Dead Boys

by Gabriel Squailia

  “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.

  Hours passed. Boredom trickled between them like drizzling rain. Jacob could hear the debtors moving and barking, preparing their departure, he supposed, but could see nothing but bare rock and the girl.

  For a time, Jacob couldn’t look directly at her. Her gleaming bones reminded him that he was on his way to disassembly, that his quest was dissolving, moment by moment, in this acidic silence. And how disgusting it was to see an entire skeleton, up-close and utterly unclothed, lacking the promise of impending preservation, without even the meager accessories of a Hordesman! He lifted his hands to his face to shield himself, however briefly, from the sight of her, but upon feeling his fingertips clack against bone, he realized that his skull was as naked as hers. Ashamed, he was attempting to summon the bravery to greet her when he spotted a sudden lurching on the path and froze in place.

  It was the Leather Masker tumbling down the path like some rotting primate—loose, compact limbs flailing under his robe, skull hidden away behind a luchador mask embroidered with a second, stylized s
kull, nothing of his body visible but grinning teeth and empty eye sockets. In moments he’d rolled up to the cage and pounced onto its bars, slapping gloved hands around them, turning his head sideways to peer within.

  “So this is ‘im, Jean-Luc? The Clock-Thief ‘imself?” He snorted, and Jacob was afraid, not that the Masker would attack him, but that in his tumbling and growling and snuffling he would ferret out the truths that Jacob was hiding. A terrible question occurred to him: what would they do if they learned of Remington’s talents? Even if they’d witnessed the monster’s construction, they clearly hadn’t drawn the right conclusions. Were Remington captured, would he resist, or could he, in his naïveté, be convinced to make something even more monstrous than the Last Man Standing?

  With a sudden resolve, Jacob promised himself that they’d never find out. Leopold and Etienne were already suffering for his mistakes; he’d not add Remington to that list.

  The Leather Masker pointed a gloved finger at his face. “This is ‘im who’s cost us all this effort—and what is ‘e now that ‘e’s ‘ere? No master criminal, just another turd circlin’ the bottom of the bowl.” Clanging a fist across the bars, he shouted, “Perk up there, Clock-Thief! We’ll require a better show than this, after all we’ve spent.”

  “He does not know, Monsieur,” said Jean-Luc. “He does not know what time and care you have put into his capture. But I think he should!”

  “Jean-Luc thinks you should,” said the Leather Masker, tumbling onto the dusty path, where he sprawled extravagantly, digging a hand into his robes. “I guess ‘e’s got a point,” he said, pulling out a pair of dice and rattling them in one hand. “Probably curious ‘ow we even knew to look for your knob, innit? Thought you were so careful.”

  “It was I who discover this detail,” said Jean-Luc, strutting around the Masker, who began rolling his dice repeatedly in the dirt. “My master, the Gambler, it was he who put me in charge of searching your clock-tower, for it seem impossible to him that the ringer himself should simply disappear—with no face, and a debt-stamp right in his forehead? Impossible! So I inspect every last pebble within, and am finally bother by this hole in the wall you know so well. ‘A window to nowhere,’ I say, ‘and the only escape for our Clock-Thief.’ So I volunteer to climb down into the dark, and there I find the hole you have beat out of the stone!”

  “Cracked that tower right open, so we did,” growled the Masker, still busy with his dice, “and found both ‘alves of the ringer you broke in two. That’s a treason right there, desecratin’ the corpse of one of the Magnate’s own debtors! Spoke ‘ighly of your bravery, ‘e did, but not so ‘ighly of your aim.”

  “You see,” said Jean-Luc, “when you pull off his head, you shoot at this window to nowhere, and you miss—and this is when his head roll between your legs, giving him a look up your robe at your protubérance! Oh, if only you had wore some trouser, Monsieur, you would be free today.”

  The Masker scooped up his dice and tumbled to his feet. “Looked all about for the man with a statue for a cock, so we did. Nearly ‘ad you in the Tunnels, too. You escaped for the nonce, but snarin’ you was a mere matter of persistence.

  “Built us a raft ‘alf as wide as Lethe. Brung out thousands of debtors from the Pool to tug it upstream, enough to canvass the underworld twice over, should we ‘ave needed to. Them ‘eadless decoys by the cave were a lovely touch, but we’d an army to conduct our search. And now ‘ere we are. And ‘ere are you. And now I want to know, Leopold.” The Masker leapt at the bars. “Ah, yes, we know your name! John Tanner gave you up, with joy.”

  “Tanner?” said Jacob, infuriated by the very mention of his competitor’s name.

  “That’s got ‘im goin’!” barked the Masker to Jean-Luc. “Aye, John Tanner, whose name you’d given as your own in the Crowded Car, offered up all we needed to know. Except for one damn thing that’s been botherin’ me all this while. Wormin’ in and out of me skull until me sane ‘alf’s gone ‘alfway barmy.” He rapped his gloved knuckles against his masked skull. Jacob heard a rattle, and wondered if the man’s head were stuffed full of dice. “All I want to know, Clock-Thief, and the only thing that will ‘elp me reckon what to do with you now, is the answer to one question:

  “Why?”

  “Oui, pourquoi?” Jean-Luc echoed, striding to the Masker’s side. “Pourquoi?”

