Dead Boys (33 page)

“All right!” rasped a Plainswoman in a leather girdle. “A little practice before we get down to business.”

Jacob saw the axe beginning its swing and leapt deftly aside. As the axe-wielder sank his blade in the sands, Jacob struck and was surprised to see his opponent launched into the air by the touch of his hand.

“What business?” said Remington, sidestepping another slow blow. “Are you trying to get back to the scrimmage?”

From the ground, the axe-wielder shook his head. “Ain’t no scrimmage to speak of,” he gurgled. “Whole thing’s cleared out, from Rim to Rim.” Laboriously, he righted himself, then trotted toward his axe, seemingly oblivious to Jacob’s strength and speed.

“Now our little squadron will be the first to return,” said the Plainswoman, jabbing her sword in the general direction of Adam’s ribs. “All we have to do is fight each other until three of our four are fallen, and the remaining fighter will, by definition, be—”

“The Last Man Standing!” they all roared at once, hollering and whooping as they made ineffectual passes at the ring of Seekers.

“Let us leave these simpletons and discuss,” said Shailesh, drawing the company away. The Plainsmen were happy enough to stagger on, clashing their weapons together as they went. “Something has happened in the Plains,” he said. “Something momentous and unexpected.”

“And those four weren’t at all afraid of us,” said Siham. “Isn’t that weird? Don’t the Plainsmen think we’re all witchy?”

Jacob, peering toward the distant walls of White City, had an awful premonition. “Remington,” he murmured, “can you see through the crow’s eyes from this distance?”

“Hm? Oh, sure. There he is, flying above the walls.” Remington spread out his bony arms and started running in circles, crying, “Whee!”

“Focus, Remy,” said Jacob. “What can you see down below?”

“Oh, that. Everybody looks like little ants! The Seekers are the white ants, and the other guys—wow, there’s a lot of them. They’re kind of everywhere.” Remington dropped his arms and looked up at the company. “I think the city’s under siege.”

“Scaffolds,” said Jacob, pointing. “The walls of the city aren’t white any more. They’re covered with scaffolds.”

It was a great while before anyone spoke, and it hardly mattered who it was.

“How long were we gone?”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Mask of the Magnate

T
he crow fluttered to a landing on the corner of an open-roofed laboratory in the midst of occupied White City. The chamber’s walls had been half-heartedly defaced by its occupants, ten of whom lounged about trying to summon the civic pride to do more damage as the other two theatrically decried their situation.

“It’s dehumanizing, that’s what it is!” cried Elspeth, pacing before a large plastic barrel, waving the blunt-tipped sword she’d been issued by the Magnate’s bean-counters.

“O fickle-fettled Fortuna! We’re nought but dehumans to thee,” said Oxnard, pounding his fist against the barrel’s lid, causing the river-water within to slop over one side.

“They made it sound so glamorous, with their tales of ransacking and kidnapping. And did you hear how we were to bring low the beast?”

The ten other warriors added their grumbles to the performance, urging Elspeth on.

“And what did that amount to? Spectating at a safe distance while all ten metal-men cut the Last Man Standing into hanks and hunks, shrugging off its blows as if they tickled their chrome-plated skulls. Well, the Magnate told us one thing truly: we’re stronger now that we’ve joined his army, ain’t we? So long as we stand behind the ten of them, we are!”

“A plagueful of poxen on the Manganate!”

“They said they’d make me an officer, didn’t they, Ox? But none of us, not even myself, is anything more than a metal-man’s lackey. What maneuver has any Plainsman performed here but for leaping into the raining blows of some jumped-up pile of bones? We’re agents of distraction, all in the name of giving one of them gilded lilies an opening. And now, as if our lackeyism weren’t crystal-clear, we’ve been blessed with a new assignment: guarding a blooming bucket while the metal-men bash Boners through eternity!”

“Teckmology hath dunked us to the depths of woe,” moaned Oxnard, thumping the barrel’s lid again and paying no mind when it thumped back.

“And why were the metal-men chosen? Were they the best among us, Ox?”

“Elspeth, sir, they wasn’t!”

“Nay, Ox! They were merely—the least.”

