Dead Boys (23 page)

While the reaper struck with both daggers at Adam’s arms, Eve brought two balled fists down on her back with such force that her skeleton burst. Adam, though his arms were cut to the bone, tossed reaper-pieces through the holes hacked out of the Last Man’s body. Before the reaper’s stained little skull succumbed to hack-shock, her conquerors climbed through one of these openings into the Plains, where the Last Man Standing was bashing the last few Hordesmen into rattling bits.

While the bones were being scattered, Jacob strode toward the shadow of White Gate, slipping into a crevice so narrow that he could not fully spread his arms. He walked down that crooked hall alone, trying to ignore the sounds coming from atop the creature, needing urgently to be the first of the company to see White City.

This was his moment. Whatever Leopold and Etienne were suffering could be fixed, but Jacob had waited too long to delay his triumph. He plunged deeper, following the swaying and twisting of the path until it ended abruptly in a massive slab of white stone. Laying his hands on its unyielding face, he grunted in irritation, then shrugged off his knapsack, hoping to find a tool that would aid in his ascent.

Before he’d opened its flap he saw the ropes tumbling down the walls. In moments, they were taut with the white-headed, dark-robed weight of debtors. Jacob held up his hands, his jaw working silently as scores of them swarmed the hallway. A gabbling gang peered down from the Rim, where dozens, hundreds,
thousands
of debt-stamped skulls were amassed high above the Plains, stretching as far as the eye could see, every one of them staring at Jacob.

Staggering back against the Gate, he glimpsed a dark skull among the white ones. It was the compact form of the Leather Masker, rattling a pair of dice in one gloved hand.

Jacob screamed for help, thinking that at any moment the Last Man Standing would grind these soft bodies into paste, for these were no Plainsmen, only unarmed debtors. Then he heard the twinned bellow of Leopold and Etienne, and the thunder of the Last Man’s bulk slamming against the mouth of the crevice, which was far too narrow to let that body through.

“It isn’t me,” he blurted in desperation. “I’m not the one you’re looking for. I’ve stolen nothing from you; it was—”

But the debtors had already pinned Jacob’s back against the Gate and yanked his corduroy trousers down. A cheer went up when Leopold’s cock sprang up below his belly. Jacob, whose limbs went as limp as they had when he’d been bisected, was trussed up and hauled on the end of a rope to the top of the Rim, where the mass of debtors passed him hand over hand, away from the tall Gate of White City.

III

CHAPTER TWELVE

In the Box

T
he thousands of debtors who lined the Rim in two tidy rows tossed Jacob’s hog-tied body southward like a sack of cargo toward a ship. As their skulls flashed past he wondered whether he’d join them in indenture, or if the Magnate had something even less palatable in mind. Leopold’s crimes were surely grievous enough to earn disintegration.

Regardless, they couldn’t very well punish Jacob for his partner’s transgressions. He’d explain, and they’d see that he was an innocent.

But as he prepared the story in his mind, it occurred to him that he’d known full well where the watches had come from when they’d been traded for his monster’s armaments, and the theft hadn’t bothered him then.

The guilt was his, after all. Treason halved was still treason.

A strange noise tore him from his thoughts, a polyphonic bark rippling through the ranks of debtors, whipping past him before he could comprehend it. The debtors were speaking almost in unison, passing a message from the Torn Curtain to White Gate in some unfamiliar dialect of Deadish.

He stared over the flat top of the Rim, finding that his peculiar mode of transportation granted him lurching glimpses into the desert beyond the Plains, where a dust storm roiled, wider than his eyes could take in.

The debtors around him remained hidden from the eyes of the Plainsmen as they’d hidden from the company, by keeping away from the Rim’s inner edge. They had eyes on the floor of the Plains, though: Jacob was tossed past a debtor lying on his belly, peering down at the floor of the Plains through a telescope, his head camouflaged by a dusty blanket.

They must have dozens of spies up here, he thought as he spotted another. They were keeping watch for the Last Man Standing.

