Empire of Bones (20 page)

“I’m sorry,” Cyrus said. “I really can’t believe anything you say. For all I know, you brought the ‘gillies’ in yourself. Why are you even here?”

Sterling grinned. “Why, Cyrus Smith, I thought you would have heard. I’m the cook.”

Cyrus stared as the big man shifted his bulk on the two bent metal rods he used as legs. He was the cook? Again? Even after the poison? It didn’t make any sense. But at the same time, Cyrus’s mind drifted to the world’s most perfect biscuits. His stomach growled loudly.

Sterling laughed. “I’ll take that as the greatest compliment a lad can give.”

Cyrus moved into the tunnel mouth, feeling for the top of the stairs behind him with his toe. He couldn’t believe Sterling. He had to do what Rupert had told him to do. Rupert could be waiting for him right now. And if there was an ambush waiting instead, well, maybe Lilly the Bull would help out.

“Don’t follow me,” Cyrus said. “I don’t want to kill you.”

“You’re too kind,” Sterling said.

Cyrus turned and took one step down the dark stairwell. Below him, he heard shouting. Men cursed. Wet feet slapped on stone.

Sterling’s hand landed on Cyrus’s shoulder.

“Douse the snake light and follow me,” Sterling whispered. “
Now
. I don’t want them killing you.”

 eleven 

PLUMM

P
LUMM
, N
EBRASKA
, had been nothing but a railroad town. Some folks had worked on the farms that surrounded Plumm on every side, tilling and planting and cutting. Some folks had worked in town, trimming hair, scrambling eggs, making soap, plucking chickens, butchering beef, selling things like radios and milk shakes and couches to each other out of little brick storefronts with big windows and sideways signs that hung over the dusty sidewalks and had all been painted by the same old man who also welded the handrails for everyone’s front steps. A few more people worked in government, telling everyone else where they couldn’t park their cars or graze their horses, and what music was allowed at the one school dance that happened each year, and how long after dark people could stay in the tiny Founder’s Park with the cracked statue of bald old Edward Plumm.

But most folks had worked in the rail yards and in the warehouses beside the rail yards. Big trains had rumbled through Plumm, trains heading all the way up to
Chicago, trains miles and miles long, loaded with cattle and corn. When those trains left Plumm, they were loaded with even more corn, spouted down from the big gray silos at the edge of town, and with pallets and pallets of Holy Soaps, made in iron vats with real animal fat and secret ingredients guaranteed to increase holiness after ten uses, and scented with things like lavender and honey and vanilla.

When Plumm was at its biggest, 251 people called the town home, and ten tons of Holy Soaps were loaded onto the trains every year. A woman named Sissy Plumm lived alone in a big brick house on top of the only hill. She owned Holy Soaps, designed fresh Holy Soaps, and invented new sins that Holy Soaps could cure. She never married and never had children, but one day a train brought her the pieces of a radio tower, and a pipe organ, and old silver microphones, and all put together, those were better than children. She started broadcasting the
Holy Soap Soothing Lunchtime Purity Hour Radio Show
from her living room, and everyone in Plumm, Nebraska, had to listen, and the mayor walked around at noon making sure that they did.

But the trains stopped coming. Bigger silos were built in bigger towns, and they were filled with more corn. And people stopped listening and stopped cutting each other’s hair and selling each other milk shakes and making Sissy Plumm’s Holy Soaps. And no one cared what
music was going to be played at the school dance or where their horses could graze and how late they could stay in the Founder’s Park. Because no one stayed in Plumm at all. Almost no one.

Sissy Plumm stayed in her big brick house, and she played her organ and she disobeyed her own rules, but then she washed her hands with some of the thousands of pounds of Holy Soap that would never get loaded onto trains, and every day at noon she sang her songs and taught her lessons about the dangers of sneezes and walking too quickly on Sundays. Every day she shared her wisdom on the
Holy Soap Soothing Lunchtime Purity Hour Radio Show
.

Until one day, she didn’t.

The morning sun crept through tattered lacy curtains and found an old bed with four wooden posts carved with birds and flowers and rabbits, and on the bed, the sun found a boy with light skin and black hair. Oliver Laughlin was on his back and his eyes were open. But Oliver was new. He no longer looked out of his old eyes. He no longer thought with his old mind. A broken bamboo cane was in his hands, and the silver knob on the end was open, revealing a large tooth so dark it looked like a triangular hole in the sunlight, like a tiny door into some
other reality, distant and cold. Phoenix pressed the tooth against his young new lips, savoring the cool electricity it sent into him. His new existence was more complicated than he would have liked, but there was such excitement in youth, such freshness in every nerve ending. How his grandnephew could have been such a pasty, mopey boy, he couldn’t imagine. The lad had senses almost as sharp as some that Phoenix had designed himself, and that was even before Phoenix’s extensive renovations after moving in. Oliver’s mind had speed, too. Nothing like the speed of thought Phoenix had managed in his last body while wearing the Odyssean Cloak, but still, it had been a stronger starting point than he had expected.

