 
# Seven Threads

# By Jason Fischer

Copyright 2017 Jason Fischer

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

# This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

#

# "By the Laws of Crab and Woman" was originally published online by Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 17 Issue 6

# "Rolling for Fetch" was originally published online by Aurealis Magazine Issue #49

# "Defy the Grey Kings" was originally published online by Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue #180

# "The Dog Pit" was originally published in Cthulhu: Deep Down Under

# "Pigroot Flat" was originally published in Midnight Echo Magazine #8

# "The House of Nameless" was originally published in Writers of the Future Volume 26

# "Gunning for a tinkerman" was originally published in Aurealis Magazine #44

#

# This ebook edition published by Jason Fischer, January 2017

# Cover design courtesy of canva.com

# Layout by Jason Fischer © 2017

#

#  Dedicated to eager readers everywhere

#

# Contents

#

Author's Note

By the Laws of Crab and Woman

Rolling for Fetch

Defy the Grey Kings

The Dog Pit

Pigroot Flat

The House of Nameless

Gunning for a Tinkerman

About the Author

#  Author's Note

# These stories have been published previously in one form or another, and are collected here to give new readers a taste of my work. In this carefully selected collection I delve into the fantastic, the sad, the horrible and the humane. Like a needle-work sampler, here are seven fantastic threads, woven together for your pleasure.

# By The Laws Of Crab And Woman

For her heresy, Reft climbed up to the House of the Pale Daughters. The law dictated that she take the penitent's path, so she stood barefoot and bleeding in the front courtyard, picking thorns and slivers of glass from her feet.

Reft held a crab on a leash, a juvenile almost up to her waist in height. Its shell was fresh after a recent moult, streaked with blue and orange. Like the other crabbers, Reft had fastened a platform to its back, drilling deep into the hardening shell. From now on, as the crab grew, the platform would grow, and by adulthood it would have entire buildings bristling from its back.

The inner door to the House opened, a thick slab of stone that turned easily on a pivot hinge. One old woman pushed it open with the tips of her fingers.She was like a piece of driftwood in a robe, flinty eyes buried in a maze of scars.

"Reft the heretic," she said. "You have come."

Reft fussed nervously about the crab, unpacking the trunks and crates that she'd lashed firmly to its back. With the tip of a coral knife, she parted the wax seal around the lid of an amphora.

It was honey, gold and thick, filled right up to the brim.

"What does this get me?" Reft asked.

"Death," the crone said.

"Yes," she said, voice shaking. "But how long does it get me?"

The ancient woman trailed a finger along the top, and sucked at the goopy mess. Where a thimble of honey was beyond the means of most, this was worth a fortune.

"One year," the woman said, and Reft moaned. She cut away more netting, revealing further trunks and crates. She spilled treasures at the old crone's feet. A breastplate made of laminated crab-castings, set with pearls. A dagger smelted from an iron ore, worth a prince's ransom. A shell-backed guitar, a tapestry, bags of rice and a cask of mash liquor.

With each gift, the old woman added time. One year became two, two became five, and soon Reft was adding mere days, pulling rings from her fingers and toes, plucking the silver hoops from her ears. Soon she was pushing the crab's leash into the old woman's hands, and she kneeled, weeping, begging for more time. She grabbed for the hem of her robe, but the crone stepped on her fingers.

"Have some dignity," the old woman said, a little disgusted. "Everyone dies."

"I have nothing now," Reft said. "I am ruined."

"You were ruined the moment you strayed," the woman said. "I give you eight years, Reft the heretic, and may every moment weigh upon you."

# #

She was not allowed into the sanctum of the House. Reft lay in the courtyard, broken and reeling, watching as a line of girls emerged from the stone door.

These were the Pale Daughters, dressed in the same felt robes that their door-keeper wore. Some were almost women, hard-eyed and sinewy. Others were gangly girls, others spotted with acne, many soft with pre-teen fat. Some were tiny, barely children, their hair thin and light.

Each of them a killer.

One by one, the Daughters looked down on her, as if searching for something in her face. After a long moment, each girl would shake her head and return to the House, a solemn line as long as the one that emerged.

They did not snicker or make mischief like Reft's own children. Each of these girls had a serious cast to her eyes, an alien stare. Again and again, Reft was rejected, failing some criterion that she could not place.

Finally, a young girl stood in front of Reft. She was a skinny thing, perhaps eight or nine years old, with a doll's face and wispy brown hair. After a long piercing look into Reft's eyes, she nodded. Turning as one, the other Pale Daughters returned to their House, filing in through the door with absolute efficiency. In moments, the stone door slowly shut.

"I am your daughter," the girl said, as if she was almost surprised to learn this. She sat down, cross-legged in the dirt, sharing an awkward silence with Reft.

The old woman reappeared.

"Reft the heretic, you are to raise this girl," she said. "You are to give her a place at your table. She shall labour for you without complaint, and honour your family that is now her family."

Reft nodded.

"Eight years from this day, your Pale Daughter will end your life," the woman said, with neither malice nor kindness. Reft felt the bubble of a hysterical laugh rise from her chest, and bit down on this with all her might.

"What is she called?" Reft asked the old crone, and then turned to the girl. "What is your name?"

"She is your Doom," the woman said, and the girl shrugged, as if the name were as good as any other.

# #

Set on the upper tip of High Claw, the House of the Pale Daughters was a grey canker looking down on the island. High Claw was a mountain, tapering up from the Murk like a crooked finger. Across a narrow gulf was Low Claw, the lesser half of the island, and rope bridges and rambling wooden structures bound the two like a crab's pincer.

On the promise of future payment and favours, the penniless Reft bartered with the rope-gangers, buying a trip down to the tree-line. Her feet were bloody, and she didn't think she would survive another trip down the penitent's path.

Doom sat next to her on the sky-dock, a biddable doll. From here Reft could see the industry of High Claw, the First Island. The homes of the well-to-do clung to the cliffside, full of sunlight and fresh air. She'd dreamed of such a house once, had promised one to her husband in happier times.

Crops spiralled the stone finger, in terraces and windowboxes, growing in squares wherever there was a rooftop. Both High Claw and Low Claw were honeycombed with tunnels and poorer living spaces, long since stripped of ores and oils.

Below all of this, the Murk. Today it looked like a sea of milk, a miasma interrupted by the tops of ambitious trees. Only the poorest lived near the bottom of any island, hacking away at the brush that grew up towards their shacks.

They were miserable folk, who sweated and coughed often. The Murk pulled at the unlucky, drawing them down the islands as their fortunes dropped until finally, they were within reach of the tree-line. Many of them caught the jaundice, or had to run from the laws of crab and woman. Nothing for such but the belly of the Murk, that underworld of sickness and murder, no sunlight but the faint lick that reached through that swirl of filth.

Doom smiled over at her, kicking her legs playfully over the void. Her arms and legs were thin, and she looked so tiny that the wind itself might send her over the edge.

"It's amazing," the girl said, gesturing at the swaying rope-city, the planks and fibres held taut between High and Low Claw.

"Did you climb the path?" Reft said. "When they took you to live in the House?"

"I was born in there," Doom said, wrinkling her brow.

The rope-gangers came for them then, a crew as sinewy and tough as the ropes they worked. They hauled a wicker-basket to the top ledge of High Claw, working with levers and detachable pulleys. The crew were exhausted, and set the basket on the ledge with the last of their strength.

"Yer to pay a fifth again, crabber," their bosslady said, and Reft had no choice but to nod agreement. After a rest and a flask of spirits, the rope-gang set off on the downward journey.

Reft and Doom sat in the basket, built to take the weight of a dozen sheep, but even so Reft was terrified, starting at each creak, closing her eyes as the winds buffeted them.

Doom watched wide-eyed as the basket passed between draughty houses, all basket-weave and driftwood, flexible to the ways of the wind. Next a vertical market, the vendors arranged like flies in a spider's web. A meat hawker rappelled from his spot, matching the descent of the basket, wailing and waving his skewers of pigeon and crab.

Then they were through, and only the mother-ropes remained, falling down to the bottom of the twin islands, bound to anchor blocks just above the tree-line. Reft could see the big crabs now, lashed to the Pier.

There she was. Old Char, her beautiful woman. The crab hatched a century ago, and had served her mother, and her mother's mother. Where the other grand crabs were orange or blue, Char was red, her shell burnt to black in places, an ancient fire that had consumed the first platform in Reft's mother's time. Now, her back bristled with new outbuildings, a nursery for the larvae, and a grand central hall, Reft's home.

The rope-gangers stopped the basket by the Pier, exhausted from the long journey. The bosslady scratched out a promissory note on a lobster shell, and held it out for Reft to make her mark.

"Every month, a fifth again till yer pay the full toll," the ganger grunted. It was usury, but Reft had no choice but to take these terms. She'd never unload a cargo again if she cheated the rope-gangs.

Reft headed down the last stretch of path to the Pier, the carved steps sweaty and slick this close to the tree-line. Doom followed closely behind, gawking at the edge of the Murk, at the big crabs, jostling and chittering to each other.

Reft stopped. Her family were waiting on the pier, a row of figures dwarfed by Old Char behind them. Her husband, Eakr, and the three boys she'd birthed for him before her womb went still.

They were small, like all men and boys. Reft had prayed at the temples in High Claw for a girl, for a strong pair of hands to help on the deck. What she got was three boys, a dying marriage, and then her mad scheme, her crime against the laws of crab and woman.

Heresy had sent them the daughter nothing else would.

When Eakr saw Reft with the strange girl from the House, he fell to his knees, wailing. Reft rushed up to him, but he slapped away her reaching hands, only allowing his sons to help him to stand.

"How long?" Eakr asked.

"Eight years," Reft said.

"What did they take?" he said, looking behind Reft for porters, for any treasures she'd brought back from the House of the Pale Daughters.

"Everything. Every last crumb."

"You. You have ruined us," he said, pointing at her with a shaking finger. "Now your family starves, Reft."

"Eight years is time enough to raise more capital," Reft said, looking to her family for sympathy, finding only flinty stares. "I will fund an appeal."

Eakr laughed, a bitter trill with no mirth in it.

"Appeal to her," he said, pointing to Doom. "Appeal while she drives a knife into your heart."

Reft and her miserable brood filed up the gangway, dogged by their newest member. Doom looked around in wonder, examining the places where living shell met the carpenter's leavings.

Supper in the grand hall was a stew of gristle and oats. Reft suffered through every mouthful, watching her sons exercise their expensive table manners on a beggar's meal. Eakr would not allow Doom to eat at the family table, so the young girl squatted by the firepit, sharing her gruel with the infant crabs.

The girl was silent, the picture of innocence and good cheer. Eakr wheedled and one of Reft's sons wept, refusing to eat the poor fare. Soon the young killer nodded, warmth and sleep reaching for her. Reft stood at Doom's feet, looking down on her for a long moment.

She draped a rough blanket over her Pale Daughter, and Doom drifted into slumber with a smile on her face.

# #

To take on new cargo and refit the compound, Reft had to go deeply into debt. She ran the sums, and realised that for the first year of her borrowed life, they would eat gruel often.

The only good thing in her life was Old Char, who waded through the Murk without complaint. The crab was mature, clearing the tree-line in most places. Her legs were armoured and long, and found good purchase under the miasma more often than not.

Whenever a cacodrill tried to snap at her legs, she would either crush the beast underfoot, or snatch it up with her pincers, stuffing the dumb lizard into her maw. Old Char's favourites were the big eels, the ones that strangled and ate women beneath the Murk. Where the Murk opened up to the flow of a river, she would hunt schools of them, scooping them up by the dozen.

Reft took them on a trading run through the Archipelago, urging Old Char to each pimple of land that rose from the Murk. Like High Claw and Low Claw, the islands were thin and tall, slowly growing out of the swamp.

Tower was the tallest island, where the settlers had carved out a spiralling terrace to farm sheep and wheat. A lot of good trade came from Bridge, a slab of rock held aloft by three strong pillars. Other islands were not so impressive, failed settlements that barely rose above the Murk.

Reft had to lay off the crew, so Eakr and their sons worked now, unloading goods from the docks, winching everything up to the storehouse on the back of Old Char. Last year they had been wealthy, and Eakr described every indignity that he suffered.

"You promised me a house on High Claw," he said, hooking up another sack of coal for the winch. "Our sons were meant to be debutants at Bridge this season."

The boys were busy around the bins, bagging up the coal for transport. Pol the oldest was a mess, face streaked with sweat and black dust. Aeri and Luin were young, barely older than Doom, and they struggled with the heavy sacks. The boys dragged them across the docks, spilling lumps of coal with every step.

"This is just a setback," Reft said, cranking the winch lever. Normally two strong women operated this, and her shoulders ached from the work.

"Before that creature executes you, I want that house on High Claw," Eakr said. "You will set up our sons with the dowry that they need."

"Yes," Reft said quietly. She looked where Doom was filling her own sack full of coal, uncomplaining. When it was full, she hefted it up in her arms, like a big dusty baby. On her own she was matching the work of her three "brothers".

"She's not natural, Reft," Eakr whispered. "If you were woman enough, you would smother that thing in her sleep."

"If I kill my own Pale Daughter," Reft said, "the House will send a dozen in her place. You, the boys, even Old Char here would suffer. Do you want that?"

"We already suffer," Eakr said, closing his mouth when Doom drew near. The girl gave Reft a smile, placing the bag of coal gently at her feet.

# #

Reft could finally afford to hire some deckhands, a pair of criminals exiled from Low Claw. Their only choices were to sign on with a crabber, or to take their chances in the Murk. Mal and Bon were rough women, marked with squid ink and copper piercings. They wore coral knives at their belts, and watched Reft's sons whenever they walked the deck.

More than once they'd whistled at the boys, making scissoring motions with their fingers. Cock-cutters were often sent away from the islands, and Reft took to barring the great hall at night. Eakr wanted the pair evicted from Old Char. Where the old crew had been like family, he would not even allow this pair to eat at his table.

"A pair of crooked sinners," Eakr said. "They will kill us in our sleep, and abuse our boys."

"Nonsense," Reft said, but watched the women just the same. She gave them a building at the very rear of Old Char's shell, a shack once used for smoking meat. Here they spent their free time, drinking and cooking their rations over a small fire.

One evening, Reft woke for the chamberpot, only to see that Doom was missing from her spot by the fire-pit. Eakr would not give her a bed, so she slept with the crab larvae, nursing Old Char's babies with more skill than any crab-nurse Reft had ever paid for.

The doors to the great hall were ajar, the heavy beam set to one side. Fetching up her mace, Reft stepped onto the deck, heart pounding.

There was laughter from the smoking shack, the low sound of a grown woman talking inside. The high reply of Doom, her Pale Daughter.

"I heard she is a heretic," Reft heard Mal say. "Why set a waif like you onto a crabber?"

"It is the law," Doom said.

"Why wait?" Mal said. "Do your job now. We could all be very rich."

"We could help you," Bon slurred, and Mal laughed. "Kill that cursed bitch, and toss her brats into the crab. We could take Old Char."

"You cannot harm Reft," Doom said simply. "I will not let you."

The women roared with laughter.

"You won't stop us," Mal said. "Why defend that heretic?"

"She is my mother," Doom said. "The House of the Pale Daughters has set me in her service."

"The way I see it," Bon slurred, "yer gotta kill her. Now, seven years, death is death."

"No," Doom said, and the pair laughed.

"Maybe we should kill you, little girl," Mal said.

Just outside the flimsy door, Reft steeled herself. The women were as hard as petrified wood, covered in knife scars. Reft was a trader running to fat, and she held no illusions about what the pair could do to her.

They're going to hurt Doom, she thought, and went to make her move.

There was the sudden shuffle of feet on the deck, the roars of the women as they jumped to their feet. In one heart-beat, Reft heard the crash of a dish breaking, a scream, the thump of a body falling. Finally she kicked the door open, arms shaking as she lifted the mace.

"Leave her be!" she cried, only to see Doom standing over the pair. She held their coral knives in her hands, each of them bloody up to the hilt.

Bon stared at the ceiling, blood gushing from a hole above her heart. Mal flicked about like an eel, gasping for air through the severed ruin of her throat.

Reft dragged the bodies over to the front of Old Char, Mal still twitching as the life leaked out of her. Reft gently rubbed the crab's swaying eyestalk, and then the old girl stirred from her slumber.

"This is the food line," Reft said, lashing a rope around Bon's ankles. Doom watched the complicated hitch knot, and helped Reft to shove the dead body out and over the edge of the shell.

The body dangled in front of Old Char's mouth for a heartbeat, and then the crab lurched forward, snatching it up with her claws, stuffing it into her mouth. Her mandibles smashed together, crushing the corpse into paste.

Reft drew up the mouth-line, the end now frayed and bloody. She looked at the other woman. Mal gurgled weakly, blood bubbling out of her mouth. She raised a hand, fear writ large in her dying eyes.

"Do you deserve mercy?" Reft said. Mal nodded.

"I shall leave it up to my Pale Daughter. Doom, does this woman deserve to live?"

She said nothing, merely kneeling down by Mal's feet. As Doom began to tie the knot around her ankles, the dying woman wept, mouth moving in a plea she no longer had the air to voice.

"You tried to murder this little girl," Reft said. "Here is your mercy."

Together, Reft and Doom pushed Mal over the edge. The rope pulled taut, and Old Char snapped her up, chirping joyfully as she ate her alive.

The next day, Reft gave Doom the smokehouse for her own use, and built her a bed out of scrap wood and leather straps. From that day on she visited the great hall only to fetch her meals, and to tend to the larvae.

"I am pleased that I do not have to share a roof with my wife's killer," Eakr said. The great hall became a more peaceful place, but Reft still felt the presence of her Pale Daughter, saw her Doom wandering the deck. She remembered all too well her inhuman speed, the way she'd butchered two grown women in the blink of an eye.

Each day slipped through her fingers, and eight years seemed like nothing at all.

# #

It took Reft more than a year to get her books back into the black. These days there were more crabbers plying the Archipelago, and she'd had to keep her profits razor thin.

She put on another crew, honest deck-hands with references. Under Doom's care, the latest batch of crab larvae had grown their first shells, and Reft sold the juveniles for a tidy sum.

"We should be bringing trade for the priests on High Claw," Eakr complained, unhappy with this modest accumulation of wealth. "Yet here we are, scrapping over postal tenders. Fetching salt for the outer islands."

"It's good work," Reft said. "Steady income."

"Steady income," Eakr scoffed. "You have seven years left, Reft. Seven years to make this right."

The holding sheds still stinking of pigeon meat and smoked eel, Reft steered Old Char towards Bridge. Their oldest son Pol was desperate to join the other debutants, and find himself a wife. Reft and Eakr had thunderous arguments over the amount of dowry he should take.

"I need money for trade goods," she warned Eakr. "We cannot go into debt again."

"Who will Pol get with this?" Eakr said, tossing the small purse of coins back onto the table. "He'll get a shepherd, or a farmhand. Worse luck, he'll have to marry a crabber."

"I paid for my mistake," Reft shouted. "This is the best I can do."

Eakr ran to his sons, sobbing and railing against the injustice of it all. Reft left the great hall, storming about on the deck.

I should run to the Murk, she thought. Leave that shrieking dick to fend for himself.

Doom was at the front of the deck, standing in between Old Char's eyestalks. She swayed in time with each lumbering step, but hers wasn't the balance that any crabber developed over time. She seemed rooted to the shell; not one of the parasites that crawled on Old Char's back, but a new appendage, a third eyestalk scanning the Murk for food, for enemies.

"There is a new island," Doom told Reft, voice absent and low, not taking her eyes from the Murk the crab was lumbering through. "Even now it is rising."

Reft grew excited. They could claim land if they got there early enough. Trading rights if they beat the other crabbers to the site.

"Take us there," Reft urged her. "We must get there fast."

Doom stroked the fine hairs on Old Char's eyestalks, whispered to the crab. The behemoth turned from her path, ignoring the bulk of Bridge on the horizon.

When Eakr discovered the change in direction, he flew into a fury. Pol joined forces with his father, and they screamed at Reft to turn the crab around, to deliver the oldest son to his season in the sunlit courts.

"You turn away on the say-so of that thing?" Pol said, pointing at Doom. "She is going to kill you! Don't listen to her."

"Be silent!" Reft yelled, unbuckling her eel-skin belt, wrestling it out and into her hand. She was furious, trembling all over. By the laws of crab and woman, she had the right to beat any man for any reason. Weak little things, good for nothing but their seed, for the little jobs that no woman would do. Eakr and Pol looked at her dubiously; she'd never raised a hand to them in anger.

"You're too weak to whip your own," Eakr scoffed. "Mark my son, and I swear we will smother you in your sleep."

Doom moved fast, her tiny hands darting like the claws of a crab. Father and son retreated, crying out as the Pale Daughter slapped and pinched at their faces, leaving red welts wherever she struck.

"Do not threaten my mother," Doom said. "By the laws of crab and woman, her life is mine alone to take."

Eakr and Pol fled, all tears and bruises. That night they barred the great hall, keeping Reft and the deckhands away from a cooked meal. Reft ordered the crew to break the door in, and by the time they got through, hungry and furious, the doors were a flapping ruin.

"Out," she told her husband. "You sleep on the deck tonight, and every night until I can bear to look at you."

Old Char lumbered on, oblivious to the drama on her back. The Murk was pale yellow here, drifts of fog and muck that swept across the swamp in a striated pattern. Most of the time Reft could see down to the bottom, where trees struggled for light.

"It is thin here," Doom said. "Tonight, this is where it will come."

Under the moon, the trees shook, and the Murk bubbled. The dactyls from Low Claw came to circle above the spot, and Doom cried up to the winged reptiles, a wordless shriek that made Reft's skin crawl. When it finally rose from the Murk, the island was a stunted thing, hardly worth giving a name to. Reft tried to claim it anyway, only for the factors to arrive and declare her claim on the island as worthless.

The moment she left the House of the Pale Daughters, Reft the heretic became legally dead. Under the tongue-lashings of her husband, she turned the crab around, as penniless as she'd ever been.

# #

Reft had two years left to her purchased life when she married off Pol to a factor on High Claw. The dowry was Old Char herself, the big crab to be given to her daughter-in-law after her own demise.

Eakr was ecstatic with the match, but badgered Reft at every opportunity. Once Doom executed Reft, Eakr could not rely on Pol's wife to care for the extended family. There were two more dowries to make, and the fine house on High Claw that he felt Reft owed to him.

This far into her sentence, Reft began to feel the pressure of every day, a race against death itself. Always, always her Doom followed her on board, lurking at her elbow, helping with this or that task. She served Reft with a smile, but the rest of the family barely existed for her.

One day Old Char began to brood, shuffling slowly between Bridge and Tower. Her eyestalks drooped, and she chattered irritably when Reft tried to talk her into continuing.

"Now the crab falls ill," Eakr said. "And so it goes for Pol's dowry. We'll be treading the Murk next week!"

"Be silent," Reft snapped. "She wants for a mate is all."

Old Char would not move any further. They set the fires at the top of the great hall, and by midnight another crabber came by. Reft recognised Tater the Eld, an old rival. Tater drove Fabr, a bull crab in his prime. Fabr was pale with streaks of orange, and he danced around, excited at the smell of Old Char.

She responded to the bull crab with a great clash of claws, the promise of violence if he dared to get close to her. They circled each other, chirping and clicking their mandibles. Matings were not unknown to end in killings.

"So you want your bitch serviced," Tater called out across the gap, leaning on her own railing. "What will you give me for risking my crab?"

"Half of the larvae," Reft offered.

"From this old boiler? You'll have to do better than that."

"I've three years left before my execution. You can have the pick of my sons."

"What of my dowry?"

"Damn you. Three-fourths of the larvae. We shall train and fit them all for you."

"All of the larvae," Tater said. "I'll also take your husband."

Reft smiled. "Done."

"What?" Eakr screamed. He rained blows on her, his fury beyond words. Doom interceded, seizing the man by the wrists, twisting them behind his back until he howled for mercy.

"Tater the Eld has a house on High Claw," Reft said, trying not to flinch at the pure anger pouring out of her husband's face. "You are now provided for."

"Tater is an eel of a woman, you - you cannot sell me to her! I am no sack of trade salt, I am your husband."

"Till death, as I swore to you at the altar. Then, you will be her husband. This is my wish."

When Tater the Eld invited her over to her deck for a drink, Reft cast over a rope and swung across. Even on the back of Fabr, she could still hear Eakr's cries, the curses he hurled at her.

"You are braver than I," Reft said, accepting Tater's flask of mash liquor.

"I like my men to have a little fire, Reft the heretic," Tater said. The crabs continued their mating dance, claws crashing together, a frenzied chitter coming from both of them now.

Fabr danced around to the rear of Old Char, who presented to the bull. The two crabs ground together, screeching, throwing their humans about as they consummated their dance. Reft later found that Fabr got too enthusiastic and crushed Doom's little smoke-house into splinters.

"What was your heresy, Reft?" Tater said. She was flush with a good deal, and a victory over an old rival. She had a twinkle in her eye, and Reft knew that the tale of her own ruin would make this the best day of Tater's life.

"I was fitting together an expedition," she said with a sigh.

"So?"

"I meant to take my crab to the edge of the Circus," and here Reft meant the distance from High Claw where the crabs would journey no further, in any direction. "My expedition was going to take to the Murk itself, brave the rivers and swamp mud and all of the vile things down there."

Reft took a deep belt of the liquor, gathering her words. Tater listened intently, a bag full of mirth just waiting to burst.

"I believe there is an end to the world," she said. "The very edge of things, a place where the Murk stops."

"End of the world!" Tater wheezed with laughter. "Oh, do go on. Killed for a myth."

"I'm not dead yet," Reft said.

# #

Old Char chirped cheerfully, sweeping through the Murk with an extra spring in her step. Clutching copper nails in her teeth, Reft wobbled around on the roof of the great hall, fixing the shingles Fabr had broken during the mating.

She looked down to see Doom picking through her ruined hut. The tiny girl shifted the beams single-handed, setting the wreckage into a neat pile.

Reft frowned when she saw Aeri and Luin come to watch Doom working. As Doom set aside a beam a grown woman would barely be able to lift, her sons spoke to her Pale Daughter for many minutes. When the conversation ended, the boys all but ran back to the great hall, not looking back.

"What did they want?" she asked Doom. The girl had raised an even simpler shelter, a roof with no sides. The rest she was remodelling into a larvae pen, with a space for a mud sty and a fire-pit for warmth.

"Tater the Eld thinks you are going to force Old Char to go beyond the Circus," Doom said, hammering in nails with single, precise blows. "She fears for her larvae investment. Eakr fears for Pol's dowry, should the crab die."

"Seems they fear me more than you now."

"Aeri and Luin brought me a message. Your husband and his future wife want me to execute you now."

Reft licked her lips.

"I still have two years."

"Yes."

"Did they offer you money?"

Doom nodded.

"I'll match it. I'll pay more."

"You've already bought your death, mother," Doom said. "By the laws of crab and woman, that is when you die. No earlier."

Reft quietly thanked her. The whole way back to the great hall, she trembled with relief, and then with anger, at the knowledge that her family plotted against her, even as she worked her final moments away to provide for them.

She went through the motions, sharing food at the table, planning their route and future trades. As she slid into bed with a smiling Eakr, Reft the heretic knew one thing.

She was going to run, the laws of crab and woman be damned.

# #

There were places in the Murk where the water ran fresh and sweet, and where the miasma and rot were almost forgotten. Colonies sprouted along these water-ways and lagoons, little villages on stilts. There lived the destitute, those who rebelled against islander law, criminals who'd been sent down into the Murk to die.

The laws of crab and woman were not observed there. Men behaved as they wished, and the woman who raised the belt was as likely to die with a knife in her ribs as to enforce her own dominance.

