Leopold regarded the mask with uncertainty, twanging its rubber band. “I must say that neither of your skulls looks quite as old as I’d expect.”
“Don’t they?” growled the Gambler, digging in his pockets. “I s’pose they wouldn’t. We must ‘ave been other Maskers before we swapped. These things ‘appen, once you’ve been dead longer than you lived. I say, mate, ‘ave you got me dice?”
“I must have!” said the Magnate, reaching into his own pockets to withdraw them. “These masks, you see, they’re solutions to a problem that time causes. Or else they’re answers to a question that time asked. Anyway, the story starts and ends with time, though what doesn’t?”
“It’s like this,” said the Gambler. “The Magnate rules for eternal time, yet eternal time robs ‘im of ‘is will to reign. Sad old story, but the best we’ve got.”
“You’ll see it yourself,” said the Magnate. “The years that pass blunt your memories first, then your feelings, then your very will; we call it ‘flattening,’ because it leaves a man feeling like a paper doll. At first, one can lean into his mask, drawing strength from his role, if you will, but after a decade or two of that, well, the mask itself begins to seem like the problem. Curious longings beset you: now that infinite power’s been won, you find yourself longing to cast it off! Isn’t that a twist?
“Hence the masks. These days, when I grow so tired of the years upon years of rule that I can no longer face the tolling of the bells, I can simply trade masks with the Gambler and be brusque and reckless instead. We began the practice centuries ago, except that, as you say, my actual bones aren’t old enough for that to have been me, are they?”
“Then that’s why you’ve gone to all this trouble?” said Leopold. “To add me to your collection, as some sort of antidote for senility?”
The Gambler guffawed. “Ain’t that a way of puttin’ it, Mags? No, Clock-Thief, I don’t think we’re senile. But the best way to revitalize a flaggin’ rulership is to let it swaller up a mouthful of resistance.”
The Magnate nodded eagerly. “The new ideas that surge forth from a corpse as fresh as you can be folded into our reign, and they always make it stronger; it was that way with the Gambler, whose brutality restored our hold on Dead City when it had gone a little limp. We simply harnessed his challenge and made it a part of our strength! As his moniker suggests, he had a weakness for the Dens, and so we hired an actor to bet against him, then ran him so far into debt that he proposed, all on his own, a bet of eternal time. He lost, of course, since we’d loaded the dice, and then he was ours: the Gambler joined the Council.”
“But after a century or two even my tune changed,” said the Gambler sadly. “I’ve yet to meet a will the years can’t flatten.”
“And so I traded masks with him, or rather the man who was wearing the Magnate’s mask did, and it turned out that a man only playing at being the Gambler was even better at being the Gambler than the Gambler had been!”
“Wasn’t long before all of us swapped ‘em around so much that we forgot who was who, but after a time even that weren’t enough. That’s when we looked at ‘iring from outside the group.”
“And here you are,” said the Magnate with admiration. “And so you see, all this pursuit has been by way of evaluation. The tower bit was good enough to get our attention; the escape downriver was downright inspired; but it was using the Seekers against us that made us discuss your inclusion in the group. And the use of your friend as a decoy! Well, that sealed it, and just in the nick of time. Overall, it was your flamboyance that swayed us, for at this juncture we need more than another man in the shadows: the Council, like the city it serves, needs spectacle.”
“A figurehead,” said Leopold.
“A mask to stand before the Maskers!” cried the Gambler. “To deal directly with the citizens of Dead City. Throw ‘em parties and such. Swill and circuses.”
“It’s the role of an afterlife,” said the Magnate, leaning forward. “But don’t forget, should you ever tire of it, you have but to ask, and one of us will gladly trade.”
“Think of me,” said the Gambler, patting Leopold’s knee. “I’m sure you’ll agree, Clock-Thief, that I’m uniquely suited to bein’ you.”
Leopold stared down at the mask, then out at the walls of White City, receding into the empty Plains. “How far away it seems already,” he muttered. “What a long, long way from the company we’ve come, in such a short time. And why shouldn’t we travel farther from them still? Why, isn’t this the fate I was aiming for all along?