Hope kindled in his heart, for the company could pass easily through the Torn Curtain and overtake his captors long before they reached Dead City.

But the Masker knew as much. Why, then, was he transporting his prisoner so openly?

A second message passed through the debtors, traveling in the opposite direction this time, a single phrase leaping from one throat to the next in the same thoughtless, reflexive way they were heaving his body, moving more quickly by mouth than he could be passed by hand.

It’s like a disciplined game of telephone, he thought, and then he was hurled face-first off the edge of the Rim.

He broke his fall on a scaffold outside of the Torn Curtain, made of warped, wine-dark wood connected by ladders of rope, rubber, and chain. Its surfaces, like the desert below, swarmed with debtors.

Four of them surrounded Jacob. He stared through their legs at the sloping desert rock to the north, where hundreds of thousands of skulls snaked past the horizon.

“All this for a handful of watches?” he said as he was rolled onto his back.

“Don’t know much about the Masker, do ya?” said one of the four.

“Them’s the crown jewels you stole,” said another, holding Jacob down with her foot while the others unfolded a bed-sheet. “King’s got to chase his jewels.”

“Whate’er the price,” said the third, tying the corners of the sheet onto bamboo poles driven into the platform.

“Such is the weight of sovereignty,” said the last, arranging the sheet like a tent around them.

They huddled together to inspect him, drawing so close that their skulls knocked together. Jacob recoiled in irrational fear as their skulls grinned down over the corrupted flesh of their throats.

“Right-o,” said one, jabbing a thumb at his neighbor, “he’s closest to your height.”

They rolled Jacob over and untied his bonds.

“Time to play dress-up,” said the debtor so selected, pulling his robe over his head while the others yanked off Jacob’s clothes.

“What will stripping me naked achieve?” cried Jacob, terrified by the prospect of seeing Leopold’s legs sutured to his torso. It hadn’t been long ago, but he’d all but completely blocked out the memory of their merging.

“You should know, you gave the Masker the idea.” Catching Jacob’s trousers in the air, the debtor pulled them on, clucking as he wiggled his finger through a hole in the pocket.

“Our co-worker here will be your decoy,” said the debtor working Jacob’s shirt open. “We brought you this far in case your friends was watching. Now, if they follow, it’s the decoy they’ll chase, while the Masker takes you the back way.”

“But they travel with the beast,” said Jacob as the decoy pulled on his shirt. “The Last Man Standing is armed with a hundred shining swords. If you take me, you’ll never walk again!”

“That’s the plan,” said the decoy, tucking in his shirttails. “A debtor disassembled in the line of duty joins the Order of the Ossuary. Thereafter he is carried about on a velvet pillow according to his whim. Every debtor on this detail hopes to be ‘hacked up’; your friends will be doing us a service if they catch us.”

They lifted Jacob to his feet, pinning his arms behind his back. One of them paused, noticing the little leather pouch tied around his wrist and squeezing it suspiciously. “What’s this, then?” he asked, tugging at its strings and peering inside. “Ech. Nothing here but dust and rubble.”

Jacob ground his teeth, but kept silent. He’d long forgotten about Ma Kicks’ severed finger, which must have been pulverized in its pouch while Jacob fought in the scrimmage. He felt a stab of guilt that he’d allowed it to be destroyed.

Leaving the pouch where it dangled, one of the debtors brought a rusted razor blade to his throat. “Never mind. Let’s make this pretty face shine,” she cooed, sweeping the razor around his neck, where the skin parted like tissue paper. “Would you look at that? We don’t even have to scrub!” Sinking her fingers into his hair, she pulled off the loose sheath of his face and tugged it down gingerly over the decoy’s skull.

“How do I look?” said the decoy through Jacob’s lips, adjusting the skin until the eye-holes lined up just so.

“You’re a vision.”

“The spit and image of the Clock-Thief!”

“With one obvious exception.”

There was a somber pause while they examined the object of Leopold’s pride.

