Dead Boys (34 page)

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Jacob, deeply irritated without knowing why.

“Ha! That’s what the Bonemen are, you see,” he pronounced to the air before him, “a tribe of warrior-sages committed to the mystical art of not knowing. Isn’t that right, eh? Isn’t it?” The skeleton staggered forward, shoving Jacob’s shoulder with one slimy hand.

“I beg your pardon!” said Jacob, stepping aside. “I was a citizen, and renowned as the finest preservationist ever to wield thread and needle.”

“Ha! Double and treble ha! The Boneman mocks me now,” he told his invisible confidante. “You know very well that you were no such man, for I was he! The grandest and greatest, the mightiest and most magnificent preservationist ever to wield—well, thread and needle, as you put it. Yet who will seek my services now, now that I am undone? My beautiful face, my flawless body, all have fallen apart in these turbid waters; and though it be no fault of his own, no one trusts a bald hairdresser, do they, Boneman? Oh, what will become of the once-immortal John Tanner?”

“Hey, it’s the Man in the Moon!” cried Remington. “Only—out of the Moon now.”

“A friend of yours?” said Siham.

“My nemesis, apparently,” said Jacob.

“Nemesis!” cried Tanner, backing against the wall with his skeletal arms in the air. “Does the sly-skulled Boneman invoke the dastardly Campbell, who even now is doubled over with laughter at the fate he plotted for me?

“And how could I have foreseen it? Campbell gave every appearance of giving up his claim to the preservative kingdom; he left without warning and without a trace, after he was joined by a suicide, two headless hobos, the Hanged Man, and goodness knows what other Lethean freaks. Where did they go, and toward what end? These were no concerns of mine, no: not Tanner’s worries, for he was too busy falling into the trap that Campbell had laid.

“What hunger I had for the business he abandoned! I fell upon it like a starving man at a feast, gorging myself on his clientele; and when the Maskers found me, telling me that my name had been dragged into some sordid head-theft in the Tunnels below, I found a way to turn that, too, to my advantage. I knew it was Campbell’s doing, of course, but I still imagined I could best him.

“I told them all I knew, and all that I could do for them: I told the Maskers I’d make them immortal, invulnerable, though I hardly knew how—in truth, my best efforts had only nipped at the heels of Jacob Campbell’s treatments. Thus, when the Magnate summoned me to his Council to tell me of his plans to build an army of invulnerable warriors, I fell into a panic. I said yes, of course, and promptly broke into Campbell’s quarters, to see what clues he might have left in his wake.

“And there was his book of secrets, written on the pages of the body: Jacob Campbell’s perfect specimen, sitting motionless in a rocking chair, waiting to be revealed, piece by piece!”

“Shanthi!” cried Jacob.

“Was her name Shanthi?” Tanner asked himself. “She gave no name; she said nothing at all as I peeled her, layer by layer, away from herself, learning what Campbell had known all along: that we’re all Bonemen beneath the flesh. Oh, how I’d wondered at his methods, how I’d marveled at his technique, thinking he’d somehow made their muscles solid, when it was only carven wood clasping bare bone!

“The innovation came in a flash: I’d pick the Magnate’s warriors clean and cover their bones in metal. I told the great man of my plan, and he gave me twelve hacked-up refugees from the Plains and a workshop near Southheap, where I could melt down metals and dip bones. But it took so long to do it that the bones forgot their bodies by the time the metal had cooled, and I ended up with nothing but shining parts! I tried bending the metal around the bones next and had some luck with that; the first warrior who worked was an amalgam, if you will, partly welded, with his extremities dipped in metal, his missing leg rebuilt from mechanical parts, and his useless arm replaced with a hammer.

“Yet even this success was too slow for the Magnate. By the time I’d made him ten such warriors, he was demanding a hundred, and within three days! So flush was his city with Plainsmen fleeing some mythical beast, eager to fight for any reason at all, that he declared himself ready to attack White City then and there.

“Campbell’s trap had closed around me! Instead of making metal-men, I faked them, pulling off their flesh and painting them silver, or covering them in foil. I told them desperate lies, saying that their treatments had infused them with supernatural powers. Most of all, I made these impostors swear to follow the ten metal-men at their vanguard, for under this leadership, their putative powers would bloom: and the soldiers, being soldiers, ate it up with a spoon!