The Plainsmen, having warmed to the topic, were excited enough to resume hacking at the walls.

“’Twas cheaper to weld blades and hammers to broken men than to plate a warrior entire, so those that fell beneath our swords in the scrimmage were made into our generals. They’re the ones were hacked apart, yet we’re their spectators now!”

“Indignable it are!” said Oxnard. “We art the lowliest of lowlies now: lowlier than face-lacking debtors; lowlier than hacked-up metal-men; and fathom-depths of lowliness lowlier than them Boners, who art speedier and strengthier than I know not what! All them what’s greater than we art lesser in form: yet do you think, sir, that if we wert whittled down to bonishness ourselves we’d rocket through the ranks? Nay, we wouldst not even then!”

Elspeth dropped her sword on the floor. “Oxnard, that’s it!” she cried. “You great, moronic genius, you!”

“Eureka!” cried Oxnard, dropping his sword in agreement. “But, sir, what have I geniused?”

Elspeth pulled her armor loose and peeled off the grimy garments beneath, revealing a body more husk than flesh. “Those Boners are quicker than our metal-men, aren’t they, Ox?”

“By a muchness, sir,” said Oxnard.

The warriors around them stared in confusion as Elspeth gripped the dehydrated remnant of her calf and tore it from the bone. “Their movements are so rapid that they’re all but invisible to the naked eye, aren’t they? Fast enough to fake, Ox. Fast enough to fake.”

She’d stripped her lower half down to bone caked with ages-old grime but was having trouble reaching the rest. “Help me whittle, lummox!”

Oxnard, too confused to protest, began yanking off his commander’s flesh by the fistful, and hiccuped in delight when it was done. “Why, Elspeth, sir, you’re rebirthed! My own noble commandress, the first Plainsman to abstain the mightiful strength of the Boners.” He thudded to his knees, stricken by a sudden fear of her tiny frame, which in its filth could pass for that of an elder Seeker. “But be thou merciful, sir. Chop me not with thy dust-beams, nay, not even for demonstrational purposes!”

“Oh, stop your mewling, Oxnard, I don’t have any damn dust-beams. However!” Elspeth whirled about, imitating the martial style of the Seekers, and brought her open palm to a halt at Oxnard’s sternum.

“Thou really dothn’t have dust-beams, sir. I felt that not whatever.”

“No,” said Elspeth slowly, “but when I make such a gesture at you, you’ll fly backward as if it were the mightiest blow that ever a Boner landed. Thus, when they see me tossing the dozen of you about like grotty little rag dolls, they’ll think I’m one of them, and I’ll stroll into their impenetrable Plaza forthwith!”

The sense of this plan impressed the Plainsmen, who, in a roaring rush, abandoned their post to practice in the open. The crow fluttered down to peck at the lid of the barrel, broadcasting nothing to Remington now but an empty room.

“I guess that’s it,” said Remington, running through the desert in the midst of the company, pitching sand behind his skeletal feet. “There’s nothing in the lab now but that barrel of water, but I swear, guys, something inside it thumped! Maybe it’s an ultimate weapon. It could be a super-warrior built from pieces of the Last Man Standing!”

“Or a platinum-plated vulture,” said Jacob, “with lasers for eyes.”

“Ooh, what if it is?”

“It could be anything or nothing at all. But with the city taken over, we haven’t the time—”

“Remington’s right,” said Etienne. “If the Magnate thought it was worth protecting, it’s worth investigating.”

“We’ll go there first,” said Siham, “with Remy’s crow as our lookout.”

“What a terrible scene!” cried Shailesh as they spied Sandy Gate. “And what a shame that we’ve missed so much of the struggle!”

“This can’t all really be about a handful of pocket watches, can it?” wondered Siham.

The crow swooped over White City’s reconfigured streets, sweeping over bands of vandals, shipments of munitions, and the chaos at the city’s center before zeroing in on a maze of empty streets. The company, who’d followed Remington’s wordless signals and the crow’s overhead surveillance from the unguarded Sandy Gate, dashed through abandoned rooms and disused hallways until the sudden appearance of a group of debtors forced them into the marble room, no larger than a closet, where Siham had perfected her Ten Arrows technique.