The dactyls who roosted in Low Claw raided the outlaw settlements with impunity, the winged reptiles breaking into the huts and eating their fill of human flesh. Other times the cacodrills would snatch people from the doorways, or chew the posts until the houses fell down.

"I've heard a rumour about iron ore," Reft explained to Eakr. "Enough to buy Aeri and Luin into high society. Enough to free our family from the crabber's life."

"You mad fool. We should not go near the stilters," Eakr said, but the gleam in his eyes spoke otherwise.

Reft spent more time up on the roof of the great hall, tapping away at shingles that she'd already set. She'd left one of them loose, and for the past few months had been hiding coins underneath it.

Doom lay in her larvae pen, covered in the infant crabs. She stared at Reft from the mud, tracking her as she hefted the shingles that she didn't need. Reft wondered if she knew the truth, had guessed that her mother was eyeing off the Murk.

Dawn brought Old Char to the sweet-waters, and the crab fed on silver eels, gorging on swarms that were hundreds strong. Reft urged the crab downstream, and she crossed many deep lagoons, swimming when her legs could not reach the bottom.

A narrow delta of life, fecundity surrounded by decay. Fish for the eels, the eels for the cacodrills, and the people who preyed upon all of this and were preyed upon in turn.

"It is beautiful," Doom said when she brought Reft some lunch. "A shame no island will sing here."

Reft took Old Char in to the first of the stilter villages. People stood on their roofs, calling out, singing them in with joy. Traders seldom came, and crabbers never. Her crew were busy trading for staples such as flour and salt, taking on wood and the handful of tin ores the stilters had found here.

It was not the wealth she'd promised Eakr, but the tiny trickle of coin was enough to keep her husband busy. By the time the crew halted trade for their noon meal, the cry went up on the deck of Old Char.

Reft the heretic had gone missing.

By the end of that first hour, Doom broke the neck of Eakr, and slit the throats of Aeri and Luin when they tried to run for safety. She butchered Reft's crew, and then turned on Old Char herself, severed her eye-stalks, dodging the blind fumbles of her claws as she dealt the crab one thousand precise wounds. When the big crab fell, the cacodrills fell upon the enormous corpse in a feeding frenzy.

Doom stepped lightly across their scaly backs, as she chased Reft the heretic into the Murk.

# #

The stilters spoke softly, their patois full of clipped, low sounds. Reft stared flatly, almost numb to the terrors of the swamp. She watched with detachment as her guides poled their flat barge past packed banks of cacodrills, sunning themselves and watching their passage with half-lidded eyes.

"They sleep," the guide said. "You only see them after they've eaten."

Reft wanted to wade over and place herself in their jaws. From her hiding place she'd seen the Pale Daughter slaughter her family and crew, saw the ease with which she'd gutted Old Char.

There were no true rivers in the Murk, and more than once they had to haul the barge up and onto the bank, carrying it on to the next body of water.

When the last fingers of sunlight made it through the tree canopy, a serpent took the first guide, the bulk of the snake falling onto their boat into a graceful loop. Within a heartbeat it snatched the man up in its jaws, and then slipped into the water, the last scaly coil gone by the time the guides could seize up their hatchets and spears.

"This is a good day," the guides said as they crept under the upturned barge to sleep for the night. They were pressed cheek to jowl, sweating in the mud, mosquitoes and leeches feasting on them by the dozen.

"How so?" Reft said, so terrified that this came out as a squeak.

"Lucky to only lose one person on the first day. You will journey far, heretic."

Each day brought its own terror. The miasma came in thick at one point, and the guides passed around bandannas soaked in vinegar, with gauze strips to cover the eyes.

Then, the waterways ended in a treacherous bog, miles across. They broke apart the barge, and used the planks as a mobile pathway. One person at the front would test the ground with the pole, and others would lay the planks, the last in the row passing the planks overhead as they travelled.

Travel slowed to a crawl. A lone dactyl flew across the bog, intent on the stilt villages. The guides froze into place, hoping the lizard did not spy them in the open.

"Our luck holds," one woman said as the dactyl flew to mischief elsewhere.

It was then that Doom found Reft. She crossed the bog at a run, never slipping in the mud, never falling to quick-sand, passing unmolested over the snakes that had killed one of the guides.

Wide-eyed, the guides moved their planks as fast as they could. One starved boy fell into a slurry, and they had to leave him behind, choking on the mud that instantly drew him under. Always, that implacable advance, a whip of a girl loping across that murderous field, mocking their efforts to flee.

"Pale Daughter," one guide gasped. They raised their spears and hatchets, but Doom walked amongst them, unnaturally strong and quick. One struck her square in the breast-bone with a spear, but the bronze spearhead did little more than scratch her skin. Wherever a blade was raised against her, she took it as if an offering to her, and butchered the guides with speed and savagery.

Reft fell to her knees in the mud, weeping as Doom stood above her. She dropped a bloody hatchet at her feet.

"You ran, mother," she said. "You've got a year left, and you ran."

"I had to," she said. "I'm dead now, or tomorrow, or in a year by your hand. I want to see it, just the once."

"See what?"

"Where the world ends."

Doom lifted Reft to her feet.

# #

Doom was at home in the Murk. The beasts of the underworld would not molest her, and it was as if she had a map of the landscape in her head, charting the path with the surest footing.

Every night, she would return to their camp with an eel or a fish, and a lump of dried peat to cook it on. Around them, the cacodrills barked and the eels snapped, but Reft felt safe, more secure with her Doom than she had in her own bed.

The rot and the fog began to eat at Reft's lungs, and she developed a hacking cough within a month of their journey. Doom took them to a sweet-river, even though it tacked against their heading. The wind down the water blew the miasma clear, and Reft breathed a little easier.

"There it is," Doom said, reaching an arbitrary point in their path. She paced left and right, as if unable to pass. "This is the furthest point."

Reft realised it was the Circus. She stepped past her Pale Daughter, and crossed the invisible line herself. Doom frowned, and strained, and finally followed Reft, though the effort seemed to tax her greatly.

"Beyond here I know nothing," she said.

# #

Reft grew ill, and knew that something had taken root in her lungs. There were entire days where she lost herself, raving and splashing around in that poisonous underworld.

Occasionally she woke to find that Doom was carrying her, never missing a beat as she hauled a fully grown woman through sludge and mangrove. She urged Doom to move faster, even as she struggled to remember how many days he had left.

"Why do we persist in this heresy?" Doom asked. Reft wheezed laughter, only stopping when Doom trickled water into her mouth.

"There is only the Archipelago, and the Murk stretches beyond this forever and ever," Doom frowned. "To suggest otherwise is against the laws of crab and woman."

"So why do you help me?"

"You are my mother," Doom said. "I must honour you, until your last moment."

"How long do I have?" Reft asked, unsure if she was speaking of her death sentence, or the other death that grew within her.

"Three months tomorrow," Doom said.

She walked, she was carried, she lay on some sort of sled. Always, the tireless metronome of Doom, trudging forward, a killer giving her life. Doom fed her slices of eel, fish, birds that she plucked from the air.

Reft dreamt of her early life with Eakr, the love they'd shared when they were young and yet to be broken by the world. The hopes they'd had for each of their babies, the plans they had made! He'd been kind once, with many smiles and soft kisses.

The fever dream shifted, and now she bounced her baby boys on her knee, taught them to walk on the deck. Two of them dead now, and the third to be cast out with no dowry to speak of, and so worse than dead.

She'd as good as killed her boys by running away like this. Reft woke, weeping.

She saw they were on a true river, the fattest vein of water that Reft had ever seen. Clarity came to her, and she realised that she was on a huge crab-shell, flipped over to make a raft. Doom paced the edges, pole in hand. She did not need it.

"We move swiftly," the girl said, eyes wide. All the water Reft had ever seen was sluggish or still. This river gushed like an artery spilled, and it seemed like a wound to the Murk, an affront to the world.

"Why are you blind here?" Reft said. "Why didn't you know of this thing?"

Doom would not answer, poling them around a tangle of logs and roots.

"Many years ago, I spoke with a murderer who had a Pale Daughter," Reft said. "He said she spoke with crabs in her dreams, even though learning their tongue is against the laws of crab and woman."

"What of it?"

"When you spoke to Old Char about the new island, you were whispering in their language. I heard you clearly. And it troubled you to pass the Circus, where no crab may wander."

"What are you saying, Reft the heretic?" Doom said. She held the pole tightly, as if ready to brain her with it.

"You know what I am saying," Reft said. "There are the laws of crab and woman, but no laws for crabs alone, or for women. And here you are, beyond your own laws and your own empire. What is it that you want to see when we finally stop?"

"I want to see your death," Doom said. "I want to give you to the Murk, and return to the House of the Pale Daughters."

"I don't believe you," Reft laughed, breaking into a coughing fit. "Neither of us is ever going back."

Doom would not answer, and watched the river thoughtfully.

# #

The mangroves grew thickly here, and the poisonous funk that clung to the Murk was finally gone. On the last day of her purchased life, Reft the heretic awoke to a sweet smell. It was fresh, the cleanest air she'd ever breathed, with a tang she could not place.

"We must be near the end," she said. "The Murk itself is breaking into pieces."

The river became a thousand other rivers, winding through a delta of islands. By the bow of their raft, schools of bright little fish danced, without an eel or cacodrill to be seen.

"This is heaven," Reft said. She barely had the strength to lift her hand now, and Doom knelt beside her as she trailed her hand in the water, unafraid of losing it.

Then they slid through that final envelope of trees, and there was nothing surrounding them, nothing but open water ahead for as far as they could see. It was overwhelming, and Reft gibbered, terrified, awestruck at the sight.

Doom stood in the crab shell, and for the first time since she'd know the girl, Reft saw fear wash across her face. Doom frantically fought against the movement of the water, poling their crab-raft until it caught against the last spit of land.

"What is that?" she whispered, tears falling down her face. She shook like a leaf, and soon Reft and Doom were holding each other, unable to comprehend so much water in one place.

"It was really here," Reft said. "The edge of the world."

Doom helped Reft to stand, and they slowly walked to the edge of the mud bank, the dying woman finally kneeling at the very edge of all things. Doom joined her, watching as the waves lapped in and out, with nothing ahead of them but a horizon of water, razor flat and terrifying.

"Was it worth it?" Doom asked.

"I destroyed my family for this. I lost my life for this," Reft said, and she wept.

The sun set into that awful sight, and as the horizon turned into fire, Doom slid a knife into her mother's heart, rocking her to sleep as the water drank her life blood.

# #

She was free for the first time in eight years. The girl who killed Reft the heretic felt the distant pull of High Claw, the urge to return to the House of the Pale Daughters, who were not really daughters at all.

There was a power in the Circus, the laws of crab and woman, an irresistible force that held this land in a pincer grip. She looked down on the body of Reft, her open eyes staring to the horizon, to the freedom of the water.

"I loved you," she said, weeping over her mother's body, salty tears dropping into the blood and foam. Doom felt the deep ache of loss in her chest. She'd never told her while she drew breath.

This far from the invisible draw of home, she was more woman than crab, and she felt sorrow. Anger.

Rebellion.

Doom pushed her crab-raft into the waves, and poled towards the horizon. A current caught the raft, and she slowly bobbed forward. The Pale Daughter did not look back.

#  Rolling For Fetch

When Whip went skeg, he arranged a meet with a back-alley butcher, a coin-friend whose pockets rattled with illegal meds. When the coast was clear the gear was brought out of hiding. The stained hack-saw was much neater than an axe.

The amateur surgeon cauterised the stumps with an old oxy-set while his chums kept lookout for the pol. He threw the feet over his shoulder for the dogs to snap up.

The best surgeons claimed that they could do the chop and fit a skeg with a rig in five minutes or less, but Sad Pepe's personal best was seven minutes even. Anything else was either boasting or butchery.

The main struts of a skeg rig eventually fused with the shin-bone, but the first month or so it was just stainless steel pegs and wires, driving Whip's immune system nuts. He'd been dosed with dirty nano-work, old cancer-killing stock bred into a dubious cure-all. A nostalgic fallacy, given the filth on the street and the clip-clop of horse shoes on asphalt.

The drive train went underneath the muscle itself, something like the innards of an old clock, a mesh of gears and cogs. Then the winder cranks, one in each leg, protruding between the peroneus longus and the tibialis anterior, reminding the world that anyone mad enough to actually go through with this was not a human now. More a wind-up toy with a death-wish.

Finally, a pair of wheels were connected to the bottom of the rig, hooked up to the drive-train dangling from each bleeding leg. The most popular option was a pneumatic tyre with a knobbly grip, one foot in diameter, filled with smart-gel to ward off punctures, magic goop to heal over little nicks and tears.

Good suspension was a must.

When Whip survived this procedure, shook off the inevitable infection, unlearnt the life-long art of walking and earnt his gangdanna, he had the right to call himself a skeg.

# #

Whip never stopped rolling. He slept upright like the horses he'd once curried, rolling around in slow circles, motivators clicking as the tension slowly bled from his rig. The constant ache in his legs became a dull absence, and even the lowest gears began to struggle as his muscles and tendons relaxed.

For that moment, Whip was nothing more than a cripple, a tottering freak with several kilograms of metal and rubber protruding from his mutilated legs.

Whip knelt down, winding the cranks, feeling the first delicious tickle as his muscle fibres stretched. He redoubled his efforts, until every muscle from the hip down burned with tension. Motivators humming, he could feel the potential, and Whip danced on the spot like a Lipizzaner in dressage, testing the rig. He was ready to roll.

Five years in from his own chop, and Whip was a world removed from the stable-lad he'd been. His legs were enormous, twin trunks of muscle, and his only concession to decency was a filthy kilt. His hair and beard were a knotty tangle, partially hidden beneath a gangdanna.

An arc of goth-print rose above his navel, the ink rainbow pasted across his abs reading NEVA STOP ROLLIN'.

Whip usually went lookout, keeping an eye on his mob, tonight kipped out in a run down park. The abandoned edges of the old burba were best for skegs, and the pol rarely visited, save to scope for looters.

"Reveille, you dozing dogs!" Whip shouted, scooting through the pack of snoring freaks, clipping his wheels against theirs. Cursing, his mob met the dawn, grumbling and winding their own leg cranks. Some of them hit the go-powder, passing around a paper funnel and drawing in that magic dust through red-ringed nostrils.

"Don't sob so hard for a bed and a pair of shoes, me grumpy chums. You all wanted this life," Whip laughed, rolling down an ancient and rusted slippery-dip.

"Yeah, but I didn't want Lord Whip crowing every dawn," young Rabbit said, and the mob whistled and clapped.

"Alright, you bunch of sooking babs, we're off to the metro," Whip said through a wide grin. "I've got an inkling that there's good fetch at Jona Smif's today."

They rolled through the inner burba, a mob just over a dozen strong, laughing and jostling and darting through the morning traffic, baker's nags and the last of the crap-carters. Whip rolled at the front, legs sweeping and motivators whining, working up through the gears until he was somewhere between a canter and a gallop. When a milkman cursed them for spooking his horse, Whip rolled backwards, pointing to his tattoo and staring at the man, daring him to go for the switch.

The man looked away, swallowing his outrage, and Whip laughed. The rest of his mob whipped past the cart like hornets, fly-wheels whining, and the old nag jerked around in its harness, terrified by the noise and the speed of these butchered men.

The fetch-house of Jona Smif was a squat lean-to, cheap like the man himself. The mismatched fibro shell was connected to the power and best of all, the tellingphone. Smif was the real deal and all the mobs knew it.

"Look there," someone said, and Whip saw another skeg mob, sprawled across the footpath like feral dogs. He didn't know their gangdanna, and didn't care. They'd staked out Smif's joint, and he wanted it.

"Roll on now," Whip told them. "Or grief."

One of them arced up, a wirey little bruiser with a mouth to her. Skeg women were a hard kind, nothing feminine left to them after they swapped their feet for wheels. She launched into a string of foul language, and so it was grief that they chose.

The mobs circled each other, testing and baiting and waiting for one to make the first move. The street cleared of walkin-folk in seconds. This new mob had strength in numbers, but some of them looked new to their rigs, and Whip reckoned on them not being worth squat in a rumble.

They did for them, but not before their mouthpiece pulled some ballerina move, clocking Rabbit in the head with one of her wheels. Such flexibility he might have appreciated under different circumstances, but the skinny kid was left shaking the pain out of his brain-pan as the other mob rolled on.

"Can't even see straight," Rabbit said shakily when he stood, and Whip swore. He was the quickest skeg rolling under his gangdanna, and knew the metro better than any of them. They would have to work double hard to make up for his thumped noggin.

Then the first jobs came in over the tellingphone, and Jona Smif was out on the stoop, handing out chits and haggling over the fetch-fee.

"This one's right urgent," he said, "Plans or summat, got to be before the suits within the hour."

Grimacing, Whip knelt down and took the chit out of Smif's hand. He was the only one who could do the fetch, but he didn't know the area as well as Rabbit, who seemingly had all the shortcuts carved onto the insides of his eyeballs.

He poured on the speed as he rolled to the pick-up, a munici depot. To Whip's eternal shame, he got the address wrong. He rolled around, thumbing through his old road-book and cursing, finally hitting the right depot.

"Quick now," some daft desk-jockey told him as he stuffed the rolled sheaf of paper into his pack. "You're right late."

There'd be hell to pay if he muffed this, and Jona Smif might not pony up with the fetch-fee. Always a first time for everything, but Whip didn't have to like it.

Not paying attention as he read his grid-guide, he moved through the horses, steam-carts and bicycles by instinct but didn't see some poor lady making to cross the street. He knocked her onto her broad backside, sent her groceries flying.

He might have hung around and helped her pick up if he'd the time. As it was, the minutes were falling by. A wave of apology was the best he could give as he kept rolling, but this was seen by a polizei, who turned the klaxon on his coughing steam-bike and gave chase.

"Stop, skeg!" the chubby law-lark yelled through a loudhailer. Whip spared them a glance, and saw the pol in the side-car cranking on a wireless tellingphone.

"Never stop rolling," he said to himself.

Head bent he laid the power on, sweeping his legs and working through the gears until the motivators screamed, whining like they might fall apart.

He pulled away from the pol, and took a cunning left through a cramped street-fair. He flipped the bird and laughed at the pair, who turned their great sputtering machine around and took off with an angry roar.

"Left you damn fools in my spin," he laughed.

But it was far from good. The law was probably staking the main roads, and he'd have to sneak through the curly little alleys and lanes to get to the drop-off.

"Never muffed a fetch, not gonna start to," he panted, rolling on. It was the best time he'd ever made, scraping his arms on brick when he took those tight turns too fast, knocking over bins and such, and he rolled into his drop-off, right on the knocker.

He was panting like a racehorse, covered in scratches and sweat, knowing that the pol would be watching for him all day. He stepped into that office, locking his wheels and clumping awkwardly across the carpet floor, jerking the plans out of his pack. Tossed them onto the counter and made as to leave.

The young lass behind the desk cleared her throat. Whip thought she might be about to tell him off for leaving wheel marks on the carpet, or to accuse him of being late with the drop.

"Come here, skeg," she ordered him, a sneaky little smile on her dial. He was a handsome lad and got his fair share of attention, figured her as another fool girl love-mad for skegs. She was Vietnamese, a pretty girl dressed plain, with a laddish bob-cut and wary eyes.

"You're a fair lass," Whip said, leaning on her counter and giving her the once-over. "But you've no wheels, and I'll only break your heart."

"You forgot your docket," she said, stamping it "DELIVERED" and sliding it across the counter. "Well, don't let me keep you."

# #

Early next morning, Whip left his mob, went off on his own business. He went to the munici offices, lurked around by the fruit sellers and water-haulers, waiting for the morning rush. The horse-trolleys and bicycles began to arrive from the burba, spilling walkin-folk into the metro for another day of coin chasing.

He saw her, the girl from yesterday. She stepped from the back of a horse-lugged bus, looking a little bit lost in all the chaos. She couldn't spot a street-sweep and made to cross the street anyway, pulling up the hem of her dress, eyeing the growing sea of horse dung with disgust.

Whip saw his chance, and in a flash he cut across the traffic, sweeping the lass into his arms and depositing her safely on the far side of the street. It was all over in a moment and she barely had time to blink.

"Get lost, skeg," she growled, glaring up at him from somewhere near his navel. He stood there on the sidewalk, motivators quietly humming as he watched her walk into the building.

He was out the front of her office the next morning, and swept a path across the street for her, him who'd never lifted a broom in his life. He fixed to deliver all the fetch to that building, and would only do those runs, smiling at her as she drove her "DELIVERED" stamp into the dockets with great force.

Day after day he bothered that poor girl, and weathered her scorn, noting that she still did not send for the pol. He learnt that her name was Anh. One day, she gave him the dried leftovers of her bánh mì and a hello. Some weeks later they were standing at her front doorstep and she still hadn't told him to nick off.

"Well, goodnight I guess," Anh said with some surprise, and shut the door in his face. But she didn't slam it, and Whip counted this as progress.

"Will you bring me a sandwich tomorrow?" he shouted through the keyhole.

"Maybe," came her muffled reply.

# #

They began a deliciously slow courtship, and it was the same old story, told with different parts. Once it was skin or religion, but the modern scandal was a modified daring to step out with a "classic" human. The mixed couple of the day, greeted with finger-waggling and disgusted whispers in the salons.

He brought Anh to meet his mob, the most important thing in his life meeting the previous most important thing. Some of the lads were a little bit sore, and while no-one gave her grief, you could see their disgust. The great Whip, brought low by some piece of walkin-folk fluff.

"This is ridiculous," Rabbit whispered to Whip. They were rolling slow through a quiet part of the burba, letting Anh keep up with them. She was in one of those feet-strapping rigs, legs all awobble and many a time upended on her arse. The skeg only laughed the once, until Whip unpacked his fists and got a beating out.

Some folks take to wheels, some never get the knack, but Whip knew she'd never fall in love with her wheels. She'd never get the chop, not even for him.

# #

They were meandering, following the canals. It was a Sunday, and with the barge-masters in church and the usual tangle of horses a-stabled he could get a good run along the banksides, the slow rhythm of the metro streets stilled during God's hour. Anh didn't care much for church and skeg never went, nor were expected to.

Anh clutched to Whip's back as they drifted down the street, her legs wrapped around his waist. She'd given up the feet-rig as a bruise-maker and a bad idea.

"I love you Anh," he blurted out, fooled by the romance of the setting. He couldn't see her face, but felt her arms tighten around him. He instantly regretted saying it, but went on. "I can't hold it in any longer, I love you and I want to be with you."

"Whip," she said. "Whip, you're a good boy. But it won't work. We should end this."

He slowed, let the wheels spin, the gears work down, and then finally he rolled to a stop. He felt her arms relax, and she slid off his back.

"So that's it then," he said, not asking. "We're different, so you just give up. I'm not a thug on wheels, you know that."

"No, Whip. It's not about that." But her voice gave, and they both heard the lie.

"It is. I don't care that you're walkin-folk, that the lads give me a ribbing over you. I don't see feet, I only see you."

"I won't go through with it," Anh said suddenly. "I won't—my feet—"

"I don't want you to get a rig," Whip said. "You don't belong in that world."

"But that's it!" she said. "You don't belong in mine! Do you think I want to show my skeg boyfriend to my neighbours, people from work? I'll probably get fired."

"For seeing a skeg?" he snorted. "Right."

"It happens. They sacked some girl in accounts, she wore his gangdanna as if it didn't matter. She had her hand in the till, supporting his mob."

"Who cares what people think? We can make it work."

"We can't! You—you're not normal," Anh cried.

She ran, and he let her go. He'd run out of words anyway. Whip rolled alone for a long while, just looking at the filthy muck floating along the canal.

He rolled here and there, gave his rig an absolute flogging. It began to sink in that this was a goodbye of sorts. He'd never move this fast again.

Whip was going to need a lot of money.

# #

Next day Whip pulled Rabbit aside, asked if he would go as his second. Death-run, high stakes.

"No Whip, oh no," he said. "Whatever trouble you're in, it can't be that bad. Let your mob help you out, we're your brothers. Don't do this."

"I want you as my second. I'll go alone if I have to."

Loyalty was its own currency in skeg circles, and so they rolled. This death-run was being held in a warehouse, spotters on the roof to watch for polizei. Whip's mob didn't usually hold much truck with this, figuring it was a sport for washed-up skegs in need of fast cash.

All for the rich folk in need of excitement, those willing to pay skegs to strap on blades and have at one another. An underclass of an underclass, these warrior skeg were often seen on the roll, all hacked up with scars and that mad gleam in their eyes.

"She's not worth it," Rabbit said. They were sized up for blades, great sharp cutters strapped to their forearms. They had a handle in the middle, like the hated baton of the pol. Whip and Rabbit were to race around the pallets and barrels and other junk they'd arranged into an obstacle course. Another pair of skeg would come for them, legs pumping and sharp blades swinging.

"We should roll on," Rabbit said. "Who cares what these mongrels think?"

"Well, we're here now," Whip said.

"I'm so scared I'm about to piss my cullottes."

Whip ran his blades against each other, the sharp edges going snikt! "Look at yonder skegs. We can take them."

They'd been matched up against a pair of menacing shapes, just beyond the circle of flickering torches. The odds slated onto the bookies" chalkboards put them at very long odds to even come out alive. Their opponents were sparring against each other, blades flashing and clanging.

"Please Whip," Rabbit begged. "We don't need to do this. They're gonna kill us."

"I need the money!" Whip snarled.

"Why? You don't need lodgings, and your rig looks fine to me. All you need is food and go-powder, and we can spot you if you're short."

"I need an operation," Whip said, and would say no more.

Someone blew a whistle, and they were herded into the makeshift arena, prepped for the death-run. The crowd were right up to the torch-line, howling and waving their betting slips in the air.

"Money's no good if you're dead," Rabbit said.

"Go then, you pink puss. I'll do this without you." Not unknown for a seconder to pass on a death-run, but solo fights were fine. He'd go toe-to-toe with their chief cutter for half the purse.

"She's not worth dying for," Rabbit said, and threw his blades down against the cement floor. The mob booed and laughed and threw their empties at the lone skeg.

"I need you now Whip, brother's got to watch a brother's back," Rabbit yelled, a half-empty bottle nearly hitting him in the head.

After a moment of indecision, Whip closed his eyes with a grimace, pulling off his blades. The pair traded punches and abuse with the crowd the whole way to the door, and barely made it out of that place. A trio of skegs tried to jump them in a back-street over their voided wager, but Whip took a beating to them with a fury Rabbit had never seen.

The next day, Whip vanished.

# #

Rabbit had been as far as Anh's front door once, and knew the way. She answered the door when he knocked, had it sitting on its chain.

"Oh. What do you want?" she asked. Her face was lined with worry, eyes reddened from crying.

"I'm worried about Whip. Have you seen my brother?" A moment's pause, a heavy sigh. She unchained the door.

"Come in," she said. He locked his wheels, moving clumsily over her wooden floorboards, trying not to knock the knick-knacks and ornaments over.

"Through here," she said, ushering him into her living room. He could see Whip sitting down in an arm-chair, facing the window. The curtains were parted and he must have been looking out at the stars or the moon or something. A kerosene lamp flickered on the sideboard, giving a weak light to the room.

Rabbit clambered awkwardly across the tatty old rug, and when he saw Whip he gasped. His rig was gone. Completely gone. They'd pulled the boxes and gadgets and gears out of him, separated the steel struts from his shin-bones. Where his legs had ended in stumps were a pair of feet, pale and held on with thick black stitches. His new feet were marble white, except for the ends of his toes, which were a worrisome dark colour.

