Dead Boys
Page 29
“But look at me. What was once my calling is now nothing more than a dream, the faint flickering of a candle in the depths of my mind. I’ll watch it gutter out, and you can leave me to it with your conscience clear.”
“Let’s just slow those horses down a minute,” said Siham. “If what you really want is to keep looking for your family, there are ways to get that done. There’s a whole Plaza full of partial warriors who’d love to hit the road again.”
Etienne ground his teeth. “After what I suffered in the Plains, the thought of joining my will to a collection of fragmentary strangers with a history of violence sounds like a recurring nightmare.”
“You’ve already made up your mind,” said Jacob, beginning to grasp the fiery determination he’d seen in Etienne’s skull. “As soon as we depart, you’re planning on tunneling back into yourself. You’re going to end up just like—”
“A floater,” said Etienne. “That’s all I can be. On the river or on a shelf, it makes no difference so far as I can see. I can’t have peace, but I will have quiet.”
“Yikes,” said Remington, and the laboratory fell into a brooding silence.
In the end, it wasn’t broken by speech, but by motion.
First Eve, then Adam clattered down to the laboratory floor. Eve reached out for Etienne’s skull, lowering it onto her severed spine, where a line of her dust snaked up and locked him in place. She stood, twirled, hooked an eye-socket in one finger, then tossed him to Adam, who caught him lightly and set him atop his own frame.
“Oh, good idea, you two!” said Remington. “E, you could bounce back and forth between them. You can trust these guys as much as anyone. I don’t even think you’d have to merge. I could just let them see through your eyes the way they see through mine.” Adam and Eve pumped their fists.
“That’s very generous of you both,” said Etienne, startled, “but I have no idea where we’d even begin. The Seekers say there are five chambers in the Land of the Dead, and my family could be in any of them, or none. It could take centuries. No, I won’t ask that of anyone. It’s better for all of us if we never have to face that failure.”
Eve waved a hand to dismiss him, then flung herself full on the ground, stretching her bones into a kind of skeletal rope, at the end of which one hand rose, giving a thumbs-up.
“The longer the path, the better,” Jacob translated. “I couldn’t agree more. Good lord, Eve, how much dust do you have?”
“More than me,” said Siham. “Girl’s got moves.”
“I’m just gonna give you the option,” said Remington, extending three tendrils of dust from the center of his skull. “You guys can figure this out on your own.” Each tendril brushed against one of their skulls, and a sudden crackle of static electricity intimated that the job was done.
Etienne looked down at the body that now served as his vehicle, flexing the fingers on Adam’s hand. He let out another heavy sigh, but his movements—a jouncing on the tips of the toes, a sudden sweep of the arm, a long look from side to side at the tops of the walls in the laboratory—betrayed his fascination. “I should have known you wouldn’t make this easy on me. We’ll debate this amongst ourselves. No one will mind if we take our time hashing it out, I suppose.”
“Not in these parts,” said Siham. “But where does that leave you, Remy? Are you coming with us?”
Jacob felt a thrill rush through his bones. Us. He said nothing, convinced that speaking would startle her into changing her mind.
“Who, me?” said Remington softly. “Oh, I’m going up the mountain. I could use a break, you know? And I want to be the first one to hear the Poet’s new poem. I think we’d have a lot to talk about, cloud-wise.
“There’s a lot of adventure still ahead. A lot for me to explore. But I need a nice quiet spot to do it, and a couple of hundred years.”
Jacob lifted the Crown to his head. “I wonder if I’ll even recognize you when we meet again,” he was saying. The Crown didn’t settle so much as it clicked into place. “I wonder if we ever will.”
“I’m pretty sure we’re all going to the same place in the long run, Jake,” said Remington, his skeleton beginning to dissipate. “But I don’t really know what that means. I guess we’ll all find out together.”
“Farewell, my friend.” As Jacob stared at the swirling bones of his ward, he began to drift into a state that blurred the edges of all the figures around him.
“Bye, Jake!”
“Are you ready, Siham?” slurred Jacob, his joints beginning to loosen.
“Died ready.” She caught him as his body slumped, scooping him up in her arms as the threshold rose around them, causing their substance to waver like a curtain in a breeze. She took a single step forward and the veil cinched up behind her, sending a wave of dust roiling back into the laboratory. It swirled around Etienne’s skull, rebounding from solid bone, but passed right through Remington, meeting no resistance.
Adam and Eve stood staring at the empty room through Etienne’s sockets for a long while, then turned to Remington and bowed. Remington watched them go, then waited for the white-feathered crow to flap slowly down, landing in its old nest to preen.
The change was gradual, imperceptible. The crow was sitting in Remington’s skull, and then its ivory talons were settling on the floor. It squawked three times, then launched itself into the air, swooping high over White City in a widening spiral, searching for Remington, finding only wisps. The cloud that had been a boy was sweeping through the nooks and crannies of White City, crackling through its mutable buildings, whispering through its halls. The Seekers whose skulls it filtered through were startled by ineffable sureties, strange visions, snatches of poetry and song. “All roads lead to dust,” they murmured, suddenly seeing the truth in the Poet’s syllables as they followed dusty tendrils through the maze-like streets, toward the open archway of Poet’s Gate, where a bird with brilliant wings flapped and cawed goodbye. As the cloud’s last wisps wafted beyond the city’s borders, the bird turned and dove, its mass rippling out into a broad teardrop as it plunged, merging with the cloud that drifted, broad as a cathedral, toward the foothills of White Mountain.
It wasn’t long before the boy took his own shape again, with the crow’s white head peering through the back of his skull. Maybe it was just a habit, but there was something Remington liked about the feeling of his feet on the path.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
I
Chapter One: On Southheap
Chapter Two: City of the Dead
Chapter Three: The Hanged Man’s Laughter
Chapter Four: The Underground University
Chapter Five: The Crowded Car
II
Chapter Six: On Lethe
Chapter Seven: The Living Man’s Remains
Chapter Eight: The Plains of War
Chapter Nine: Recruits!
Chapter Ten: The Scrimmage
Chapter Eleven: The Last Man Standing
III
Chapter Twelve: In the Box
Chapter Thirteen: Bonemaiden
Chapter Fourteen: City of Bone
Chapter Fifteen: Song of the Sands
Chapter Sixteen: The Mask of the Magnate
Chapter Seventeen: Infinitesima