The Cruik writhed and fed and grew, but only so much. Lucy withdrew it slightly, the staff remaining attached to the tower by a thick rope of shadow. He undid the magic holding the brass cladding onto the staff, setting these lesser demons free. Long ago he’d bound these forms to the Cruik in an attempt to control it, but now they were holding the entity back and limiting its potential.
After Lucy hurled the brass hoops to the ground, the released demons fled from the Waking City. They grew shining wings and howled with fear.
“They’re coming,” Lucy said. “Be ready, my brother.”
The tower hummed. The golden light within flickered as the naked Cruik strangled it. The other towers behind it suffered the same malaise, and the black tendrils climbed them as the Cruik somehow multiplied its assault.
The glass swam with shapes, as if it were a golden aquarium filled with all wonder of creatures from an amber sea. Vast beasts that were a forest of eyes and hands appeared, pushed against the glass from the far side. In vain they fought to limit the spread of the Cruik.
The shadow hook lashed about, and where it caught the alien beings, they shrivelled and faded, falling back into the amber murk.
“Well, lookie there, Sol,” Lucy said. “Wave hi to Hesus.”
One of the defenders was a pair of giant hands, twin squids that coasted about in that mysterious aether. They were marked with Hesus’s old tattoos of the words BEFORE and NOW and pierced with the same ragged holes that Lucy had inflicted upon their owner during the battle of Sad Plain.
“We’ll be seeing you real soon, old buddy.” Lucy crowed.
Something swift and strong knocked Lucy and the Boneman to the ground.
Rising from the concrete, the Boneman saw Bertha straddling his prone brother, her bloodied and twisted hands closed around his throat. Her armour lay shattered, and her body was irreparably broken, but his wife still lived.
“The Cruik is mine.” Bertha howled. “Give me the Cruik.”
His hands gripping the staff tightly, Lucy raised it and drew out a curling ribbon of darkness from the tower. An offering. Bertha released him as she reached for the Cruik as if entranced.
Lucy jabbed the staff deep into her belly like a spear. She howled in disbelief, and the Boneman cried out in despair as he watched her body shrivel, her essence drawn into the Cruik. In moments, she was a dried husk, then dust that fell to the ground.
“It’s all yours,” Lucy said to Bertha’s drifting remains.
Fuelled by the dead woman’s essence, the shadow-Cruik continued to grow. The towers were now almost completely wreathed in those black threads. The Overhaeven defenders beat against this constriction, but fell by the hundreds. The flesh of this dark serpent burned them like acid.
The golden towers began to flex as the Cruik drew its coils tight. Much more of this assault and the glass skin would rupture. Papa Lucy would have his gateway into Overhaeven.
“What have you done?” the Boneman shouted. “You killed her!”
“She was already dead, Sol,” Lucy said through gritted teeth. He hauled on the Cruik as if landing the world’s biggest fish. As the coils tightened more, he laughed in triumph.
“They’re all dead, baby brother. Her, the Jesusfool there, every single person between here and the sea. They’re all about to burn.”
The Boneman saw the first cracks appear in the glass and felt the pulsing energy as the crumbling world veil gave way to the Overhaeven. He saw the meaning of Lucy’s words. When that gateway opened, the Now would be burnt to a cinder. A whole world in flames. Papa Lucy thought nothing of this.
“We’ll be gods, Sol. The usurpers of the Overhaeven. What price is a world when the universe can be ours?”
Before the Boneman, Lanyard Everett struggled to rise and lifted his gun. Even at the end of things, despite the futility of his actions, the Jesusman continued his duty. Lucy laughed as he froze the man in place with a word.
“I will pave our way to glory with every single one of their pointless lives. And do you know what?” Lucy raved. “Tomorrow you’ll thank me.”
“I thank you now, brother,” the Boneman said, advancing slowly towards Lucy. “Thank you for showing me what you really are. Thank you for bringing me to your moment of triumph.”
In sleeping, the Boneman had lost his art, but this one thing remained to him. Death was his, and in this strange second life, the sorcerer could still hear the whisper of life that ran in bones.