“This may be redundant, chaps, considering that you own me for time eternal, but I accept.”
“Lovely,” said the Magnate, lying back on his cushions. “Just lovely. But don’t think of it as us owning you, Clock-Thief. In our organization, everyone is owned by everyone else.”
Leopold and the crow stared at one another in a long, wordless farewell. At last, using its black, beady eyes as a pair of convex mirrors, he fit the plastic mask over his skull, taking a careful moment to arrange its open mouth over his bare teeth: a man without lips doing his utmost to smile.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Infinitesima
Jacob held his hand flat before his empty sockets for the umpteenth time that afternoon. Through the spaces between the gleaming bones he saw the scarred surfaces of the laboratory he’d appropriated, then cleaned of rubble, some days or months before. As he summoned the dust to the joints of his hand, it occurred to him that this new workspace bore a certain resemblance to the tilted flat he’d once kept in the building called the Leaning Dutchman, in the neighborhood known as the Preservative District.
What a long way he’d come, only to find himself rebuilding the very place he’d started from. There was comfort in the familiar, after all he’d been through. If he weren’t careful, if he didn’t get the help he needed, this might well be his journey’s end.
But the dust will never settle here, he thought to himself.
His phalanges separated, seeming to float in the air as he focused his vision on the broad marble tabletop where he’d been learning to carve marble with his buzzing threads of dust. Slowly, he waved his hand, watching the digits undulate as he bid a silent farewell to this facsimile of his past.
“Again!” cried Siham, slamming the thin marble door behind her and startling him so thoroughly that his hand snapped back into shape. “Jacob, it happened again. Another idea that cuts the time they take on reconstruction in half; another demand that I be brought before the Meeting for testing. I can’t even walk down the street here without someone challenging my right to exist.” She flounced against a wall, her skeleton twisting in midair, reassembling as it landed. “Everything’s an argument,” she murmured from the floor, her legs already locked into a full lotus. “It’s like the holidays at my mother’s house, except everyone’s a martial arts genius.” She slid her hands over her sockets. “We could be learning so much from each other. But it’s never going to stop, is it?”
Now was as good a time as any. Jacob slid down to join her, though he maintained his standard bodily structure. His training was going passably well, but it was clear his talent lay in dust-carving, not bone-fighting. “It does seem as if the Seekers have a certain double standard where the most powerful members of their community are concerned.”
She dropped her hands. “How do you mean?”
“You’re the one who made the argument. ‘My teacher had no teacher,’ wasn’t it?” He pointed up through the laboratory’s open ceiling at the spire of White Mountain, a gnarled finger in the sepia sky. “A Seeker with no more credentials than you or me sits on that mountaintop for a century at a time, free to compose and commit to memory his epic poetry without interference. Then he descends into White City to sit under a willow and recite, knowing full well that whatever he’s written will throw the society that’s formed around his legend into absolute chaos.”
“As usual, the Poet Laureate of the Underworld is in a class of his o
wn,” said Siham. “Nice work if you can get it.”
“Tell me,” said Jacob carefully, “why do you think it is that he encounters no resistance? Is it simply because he was here first?”
“I don’t think that’s a fair assessment,” said Siham. “It’s not like they were fawning over him the last time he came down. His latest poems were controversial, and he stuck around for a good bit of the controversy. He takes his knocks, he just kind of has this knack for deflecting. I think it’s the pentameter. No one’s got a snappy comeback for a heroic couplet.”
“I’d imagine that practice helps, too. He’s been at this for a while, hasn’t he?”
“Sure. And I’d be willing to bet there were as many arguments in the old days as there are now. People tend to smooth those things out of the official story after a while.” Siham began pacing around his worktable, hefting a carving of a crumpled automobile and tossing it between her hands. “It’s like the Seekers need change, but they still can’t stop themselves from resisting it. Anything that alters the fabric of their culture provokes this collective hissy-fit, but they end up changing all the same. It’s really unpleasant for everyone involved, but I keep feeling like it’s something they have to go through, you know? Like growing pains.” Jacob cringed as she slammed the carving down. “So maybe it’s me who needs to step up to the plate. Right?”