"The doctors grew these in a tube, took a bit of my hip bone. First time it's ever been done," Whip said, looking at Rabbit from the chair where he rested. Anh fetched him a thin blanket, which she put across his lap to hold off the winter chill. He looked weak, worn out. Rabbit stood there, towering over him in his rig, and Whip seemed less than a man, something broken and wasted.

"Why did you do it?" Rabbit whispered.

"We disgust them," Whip said. "We fetch and scurry for those walkin-folk, and they admire us but there's envy too. How a skeg can roll so very quick, while they must toddle down the road on their feet."

He waggled the pale flesh, as if making some sort of point. The lamp ticked and hissed, and Whip was quiet, contemplating the lumps of meat tacked onto his legs.

"Did it work? Can you wriggle your toes?" Rabbit asked, and Whip bit his lip. Finally he shook his head no.

"Spend all of my coin on the feet, but didn't have enough to pay the bills. The doc did a rush job. Reckons they're gangrenous now." He sounded calm but something in his face spoke of panic and worry.

Rabbit offered to pony up enough coin to get him back into a rig, knowing that he'd decline the offer. He wasn't skeg now, could not accept charity from those he'd cut out of his life.

"Well, goodbye then," Rabbit said, and the last he saw of Whip was a broken figure hunched in a chair, keeping a silent vigil as his feet slowly killed him.

# #

Some years later, Rabbit caught a bus, quietly nodding off, lulled by the hum of the hydrogen engine warbling underneath him. It still took some time to traverse the old metro, but it was market day, the streets choked with nags hauling ancient carts. Mostly a show for the tourists nowadays.

A courier sped past on a sleek little scooter, its exhaust puffing water vapour, and climbed up onto the footpath when the horses proved too slow.

He did not see any skeg rolling today.

"Nostalgia is a thing of the past," he told the nun seated opposite, who did not even look up from her romance novel. Snorting, he waved his hand above, fumbling for the stop-cord, and reaching for his cane he stood.

Rabbit left the lonely bus-stop and walked into the cemetery, limping and leaning heavily on the stick, but walking. The stone he was looking for was modest, with a tiny plaque. With some difficulty he knelt before Whip's resting place, his new feet throbbing.

"Roll on, my brother," he said, and finally laid his gangdanna down.

# Defy The Grey Kings

There are many ways to kill an elephant. When that mountain bears down on you, shaking the earth and screaming for your blood, show no fear.

Only without fear will you see the truth. They are quick, even draped in chain and iron, but you are quicker by a whisker. They fight like devils, but it only takes three people who know what they are doing to bring an elephant down.

They are afraid of you.

All elephants can die.

# #

I bring you two things today. Iron, sharp and true, and a story. If you don't gain the truth of things from this, you would best drive these blades into your own hearts.

I have slain many enemies, both grey and pale. I've learnt things in that awful quiet, the moments of pain and sorrow after the fury, where men like me pass over the dead and dying. The road that brought me here is slick with blood, and if you do not listen to me carefully, your own deadly road will wash you away.

# #

I was born a slave, like all of you. My master was a hoary old bull known as Ascaro, one of the Bull-King's champions. Twenty feet high at the shoulders, and even past his prime he was a quick devil, though old muscles were turning into fat.

Where other elephants cover themselves in tattoos and silk and let the scriveners carve boasts upon their tusks, Ascaro only ever wore his scars. The end of his right tusk was shattered from an enemy axe, and a lucky blow had taken his left eye long before I ever drew breath.

I spent many hours scouring his hide with brushes and bronze scrapers, and I knew that grey map of his battles well. He drank melon wine during his mud baths, and when his one eye turned red and crazed, he played his favourite game with the house slaves. Without warning, his trunk would flick backwards, and those of us cleaning his back would have to dodge his drunken fumblings and try not to slip and fall. The first slave to fall into the mud bath was the one that he would kill that day. He would pin them down with his foot, exerting just enough pressure to hold them under the mud.

I would stand on that heaving back with perfect balance, and not once did I cease my endless scrubbing, staring only at my broom as someone else drowned in the mud.

His lieutenants and lackeys would cheer him on while he murdered a human being for no reason. Even the house poet would stop plucking the bouzouki with his trunk and join in the laughter. Just before the bubbles finally stopped, Ascaro would step down hard, crunching bones. He would pluck each corpse out of the mud, tossing it across his great hall. Each body fell with a meaty smack, arms and legs a muddy broken tangle. The elephants would roar and laugh at the sight, each of them screeching that horrible deep-throated rasp that every man loathes.

I survived the bath game longer than any of the other slaves in the house of Ascaro, and only then did my master look upon me with value. He took the broom from my hands and gave me to a man named Mouse.

"This one dances well," Ascaro told Mouse. "Teach him to dance with a knife."

# #

Mouse was a hulk of a man, almost as scarred and grizzled as our master. He took me away from that miserable house, from all I'd ever known.

He led me across the streets of Tusk, through the plazas and across the causeways. It is a city built to the scale of our masters, already old when the elephants learned script and set their histories down. I felt like an ant, just another attendant below the notice of our grey kings. Here the wealthy promenaded, draped in silk and gold-dust, and each elephant carried a dozen slaves armed with fly-switches and scratch-sticks.

"You will be dead within a week," was all that Mouse said to me during that long journey. "I will call you Ghost, just to save time." It was as good a name as any I'd been called.

We passed through the deep throat of a gate, dwarfed by the walls no siege engine could level. I saw a field of sawdust below, bordered by the city wall and the dark murk of the Indus River. Hundreds of slaves worked the field, scattering fresh sawdust like they were sowing seeds. Longhouses ran level with the edge of the field, mud brick daubed with red ochre. One of these was marked with the sigil of House Ascaro.

"Welcome to Blood Meadow," Mouse said.

# #

The longhouse of Ascaro was rude but functional. In the gloom lay a hundred empty slave pallets, bare slabs of wood. A handful of people huddled around a firepit.

"What is this you've brought us, Mouse?" one of them called out.

"A ghost," Mouse replied, and the group chuckled.

The slaves were devouring some small animal cooked on a spit. Their sharp knives flickered over the carcass, reducing it to bones in minutes. One scarred woman flicked a morsel of meat directly into Mouse's open mouth, and the group roared with laughter.

Like Mouse, these people were hard-edged and confident and drank their master's melon-wine with gusto. They did not act like any of the house-slaves I'd ever seen.

"Sit down, Ghost," one of them said, pushing over a chunk of log with a boot. "You're not dead today."

I shared their meat and their grog, quietly taking in my new home. As the sun set and the lodge filled with shadows, I stared at the racks of elephant weapons on the walls. Oversized javelins, spiked maces, and battle-axes no human could even hope to lift. Two great swords rested in an iron bracket, crafted to fit the exact curve of our master's tusks.

Beneath this lay the thick iron shell that Ascaro wore into battle, heaped into a pile of plates and links and buckles. I saw the face plate, battered in dozens of places, the spot in front of his dead eye covered by an extra layer of iron and rivets. The empty eye socket watched me as I ate his food and drank his wine. I shivered.

I learned the others" names as the wine flowed. A man with a great grey beard and no hair, who they had called Boy. Two women with muscles like hard wood, twin sisters called First and Second. A giant of a man, muscled like an ox, with only a stub of tongue. Punishment from speaking ill of Ascaro. They called him Lucky.

"When does it begin?" Boy asked.

"One week," Mouse said.

"Time enough to train your Ghost?" Second said.

"No," Mouse said. "He'll die, or not, and it's nothing on us."

Ever since I could toddle, I'd been a slave. I knew my own utter lack of worth. Even as they talked about my death, I stared into the flames and ate every scrap of meat from the bone in my hands. That was another day's problem, and tonight I was free.

"Come here, Ghost," Mouse said, and stood me up in front of the firepit. The others jostled together, all glee and nudging elbows.

"You've the look and stink of a house slave," Mouse said, his eyes boring into my own. "We don't mix with pot-scrubs here."

"Stinking pot-scrub," First hissed, and the others hooted.

"You're dead meat," Mouse continued. "I'll give you five minutes out on the sawdust. You'll beg for a broom in your hand, Ghost."

"Probably wet himself," Boy grunted, and the twins howled with laughter. Even Lucky joined in, barking out his own tongueless enjoyment.

"Changed my mind. The slave dies here tonight," Mouse said. Seizing me in his hands, he tore my tunic from me with one swift motion. It was the last thing I owned, and he threw the filthy fabric into the fire. I stood before these people, naked and defeated.

"You're dead," Mouse said, and held a knife to my throat. It bit into my adam's apple as I swallowed, but when I looked up from the blade, I met his eyes calmly, without fear. At that moment I was empty of everything, and he raised an eyebrow, seeming to approve of what he saw.

He stepped back, raising his knife in salute. That was when the water splashed me, soaking me from head to toe. Coughing and wiping my eyes, I saw Boy and Second, holding a dripping half-barrel.

"Is this slave dead?" Mouse asked.

"He's dead. Dead as dead," Boy said. They surrounded me, clapping me on the shoulders, and bidding me welcome. Lucky attacked me with a rough scrap of towel. First brought out a cloth undershirt and pants, and Second helped me put on the first pair of boots I'd ever worn.

When I was dressed, Boy filled my hands with a square parcel, a heavy bundle of metal links and leather. A chain-mail shirt, reaching down past my groin but split up the sides for mobility.

They fitted it to me, Mouse tutting and making measurements. They spoke of a blacksmith, expected any day now.

"Bring it out, Lucky," Mouse called, and the one-armed giant put something into my hands. It was a sword in a sheath, curved like the master's tusk blades. The handle felt old and worn, and the leather scabbard was scratched in dozens of places.

I drew the sword in one movement. The blade was battered and rough, more of a tool than a weapon. When I tested the edge, it sliced open my thumb with no effort.

"This belonged to Pup," Mouse said. "Pup ended up with a tusk in his guts, so now it belongs to you."

I learnt that we were called Rothai, and in the longhouses all around me, other teams of Rothai were gathering. In one week, they would all do their best to kill me.

# #

Other slaves came, to fill the bunks. House slaves from the city, shuffling in by the dozen. Already I looked down on them as animals. Pot-scrubs. Next came the blacksmith, making the long-house unpleasantly hot as he banked white-hot coals in the forge.

My hours were filled with swordplay, as the Rothai played at killing. Mouse carried the twin of my sword - our two curved blades represented the twin tusks of our master. The twins First and Second wielded the kontoi, double-handed lances with iron points two feet long. Boy had a battle-axe, while Lucky swung a flail with enough force to crack skulls.

All about us, the Rothai of the other elephant houses made their own practice in the sawdust. Each was armed in an identical fashion to us. This was because of something called the Concord, Mouse said, and that was all the explanation he offered.

It wasn't enough to learn the death skills; we sparred on log frames ten feet above the ground, leaping across tightropes and netting, all while our fellows jerked at the workings to test our balance. We Rothai would ride out on the backs of our masters and fight on the move.

I felt a stone twisting in my guts whenever I looked at the other warriors. We had no quarrel, but any of these people would end my life and think nothing of it.

Mouse studied my form with the sword. He declared me fit enough to not embarrass him but still unlikely to live out the first day. I spent the last night hunched over the latrine pit, purging from both ends. The twins and Boy laughed and called out encouragement.

When dawn came, we heard the poets bawling out on the sawdust, paid to recite elephant lineage and exaggerate their patron's deadliness. Then came the hammer of drums, the call of a hundred conch shells. Elephants roared with anger and blood lust.

Ascaro finally arrived, stinking of grog and covered in his own filth. He berated and abused the house slaves as they got underfoot, killing two before Mouse could quiet him.

We hauled on ropes, lifting the chain-mail skirt up and over Ascaro's back. Two dozen big men sweated and heaved on a pulley, hauling the inch-thick chest plates up and into place.

Next came the iron greaves around his legs, laced up with leather trusses. A team of children climbed up and down a rig, deftly connecting the dozens of segmented pieces that made up the trunk armor. Ascaro tested his trunk for flexibility, and the pieces rattled as he gripped an enormous axe.

"My swords!" he roared, stamping impatiently.

As another crew winched the enormous face-plate into position, we ran up with the swords. It took three of us to lift each blade up to our master's tusks, nine feet of solid iron. The blacksmith threw the hasps over each tusk, and swiftly hammered in metal pins to hold the blades fast.

We swarmed over our elephant like birds looking for ticks. Everywhere was a pair of hands tightening a buckle or a rope or setting the iron plates. Planks were passed across and lashed into a rough platform for us Rothai to walk upon. Finally Ascaro had enough of this fussing and started to move, shedding slaves with every lurching step. They wriggled down ropes and fell to the dirt floor until the only humans who remained on Ascaro's back were those of us clad in leather and chain.

We Rothai took up our positions, each of us lashed to a rail that ran up the centre of Ascaro's back. Long knives at our belts had the sole purpose of severing this rope - or someone else's.

As Ascaro burst through the doors of his longhouse, I saw the Blood Meadow in all its awful glory. I vomited over my master's side, and the twins laughed all the way into battle.

# #

Everywhere, elephants encased in metal, hundreds of iron mountains at full gallop, and they raged and clashed. Iron struck iron, and already the sea of sawdust was spattered with blood.

"Be ready," Mouse shouted from his perch just behind Ascaro's head. Second stood above Ascaro's shoulders, her long kontoi at the ready, calmly watching the thunderous murder that we were racing towards. Her twin sister paced around above Ascaro's rump, watching behind for sneak attacks.

Our master veered around a whirling knot of combat where three elephants fought each other, enormous maces and axes rising and falling.

Ascaro made a sudden left, and my feet nearly slipped out from beneath me. Two elephants lay tangled in death, their tusk swords buried in throat and breast. The downed Rothai crews fought to the last on that grey hill, swords and flails flashing. Someone hoisted a lone kontoi with a red pennant tied to the shaft.

"No point waving the blood flag," Boy laughed, and sure enough the flag-waver was butchered by his enemies. Moments later, another elephant ran past in a rage, blinded from a head wound, and slammed into the dead elephants at a full charge. When the wounded elephant rose, I saw that he'd crushed the surviving humans into paste.

"Stay off the ground, Ghost," First shouted. "If your rope gives, you're dead."

Ascaro weaved through the melee, smashing his axe to left and right, forcing his way through like an unstoppable force. Then, he shrieked with glee, and his nimble manoeuvring became a charge.

"Ghanghil!" he shouted. "Face me!"

He bore down upon an elephant in black iron. This new enemy had been in combat for some hours now. His plates were heavily dented and his chain skirts torn and dangling in several places. Ghanghil looked upon my master with undisguised hatred. He raced towards him with fresh energy, raising a bloody mace high into the air.

"Rail!" Mouse shouted, and we knew to drop low, holding onto the middle rail for all we were worth. Ascaro and Ghanghil met with a deafening crash, and we were flopped around on his back like landed fish.

The two bulls strained at each other, tusk-swords scraping and rasping. Between this, their armored trunks twisted like great serpents, the big axe and mace rising and falling.

Over Ghanghil's head, we saw his Rothai rise, and Mouse screamed, ordered us to our feet. Second was up and lunging, batting aside the enemy kontoi that sought out her heart. Ghanghil's second kontoi came out of that press of faces, but Lucky wrapped his flail around it, pinning it down for Boy to snap with his axe.

I waited at the back with First, sword at the ready. Two other warring elephants passed us by in a deadly race, and a man with a kontoi took a quick stab at us, trying for a sneak kill.

First simply ducked, but I was not quick enough. The iron lance-head caught me in the shoulder, snapping through the chain-links and pushing me straight over the side.

"Ghost!" First screamed, and then I was falling towards the sawdust. Then the rope caught, and I was a dangling dead weight, swinging just short of the ground. I swayed and lurched as Ascaro shifted. It was all I could do to hold onto my sword.

Around me, elephants thundered, and a passing axe-man took a swing at my rope. If I didn't get up soon, someone would sever my rope and I'd die on the sawdust.

"Hold on," First shouted. She held her kontoi over the side of the elephant for me to grab. When I snatched it with my free hand, she drew me up slowly, grunting with my weight.

First helped me to my feet, grinning with relief, when a blur over her shoulder made me cry out. We turned just in time to see a second elephant, in the same black iron as Ghanghil, crashing into our master at a full charge.

His tusk-swords buckled Ascaro's rear plates, one of them reaching through leather and chain to cut deeply into our master's rump. We barely had time to regain our footing when Ghanghil's axe came smashing down.

It was only the skills learnt in the bath game that saved my life then. The axe blow split the plate where I'd stood a moment earlier. A flood of enemy Rothai leapt over the elephant's head, hooting and hollering as they slid down his trunk. Six warriors, each of them trailing a flapping length of rope.

"They've cut cords! Mouse, help!" First shouted, trying to keep them at bay with her lone kontoi. I hovered at her side, swatting away the second one with my sword, even as the enemy rushed us.

Then Ascaro turned, withdrawing and fighting his way free of Ghanghil. The three elephants circled, the two in black iron fighting as one.

"Grengkil and Ghanghil," Ascaro snorted. "You bastard brothers in black. I'll bleed you today!"

Grengkil's entire crew were on Ascaro's rump now, forcing us back towards Ascaro's head. First lost the head of her kontoi to an enemy axe-man, and she retreated with a curse, left with only her rope-knife to fight with.

I took a spear to the thigh and was fighting a losing battle against two swordsmen when Mouse and Lucky came to my side. In moments one foe was dead, another dying, and then Second was there with her kontoi to prod the survivors backwards. The last man fell bleeding from the gut, to the sawdust and certain death.

Ascaro was holding his own. He'd crushed Ghanghil's trunk armor with one lucky blow, and Ghanghil bled deeply. His Rothai raised the blood flag, and he retreated from the melee in defeat.

Grengkil had done his best to smash Ascaro's blind side, but now it was one on one. My master shrugged off half a dozen deep wounds, driving the black-armored elephant back with his superior size.

Their axes came down with fury, sparks flying from each crash of metal. Finally Ascaro twined his trunk around Grengkil's own, holding the smaller bull's axe in place.

"Now, cut cords!" Mouse shouted, and it was our turn to slice at our ropes. We leapt from one elephant to another, and no one was there to oppose us as we sliced away buckles and straps, stripping away layers of chain and plate.

"Mercy!" Grengkil cried. "I show blood flag. Please!"

But there were no Rothai on his back to raise the red blood flag of surrender.

"Master?" Mouse asked. The glare in Ascaro's eye was instruction enough. We struck at the base of Grengkil's skull, knives and blades seeking out his veins and spinal cord, and we robbed this giant of his life.

# #

It was a great victory for my master. Ghanghil and Grengkil were two of the Bull-King's favorites, and to slay one and humiliate the other had raised Ascaro in that complex hierarchy.

But Ascaro was furious. Even as the dead elephants were carved apart and put on wagons for interment in the Memory Hall, he lined us up in front of his longhouse. Six Rothai, most of us still bleeding, but we stood as straight as a row of nails.

House slaves swarmed over Ascaro, pasting on unguent with trowels and mops. Two were trained surgeons, stitching up his wounds with foot-long needles and cord.

"That wretch Grengkil got the jump on me," Ascaro rumbled. "If I wasn't faster and stronger, those brothers would be pissing on my corpse right now."

We stood silent. Next to me, First flushed, and I saw her tremble slightly. If she hadn't been saving me, she'd have spotted Grengkil attacking from the rear and would have been able to give the warning.

"I am the greatest on Blood Meadow. The greatest!" he said. His trunk snaked sinuously; his great ears flapped. From hours of scrubbing this monster, I knew every sign, every little twitch. Our master was at his most dangerous.

"So why have I got a gaping hole in my backside?" he roared. "Who was meant to be watching back there?"

It was always up to those with kontoi to watch, front and back. The elephant loomed above the twin sisters, all grey wrath and vengeance.

"It was me," Second said, and First cried out in disbelief. The sisters both tried to accept blame, and Ascaro stamped at the ground, losing patience. Elephants, as you know, have trouble telling humans apart, so it would have been impossible for him to pick out which twin was which.

Mouse stepped forward, and with no expression he pointed at First. The sisters gave up on all self-sacrifice, and First waited for her master's judgement.

"You will die," Ascaro said, and First bowed her head. "You have served well until today, so I offer you a choice. Put your head beneath my foot, or fall on your sister's blade."

"No!" Second said. "You cannot!"

"Hold your tongue," Ascaro said, "or Mouse will find two new Rothai tomorrow."

The twins turned from the elephant, and I saw Second draw her rope-knife with a shaking hand. The sisters kissed and touched brow to brow, tears mingling across those mirror-image faces.

"Enough! Do it!" Ascaro roared, and First pushed herself forward, the knife biting deep into her chest. Sobbing, Second thrust up with her blade, again and again, until her sister finally stopped twitching and screaming.

Mouse brought a replacement to the longhouse the next day, a Rothai with a dead master. Mouse named her Nails, and as always the joke of this new name was something he kept private. We threw water on her, and drank, and pretended that First had never walked amongst us.

# #

We had many victories that season on the Blood Meadow. Ascaro began taking more risks on the field than ever.

I gained confidence with the sword, and soon I was at Mouse's elbow whenever the call came to cut the cord, to take the fight across to another elephant. Each fight brought another scar, and more memories of carnage. I tried to wash them away with melon-wine.

I drank, I slew, and I survived.

Men faced me over bare blades, and I struck them down first, drove the life out of them with urgency. Each one was a poor slave like me, but one thought drove my sword-arm: Better you than me!

One day, the madness stopped. Like my master I woke up with a hangover, but instead of combat, we were kneeling in the sawdust, paying obeisance to the Bull-King, the most perfect of all elephants.

A pair of palace elephants waited behind us with maces, ready to crush any human who dared to look upon the Bull-King's radiance. I caught a perfectly painted foot but dared not look any higher.

The Bull-King spoke for many minutes, praising Ascaro, offering him titles, more slaves, new land. When he paused, soaking up the polite trumpeting that passed for elephant applause, Ascaro said "No."

"No?" the Bull-King said, somewhere between amusement and displeasure. I felt the Bull-King's elephants close in, and I knew that they would beat us all for Ascaro's disrespect.

"Bull-King, I ask only one thing. Make me the Scourge."

"But... you are old now, Ascaro," the Bull-King said. "That should be borne by a young bull."

"I have won Blood Meadow by strength of arms," Ascaro said. "Your young bulls quiver before me and raise blood flag before I can close with them. I am the best, and I must be the Scourge."

A conch horn sounded, and more elephants came running. Advisors to the Bull-King. They spoke on the sawdust for many minutes before the Bull-King gave his grace.

# #

Our master now commanded the Legion and brought fire and iron in the Bull-King's name. You know what Ascaro did, if you've ever walked past the poets or scurried through the Memory Hall on some errand. We brought war to the Bull-King's enemies, brought rebel villages under his rule. We fought the mammoths of the North and the skulking creatures of the Eastern Waste, but Ascaro did not meet his end in a glorious battle.

Three long years I painted the land with the blood of the enemy. Each season we returned to Tusk and to Blood Meadow, wondering if that was the year the sawdust would drink up our lives. None were able to snatch the Legion from Ascaro, once he had his trunk firmly wrapped around that prize.

When our vassals paid their taxes and our enemies wintered away from the front, we hunted runaway slaves. The Marchlands were thick with wild tribes who'd never lived under elephant rule, but these barbarians were wily and hard to track. Worse still were places like Deeping Forest, craggy and thick-grown, hard for elephants to enter.

We spent endless hours in that damp wood, on elephant back or loping alongside, shivering and wet from the daily downpour. Everywhere I looked, I could see the shape of elephants in the trees, pushing through the thick growth, hacking branches with their axes. If there were runaway slaves here, they'd have already fled from that endless chopping sound.

Each mile was hard won, and evening brought us to a sulking camp. Scores of elephants jostled around the wine cart, snarling at each other and cursing Ascaro when he wasn't within earshot. We Rothai huddled around the baggage train with our own beetroot grog, all the elephants were allowing us on this trip.

"We will find nothing," Boy said, his white beard stained red from weeks of drinking the rotgut stuff. "One campfire, and it was cold ash."

Later on, the elephants grew drunk and boastful. One of Ascaro's lieutenants fancied himself as a poet. Even though he was so drunk he could barely stand, he belched and farted his way through a grotesque recital of the mammoth wars. This sparked off an all-out brawl between the poet and half a dozen of his listeners.

Trees fell, and blood was spilt by the time Ascaro intervened. Laying about with his armored trunk, my master separated the brawlers. "Have some pride!" he shouted. "You are Legion. Find some other way to occupy yourselves!"

By way of example, Ascaro snatched up a Rothai trying to sneak away from the melee. Gripping him by an ankle, he tossed him across the camp. Another elephant caught the wailing man, and then others joined in, tossing the warrior back and forth.

We watched in horror as first the flying man screamed in terror, then in pain as the exuberant elephants dislocated all his joints, then in horror when they simply decided to pull the man apart and see who got the biggest piece.

"No. That's not right," I said to Boy. "He wasn't a pot-scrub. Rothai don't die that way. They just don't!"

"We die however our masters decide we die," Boy said. "Tomorrow that could be you, or I, and that's the way of it."

That was the moment that I knew Ascaro would, sooner or later, turn on all of us. Better you than me, I thought. Silent and thoughtful, I considered the gloomy depths of the forest.

# #

I did not trust anyone outside of my own Rothai crew. I sounded out my thoughts with Second, waiting until she was so drunk that I could deny the conversation.

"I want to see that devil bleed," she whispered. "If you are serious, I'm with you."

I did not trust the woman named Nails, First's replacement. Mouse had claimed her as his wife, and she ran to his ear over the slightest things. I took care to approach Boy when neither Nails nor Mouse were around. To my surprise he wasn't even concerned to hear about the planned murder of our master.

"You mean for us to live in that?" Boy said, eyeing off the damp forest with distaste.

"There are people in there, and they are free," I said. "Second says she saw a boy in a tree, just watching us."

"She saw a runaway, and didn't say anything?" Boy said. I nodded, and knew this was the moment that the old man would either turn us in or chew the idea over in his mind.

There was the faintest of footfalls behind an old oak, the sound of a boot scuffing mouldy leaves. I put a hand to my sword-hilt and Boy stepped towards the noise, baring his rope-knife.

It was Lucky who emerged from behind the tree, and who eyed us both warily. He'd have heard every word of our palaver, and knew enough to damn us.

"You tongueless mutt," Boy spat. "Skulking around your own crew. Hear anything interesting?"

Lucky nodded. Boy looked at me, long, considering, then he sheathed his knife with a sigh.

"Ghost has the right of it. We can escape here, but it will be a red day's work. Can we count on you?"

Lucky frowned, and looked to the main camp. Two elephants were sparring with broken tree trunks, and the Rothai were brooding lumps, huddled around the smoky campfires. A feeling of murder hung over Ascaro's camp, and Lucky had worked the Meadow long enough to know when to tread lightly.

"What will he take from you next?" Boy said. "A finger? A hand? That grey bastard has already decided to kill you one part at a time. I've seen him do it before."

Lucky wavered by the tree, indecision on his face. He worked his lips and grunted with frustration.

"It took ten years for the last one to die," Boy said. "A mighty Rothai, whittled away until he was a torso and a head. The house-slaves fed him, and cleaned him, but every night Ascaro would come and watch that poor idiot, struggling to eat without hands, tongue, even lips. Our master there, he'd hold his foot above that bag of meat while he ate, waiting for him to nod."

"That Rothai lasted one month before he asked for Ascaro to crush the life out of him. He begged for his own death, and don't think you won't do the same."

Lucky barked and made a rude gesture. He didn't believe Boy. He slunk back into the camp, body tense as he waited for us to rush him.

"Easy," Boy said, and I let go of my sword. "He can't tell Mouse anything, not if he tries."

