it snout-first into the dust.

  “Cut that out,” Lanyard barked. “I caught you fair and square, so don’t try nicking off.”

  The Taursi honked mournfully as it tried to wriggle out of its bonds. It leapt around the campsite, ungainly and confused, knocking over rubbish and causing an absolute racket. It hissed at him and brewed glass, but did nothing more than cut itself. Finally, it sank back against the side of the burnt nest, its quills settling as it watched its captor.

  “You’re done. Good.” Lanyard gave the native a belt of bleed-through grog, which it lapped at gratefully, snout buried deep into the neck of the bottle.

  “Might not have to kill you, or sell you. I’ll make a deal with you, young lad,” and Lanyard knew enough from his time as a slaver to name it as a young buck, a hunter without a tribe or a mate. No one would know its whereabouts, and they both knew this.

  “I know about the other world, the grey one. The one between the others. Take me to the shadow-roads, and then I’ll let you go.”

  The Taursi’s eyes went wide, and it shook its head with terror. Lanyard gave the native a ringing back-hander and raised his fist to give it another. The Taursi whimpered and yammered in its own tongue, but it would not speak of the Greygulf or surrender the secrets of its kind.

  Lanyard sighed. Bauer didn’t have the time to teach him how to open the world veil, a discipline that required years of study, not the brief window of time Bauer’s reprieve from death allowed. Once again, Lanyard’s tuition as a Jesusman fell short of the task.

  “Look,” he said, popping open his shirt to reveal the Jesus tattoo. “I’ve been in there. Jesusman. I just need you to open the way. Do it, and I’ll let you go.”

  It took an hour of cajoling and threatening, and more grog than he was prepared to give away, but Lanyard finally convinced the Taursi to open the shadow-road. Gripping it firmly by the elbow, he led it to the doorway where the tracks of the dead witches led to an unremarkable patch of ground.

  “No funny business,” he warned. “I’m coming in there with you.”

  Once more they stood inside the puckering doorway, standing on the winding silver band that was the shadow-road. Lanyard leaned over the side, retching and heaving as his stomach seemed to eject every meal he’d ever eaten.

  When he stood up, he found the Taursi shuffling forward, attempting the slowest ever escape. It clung to the edge of the road as if working up the courage to jump and shatter its body on the silver soil far below.

  “Don’t be bloody stupid,” he said. “Get up.”

  As they crept along, he kept watch for witches, but the shadow-roads seemed much quieter than the last time he’d been here. Nothing foraged on the plains below. All of the witches were elsewhere, as if drawn away by a summons.

  “Trouble,” he muttered to the Taursi, who looked at him fearfully. Indicating it to continue, Lanyard urged the creature across the nightmare landscape. The shadow-road brought them to the tall spire of Neville, the terminus of the shadow-roads.

  Overhead an enormous bleedthrough was ready to pierce the world veil. The bulge pressed against another fold in the cosmic skin, wearing a way through. Soon it would burst like a boil, passing straight into the Now. A perfect bleedthrough of incredible size, shining with a strange golden light.

  A line of shadow stretched across the silver sky, as if the sphere ran with a hair-line crack. It was a reflection of something in the Now, but Lanyard could not guess what it meant. The black line reached towards the bleedthrough, the end curled and waving about like a hair in the wind.

  “More treasure in there than a man could ever spend,” Lanyard said, pointing upwards. The Taursi honked quietly, terrified by the spectacle. It yammered at Lanyard, trying to tell him something about the imminent bleedthrough. It didn’t know the man-tongue and could not accurately communicate its fears.

  “I don’t understand a bloody word of your language, mate,” he said. “Got no idea what you’re trying to say.”

  The Taursi gave up and shuffled forward as fast as the hobble would allow. After what seemed like hours on the shadow-roads, they stole into the lair of Neville. Lanyard watched carefully, wary of the gluttonous master of the house.

  He needn’t have bothered. Neville lay dead on the distant floor, his immense body crushed beneath a bombardment of bleed-through junk. Fridgerators and chunks of stone had been used with aerial precision, shattering his arms, grinding his head into jelly. Lanyard thought he could see marks graven into the items, enchantments rendering them effective against witch flesh.

  They were Jesusman marks, the same as the ones on his guns. He frowned, puzzled at this development. Was this a revolution amongst the witches? Or was it the Jesus himself, the master taking revenge on his wayward servants?

  Either way, Lanyard decided to get out of there as fast as he possibly could.

  “That one,” he said, pointing to another shadow-road with certainty. He did not know how he knew it was the correct way; there were dozens of roads in the terminus, like a tangle of silver string that met in the middle. But they followed it all the same, and Lanyard had no doubt. This was the path back into the Waste, to the place where he’d been taken.