“Are you suggesting—”
“I’m done suggesting,” she said. “I’m anointing myself. Hey presto—I’m a full-fledged Seeker, and I get to do what I need to, with or without the Meeting’s permission! There you go. That was my graduation ceremony.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks. Now I’ll head out on my own, just like the Poet did. Making the path ahead my poem. Blazing a trail for the Seekers to come. I’ll show these ninnies what a real seeking looks like!”
“Splendid,” said Jacob, leaping up to join her. “When do we leave?”
“We?” Siham stopped pacing. “Whoa there, killer. It’s been fun and everything, but this is a one-woman show. I mean, it’s not the Poet and his sidekick up there. No offense.”
“None taken,” he said, without much conviction. “My mistake. It’s just that what you described sounds so much like my plan to reach the Lands Above that for a moment I thought it might be a natural fit. A wearer needs a carrier, after all.”
“Well.” Siham hopped onto his table and sat for a while, dangling her legs. “As far as vision goes, I can see where you’re coming from. That’s a humdinger of a quest you’ve got there, and it would take me as far out as I need to go. But it’s also, and don’t get bent out of shape here, completely impossible, at least for the foreseeable future. I mean, you’ve got no Crown of Bone, and no way of dreaming. And I can’t hang around here any longer. This place is getting to me.”
“Of course. You need to dash through the nearest gate and find your path as you walk it.”
“Exactly.”
“Just like you did last time.”
“Exac—hey.”
“And I suppose it wouldn’t interest you to know that Remington is, at this very moment, retrieving the Crown of Bone from the cloud.”
Siham unfolded her arms. “Okay, a little. I am marginally interested.”
“Or that he believes he’s found a way to teach me to dream.”
She slid off the table and started pacing again, more slowly this time. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to hang out for a little longer. Just to see what happens when the kid returns.”
“Oh, I’m back!” came a voice from above.
They stood, expecting to see Remington’s skeleton clambering over the wall, but found, unaccountably, nothing.
“Remy?” called Jacob, disconcerted. The voice was unmistakably the boy’s, but he couldn’t isolate its source. “Where—where are you?”
“Whoopsie-daisy. I forgot to be solid. Sorry, it’s been a weird week.”
Thick, patient tendrils of dust corkscrewed down from the top of the wall, pooling in two distinct spots on the floor, then filtering up, slowly and transparently, into the rough shape of a human skeleton. “Turns out you can really speed up the whole scouring thing if you set your mind to it! It was taking too long to find all the bits of the Crown by wandering around in my skeleton body, so I set the dust to work grinding down my bones. Yak-ak-ak-ak-ak-ak! Once you get going, it doesn’t take much time at all.” A small, hovering cloud was filling in his outlines now, chugging down until his form was opaque. “Then my dust reached out into all the rest of the dust in the cloud, and we asked the Crown if it would come back and help you get to the Lands Above.” His transparent hand reached up and knocked on the back of his own skull, and as it fell away he looked, at a glance, like the Remington Jacob was accustomed to. A glance into his eye sockets, however, revealed tiny, swirling sandstorms crackling with energy. “Good news! The Crown said yes.”
“Where is it?” said Siham.
“Oh, the other me must have it. Hold on, I’m coming!”
They could only gape as Remington’s ghostly double opened the door, twirling a thin oval on one finger. The two Remingtons waved, saying, “Hiya!” in unison, then stepped into each other, merging without a sound. The skeleton that coalesced where they’d collided looked as solid as any other Seeker.
The others followed: Adam, bearing Etienne’s skull, and Eve, upon whose shoulder the reconstructed crow preened its brilliant feathers. Jacob lifted a hand to its wing and was shocked at its solidity, for the bird had been rebuilt, from beak to tail, out of powdered bone.
