Dead Boys (17 page)

“Man down!” cried Clay, who could barely be heard over the roar of the spectators. He was drowned out completely as the enemy general’s war-cry drove her underlings into a frenzy, pounding their weapons against the back of the door and howling.

In moments, the door reached to the base of the hillock, leaning diagonally over four crouching warriors, one of whom popped up with a baseball bat, forcing Jacob to defend himself with his crowbar.

Remington, who had the task of seeing for two headless combatants, found it difficult to determine what he ought to be focusing on, and while his eyes were on Adam’s scuffle with one of the door-bearers, the other sprang up and swept Eve’s legs from under her with a billy-club—an event he witnessed too late to stop. The spectators went mad as she struck the earth, hooting at Clay that his team was already finished, and the enemy general, agreeing with their estimation, lurched around the side of the hillock, withdrawing an antique short-sword from a cardboard scabbard as she made her way toward Leopold’s fallen form.

But Remington had little attention to spare for Leopold. As soon as Eve went down, her assailant began pounding on her with his billy-club, and Adam, hearing the crunch of her ribs, hurled himself neck-first off the hillock and into the oaken door, slamming its bearers to the ground beneath it. As he landed on his backside, his knife slipped out of his hand and skittered to the feet of the rock-thrower, who uttered a long, jubilant ululation as he took possession of his first edged weapon.

“Shut him down!” said Clay, who, expecting no sensible response to this order, was astonished when Remington launched his signpost like a javelin straight through the rock-thrower’s stomach, turning his war-cry into a bleat of surprise as he was pinned to the ground.

In moments, three of their five opponents had been knocked off their feet, but Jacob was oblivious to this change in their fortune, being preoccupied with the curious duel he was waging against the batter. They were swinging at each other, but given their general unsteadiness, their weapons were more often used for balance than aggression. As Jacob took advantage of a rare moment of equilibrium to prepare a competent swing, the batter, hearing a sharp whistle from the hillock, loosened his grip, and as Jacob’s crowbar connected, the bat flew from his hands.

“Nice one,” said Clay. “Now mash him!”

“Mash!” cried Gork, overcome with emotion, but before Jacob could comply, the batter turned and stumbled into the Plains. Adam, finding his feet, staggered after the batter, and Jacob, using his crowbar as a walking-stick, tottered down the hillock after him, more out of a desire to protect his unarmed companion than any sense of wrath.

Jacob was likewise devoid of fury, terror, bravery, or any other state he’d associated with battle, yet an undeniably violent haze had enveloped him, rendering certain alterations to his consciousness: for instance, it obscured the sounds of the hillock (including certain shouted warnings that he would no doubt have found useful) but rendered gloriously the little plumes of dust rising behind the batter’s footfalls as he led them into a sandy patch of the Plains.

Jacob had begun to wonder, given their relative speeds, if it was possible to catch the batter before they reached the opposite side of the Rim. As it happened, he only followed for a few more paces before the general shrieked an order.

The batter stomped three times on the ground, and the earth below Adam’s feet exploded. A desiccated lieutenant, who’d clearly been buried in the sand like some bellicose jack-in-the-box, sprung up with surprising force, swinging his machete in a wide arc; the blade severed Adam’s thigh in one stroke, and the lieutenant landed on his feet, lunging toward Jacob, who was suddenly forced to take the business of war more seriously than he cared to.

Here they are, thought Jacob: the terrible foe, the blade that may undo me, et cetera; but where is the fear? He raised his crowbar, blocked the blow, and braced himself for the next, feeling nothing but a touch of dread. The machete was hacking through the air, rising and falling, and his crowbar was rising and falling to meet it, causing the two of them to shudder without straining, to stagger without toppling. It all felt comfortable, even natural, as if the dust that covered them were a narcotic.

We’re drugged, he thought. The Plains are reeling us in. Making us a part of them.

