Dead Boys (14 page)

H
ow did this war begin, anyway?” asked Remington as they climbed.

“It didn’t,” said Etienne. “Despite its name, there’s no war in the Plains: there are no armies, and only the loosest of rules. But what looks like chaos is unity. All the corpses you will meet and fight and flee from have agreed on their terms of engagement for a single reason. If you’re going to survive the long walk to White City, your only hope is to understand that reason—which the passing ages have embedded in the legend of the Last Man Standing.

“Long ago, when Tutankhamen ruled Dead City, two warrior-women lived on the Earth. Each warrior was tall and strong, and each was the champion of her people, bound by honor to defend them in single combat if they were ever threatened.

“The two warriors lived in neighboring villages connected by a path, and on the path lay a sacred site where a banyan tree grew beside a freshwater spring. The tree was sacred to one village, the spring to the other.

“One day each year, the people of the village of the tree held a great festival there, dancing and singing to honor the tree spirits. On another day, the people of the village of the spring held their own festival, dancing and singing to honor the spirits of the spring. Since one village kept their calendar by the sun and the other by the moon, these festivals began on different days but drifted closer and closer together, until one day the people of both villages arrived to worship at the same time.

“Once there, the villages’ holy men began to argue, and the argument spread through the people. But before their words turned to violence, the two warriors strode into a clearing across the path and began to fight on their behalf.

“The people were silent as the warriors fought with hand and foot, arm and leg, tooth and nail, but not with their blades, for they had left their weapons at home on this holy day.

“Their blows fell like hard rain and made their bodies wet with sweat and blood. They fought from dusk to dawn, and from dawn to dusk again, while the people of their villages sat apart from each other, waiting, at first in silence, then with growing discontent.

“When the second night came and neither woman had fallen, the people began to argue with the holy men. ‘Our warriors are strong,’ they said, ‘so strong that mere flesh cannot undo them. While we wait, the gods wait, too. Will you have them wait until they are unhappy enough to curse us all?’

“The blacksmiths were especially loud. ‘It’s true!’ they said. ‘Our warriors will fight with their bare hands for a month before one remembers she can fall. But this is not a tournament! These wild women are fighting for our village, for its homes and stones, for the harvest we reap, for the metal we dig from the earth! It is right that they should fight with that metal in their hands. Maybe that will remind them they’re mortal! Send for their blades, O sages, and save us from certain destruction!’

“‘No weapons may be brought to sacred ground,’ said the holy men.

“‘This earth below our feet is sacred,’ said the blacksmiths, ‘but not where those warriors are fighting. It’s the blades, not the fighters, that will decide this. Send children to fetch the blades from the warriors’ homes!’ The holy men, hearing a threat in the roar of approval that rose from the crowds, relented.

“The warriors, however, were already wearier than anyone knew.

“When the weapons arrived, the warrior-women were called apart and armed. They staggered back into the clearing and crossed their blades. In the moonlight their silhouettes were as alike as paper dolls. Each summoned the last of her strength, leapt into the air, and with a single stroke sunk her blade into the other’s heart.

“Each warrior was dead before she hit the ground.”

“Who told you all this?” said Remington.

“I read it in a book,” said Etienne. “Now hush.

“As the villages fell into confusion, the warriors descended to the underworld, both washing up at once on the banks of Lethe. They rose from the banks, pulled the blades that killed them from their own hearts, and, though their bodies were sluggish, they fell to fighting at once. The ringing of their blades could be heard all up and down the riverbanks.

“Now, as different as Tutankhamen’s necropolis was from your Dead City, one thing was the same: Tut’s citizens abhorred violence. In his time, it was said that one’s physical corpse and spiritual essence were a single substance, and that losing so much as a finger could damage the soul.

“Tut’s lawmen so outnumbered these two that the warriors quickly surrendered. Instead of being brought into the Halls of Welcome, where corpses were educated in the ways of death as their rigor mortis passed, they were carried out of the city as they stiffened, deposited on a great plateau in the midst of the desert.

“‘Out here you can cut each other to pieces,’ said the lawmen, ‘but don’t leave this place until your fight is settled.’

