Turtwurdigan was nowhere in sight. Not yet.
Behind this feeble defence, dozens of enormous sky-fingers painted the horizon with glass and gold. The Waking City. His brother’s gate.
“Come on! Don’t tell me John’s here too,” Lucy scoffed, peering through farsight eyes. “He obviously wasn’t listening when I told him he was a dead man.”
“He’s already dead, Lucy,” the Boneman said. “You saw how he went into the stone. Too deep.”
“Good thing I brought some dynamite,” Lucy said. Brow furrowing for an instant, he silently sent out his orders, and small groups of his mind-slaves raced about, scaring the monstrous vanguard into a semblance of order. Bertha and her psychotic warriors were in the first wave just behind the most Waste-twisted of the troops.
If Turtwurdigan showed herself, the Boneman was expected to send in the dead. In death they were weak, but their sheer weight of numbers would turn any battle, and fire did little harm to bare bones. That he knew, from bitter experience. He was the general of a silent reserve, his soldiers rotting and fly-blown.
Bertha met his eyes briefly over the press of troops, but she turned away. He’d been kidding himself. Baertha Hann was long gone and their marriage centuries dead. All that was left of his wife was a monster that loomed above the lesser creatures. He felt the anguish as the final cord connecting them fell away, the finality of her gesture obvious.
After tomorrow, if they lived, he would never see her again.
“We shouldn’t go in that way,” the Boneman told his brother, fighting off the dull ache in his chest. “All of the Jesusman’s defences are in that narrow corridor. If we circle the city, we can reach the towers from the other side. It won’t take us an hour.”
“Sol, you’re a boring man and that’s a boring suggestion, even for you.” Lucy dismissed the plan entirely, and the Boneman saw how his brother favoured one mad charge. Lucy was unable to do any differently, given that someone dared to stand in his way.
That’s not to say that Papa Lucy was stupid. He certainly understood the fine art of delegation.
“Lady Bertha, be a dear and fetch me that Jesusman,” Lucy said through the megaphone. “Do whatever you want with John’s garden gnomes.”
She nodded, snarling and baring a jagged row of teeth. Someone set a hand-cranked klaxon into a strident warble, followed by the tooting of a hundred car horns. An angry hum, the redline revving of coin-riders now grafted onto their machines.
Then the rush. The surge of broken beings thundered into the Waking City, straight into the funnel of barriers and roadblocks, into whatever traps the Jesusman had laid for them.
“I tell you, Sol, it’s funny where ambition can take you,” Lucy said matter-of-factly, a mad light dancing in his eyes. “Could you have imagined this? Back in the old world, you’d never have thought we’d end up here, today. You, all bones and misery, and your missus an actual ogre. Me, I’m still as handsome as ever.”
He ruffled his mohawk playfully. Ahead, the shouts of the vanguard, a spatter of gunfire. Then Bertha’s car was lost in the dust, and the Boneman’s heart fell.
“Now, we’re lording it over this broken arse of a world. All the pompous shits who doubted us are dead. The Collegia became a smoking crater, and under our watch, the human race fell to cannibalism and scavenging. An amazing life, and we saw it all. And now…now we get to see this.”
The sorcerer pointed grandly to the golden towers that shined so brightly they were difficult to look upon.
“I ask you, Sol Papagallo, could you have ever imagined this moment?”
“Not in a million years,” the Boneman said softly.
“That’s because you have no imagination. I’ve looked on this scene every single day, my brother, every miserable day of my existence. And when this moment arrived, I always knew exactly what I would need to do.”
“Do what?”
“Trust me, Sol. It’s gonna rock your world.”
Bertha leaned out of the speeding buggy, her personal chariot now a hybrid of undead flesh and scavenged mechanics. One of John’s stone soldiers reached for her, and she swung an iron pipe with precision, snapping its marble head clean off.
Her mutated buggy slammed into a cluster of bronze men, scattering them in all directions. The fleshy engine chattered and then died. Bertha saw a bronze rifle lodged, bayonet first, into what passed for the vehicle’s heart.