Then the lieutenant plunged his scimitar into Jacob’s belly, missing Etienne’s chin by an inch. Jacob took the opportunity to bash his crowbar into the lieutenant’s head, knocking some inessential bones into disarray.

We could spend days like this, thought Jacob as he regained his balance, but before another moment passed, Remington’s crow swooped into the lieutenant’s face, digging its beak into his eye, blotting out his vision with its wings.

“Do it,” said Etienne, and Jacob yanked the scimitar from his own gut and swept it through the lieutenant’s neck, trimming an inch off the crow’s tail-feathers in the process.

“My apologies,” said Jacob to the crow as the lieutenant’s body flopped back into the pit, “and my thanks.”

The head had landed face-down, and with the tip of his boot Jacob righted it.

The batter who’d led them here was now far in the distance, waving Adam’s severed leg like a trophy as he loped away.

“Oh, Adam, I’m sorry,” said Jacob. “There’s not much point in chasing him now, I’m afraid.”

“It’s only a leg,” said Etienne.

“Perhaps, but the poor fellow doesn’t have much left,” said Jacob, hefting Adam over his shoulders and turning toward the hillock, where he was surprised by how much of the general’s squadron was on fire.

“Everything turned out all right, then?” called Jacob. Standing at a safe distance from the blaze, he set Adam down and allowed himself to become mesmerized.

The entire hillock was silent, as everyone from the stone-thrower pinned to the ground to the heads on the totem pole stared into the dancing flames, awed by a sight none had witnessed since they walked the Lands Above. Fire, however eerily it recalled life, was no foreigner to the land of death; it was simply unpopular there, for reasons ably demonstrated by the general and her two minions, who writhed, slowly and involuntarily, one above and two below the raging wreck of their formidable oaken door, muttering their dissatisfaction as their flesh turned to ash.

“How?” said Jacob, a question Leopold was happy to answer.

“Really, old boy, I couldn’t have done it without you. While you and the headless wonder were traipsing merrily into the trap laid by this bunch of ne’er-do-wells, their slattern-in-chief was standing ominously above me, waggling her blade and calling me terrible names that Clay was too happy to translate. This whole pile seemed to find her amusing, encouraging her to precede injury with insult, leading to that rhetorical flourish that was her undoing: her final gibe was to call me ‘gutless,’ a state she sought to illustrate literally by slashing open my stomach. Of course, I wasted no time reaching inside and retrieving—”

“My lighter!” said Jacob, catching it in the air.

“While the doxy stood distracted by her own declamations, I sparked its wheel. This desert air had dried her out so thoroughly that the merest lick of flame at the hem of her garments engulfed her in an instant. She dropped her weapon into my lap (no damage there, thankfully), and dear Eve, who’d recently righted herself, used her buckler to knock the floozy onto the door, birthing this bonny blaze.”

“And you, Remington,” said Jacob, “how did you fare?”

“I watched. Hey, now that Adam’s lost his leg, I’d like to try an experiment. I know the guys at the stitchery said it wouldn’t work to replace somebody’s leg with somebody else’s, but I have an idea.”

“Very well,” said Jacob, “you can all do as you please while I’m repairing Leopold’s neck. Let’s set up camp near the pole; with any luck, the spectators will be excited enough to tip us off if a threat approaches.”

The spectators, in fact, were happy to play lookout, stimulated as they were by the victory of these underdogs, which they attributed to Clay’s intervention. As they spun the tale into a legend, putting Plains-Deadish to its best use, Jacob began to saw off a section of the billy-club recently wielded by a door-bearer, retaining a cylinder of lightweight metal. “I’ll drill some holes in it and secure it to your spine with wire,” he said.

“Carry on,” said Leopold.

“From now on, you’ll be unable to turn your head without turning your shoulders.”

“An improvement over the old method.”