“Then my ten true metal-men passed the test of the Plains, laying low the bugbear that prowled there, and the Magnate, believing his metallic squadron to be one hundred strong and invulnerable, marched them toward White City, dragging me behind with a host of Plainsmen, all of whom I was meant to plate as soon as we arrived. Too soon, the scaffolds were built, and the Magnate sent the metal-men down to attack White City, to seal my fate!

“When the true metal-men attacked the Seekers, the Seekers felt their strength and struck back in kind. So long as they struck the metal-men, all was well, but when one of the impostors wandered into the line of fire, he was shattered into silvery shards.

“The Seekers reacted strangely to this victory—with grief, with shock, with confusion—and thus the Magnate learned that his enemies would defend, but never destroy. Thus he adopted my deception as his strategy, hiring some blasted-out sawbones and his legless assistant to make dozens more metal-men and hundreds more impostors, so that the Bonemen would hold back their strength for fear of what their blows might do.

“It was luck I’d brought him, and a foolproof plan, but did he reward me? Ha, and quadruple ha! Instead he punished me for the very stroke that bought his victory, ordering his debtors to dunk me in this barrel of river-water to deliquesce!

“And what will become of John Tanner now? Alas, the best I can hope is to eke out a beggar’s existence in some disused corner of the Tunnels, for what self-respecting citizen would do business with me now?”

“None I’ve met,” said Jacob, patting Tanner on the shoulder blade. “Best of luck, old boy.”

Turning to Siham, he shook his head. “For a moment there, at the start of that nauseating monologue, I thought I might find a way to sympathize with Tanner’s predicament. I’m afraid the cloud hasn’t made me any kinder, though—I still find him as loathsome as ever. But what a terrible series of developments he’s revealed! Can we really overcome these metal-men?”

“We can,” said Etienne, “if we’re as ruthless as we were in the Plains.”

“Like it or not, that’s the path ahead of us,” said Siham. “Come on, kids: we need to get to these so-called warriors before they do any more damage.”

The company left Tanner blubbering in the laboratory and set out for the Plaza, using Remington’s crow as a lookout, dodging even small bands of debtors for fear that any contact would bring hundreds of Plainsmen crashing down upon them. At last Remington led them through a narrow hallway toward the terrible noise at the center of White City.

They emerged into an ocean of corpses whose waves broke on the walls of the Plaza of the Ancients. Around that edifice every able-bodied Seeker in the city had joined in a defensive ring, fighting with terrible focus, though at reduced strength. The combat was concentrated around the archways and windows of the Plaza, from which the Seekers flung their opponents as far as they could, only to meet them again moments later; and while the Seekers were occupied thus, the shining figures of the metal-men and their painted impostors attacked, pressing their advantage ruthlessly with bludgeon and blade.

The Magnate’s forces cheered through it all, taking such satisfaction in every blow they landed that they seemed not to care how seldom they did any harm. The Seekers, meanwhile, labored without joy, losing a little more heart with every broken bit of sculpture that was hurled at them.

“Steady and staunch! Keep ‘em running, lads! Beat the blaggards to bits!” barked a hooded figure Jacob recognized as the Leather Masker. “First citizen to seize a skull from the Plaza’ll be dunked in swill and gold-plated!”

As a roar ripped through the ranks, Siham drew humming threads from her fingertips. “They’re trying to take the ancients hostage,” she said.

“At this rate it’s only a matter of time,” said Etienne.

“We’ll join the ancients together,” said Jacob, rubbing his finger-bones together. “Remington, you’ll make a Last Seeker Standing, then draw the army away from the Plaza. Lure them into the Moving Desert, and the job is done—they’ll all be powdered at once!”

Shailesh and Siham glanced at each other. “Hm. Yeah, that’s a bit much even for me,” she said, and then they were plowing through the mob, the apprentices fighting as well as they could behind the whirling bones of Siham and Shailesh.

Any doubts that Jacob had about his ability to keep up were dispelled as soon as he grabbed his first Plainsman. The scouring had taught him nothing of the advanced techniques of bone-fighting, but he was now ten times quicker than he’d been in the Plains, and with the strength of unfettered bone. Tossing the warrior through the air, he whirled on the point of his toe toward the next, who was swinging his sword at Remington; as Jacob’s open hand knocked the swordsman to the street, Adam snatched the sword from the air and hacked three Plainsmen to pieces.

