The road flattened as it approached one of the great, vertical flanks of the Wall of the World. Jean-Luc urged the debtors to bring the box as close to the end of the path as they could, then had them remove their harnesses. He and the Masker squatted in conference beside the Wall, consulting a yellowed scrap of paper on which a kind of constellation was drawn. At length, the debtors were arranged in a bizarre configuration before the bare rock, standing on one another’s backs and shoulders, forming towers and pyramids with their bodies and stretching their arms to their utmost limits in order to reach those tiny, barely visible indentations that were their goal.
“Very good,” said Jean-Luc when all were arranged just so, “and we depress on trois. Un, deux, trois!”
A loud click was followed by a bassy rumbling as a slab of mountainside shuddered behind a well-disguised seam, opening a dank tunnel through the rock. As Jean-Luc hollered, his debtors secured their harnesses and lumbered into the dark. Jean-Luc took the lead, inspecting the ground ahead for cracks and pits.
Jacob stared as the Masker led the way, feeling surprisingly little relief. There was no point in wondering what would come when they returned to the city: his existence was now completely beyond his control. He laid back on the floor of the cage, staring up at the roof of the tunnel until it melted into sky.
Days passed, maybe weeks. All the ground the company had covered on the current of the River Lethe passed by again, this time at a snail’s pace. His captors left him alone, and his fleshless neighbor never moved.
The silence became oppressive. Hating the sight of the debtors, disturbed by the very presence of the Leather Masker, depressed by the slowly-passing landscape, he began to stare, unabashedly, at the skeleton girl.
He’d thought of her as his mirror, but he couldn’t ignore their differences any longer. She’d been sitting perfectly still for miles and miles of bumpy road, while Jacob couldn’t keep himself from fidgeting. Every time his mind wandered, he caught his right hand picking at the skin that drooped from his throat, loosened by the knife of the debtors who’d taken his face. Each time he saw a bit of his own flesh pinched between thumb and forefinger, he gasped in disgust, tossed it through the bars, and tried his best to emulate the skeleton girl’s stillness.
After unconsciously tearing another hunk from his throat, he slapped his hands on the cage’s wooden floor and said, more loudly than he’d meant to, “However do you sit so still for so terribly long?”
The skeleton girl didn’t budge. For a moment he was afraid he’d offended her. Then boredom drove his fingers back to his neck.
“I’m asking out of genuine curiosity,” he said, grasping his right wrist in his left hand and forcing it into his lap. “It’s a talent I’ve never mastered. Stillness, that is. I get uncomfortable, and then I start to move. As if action, any action whatsoever, might save me from the void. You’re familiar with the sensation, I assume?” He stared at her placid skull. “Or perhaps not.”
Scooting closer, he dropped his voice to a whisper. “It’s this feeling of being trapped. Which we are, of course. It’s driving me a bit batty. Were there only a sandstorm at hand, I might well follow your example!” He drummed his fingers on the floor, giving her an opportunity to respond. “The last time I felt this way was something of a turning point for me. There was a drought in the city, and—well, I suppose it wasn’t as bad as this. But it seemed just as awful, being trapped in my apartment for months on end, without a thing to keep me occupied. I gave myself something to do, of course: I tidied, until I couldn’t tidy any more. Then I started, well, making little figurines from everything I could put my hands on. Little people, you see, people I could pretend to preserve. I built them from scraps of wood and cloth at first. The scraps didn’t last long, so I whittled down an entire chair and cut a fine, black jacket into ribbons. When that was gone, I improvised. It was filthy, I suppose, but I won’t lie to you, I did it. I unbuttoned my shirt and began to pick my chest apart. The flesh there had never been properly preserved, you see, so it had gone soft, then hard again. Perfectly pliable, with a sort of rind on the outside. I made an army of little men out of it, little Jacobs, and it was diverting enough, I’ll admit, until I looked down at the ruin. Bones showing. Ribs grinning up at me like wide-spaced teeth. I buttoned up and started pacing, promising to leave myself alone, but worrying that if the drought didn’t end immediately I’d literally tear myself to pieces. The truth is that I would have, had I not heard a voice through the window. Blessings! it cried, and that’s when things changed for me. When I started on this path toward the Lands Above. Which I suppose I’m not on any longer.”
