Lanyard set a billy over the embers of the house and boiled a pot of tea. He felt the same light-headed tingle of old, the first idle squirt of adrenaline. He knew in his bones that a killing time approached. The little ritual with the tea calmed him, and only here at the end of things did he realise that this was Bauer’s habit, one he’d been aping for years.
Soon, he would have to stand tall, an inadequate man in a lonely place. Monsters were coming and perhaps gods. It was up to him to stop them all and save a kid who needed him.
Perhaps he wouldn’t measure up. He might panic at the sight of his foe. The marks and words might jumble in his mind. He remembered fighting by Bauer’s side, hands shaking and useless, bullets missing more often than not. A scared boy who tried to murder his way out of that life.
You could run, he thought. This doesn’t have to be your problem. Bauer doesn’t own you. No one does.
Live your last few days in peace. Find a woman and a bottle, see out the world’s end in style.
The pot boiled. The Taursi tried the tea but spat it out in disgust. When Lanyard offered the native a cigarette, he accepted, wheezing and slobbering over it. Smoke curled out of his snout and his dark eyes seemed glazed.
“Nothing like a smoke and a good cuppa tea,” Lanyard said, idly poking at the fire. “Life’s pretty nasty, but if you can sneak in a smoke and a brew, you’re doing okay.”
The last of the Jesusmen looked over his kit. He stripped and cleaned the gleaming guns. When he held his hands out level, they did not shake. Dead calm. He thought of Tilly alone with the crooked women and felt shame that he’d ever brought his foul gang to her gate. It was up to him to fix this.
Spread out along the top of a fossilised bus, Lanyard adjusted the telescope. As he panned across the Waking City he whistled softly. The Jesusman observed the cluster of shining buildings, massive structures that made the Selector’s Tower look like a slap shack.
“Look at that. Fos told the truth,” Lanyard called out. The Taursi squatted in the shade of the half-buried vehicle, visibly scared at the sight of the enormous bleedthrough.
Like a garden of glass, the city slowly grew, one storey at a time. Around them the Waste trembled with a series of small aftershocks Lanyard felt deep in his joints. Perhaps this sinister land was wounded by such a large intrusion. Acres were displaced as the city pushed into the Now.
There was movement, and Lanyard twitched the far-glass left and right trying to find what walked in this mass of buildings and bizarre monuments. There. A white shape flicked into view, joined by another. Soon, a pack of white shapes ran those glass gullies, hundreds of them swarming and on the hunt.
“Witches,” he said, his blood running cold. Then, he realised he wasn’t feeling that typical dread down to his bone marrow, the famed witch-sniffing skills of the Jesusman. These were something else. Leicesters that moved like men, statues given life. He shuddered and hoped Carpidian’s slouch-hat marked him as a friend.
He passed across that shimmering phalanx of skyscrapers punctuated by lesser buildings of brownstone and brick. Everything had bled through with perfection down to the street signs and traffic lights. A man with a crowbar and a sack would walk away from the Waking City with riches untold.
Then he saw her, and all thoughts of loot fled from his mind. At the edge of an apartment rooftop, a small figure sat, her mousy fuzz of hair tangled by the wind.
“Tilly!” he said, laughing with relief. He wasn’t too late. The girl was safe for now, but when he saw the running battle underneath her high seat, his heart froze.
Two enormous creatures rushed at her building, battering at the doors and windows, throwing off the soldier statues that sought to pin them down. They were freaks from the Waste, twisted creatures that might have been human once.
A moment later, he realised just who they were. With a curse he snapped the telescope shut and reached for his rifle. Sliding down the gritty bus roof, he landed lightly and stalked towards the city with purpose.
“Don’t stop,” he warned the Taursi. Blinking against a sudden shift in the light, he kept his feet as the land itself lurched. Tonnes of loose dust drifted earthward, a dry mist that got into his eyes and made him cough.
He ran as he fought the sucking grasp of the pliant earth and pushed against the hills that rose and fell like little waves. Finally, he passed an unseen border, the outskirts of the bleedthrough. All of the lunacy ceased here, and even the sun moved the way it was meant to on this side of the line.