I saw Lucky approach the grog-cart, and he sat down on the same log as Mouse and Nails. Our crew leader was holding court with the other Rothai bosses, who howled with laughter as the ladle of beet grog passed around their damp circle.

"He'll ponder it some," Lucky said. "When the moment comes, he'll either be for or against. If he hesitates, even for a moment, kill him."

Over at the elephant camp, the sparring match turned ugly. Ascaro ended the brawl by burying his axe in an elephant's face. Night fell in our dripping forest camp, even as a team of Rothai stripped the cold grey body of arms and armor.

Neither elephant nor Man rested easily that night.

# #

No elephant who'd served as Scourge of the Legion had ever rooted out the human settlements of Deeping Forest. Ascaro blustered and raged during each night's camp, vowing to be the first to end this haven for escaped slaves.

Deeping Forest clung to the back of a mountain range, affording few paths that an elephant to easily climb. Only Ascaro's pride kept that force moving forwards and upwards, snapping trees every minute, trampling centuries of undergrowth beneath that inexorable advance.

We found what passed for a small village, long abandoned by the time Ascaro's armored bulls reached the plateau. There were signs of a hasty evacuation and the ashes in the firepit were still warm.

We destroyed that rude place. There was a miserable vegetable patch, hard-won from the stony soil, and we took everything before we turned salt into the earth. There was a spring here, clean and pure, and Ascaro ordered the elephants to take turns fouling it with dung. Our grey masters trod the huts and lean-tos into kindling.

Finished from our work in the village's gardens, we set torches to the ruined buildings. The elephants of the Legion relaxed, assuming their hard journey was over. Ascaro soured that idea the moment he heard it.

"We lose hundreds of runaways every year," he grunted. "There were maybe twenty of the pink rats living here. We keep searching."

The elephants held themselves a small feast, roasting vegetables and mash over the coals of the burnt settlement. The Rothai were sent up into the tallest trees to look down for smoke, for any movement. There was a larger settlement in Deeping Forest, and Ascaro meant to have it.

I clung to the tip of a pine and saw how the terrain grew ahead of us. Thickly wooded ridges, bunched up into folds of near-vertical rock.

"Tomorrow," I whispered to Second that night. Boy nodded when our eyes met over the grog ladle, and that was all the planning we made. I took out a whet-stone and sharpened my sword with long slow strokes. Mouse and Nails returned from their latest tryst, sharing a jug of the good melon wine. Ascaro had been generous to his favorites that night.

"You expecting a fight, Ghost?" Mouse said. I grunted, and worked on the point of my blade, making sure it was sharp enough to punch through mail. Nails stared at me for a long time, lip curled into a sneer. If she thought I had ambitions on Mouse's position, she was sure to cut me in my sleep.

"You'd be smart to bring down a runaway," Mouse said. "You know that Ascaro is offering a brace of slaves for each one that we kill or capture? Our own slaves, Ghost! And the first Rothai to spot a large settlement will be given his own estate in Tusk! You could be a free man tomorrow!"

I paused. Ascaro's offer was stunning in its generosity. Freedom for a human was a rare gift, unheard of in my lifetime.

I looked over at the drunken elephants. We were here for their pride, to punish those humans who'd dared to defy the grey kings. I drew on the whet-stone too hard, a squeal that drew a spark and left a burr.

"Perhaps I'll let you visit my new house," Mouse said dryly. "There'll be blood on my blade before there's any on yours."

I drew the whetstone once more.

# #

Morning took us down from the plateau and into the next valley, axes flashing as our grey lords smashed through yet more forest. The high rock at our backs held off the morning sun, and soon we were swallowed up by fog. I could barely see the elephants to our left and right, and soon even these rolling shapes were eaten up by the white.

I heard the sound of axes biting into wood, the creak and crash as the lesser trees were pushed aside, and could not have said whether this was ten feet away or a hundred. We were alone in a pale universe, with no witnesses. There would be no better time than this.

I tried to signal Boy and Second without alerting the others. When I turned to Ascaro's front, I saw that Mouse was kneeling right his ear, holding a low conference – our master grunted, a tone of annoyance in the sound. I knew it well. Mouse always pushed his luck when he offered suggestions to the mad brute.

Mouse had picked a different railing order this morning. Lucky and Nails were up the front with him, the rest of us stationed from Ascaro's midsection to where Second sat above his rump.

Even as Mouse steered Ascaro through the gloom, I slowly drew my sword. Boy nodded once, holding his axe low and ready, and from the corner of my eye I saw the tip of the kontoi that meant Second was at our shoulders. Our ropes traced along the center rail, and we made our move.

Perhaps it was the pad of our feet moving across the chain-mail and planks, or the whisper of the sliding ropes, but Mouse looked up. The moment he saw us running, he gave a whistle between his teeth and leapt out into the fog.

Lucky and Nails vanished just as fast, and I saw the flapping trail of severed ropes following them down into the mist. Beneath us Ascaro stepped up the pace, laughing as he crashed from tree to tree, trying to shake us off balance.

"A trio of villains on my back," he roared, "and all day to kill them!"

His trunk flicked backwards then, axe held on the flat as he attempted to swat us. Second and I dodged that flurry of blows, but Boy was not so fast. I saw him crumple, and a red smear followed him as he slid out into space, bloody and limp.

"We need to cut ropes!" Second cried, but I ignored this. Reaching the base of his skull, I dodged the rolling metal serpent of Ascaro's trunk, hacking away buckles and straps. Second fenced with her kontoi, lance head dancing up and down the trunk armor, searching for a weak spot.

I'd peeled away the chain skirts and neck plates, and only the leather undershirt held me away from Ascaro's spine. I raised my sword. Then the world crashed around me.

Two other elephants had appeared out of the mists, drawn by Ascaro's cursing. They held fast, and Rothai flooded onto Ascaro's back, driving me away from the vital spot. Another swordsman slashed across my knuckles, and the sword tumbled from my hands.

I fought on with my rope-knife and sent away one or two of them bleeding, but the end was the same. I was beaten senseless and dragged down from my master's back.

Through eyes half-closed by swelling, I saw Second dangling from her rope, the tip of a broken kontoi still lodged in her throat. Amazingly Boy was still alive, but he'd been broken grievously by the swat of Ascaro's giant axe. The other Rothai cut him down and presented him to his master.

"You have served me for many years, Boy," Ascaro rumbled. "So I shall show you mercy."

Mercy was Ascaro stepping on each limb in turn, slowly grinding Boy's body into paste. As the bones snapped I dry-heaved and begged my master to stop, but on and on he went, pushing his weight into my screaming friend. Whenever Boy passed out, Ascaro gave him time to revive. Once, he ordered the other Rothai to dose him up with rotgut grog, to dull the pain just enough that he would stay awake throughout the ordeal.

Finally, Ascaro wrapped his trunk around Boy's neck and plucked off his head like a grape. It was my task to carry it the whole way home to Tusk, and every time I looked down into Boy's horrified face, it was a reminder that my master was far from finished with me.

#

Once more I placed in Ascaro's villa. I was the lowest of his house-slaves, and my drudgery was only interrupted by a daily flogging.

Each month, Mouse visited, and I lost something else to his blade. An ear, a toe, a finger. Each time, Ascaro and his cronies would laugh at my extended punishment.

"I taught Lucky to read and write the moment he lost his voice," Mouse teased, flicking my severed pinky finger over his shoulder. "Passes on all sorts of interesting scraps to me, that tongueless bastard."

I spent days scrubbing the latrine trenches and trod laundry in the putrid fullery vats. Over the months I was given every vile task Ascaro could dream up. My food was rotten and worm-ridden, if it arrived at all.

Then I was given a broom and pushed into the baths, and I knew it was all going to be over soon. I cleaned up the mud and helped to haul away dead slaves whenever Ascaro murdered one.

Mouse bathed with Nails, holding court with the other freed slaves. Emancipation was now the fashion, but it was rare, and those freed were always the worst examples of humanity. They played their own variety of the bath game, and it pleased the elephants to see humans drowning slaves in the baths over the smallest slight.

Yet none of them were permitted to slay me. I was Ascaro's alone to kill.

# #

Ascaro summoned me to the baths one night, after all of his guests had retired. My master stank of grog and vomit, and he had a look of madness in his one eye.

"Ghost," he said. "I want you to scrub my back."

He hooked his trunk into a kind of step and lifted me up and behind his shoulders. I trod lightly across his mud-slick skin, taking care to sweep deeply, watching for the twitch in his muscles, the sign that he was going to strike.

For long moments he sighed in contentment as I scrubbed, the bristles scratching and digging deep into his skin. It didn't make sense that he would kill me this way. No-one was here to witness his ultimate triumph over my rebellion.

He moved fast then, but only to draw melon-wine into his trunk. He let it drain into his mouth and chuckled darkly when I flinched.

"Don't let that broom slow," he teased. "Keep me in a good mood, and you may live out the day."

I pushed the broom again, and that was when he struck. He flicked his trunk backwards, a grey sinuous serpent that snatched for me, again and again.

I dodged, leapt, and slid around on his back. He grabbed again and again, but each time he was a second behind me. But for all my speed, I was tired, and there were no other slaves to hide behind. Since Mouse had taken some of my toes, my sense of balance was off. He'd snatch me up, and soon.

"Hold still, you damn slave," he growled. I did just that, but even as his trunk snaked towards me, I broke the broom across my knee.

His trunk wrapped around my waist, but before he could plunge me into the mud, I rapped him across the snout with the broom handle.

"Face me, you fat old coward!" I shouted.

Ascaro brought me forward, the trunk tightening around me, squeezing the life out of me. He roared in fury, cracking my ribs and making my vision go dark, and then brought me in front of his face to watch me die.

I stabbed out with my snapped broom-handle and buried it deep in his eye. He howled in fury and tried to pull me away, but I clung onto the handle, twisting it, screaming my own defiance.

"You are killing me," Ascaro cried, surprised and afraid.

I drove that stick deep into his brain. He sank down into the mud, twitching and gasping, and then finally he was still.

# #

The murder of a master by his slave is not the point of my story. The elephants are monsters, but they are not for you to kill. If you fight them, they will break you, or kill you. Look on what they have done to my body, I who they have trained in the arts of death. You are pot-scrubs. Mark this lesson well.

There are others like me, others hiding in the in-between places. We slip in and out of Tusk like mice, and we nibble in the dark, bringing their city down one grain at a time.

No. Your place in this war is different. You must leave. In ones or twos, and never by the same way. Your job is to walk away from Tusk.

When you leave, we will find you. There is a human nation, hidden beneath the grey one. But the iron in your hands comes with a price.

That night when I left Ascaro's body in the mud, I slipped into Mouse's fine new house and left it a burning knackery. I murdered those collaborators, but this revenge wasn't sweet. I was sad when I stood over their bodies, sad that it needed to happen.

Come to us with a bloody blade, or we will turn you away. There is someone near you like Mouse or Lucky. They are traitors to your people, and your true enemy. Be swift when you kill them, no matter how cruel they were in life. Take care that you do not linger long once your knives are wet.

For all that your masters strut and bully, they need your clever hands. Above all they need your fear. Fear gives them farms full of starving slaves, while the canals run choked with food barges and miserable wagoneers file into Tusk, hauling food they dare not touch themselves.

The elephant's foul city only exists by our sufferance. Every day I picture that flood of wagons and barges slowing to a trickle, the ancient gates sucking at the last of the food like a dozen hungry mouths. I see their temples and pyramids overgrown in vines, forgotten in a jungle of our making.

Above all, I picture their bones in the plazas. Outside of their ruined city, I imagine our villages, huts made from their rib-cages and covered with stretched skin. I see their tusks used for ornaments and trade, but most of all, I dream of the day when those grey killers are fastened into the ploughs, urged on by a whip in a human hand.

Defy the grey kings. Our time is now.

# The Dog Pit

The Dutchman finally found the boy out on the gold diggings.

Being close to seven feet tall and as broad as an axe-handle at the shoulders, Cornelius Tesselaar was an instant curiosity in that place of mud and slap-shacks. His frock-coat and good boots spoke of a man more used to cobbled streets than a fossicker's warren. He wore a top-hat, the good silk kind, and peered around him through a pair of expensive bifocals that by themselves would earn him a knifing if he stayed too long.

A quiet word and a handful of coins led Cornelius to the nearest opium den. He swept open the hessian sack that served as a doorway, and stood blinking at the thick cloud of smoke that drifted out.

"Toby Jangles," the Dutchman boomed, striding inside. A dozen faces stared blankly at the man, even as he stepped over their sprawled bodies. One or two furtive shapes slinked away from the doorway, creeping into the furthest shadows of the clapboard shack.

"Toby Jangles," he said again. He approached one figure, slumped against a wall, only to find it was a Chinaman with a drawn dagger and a crazed look on his face. Cornelius backed away slowly, hands held high. Grunting, the Chinaman returned to his long-stemmed pipe, and the murder in his eyes soon eased to poppy dreams.

"Toby Jangles!"

The Dutchman wrestled a poster out of his purse, smoothing out the edges. By the dim light of the smoking oil lamp on the wall, he marked every face, patiently working his way through the mass of addicts and broken creatures. Finally he knelt beside a pallet, looking down on another colonist brought low by the poppy. He'd found the boy.

The lithograph in his hands showed a young man with a larrikin's smirk, a Push boy wanted for a number of crimes. The police artist had sketched him in typical gangster attire – bell-bottomed pants, white shirt with no collar, short black paget coat, high-heeled boots and a gaudy neckerchief.

The creature dozing in the cot was a world away from this depiction, but even with the sallow skin and the wear of a life hard lived, the boy was unmistakeably Toby Jangles. He'd swapped Push clothes for grubby miner's gear, and his fingers and throat were long bare of the jewellery that was his namesake. Judging by the lack of meat on his ribs, Cornelius didn't want to guess when the boy had last had a meal.

The Dutchman took the long pipe, still dangling from Toby's lips, and set it on a low table. Scooping the boy up in his arms, he carried him out of the opium den. When the proprietor dogged him, demanding the settling of an account, he knocked him down with the judicious application of a boot.

Knives were drawn and curses thrown, but none of the drug-peddlers bothered to follow Cornelius out into the muddy street. He wove through the parade of fossickers and parasites, mindless of the distractions offered by the nameless shanty town. Making a beeline for the horse rail, the Dutchman dropped Toby Jangles straight into the nearest water trough.

Spluttering and howling, the boy snapped out of his drug-fugue. A combination of animal cunning and street smarts brought his fast knuckles towards the correct antagonist, all within that first moment.

The Dutchman caught his fist in a big ham-hand, and propelled Toby back into the water. When the boy leapt out for a second go, the big man twitched back his coat to reveal the Colt revolver on his belt.

"Don't be a fool," he said, and the boy relented. Toby sagged against the side of the trough, coughing and dripping into the mud. The big Dutchman knelt close, regarding him over a pair of bifocal spectacles. Once more he produced the lithograph, and the boy's eyes narrowed at the litany of sins attributed to his name.

"I've searched nearly every dance hall and cheap theatre in New South Wales and Victoria. You're a hard man to find, Toby Jangles."

"You'll not drag me back to Sydney," Toby said. "Put a bullet in me now, if you have the marbles for it."

"Toby, I have little concern for these misdeeds," the Dutchman said, and tossed the lithograph into the water trough. The ink ran, and the paper was unreadable within moments.

"What are you about, mister?" Toby said. He looked at the stranger with something between curiosity and outright fear.

"You saw something, Toby Jangles," the Dutchman said quietly. "Something that curdles in your mind, that drives you from bottle, to pipe, to whore's quim. You left your fellows to a fate worse than death, and you left Sydney within the hour. I'd very much like to speak with you about that."

# #

The Dutchman steered the boy into one of the cleaner eateries in the camp. When he put a bowl of stew and a heel of bread in front of the boy, Toby picked at it, even half-starved as he was. The Dutchman knew of the poppy, how it robbed the addict of all hunger.

"You're not a copper?" the boy mumbled over his food.

"I have been a priest, a professor of theosophy, and an archaeologist of no small note. Once, I spent a decade in the Orient, as an acolyte in a mystery cult," Cornelius said, eyes made large by his queer eyeglasses. "Boy, I have little truck with the laws of man."

The boy grunted, and set to work on his second mug of ale. Content that his new benefactor had no designs on his liberty, he allowed the big Dutchman to accompany him back to his employer, a miner running a frugal claim. Toby retrieved what few belongings he had, and squeezed the last squirt of his wage from that notoriously tight purse.

"So you'd be paying me then?" the boy said, hefting the thin sliver of coin in his hands. Living as he had been, he'd be destitute by tomorrow, and starved the week after that.

"Toby, if you lead me where I ask, you'll want for nothing."

For a long moment, the boy looked at his own wretched purse, and seemed to fight an internal war. Then he looked at the big Dutchman, clearly a man of means. He nodded, and put his fate in Professor Cornelius Tesselaar's hands.

# #

It took days of hard travel to escape from that muddy Victorian gold-pit and reach civilisation. They took horses, and a coach barely deserving the name. The new train from Ballarat took them into Melbourne, where it was necessary to engage a clipper to carry them around the coast to Sydney itself.

It was a rough voyage, and Toby Jangles was no sailor. He spent two days in his cabin, heaving into a bucket. Cornelius sat with the boy, puffing on an ornate pipe and nursing him as needed.

"It seems a good time to speak more on what you saw," the Dutchman said. Other times he'd tried to glean the events from the boy's mind, Toby would change the topic, or simply stare off into the distance, too haunted by what he'd seen. Now, the lad was too tired and ill to resist the line of questioning, and spoke when he was not dry-retching.

"You know the kind of man I was, before..."

Cornelius nodded, puffing on his pipe.

"A larrikin, swaggering around Sydney. The terror of all decent God-fearing folk. We were the Blackwattle Push, meanest gang of cutters, and don't you mind what those gizzard-guts at the Rocks tell you."

"We'd run mollies, cards and dice, anything to make a bob. Sly boxing rings, robbing folks, and knocking seven bells out of any filthy copper daft enough to show his face on our patch."

"So you know that we were hard men," Toby said, pausing to gag and wipe his mouth. Cornelius pursed his lips tight around the pipe, amused at his own reference to manhood. The boy was seventeen if he was a day.

"I was bossman of the Blackwattle Push, took over after going thirty rounds bare-knuckled against old Pete Raffles. Had a lot to prove, and thought I'd take on the big dogs where they slept. We went after the Rocks Push."

The memory brought a bit of fire back to the boy's eyes. He pushed the bucket aside, sat up against his bunk. When Cornelius offered him a water-skin, he took a slow sip, swishing it around in his mouth.

"Our lads put out the word that we would meet them at Pyrmont, in one of the Scottish quarries. The one they called Hellhole, on account of the stone being so hard to cut and work."

"Hellhole," Cornelius muttered around his pipe. "Go on, boy."

"We got there early, hoping to spring out of hiding and give the Rocks boys a good belting. Perhaps they got wind of what we were up to, or they meant to jump us on the way home, but the time rolled around and they didn't show up."

"The lads got bored, and we horsed around in the pits. All those picks and dolly-carts, and nary a constable in sight. None of us worked an honest day in our lives, but there we were, smashing their neat ashlars with hammers, throwing the stone-chips at each other."

"Then Eugene Dagwood calls us over. There's a new digging the Scots have started, see, and they've roped the whole thing off. A type of old cave, a bubble buried in the sand-stone. Queerest thing you ever saw."

"'There's marks in here," Eugene calls. "Black fella drawings or some such.'"

"So we forget about the fight, and nick some oil-lamps from the miner's shed. They had a dog chained up back there, but...you know." Toby drew a finger across his throat.

"We spilled into that cavern, laughing and jostling, but I tell you this, the whole place felt unnatural. We looked at the black fella scribblings, and I'll tell you, God's own truth, but no native set his hand to those walls."

"What did you see?" Cornelius said. "If I fetch you paper and quill, could you sketch the symbols?"

Toby shook his head.

"Queer designs, shapes that my eyes had trouble fixing on. To this day, I cannot remember the marks. The further we went into the cave, the more they appeared, till the marks ran from roof to floor.

"Felt more like those old Egyptian writings than anything the locals usually paint. You know, where they paint the pictures that all mean words. But they weren't pictures of anything I'd ever seen."

"Hmm, yes, I am quite familiar with hieroglyphics," Cornelius said. "I'm rather doubtful that's what you found, but go on."

"I wanted to run from that place," Toby admitted. "Looking at the others, we all did. But we were Push boys, all stirred up. The first one to run would never live it down. So we went on, deeper into the digging. Soon we were past where the Scots had braved to go, and there were no brace-posts above us, nothing but sandstone and those carvings, all around us.

"Then, I felt it in there with us. Silent, but it felt like a big beast, hunkered in the dark, retreating from our lamp-light. Something that had no business being seen.

"And it smelled in there too. Like a wet dog. A stink of meat that's gone beyond rot and maggot, and broken right down to nothing. The memory of meat."

"'We shouldn't be here," Eugene whined, and of course the rest of us heaped the grief on him for crying coward. Had no-one said a word, we might all have left then. But we were the Blackwattle Push, and so...

"There was a cave, of sorts, a hollow place full of dripping and slime. In the middle of that cave was a set of stones, like a set of jagged teeth jutting out of the ground, and I swear, I've never seen anything as unholy as that arrangement."

"There was a pattern, yes?" Cornelius whispered. "A master stone, with smaller stones in attendance? Laid out on either side, like groomsmen at a wedding?"

Toby nodded for yes.

Reaching into a pocket, the Dutchman pulled out a leather-bound volume, an old book written in an arcane script. Flicking through it, he laid his thumb onto a particular page, an illustrated plate. He handed the book to Toby.

"Is this what you saw?"

The boy recoiled from the book with a great fright, and dropped it on the floor. The page lay open to the illustration, a jagged formation of stones, sinister, almost like the jaw-bone of some antediluvian creature. In the foreground, figures danced about with torches, in supplication to the stones.

Behind the master stone, a great shadow lurked. It was a crude dog-shape, a wolf with the ears of Anubis, with a jaw that opened far too wide. From that impossibly open mouth, a shadow tongue snaked out, entering a man's ears. It held him upright like a puppet, while he smiled with ecstasy.

Beneath this picture, the single word: KURPANGGA.

"This happened to your friends, didn't it?"

Toby Jangles whimpered. The sound built to a moan, the moan to a howl. He pushed back in his bunk, and knocked the bucket over, spilling his sick all over the floor.

"Even as the beast took your friends, you ran," Cornelius said, raising his voice above the racket. "You left Sydney there and then, with naught but the clothes on your back. Is this correct?"

Toby nodded, blubbering, snot and tears running down his face.

"I do not judge you, boy. The first time I saw something from the outer darkness, I ran for my life. You escaped its grasp, and now you have the chance to end what you saw."

"I've changed my mind," Toby whispered. "Keep your money. I won't go back there."

"I need to know where that cave is," Cornelius said, seizing Toby by the arms. "The exact spot."

"I'll take you to the quarry, but no further. I won't go into that cursed hole, not for all the tea in China," Toby said. "No living thing has any business in that place."

"I agree," Cornelius said. "That's why it concerns me that the Blackwattle Push has been seen around town, alive and well."

# #

"Certain of my instruments pointed me here," Cornelius said. He'd rented a room in the Rocks district, and the furnishings seemed an extension of the eccentric Dutchman. Every surface lay stacked with books, and the table was a jumble of alembics, braziers and various brass-geared devices. Pictures of fantastic beasts lay pinned to the walls, alongside what appeared to be mathematical formulae, and writings that resembled bird-scratchings.

Other shapes lay in the shadows cast by a flickering oil-lamp. Jars and stuffed animals, an elephant foot that contained swords, umbrellas, and staves carved with heathen totems. The whole place stank like a herbalist's stall.

"The trouble is, the science is far from accurate," Cornelius said, fussing with a brazier. He threw a pinch of shaved liquorice root into the red coals, gently puffing on them until a lick of flame swallowed up the offering.

"For instance, these formulae led me to Java, where I unearthed a nest of Yog-Sothoth cultists. But beyond the island itself, I knew not the site of their lair. It took me five years and half a fortune to destroy that foul gang."

"I continue the work of a most ancient order, but have only a shade of the esoteric skills my predecessors once possessed. I could tell you in which direction sunken R'lyeh lies, but even if I were mad enough to seek out that horrid house, I could sail for years and never come close."

Toby Jangles said nothing. He'd been struck dumb since entering the Dutchman's apartment, and still stood just inside the doorway, staring.

"Come inside, boy, and shut the door. The neighbours already complain about the smell."

"What... what are you? Do you have truck with the devil?"

Cornelius laughed for a long moment. The light from the brazier danced across his bifocals, and for one moment he looked unhinged, less than human. For the first time Toby noticed the deep lines in his face, the intensity of his stare.

"There are things crawling out there in the stars, entities that make Lucifer quail in his cloven hooves," the Dutchman said.

Herding the boy into the apartment, Cornelius shut the door and threw the bolts. Peeling apart a stack of periodicals and broadsheets, he found a newspaper and pushed it into Toby's hands.

"Can you read?"

Toby nodded, unfolding the pages. His fingers trembled a little. The Dutchman tinkered with the lamp, fixing the light as bright as it would go.

"INFANT SNATCHED FROM THE CRADLE" the headline read. Toby scanned each line, the horror growing on his face. The newspaper was little more than a rag, and the reporter had taken free licence with the more salacious details of the case.

"Here's another one," Cornelius said, pushing papers onto Toby as fast as he could read them.

"THIRD BABY STOLEN"

"ANIMAL ROBBERS STRIKE ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS"

"SOCIETY MATRON MISSING, FEARED DEAD"

"The dates, boy. Mind the dates on the papers. You'll find all of this has occurred since you fled from that awful cave."

"What is all this?" Toby whispered. He slumped to the floor, papers spilling from his hands. Realisation washed across his face.

"Evil, boy. Pure evil, and it walks the streets of Sydney. You and your larrikins have freed this thing."

"My boys. Where are my boys? Are they doing these things?"

The Dutchman did not answer for a long moment, working a mortar and pestle. He tipped a foul concoction onto the burning coals, something that looked like spiders, dead leaves, and flakes of human skin.

"The moment I got off the boat, I noticed your boys," Cornelius said. "Caught their stink on the street. Bitter experience tells me what kind of monster the Blackwattle Push serves."

As the Dutchman spoke, he seemed to hum with energy, a vibration that crawled under Toby's skin and buzzed around in his teeth. He loomed above the boy, a primal force that would not be denied.

Toby didn't know what was happening. Cornelius seemed like a bear wearing a man's skin, watching him hungrily. He'd dreamt many things in the Chinaman's opium hut, but nothing like this. What he felt probing around the corners of his mind was all too real.

"What I've been able to glimpse of their deeds," the Dutchman indicated his arcane equipment, "tells me that I have found the agents of this evil. But until now, their lair has been hidden from me. My esoteric vision is being turned aside, thwarted by that old mongrel."

The smoke wafting out from the brazier made Toby's eyes water. He felt light-headed, and swore he could hear a distant drumming.

From a drawer, Cornelius produced a black hunk of metal, the rudest example of the blacksmith's art. It had been beaten into the shape of a railroad spike, an iron tooth that shook slightly in the Dutchman's grip. Toby could not look away from that sharp point, and felt it turn a hungry regard towards him. Suddenly, the quivering spike keened and wailed, though it had no mouth, filling the room with the sound of a rusted hinge, of a violin's screech.

"I forged this myself, from the leavings of a fallen star," Cornelius said, making a visible effort to restrain the spike. "Trust me when I tell you that this will pin our enemy down."

Toby whimpered, and felt the warm flood as his bladder released down his leg. He'd never been more frightened, not even when he saw the thing in the cave....