He slumped. One of the cart’s wheels was squeaking relentlessly. “It was a similar feeling to this one, at any rate. This queer, fidgety desperation, which I’m reminded, every time I look across this box and see you, that you’re not feeling at all! That is, if you’re feeling it, you’re certainly not fidgeting. And yet they call you a madwoman, and you must be, mustn’t you, if you walked into that desert? But perhaps you learned something in there about—I don’t know, about perseverance? About surviving eternity with such stoicism?
“Tell me. Your stillness. Your silence. How do you do it?”
She said nothing. She moved nothing.
“Very well. You’re well within your rights, aren’t you.” He shoved himself away, over to what he’d come to think of as his side of the cage. “Keeping shtum. Keeping your bloody secrets. Lord knows I’m keeping mine.” Before he knew what he was doing, he’d shoved himself back, hissing, “I’ll tell you one of them. I’m innocent. Of the theft of the watches, at least. I’m not even a thief. I’m someone else altogether! I’m Jacob Campbell, not Leopold l’Eclair. How do you like that? Does it amuse you? To know that you’ll be sentenced next to someone who’s only being punished because of a prank of happenstance? It’s unjust. It’s a travesty. But what isn’t, really?”
That wheel again. It squeaked three times per revolution. Jacob looked down. Another scrap of desiccated flesh lay between his fingers. He flung it, banging his fist on the floor. “I actually imagined myself alive, you know. In my apartment. I was tearing my chest apart with my own hands, yes, but what I’d have preferred, what I actually wanted, was living flesh in its place. Some instinct I didn’t recognize, some psychological quirk conferred by death. Blood and muscle steaming as they gave way beneath my fingers, that’s what I saw. Had I been able to find my living self, to stand before that reckless little idiot, what satisfaction I’d take in killing him again!” He covered his teeth with his hands. “What a thing to say, I know. And yet, I’m somehow sure that every last corpse in the Land of the Dead can sympathize. That this is part of why we never speak of life. We hate it, don’t we? We hate the living, at least. And I wonder, I really do, if that feeling of vengeance, of violent, annihilating hatred toward my own body, toward any creature with the audacity to breathe while I am forced to be endlessly dead, is somehow related to the urge that drove you to walk into that sandstorm.” He took his torn skin in his hand with purpose, for once. “This flesh, which I’ve wasted so much of my afterlife preserving, would finally fall away. I’d be free of it at last. I’d be at peace, wouldn’t I? Like you.”
“You want to?” said the skeleton girl.
Jacob, startled, flung himself away from her. The debtors stopped, glaring at him. “Sorry!” he cried.
She tilted her head. “Seriously. Would you like to check it out? Being at peace, I mean.”
Jacob laughed. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I really would.” He let go of his ruptured neck. “Let’s just ask them if we can get off at the next rest stop, shall we?”
“We don’t need anyone’s permission!” She had a voice like a flute, lilting and easy. “After all, neither of us is who they think we are.” With startling speed, she stood. “I know some people who might be able to help you get all those knots untied. They couldn’t help me, but they might be just right for you.”
“K
n—knots?”
Their captors had stopped again, more agitated this time, hollering and waving their hands. “Get ‘er down!” roared the Leather Masker.
“Knots, man! Knots in your story. It’s like you’re following a string through this giant labyrinth, and where it leads is somewhere amazing. You just got a little tangled up on the way.”
“Be seated!” Jean-Luc approached the box, banging on its bars with his fist. “You must be seated!” he cried. “Enough of this senseless resistance! Garçons, procure the disciplinary measure.”
“I’m happy to discuss these knots at length,” said Jacob, holding tight to his knees. “Just be seated, I beg you!”
“Whatever for?” said the skeleton girl. “They call me Bonemaiden, by the way. What we’re going to do now, Jacob, is take you to White City. And if Shailesh is angrier when I return than he was when I left, well, I’ll just have to put him over my knee.”