“Here’s your Crown, Jake,” said Remington, tossing it high in the air to land on Jacob’s wrist. Whisper-thin, it was composed of intricate braids that held together no matter how hard he tugged.
“A Crown of Dust,” Jacob murmured. “But there’s still one problem to tackle. The wearer has to dream, and I can’t very well nod off. Unless you’ve decided to come along, Etienne?”
“I have no desire to return to Earth as a severed head,” rumbled Etienne from under Adam’s arm. “Nor is there anything left for me to return to. But if I could learn to dream in death, you could, too, I suppose. My catatonia was not altogether pleasant, but it was a subconscious state full of strange visions. I believe it would suffice for the purposes of the ritual.”
Jacob peered at him, concerned. Etienne’s voice sounded every bit as gravelly and morose as it had when he’d first awakened.
“Should be pretty easy,” said Remington, lifting Etienne with one hand and laying the other on Jacob’s skull. “We’ll just sync you guys right up.”
“Etienne,” said Jacob, “are you quite sure—”
But it had already begun. The storms in Remington’s skull were spinning fast enough to whine, and Jacob’s frame jolted as if struck by lightning.
He saw himself through Etienne’s eyes, stripped of flesh, grinning and bare.
Is this who I am now?
Is this who I always was?
He felt a powerful urge to launch himself back into his own body. But he remembered what was at stake, and then the rest came rushing in.
Jacob saw through his own eyes and Etienne’s at once. Their skulls stared at one another, sensations mingling, memories and abilities arcing through Remington’s dusty frame. The knack of deathly dreaming was surging into Jacob’s marrow, but with it came a surge of memory that seemed somehow hotter, more urgent than anything he’d seen in the cloud.
The stump of his neck rested on a tablecloth. The seer’s hands were gripping his hair. He couldn’t shut his eyelids tight enough to block out the sight of the customer before him.
He’d never forget her red hair hanging limp in her withered face as she’d flung gobbets of his flesh through the fetid air. He’d never forget any of his murderers. How could he, when so many of them had returned to ask his advice? This one had lost her lover between life and death, and she wanted Etienne to find him.
But a curious thing was happening: the hotter the e
mbers of his anger burned, the quieter he grew, until he could feel the answer rising, blotting out the world.
He’d disappear inside himself, where none of them could ever find him. He’d go silent. He’d go to sleep.
As Remington released him, Jacob fell to his knees. “We haven’t helped you at all, have we? I had hoped that scouring would set you free.”
“Free?” whispered Etienne through his teeth. “Oh, I’m free. Free to sit on a shelf with the ancients while the rest of you gallivant through the worlds. Free to be carried around like a damaged antique, dispensing advice from the shadows. Free to watch this wretched world destroy hundreds upon thousands of afterlives. Free to disintegrate slowly, like every other corpse damned to consciousness. I am as free, Jacob, as I can possibly be. But the burden of my freedom isn’t yours to bear, and never was.”
Jacob grasped his own ribcage. “Then what Clarissa said, what she showed you in the storm, brought you no peace.”
“You really think it should have?” said Remington. “I mean, Ma could have helped him. When she found him. When those drunks attacked him. With that baby’s powers, she could have helped a lot of people.” He shrugged. “She wasn’t really big on looking out for anyone but her baby.”
“It makes no difference. This isn’t about forgiving her. I never blamed her. The truth is,” Etienne muttered, “Clarissa and I are built of the same stuff. Sequestered in self-pity, begging to be excused from the constant judgment on how we choose to spend our time. Both of us only want the impossible.
“She imagines her baby playing happily in the nursery she’s built, forever innocent of the city below. But you could punt me all the way back to Southheap to accept her apology with all the lavish sentiment I could summon, and she’d still be no closer to achieving it.”
“What is it that you want, then?” Jacob said.
“I want to find my family. To tell them my story, and to hear theirs. Not because I believe I’ll be any happier when it’s done. Because this is how the Book of the Rassendren clan says I might leave my boyhood behind, and I’ve realized that, despite all the time that’s passed in the underworld, I’m still the child I was when I arrived.
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