As she struggled to extricate herself from the buckled vehicle, a large marble soldier came for her, half again the size of its comrades. It slammed the butt of its rifle into her face, and again. She lay trapped, fighting off the stars and the spinning darkness that beckoned.
“No!” She growled and brought up the iron pipe, blocking the stone gun. Swiping downwards, she snapped the false gun in half. Fighting like a cornered dog, she sent the statue reeling backwards with a web of cracks spreading across its broken face.
Finally, she pushed the bent frame aside, the metal tubing squealing and then snapping before her strength. Rising above the melee, Lady Bertha climbed out of the wreckage gripping the iron pipe in her ham fist.
The big Leicester came for her. With a snarl, she broke off the hand that reached for her. When the jagged stump came around in a haymaker, she wrenched the arm clean off.
The other fist rang against her armour plating. The statue pinned her to the car and drove its broken head into her nose. Stone fingers closed around her throat.
Fighting for breath, she reached up and snapped the statue’s head and broke its arm off at the shoulder. The hand continued to choke the life out of her, and she slowly plucked at the marble digits, twisting them off one by one.
“Stop trying to kill me.” She gasped as she wrenched off the statue’s legs like drumsticks. The disembodied limbs continued flexing as they kicked at her. She remembered fighting these animates during the first pogrom, enforcing Lucy’s shit-fit in the months after John Leicester turned rogue. None of them had given her this much trouble. Only after she had stripped it down to a torso did the Leicester grow still.
Around her the advance was bogged down, her loping mutants held back by a stern-faced wall of stone and bronze. Mad Millies darted through gaps in the melee, but their knives and guns had little effect on their stone enemies.
The Jesusman had set wards, spray-painted marks of unmaking and warding that flared. Her soldiers fell. They reformed into their constituent parts and died from shock. But the marks were crude, and it was child’s play for her to undo the worst of them to allow more of her people to advance.
Every Leicester that fell took a dozen of her vanguard with it, and their strange corpses piled high. Those Millies who had crude bombs or grenades from Before hurled them at the statue line, blowing up friend as often as foe.
“Enough of this,” Bertha said. Then she felt a tickle in her soul that stopped her in midstep.
The Cruik was nearby, close enough to call to her. The Jesusman had tricked it into captivity, bound and hidden behind his little wall. The Cruik promised her strength, promised to serve her exclusively. It had been so long since she’d touched the staff, and the long-forgotten absence seized her body and soul. She ached for the Cruik, she needed it.
Gasping, sweat washing across her bloody face, she remembered the moment that Lucy came for her with similar promises on his smiling lips. Then, the touch of the staff as they lay together in her husband’s bed, the thrill as its power caressed her. Started to change her body.
“You’ll be perfect,” Lucy had told her. The first of many comfortable lies. Bertha felt anger then, an old jealousy she’d forgotten in the long night of her madness, pacing and mindless in the ruin of love’s home.
The Cruik was hers.
A handful of the mutant machines broke through the line and made for the final barricades where the Jesusman stood between them and the golden towers. Bertha saw the buggy-things roar forward screeching and smoking. Part of the car wall exploded, burying her forces in
metal and rubble. Then the popping of gunfire, two guns coughing lead at the survivors.
“Forward!” she yelled. “Break these damn things!”
Shouldering a wounded bird-thing out of the way, Bertha pushed into the front of the line, battering a bronze soldier into a flattened mess. Another Leicester reached for her, and she sent its marble head flying.
In every stern visage, she imagined Sol’s face and found that this helped. Her own face bloodied, her armour plate hanging by one remaining strap, Lady Bertha fought on and fought through. It cost them hundreds of dead, but she didn’t mourn a single one of her soldiers. That was what Sol was for. Every soldier that fell in Papa Lucy’s service would fight again, and again, until they were dust.
The last of the Leicester animates lay broken, severed limbs twitching. Now, nothing stood between her and the Jesusman but a wall of junk and whatever crude booby traps he’d managed to assemble.
The Cruik called to her, begged her, promised itself.
Looking over her shoulder, Bertha felt reassured. Sol’s walking graveyard stood ready, plus the rest of Lucy’s warped army. Hesus’s final servant was about to make a pointless last stand.