The warriors before them recoiled, howling the news through their ranks: the Bonemen at the Plaza’s northeast corner were playing for keeps! The mob around the company scattered, loath to verify this rumor for themselves, and Jacob soon saw the whirling shapes of Gielgud, Ai, and Yasmin in the archway ahead, fending off a platoon of Plainsmen with a telltale shine at its center.

Gielgud and Yasmin fought as a single unit. While Yasmin blocked the archway, absorbing great violence through the discipline of marrow-grip, Gielgud leaped and lashed out all around her, tossing as many warriors into the crowd as he could lay hands on. Orbiting the pair was the crazed figure of Mistress Ai, whom Jacob only recognized after her whirlwind dispatched ten men at once and she came to rest in her usual, motionless stance. When another wave descended on the archway, she broke apart into dozens of twirling, whistling, frenzied pieces, each so far from the next that it seemed impossible that they all belonged to a single Seeker.

As Gielgud and Ai deflected this second wave, Yasmin saw the company approaching; squealing her greetings, she stepped aside to let them into the Plaza.

Before they had the chance, ten metallic skeletons tumbled into the gap, lashing out in a shining blur of such speed and fury that there was no hope of telling the metal-men from the impostors.

While the Seekers fought them back with focus and desperate caution, Eve, falling on the attackers with a bearded axe, cleaved an impostor’s painted arm from its shoulder.

“Hold off!” cried Shailesh, but before he could scold any further, he was struck in the spine by the head of a massive hammer and thrown by its weight against the Plaza’s outer wall. Mistress Ai, screaming at the company to keep out of her way, knocked the hammer-wielding metal-man toward Gielgud, who pitched his heavy body into the air, and while Gielgud swung his long arms to meet his next opponent, the metal-man landed with a crash at Jacob’s feet.

Jacob, unarmed, outmatched, and twenty feet from his fellows, backed away as the metal-man pushed himself onto his feet with the sledgehammer welded to his arm. Jacob feinted to the left and ran to the right, hoping his newfound agility would get him to the safety of the archway, but a fallen Plainsman grabbed hold of his ankle, and he slammed to the street between the metal-man’s feet.

The creature’s jaw squeaked open, revealing a row of tarnished teeth, and as its mechanical foot crashed down on his chest, snapping several ribs at once, it cried, “
Yeargh
!” and let loose a profane burst of Plains-Deadish. Jacob, as the hammer’s massive head reached the apex of its arc, recognized the broken body of Otho, whom he’d stitched together beside the Medic. Jacob wished, briefly, that he’d kept his needle and thread to himself, and then a deafening crack rang through the air.

As the hammer swung, ten white bullets hung in the air around it. Then Siham’s fingertips, at the ends of their dust-threads, whipped around Otho’s shining frame, squealing against metal as they gnawed through its joints. Before the hammer struck Jacob’s skull, Otho’s weight was lifted off of his ribs, and the metal-man fell, in glinting, clanging pieces, onto the marble floor.

Jacob stood up in the midst of shining rubble and jagged bone and saw every warrior around him, Plainsman and Seeker alike, staring in shock as Siham’s ten little fingertips snapped back into place.

“I know not whether it be for good or ill,” said the skull of an ancient beneath the watchful eye of the crow, “but a new era has dawned.”

In the hush outside the Plaza, eleven Plainsmen burst from an alley, chasing a brown-boned skeleton over Otho’s silent bones. As the skeleton threw a hand into the air, her pursuers fell screaming to the ground, and she staggered backward through the archway of the Plaza of the Ancients.

“Oops,” said Remington, startled by the crow’s incessant squawking, “that’s no Seeker—that’s Elspeth!”

The moment she was inside, Elspeth snagged the closest skull from its cubbyhole, lobbed it through the archway into Oxnard’s outstretched hands, and exploded in triumphant giggles. As Oxnard melted into the crowd, she howled, “Operation Trojan Corpse is complete!”

“That was Althea,” stammered Yasmin, wrapping her skeleton around Elspeth’s. “They’ve taken the honored Althea’s skull!”

“A hostage!”

“A Boner’s head, at last!”

“Three cheers for Dead City!”

“Four cheers for the Plains of War!”

The chaos around the Plaza grew yet more frenzied. Those fighting instincts that had been blunted by sheer repetition were sharpened, and bone clashed against metal and flesh with deafening force, yet no Seeker was willing to follow Siham in breaking the taboo, and all the clashing that followed represented nothing but a furious extension of their stalemate.