  Jacob stared at them, trembling. “Why—why what, exactly?”

  They exchanged an incredulous glance. “Why’d you take the bloody watches? T’was a damn fool thing to do. And I’m an expert on the subject of damn fool things, as anyone who knows me knows. You might ‘ave gambled your lifetime on a throw when you was moments dead—leastways, that’s the rumor—but I gambled eternity to get where I am. Every stinkin’ grain of sand in the glass.” He rattled the dice in one gloved fist. “And knowin’ a thing or two about gambles, I know that every gambler ‘as ‘is reasons. Secrets ‘e whispers to Fortuna, ‘oping she’ll choose ‘im from the crowd. So tell me, Clock-Thief, one fool to another. Why’d you do it?”

  Jacob’s mind had seized, offering no answer to this question. “A moment. A moment to gather my thoughts.”

  The Masker grunted. “S’pose we’re ‘ardly in an ‘urry.”

  In the overlong pause that followed, one truth emerged: Jacob’s continued existence, and that of his companions, depended upon how he answered this question.

  His mind raced. He had no way of knowing why Leopold had stolen from the Magnate, beyond an obvious hunger for power. And there was no point in trying to convince these men that he wasn’t Leopold, as Leopold’s unique genitalia had provided them with all the evidence they’d require.

  The truth wouldn’t help him now. Anything remotely resembling it would lead them, in time, to Remington.

  He was shaking by the time the Leather Masker disengaged from the bars of his cage and plopped down in the dirt, resuming his incessant rolling. Something about the action caught Jacob’s eye, some oddly insistent precision. It reminded him of the way Ma Kicks had rolled her own dice, so full of intent, and more: full of ritual. Then he heard the Leather Masker muttering a number under his breath before each roll, and saw his body stiffen with triumph when the dice matched his guess.

  Jacob had his answer.

  “Why does any gambler roll the dice?” he said, taking to his feet in an imitation of Leopold’s confident strut. “That’s the question, isn’t it? Why does any man gamble, and were my reasons any different from those of the braying crowd at Caesar’s?” He knelt close to the bars, pushing his skull against them to peer down at his captor. “Which is another way of asking: are yours?”

  The Leather Masker scooped up his dice, cocking his head.

  “It may occur to us that we can’t control the choices we take,” Jacob went on, “but that doesn’t mean we believe it. Instead, we have faith in chaos—faith that the dice we throw will fall at random—or we turn Fortune into our goddess, hoping that our behavior might sway her whims in our favor. But you’re too wily for either of those excuses, and so am I.”

  The Leather Masker shook his head, and resumed his rolling. “Audacious, I’ll give you that. Comparin’ yourself to me, with your feet a-thumpin’ on the gallows floor!”

  “I’d already be swinging if you hadn’t made the comparison yourself,” said Jacob, steadying as he warmed to his role. “It’s clear after moments of meeting you that you understand what really governs the pips on those dice. What appears to be chance, or the caprice of a goddess, isn’t random at all. It’s physical. The way those dice fall depends upon a host of minute forces: gravity, air pressure, irregularities in their shape and weight, the way they sit in your fingers, the angle of your hand when you toss them, the force, the spin, the surface of the ground itself. Thus, winning is not an art, but a science so maddeningly precise that no ordinary man could hope to learn it in his lifetime.

  “But you’re no ordinary man. And you have far more than a lifetime at your disposal. Yo
u can throw those dice for the rest of history. You can throw them until you master every variable on that long list, and then, in the end, chaos will have no choice but to serve you.

  “Just like a god.”

  The Leather Masker stopped rolling. He left the dice in the dirt and crept, with uncommon care, to the side of the cage. “And?” he rumbled. “What’s any of that ‘ave to do with you, Clock-Thief?”

  “With—with me? Right. Of course.” Jacob had been so excited by his idea that he’d utterly forgotten where it was leading. Having nothing in reserve, he focused on saving his hide. “I ask only for the chance to serve you, at—at the side of chaos. Let me be your acolyte. Let me be your worshiper. Above all, let me continue to be.” Falling to his knees, he grasped the bars, desperately hoping that theatricality would save him where his wits had failed. “Don’t grind me to dust, my liege, I beg of you!”

  The Leather Masker stood perfectly still. Jean-Luc was watching, rubbing his hands together slowly.

  That’s it, thought Jacob, I’ve bungled it. Imagining his body broken beneath the weight of the Pestle, he was on the verge of dropping the act when the Leather Masker began to chuckle.

  “What, the Mortar and Pestle, that’s what you’re on about? Punitive deconstruction and that? You surprise me, Clock-Thief. After all this time and energy spent, you think we’d just grind you up and toss the remains into an ashtray? You’ll not be so lucky, I’m afraid!” Scooping up his dice, he clapped Jean-Luc on the back, sending the lanky debtor sprawling. “We’ve got somethin’ special planned for this one, ‘aven’t we?”

  “Of course, Monsieur!” his lackey cried, scrambling up again.

  “Right, then—saddle up!”

  Jean-Luc fell to the task with relish, arranging eleven other debtors in two rows beside himself, where they began, in two rows of harnesses, to pull. The Gambler trailed behind the cage, stopping every so often to roll his dice and mutter, and Jacob, exhausted and with no idea whether he’d succeeded or failed, fell to the floor of his cage.