“When they began, the warriors’ bodies were stiff and plump, graceless and pretty, slow and muscled. As time went on, their bodies dried, their hides cracked, and their flesh fell away. Their blades clashed, they stomped and twirled, generations of their relatives were sent down the river, and the two women’s corpses were worn down to the bone.

“They fought so fiercely for so long that their claw-like feet dug out the rock, wearing a great, flat floor into the middle of the plateau, yet because they never crossed the boundaries set by the lawmen, a wall of stone stood around these plains, closing them off from the rest of the underworld.

“In the end, it was the blades that decided the winner. After countless clashes, the blade of the moon notched the blade of the sun beside the hilt. The warrior holding the blade of moon and spring struck again, cleaving the blade of sun and tree in two, and then, without hesitation, she cut her enemy’s skeleton into pieces and scattered her bones to the west. She threw the broken blade across the Plains, where it struck the wall left behind by the Plateau and left a great hole behind: the Torn Curtain. As for the fallen warrior’s skull, the victrix left it where it lay.

“Standing above it, she raised the blade of moon and spring above her yellowed head, but it was a sunbeam that fell upon her from the heavens. Though she only now remembered it, she was the warrior who hailed from the village of sun and tree. Since each woman had, upon quickening, drawn the blade that killed her out of her own heart, each had fought the battle with her enemy’s weapon, and so it was that the blade of the moon cut the moon-woman’s body into pieces.

“The victrix was brought back to life, and more. The sunbeam falling from the land above made her flesh immortal and stronger than that of any living warrior. She rose through the earth to the land of the living, where she led her people in the war that had erupted during her long absence. And when she had conquered her enemy’s people, she found another war to fight, for though she lived again, she had lost the taste for food, drink, love, and song, caring only for that art that she’d spent a dozen lifetimes perfecting: slaughter.

“As for the warrior who remained below, she could no longer move, let alone fight, and was obliged to remain in the Plains. When the next warriors were driven there by their own violations of Tut’s law, she told them her story, and so it has come down through the years.

“Thus, the Plainsmen believe that the next time a warrior stands over the Plains in victory, she’ll be granted eternal life and return to the Lands Above in immortal glory.”

“Then it’s melee,” said Jacob. “Every warrior for himself.”

“Melee on the grandest of scales.”

“What happened to the loser?” said Remington.

“They put her head in a niche high in the rocky Rim that surrounds the Plains. She was the first of many honored spectators.”

“And the book you mentioned,” said Jacob, “where you found this tale—”

“Is lost,” said Etienne. “Look ahead: the Rim is on the horizon.”

Only scrutiny revealed the shape of the Rim, for the air was thick with motes of dust. Through their lazy currents, at the top of the long incline, the Rim rose like the stump of a mammoth tree, thick-walled and hollow. Its walls thinned as they rose, then terminated suddenly half a mile from the ground. They were the color of ancient vellum, smooth but for a single, jagged rift wide enough to admit a platoon of corpses—the Torn Curtain.

“Well,” said Jacob, “there’s the door. I suppose there’s nothing left to do but walk inside.”

“Has it occurred to you that we’re unarmed?” said Leopold. “The thuggees lying in wait on the other side will churn us into pâté!”

“Etienne, are you certain we’ll be safe?”

“Safe?” said Etienne. “Of course not. The entire population of the Plains wants to do you bodily harm on principle. Was anyone listening to my story?

“But if it’s weapons you want, there’s a market within that sells nothing else. They’ll take city-goods if you have them to trade.”

“A market, eh?” Leopold brightened instantly. “Splendid! Then we’ll arm ourselves forthwith.”

“Right,” said Remington. “And we shouldn’t have any problems staying out of trouble. I mean, if Etienne got through when he was soft and squishy, what do we have to be afraid of?”

“The living move faster than any lurching corpse remembers,” warned Etienne, but Remington and Leopold had already moved on, and Jacob, despite his trepidation, trudged on behind them.

The company’s bravery was quickly extinguished. Visibility worsened as they neared the Rim, the thickening air giving the company the impression that they were walking into a mist. Since even Remington was hesitant to enter a realm he could not see, the little group was slowly coaxed inside by Etienne, who convinced them that a raging battle would make some kind of noise, while this dust-cloud was chillingly silent.