"You are the only member of the Blackwattle Push to have kept your soul from that shadow-hound's tongue. You have seen its marker stones, and fled intact. The sun has washed this taint from you, and that gives you something of a resistance to that dreaming dog."

Kneeling, Cornelius pressed the iron spike to the floorboards, fighting it with all of his strength. It shivered and whimpered and stabbed at the wood, frustrated at the nearness of Toby's flesh.

With one swift motion, the Dutchman swept a silken cloth over the iron spike, and it lay still. Thus wrapped, he placed the arcane weapon in his pocket.

"I charge you with this, Toby Jangles. You will return with me to the lair of Kurpangga, the devil-dingo that should not be. You shall see to it that the beast sleeps for another age."

Toby nodded quickly, eyes fixed to the pocket that hid the enchanted spike.

"Now, you will repeat my words, and know that you are entering into a most serious oath."

Shaking on the floor, Toby said the words. He belonged to the Dutchman now, for better or worse.

# #

"Your larrikins will come, the moment they learn their master is in danger. I have a man on retainer, a most useful sort. We shall need him tonight."

Toby followed Cornelius down the streets of Sydney, a lost pup. The oath he'd given still rattled around in his mouth, and he felt an almost physical bond to this monster, to that impossible iron beast that slumbered in his pocket.

They met the man in a boarding house, a dim-lit place that stank of cabbage and unwashed men. Somewhere within, a pair of drunks quarrelled, and an old man wept to the derision of his neighbours. Cornelius strode to a particular door, and knocked upon it merrily.

A man answered, a leathery sort with cold eyes. The room was a tiny cubby, with a cot and not much else. Cornelius introduced the man as Bunberry. The man did not say a word to Toby, and with an economy of movement he swiftly gathered a selection of weapons from a trunk.

With wide eyes, Toby saw Bunberry holster a trio of pistols to a complex harness, and he strapped a cavalryman's sabre to his side. Once he had shrugged into a sailor's greatcoat, this small arsenal was hidden from casual view.

Then he produced a British rifle, a great big Brown Bess, complete with a wicked looking bayonet and enough powder horns to start a small war. Bunberry wrapped all of this into a canvas, and belted it up with ropes until it resembled a swag, which went over one shoulder.

"I'm ready," Bunberry said. It was all that Toby ever heard him say.

They left the boarding-house, Cornelius leading the way through the night streets. What folk were out kept at a distance, and the sly-grog houses were closed. As they entered Pyrmont, Toby wondered at the Dutchman's sense of direction, taking turns and shortcuts that only a local would know.

"You knew all along," Toby said numbly, realising the quarries were nearby. "You knew where it was."

"Hush, boy," Cornelius said, draping a friendly arm across the boy's shoulders. "I've yet to lie to you. We trailed the Push through normal means."

"But – but you said-"

"My good boy, I have given oaths in low places. I cannot speak a falsehood," Cornelius said, and Toby could not tell if this was a point of honour or a frustration to the man. "Bunberry, be a good fellow and watch for the Push boys. We are close."

The trio approached the sandstone quarries, and had the cobbled streets all to themselves. Toby noticed that all the doors and windows were shuttered, and in some cases nailed and barred. There wasn't so much as a starving dog to be seen, and if there were rats they had the good sense to hide in the deepest of holes.

They reached the quarry known as Hellhole. The gates were locked with a thick chain, and above, a sign painted in a shaky hand.

"DIGGINGS CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE."

There was a small shack for a nightwatchman, but no lamplight shone through his window. There was no-one to see them, and none to protest when Bunberry put a bullet through the lock.

Unwrapping the chain, Cornelius pushed into the quarry. He fetched a lantern from the nightwatchman's shanty and used it to light their way across the work yard. Tools had been left out to rust in the weather, and a shed door flapped in the wind, squealing on unoiled hinges.

The pit caught the rain, and had poor drainage. Soon it was like slogging through a swamp, and it seemed a miserable place to labour for stone blocks.

Once more, Toby saw that narrow crack in the ground, and the cave looked even more menacing, a stone mouth ready to snatch them all up. Someone had rolled a barrel of gunpowder here, but mere feet from the entrance it lay in pieces, the staves cracked open with hammers and axes. The powder was scattered all around, trodden into the mud by a multitude of footprints. A melee. A fuse cord lay nearby, cut into many pieces.

"Watch how they defend their nest," Cornelius told Bunberry. The gunman took apart his swag, and primed the big rifle with the ease of long practice. With one precise movement he attached the bayonet. The mercenary shrugged out of his greatcoat and took a position before the cave, an arsenal at his fingertips.

Nodding to the man, Cornelius pressed Toby in the small of the back, herded him towards the source of all his nightmares. For one long moment the boy resisted, whimpered at the memory of the monster within.

"Go," Cornelius said. The word was a lash, a command that could not be disobeyed. The boy shuffled forward, jerky movements like a puppet's. The pair entered the cave that the Scots could not destroy, walked beneath a million glyphs never marked by the human hand.

"There was a war, in the earliest days of this world," Cornelius mused, translating on the fly. "Terrible beasts fought in the lakes of magma and on the curing mantle, fighting for possession of the world that would be. The devil-dingo lost, and so he was sealed into the stone."

Toby's eyes darted from left to right, looking once more at the murals and sigils. A giant with a squid's face pinned down a dog with its foot, with lesser monsters crowded around in victory. The next picture showed a curled-up dog, trapped in a womb of stone.

"Kurpannga has been dreaming down here for a billion years," Cornelius said. "He has entered the myths of the natives, and sowed chaos and darkness into these new settlements. Now, the bloody Scots have dug him up. And your villains have crept in and poked him with a stick."

Toby paused, but the next moment Cornelius crooked a finger. He tottered forward as if he were on a leash.

Behind them came the echoing crash of Bunberry's rifle, followed by a piercing scream. Next, the repeated crack of his revolving pistols, greeted by pained cries, howls of dismay.

"Your larrikin fellows have come to stop you," Cornelius said. "Step lively, in the event that Bunberry's aim is less than true."

They ran through a twisted spiral of cave, the bobbing lantern revealing glimpses of pre-human artwork even more alien than that by the entrance. Whenever Toby lagged, Cornelius would curse at the boy, hauling him onwards with the enchantment, using his fists when even that did not suffice.

Behind them, one final gunshot, and then a clamour of shouting. Bunberry was shouting something, but then he gave rise to an awful scream, a blood-curdling cry that echoed through the cave for many long moments.

Even as the man fell silent, several voices raised laughter. Footsteps rang into the cave, accompanied by one wit who set to howling. Cornelius dragged Toby by the collar, and panting and wide-eyed they spilled into the inner sanctum of that place, a low-roofed chamber where the stalactites ran with slime, like mossy fangs.

Once again, the row of standing stones, like an ancient jaw-bone had been set into the bedrock. The stink of wet dog and rot pervaded everything. Cornelius gagged.

Underfoot were dozens of bodies. Desiccated husks, still dressed in clothes. The stolen babies, the missing society marms and prostitutes, all of them lay scattered across the cave floor.

Even as the Blackwattle Push closed in for the kill, Cornelius pushed Toby forward, crunching across the carcases. The boy landed painfully on his knees, trembling as he looked upon the arrangement of stones.

"What am I meant to do?" the boy said, literally shaking with terror. "How do I stop it?"

"Just wait."

Long-starved of sunlight, the stones seemed to drink at the lamp-light. The shadows that danced around on the slimy walls moved, running together like bodies of water down the path of least resistance. A shape rose up from behind the master stone, a physical presence that loomed over the two men.

The shadow formed a face, a snout that ran across the cavern wall, splitting in two. The jaws opened wide, and a tongue snaked out, a vine of darkness that moved sinuously, testing the air. When it brushed against Toby, it ignored Cornelius entirely, and pounced on the boy with visible excitement.

"No!" Toby screamed and made to flee, but Cornelius held him still. The shadow tongue slid into the boy's ear, questing around for whatever it fed on.

"It remembers you," Cornelius said, struggling to hold Toby still, even as the boy shook and fought and cursed. "I did not lie to you, boy. In your circumstance, you have developed a resistance to Kurpannga's attention."

At that moment, he turned Toby around, pushing him up against the largest standing stone. With one motion, the Dutchman retrieved the star-nail from his pocket, and shook the silk covering loose.

The spike leapt free and buried itself in Toby's chest. It wriggled, and pushed through, shrieking and gouging until it pierced the rock itself.

The shadow dog grew frantic, and raced around the walls, searching for escape. It became a pack of snapping animals, a snake that tried to withdraw its shadow tongue from the boy's ear. But inch by inch, it lost the fight, and the devil-dog was drawn into the boy's head.

Toby Jangles hung there, pierced through the heart, fastened to Kurpannga's rock. He lolled as if drunk, feet drumming, eyes rolling back in their sockets to show the whites. For a long moment, the cave was silent but for the dripping of wet stone. In the tunnel, the larrikins had gone silent, their curses and cries instantly snuffed.

Then Toby opened his eyes, and stared straight at Cornelius. The scared boy was gone, replaced with something wild-eyed, something without a trace of human emotion.

He opened his mouth, and barked ferociously, spittle flying everywhere. When Cornelius walked away from the pinned boy, Toby howled. It was a pitiful cry, that spoke of hunger and loss, of a prison that had lasted for a billion years.

# #

Cornelius stepped over the lifeless bodies of the Blackwattle Push, scattered in the tunnel like so much cold meat. The moment he'd trapped Kurpannga in Toby Jangles, these puppets had collapsed with cut strings.

Taking his time to muse over the carvings in the tunnel, Cornelius found what he was looking for. Whispering over his thumb-nail, he gouged into the sandstone, changing one of the sigils in a minor way. Stepping lively, the Dutchman exited the cave, watching as the sandstone shifted, melting like toffee and fusing into an unbroken whole.

In moments, it was as if the cave had never been breached, the facing pure and unmarked. Cornelius stepped over the broken body of Bunberry, eyebrows raised at the damage the larrikins had done. He'd seen an execution once, where a murderer was torn apart by horses. Bunberry appeared to have met a similar fate.

With more firepower than the Kelly Gang, he'd done nothing more than slow Kurpannga's puppets. The Dutchman mourned the waste of a good man for all of a second.

Cornelius traced around the body parts with a chalk, whispering and muttering until these too sank into the viscous stone, sealing poor Bunberry within a secret grave.

The Dutchman left Sydney within the week, his business done. His instruments showed a new visitation, evidence of an Elder God over in New Zealand. Before he left, he bought the deed to the Hellhole quarry from one Charles Saunders, a man who swore that he'd be unable to turn a profit from "that awful sinkhole".

He simply closed the place down.

It was almost one hundred years till Cornelius Tesselaar returned to Kurpannga's prison. He travelled under a different name, and in the clothes for that era. By his side, a beagle he'd named Toby pulled at his leash.

"The children play down there," the town manager told Cornelius, a sheaf of planning papers in his hands. "Soccer when it's dry, and they swim in the hole when it's rained. Filthy place, and the children who lurk here aren't much better."

"What are they like?" Cornelius asked. "The children who play here."

"Monsters," the man said. "Mark my words, half of them will end up in jail, and the other half will end up dead."

"Fill it in," Cornelius said. "You may have the land, and build your council works on it, but fill in that hole as soon as you can."

"Too right," the council man said. The beagle named Toby lay on the very edge of the pit, and began to howl for all he was worth.

#  Pigroot Flat

The flies should have given fair warning to Hazel. That, or Codger straining at his leash and barking like an idiot. But the dog was asleep, his feet twitching in a dream. Hazel was wool-gathering in the garden, turning pigshit into the red earth and wondering if anything would grow. A dozen flies became a hundred, then the tin-cans began to rattle.

Dropping the shovel, Hazel ran.

Swearing at the useless dog, she knocked him in the ribs with her boot. Codger barked then, barked for all he was worth. Hazel hauled him along by the collar, and the stupid mutt yipped excitedly, doing his best to wriggle out of her grip.

Hazel had done a turn or two as a roustabout, and years spent throwing sheep and feed gave her ropy arms strength. More cans rattled, and she dragged the pig-dog up the ladder, even as he yipped and gagged and choked on his collar.

Early on she'd spent a whole day on the roof, and nightfall saw her sunburnt and thirsty. She had a camp up there now, slept there most nights. A beach umbrella, food and water, a swag and some chairs. The old rifle and the CB, for all either were worth. Codger couldn't be trusted not to fall off the bloody roof, and so he was tied to the TV antenna.

He barked enough to do himself an injury. Hazel sighed, and watched as her visitors ran around the yard, buggering everything up. Dozens of them today, tripping over the ankle-high fencing wire, rattling the tin cans and cowbells she'd attached every few feet.

They were in the garden now, knocking over stakes and squashing the seedlings. The sound of breaking glass came from the green-house, and they even tried the doors on the four-wheel drive, chattering excitedly as they pounded on the windows.

"Ba Ba Ba!" they shouted gleefully. HAZEL'S ECO TOURS, a dusty decal read on the driver's side door. The tires were flat, the engine out and in pieces.

"Stupid bastards," Hazel said, wincing as they clattered around on the porch, ran through the house underneath her. It got that it wasn't even worth fixing up the doors and windows, so she just left everything open now. That way, they'd go through the house with a minimum of damage, and pour out into the backyard when they got bored.

Hazel had set up a playground to draw them out. Toys, bikes, footballs, even a swing-set. She'd visited the Halletts recently, her neighbours from ten clicks up the road. They'd had kids, probably all dead now. Their farm was silent, and she never cared to linger long.

The ladder scraped along the guttering, and Hazel swore. She dropped her half-rolled cigarette, and slid across the hot tiles, grabbing at the top rung. There was resistance at the other end, and she peered over the side. A rotten face stared up at her.

A woman, a few days on the wrong side of dead. She should have been so much rotten meat, but here she was, smiling up at Hazel, hauling on the ladder for all she was worth. The stink was enough to make Hazel gag, and almost every inch of the walking corpse was covered in flies.

"Play?" the dead woman said, rotten slug of a tongue still working in her mouth. In time, she would become like her idiot friends, speaking in an autistic babble, finally communicating with nothing but the click of teeth, the excited wheeze of maggoty lungs. The fresh ones liked to have a chat.

Hazel let go of the ladder, watched as it clattered to the red earth. The dead woman tried to raise it up again, couldn't quite work out the angle. She gave up the attempt to reach the roof and stood underneath Hazel, waving cheerfully. Fetching up another cigarette with shaking hands, Hazel looked down at the corpse, tried to recognize who it was. Probably someone from town, or hiding out on one of the stations. Underneath the shroud of flies, the dead woman wore dusty jeans and a flanno, torn to strips now.

Near as she could tell, the dead woman had been beautiful once. Maybe a tourist, or some fool from the coast, looking to snag a rich farmer. Hazel felt angry at the thought, and then weird, the way she remembered when she saw someone prettier than her. Jealous, wanting to belong to their world.

Now, the pretty girl was just dead meat. Hazel shook her head, vanished the dark thoughts. Everything was different now, and Hazel needed to get used to it.

Codger was going nuts. He stretched out as far as the leash would allow, snarling along the gutter's edge. The TV antennae strained, and bent with a worrying creak.

"Doggy!" the dead woman shrieked with delight, pointing. "Dog doggy. Doggy. Play."

Hazel looked over at her campsite, wondered if it was worth fetching Gilbo's gun. A big .303, it would drop anything worth dropping. As he'd often reminded her after a few beers.

"Play!" the dead woman insisted, reaching upwards as if in benediction. Codger yipped and hauled at his collar till he was bug-eyed, teeth and scrap of tongue dancing along the edge of the gutter.

They were like something out of the old science-fiction movies, like at the picture theatre when Gilbo was courting her. The recently deceased, risen from death and come for the living. But in none of the b-grade horror flicks had the ghouls been like this.

Idiots. Cheerful monsters, who came calling like the Sandlot Kids. When they caught something living, they'd swarm in, babbling and chatting, smearing their rotten fingers all over the poor bugger, slobbering and kissing them.

That was all it took. You'd be dead in an hour, and up and walking by sunset. They didn't need to bite you, not these idiot dead things. They killed you with love, doomed you with a toddler's affection.

Hazel considered their affliction, and decided that she understood them all too well. She had a grudging respect for these lost souls, exasperation rather than anger as they wrecked the place. Turned out it was hard to hate something that loved you back.

The dead woman was caught up in a stream of corpses that poured out of the house. A man who was almost rotted down to bone carried Hazel's toaster. Another an old record. The walking corpses made for the impromptu playground, and the dead woman waved at Hazel.

"Bye!" she called. "Bye doggy!"

Hazel watched the corpses at play, and realised that her distraction worked too well. They clamboured over the swingset, and lined up patiently behind the slippery dip. Normally, they'd have lost interest and moved on by now.

There was a pattern to these visits – gangs of the friendly dead visited all these old holdings at least once a month, and back again on their way to town. She'd seen groups heading north to Darwin, others south and maybe all the way down to Alice.

She picked up the rifle. Grimaced. Set it down by the water container. Codger looked up from his paws, whimpered with something that might have been boredom or frustration.

Only a dozen or so of the idiot dead, but she couldn't bring herself to shoot them. They were dangerous, she reasoned, the way that a snake or a dingo could be dangerous. Just part of their nature, and they couldn't help the way they were put together.

They were dead once, but the rules for death had changed.

Even as she watched the joyful corpses, she found her eyes drawn to the dam. A broken tractor lurked by the water, jerry-rigged with a digging bucket. The metal teeth rested on a bank of cracked earth, mud once.

Across the bank, she'd laid out sheets of tin, weighed them down with cinder blocks. Empty beer bottles, anything that would make noise. The beginnings of a concrete slab; a mixer standing idle, cement bags split and gone bad from neglect. Gravel was scattered everywhere. Cursing and crying, she had quit halfway through, tossing the shovel out into the middle of the dam.

Something buried once was buried good enough.

Next to this, the trunk of a long-dead iron gum, bound with chain. Old iron, red from decades in the weather. The links ran down the trunk, ran across the clay-pan until they ended in a single shackle.

The meat chain.

Hazel took her crossword book out of her back pocket, and attacked the squares with a stub of pencil. There was nothing left to do but put her feet up and wait for the pigs.

# #

Pigroot Flat belonged to Gilbo's dad, until lung cancer ate him inside out. Young Gilbo didn't have anyone else, and so he spent five years in a boy's home down in Adelaide. On his eighteenth birthday he came back, moved into the old shanty. Now Gilbo was gone too, and Hazel supposed that made it her place now.

Ten acres of scrub, an hour's drive west of Katherine. Gilbo had spent twenty years on this block, trying to turn his old man's leavings into cash. He put up a dormitory for the backpackers who never visited, and bought riding horses that grew fat and lazy in their yard.

"We're too far from town," Hazel said to Gilbo, back when she still had hope of a ring on her finger. "Should look into guided tours. A boat on the Gorge. Take tourists pig shooting."

Gilbo did none of these things. He drank, broke Hazel with his words, then his fists. Introduced her to the meat chain.

# #

That old fear tickled through her belly. Hazel bit at her nails as the sun drifted through the scrub, watched as her dead visitors organized a simple ball-game.

She gave up on the crossword. Opening a tin of dog-food for Codger, she heard grunting, the thump of many feet, an excited squeal that echoed through the bush. Codger danced about on the roof, torn between his dinner and the sudden stink of pig.

They came pouring out of the bush, a big hunting pack. Razorbacks with nasty tusks, their fat sows bouncing along behind them. Piglets jumped around, struggling to keep up.

The end of the world meant nothing but good times and fine dining to these residents of the Northern Territory. Hazel watched as the pigs bolted through the playground, knocking the dead over. They squealed and squabbled amongst themselves, stripping the rotten meat from still twitching skeletons. Whatever fear they'd had of people was long gone.

The dead girl had enough sense to climb the slippery dip, but a young boar clambered after her, snapping and slavering. It reached her foot, and tore it loose. Three more pigs joined the first, fighting to get at the freshest corpse.

Hazel wasn't scared of the idiot dead, and the pigs were just a fact of life around here. But that old anxiety still danced around in Hazel, until her gut felt like it was full of bitter coffee. Gilbo taught this feeling to her, even as he showed her how to take it away. There was a process to follow, but now the bloody pigs were ruining things.

Fear. Amplified by the simple fact that she was completely alone. Last woman standing. She trembled all over, moved her dry lips in a silent litany.

Meat chain.

It had to be now. The rules had changed, but it was do this, or lose her mind.

"You bloody well leave her alone," Hazel muttered. She rested the .303 on an old esky, lining up the sights on the next leaping pig.

"Keep away from her."

A thunderous crack, and then the first pig ran in a confused circle, bleeding and screaming. Codger barked fit to burst, as Hazel sent round after round into the pack. Finally they fled, some dragging their rotten meals back into the bush.

She let Codger off the chain, and the pig-dog fought out of her hands, leapt off the roof with no hesitation. He was off, barking and bounding through the scrub like madness on legs.

Gripping the gutter, Hazel lowered herself down, dropping almost a metre to the ground. Wincing, she limped across the yard. The last light of dusk painted the carnage in shades of grey.

The idiot dead never stood a chance. Rotten meat lay strewn across the yard, guts and bones spread wide by the feral pigs. Some of the bodies were still twitching and trying to move. Hazel coughed up a little vomit into her mouth, fought the rest back down. This is not the time to lose it, love.

A razorback lay slumped across the slippery dip. Its life-blood ran down the plastic chute, pooling at the bottom. A fat pig, well-fed and fresh, but Hazel wasn't game enough to eat it. Who knew what the zombie-meat did to its insides? She missed bacon and pork chops, but it wasn't worth the risk.

"Piggy?" the forlorn voice came. Still perched at the top of the slippery dip, the dead woman looked down at Hazel with some confusion.

"Piggy's gone," she replied, and crooked a finger. "Come on, love. We can play now if you want."

The dead woman smiled then, lips sliding across a slimy jag of teeth. She slid awkwardly down the slide, clambering across the barrel chest of the dead pig. Hazel moved backwards, beckoned. The dead woman fell to the ground, tried to rise on the shattered bone where her leg ended now.

"It's okay," Hazel said, making sure to stay clear of those reaching hands. Even in the gloom, she could see the rapture in the corpse's face, the joy of friendship, even love. The dead woman rose, crawled forward when walking failed her.

"We can be friends now," Hazel called out, and meant it. "Let's play over here."

She led the dead woman on, past the house. There was a toolshed by the silent dormitory, and Hazel reached into the gloom, found the old school bag just inside the door. Dusty now, wreathed in cobwebs. A familiar weight, and it felt good.

"Keep coming," she said.

Codger came back from his fruitless pursuit of the pigs, trotting through the yard with a human femur in his mouth. When he spotted the dead woman crawling towards his mistress, he dropped the bone, hackles rising. Lips slid away from bared fangs, and a snarl came from deep down in his chest.

"Leave off!" Hazel shouted. When Codger began growling and edging closer, she fetched up a stone and skipped it across the dust. The dog shied away from the bouncing rock. Fetching up the bone, Codger retreated underneath the house pilings, sulking and whining.

"Idiot dog," Hazel said, shuffling backwards. The dead girl crawled closer, beaming, reaching for Hazel's feet almost shyly. This close, the mortal stink almost overcame her. Hazel fought the urge to vomit.

"Play?"

"Over here."

Slow backwards shuffle, ever aware of the disease on those lips, knowing that a single scratch would doom her. She'd fought off this moment as long as she could, held those old feelings at bay.

There were ways to cope with life on Pigroot Flat.

Living woman and dead obscenity inched across the dusty yard, past the four-wheel drive, around the brooding hulk of the tractor. Hazel led the monster towards the dam, beckoning her on.

"You're beautiful. Pretty girl," Hazel said, wondering who she was trying to convince. The dead woman preened at the compliment, the slimy crack of her mouth turned up at the corners.

"Pretty," the cadaver agreed.

"This way," Hazel said with false cheer, beckoning as if to a puppy. She felt her boots crunch into gravel, lead the dead woman across the corrugated iron. Clattering across the iron, the corpse wheezed with excitement, moving faster now.

"Come and play, pretty girl," Hazel said, kneeling in the cracked clay. Behind her, thousands of mosquitos made an airfield on the dam water, dancing on the murky film. On the water's edge, the cracked clay gave way to pig shit and algae. She wouldn't let an animal drink from it, but that was the point of the whole thing, an element of Gilbo's infamous script.

Hazel tensed, held ready. Opening the school bag, she tipped out her tools, checked that everything was there. She'd need to be quick.

When bruise-coloured fingers brushed against her boots, Hazel ran around the iron gum. With reflexes born of farm-life, she snatched up the rusting snake that was the meat chain. Dove upon the dead woman like a calf in need of hog-tying.

She clapped the shackle around the corpse's ankle, just above its remaining foot. Even as it turned and grabbed at her, screaming like a terrified toddler, Hazel dodged the reaching hands. She pushed it face first into the clay, knelt in the small of the corpse's back. Something gave beneath her with a sickening crack. Hazel's whole world seemed like a miasma of rot and flies.

In seconds she had the muzzle on. A wire frame, much like what the greyhounds wore. Next came the oven mitts, strapped onto the corpse's hands with duct tape.

"Yes, that's it," Hazel exulted, looking down on her handywork. A moment later she staggered over to the dam, and vomited up everything she'd ever eaten.

# #

Gilbo vanished for a week once, took the house-keeping money and the only car that worked. He came back in the middle of the night, and Hazel woke to a furious beating. He was blind drunk, stank of booze and vomit. She begged, pleaded, crawled across the bed. He hauled her in with no effort, dragged her out of bed by an ankle. Boxed her almost into that sweet darkness.

From a dim place in her mind, she noted how he broke her nose, cracked a rib, and snapped several of her teeth. She'd been beaten before, but never this bad. He's going to kill me.

"It's time, bitch!" he shouted. Gilbo carried her out of the house, across the yard. Towards the dam, the iron gum stump, the old chain that he refused to speak of. She wriggled and fought, but Gilbo was built like a brick shithouse.

He threw her to the ground, kicked her in the gut for good measure. Winded, she tried to crawl away, tried to call for help. Stupid. Even if she had an air-raid siren, the neighbours wouldn't hear. Gilbo knelt on her back, an implacable force. Something fastened around her ankle, a tight pinch.

Next came a muzzle, and she cried out as the steel jammed against her broken face. He placed something around each hand, binding it up tight with tape.

Then Gilbo left her alone, to sob and shake in the dark.

Terror wouldn't let Hazel sleep. She saw the sun rise over the dam as she shivered in her dirty nightie. The house was silent and still, and she strained her ears, heard Gilbo's snoring.

Every movement brought a wave of pain. Hazel worked herself up to a sitting position, tried to tear off the tape. She couldn't do anything with the mittens on, and the muzzle prevented her from tearing at the tape with her teeth.

Heart sinking, she examined the shackle, noted how the rough metal already wore at her skin. The iron was weathered but strong, almost a half-inch thick. Even if she had a hammer and chisel, Hazel doubted she could hack through this. The other end of the chain fed through a bracket, hammered deep into the tree.

Planting both feet against the stump, Hazel strained, pulled the chain as hard as she could. After several minutes, she slumped to the ground, defeated. She wouldn't be leaving until Gilbo unlocked it. Or killed her.

The sun climbed into the sky, and burnt the last of the night chill. Hazel started to roast in the sun, and by the time noon rolled around, she was burnt from tip to toe. Gilbo snored through the day. The sweat poured out of Hazel, and she circled the stump, trying to hide in a sliver of shade.

She licked her lips, wincing as her dried tongue danced across the skin Gilbo had split with his fists. Her whole mouth and throat were as dry as leather, and she ached with thirst.

When he'd had a skinful, Gilbo was known to sleep till dusk. Hazel realized that she might die of thirst before he bothered to see to her.