  It could have been minutes or hours, but Neville’s house was now a distant mark somewhere near the restless horizon. Out of the eerie quiet, a hollow booming sound ran through the Greygulf as if someone had struck an enormous kettle drum. Thunder without lightning, and the bleedthrough lurched across the sky on the verge of pushing through the world veil. The path beneath them shook.

  A worrying crack developed on one edge of the shadow-road, and a large chunk of the silver pavement fell to the distant ground. Without a word, Lanyard quickly cut through the Taursi’s hobble. Pulling the native to its feet, he urged it to run. The native soon outstripped the human, loping along on its back-bent legs.

  Lanyard ran until his sides ached, each breath an agony. Across the landscape, he saw a distant shadow-road give
way and collapse. The tremors snapped a great span and sent it tumbling to the ground, columns and all.

  Ahead, he heard an excited honking and saw daylight. The Taursi had reached the end of the path and was holding open the doorway for him. It beckoned him to hurry with its bound arms.

  “Wait,” he gasped, and a final tremor sent him to his knees, almost to the lip of the elevated pathway. He pushed himself away from the precipice, shaking at the nearness of his escape. Rising, limping, he leapt through the doorway, gagging and retching as the shift between worlds worked its usual misery on his insides.

  “You waited for me,” he managed to say. Without another word, Lanyard slit the Taursi’s bonds and watched as the creature brewed up a batch of sharp glass, finely weighted and ready for throwing.

  The creature finished its work, quills settling and dimming to a dull red as the heat dissipated. It quickly snorted up a drift of loose sand to line its second stomach for future glass firing.

  Lanyard scanned the Waste, featureless in every direction. Behind him, the distant shape of the bottle-tree, the place where Slopkettle had chained him and left him for dead.

  Ahead, the Waking City. Tilly Carpidian needed him, and a promise was a promise.

  The Taursi honked excitedly when Lanyard brought out the shard of Turtwurdigan from his satchel. He unwrapped it from the cloth and fed it a trickle of sunlight to glean the direction to Tilly. He fought against its seductive pull. The Jesusman looked up from his interrogation of the glass to see the Taursi bowed in worship, claws spread as it pressed its face into the earth.

  “I guess you’re coming too,” he told the native, and when he set off on the correct path, it leapt up to follow.

  — 20 —

  The big Leicester carried Tilly on its shoulders, jostling her around roughly as it lurched along the street. Behind followed the bestial roars of Dogwyfe and Slopkettle, knocking over the other bleedthrough statues and pushing through their ranks.

  The Leicesters came to her aid, wordless and plodding. Perhaps they recognised one of the faithful or they were compelled to guard the weak from monsters. Perhaps they had a different doom in mind for her.

  Either way, a reprieve.

  Slopkettle and Dogwyfe had spent the last few hours lurking on the edges of the Waking City, terrified, but hunger defeated cowardice. The mutant women were far from human, but now that they’d seen their untold wealth, their blasted minds remembered the girl and remembered the joys of a bubbling greypot.

  “Quick! She’s coming,” Tilly told the stone soldier. It didn’t speak to her but regarded her with that vigilant stare, its expression fixed. She looked back to see a knot of smaller bronze soldiers beating at Dogwyfe with their false rifles. The birdwoman simply barrelled through them, scattering statues like leaves.

  The Jesusman’s gun strained against Tilly’s back, a useless hunk of iron without any shells. But she wouldn’t leave it behind. To give up on it meant giving up on Lanyard, and if she did that she might as well climb into the greypot herself.

  Slopkettle roared, an echoing whine that bounced against the glass canyons. Tilly clung tightly to her saviour, ducking as a large jag of metal whistled past her head. The flenser was fashioning knives out of her new flesh, shards of steel that she hurled through the air with reckless abandon.

  “We need to get above them. Off the streets,” she said, pointing through the ranked buildings up to their dizzying heights. The big statue nodded once and plodded forward. Its marble feet sank into the pliable earth, but it made the most of the bleedthrough, sticking to the occasional cement footpath, jumping onto patches of fused asphalt where the Before-Time roads once ran.

  “Girl!” she heard Dogwyfe shout. Tilly turned to see the mutant grinding a soldier into the earth with her claws, plucking stone men from her back and hurling them into the buildings on either side. Statues fell into old storefronts, still marked with the names of the merchants and pictures of goods Tilly didn’t recognise.

  The Leicesters bounced from the plate-glass windows, and Tilly watched in disbelief as the statues stood up and chased after the changlings. The glass wasn’t scratched, though it should have shattered into a thousand pieces.

  “What is this place?” she whispered, as her rescuer reached the side of a brick building that was half the height of the skyscrapers around it. The Leicester stretched out to its fullest height and snagged a ladder with its fingertips. He slid down the steel rungs. Tilly saw that a rickety iron stair ran to the top of the building.

  The folks of Before had elevator boxes. Something like this would be for emergencies only, especially if it was located on the outside of the building.