As they crammed themselves inside, their ribs becoming fundamentally entangled, Jacob whispered, “Does fighting our way through appeal to anyone else?”

“The Magnate’s forces outnumber us a thousand to one,” said Siham. “How would we dig ourselves out?”

“Cutting them into manageable pieces has always worked for us,” said Etienne.

“Impossible!” said Shailesh. “Every Seeker has taken a vow not to divide that which died whole.”

“At the cost of your body?” said Jacob. “At the cost of your city?”

“At the cost of the underworld itself!” said Shailesh. “We are not gods, to decide which men may walk and which must sit on the shelves like weights for paper!”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Shailesh,” said Siham. “Doing nothing means letting White City fall. Doing nothing
is
doing something.”

Shailesh sighed. “You are no longer my student, Siham. But I would still ask you to respect that these debates have occupied the Meeting for centuries.”

“So has the question of how to keep the minutes. Look, Shailesh, it’s not complicated. The rule against dividing corpses is all about potential. Anybody could end up being a fool, or a sage, or a hero, or a villain, so long as she’s around long enough. And Seekers are all about giving people the chance to make good. Right?”

Shailesh ceded the point. “Just as the Plains warriors joined the Poet, then turned to peace, so may any man transform in the fullness of time.”

“Then it follows that we have a duty to protect our own first, before our enemies. Your own city, your own people, your own self—those are the things you have control over. Those are the things you actually have a shot at changing for the better.”

“So we should cut our way through these weaklings to preserve ourselves?” said Shailesh. “But they are harmless! They lack the means to damage us!”

“Just because they haven’t yet doesn’t mean they never will,” said Siham. “If they’ve gone from zero to metal-men in the time it took us to scour, how much further will they go if we just stand around and parry their blows for another five years?”

“Aha!” said Shailesh. “So, because they have the potential to destroy us, we should destroy their potential to do it. I see your logic and vehemently dispute it!”

“Hasn’t scouring taught you anything? We don’t destroy or create—we transform. All we do is change. But Etienne is no less himself because he’s lost his body. And Althea and Hamish would never have founded the art of bone-fighting—the art you’ve dedicated your afterlife to studying!—if they hadn’t been hacked to pieces.”

“But a man’s substance is his will!” said Shailesh. “If we were meant to divide, we would also have been given the power to—”

“To join?” said Remington.

A long silence fell over the marble chamber.

“We’re dust,” said Siham. “I’m dust, you’re dust, everybody is dust. That’s the gift he uses: it’s just dust talking to dust.

“A man’s bones aren’t his will, not his alone. Bones are will, period. The
him
in them is on loan, but the will itself belongs to the cloud. It’s in the cloud that we can see the truth: our bones are just dust in the shape of a person, but sooner or later, by water, by wind, or by time alone, all of us, all of them, all things below the Earth will just be—dust!

“So tell me, Shailesh, who is it that you think you’re destroying?”

Above the chamber, the crow squawked twice, signaling that the coast was clear, and the company extracted their tangled bones. Shailesh argued no more, but he carried their debate as he followed on, muttering arguments and counter-arguments as he went.

The company made for the laboratory, where a sizable stone on the barrel’s lid was its only guardian. Adam and Eve rolled it onto the ground, tipped the lid to one side, plunged their arms into the water, and pulled a loose-jointed skeleton free.

The prisoner loosed a rubbery moan as his bones touched the ground, his basic unsteadiness betraying the effects of river-water on the mind of a quickened corpse. His skeleton was dripping with a gelatinous substance, which, as he dragged it from his skull and slopped it on the floor, the company recognized as flesh broken down by Lethean waters.

“What, fleshless?” said the prisoner. “Melted down, melted into weakness, as payment for the strength my molten metal brought his men? Is this the ruin that my nemesis so often, so fervently wished upon me? Is this the end of the man I was, and if so, what possible kind of man can it be the beginning of? You there!” he cried, leveraging a goopy finger at Jacob. “You’re a Boneman, aren’t you? Tell me what I ought to do in this accursed crucible of an afterlife, since this is what my efforts have earned me!”