Crawling across the clay, Hazel inched towards the old dam. Her hands slid around in the greasy pig shit, but she picked herself up, reached towards the foul water.

A tug at her ankle. She looked back to see the chain at full stretch. The water's edge was just beyond her reach. She strained, winced as the shackle rubbed her ankle raw.

Curled around the stump and dozing, Hazel was later woken by the slam of the screen door. She looked up in terror as Gilbo stepped off the porch, a dusty old school bag in one hand.

"Richie, please," she whimpered, daring to use his first name. He crossed the yard like a man with a purpose, and Hazel couldn't remember the last time she'd seen him stand so tall.

He looked at her indifferently, all the anger of last night gone. This dead stare was far more terrifying than the drunken rage, and she trembled, tried to back away from this stranger.

"This is the meat chain," he told her, placing the school bag on the ground. KATHERINE AREA SCHOOL, the faded old legend read. The leather straps were busted, and a canvas flap hung loose. He flipped it open, and Hazel moaned with fear.

Knives. A hacksaw. Hammers and even an old hand-drill.

"My great grand-dad brought this over from Mount Isa," he said, rattling the chain idly. "He had a claim there, ran a thousand head of sheep. Black fellas ran wild over there once, killing stock, spearing folks in their huts."

He tested a big knife against his thumb, found the edge wanting. Even as Hazel moved her lips in a silent plea, Gilbo worked a whet-stone over the blade.

"An army of savages, real cowboys and Indians stuff. Their land, and they fought for it tooth and nail. So, my great grand-dad lost one sheep too many, and saw red. Fixed this here chain into a stump, much like this one. Went out on his horse, sent a mob of blacks running. Killed three or four, dragged an old woman back by the hair."

Tested the edge, drew blood. Smiled, but it was just a quick twitch of the lips, his eyes set in a cold lizard stare.

"Kept her in the chain for a week, shot every black face that came to save her. In the end her mob were just trying to bring food and water, but he shot "em just the same."

He ran the blade along her leg, little steel kisses that parted her skin, sent a trickle of blood into the red clay. She screamed, and her curses echoed through the lonely scrub.

"Turns out the meat chain was good fun. Character building. This here is a family heirloom. I've worn it too, and now it's your turn."

Gilbo brought her into the family tradition, a long and bloody lesson. He did not kill her that day, or the next. He promised that one day she would die in the meat chain, but only when she begged him for it, and only when he had a kid to pass this dark legacy onto.

Eventually Hazel agreed to these conditions, and she meant it too. Then he let her go. The visible wounds healed in time, and Gilbo never laid a hand on her from that day.

He had another outlet.

Hazel found a new role as Gilbo's apprentice. Lost waifs, hitchhikers and tourists, they all took a turn in the meat chain. Hazel was part lure, part caddy, and she handed over the knives, watched happily as her man carved up the women she'd befriended.

One night, Hazel put sleeping pills in Gilbo's curried prawns, concerned that he was going about things wrong. Quite simply, he didn't love them. Everything Gilbo did to the girls in the meat-chain was hateful, an act of violence, dominance. It was his legacy, and he didn't even understand it.

The true secret of the meat-chain was intimacy, a love that transcended all common sense. She saw glimmers of it, lurking around her man's shoulders as he went to work.

Even as the life rattled out of them, the girls always loved him. Friendship stripped down to a bare honesty, even as their skin parted from flesh and their flesh parted from bone. They shared confidences with their hulking killer, more than even Stockholm's Syndrome could explain.

These girls needed to be treated properly. With respect.

Gilbo woke in the meat chain, and died slowly. Hazel did her best to make him proud. About a week later she put him in the ground with all the others, and took over the family business.

Beautiful backpackers from Europe, leggy blondes with light smiles. They came to stay at her block, lured by the cheap rates. Green-friendly tours, run by a female owner-operator. A safe destination. It was hardly a success, but she got by.

Some came alone or in twos, and these were the tourists she sometimes introduced to the meat chain. Over days she befriended them, learnt their innermost secrets. They grew to love her, as she loved them, even as she ran Gilbo's tools over their bodies.

She wasn't deaf, knew that the tourists giggled at her crooked nose, her gappy smile. Teased her in their Nordic tongues, even as the four-wheel drive bounced their pert bodies around. Time was not kind to Hazel's looks, and no-one kissed her anymore. Still, she gave these girls new kisses, in all the places that the handsome men kissed them.

Hazel's circle of friends grew year by year. In the times that the chain was empty, she'd sit by the dam, reliving these brief friendships. She remembered them fondly, and mourned them with kindness.

Then one day, the world ended. New friends were hard to come by.

# #

"This is the meat chain," Hazel told the dead girl. The corpse smiled up at her, reaching for her with mitten hands. She brushed aside the reaching hands, continued with the script.

"Chain," the dead woman echoed.

Apparently Gilbo's dad introduced the oven-mitts into the ritual; this was about the time that law-men took to scraping dead women's fingernails, to see who they scratched at in their last moments. Hazel figured a mass grave was damning enough, but praised her dead father-in-law today. The resurrected girl could do little to infect her.

Hazel wore a butcher's apron, rubber gloves that reached almost to her elbows. A bandana, soaked in vinegar to keep out the stink, and thick safety goggles from the shed. No sense risking a bit of spit or blood landing in her eyes.

She ran through the history of the chain, told her new friend all about her part in its legacy. She'd always found the initial begging and screaming a little annoying, so it was a pleasant surprise that the dead woman went along so cheerfully. She even echoed the words as best she could, and Hazel had never laughed so much.

But then it all went wrong. The woman happily let her peel off the rotten skin, take off layer after layer of meat. But the pain was missing. There was no communion to this, no intimacy. The dead woman did nothing but gurgle happily, even after Hazel took her slimy tongue out by the roots.

"It doesn't work!" Hazel cried. Wielding knife and saw, she broke the woman down into her individual parts, left with a neat stack of rank meat that continued to writhe. Normally this was a meditative time, a goodbye to a new friend. Hazel was shaken to the core, and hacked away messily. She'd never been lonelier, or more frustrated.

Empty.

Safe or not, it was time to leave Pigroot Flat.

She left the dead woman by the side of the dam. The stack of severed limbs continued to twitch and shiver. When Hazel limped back to the house, an arm rolled onto the ground, kept rolling until it was thrashing around in the dam.

Only then did Codger deem it safe enough to come out of hiding. He was canny enough to know that the pigs would be back, and they'd make short work of all that meat. He stole across the yard, wary of his mistress. In seconds he was back under the verandah, dragging the dead woman's head by a hank of hair. Her jaw still worked, and the remaining eye regarded the half-starved dog with love.

"Doggy," she mouthed, her blue lips curving up into a radiant smile.

# #

Hazel spent a long time by the dam, bidding her friends goodbye. She made her final peace with Gilbo, and left Pigroot Flat, left her history slumbering beneath the earth. Codger trotted behind her but she threw stones and curses, drove him into the scrub. The dog had tasted people flesh now, would probably turn on her if she got too weak.

The township of Katherine was an open-aired graveyard, full of playful corpses. They splashed around in the Gorge, others wheezing rotten laughter as they kicked the footy. One even had a fishing line out, the hook dangling a good foot above the water.

The cars all sat on flats, batteries long dead. Gilbo might have got one working, but Hazel was no bush mechanic. Snatching a bicycle from a dead man's hands, she ignored the invitations to play, dodged their skeletal fingers.

She pointed the bicycle down the cracked highway, and rode.

Every place was the same. The apocalypse had rolled over every farmhouse, every roadhouse, every sheep station and shit-shack. Numb, burnt to leather by the sun, Hazel passed through Tennant Creek, Davenport, Alice Springs. The dead, red heart of Australia.

By now the idiot dead were little more than skeletons in the sun, sinew holding bones together, skin drawn taut. They waved enthusiastically, shuffling after her bicycle.

On the day she saw the crude fort, she was walking like a dead thing herself. The chain on her bicycle had snapped, but she pushed it mindlessly, useless pedals clicking, busted tire dragging. An enclave, set almost a mile from the highway. Behind the barricades, a stand of trees. Perhaps a waterhole?

The gate opened. Figures rushed towards her. Hazel dropped the bicycle to the red earth, and shook with silent sobs.

People embraced her. Someone pressed a water bottle against her lips, and she gulped it gratefully, water running down her filthy face.

They led her into their compound, and she gazed around in wonder. Buildings, green gardens, livestock. Kids, playing in the street.

People, dozens of people.

The first she'd seen in years.

They closed the gate behind her, and Hazel clutched the old schoolbag close, the one marked KATHERINE AREA SCHOOL. Dangling from the open canvas flap, a loop of rusty old chain.

"You're amongst friends now," someone said to her, and she smiled.

# The House of Nameless

The date had been going well, all things considered. No girl in her right mind ever thought she would sit down to dinner at a minotaur's house, but then again no-one knew that Raoul could cook up a storm.

"I've been saving this for a special occasion," he said, bumping open the kitchen door with his broad hip. He had a freshly baked pavlova resting across the palm of one broad hand, his free hand proffering a bottle of Sauternes that was pinched between his enormous thumb and forefinger.

He stopped short. The girl was sitting rigid in her seat, gripping the edge of the table and trembling. There was a stranger in his house, standing right behind her, resting his hands upon shoulders made bare by her evening dress.

He was a patch of murk and drab, and Raoul found it difficult to look directly at him. His eyes seemed to slide off the intruder's shape, as if he were too greasy to hold light and form.

Raoul growled. His horns were sharp enough to pierce an engine block, but he hesitated. There were measures in place to keep weak minds out of this house, and this intruder had bypassed them all.

The man stank of rot, and was sniffing at the girl's scalp, long and lovingly. The intruder was blurred around the edges, not a definite shape so much as a smudge. He moved in jerky fits and starts until he stood before Raoul.

"I knew you, back in the One-Way-World," the stranger said. "You were Mithras then."

"Get out of my house," Raoul said. "Now."

"I will undo all of your works," the man said, turning sideways and inside out till he was gone.

Raoul hushed his weeping date. He gently licked her forehead with his broad flat tongue, massaging the incident out of her mind. The minotaur sent the blank-faced girl safely home, realising with some embarrassment that he had already forgotten her name.

# #

He checked and refastened every door, even the basement door that led out into the cold vacuum of space. With the girl gone he let the subterfuge drop, and the true nature of his domicile asserted itself.

Gone were the chandeliers, the immaculate mosaic flooring, the tapestries and hangings. His rats-nest of an apartment emerged, complete with flaking stacks of periodicals, weight sets, and mismatched furniture that had started to buckle beneath his weight.

The only true thing to appear in Raoul's spiderweb had been Picasso's Minotaur Kneeling Over Sleeping Girl. An original, and the lurid drawing had made his date a little nervous, but ultimately curious. He thought it only fair to give her some hint of what his true intentions were, and it was an ice-breaker if nothing else.

"You looted this," she had said, arching an eyebrow. She touched his arm as she took in the image of the virile bull-man, lurking over the innocent girl, waiting. The date had been going very well, before something with the power to break through his safeguards had appeared in his house.

Raoul didn't believe in phones, but he had a battered old note-pad on the counter, propped up against a grimy kettle. It had an elaborate sketch in ballpoint on the cardboard backing, a puppy curled up and sleeping.

If someone phoned him, their words appeared on the topmost page. Raoul found that he preferred to wander around in his squalor and think for half-an-hour or more of what to say, then to write a suitable reply underneath the words of his caller.

This came over on the phone as if he had said the words himself, and the pacing of his speech seemed quite normal. The minotaur liked having the advantage of hours of thought, a chance to reference his various books, or the means to outthink his various lady-friends if one of them happened to call and he was with someone else.

Specifically, he'd invented the device to deal with Lune.

"Hello, it's me," he wrote.

"You'd best be scribbling out an apology," her words appearing in her own neat hand. "I know you just had a visitor."

Long minutes of thought. He knew she was cunning enough to keep eyes on him, jealous enough to wish him harm. Powerful enough to deliver it.

"I had more than a visitor. Someone broke into my house."

"Into your house?" came the writing, cramped together in an excited scrawl. "You've gone to great efforts to keep everyone out. Including me."

"Please, Lune. This man, this intruder, he stank of the old ways. Aren't you concerned?"

"If it's to do with the One-Way-World, I suggest you go see Nameless. I'm done talking."

Her final sentence underlined itself several times, indicating that Lune had terminated their conversation with extreme prejudice.

# #

Raoul visited the house of Nameless. In truth it was the echo of his family home, a sagging mansion full of ghosts and sour days. There was a beach and a caravan park below the cliffs, but these places and the happy sounds that floated up from them were only there to torment Nameless.

"Come in," he told Raoul. The minotaur stepped over the muscle-bound ginger tom that was sometimes one cat, sometimes a dozen resting on every surface, snarling. The cat/s were scared of Raoul now, having attacked him only the once.

They went through the kitchen, past the dining table set with plastic place-mats for a family that would never eat together again. There was room after room full of memories and photographs, and the sunlight drifting through the windows was pale. It was always dusk here, and Nameless would not turn on the lights.

"Up here," Nameless said, and they climbed the stair. There was an old child gate at the bottom, busted now. Up and up, winding, and there were more floors than it looked from outside. They climbed until Raoul snarled impatiently and terrified Nameless into giving him the top floor, the little den of Father.

"I've got this video," Nameless said, and hands shaking he slipped the cartridge out of the paper case. "THE FUNNY TAPE!" the label read, and he fed it into the guts of a big chunky VCR.

They sat on the dusty couch, the minotaur and the little nothing-man. There was a photo of his family on top of the TV, and everyone but Nameless had their backs turned to the camera.

The tape started, and it showed a young Nameless, back when he had name and life and love. He frolicked on the beach with friends, turning cartwheels to impress the girls.

"Is this how you waste your days?" Raoul asked, knowing the answer. He could taste it in the air, the funk of a house where each day was a hundred years of dusk and loneliness.

"There's more," Nameless mumbled, but stopped the video, cheeks flushing.

"So, given eternity, you would sit here and stew over your misspent youth," Raoul said. "Enough. I would have your thoughts on a matter."

Nameless ejected the tape, reverently sliding it into its case. He rested it on the coffee table, lined it up within its boundary of dust.

"I had a visitor, in my house," Raoul said. "Uninvited."

"In your house?" Nameless pursed his lips, frowned. "That's tricky."

"Stank of the Old Ways, and that from a man who was hardly there. He spoke of the One-Way-World."

"Ah." Nameless drifted into a powerful memory, and Raoul was caught on the edges of this thought, almost drawn into the reverie. The minotaur stood up and with one hand flipped the sofa, knocking Nameless onto his back.

"Why?" the man said, winded. He got up, blubbering and clutching at Raoul's thick furry legs.

"There's enough of the One-Way-World in your head to cause trouble," Raoul said.

"I've been good," Nameless whined.

"You've dragged more than one fool into that mind of yours. Now tell me what you know."

"The man. That blurry, secret man," Nameless whispered. "I thought of him today, when I was making a sandwich," and Raoul knew he was lying, there was never a scrap of food to be found in this house.

"The truth, NOW," Raoul said, and put enough god into it that the knick-knacks on the windowsill bounced around and the window shook. "Or I will turn you out and close this house to you."

"I was reading my high-school yearbooks," Nameless said, terrified into truth. "I was reading the names, and when I saw a photo I thought of the man."

"Show me," and Nameless was hauling a carton out of the nearest shadow. It was brimful of curios and memories, a lifetime of hoarding every encounter, every word. There were lovenotes with the folds worn away, the ink nearly read from the page. Scout badges, speeding fines, broken condoms, the whole box and dice.

Nameless produced the yearbooks, and gave a guilty grin.

"Meant no harm by it. Just looking."

"You were trying to find your name," Raoul said. "Try, it's not in there," and surely Nameless must realise that every mention of it was gone. Excised throughout the whole universe, from his birth certificate onwards.

"Show me the photo," and Nameless was flipping through the pages, past the photos of the formal and the signature page. He stopped at a class shot, rows of kids grinning or scowling at the lens. It was Nameless's class.

Nameless got the faintest of connections to Raoul's intruder, and Raoul carefully captured the very edge of this thought. He had a trail now, and tore the page out of the book.

"Finally, you're useful for something. I'll leave you to it," Raoul said, tapping the video case with his massive sausage fingers. Nameless sat still as Raoul left by the front door, moving only when the wake of the minotaur's far-travel had settled.

Sliding the Funny Tape into the machine, Nameless howled. Raoul had replaced his precious memories with an aerobics programme, and an infomercial for a fruit juicer.

# #

Raoul appeared on the deck of The Cheerful Misogynist. The ship was the size of a city, a party boat mounted on wheels and rollers and treads. It was driven by sail, fans, balloons and oars, and rumour had it that a FTL drive could be found deep in its innards.

There was a girl here, Imogen, under his protection.

As could be expected from his entrance, there was a fuss. The sudden appearance of a minotaur can hardly factor into the average fetish, and most of the debauchery stopped wherever he passed.

There wasn't a crew as such, but there were those who liked to think they served the ship, hauling on ropes and scrubbing at the ancient decking when someone yelled at them. The Captain himself appeared, straightening his epaulettes and setting his cap level.

"Milord," he said, offering a lazy salute. "Captain Aurora Luca, if you please."

He wasn't in charge the last time Raoul visited, but the position seemed to be up for grabs whenever the predecessor got bored with it.

"I seek my ward," Raoul said, and for a moment Captain Luca was confused. But the ship itself filled him in and understanding dawned in his eyes.

"Young Imogen," he said, fingering his salt-and-pepper beard. "She's belowdecks, and well cared for."

"I would see her," the minotaur told the man, who shrugged, leading him to a hatch. It was a tight squeeze but the minotaur climbed down the ladder, following the Captain along a cramped passage. When his horns scraped the ceiling beams the ship grudgingly grew to a more reasonable dimension.

"Not welcome, Raoul," Luca said suddenly, now as the voice of the ship. "Do your business and go."

They passed a thousand fantasies, every kind of fetish and whim, hearing the low sobs of those who were meant to cry. Raoul had spent his mandatory season on board The Cheerful Misogynist and had no wish to open any of these doors.

Luca led him into an elevator, the clanky old kind with levers and a sliding cage door. After a gut-twisting descent, the door opened onto the Hieronymous Bosch wing, acre upon acre of purgatory. There were other horned beasts here, and he was barely noticed. Luca took them through the yawning mouth of a fat slavering worm.

After a moment of darkness and intense heat, they were climbing a set of stone steps. There was a crude wooden door, and Imogen was behind it.

"Raoul," she said, throwing her arms around the minotaur's waist. She was filthy, her hair matted into thick dreadlocks. "I want to leave this horrible place."

Raoul looked down at Captain Luca, who held up his hands, shrugged.

"She didn't like our games, didn't want to join in," he said. "Her greatest desire was to be left alone, we only gave her what she wanted."

They'd been keeping her in solitary confinement, halfway between a monk's cell and an oubliette. There was a rotten straw pallet with one ragged blanket, and a toilet bucket tipped over in the far corner. They'd nailed a banner to the damp stone wall, higher than she can reach. It read SUIT YOURSELF, YOU STUCK-UP BITCH.

"I'm not happy," Raoul rumbled. "Our agreement was quite clear."

"Keep her safe," Luca said, speaking as the ship. "Keep her hidden from her old lover. That is all."

"Splitter of hairs," Raoul said. "You have wronged me. The girl did not want this."

"You forget, Raoul," said the ship through the man. "Your precious free will does not apply onboard us. We generate our own laws here."

"I'm leaving with the girl. Be glad I take this no further."

"Of course. Still, there is the – simple matter – of our bargain," Luca's lips moved. "You owe us, little cow-god. We want your horns."

Luca blocked the doorway. He was no threat on his own, but Raoul could feel the presence of the ship in him, the weight of centuries of malice. True, he himself still had some power here, but would it be enough?

"You want these?" Raoul said, reaching up and touching the tips of his horns. Luca nodded for yes.

"A deal is a deal," and then the minotaur was upon Luca, goring him and flinging him about like a floppy toy. Imogen was screaming at him, telling him to stop, but he had the rage in him. He cast the broken man to the floor and became all feet and fists, before sense returned, the knowing that the ship would now do its best to destroy them. He heard the stones moving, felt the ship flexing and ready to bear down upon them.

"Get the Captain's hat," he ordered the terrified girl, and the stone wall opened before his horns as if it were paper. They were through and running, even as her prison became fire and wrath and unmaking.

Raoul snatched Imogen under one arm, the better to charge through the walls. The ship was squeezing like a fist, trying to trap them, but Raoul outpaced the changes, ran through desert and castle and future metropolis. Perverts scattered in terror from the roaring bull-man.

Finally they reached the hull, a curving mountain of fitted planks that stretched upwards into a false sky. The hull didn't give for Raoul on the first go, so he set Imogen down on the floor. Taking a few steps back, he charged at the wall, his horns lodging deep. Gouging and twisting he pierced all the way through, till a tiny hole let the daylight inside. Thrusting both hands into the hole, the minotaur stretched out the edges like clay. It was a great wound in the belly of the ship, one that wouldn't mend easily.

"Be ready!" he told Imogen, sliding his bulk through the tear. He was out and hit the ground with bone-breaking speed, rolling to one side as an enormous wheel missed him by inches.

The city-ship was powering along at a terrifying rate, crushing a suburb into rubble. Raoul kept pace and snatched the plummeting Imogen before she could break upon the ground. A hundred hatches opened along the side of The Cheerful Misogynist and there was a barrage of cannons, even a trebuchet swinging its great lazy arm. Death rained all around them.

The minotaur veered from the ship's destructive path, legs burning as he cleared white-picket fences and vaulted over cars in drive-ways. When Raoul escaped the shadow of the looming boat he entered far-travel, charting an impossible distance.

# #

"I made a mistake," Raoul said. "It was wrong to leave you with the ship."

They were standing in his squalid living room, both covered in dust and scratches. Raoul was panting like his lungs were about to pop.

"You killed him," Imogen whispered, shaking. "You killed Luca."

"Hush, love." Raoul held her gently, aware that his furry hands were caked with the Captain's blood. "It takes a great deal of effort to kill someone these days. I doubt that he is dead."

He steered her over to the formica dining table, sat her down on a battered art deco chair. She wouldn't look at him, so he busied himself with boiling water on the gas-ring.

"I don't understand you, Raoul," Imogen finally said. "There's rumours about you, about what you are. Yet you choose to live here."

He knew it was a pig-sty. He liked the piles of dirty dishes, the stacks of mouldy books lining the walls. He went to great pains to collect this clutter and arrange it just so.

"It really smells in here," she emphasised, and the minotaur smiled. He put a warm cup of instant coffee on the table, next to Captain Luca's hat.

"We are defined by our ephemera," he said. "Without clutter and junk, we aren't really alive."

"Raoul, this place is a disaster. At least Nameless has an excuse for hoarding rubbish." She played with the hat, and went to put it on her head.

"Don't," Raoul warned. "Do not put that on."

"Why not?"

"Because you will become the Captain of The Cheerful Misogynist, and you will bring that murderous boat into my house."

Raoul found an empty shoe-box somewhere under all the junk, and jammed the hat into it. He wrapped it up with an entire roll of sticky tape and tied an extension cord around the whole mess. It went deep into his pocket.

"Why did you come for me? I thought you'd arranged to hide me on the boat for exactly one century. What's going on, Raoul?"

"I need you, Imogen. Not for that," he snorted as she rolled her eyes. "I need your help with something."

He pulled the rumpled year-book page out of his pocket, flattened it out in front of her. He pointed at the class photo.

"One of these people invaded my home. Found where it was for starters, and got past everything I've thought of to keep people out. No doubting in my mind, he knows the old ways."

"Hmm." Imogen stared at the photo. With free will restored she'd already changed her hair from ratty to natty, and her outfit flickered between a slinky dress and a power-suit.

"You have to try harder," Raoul said, and gently licking her forehead he passed over the thread of thought that he took from Nameless. "You were one of the last ones to leave the One-Way-World. Can you feel anything in this photo?"

"Quick, gimme a pen," she said, finally settling for khaki pants, Docs and a Rolling Stones t-shirt. She drew a biro outline around one of the boys.

"Oh. It's just Nameless," she said.

"As always, he thinks of nothing but himself, his past. What a waste of time."

# #

There was a letter in the mail-box, marked "RAOUL MITHRAS". The envelope was marked "card only", and Raoul sniffed it cautiously. Deciding it was safe he slit it open with a thumbnail.

"SHH, IT'S A SPEAKEASY!" the card cried out loud, a cut-out in the shape of a wine barrel. A muted jazz riot could be heard blasting out of the card when he opened it. Imogen could see the reflections of a turning mirror ball on the minotaur's face.

""You and a friend are invited to Madam Lune's top secret party,"" Raoul read. ""Don't tell the law.""

"Fun!" Imogen said.

"I don't know. Lune and I are having – problems."

"What have you done now?" Imogen said, exasperated. Raoul scowled but didn't answer.

"I leave you alone for five minutes. Sheesh. Well, I'm going. I've been stuck on that boat for ages."

"This is a bad idea," Raoul rumbled, but he stepped into a zoot suit, with a trilby that sat nicely in between his horns. Imogen wolf-whistled.

"You look snappy."

She dreamt up a flapper outfit, with her make-up caked on and a bob hair-cut to match her laddish physique. She had a cigarette holder and a fur stole.

"Well aren't we the cat's pyjamas?" she purred, and they leapt into the card.

Lune was famous for her parties. The last one she threw was the Egyptian Extravaganza, and it went for two hundred years. The Cheerful Misogynist turned up and forced its passengers to build her a scale model of the Great Pyramid. By hand.

This one was an amazing replica of a speakeasy, if the entire city of prohibition-era Chicago had been a boozy party held openly. It was an art deco nightmare, and Raoul shook his head at Lune's twisted take on history. There was an army of federal agents splitting barrels of moonshine over the gutters, but only so that the guests could dip their cups into a ready supply of booze.

"Let's boogie," Raoul said, over the music of the nearest big band. They did the Lindy Hop, the Bunny Hug, the Charleston. For a man-bull hybrid, Raoul was light on his feet and Imogen floated around him like a butterfly.

"Raoul! Darling!" and Lune was there, draped all over the surprised minotaur. Even though she was Aphrodite and Gaia and everything else femme, Lune managed to look cheap. She had too many feather boas and a carafe of gin clenched in one hand, with one of her stockings unstuck and sagging around her ankle. She bumped Imogen aside, covering Raoul's snout with sloppy kisses.

"Lune, it's good to see you," he lied, gently peeling her off. "You remember my ward, Imogen?"

"Not really," she said, turning from Imogen's death-stare. "So, who was your visitor?"

"No-one. A friend," Raoul started, but Lune laughed, a short sharp bark. There was something of her Durga aspect in the sound and he knew he needed to tread carefully. For all their sakes.

"Bullshit from the bullman. Here I thought you were a gentleman. No, I've had to invent a chevalier, all on my ownsome."

Lune stuck two fingers in her mouth and let rip with a world-shaking whistle, so loud that her costumed guests clutched their heads in pain. A man came trotting to her side, and for a moment Raoul tensed up, nostrils flaring. He could swear that the man had a blurry face, until he realised that the man has no face at all. In fact it was a mannequin given motion, with a judge's wig sliding around on its head. She'd dressed it in robes befitting the judiciary, and Raoul understood the irony. The only guest likely enough to obey the prohibition should symbolise the "law".

"This is King James," Lune said. "Say hello."

"Open your hearts to us," the dummy said, in a rumbling baritone. Where its mouth should be, the moulded lips tried to move. "We have wronged no one; we have corrupted no one, we have cheated no one."

"Paul's Second Letter to the Corinthians," Lune said, a drunk's grin plastered across her face. "I made him and he always knows what to say."