Phoenix had overhauled his pale grandnephew in a shallow pool, in an abandoned factory, pouring force into wires and needles, violently reweaving every joint and bone and muscle and organ, sharpening and grinding the mind, heightening senses well beyond human levels, beyond most bestial levels. Except for smell. Smells were intrusive. He didn’t want them, and he didn’t need them. He had people to smell for him.

And then, when Oliver had lain in that pool, still and cold and broken, when his heart had stopped and his mind was void and his soul had fled, Phoenix had left behind his old ashen body, and he had entered his nephew.

There had only been one oversight: allergies. Phoenix had never before known the itching, sneezing torture
of hay fever, and so he hadn’t thought to search his grandnephew for that particular flaw. And so far, fixing the allergic glitch while living inside the Oliver body had been beyond him. After two months spent surrounded by fields, he hated hay fever almost more than he hated the Smiths.

Phoenix rocked off of the bed and his young feet found the floor. He faced an antique dressing mirror with speckled flaws in the glass. A tall shirtless boy with pale skin and symmetrical veins on his arms stared back at him. It was strange, this Oliver self of his, being a boy. Having two arms again and a mind that tried to move in straight lines. He brushed back his thick black hair and stared into the dark owlish eyes he had molded for himself, eyes that could see bright color in the faintest moonlight. There was an extra membrane hidden beneath the lids, tucked away for when he needed it, a lens for use in water. He blinked it now and smiled at the ticklish sensation on his eyeballs. He had set Oliver’s gills low on the neck, just above his shoulders, in case he might ever need to hide them beneath a collar. He had decided against the photosynthetic skin for himself. The added energy gleaned from light was interesting, but not so enticing that he wanted to live his life tinted green.

Phoenix contracted his chest and torso, his abs and shoulders and arms. His lean body knotted up and vibrated like a plucked string. His veins rippled like
whips beneath his skin. Grinding his teeth, he forced the tightness even further, into pain, into agony. He felt the scream jump up inside his throat and he smiled it back down, relaxing. The young muscles were only just beginning to reach the potential Phoenix had planned for them. The old Phoenix had shed his white coat and become monstrous to achieve strength, but this young Phoenix, fast and slight and fresh, already had the strength of an ape in his grip.

And of course, he’d narrowed Oliver’s nose a bit. He’d never liked that brat’s nose.

Phoenix flipped the broken cane and caught it, smiling. It was good being young. It was something he could happily be forever. And he would have done just that, infusing Oliver with the transmortality of Gilgamesh or even that red pig Enkidu before taking the boy’s body for his own. But the Smiths had just managed to muck things up before he had been able to. No matter. Transmortality could wait. He couldn’t be killed while he held the tooth anyway. He would let his Oliver body grow another inch or two before he captured an appropriately strong transmortal and stole his life from him. But the Smiths’ meddling must be stopped now. Their role in Phoenix’s story needed a dark and painful close.

First, they had taken the tooth from Skelton, along with everything else Skelton had hidden from Phoenix in those final years. They’d killed Maxi and burned the
arm off the Old Phoenix when Ashtown was as good as his. They’d taken back their father’s body just two months ago. They’d helped destroy the Odyssean Cloak. They’d prevented Oliver’s transmortality. They’d taken his oracle, and they’d torched his cigar factory. He’d liked that factory. He’d expected to do a great deal of work there. Instead …

Phoenix turned away from the mirror and jerked back the lacy curtains. He was looking down over the tiny, crumbling town of Plumm, Nebraska.

Phoenix tapped the black tooth on the glass. Then he dragged it, watching glass powder rain from the sharp groove he was carving. The Smiths were meddlesome, and for that, he was grateful. They sparked a little extra desire deep inside him. It kept things
personal
.

Let the transmortals tear cities down. Let Bellamy Cook kick every brick of Ashtown into the lake. Let Radu Bey gut the Avengel and feast on the Sages if he liked. Phoenix had promised himself the Smiths, and promises to himself were the only kind of promise he ever kept.

The Smiths were out there. Somewhere. Following Skelton’s steps. Collecting tools and weapons and charms that the old thief had hidden from him.

Phoenix had no plans to kill them. No. The Smiths deserved to experience many, many slow transformations before death could even be discussed.

Oliver Laughlin’s lips tightened in sudden amusement.
At some point, he would design a spouse for himself. He would use a girl as clay and mold her into the mother of a truly new race. Why not the Smith girl? The boy could be carved and hacked and modified into something barely breathing and barely human. But the girl, why not make her more than perfect? She could be his Eve.

The door to the bedroom opened and a tall redhead in jeans and a white tank top stepped inside. He was one of the Reborn, greenish beneath freckles. His gills were high, just beneath his ears, and the bone tattoos on his arms were striped with precise symmetrical veins. His blinking blue eyes had the odd horizontal pupils of a goat.

“I thought I should wake you, Father.”

“A statement,” Phoenix drawled, “that implies I was asleep.”