  The roar of Slopkettle was closer now. Shaking, Tilly climbed up the statue’s arm, hauling herself up and onto the ladder. When the statue made to follow, the steel frame groaned and a support bracket began to pull away from the wall.

  The big Leicester stepped back and pointed upwards with some urgency, glaring at her with the same stoic expression. Tilly did not need to be told twice. She climbed up the ladder as quickly as possible. When she reached the staircase, the statue seized the ladder and gave it a twist, snapping the metal frame and then letting it drop to the ground.

  With the heavy shotgun bouncing against her back, Tilly climbed towards the heavens, muscles straining as she cleared flight after flight. She made the mistake of looking down, and the iron grating of the steps seemed flimsy with the ground a distant place. If she slipped over the rails, she would splatter like a bug.

  Slopkettle was below, wrestling with the big Leicester statue. Steel met stone as the two monsters traded blows. Dogwyfe was leaping up against the building trying to grab the bottom of the fire stair. A vast horde of statues below mobbed the pair and tried to stop them.

  Closer to the roof now, Tilly spotted her reflection in the glass across the street, and she looked like a tiny termite scaling its nest. Suddenly, the whole staircase lurched, nearly shaking her from the handrails. Dogwyfe had finally clawed onto the fire stair and was climbing up the outside of it, yelping excitedly and crying for “Meat!”

  Everything shook, and Tilly cried out as she tried to keep her footing on the stairs. She heard the squealing of metal as the brackets strained under the weight of the bird. The lower half of the staircase pulled free of the building and the wobbling frame fell onto Slopkettle and the crowd of statues directly beneath. Plummeting to the earth, Dogwyfe scattered soldiers like they were skittles. She limped away, yowling with pain and frustration.

  Tilly continued her ascent. When she reached the safety of the roof, she shook with relief, adrenaline souring in her stomach. She took in the majestic view from her eyrie and a smile spread across her face.

  The Taursi showed Lanyard the secret way of travelling, the one they used for places where the shadow-roads did not run. Cradling Lanyard in his arms like a giant baby, the spiky native moved forward at a blur, his quills spread out to their full extent. Lanyard felt a great heat come from the creature and saw his clothes start to singe wherever they touched the Taursi’s skin.

  The landscape before them blurred, and Lanyard felt the world veil shift just a little, as if pinched together by an enormous finger and thumb. With its claw, the Taursi made a ragged tear in the veil just big enough for the two of them.

  The Taursi took a league-long stride and then another. Lanyard gritted his teeth against the searing heat and ignored the sweat that ran into his eyes. He needed to do this.

  Eventually the Taursi indicated that it was tired, and it set him down. It snuffled at the earth with its snout. Lanyard saw beads of hot glass dripping from its quills and understood how much this magic taxed the creature.

  “Enough,” he said. “We can walk awhile.”

  This far into the Waste, it seemed like they had left most of the freaks and mind-traps behind. They only met with a weatherboard slap shack, which kept pace with them for an hour or two. It never moved when looked at directly, but the bui
lding slowly closed in, circling them like a predator. Finally, it stood in their path, door yawning open like a mouth. Within, he heard the scratchy sound of a record player, dead voices warbling a forlorn tune.

  “Piss off,” Lanyard said as he put bullets through each of the windows. The Jesus-marked guns caused it pain, and it howled at them, until the door slammed shut and cut its cry short. Lanyard raised his hand to sketch out a mark of unmaking, but the boards started to give and the whole structure collapsed in on itself.

  “Have to burn it, just to make sure,” he said, digging into his pockets for a match. The Taursi honked mournfully at the jumble of rotting wood.

  Lanyard called a rest as he burned the predator house into ash. The directionless sun seemed at its highest, and he drew the chattering glass out of his satchel. Turtwurdigan drank deeply of the sunlight and showed Lanyard the bleedthrough. The beacon was a broad column of golden light now less than a day away.

  “Hesusman,” the old spirit whispered. “Friend of old.”

  He felt his head turning, as if in the grip of a powerful hand. Once more, he looked across the Waste, southwards to the settler lands. A smoking column beckoned to him, marking the antithesis of the Waking City. Sad Plain.

  “No,” he said and threw the cloth back over the glass. His hands shook with the effort of resistance. Only when he buried the glass deep into his satchel did he regain a mastery over his own thoughts.

  Tricky bugger, Lanyard mused. What’s it playing at? There’s nothing at Sad Plain, nothing but broken glass and bullshit.

  “Oh, get up,” he said as he nudged the Taursi with his boot. Once more the native lay in supplication, mumbling whatever passed for a prayer to those people.

  “You wanna carry it?” He offered the satchel to the spiky beast. The young buck retreated in horror, honking and holding up his hands.

  “Settle down, mate. Just pulling your leg.”