Then I’ll be free, she thought. Free of that charming bastard and his mope-faced little brother.
I’ll take the Cruik, and they’ll never see me again.
“You lot, go in and get the Jesusman,” she told a group of bike-wheeled camels. “Alive.”
She drew the mark for farsight with one talon then drank in the terrified faces of the Jesusman and the girl at his side. They cradled their Jesus-marked guns as they watched the approach without a word. A smile crept across Bertha’s ravaged face, and it was a terrible thing.
Then she felt it. A push from elsewhere, the sense that something was stepping through from a distant place.
Even as her monsters leapt forward, the world veil tore right there in the middle of the street. A golden far-door eclipsed the towers behind it, the other side so bright that it pained her to look at it.
An enormous Leicester stepped out of the gap, a tower of stone that stood three times the height of a man, with every inch of the stone soldier stained a deep crimson. The asphalt cracked beneath its heavy tread. Behind it, hundreds of figures spilled from the sorcerous gate, gleaming in the otherworldly light.
Then the far-door winked closed. Bertha saw the red giant stand above a host of Taursi, but these were not the rude prisoners that died one drink at a time. These were clad in glass breastplates, their limbs sheathed with shining bracers. Quills spread and glowing white hot, the creatures drew shining blades from within themselves through apertures in their transparent armour.
On each breastplate, a sigil glowed with a soft light. Bertha recognised the sign that was scrawled over and over Papa Lucy’s clay body as she and Sol brought him back into life.
These strange Taursi bore the mark of the Overhaeven. They were exactly the same as the ones she’d fought at Sad Plain.
“No,” she said with a tremor. Her troops quailed before the giant, and some of them openly turned and fled. The red Leicester stepped forward, swinging its sculptured rifle like a scythe. It scattered the first rank of Bertha’s force and stomped on a bird-thing mad enough to attack it, crushing it into paste.
The Taursi charged honking and leaping, and filled the air with glass and death. When the shards struck flesh, it was like the breaking of a miniature sun, a bright flash of light as it burnt the enemy from within.
Those that held fast against this terrifying onslaught answered with gunfire, but the glass armour of the Taursi held against this offensive, often taking two or three bullets before cracking.
Swatting aside deserters and anyone who stood in her way, Bertha pushed through the packed lines of her freaks on her way towards her ruined buggy. Leaning inside, she plucked out an enormous rifle. Near as Sol could figure, it had been an elephant gun in the Before. They’d removed the trigger guard to fit her misshapen hands.
Before the Collegia had fallen from the sky—before she’d married into poverty and infamy—Baertha Hann had spent many weekends hunting on the family estates. She hadn’t forgotten a trick.
Climbing onto the top of the wreck, Bertha rained bullets onto this force of Taursi, each round punching through their armour as if it were paper. The rifle gave a mighty kick, but she was big enough to ignore the recoil.
Even as she worked the massive gun, Bertha spoke the words of madness and fear, sending marks flying into the press of battle. Some of the Taursi staggered and shook their heads as they fought an internal battle. Others broke and fled, or laid into friend and foe alike.
When she’d given the Taursi enough grief, she turned her attention to the giant Leicester. Her bullets knocked big divots out of its face and neck, and she sent a cluster of rounds into its stone heart. It continued to stride through her soldiers, carving a bloody path towards her.
“Baertha,” it boomed, broad mouth open and stone lips flexing. Its features moved slowly and shifted subtly. Stern eyes gave way to a friendlier cast, hard cheeks filling out, moulding into a round face wrinkled with laugh lines. She remembered seeing that face in a chapel, smiling and hopeful as he gave her to another man. In later times, he’d smiled less and frowned more. He kept his own counsel when once he’d roared with laughter, loved, and fought with passion for the things that mattered.
Now that familiar face hung with sorrow, grief tinged with anger.
“John?” she whispered.
A shadow fell across her face as her old friend raised his rifle.
— 24 —
John bloody Leicester,” Lucy said, shaking his head. “Of all the dead shits to make an appearance. Oh well. Let’s go kill him.”