Jacob inspected the remains of the broomstick-apparatus, which, it turned out, was lashed between Leopold’s shoulders with duct tape: a durable solution, but impossible to remove without flaying his back. Jacob sawed the broomstick down instead and turned his attention to the crimson scarf that hung limply from Leopold’s neck, its knots so encrusted with filth that they couldn’t be untied.

“I’m afraid this can’t be salvaged,” said Jacob, withdrawing a pair of scissors.

“Let it fall away, then. Let it all fall away.”

As Jacob’s fingers peeled away the fabric, he saw that Leopold’s neck had, at some point since the preservation of his nether regions, been torn open, resulting in a ragged edge of skin hanging loosely over the exposed innards of his throat.

“Would you like me to try and sew this up for you?” said Jacob, wondering with some distaste who had performed such a sloppy job, and to what end.

“There’s no need. We’ll all suffer greater indignities before we reach White Gate. It’s time we left vanity behind, Jacob: the Plains mean to change us.”

Beside the pole, Remington had found a leg about the same length as the one Adam had lost, and sat down with it, clamping its thigh between his knees, staring at its stump.

“This cannot work,” said Desi from the pole. “You are attempting the marriage of apple and orange.”

“Don’t seem like it ought to,” said Clay, “but it don’t seem like those meat-shields should be able to see, either.”

Remington took Adam’s knife in his right hand and began paring the flesh from the tip of his left index finger. “Bone is the engine,” he said, carving down to the knuckle. He repeated the operation with his opposite hand, then peered at the exposed tips, two white spikes emerging from tubes of rotting muscle.

For a moment he sought the state of mind he had attained in the cave, but as the breeze blew dust through the bowl of his skull, he found it unnecessary: his mind was already perfectly suited to the task at hand. There was no need to reach out for the hands of his fellows, for something steady and infinitesimal already joined them, something that suffused him as he reached his fingertip to the gleaming femur of the severed leg.

No spark occurred when the two bones touched, and if any physical force was at work, it was subtler than Remington could perceive, yet once the connection was made, his mind went rolling down the thigh, swirling around the kneecap, plunging along the shinbone, down five metatarsals, to the tips of five toes.

Slowly, drawing on the leg’s will as well as his own, he unbent its knee, then kicked its foot into the air.

“
Brujo
,” whispered Desi.

He touched his other finger to the stump of Adam’s thigh, joining the two severed femurs with his skeleton. For a moment he felt uncomfortably crowded, then he simply abdicated. His body slumped over, and Adam took control, lifting and lowering the severed leg through the conduit of Remington’s bones.

“You can stitch these guys up now,” said Remington over the spectators’ murmurs. “Just make sure the bones are touching.”

Jacob, who was testing the integrity of Leopold’s reinforced neck, looked up to see Adam holding his new appendage flush against his stump, wiggling its toes.

“Well,” he said, popping open his canister of needles. “This simplifies matters.”

CHAPTER TEN

The Scrimmage

T
he company couldn’t ignore the battle’s losers for long. A severed head awakened and started cursing, first at his own body bashing itself against the walls of the sand-pit below him, then at the smoldering ruins of his general, who responded in kind. As the disagreement infected the rest of their squadron, engulfing them in an argument fueled by enough acrimony to last for the rest of time, Etienne began fretting aloud. “We can’t stay here,” he said from Jacob’s chest.

“Well, of course not,” said Jacob, victory lending him a certain breeziness. “I’ll finish up here in a jiffy, and we’ll be on our way!”

“Look at that leg,” said Remington as Adam stomped around the hill. “You’d think he was born with it!”

“Perhaps,” mused Leopold, “I ought to have you slap a second sword-arm on my back. Or do you think the front would be more useful?”

“Oh, shut your
traps
!” shouted Etienne. “You think this is a game, don’t you? But our eternity is in your hands, hands that will be ripped off as soon as you step into the scrimmage if what you showed in that scuffle is all the fight you have!”

The company was too stunned to reply.

“Jacob, stand and face the others,” he said. Jacob complied without a word.