He stood next to his brother, behind the corrosive protection that the Cruik offered. Reaching forward as if offering to take the load of energy, the Boneman laid his hands around Lucy’s forearms and reached in through the skin for the bone.
As Lucy cried out in shock, he plucked the bones free and cast them aside. Everything from the elbow to the fingertips tore from the flesh. Two trees of bone that instantly reverted into the animal remains they truly were, substitutes that were baked into clay. As Lucy’s false bones fell apart and struck the ground, they shivered into dust.
Lucy howled with pain and anguish. His arms were now floppy bags of skin that could not hold onto the Cruik or even draw upon a single sorcerous mark. The staff clattered to the ground, and Papa Lucy ran.
The Cruik’s shadow whipped about, drawn back towards the abandoned staff like an unravelling thread. It fought to keep its purchase on the Overhaeven, but the remaining spirits pried the hook loose with their ghost fingers.
Hesus was there at the last, his great fists battering the Cruik’s shadow-self, driving it out of the tower. With its last ounce of strength, the staff stood up on its end, the hook quivering with rage. Finally, it was spent and stood in a sullen defeat. The Boneman tipped over the Cruik with the point of a bony finger, and the wooden staff clinked against the cement.
Hysterical with bags of skin flopping from his elbows, Lucy ran about mindlessly, crazed and scared. He froze when he heard the low bubble of laughter behind him. He turned to see the cold stare of the dying Jesusman, now standing on unsteady feet. Then, there was nothing left to Lucy’s world but the double infinity of the shotgun barrels.
Lanyard Everett pulled the trigger and turned Papa Lucy’s head into a bloody mist.
— EPILOGUE —
The Boneman spoke to Lanyard’s ravaged insides. He drew out the jagged sliver, sealed up the holes in the man’s intestines. In moments, he made the broken ribs line up correctly and knit, then saw to it that the flesh would mend clean. He mixed his own magic with the best of the Taursi’s sorcery, deftly sketching out Overhaeven marks on the man’s skin.
“You turned against your own,” the Jesusman said to the charred skeleton. “I understand what that’s like.”
“Oh, you do?” The Boneman continued his ministrations. Although his scrap of silvery tongue clearly unnerved the man, the Jesusman made a point of looking at the skeleton’s face when he talked.
Lanyard watched as the corpse worked sorcery upon his broken guts. “You had to do it.” He winced as muscle shifted back into place. It was far from a painless procedure. “If someone acts like a bad dog, you gotta put ’em down.”
“It was nothing like that,” the Boneman said, but he wondered if this was true. He helped the man climb to his feet, a dead hand gripping a living one.
Tilly still lay on her side, her mousy hair protruding from a bundle of blankets and rugs. The sorcerer searched her for any lasting damage, but she fared no worse than if she’d taken a bad tumble from a horse. She was still unconscious but was breathing easily. She just needed rest.
“Kid’s resilient,” Lanyard said from his side. The Boneman nodded.
They took a walk through the ruins of the Woken City. The battle had levelled nearly half of the magnificent bleedthrough, and the fires burned out of control now. Almost one quarter of the city lay buried beneath razor-sharp glass, a shining snowfield to mark the final resting place of Turtwurdigan. It was a valiant ending for such a strange creature, defending Overhaeven from the Cruik and its
favoured slave.
“So, what happens now?” Lanyard asked. The Boneman shrugged, his collarbones lifting and falling. As the pair poked through the aftermath of the slaughter, the Boneman eased the suffering of the occasional twisted survivor into death.
The Jesusman assisted here. His marked guns delivered a swift mercy to the lingering mutants. When his bullets were spent, he tried to send the dead over with his knife, but more often than not it proved too difficult to cut through machine veins and engine hearts, so it was up to the Boneman to sing these ones to a gentle sleep.
They came across the severed head of John Leicester half-buried in rubble. To their surprise he was still conscious, eyes blinking, stone lips gently moving.
“I am sorry, Sol.” The broken head rumbled. The Boneman nodded, gently patting the statue’s cheek with his blackened finger-bones.