“Did you say White City?” said Jacob.
“Well, sure. Did you really think I was a debtor?”
Their captors were pulling long poles lashed to serrated blades from the trunk at the rear of the cage. As they jammed them through the bars, Jacob crawled towards the middle of the cage, rolling his body into a ball to escape those toothsome edges. “Oh, do sit down,” he cried, “before we’re in bits!”
“Stop squealing, Jacob, just tell me you’re in.”
“If you know of some way to instantly whisk us out of this cage and over the miles to White City, then yes, I’m in!”
“Perfect,” said the Bonemaiden, lifting herself onto one toe and whirling around so quickly that her tiny frame became a white blur. A tremendous crack assailed Jacob’s ears, and the Bonemaiden stopped, the bones of her fingers and forearms whipping back into place as a great many things clattered to the ground. The bars of the cage and the bladed ends of the poles had all been severed neatly in the middle, and the roof of the box crashed to one side, to the great surprise of the debtors.
“Grab ‘em, damn you!” shouted the Leather Masker.
“Let’s skedaddle,” said the Bonemaiden, sweeping Jacob over her shoulder and leaping over the bisected bars of the box. The debtors charged at her, and with a series of motions so fluid that Jacob’s body hardly jiggled, she knocked them all to the ground.
As Jean-Luc and the Masker struggled to climb over the heap of debtors, the little skeleton with the corpse on her shoulder dashed out of sight.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Bonemaiden
The process of quickening, from the first stirrings of awareness to the final coordination of will necessary to walk, generally took between one and three days, during which an immigrant worked ceaselessly, desperately, toward motion. Watching one’s finger twitch in the mud for eight solid hours before it could be moved had a way of permanently lowering one’s expectations, and by the time a corpse was up and staggering, he had abandoned all living notions of physical agency and accepted the speed of death as a sluggish, unalterable constant.
The Bonemaiden was a revelation. Even the Hordesmen, unencumbered by flesh and faster by far than Jacob and his cohort, had been slower than a living human in good repair, but the Bonemaiden, even freighted with a passenger, made those warriors look like listing zombies.
Where others lurched, she danced; where others lumbered, she flew; and as she bounded over the heads of the pedestrians they passed, they hardly had time to notice.
Nor was speed the greatest of her qualities; her feather-light frame moved so gracefully and with such elasticity that it was easy to overlook how little she relied on conventional notions of human anatomy. She could expand and contract as she wished, allowing space to blossom between her joints to lengthen a stride into a vault. Her legs could swing freely around her hips to avoid obstacles, then join into a single, flexible bundle of bones that robbed her landings of their ability to jolt. In fact, Jacob, though he was slung over her shoulder, experienced so little turbulence as she ran that it cost him some effort to shake off his wonder in favor of a sense of indignation he felt was well-deserved, and by the time he’d cried out in tones strident enough to earn her attention, the city was far behind them.
“Mercy!” he cried. “Murder! Mutiny! Slow down; stop altogether! Bonemaiden, you must put me down!”
Without slowing a whit, the Bonemaiden flipped him into the air and caught him neatly in her open arms. “Now, Jacob, you agreed to this,” she said. “We’re going to get you to White City, remember? Anyway, we already ran away, so it’s kind of late to back out.”
“But we’re heading in the wrong direction! You’re galloping upstream, away from the Plains. I still have friends there. Friends who are in a good bit of trouble because of me.” Briefly, he filled her in on the company’s adventures, which seemed not to surprise her. “I can’t just abandon them now, not after what I’ve put them through.”
“I’m not asking you to.” The Bonemaiden patted his back, as if his mood might have been caused by trapped gas. “Habibi, there’s a line of debtors running all the way from Dead City to the Plains of War, okay? Now, if we go that way, too, we’re going to have to fight them all, and I don’t have the patience. Even if they give up halfway, they’ll still be lurking behind rocks and reporting on every little thing we do, and I, for one, could use a break from being watched.”