The Boneman stood up in the moving convertible, shading his eyes against the flashes of light and using his farsight to penetrate the smoke from the burning vehicles. He boggled at the sight of Taursi bearing Overhaeven marks and fighting with a glass-magic he’d never seen the likes of.
None of this was as concerning as the sudden reappearance of an old ally, a friend he’d thought long dead. He watched with sickened fascination as John Leicester stalked through the chaos and straddled Bertha’s buggy with his tree trunk legs.
Bertha stood frozen before her fate, her gun forgotten as the stone man loomed above her. Sol saw their lips moving as the old friends spoke to each other with brief words.
In a final moment as Bertha stood hypnotised by terror, John raised a stone rifle the size of a telegraph pole. Then the gun butt fell with a dreadful blow that shook the buggy. When the giant soldier turned away to take the slaughter elsewhere, Lady Bertha wasn’t moving.
The Boneman fell back into his seat and grief gripped his chest, a bubble that rose up into his throat and burst. He howled with sorrow and shook as tears leaked across his ruined face.
“Plenty more fish in the sea, buddy,” Lucy said cheerfully.
“She’s dead, you horrid fuck,” the Boneman sobbed. “My wife is dead.”
“Hey, take it out on the bad guy, Sol. Just trying to lighten the moment.”
Blinded by tears, the Boneman summoned his thousands of mobile corpses and sent them teetering into the Jesusman’s funnel of death. Then he made them run, pushing them faster still, heedless of the damage it did to their fragile bodies. They passed around the roaring convertible, a tide of bone and rot that swept into the Waking City. Dozens of the corpse soldiers were consumed by the magic and crumbled, then were trod underfoot by the thousands following behind.
“That’s the spirit!” Lucy shouted, leaning hard on the car horn. “Give ’em hell.”
Papa Lucy drove into the madness at full tilt, knocking aside friend and foe alike. The street was like a field of stars gone nova as the strange Taursi glass magic burned away Lucy’s front ranks. But these bright flares were slowing. The Taursi had used up nearly all of their mysterious weaponry, and now the Waste-twisted freaks began to drag them down.
Above this battle strode the red giant, batting aside any who came within reach. It was John Leicester recast into the image of a First Soldier. The sad fixations of a wannabe warrior carried out to their conclusion, the Boneman thought. He remembered the rain of shards on Sad Plain and the moment that John’s life bled out, when he abandoned flesh for stone.
He’d been a traitor then. And John Leicester continued his treachery. The Boneman saw the buckled wreck of Bertha’s buggy and the flashes of her prone body as Lucy’s maddened beasts wheeled past striking into the Taursi’s flank.
“Where have you been hiding, John?” the Boneman shouted, grief stricken. He snatched up a gun from the arsenal in the backseat and clumsily emptied a clip into the red titan.
Stone chips fell from the bullet holes, which had no more effect on the giant than a cloud of biting gnats. Propping a rocket-propelled grenade launcher over the windshield, Lucy sent the missile spiralling towards John’s chest. It struck with a cloud of fire and smoke, the explosion knocking the giant back a step. Thick sheets of stone rained on the melee below, crushing mutant and Taursi alike.
That got John Leicester’s attention.
“Quick, get me another grenade. From that box there,” Lucy said, shouting impatiently as John Leicester came to meet them. His great stone boots beat a path towards their fishtailing car.
“Oh damn it,” Lucy said, kicking open his door and rolling free. The Boneman barely had the sense to follow a moment before the stone rifle fell. John staved in the front half of the car. The old motor gave a final death rattle, while John’s next blow remodelled the passenger compartment into pressed tin.
“That bastard wrecked my ride!” Lucy shouted, face flushed with anger. The Boneman fell prone as the enormous rifle came around on the backswing, a stone tree trunk that swung mere inches above his head.
“This way!” Lucy said, dragging his brother to his feet. They ran through the press of battle. Lucy called up fire marks on his own troops and burned them to ash when they blocked his passage. As John slowly turned and raised his gore-streaked rifle, the mohawked sorcerer set a blinding sigil on his eyes.
Papa Lucy & the Boneman Page 29