“Quickly now,” he called to the Taursi. “Hell if I’m staying out there.”
Lanyard’s companion stepped into the outer edge of the Waking City, quills clicking together as he shivered with fright. He honked quietly, pointing a claw to the glass city with increasing frustration and insistence.
“Can you draw?” Lanyard said. “I don’t understand a bloody word.”
At the creature’s blank look, Lanyard knelt with a sigh, tracing a finger through the dirt. Nodding with understanding, the spiky giant joined him on the ground. The concept seemed foreign to the creature, but eventually it drew a long scratch with a curling end. A snake or something with a hook on one end.
“Grook,” the Taursi said, pointing at this mark, then back out into the Waste. It repeated the word but gave up in a sullen huff when the man couldn’t grasp its message.
“Enough of that, I’ll work it out later.” Waving him forward, Lanyard kept low, using doorways and scattered vehicles for cover. Everywhere the wealth of another world. He ignored it, worried only for Tilly.
If I can keep just this one promise, I’ll be free of a million broken ones, he reasoned. Poor kid shouldn’t be caught up in this mess.
Reaching a corner, he saw a bronze statue hurtle past him, arms wheeling. It landed in a bus shelter that crumpled like tissue paper.
A familiar howl, so close that it made his heart quicken. He peered around the corner and saw the thing that had once been Dogwyfe, a terrifying marriage between human and bird. Leicesters swamped her, and she lay about with an animal fury, snapping stone heads and knocking statues over with the cruel talons on her feet.
Slopkettle was something else entirely, and Lanyard shivered when he saw his old lover. A blend of steel and flesh, she ignored the statues that climbed all over her as she tried to kick in the main doors with a spinning tyre that was now her foot.
“Time to strike my colours,” he told the nervous Taursi. He unbuttoned his shirt with an odd calm, revealing the Jesus tattoo to the world. Lanyard stepped around the corner, and walking coolly towards the melee, he fired a single round into the air.
Everything stopped. The living statues ceased their silent offensive and slowly advanced towards him, regarding him impassively. Lanyard looked warily at the crowd. He hoped that the combination of slouch hat and Jesus ink would mark him as a friend.
Bauer best be right on that front, he thought as he chambered another round into the ensorcelled rifle. The statues paused, unsure, and then Dogwyfe burst through their ranks, howling for Lanyard’s blood. She bore down on him with lightning speed. He drew a bead on the twisted freak and noted in that last moment how the Waste had turned her into a perfect instrument of death.
He pulled the trigger, the rifle bucking in his arms, and then he stepped aside at the last possible moment, unflinching in the face of this flailing monstrosity. The tip of one claw snagged his hat, and then Dogwyfe slid past him, bloodied and screaming. He loaded another bullet and shot it into her face as she rose. Incredibly, she staggered towards him, oblivious to the ruinous holes in her chest and face.
Lanyard’s Taursi ally honked, and what was left of the riding bird in Dogwyfe flinched at the sound. Wild birds feared the natives, their bridles and swift hands. Brewing up a handful of throwing glass, the Taursi filled the air with the sharp jags. Lanyard lined up his gun between the dazed Dogwyfe’s eyes. One more thunderclap of gunfire and the ruined woman fell stone cold dead.
Then an e
ngine roared, and Slopkettle slammed into Lanyard. He felt a rib crack beneath her steel fists and he toppled to the ground like a cloth doll.
Lanyard struggled to rise, cursing his stupidity. She’d come from an unexpected direction after circling the block, the chatter of her engine heart misleading in the narrow streets.
Coughing and wincing as the broken bones scraped around in his insides, Lanyard got to his knees. He could only watch as the bike-woman ran down the unfortunate Taursi, who cried out in fear and tried to run. The young buck threw glass and then scratched at the monster, curling up in a ball as she made pass after pass, grinding him into paste.
“Poor bugger.” Lanyard gasped.
He looked for his enchanted rifle, only to see Slopkettle across the street, examining it with a sour look on her face. Slopkettle broke apart the gun with her chrome hands. With no effort, she split the stock and twisted the iron barrel crooked. She looked at him with the same scorn he remembered, but the only insult to pass her mouth was the mosquito whine of her motor, followed by a tiny trickle of blue smoke.