These three survivors held council and talked until the sun sank below the city’s horizon and slid across the Waste. They paused only to carry Tilly down to where the red face of her god lay buried. Lanyard lit a fire to warm them as they talked into the night. The Boneman sat as far away from the flames as possible, frightened by the orange licks.
“What we called the Now is actually a prison,” John Leicester was saying, “and Turtwurdigan was the warden.”
He explained the hierarchy of Overhaeven. The Taursi were servants, something like the angels of the old belief. Whenever one of these servants fell from grace, the criminal’s entire bloodline was condemned and sent into exile under the watchful gaze of the Mother of Glass.
These criminals were stripped of all but the crudest of glasswork and allowed only the run of this world and certain aspects of the Greygulf. When the mountain range finally met the sea and this world was at an end, Overhaeven had decreed that their sentences would have been served.
“Lucy broke into a prison,” the Boneman said, and then his absent lungs flexed with laughter, tears running from his all-too-human eyes. A broad smile spread across the statue’s face, and he laughed, too, sounding like a rockfall.
The stone head and the burnt skeleton talked long into the night, reminiscing over ancient memories, friendships, and enmities that were centuries dead.
“Never heard of this Overhaeven place,” Lanyard mumbled later, poking at the fire with a stick. “Seems to me that if there was all this going on somewhere else, old bones here would have known about it.”
“There was a political decision long ago,” John rumbled. “After each Prime Realm was created, Overhaeven was not to interfere with it. They withdrew and left the facets of creation unfold as they would. No engagement whatsoever, for good or ill.”
“Well, that went well,” the Boneman said, remembering the sudden death of the Before. The fire crackled, and they watched as the Jesusman cooked a looted tin of beans on the coals.
“After Sad Plain, Hesus and I were admitted into Overhaeven,” John said. “On probate. Because we defended its borders against our own, we were to be the guardians of this world. Your jailers.”
“Why did you stand against my brother? Why guard the borders of some alien race?”
“Hesus learnt the truth. Lucy destroyed the Before. He used the power stations to fuel his first assault on Overhaeven, knowing it would destroy our old world.”
The fire crackled, and the Boneman bowed his head as this final truth struck home. Lucy had destroyed the Before, even as he acted like its saviour.
“And here I was thinking that we’d won at Sad Plain,” the Boneman mused. “The Family won nothing but a jail cell, didn’t it?”
“The gods wanted you dead, Sol. Be thankful for the centuries you had, lording over this dust bowl. The punishments of Overhaeven, you—you don’t want to know.”
The next morning, they fetched a car to tow the stone head back to the golden towers. Wrapped in ropes and chains, the red stone scratched deeply into the asphalt.
At the base of the nearest tower, Lanyard and the Boneman used levers and rollers to move the stone closer to the glowing glass. This was John Leicester’s only exit from Now, and he was needed back at his post.
“I’m sorry I didn’t get here sooner,” John said. “Hesus and I petitioned our superiors for leave to stop Lucy. They take a long time to make a decision.”
“Bureaucrats,” Lanyard muttered, straining at a crowbar while the stone shifted another few inches.
“When Lucy summoned this gateway into the Now, I bent the rules a little. I told Turtwurdigan where to guide what remained of my faithful. I’m in disgrace now, if you must know.”
He said the word with some emphasis, revealing that staying in a state of grace was very important when it came to Overhaeven.
“Wait a minute,” the Boneman said. “Lucy brought the Waking City here? He did this?”
“He did a lot of things while he was stuck in the Aum. Your brother was using you, Sol. I’m sorry.”
Lanyard withdrew for a cigarette, letting the two old friends make their goodbyes. After they had a long talk, the Boneman waved him back over, and they rolled the stone head into the glass. The skin of the Overhaeven parted to accept one of its own.
Tilly woke that afternoon, aching and bruised. Blinking wearily, she saw Lanyard sitting across a cookfire from the Boneman. The girl panicked as she fumbled in her blankets for the gun the Jesusman had gifted to her.
“Be easy. We’re just talking,” the Boneman said, his blackened skull turning towards her. She shivered and felt pinned in place by those sad brown eyes.