"It's madness is what it is," Imogen said. "Don't tell me you fed a bloody Bible into that thing."

"Let us walk honestly," King James said, "as in the day – not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife or envying."

"Well, he's got your measure," Raoul said. "Maybe you should have fed it some Henry Miller or something."

Everything shifted, and Raoul was knocked onto his side. A couple of the faux buildings toppled, and screaming and terror from those who shouldn't fear anything.

It was the blurry man. He'd busted into Lune's party, taking gate-crashing to a new level. He was walking towards Raoul, then running, and with every step great cracks opened in Lune's pocket-world. People were falling into the holes and Raoul knew that they would fall forever.

"Foul little cow," the blur yelled, and they met with a crash, grappling and rolling through the wreckage. Raoul was strong even back in the One-Way-World, but this stranger matched him. A blurry hand gripped one horn, shaking his head back and forth till he feared his mighty neck would snap.

Then the intruder gasped and froze up with pain, so Raoul picked him up, threw him as far as he could. It felt like he was hurling a mountain. The blurry man landed just shy of a nothing-hole, curled up and screaming. A bright silver arrow pierced his side.

Lune wore her Diana aspect and stood as tall as a tree, her bow held steady. She was pulling back on the second arrow when the man made a run for it.

"Where's your bloody invite?" she laughed, but her joviality was short-lived when the man slipped through the only door and took it with him.

# #

"We've got to get out of here," Lune said, and Imogen mimicked her silently. Like everyone else they were crowded to the very edge of the pocket-world; everything in the middle being eaten up by the spreading doughnut-hole of nothing. Every minute or so another building collapsed, and the roads and sidewalks were being drawn in like strands of spaghetti.

"Well, this is some party," Raoul said, and got grief from all directions. "What?"

Lune was shifting in between Diana and Durga aspects, which had the minotaur quite nervous. She even had a bit of Bast going on, and her cat tail flicked angrily underneath her chiffon dress.

"All I'm saying is that it's always a bad idea to suspend free will." Raoul raised his hands, tempting fate.

"It was for authenticity," Lune sulked. "I didn't want people changing into robots and dragons when they got bored."

She was the only one who could change in any way, but all she could do was flick through her aspects, impotent and furious. Everyone else was stuck in their period clothing, and there was no reaching outside.

Lune padded over to the edge of the abyss, to where the blurry man fell. There was a spot of blood there, and kneeling she dabbed at it with Bast's cat tongue.

"I know this one," she said. "Yon gate-crasher has the taint of YHWH upon him."

"Yahweh," Raoul said. He'd brought her up to speed with the events of late. "It makes sense I guess. He had the most to lose from the closing of the One-Way-World."

"Yes." Lune nodded sagely. "He was most bitter, where everyone else was eager."

The pocket-world gave a great shudder. There wasn't much time left before the bottom fell out completely.

"Raoul, the hat," Imogen said. "What about Luca's hat?"

He dug the box out of his pocket, squashed flat and wrapped tightly. It fluttered around in his hands, and he unwrapped in nervously.

The hat made a leap for his head, and he snatched it out of the air. It twitched and shook with frustration, and Raoul was tempted to lob the thing into the nearest pit.

"It's a really, really bad idea to wear this hat," he said. "But if anything can break into this place, it's The Cheerful Misogynist."

"Don't," Imogen said. "I'll do it. It'll hurt you, Raoul." She made to take the peaked cap but he lifted his hands up so high that she couldn't reach.

"No bloody way, josé," he said, taking off his trilby. "You are not going back on that ship and that's final. I'll become the Captain."

"I believe I have a better suggestion, much as it pains me to dream it up," Lune said. "What about King James?"

They all looked at the mannequin, puttering around in the rubble and soliloquising about meekness and inheriting the earth. Raoul jammed the hat onto James" head.

"Remember Sodom and Gomorrah," King James rumbled, and a moment later the prow of The Cheerful Misogynist breached the pocket-world.

# #

"What crime is Nameless being punished for?" Imogen asked. Raoul brought her in close, wary of the passengers and crew. The Cheerful Misogynist was tolerating them as a necessary evil, but only for now.

"We're not exactly sure," the bull-god said. "Nameless hasn't done it yet, and all we know is it's going to be big. Made sense to punish him straight away."

"But you made him a no-one. That's a bit harsh." Imogen went as if to say more but sat down on the deck, spinning a badminton racquet in her hands. She'd shifted into a goth get-up, a nightmare of black and lace.

Aurora Luca was onboard and very much alive, a mess of stitches, bruises and cuts. There was a loop of intestine hanging loose from a wound, and he picked and worried at it. Luca shied away from Raoul, only to continue moaning about "being replaced by a bloody bible-bashing robot."

Captain King James had been thoroughly infested by the ship. The captain's hat had become a tricorne, and he paced the deck in finery that would make Napoleon jealous. He still had no features, but now sported a moulded plastic moustache.

"Render unto Caesar," he said again, pointing at Raoul's horns. The ship just wouldn't give up, even if its only mouthpiece could do nothing but quote the Bible.

"No deal," Raoul said. "You cheated me."

"But one of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear," the ship said through the new Captain, and Raoul remembered the damage he saw on boarding. His previous escape had left a puckering wound in the side of The Cheerful Misogynist that would take years to close.

They'd convinced the boat to take them to the house of Nameless. There was no love lost between Yahweh and this, the most sinful of boats, and it had some score to settle that not even Captain King James would speak of.

The ship grew a trio of great zeppelins, each a rubber moon fastened to the deck by cables thicker than a man. The landscape passed in a blur but the wait was agonising, Raoul deciding that the rumours of the ship possessing an FTL-drive were just that. Still, it was quicker than far-travel.

"Mighty son of Minos, what brings you to this pervert's boat?" Lune purred from beside him. She'd sidled up to the prow where he gripped the railing, and gently entwined his arm. Raoul blinked and then she was holding air, he a few steps away. The best his magick could do while onboard.

"Don't, Lune. We've spoken on this."

"I don't know why I'm surprised. You've broken every heart but hers," Lune said, pointing at Imogen who was now playing quoits with a leather-bound gimp.

"I'm not for mazes or any who build them," Raoul said. "Be my friend if you will, but you'll not bind me."

For a long minute they looked at the yawning distance ahead of them. The Cheerful Misogynist was about to blast through lands which were a mad blend of downtown Chicago, the Katherine Gorge and parts of an arctic tundra.

"How do you posit that YHWH and Nameless are in cahoots?" Lune said.

"Only Nameless kept the Old Ways in his head, hoarded every scrap of the One-Way-World he ever had. Yahweh could use that poor fool as a gateway, a focus."

"We expected war from the Lord of Hosts," Lune said. "I helped to guard the waypoints when we closed the One-Way-World, but while we marked his mob of hang-tailed bullies none of us saw him enter."

"So it's to be Yahweh, again," Raoul said. "We crossed paths long ago, back when he took the Romans from me. From Mithras," he corrected.

"I thought he was meant to be the jealous god," Lune laughed.

"If I were Yahweh, I'd be heading to the house of Nameless. He thinks us trapped in the pocket-world, which gives him time to act."

"Yahweh won't be able to bring it all forth," Lune said, but Raoul could smell her uncertainty, the bitter beginnings of a strong fear. "Without a name, he's nothing to bind it to."

# #

They saw the house of Nameless, slumped across the cliffs like the broken man who lived there. Some time back they caught the far-travel wake of Yahweh, and through a sticky field-glass that King James offered Raoul he could spot the broken god entering the front door.

"Curse your sluggard of a boat!" Raoul said, snapping the glass closed. "Ram it! Bring the whole place down!"

But there was enough vinegar left in the old god to keep the ship at bay. Try as it might, The Cheerful Misogynist was grounded, straining against Yahweh's invisible hand.

Raoul and the others were out, rappelling down ropes or gliding on dreamt-up wings. There were enough holes in Yahweh's fence that they could slip through on foot.

Imogen was back to khaki's and a t-shirt, and for some reason had the remote control for Raoul's entertainment centre in her hand. Lune was passive, reining her aspects in till she needed one of them. Captain King James hobbled along, a plastic fop with nothing but a bunch of scripture in his head.

They were through the open front door, and the cat/s bombarded them, a hundred toms from the size of a kitten to tiger size. They snarled and hissed and scratched until Lune brought forth Bast in all her awful glory. The cat/s disappeared into whatever shadows they could, slipping from the anger of their lady.

"Puss is an Egyptian word," Lune/Bast said. "They've never been allowed to forget me."

It would take hours to search the house, but Yahweh left a sour funk that Raoul could easily follow, a smell that spoke to his delicate nostrils of loss and lust, of spilled seed and dust.

"The stairs of course," and they were up and running, Raoul running his horns along the banister when the house itself sought to delay them. Then they were up in the den, and Raoul saw Nameless kneeling on the ground, his box of momentos tipped over and spread on the floor around him.

"Be wary, Nameless," Raoul said. "Your old master walks in your halls."

Nameless looked up at the minotaur, and Raoul saw the ripple, the signs of a limitless being that has hidden in flesh for too long.

"Mute him!" he instructed Imogen, who thumbed the appropriate button on the remote control, but she was too slow. Yahweh spoke through the mouth of Nameless, and returned his name to him.

The One-Way-World began to slowly erupt from his mouth, an obscene bubble of galaxies and sparkling nebula. Every muscle straining against that impossible weight, Raoul lifted Nameless, a floppy doll with eyes rolling, oblivious to the intrusion.

"Call your boat," he told King James. "Do it!"

He could see the plastic mouth moving, but the words coming out were like treacle, mere sounds against a greater darkness. Raoul was being drawn into the maelstrom, the One-Way-World that was growing by inches.

He dimly noted that Lune brought out the feared Durga aspect, and the trendy flapper outfit peeled away to reveal a three-eyed ten-armed killer, bristling with weapons. She was hacking away at the walls and one hand was contorted into a little-known mudrā, negating the very house beneath them. She wanted to put a blade through Yahweh's throat but Raoul kept her at horn's length, circling him protectively with his enormous arms. Injuring Yahweh at this point could mean the undoing of all things. No second chances, not even a One-Way-World to fester in. Nothing but oblivion.

"The boat," he cried through the treacle darkness, and when he saw Imogen it all made sense. Imogen had the remote held level, and was thumbing a button over and over. Raoul guessed it to be "pause" or "slow-tracking" or similar. Either way, Raoul hadn't replaced the batteries for a thousand years, and they were only held in with duct-tape anyways. This wouldn't work for long.

Lune/Durga cancelled a wall of Nameless's house into shivers of nothing, and slipping into her Diana skin she launched arrows at something in the distance. Each shot was an eternity as she nocked the arrow and drew it to her cheek, the same cheek that Raoul had kissed and nuzzled and made false promises to. She blinked as she was aiming, and set her tongue just so. Release, and the arrow slowly glided forward.

She's cutting a path for the boat, he realised, and even as the remote control finally failed and Lune/Diana was firing dozens of arrows per second, Yahweh's fence shattered. Captain King James touched the tip of his tricorne with a plastic hand, and a moment later the enormity of the boat pulled alongside the shattered house.

They were level with the tear in the hull, the evidence of Raoul's escape that should be down near the ground. Raoul guessed what the boat was planning, and with no other choice he pitched Yahweh and Nameless through the hole. They fell into the guts of The Cheerful Misogynist, along with the growing seed that was the One-Way-World.

# #

"Well, it's a fetish boat, and the One-Way-World just happens to be Yahweh's fetish," Raoul said. "It makes sense to trap him there."

They were following the secret paths to Raoul's house via far-travel, Imogen clutched to his broad woolly chest as his legs ate up the miles.

"He'll figure it out," Imogen said.

"Yahweh thinks he won, and who are we to tell him any different. Let him run his little play-world, I know I won't bother him."

Imogen stared at him again, at the stub where his left horn was. It would take perhaps a hundred years to grow back, and he'd been halved in more ways than he cared to admit.

"A fair deal," Raoul said. "The ship hid you for fifty years, so they get one horn."

They stood at his front door now, and as Raoul reached for the key Imogen snatched it out of his hand, with a speed that was suspiciously reminiscent of Lune. She tucked the key into a fanny-pack that she had suddenly decided was cool.

"I want you to help Nameless," she said, gamely blocking the minotaur from his house. "You've punished him enough. It's wrong to leave him stuck in that boat with Yahweh, the pair of them dreaming over a seed of a world. Or a universe, or whatever."

"It's what they both want," Raoul sighed. "Neither of them want to be here, surely we owe them this small kindness." Imogen was defiant, but even she could see reason and fished out the chunky brass key, the one that could open the Great Library at Alexandria as well as a Starbucks in Melbourne.

He unlocked the door and jerked it open, but instead of his filthy apartment he could see a great frothing sea, and perched on a murderous wave was The Cheerful Misogynist. He could make out Lune's dummy on the prow, holding up a yellow curve that was his horn.

Raoul slammed the door shut.

"I wanted to move anyway," he said.

#  Gunning for a Tinkerman

Lanyard was gunning for a tinkerman.

The hunt had taken him from Overland to Inland, an endless sunburnt landscape that made his eyes swim and attention wander. The only trees were those that hugged the dead watercourses, hoping for a big rain. Everything else was dust and twisted stone.

A strong wind punished his sails, and the rusty tube-frame shook under the strain. The wheels of the skiff churned up the fine dust and threatened to become airborne. Lanyard played the cords like a puppet-master, bringing in one sail while steering with his free hand.

Rounding a sharp bend in the tradeway, he saw it and swore. He yanked up the sails, hauling back on the choke-stick for all he was worth.

It was a grandfather of a serpent, curled up in the middle of the track. The snake had brought down the telegraph line, as they sometimes did when they were hungry or lazy. It knew people would come to fix the damage in a day or two, and waited with a patience honed by decades of blistering Inland summers.

The snake came for him, head low to the ground, drove forward, faster than a man could run, and it was all Lanyard could do to leap clear before its great coils were crushing the skiff. The tubular frame squealed under that immense force, and the wind-cart tipped over as the snake poured towards the man.

Sixty feet of muscle. Scales bigger than tea-saucers. Great fangs that could pierce an engine block. It rose up above him, ready to strike. In that final panicked moment Lanyard saw it had great gleaming slits for eyes, angry orbs which had seen a hundred years or more. It had been here before the settlers, might be here when the last of them died under these unwelcome skies.

Lanyard had a revolver out and squeezed the trigger quicker than thought, sending thunder into that death's head, rolling aside as the snake drove its fangs into the dusty earth. He got lucky and shattered one of those eyes into jelly. Another bullet into its tail as it fled, wounded, over the lip of the dry watercourse that hugged the tradeway.

He saw it slip up the other side of the dead creek, slithering into the bush and Lanyard knew he should chase it, make sure it was dead. Folks told tales about the snakes of Inland, that they were vengeful and crafty. He'd bled it, and it might follow him now, come for him some quiet evening. Perhaps it already waited up ahead, wrapped around an overhanging gum tree, ready to drop on him as he passed underneath.

"I'll take your other eye, grandfather," Lanyard called out, his heart pounding and nerves shot. Groaning against the weight of the motor mounted behind his seat, he pushed the skiff back onto its wheels. He had to leave, now.

The skiff rode on old bicycle tires, one of which the snake had bent out of shape. It was more than Lanyard could fix with his bare hands, but when he hoisted the sails and released the chock-stick it all seemed to work.

A hot wind punched at his sails, and he rolled along the road at a terrifying pace. He shot past a rusty sheet of tin nailed to a tree, painted to read "BEWARE OF SNAKES".

"Good advice," he said.

# #

He hadn't always been a hunter of men, and in a time he preferred to forget Lanyard Everett was once prentice to that most despicable of characters, a jesusman.

Bauer was an old man when he sniffed Lanyard out, one of the last to walk openly under signs that brought death these days. Back then Lanyard was little more than a wretch on the wrong side of crooked, with his ribs showing and only the hope of a short and pointless life before him.

"We're not meant to be here, in the Now," the jesusman confessed to his new prentice. "Seems the Lord of the Crossing took a wrong turn. Or else this dust-bowl was his true destination, and a grander joke than I can understand."

Lanyard nodded, hating the man. This proved to be the first of many disappointments.

# #

Lanyard knew that Thomas Cobbler, the tinkerman, was in this district, paying visit to the rough holdings that somehow existed between the towns.

The winds died off perhaps ten miles down the road, and the skiff rolled to a gentle halt. The flippant Inland weather had stranded him in the middle of nowhere, sails limp in the sticky air.

With a worried eye to the bush Lanyard checked the motor. He unscrewed the fuel cap, saw that the little tank was bone-dry. He had a flask of grain fuel and poured in about three-quarters of what he had, the trickle of liquid smelling something like rotgut moonshine mixed with kerosene.

Some folks drank the stuff, drunks who didn't mind going blind. When they got that desperate they were already dead.

The motor caught on the third try, coughing and belching blue smoke. This skiff was a marvel of scavenger engineering, bits of this and that cobbled together with spit and string. He threw the lever that connected the drive-chain, and the whole thing lurched forward.

"Don't die on me," he pleaded, watching for the snake; the motor chugged away. He knew that one day soon it would seize up, like all Before-Time stuff did.

Lanyard opened the throttle a little and made good time. He drew in all the sails, all but the tiny fore-sail which he watched for signs of fuel-saving wind.

There was a holding up ahead, some mad townsman keen to gamble against nature. The homestead was a shabby patchwork of corrugated iron and rust, ringed by rail fences which kept in a handful of sheep and the beginnings of a barn and stable. Some starving chooks scratched at a handful of feed scattered across the dead ground.

Lanyard steered the skiff from the tradeway and up to the shanty, passing a boundary of stones painted blue to stand out against the cracked red earth. That meant this place was protected by town-law.

He cut the motor and pulled back on the chock-stick till the wheels locked. Stepping out of the skiff he walked up to the shack, hauling a pistol out of his pocket which he held against the side of his leg.

A fella who must have been the farmer came out the front door, waving the business end of a rifle at him. His free hand had a dog by the collar, a half-breed native mutt which strained forward, slavering and growling. A bite from such could kill a man the slow way, his tongue black and back arched, throat scraped raw by desperate fingernails.

"Bugger off," the man said, swallowing nervously. "Nothing here for you."

Lanyard said nothing, just eyeballed the settler.

There was a wobbly windmill missing a vane, filling the silence with rusty squeals as it span madly, herald to an angry black cloud rolling in from the south. A line was strung out from the verandah, clothes pegged to it, shirts billowed like sails. A basket had been dropped to the ground, spilling linen onto the dirt where the ants crawled all over it. Probably left there by the farmer's sheila, likely some leathery old tart who'd seen too much sun. She'd be hiding inside the hovel, fearing any stranger if she had sense.

"You give me honest answers, I'll leave you be," Lanyard said. "I'm looking for a tinkerman, Thomas Cobbler."

"You find him, you send him here. The record player won't work, and me motorbike's seized up again," the farmer said. Lanyard tapped the gun against his leg impatiently.

"Look mate, I don't have time to muck around. Where is Cobbler?"

"You gunna kill him?"

Lanyard said nothing.

"You must be some sort of fool, mister," said the man. "You can't touch him. It's town-law."

Lanyard could see the man measuring the odds, waved the pistol to scare some sense into him.

"He's at The Folly. His windfarm," the man added. "You won't miss it, great mess of windmills stuck on a hill about fifty miles north. No water there worth boring for, but he's the tinkerman not you nor I."

Lanyard bartered with the settler for grain-fuel, swapped him a pouch of tobacco for enough to get him to the windfarm. All the while their guns were out and the mongrel snarling where it had been chained to the verandah post. Lanyard carried a sloshing jerry-can back to the skiff and casually topped up the tank, figuring if the farmer meant to shoot him he'd have done it by now.

He knew the type, this man would rather send trouble on for others to deal with. He left the settler unharmed and unrobbed, and by Now standards that was almost friendly.

Every now and then, Lanyard spotted bleed-throughs in the distance, a wall on its own with doors and windows, and once a melted skyscraper laying on its side like a great silver worm. There was a stretch of sealed road running parallel to the tradeway, complete with dead traffic lights and street-signs. Before-Time things made most folks nervous, even as they picked through them for scraps and trade. Had he the time, he'd have looked through himself, hoping he was the first to come along since they sprung out of the ground all twisted and funny looking.

Lanyard was more nervous than most around the bleedthroughs. There were sinister creatures lurking in the grey spaces between Before and Now, monstrous beyond anything this land could offer. They were often drawn to these thin places, eager to snatch those fool enough to linger there.

"Too many bleedthroughs round here," Lanyard mumbled, wishing he'd kept some tobacco for himself. He was dying for a smoke. He touched the motor with the back of his hand, felt it heating up.

There was a little breeze, enough to keep the skiff moving at walking pace, so he rigged up the sails and gave the old engine a rest.

When he saw a whole row of Before-Time houses, joined together and intact, Lanyard swore. He fumbled for his swag, reached into the filthy bed-roll and pulled out a shotgun wrapped in oilskin. He'd killed old Bauer for this gun, graven with mark and word of the jesus.

He could feel something there, lurking and watching him, not quite in this world but strong enough to break through. He felt all the usual signs, the crawling skin, throbbing joints and aching teeth. A witch.

Not much could harm a witch, but this gun could drive the life out of one. It gave him comfort to hold that great metal cannon, till he remembered that he had no shells left.

Lanyard yanked at the starter cord, ignoring the troubled whine of the engine and realised that the snake was the least of his problems.

He may have been a witch-sniffer and the last of the jesusmen, but Lanyard Everett wasn't fool enough to stay.

# #

"You're safe now," Bauer called up to the town-men, huddling behind what they thought was a safe wall. The jesusman held up the severed head of a mad jenny, still snarling and snapping with yellowed fangs at the old man.

Once people sang the praises of jesusmen across the Now, but a day came when people forgot their many good deeds. And they always, always remembered their one mistake.

"Another mob gone feral," Bauer explained after a frightened young lad brought them stale loaves and a handful of shrivelled turnips. Custom called for the towns to provision a jesusman and his prentice, but of late the fare had been poor, the gates always closed.

"But we saved them," young Lanyard said. He struggled with the shovel, trying to split the hard clay. The mad jenny screeched at him from under Bauer's boot, her rotting face consumed with bestial rage.

"These people, they've turned from the Jesus," and Bauer said this name with the old respect. "If I had good sense I'd leave these wayward daughters to slaughter their fool parents."

While Bauer set up a camp-fire and brewed up a soup that would hopefully soften the bread, the prentice kept at his job. When the hole was deep enough he lined it with animal bones, something to distract what was left of the mad jenny's head in the year or so it would take to die. This would be the final resting place for a little girl stolen from her bed, an innocent soul made into something else.

"Here," Bauer said, throwing the head across the campfire. Lanyard caught it by the lank greasy hair, held it clear before it could take a bite out of him.

"Mark my words, lad," Bauer said, poking at the bubbling mess in his billy-pot. "This is what happens when folks start casting bones for Papa Lucy and the Lady Bertha."

The time of the jesusman had passed, and Lanyard had been recruited right at the end of their glory days, right before the word itself came to mean outlaw and dead man.

# #

He spotted the snake when it lifted its great head above a rock, its body undulating as it crawled out of a dead billabong. Perhaps it saw the light of the midday sun reflected from his field-glasses; the enormous serpent sank out of sight, waiting for him to move on. Lanyard had driven till it was so dark he couldn't see the track, but now the snake was within a mile of his campfire. Grandfather must have been moving all day.

"I need a rifle," he mumbled. He'd scraped together enough tobacco crumbs to get a smoke going, a thin paper cylinder stuck to his bottom lip. It didn't help his nerves any. The smoke trailed straight into the air, telling Lanyard what he already knew, that there was no wind at all.

Tiring of the standoff, he tried to start the motor. It coughed once, twice, three times. Lanyard felt faint with panic. He pulled the ripcord, faster and faster. For a moment he thought it had worked, but it spluttered briefly and stalled.

"Come on, come on," Lanyard said. He lifted up the field glasses to see that the snake had abandoned its hiding place, was sliding across the baked earth towards the tradeway. It knew he was stranded.

He thumbed the focus dial on his field-glasses and saw the ruin of the creature's face, a great weeping hollow where its eye once was. Grandfather was furious.

"Start! Damn dust-bound junk." He ripped at the starter cord, again and again, the danger of the cord snapping outweighed by the approach of death swiftly gliding towards him.

Then there was the most beautiful sound he'd ever heard, the coughing and rattling of that bloody machine, and he was in the seat and racing away.

"Get stuffed!" he called over his shoulder. The snake kept pace with him for a few moments, but gradually the gap widened until he could barely see the creature, a tiny dot somewhere behind him, tirelessly pursuing him.

An hour later he saw the windfarm. Perhaps twenty or thirty windmills spun lazily atop a mesa, and the only way up to them was a steep switchback. He turned from the tradeway and took to the scrub, engine growling as he bounced across the rocks and through a field of spiky yakka. Lanyard had to get to the top of that mesa before the motor finally died, and hope he could drive off or kill the great serpent.

He hit the first incline, a stretch that looked like it had been blasted out of the rock with dynamite. On the first tight turn, the motor sounded crook, like a handful of ball bearings were bouncing around inside. Lanyard squeezed the throttle to full, and the engine missed a beat, almost stalled.

"Come on," he moaned. Shifting the steer-stick left and right, he tried to climb the skiff over the loose scree and around the grooves of water run-offs. He was about half-way up when the motor gave a final death-rattle. Lanyard was out and running, the skiff rolling backwards and flipping over to bounce back down the hill, spilling his gear all over the place. He spared a glance to see that the wind-cart narrowly missed the snake, wriggling up the side of the mesa.

Each breath burning in his lungs, Lanyard pounded up the pathway, praying that he wouldn't snap an ankle or slip off the narrow switchback and into the mouth of Grandfather. He stopped dead, right near the top. Some stupid bugger had blocked the path with a crazy mess of tiger wire and chicken mesh, nailed to a great wooden frame.

He swore, reaching for his gun. The snake would be on him in moments. It was tempting to put a bullet through his own stupid skull, but a last stand was more Lanyard's style.

Resigned to this end, he didn't notice the sound of the frame shifting, a footstep behind him. He almost put a round through the old man's head but he relaxed, smiled.

"Get in here, you stupid man," Thomas Cobbler said. "Bringing snakes right to my front door."

He helped the tinkerman shift the barricade back into place, and a few seconds later the snake was striking at it, great yellow fangs pulling at the mesh. The barrier wouldn't hold it long, and it ignored the sting of the tiger-wire. Lanyard made to shoot it but Cobbler put a hand on his arm, pulled him back.

"Save your bullets," he said. "I've a better way."

He threw a lever and the snake convulsed violently, smoke and sparks filling the air. Lanyard saw a thick black cable reaching back from the gate, to a messy network of batteries and the wires which ran up each windmill.

Cobbler turned the fence off. The snake fell from the wire, smoke pouring from its mouth.

"Grandfather, you look stone cold dead," Lanyard told the serpent, and the tinkerman looked at him strange. The limp weight of the monster snake dragged it down the hill, rolling and bouncing and smashing into rocks with horrific force till the last scaly coil vanished from sight.

"Electricity," Cobbler said, gesturing to the windmills. "Well, Mister Lanyard Everett. It's been a while, hasn't it?"

"It sure has," Lanyard said, holding his gun against the tinkerman's temple.

# #

He'd only been a year in Bauer's service when he murdered his master. One minute they'd been sitting around a cook-fire, and Bauer had been telling stories of people he'd once known. All dead now.