He’d kissed those lips. They were dark and grey now. Oil leaked from hoses that the statues had yanked loose, and she was wreathed with exhaust smoke, every inch of her frame dented and battered. One of her tyre-feet was flat, riddled with Taursi quills.
With a squeal of spinning rubber, she came for him, her gait lurching and uneven. It was all that Lanyard could do to lift one of his pistols and empty an entire clip into what was left of her face.
It was enough.
— 21 —
I’ve got a theory about the Waste,” Lucy said, drinking from a jam jar full of crème de menthe. He offered it to his brother, who waved away the frothy green liquid.
“Suit yourself. As I was saying, we knew this world had troubles when we picked it. Half-finished really, a nice spot in the middle to plant our refugees, but the edges weren’t quite done.”
He slouched in his usurper’s throne, brought all the way from Crosspoint. A trio of slack-eyed children waved paper fans, trying in vain to drive the heat out of the tent. Another mind-slave brought him a map and unrolled it on the table. Lucy indicated that Bertha and the Boneman join him.
“If Turtwurdigan was the one who made this land, she should have left it a bit longer in the oven. Was she that stupid? I don’t think so.”
The Boneman recognised the map. It was one of the earliest surveys of the Now, drawn by John Leicester and himself, a vellum document crumbling around the edges. The ink had turned to sepia, very faint and hard to read. The Boneman gauged the document to be over three hundred years old.
Lucy planted his jam-jar in the centre of the map, leaving a sickly green ring on top of Crosspoint. The Boneman winced but said nothing. Lucy fished out another map from a pile on the table and laid it next to the historic document.
“See? The outer Range is slowly shifting,” he said. “All of those mountains and foothills have moved south, over one hundred miles since we planted the flag. Three hundred more years and Price will be swallowed up by the Waste, maybe Peddler’s Creek too.”
Bertha gave up hovering over the table and settled her body across the rugs, nursing a jug of Riverland wine. The Boneman thought she was glorious, a savage beauty. She’d survived the depredations of the Cruik, and the slow grind of time had remade her inhuman, a mistress of lunatics. A goddess, in fact now as well as in name. He felt awe in her presence, perhaps a little fear.
Above all, he still felt love for his wife, and it grew by the day. They were broken, but they were alive and finally reunited. He could get past the infidelity, their recent failed attempt at connecting. After everything, they were alive.
Surely, the rest will work itself out?
“This tells me one thing,” Lucy said, drawing in the Range’s movement on the old map. “The world we are in was only ever meant to be a temporary one. The Waste is a mechanism built into the Now, a way to wipe things clean.”
“That can’t be right,” the Boneman muttered, looking over the map, but realised the truth of things and saw the slow advance.
“In a few thousand years, this whole place will be blank. Wet clay ready for the next god who wants to have a turn. C’mon Sol, don’t tell me you never noticed this. You know I’m right.”
Lucy leaned in close to the Boneman and gave a weary grin.
“This world is an Overhaeven playground, nothing more. Sol, the gods are very real, and what’s left of the human race is in danger.”
The Boneman felt a moment of doubt, his transparent hands resting on the map beside his brother’s. What if Lucy had a different motivation, the actual desire to save this world and the people in it?
Sad Plain was a gateway, he reminded himself. So is the Waking City.
Lucy is using us.
“It’s no coincidence that this bleedthrough is happening on the furthest edge of the Waste, where the very fabric of this Realm is raw and pliable. Turtwurdigan is up to something rotten, and Hesus has been helping her.”
The Boneman remembered his burning flesh, and swallowed nervously. Only Lucy could save them from the Mother of Glass. He was in this distasteful business to the bitter end, clutching his brother’s coattails and praying that fortune would favour this bold maniac.
The Boneman knew he couldn’t face Turtwurdigan on his own.
“There might be another Realm, somewhere safe we could go,” Bertha offered. “Maybe we should just leave.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Lucy said. “I plan to.”