“It’s okay, Tilly, he’s a—” and here Lanyard paused, unsure of what Papa Lucy’s immortal brother actually was now.
“A friend. If you wish,” the moving skeleton said.
Warily, Tilly joined their parley, and it was then that the Boneman made his offer. He told the pair what would be expected of them now. Lanyard left the decision to Tilly, who nodded after a long moment of thought. She shook the dead man’s hand solemnly.
Only then did she cry.
The Boneman built a pyre for his brother, a great stack of furniture and doors, anything that would burn. He wept as he built it and cursed his inability to build a grand marker like the cairn of bone Lucy had left for him.
Lanyard helped the Boneman haul the canvas roll containing the mortal remains of Papa Lucy and set the bundle on top of the bonfire. Already the flesh was returning to clay, Lucy’s borrowed parts reverted to their true forms. Silty water ran from the ends of his improvised shroud, dark with blood.
“He deserves more,” Sol cried, cringing when Lanyard brought a flaming taper forward. He retreated, and though fearful of the impending blaze, was unable to look away.
“No, Boneman. You deserved more.” Lanyard grunted and then he set the pyre alight. Tilly waited by the sorcerer’s side and held his bony hand as he watched his brother burn.
Later, the trio stood around the Cruik. Lanyard nudged it carefully with his boot, but the staff was still. Its promises were subdued, listless murmurs that barely registered in his mind.
“You sure about this?” he asked the Boneman, who picked up the staff in his bony hand and leaned heavily on it.
“There’s nothing to fear if you’re the master of your own house,” the sorcerer said, tapping the side of his skull with a finger. “It’s just a stick now.”
He opened a far-door, a portal of purest night. The fleshless sorcerer regarded the man and the girl, then spread his jaw wide in what might have passed for a smile.
“Humanity is a fine thing, and worth saving,” he said. “I’ll see you soon, Jesusman.”
“Good luck, Boneman,” Lanyard said.
“Please. Call me Sol.” And with that, the last of the Family stepped through the gateway and was gone.
In the moment of his murder, Papa Lucy fell out of his loan body with shock. He was nothing but a soul now, an essence that shone with a slowly fading light. He fought the forces pulling at him. He stood firm as a doorway opened and sought to draw him into
the Underfog to his final death. He knew enough of necromancy to resist this temptation and cast about for a place to hide his spirit—a mirror. Or perhaps a body with a weak mind that he could expel and seize for his own.
As he cast his eye upon the Jesusman’s girl, he felt a second impulse, more disturbing than the draw of death. Before he could escape, a black tendril snatched at his foot and drew him away from the Underfog and into the Cruik.
The entity shivered with glee, gobbling him up with relish. In sympathy with the Cruik, Lucy experienced his own consumption from its perspective. He knew that he represented the most fulfilling meal of its ancient existence.
He stood in the sunlit palace, a false house modelled after his own. This was no accident. He’d designed this prison himself, a golden cage to lull the Cruik’s many victims into dumb obedience.
Papa Lucy had bound the Cruik and sent it away when it had nearly mastered him despite this. He had fed it a thousand others, distracted it with its cadre of willing victims, the Riders. Still the Cruik came for him at the end. It claimed a lifetime of favours owed.
Behind him, the golden doors closed. Lucy stood in the courtyard surrounded by blank-faced souls, each of whom he’d doomed to this end. Their friendly games came to an end now. They hefted croquet mallets and grasped whittling knives drawn in anger.
Before him wearing the shape of her earlier life stood Baertha Papagallo. All traces of the Lady Bertha were gone, and her frame was once more that of the demure magician from a dead world, the ballerina’s body that had drawn Sol to chase a bride above his station.
Although her face was washed out, he could just make out the shape of her eyes, the full lips that were slowly fading into a narrow slit.
Baertha snarled and drew a fireplace poker from behind her skirts. All of the prisoners were similarly armed, their placid existence riled into rebellion by this new champion.
“Here is the one who imprisoned you!” she shouted. “Papa Lucy gave you to the Cruik. Look where his lies have brought him!”
Papa Lucy & the Boneman Page 31