“Plainsmen are anything but stealthy,” he said. “If you don’t hear them, they aren’t there.”

Against their better judgment, they passed through the Torn Curtain, beneath the Rim’s tall ramparts, past the sheer drop of its cliffs, and onto the unreadable floor of the Plains. Jacob led them toward the first shadow they saw, a boulder in the midst of smaller stones.

Pressed against its backside, they strained to parse the noises that reached them: a shuffling, as of heavy fabric being dragged across a dirty warehouse floor; a squeaking and rattling, as of ancient, lightweight chain mail; and a steady, muted thumping that brought to mind a monstrous, beating heart.

“I might find this comical,” whispered Leopold, “if I were on the right side of a rapier.”

“Stay still for now,” hissed Jacob, “and quiet! The dust will settle soon.”

It did, slowly enough that their tension grew into violent anxiety by the time Etienne remarked that the stone closest to them was not, after all, a stone, but a pile of severed limbs whose occasional shifting explained the shuffling they heard. By then they could see well enough to note that the ground all around them was strewn with grasping hands, twitching calves, dissociated joints, and butchered torsos, as if a thresher had recently plowed through a field of men. An arm severed at the shoulder dragged itself by the fingers toward the nearest cairn of human parts, nestling itself with agonizing leisure at the base of the pile. Nearby lay a pair of severed legs still joined by a pubic bone, one of which was pinning a disembodied chest to the ground while the other kicked it, endeavoring to cave in its yawning rib cage.

As the company stared at this grisly tableau, a booming voice startled them into perfect stillness.

“Otho!” said the voice, its gurgling depth only matched by its volume. “Otho, canst thou hear me?”

“If he can’t,” replied a shrill voice from farther off, “half the blooming Horde can! Let it alone, Oxnard. His Crushingness is gone.”

From Oxnard’s direction came the squeaking of tiny wheels and the rattling of thin metal. “Curse thy mealy-wormy mouth, Elspeth!” bellowed Oxnard. “Here’s the grand man’s thigh-bone now, still festooned with his helmet-hard flesh!”

“Still yourself, you great dead puppy!” said Elspeth, drawing close. “By the time you’ve put together half his puzzle, all the other Plains-pickers will have picked the Plains clean and driven the Armory’s prices sky-high to boot. Leave Otho to the fate his judgment earned, and let us trade this bounty for some proper crashers and smashers!”

In a temper, Oxnard shoved his vehicle toward Elspeth and into Leopold’s line of sight: it was a dented shopping cart from a long-extinct chain of grocery stores, its bottom piled with the brick-red flesh of the once-mighty Otho.

Elspeth, a slight, purple woman with a leather jerkin and an imploded face, caught the cart in her claws, dropping the handle of her own conveyance, a child’s wagon, all but denuded of paint and piled high with weaponry.

Oxnard stumbled into view to reclaim his cart, prompting the company to hasten their creep toward the hidden side of the boulder, away from his massive expanse of skinless flesh, which was crowded with spears, arrows, and broken blades, none of which seemed to bother him in the slightest.

“Otho raised thee from a pup, ungrateful bobbin!” he cried to Elspeth, lifting the cart and shaking the bits of Otho about in dismay. “Thou wert squatting in the Parleyfields, squeening down at that bumble-blighted city, when unchoppable Otho rescued thee from future indebtitude!”

“Unchoppable,” said Elspeth, “is a poor phrase.”

“He it was that plucked us up and armed us with fearsome hacker-uppers bought dear at the mouth of the Bypass, and led us frightened as sheep-shorn lambs through that darklish path, and made us mashers of men! Hast thou forgotten, ungratitudinous Elspeth, whom it was that taught thee the stroke that severed the bean of Beano McGee?”

“’Twas Otho,” said Elspeth grudgingly.

“’Twas our dear dismankled Otho-man,” said Oxnard, and folded himself over to moan into his knees.

She stopped for a long moment, poised like a dog that’s noticed its quarry. Jacob, noting her sudden attention, left off his creeping, but the rest of the company kept scraping around the edge of the boulder.

Elspeth turned. “Ox,” she said, “make me an oath.”