The Waste worked its cruel magic on Lucy’s army. Each mile changed the coin-riders in some small way, until almost every hour somebody became a growth on a camel or crawled into the engines of their machines and replaced them with enormous fleshy hearts, exposed and throbbing. Some of the conscripts simply took a step and crumbled into dust, their shadows freed and leaping southwards across the plain. Others went to sleep as people, only to meet the dawn as stone.
The Boneman wandered the camps offering what succour he could. He’d learned many Taursi magics from the memory-glass on Bertha’s island, and sometimes he could ease or reverse the early cases.
He paid a call on Lucy towards the end of their daily march to see that the changing disease had no toehold on their fearless leader. Lucy scoffed at the suggestion and seemed hale and hearty as he threw the convertible into a joyous donut kicking up dust.
“They’re just weak,” Lucy shouted across the console. “No willpower. The Waste can’t touch you if you’re the master of your own house,” and here he tapped his temple.
Then he jammed the brakes hard and stopped the car dead. The Boneman was thrown against his seatbelt, but Lucy blooded his nose on the steering wheel.
“Can you hear it?” he whispered to the Boneman, eyes fixed to a point on the horizon. He clenched the wheel until his fingers were white.
“What is it?” the Boneman asked.
“It’s the Cruik,” he said in a shaking voice. Papa Lucy reached out a hand and clenched it as if gripping an invisible staff. “We’re so close, Sol.”
“Call back your Rider,” the Boneman said. “Before the Cruik takes another life. No one should be touching that thing. It’s dangerous. Evil.”
“I’m scared of the Cruik,” Lucy admitted quietly. “I just needed someone to carry it. That’s what the Riders were. Glorified caddies.”
“Listen to yourself!”
“Just one more time, and then I’ll destroy it,” Lucy said, as desperate as the lowest kennelweed addict. “We need the Cruik to defeat Turtwurdigan. Sol, you know I’m right.”
The Boneman nodded mournfully. Easier to prise a snake from his brother’s hands than that hook-ended monster. The construct was powerful enough to turn the tide, but he wondered if it was worth it.
“One more time,” he agreed.
“Perfect,” Lucy said.
“You came.”
Lanyard stared up into a valley of glass, and then there was nothing to his
world but a mop of mouse-brown hair and a toothy smile parting a faceful of grime. Tilly. He struggled to sit up but gasped in pain. He wondered what else Slopkettle had broken. He pushed away the horrible thought that he might be bleeding on the inside. “Said I would,” he managed.
Then he saw it. A jagged sliver of metal, one of Slopkettle’s knives. The machine-woman had stabbed him, burying the shard deep into his gut. Lanyard’s hands shook as he gripped the knife. A small tug revealed the horrible truth.
The jags were caught on his guts. If he pulled out the knife, he would disembowel himself. Tilly saw the nature of his injury and her face fell.
Lanyard was dead. He had hours left, maybe a day at best. Surrounded by wealth he’d never get to spend, the last of the Jesusmen knew he wasn’t going to leave the Waking City.
He rose, shaking off the solicitous hands of the Leicesters, but he let the girl help and leaned heavily on her slender shoulders. Standing unsteadily, he fed another clip into the emptied pistol and slid the action back.
“You need to rest,” Tilly said quietly. “There are beds in that building, clean sheets. I’ll find you some medicine.”
“No time,” he said, white-faced. “Every bastard is on his way. Trouble.”
They shared a silent reunion, the man and the girl. Ringed by dozens of living effigies, Lanyard found the situation too strange for words. Loose sand blew across the asphalt road. The wind caught Tilly’s ratty hair and shook the smock that was more dirt than gingham now.
“I didn’t mean for that to happen to your uncle,” he finally blurted. The girl looked pained, but blinked away a tear and met Lanyard’s gaze with courage.
“Uncle Spence was a bad man.”
“I’m just sorry you had to see that.”
Tilly nodded.
“We’re probably both going to die today,” he continued, regarding his injury with something approaching calm. “Just being honest. Least I stopped those horrid bitches before they could get you.”
“Why did you help me?” Tilly asked. “You’ve got your treasure now.”
Papa Lucy & the Boneman Page 26