“Are we meant to take it?”

“What if the Masker wants it?”

“Don’t be daft. It’s a defining characteristic, isn’t it?” said the decoy. “That’s what he said: ‘Make a costume of his defining characteristics.’ Off it comes!”

“Then it’s on your head if the Masker’s displeased.”

Jacob couldn’t tell which was more disturbing: the sight and sound of Leopold’s erection being torn from his body, or the howl of wounded pride that spilled from his own throat at its loss. It isn’t mine, he thought frantically, it isn’t even mine. But all the fight had left him by the time the cock had been securely stuffed down the decoy’s new corduroys. Stunned and silent, Jacob was dressed in cast-off robes, bound by the wrists, and hustled out of the tent. His doppelgänger trudged in the opposite direction, toward the ladders at the front of the scaffold, hanging his head in mock shame as the debtor behind him played warden.

“You look dapper now,” she said as she and her partner shoved Jacob back onto the Rim. “Let’s hope the Maskers’ Council has pity on you and throws your skull in the bogs. It would be a shame if they ground it down, shapely as it is!”

They pushed Jacob through the double line of debtors on the outer edge of the Rim, out of sight of the scrimmage. When White Gate rose high above their heads, they passed him into the custody of the thirteen debtors awaiting his arrival, whose leader, a gangly corpse with pale, clean, and ceaselessly expressive hands, took hold of Jacob’s ropes with relish.

“
Il arrive
!” he crowed. “To you we extend our welcome, Monsieur Clock-Thief. Boys, down the plank for our guest!”

As the others laid a board across the chasm, this enthusiastic debtor twisted Jacob’s ropes this way and that, hoping to force from him a cry expressive of the misery of bondage. He could not oblige: there was nothing left in his chest.

Jacob’s captor drove him across the plank covering the chasm before White Gate, over the site of his capture and onto the western edge of the Rim, where the path became uneven as the foothills of the Wall of the World thrust into the Plains. Ahead, towering flanks of rock closed off the rampart entirely, and although Jacob couldn’t fathom how the debtors intended to climb these obstructions, he focused on keeping his footing.

In the midst of the path stood a rickety cage on six bicycle wheels, the remnant of some century-old circus, its rotting frame reinforced with planks and straightened nails. Long chains attached to rubber loops trailed from the front, and a metal trunk was hitched to the rear. A prisoner was already inside, a teenaged girl of whom so little remained that he hesitated even to think of her as a corpse.

Jacob’s captor drove him onto a sloping shelf of rock above the box, then shoved him through a trap-door in its roof. He fell bodily to the floor not a foot from the girl.

“Please to meet your new roommate,” said the debtor, pacing before the bars. “I would make your introduction, but you I only know as Clock-Thief, and she have no name at all: she must have run away into
le Désert du Sable Mobile
when we arrive here. The sandy storm scrub off her cloth, her skin, even the debt-stamp on her skull, then send her running back into our arms,
comme un poulet plumé
! This traitor, let us call her Mademoiselle Squelette.”

Jacob shoved himself as far from her as the cage would allow, overcome by a horror of all that naked bone. For her part, the girl seemed not to have noticed him at all. She sat cross-legged, and her bones, unlike those of the Hordesmen, were so perfectly white that it looked as if she’d just been scrubbed—which she likely had, Jacob supposed, if she’d been lost in the sandstorms of the Moving Desert long enough to lose her flesh.

“She have run from her debt, a crime most full of shame, and for this she will have the biggest punishment available. We shall see her ground down—
oui
, down to the very
dust
!”

Jacob jumped as an inexplicable noise emerged from her empty frame.

The skeleton girl giggled.

“She also is quite mad,” said the debtor. “I think it must be the sandy storm still moving about in her head. If she attack you, please be welcome to break her bone.

“Now please to wait here, eh? Go nowhere!” The debtor trotted off, whistling as he went, leaving Jacob alone with the skeleton girl.