“But this is the wrong direction!”
“See, I have a theory that the underworld is round, like the Earth. If I’m right, we can just go around!”
Jacob spluttered, and the Bonemaiden burst out laughing. “Oh, Jacob, you are a goose! Haven’t you heard of the Bazakh Bypass? It’s the way all the warriors and merchants go. The northern entrance is up ahead, by the mouth of Lethe.” Thrusting her legs out before her, she skidded to a halt, sending a sibilant curtain of dirt into the river. “Here, you can even walk the rest of the way, since you love your creaky legs so much. We’ve got enough of a lead on those debtors for now.”
Jacob, climbing out of her arms and onto the ground, began walking forward, though he was painfully aware of how slowly she had to go to keep from outpacing him.
“You’re a funny guy,” she said as they strode up the riverside, cleaving ever closer to the Wall of the World. “Great big plans, but what a lot of fuss you make along the way! I’m not trying to be antagonistic,” she added before he could protest, “just making an observation in the spirit of openness, because I think we should be better friends, and I’m very open with my friends. Also in that spirit, you ought to know my proper name, which is Siham.”
“Siham,” said Jacob. “Thank you. That will, I believe, help me to think of you more as a person.”
Siham stopped short, drumming her fingers on her hips. “Do tell. How do you think of me now?”
“I’ve never—well, look, you’re not exactly—Siham, you pirouetted, and the whole damn cage fell apart! My companions on this journey have exhibited all manners of strange behavior, from eccentric to downright freakish, but nothing I’ve seen or done could have prepared me for that. I’m at a loss to explain it. Did you cut through those bars with nothing at all? With what, with the power of your mind? Or is it as the Plainsmen suggested? They call your people witches, you must know that, and while I don’t want to believe in what sounds like utter nonsense—well, I’m at a loss for a likely explanation,” he said again, kicking a rock into the water.
“Oh, that,” said Siham, wiggling her fingers. “You are a goose, aren’t you? I didn’t cut the bars with nothing, of course, and I don’t see how using my bones in that way is any more magically freakish than you walking and talking with yours. Anyhow, it’s pretty obvious if you stop and think about it: I did it with dust.”
“With dust.”
“Dust!” She scooped up a little dirt and tossed it into the air before them. “Well, not that kind of dust,” she admitted as it fell. “My own dust. I keep it on my person at all times. Between the bones. Behind my ribs. In my skull.” She flicked
her wrist, and her fingertips darted into the air a foot ahead of her, hanging there for a moment before snapping back into place. “See?”
“No, I don’t see—”
“Seeing is easier with your mouth shut.”
She brought one white hand inches from his face, an intimacy that cowed him more than the scolding. Closing her fist, she left only her index finger extended, then slowly separated its joints, balancing them in midair as if on a thread.
On a thread! thought Jacob, suddenly noticing indeed the dust between the bones, which was very like a thread, after all: a thread made up of infinitesimal particles, barely visible, impossibly still.
“But this dust,” whispered Jacob, as if he were afraid that speaking aloud might blow it away, “how do you control it?”
“I don’t,” said Siham quietly, with a smile in her voice. “I am it.” Slowly, her joints began to undulate in the air, though her hand was perfectly still.
“Not magic, then. Mysticism.”
“Not that either. My dust is made up of tiny pieces of my bone. My dust is me! Otherwise, how could I have power over it?”
“Mystifying as it is, Remington seems to have no problem exerting power over parts of other people.”
“Hey, good point. I can’t wait to meet this kid!”
Jacob couldn’t tear his eyes off of the thread, which Siham was expanding and contracting for his benefit. “Pardon my befuddlement, but why don’t those tiny grains blow away?”
“Jacob, you are aware that you have no flesh on your head, aren’t you?”
“It had not escaped my attention.”
“And your neck, except for a bit of stuff at the bottom, it’s gone too.”
“I suppose it is.”
“But while I was carrying you upside-down over my shoulder, your head didn’t fall off, did it?”
Jacob felt uneasy. “It seems it did not.”
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