What with the comraderie of camping in the outdoors and the prospect of the juicy critter roasting on a spit, Lanyard was almost surprised to find himself cradling a jagged stone in his hands. He leapt across the cook-fire, knocking the meat into the ashes, and wrestling with the old man he drove the rock into Bauer's skull again and again.

Finally the jesusman was dead, his face a bloody ruin, his body bent and broken across the log they'd both dragged over for a seat.

"I can't do it," Lanyard sobbed, the rock sliding out of his fingers. "Can't do it anymore."

During the struggle old Bauer had snatched up his jesusman's shotgun, a holy weapon the likes of which would never be made again in this world. But he was holding it by the barrel, not the stock. Even at his bloody end, it seemed that he was offering his prentice the weapon. A gift.

Lanyard had killed a man once before, but felt filthy with the shame of this cowardly act. He knew what was to come. An endless parade of monsters would still sniff him out, know him for a jesusman and an enemy. At that moment, Lanyard realised that this bloody freedom had truly brought him nothing.

Lanyard prised away the dead man's fingers, and gripped the enormous gun. It was heavy, and the gun felt cold and mean.

# #

"I can't fix it," Cobbler complained, throwing down a spanner with disgust. "Motor's burnt right out."

"Well you figure a way of fixing it, else you'll be towing me where we're going," Lanyard told him. He'd put the gun away hours ago, the threat established. He was much quicker than the old tinkerman and they both knew it.

"You bastard. I shouldn't help you. Snake will come get us both soon enough." There'd been no dead serpent down the bottom, just a bloody trail leading through the yakka.

"That's no way to speak to an old friend," Lanyard said, and the old man grizzled to himself and tinkered with the outboard. Finally he stripped the whole thing from its housing and dumped it on the ground.

"Useless," he said. "Just a wind-cart now, unless you got another motor in your swag."

Cobbler had a horse and buggy for when he did his rounds of the farms and the shacks, because "tinkermen know better than to rely on bleedthrough gadgets". The animal was well-fed and strong; Lanyard decided it was his now. Cobbler went into the buggy, trussed tightly. His stores were full of tins scavenged by grateful settlers and Lanyard took the lot. He found and discarded the old man's rifle, a rusty old .303 that was missing the bolt, but with joy he pocketed a few shotgun shells found in the mountains of junk.

"Last I heard you were running grog to the natives," Cobbler said as they rode up the tradeway. "Gareth boot you out of his little enterprise?"

"Something like that," Lanyard said.

"A long way from Riverland to Inland. A long way to break town-law. You know they'll hang you for touching a tinkerman."

"I don't go into the towns much," Lanyard said.

"Who sent you?"

"Man with a bag of coin. Shut your mouth."

Lanyard kept the horse at a good clip, hoping that the snake was too wounded to follow at its usual mile-eating pace. Cobbler's horse was a fine animal, well-behaved and sturdy. He made sure to rest it several times a day, and gave it as much water as it could guzzle.

Lanyard had lashed the frame of the motorless skiff to the back of the buggy, its rear wheels bouncing along behind them. He'd too much attachment to the wind-cart to junk it in the middle of nowhere.

"Look there," Cobbler said. One moment they were looking on a stretch of cracked red clay, the next a misshapen slice of building pierced the earth, one corner of a broken gable pointing angrily at the sky. The pie-shaped section of building swayed but didn't fall. A bleedthrough.

"Go on, you back-stabbing bastard," Cobbler raved as Lanyard halted the horse. "I hope it falls on top of you."

"You know, Cobbler, I'd gag you but I like the company," Lanyard said with false cheer. He felt wrong all over, and knew that this was a possible crossing point. There was the hint of something nearby, perhaps a distant pair of eyes watching.

"Paranoid," he said, but broke out the jesusman's shotgun just the same, primed both barrels. He now had one round left in his pocket and hoped it wouldn't come to that.

"Only a mug passes up good forage," Lanyard told Cobbler, and ignoring the twisted door he stepped through an open wall and into the past.

It might have been a book-store, or a library. Shelf upon shelf of books, here in the Now where one book was worth more than a man's life. Lanyard knew his letters but not much more. He grabbed a fat handful of books, tucked them under his arm.

"A bloody fortune," he said.

"Jesusman," he heard in his head, the mind-raping static of a witch. He dropped the books, pointed the gun left and right.

"You're a cunning one," Lanyard managed. It was almost there, watching him from its grey nest, in between all worlds and times. Hungry.

"Show yourself," Lanyard said. "I've mark and word and I'll shoot you deader than dead."

There was laughter, the witchy kind that made him want to tear his brain out of his skull, and then the sensation of the creature withdrawing.

# #

Lanyard spent many years trying to understand why he betrayed a good man. It might have made sense had Bauer been a monster, had he been anything but a doomed holdover from a kinder age. It was the most pointless of murders.

Perhaps it was fear that first set Lanyard on this dark path, from wretch to hero to killer. Fear of not living up to the old man's legacy, fear of an endless invisible army that he as a jesusman was fated to struggle against. Knowing that no-one cared anymore, that the jesusmen were finished.

Even then Lanyard must have known that he could not run from his master, any more than he could run from his own nature. Bauer's murder was a futile attempt to escape from himself.

All that was left to him now were lonely days, his only company the hungry monsters that came for him. Seems that Bauer had given him more than a gun, a trade to ply. He'd passed on this most certain legacy, the promise of a violent, lonely end.

# #

"There," Lanyard said, pointing at the beacon. The natives had crafted these by arts unknown, glass spires that littered all the lands from Riverland to Inland and perhaps further. By day they drew in the sunlight, and when night fell they lit the old ways. This spire was old, and gave a sickly red glow like the dying embers of a campfire.

A man was waiting there for them, and Lanyard knew he'd been checking the tradeway every night, just before dusk. A crooked man if ever he saw one, wearing a patchwork outfit of rags with a neat new waistcoat over the whole mess. He had a necklace of finger bones and gave them a gap-toothed grin.

"You Lanyard?" he said, and Lanyard nodded. The crooked man looked into the buggy, saw Cobbler all tied up. He licked his lips and rubbed at his crotch, and the tinkerman let out a terrified moan.

"Good, you brung him. Follow me," and the man picked up a rusty old bicycle from behind the spire. There was a little track running off from the tradeway, and the man pedalled down it, waiting for them at the first rise.

"You monster," Cobbler sobbed. "You're giving me to a crooked mob."

"I'd like to say it's just business. But I have my reasons, tinkerman. A little coin in the right hands and I heard whispers, that it was you led that town-patrol to us. There's blood on your hands, Cobbler."

Cobbler could say nothing because Lanyard was absolutely correct, he had crossed the wrong people and now it had caught up with him. Lanyard clicked his tongue and the horse walked forward, following the trail.

Their guide led them through a salt-flat, the trail punctuated by the occasional skeleton. There was no good land for miles, and no reason anyone would want to be here.

Except for the bleedthroughs. Lanyard had never seen so many. Before-Time buildings poked out of the dead ground at random intervals, but grew thicker and thicker until twisted ruins surrounded them. Wary, Lanyard lay the jesusman gun across his lap, watching for trouble. The goat track they were following sometimes ran across Before-Time roads, the horse's shoes ringing against the rippled bitumen.

As dusk gave way to night the big yellow moon made the ruins along the horizon look like a mouthful of crooked teeth. He could see campfires.

"That's our mob," said the fellow on the bicycle, eyeing off Lanyard's shotgun. "Better put your gun away mate."

They reached the camp, a collection of shanties and lean-tos on the edge of a great salt-lake, everything a curdled-milk colour under the light of that sickly moon.

The crooked mob eyed him off as he entered their turf, and they reached for home-made spearguns and what shooters they had. He could make about perhaps seven of them, wild folk living as far from town-law as they could.

"Where's your bossman?" he said. "I brung a tinkerman, like we agreed."

There was a man wearing the top half of a business suit, denim cut-offs and a cowboy hat on his head. He swung a cricket bat loosely in one hand. It was studded with cruel looking nails, stained with old blood.

"I'm Hat-Trick," and now he was close enough Lanyard could recognise the man. They'd met a few months ago, at an outpost that tolerated crooked men if they brought good trade.

"Got your tinkerman in the back," he told Hat-Trick, and the crooked men swarmed forward, hauling Cobbler out and laughing at his protests, mocking him for his tears. There was a great spreading wet patch on his trousers from where he'd pissed himself.

"Where's my money?" Lanyard demanded, and Hat-Trick pulled something out of his pockets, planted it firmly into his hands.

It was a purse, and with horror Lanyard realised it was made from a man's scrotum. There was the heft of coin inside it, but nowhere near the agreed amount.

"What is this?" he said.

"All our coin," said Hat-Trick. Lanyard felt the rage come on, had the shotgun and his revolver out in the blink of an eye. The mob made to rush him but Hat-Trick held up a hand.

"I've been through hell to get here. If you mean to cheat me I'll kill you where you stand," Lanyard said through clenched teeth. Hat-Trick laughed.

"Look around, you bloody fool. We've a fortune in forage. In the morning I'll let you take as much as you can carry."

Lanyard looked at the cannibals. One of them smiled, and in the firelight he could see that the woman's teeth had been filed into points. Common sense told him to leave now and count his losses. Greed won.

"I sleep light and I shoot quick," he told them. "If you would nibble on my toes, think on that."

He wouldn't drink or eat with them, turned down a plate of mystery stew which set the mob to laughing. He rolled out his swag and sat with his back against the wheel of Cobbler's buggy. They watched him nodding off, sharing little grins and whispers. He took one long heavy blink into sleep, but was awake with heart pounding. One of them was sliding towards him with a knife in hand, but the man dropped it into the dirt at the sight of Lanyard's revolver.

"Jokes. Just jokes," the man said with a weak smile.

# #

The crooked men started as the ones who kept the true worship of Papa Lucy and the Bone-Man. Their practices were so repugnant that the towns turned them out, even as a sanitised version of the religion sprang up behind the thick walls.

The eating of a man became the eating of a suckling pig, wearing a child's clothing. The true believers still laugh at the townsmen now, rolling ox-tails for the Bone-Man instead of knuckle-bones. Something of the visceral nature of these new gods was lost, watered down by the civilised men who claimed these cults as their own.

So even as the crooked mobs tore up the countryside and preyed on lone travellers, Lanyard respected them. They were outcasts, much like him, yet remained true to their faith, which was more than he could ever do.

# #

"I'm gonna start a new town," Hat-Trick told Lanyard in the morning. "For all their talk of laws and society, I know them other towns started out much the same. Just good forage, and a tough bossman."

"True enough," Lanyard said. "There's bigger crooks behind a town wall than anything out here."

They had Cobbler face down, holding down his arms and legs. One bloke was heating a great steel rod in a fire, until the end glowed cherry-red.

"Old days, in the Before, folks got together into villages and such," Hat-Trick told his crew. "They had blacksmiths, folks like our tinkerman here what kept everything working. Built all the stuff to keep the village alive."

He approached the man, pulled a sharp rabbit knife from his coat pocket. Cobbler saw it and screamed, wild-eyed, weeping, and begging for mercy.

"That blacksmith, most important fella in town. They needed his special skills just to keep the place going. Those villagers couldn't let him leave, not ever. They made sure he stayed, that he would serve his community for life."

It was over in seconds, but Lanyard fought the urge to vomit, made himself watch lest he appear weak. Hat-Trick hamstrung Cobbler, mutilated his tendons while the man screamed in agony. The man with the hot steel rod cauterised the wounds, and another bloke bound them up with bandages crusted with lake salt. The file-toothed woman cradled his head, forced a good belt of grog down his throat. Cobbler spit up the first mouthful, but gratefully gulped at the booze. She let him have the rest of it, and he lay there sobbing and sucking from the bottle like a pouting baby.

"Can't have our tinkerman pissing off in the middle of the night," Hat-Trick said. "We've found cars, radio sets, fridgerators and such. That bloke's gonna make this place the envy of all the towns."

Lanyard was led to the bleedthrough fields, a stretch of Before-Time junk bigger than any town. There was a car with the front half melted and poking up out of the ground like a headstone, two blokes scraping away with picks and mattocks to free it. As bossman Hat-Trick got first dibs on anything found, the deal was that Lanyard could cart off whatever he could fit in the buggy so long as Hat-Trick didn't want it first.

"You ever see anyone else around here?"

"Any fool sneak through my stuff ends up in the cookpot," Hat-Trick said, and Lanyard hid a smile. Witches didn't get eaten, they ate.

Lanyard couldn't feel anything sinister nearby, but the grey space between the worlds was thin here, thinner than paper. There'd be no trouble, no work for a witch to step through into the Now. It was only a matter of time.

He hauled out the murderous cannon he kept hid in the swag, and sure enough Hat-Trick eyed off the old double-barrelled shooter.

"There's jesus marks on that thing," Hat-Trick said. "I could haul you into a town, give you to a magistrate. You could make me very rich."

"Lawmen would take you too, crooked man," Lanyard said, scanning the warped buildings for movement. "We could end our days together, choking side by side on the gallows."

Nothing came for them, nothing but flies and dust as they poked through the ruins. Within an hour Lanyard had gathered a carton of smokes, a new shirt, some tins of food, and a book called "How to Win Friends and Influence People".

Lanyard was far from finished foraging, and a deal was a deal. He could fit a tonne of stuff in the buggy, and even intended to strap things to the skiff. He would leave this place a very rich man.

"Enough for now," Hat-Trick demanded. "You get one more forage after lunch, but then you leave."

They returned to the main camp. Lanyard could see a few other people now, filthy and haggard but not crooked men. A one-armed man was hauling a cart full of scrap wood for the fires, boards stripped from buildings and fences. A young girl was digging a latrine hole with a hand-scoop, eyes dark with exhausted terror. She was missing her right leg.

"Like any town, we got citizens," Hat-Trick laughed. "They pay us taxes to live here."

Most of these "citizens" were missing limbs. Lanyard eyed the cooking pot and decided he didn't want to know.

As his hosts ate their lunch, Lanyard hauled up a bucket of water from the soak, rank water barely worth drinking. He stripped off his shirt and washed himself for the first time in days.

"Nice tatt," someone said, and Lanyard saw it was the file-toothed woman, gnawing on a bone and looking at his leathery chest. At his jesus tattoo, a picture of a bleeding man bound tight, hands clenched into fists but for his pointer fingers, one to left, the other the right. BEFORE and NOW were writ under each hand.

"You're a jesusman," she said casually.

"I'm nothing," he said, wriggling into his new shirt. He'd gotten stupid, too tired to notice someone sneaking up on him. His pulse raced wildly.

"Fingerbone said you had a gun with that mark," she said, picking a scrap out of her teeth. "They all think you're toting the kit of some jesusman you killed. But my own eyes, they tell me you're the worst kind of fool."

"You keep your mouth shut," Lanyard said. "One word and I'll kill you first."

It was that moment that the familiar pains started, the throbbing inside his skull. There was a witch, real close, close enough to step through into the Now and make a meal out of him.

Trying to get a fix on the creature, he reached back for his shooter and that was the moment that the woman pounced. She wrapped her legs tight around his waist and worried at his neck with her sharp teeth, even as he rained blows on her head and smashed her nose with a fist. She drew blood and crowed with triumph.

The crooked mob were all over him in moments, kicking and punching and bearing him down by weight of numbers. When he came to, naked and bound before Hat-Trick, he knew that all deals had fallen through.

# #

The first jesusman to come for him after Bauer's murder was quick and strong, a man armed with naught but a sword-cane. He wore the image of the jesus across his leathery forehead and there was no mistaking him for anything else.

"Them I can understand, but why you?" the man had raved, and in a blur of movement he was so close with that sharp blade that Lanyard could see the cataracts filling his left eye, the scars covering nearly every inch of his skin.

The jesusman kept coming, even with a bullet in him, and buried his blade in flesh even as Lanyard put one final round through the man's temple. Lanyard barely survived the attack, nearly bleeding to death in a muddy Riverland street.

He found a revolver in the dead man's belt, and it spoke volumes of the contempt he must have felt for Bauer's murderous prentice. Not even worth a bullet.

There was only one more jesusman to attempt vengeance, before the pogrom and generous death bounties meant that the jesusmen had bigger problems than him.

# #

"A genuine jesusman," Hat-Trick was saying. "In our own town, no less."

Lanyard spat blood, nudged a loose tooth with his tongue. He'd had worse beatings. He could feel the nearness of the witch, content to watch for now from the safety of its nest.

"Some great work from Teeth, uncovering Mister Lanyard's dark secret," he said, and the woman gave a curtsey with an imaginary dress. Her face was a ruined mess, and it was hard to tell where his blood stopped and hers began.

"Now, the question on all our lips: what are we to do? What do we do with a jesusman?"

"Kill him!" one said. "Chuck him in the pot!"

"Make him a citizen and eat him slow," another said.

"Give him to me, I'll punish him enough," Cobbler said with passion, and the mob cheered. He hobbled over, ramming one of his crutches into Lanyard's stomach and spitting on his face.

"It was your kind what brought us here, you jesusmen!" Hat-Trick said, resting the tip of his cricket bat on the back of Lanyard's head. The weight of the willow pushed the sharp nails into his scalp. "Your dying man led us to the damned dusty Now. Not paradise, here. Our mob, the whole bloody human race having to pick through junk to survive, and it's all your fault."

He'd heard this rhetoric before, even believed it once. There was nothing worth saying, and perhaps in his heart of hearts Lanyard always knew it would end like this. The discovery, his brutal ending in some forgotten place. He was about to die, and mercy was a concept that never left the town-walls.

Hat-Trick hefted the murderous bat, held it high. He made to smash it into Lanyard's face, but pulled the bat up at the last second. Lanyard flinched and the crooked mob fell about laughing.

"You won't die that easy," he said. "You will beg for a bat in the face by the time I'm finished with you."

They bound his wrists with a loop of barb-wire and nailed the other end to a railway sleeper. A stretch of train track had bled through almost intact, like an obscene mouthful of teeth stuck sideways out of the ground and held together with a twisted belt of steel rail. Lanyard could see some of Hat-Trick's mutilated citizens shoring up the gaps, and knew this would be the basis for the town's walls.

They took turns to piss on him, and Teeth gnashed her horrid fangs near his privates. Hat-Trick would not let them harm him overly, and Teeth whined that he was ruining their fun.

"Mind your mouthhole around me," he said, a quick fist knocking her onto her bony arse. "I say he suffers long and hard, like every bloke who followed the jesus out of the Before."

They gave him nothing to eat or drink, and Lanyard baked all day, naked and red raw beneath the burning sun. They left him a rusty saucepan full of piss, all they intended for him to drink. He held out into the chill of night, but even he knew that he'd eventually give in, anything to stave off this crippling thirst.

"I'll have you eating manflesh inside of a week," Hat-Trick said. "This is just the beginning of a most delicious death."

They left Fingerbone to guard him, and the gap-toothed cannibal said nothing throughout the frosty night, just pointed his home-made speargun and dozed beneath a filthy old poncho.

"Will you take my fingers?" Lanyard croaked as the sun rose. "Will you wear them around your neck?"

Fingerbone looked at Lanyard, and nodded for yes.

They set him to working for forage, digging out the old car that Hat-Trick had his heart set on. His muscles ached from the honest rhythm of the work. The heft and swing of pick and mattock drove him on, through pain and thirst and heat.

No water when they called it a night, nothing but the pot of stale piss waiting by his post. Another guard, some crooked man without a proper name, who kicked him in the ribs when no-one was looking. Teeth drank grog with the man by the light of his little fire, her nasty little eyes watching Lanyard the whole time.

He would die of thirst tomorrow, if he survived the night. Lanyard found himself looking at the piss-pot, made himself tip the urine out before he was tempted.

"Not give you lot the satisfaction," he said through a dry tongue and leathery mouth. Somewhere between sleep and death, Lanyard felt a cool stream of water pass his lips, gulped greedily at the waterskin.

"Hat-Trick's got a temper," he heard the guard say. "Don't want the jesusman dying under my watch."

When he finally felt the witch step into the Now, Lanyard was almost grateful.

# #

Drink helped a little, but Lanyard Everett found himself drawn more and more to violence, to risk. Every time he got the shakes, or had one too many dreams about the demons he'd seen in Bauer's service, he'd throw himself into a fight.

He gambled, stole other men's sheilas, exploited the natives, shot his enemies before they could shoot him, and soon he found that the criminal underworld could accommodate a man of his temperament.

But always there were the dreams, and the certain knowledge during his waking hours that bad things were real and quite often nearby. And that he was the only person left who could do anything about it.

# #

"You bring anyone with you?" Hat-Trick asked again. He'd beaten Lanyard black and blue after discovering the shredded remains of one of his mob. There wasn't much left of the man.

"I didn't have to bring anyone," Lanyard said through a fat lip. "You bring trouble, just by being here. Witch trouble."

In dust Lanyard had tried to etch what wards and marks he knew, but when his guard saw that he swept them away, fearful of jesusman magic.

"Witches," Hat-Trick snorted. "More of your jesus lies. We follow the word of Papa Lucy here, cast his bones and do all the custom. We're watched over."

"Papa Lucy," Lanyard laughed. "Your crooked god won't guard you against what's out there."

The cannibals went for vengeance instead of sense, gathered into a great pack to hunt for the killer. They left Lanyard to his exhausted slumber, and he woke up to look into the eyes of the crippled girl.

She'd fashioned herself a crutch out of scrap wood, and limped over to give him more water when the crooked men had left the camp.

"You need to run," she said, picking at the wire twists that bound his hands. They'd bent it with pliers, and she couldn't budge it. She tried till her fingers were pricked and bleeding.

"Please take me with you," she said. "They've done bad things to me, and Hat-Trick said they're gonna eat me a bit at a time until I'm just a torso that they pass around."

The end attached to the post was hand-twisted, and between them they unravelled the wire around the nail. She helped him stand, got him moving.

"Where's my stuff?" he said. She shrugged, didn't know. He needed the shotgun, fast. The witch would feed on stragglers, and then it would come for him. They didn't like groups of people, and now that the crooked men were gone the danger was very real.

They passed the new workshop that had been made for the tinkerman, a lean-to surrounded by piles of Before-Time junk that they wanted him to fix. He was working on some gadget and looked up to see Lanyard moving towards him, murder in his face.

"Help!" Cobbler hollered out, a second before Lanyard whipped him with the loose end of the wire.

"Shut your mouth," Lanyard said and gave him an absolute belting. "Get me out of this, or you'll get another."

With shaking hands, Cobbler fetched a set of tin-snips, sheared through the barbed-wire. Lanyard felt the circulation return to his hands, winced at the deep cuts that the jags had left.

The posse had taken the tinkerman's horse, and there was only a bicycle and a broken motor-bike left in the camp. He would have to leave the girl.

Ignoring her cries, he ransacked the dwellings of the crooked mob. He found a sharp rabbit knife but none of his own stuff, pulled on some filthy clothes that had seen better days.

"Seems our jesusman is resourceful," Hat-Trick said as Lanyard emerged from the hut. The crooked man was on horse-back, pointing his own shot-gun at him. Lanyard's eyes were drawn to the yawning black of the double-O, briefly wondered if he'd see the flash before he died.

Before Hat-Trick could squeeze the triggers the horse reared up and threw him. Lanyard never thought he'd be happy to see the enormous grandfather snake, but as it sank its fangs into the horse he blessed every broken scale on its battered body. Against the odds, this enormous creature had found him, despite being shot at, electrocuted, and battered to within an inch of its life.

Lanyard snatched the shotgun from the limp hands of the crooked man, groaning and winded from his fall. The snake was curled around the twitching horse and hissed at Lanyard, ready to strike but wary of the enormous shooter.

It was only the arrival of the crooked mob, hollering and firing at the serpent which saved him. The snake held its ground, lashing out at any who came near, till it bristled with spears and bullet wounds.

From where he stood Lanyard spotted his old skiff, parked behind Cobbler's workshop. He ran for it, snatching the girl on the way. The cannibals were too busy dealing with the enormous snake to stop him.

He lay her down in the spare seat and stashed the shotgun in back. He was messing around with the rigging and sails when he felt the barrel of a pistol in the back of his head.

"You're taking me, not her," Cobbler said, and at the tinkerman's frantic urging Lanyard lifted the girl out, left her sobbing on the ground. Cobbler threw his crutch into the back and climbed in, ordered Lanyard to move.

The canvas sails rippled in the breeze, and as he pushed the skiff out onto the salt-pan the breeze became a strong driving wind. But not quite quick enough, and even as the little wind-cart darted across the flat salt-crust the snake was in pursuit, only pausing for a moment to snatch the girl into its mouth.

"Snake killed them all," Lanyard realised, which certainly explained what Thomas Cobbler the tinkerman was doing holding some dead man's pistol.

"Move this damn thing!" Cobbler said, looking over his shoulder. "Make it go faster."

With one smooth motion Lanyard heaved Cobbler over the side, and freed of the extra weight the skiff went much faster indeed.

# #

Despite his fractured apprenticeship, Lanyard knew enough to do his job. This world did not need a soft and loving shepherd, did not need a man of letters or even a man who could preach. The old morality was long dead, and the words of the jesus less than the dust he'd given them to live in.

There were creatures out there, supernatural trespassers that needed killing. He could sniff them out, make them regret the moment they trod in his world. It was a purpose, one that lifted him above being a common thug. He'd finally accepted this destiny.

He was always afraid, and often alone. But the last of the jesusmen did not need the approval or help of others. Lanyard would cheerfully kill a man over a bag of coin, but the monsters he began to murder as a community service.

He had become the last jesusman, perfectly suited for this cruel new age.

# #

He had bigger problems than the Inland snake. A witch came for him the next night, openly and without fear. Lanyard had his jesusman's gun primed, had already scratched the marks and wards into the dust when the creature sat down by his campfire, just outside of his protective circle.

"You've nothing to fear from the snake," the pasty-white creature told him, in that strange static that was halfway between voice and thought. "We fed from it, my kin and I. Every last scale, every scrap of its gizzards."

"A shame," Lanyard said. "It was honest enough, in its own way. Wouldn't say the same of your kind."

It shifted forms, like runny candle-wax. The creature had become something like the dead cripple girl, but mature, lush, a vision of the future robbed from her by Hat-Trick's crooked mob. She had both her legs, and writhed by the fire, laughing and moaning seductively. Lanyard shook his head, every nerve urging him to murder the foul creature.

"I've been sent to make you an offer, jesusman," the witch said, shifting into the form of Teeth, her foul head snapping at him from the end of the grandfather serpent's body. "We would have a settlement in the Now, and seek truce with the last of the jesusmen."

"No truce," Lanyard said. "When I have enough kit to do the job, I will return. I'm fixing to murder you, you and your whole bloody mob."

"Fool," the witch snarled. "You will never rest. We will haunt your dreams, hunt you by day and by night."

"Your friends might. But you won't."

Lanyard emptied both barrels into the monster, the report scaring a flock of cockatoos out of a nearby tree and into noisy flight. Even as the witch dragged itself across the ground, whimpering and trying to open a door to somewhere else, he hammered the life out of it with the wooden stock of that holy gun. When it finally lay silent, stinking of rotten meat and stale piss, he heaved the slippery beast into the fire.

Lanyard stacked wood around the body of the witch, and sat up throughout the night to watch it burn. When he slipped into an exhausted slumber, his dreams were still.

# ###

#  About the author

Jason Fischer is a writer who lives near Adelaide, South Australia. He has a passion for godawful puns, and is known to sing karaoke until the small hours.

Jason has won an Aurealis Award and the Writers of the Future Contest, and he has been on shortlists in other awards such as the Ditmars and the Australian Shadows. He is the author of dozens of short stories, with his books "Everything is a Graveyard" and "Quiver" now available from most online retailers.

She simply won't let the zombies stop her! Dive into the Tamsyn Webb Chronicles at <http://www.tamsynwebb.com/>.

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