Dead Boys (20 page)

I
t took me no more than five days,” said Leopold, “to spend every moment of the seventeen years I’d won—a fortune, I’d thought! And what I’d purchased seemed well worth the expenditure. Dressed as a dandy, I was as impossible to ignore as I was to take seriously, and so I could dig up a wealth of information without being suspected of anything more sinister than a predilection for gossip.

“As I adjusted my crimson scarf, I was startled by the ringing of the hour, its discord drawing my attention to the clock-tower beyond the window of my tenement, where a debtor struck his misshapen gong time and again—twenty-
one
, twenty-
two
, twenty-
three
. I was hungry to learn more about the operation of these clock-towers, which I’d heard were run on the reliance of functional time-pieces. Just the thought of those ticking watches made me feel feverish. ‘Died with a watch in her pocket,’ the gamblers would say of a woman on a lucky streak, who stood to win an account stuffed full of years.

“And yet time was also our prison, converting the grand expanse of eternity into a series of measured cubicles as dreary as any in the life we’d left behind.

“Just as the Magnate robbed me of my time by shackling me to these ruthlessly passing hours, so I swore to take my first step toward usurping his power by stealing a little time back. I knew that watches and clocks were the most potent symbols of the Magnate’s power, as surely as I’d known when I rose from the muck of Lethe that I’d come into my inheritance at last. Would the theft of a few watches make any impression upon the Magnate, considering how many more he held in his towers? Doubtful, but think of the symbolic heft! I had to start somewhere, even if I were the proverbial mosquito attacking a pachyderm.

“This city will be my kingdom, I thought from the start: I need only the patience to claim it. I have known since the night I chose to snuff out my own life that death was the best choice I ever made; that true power, power eternal, was finally within my reach; and that the qualities innate to my soul would elevate me, in due time, to godhood.

“In essence, I am the same boy I was in life, but it was the act of passing from world to world that brought about my apotheosis. In that sense, I have much in common with this pocket watch,” he said, dangling the object from his fingers, “a bauble before the river transformed it, now a treasure. Setting my sights on stealing at least a few of its fellows from the hundreds in the Magnate’s stores, I began my reinvention in the Tunnels, where I spent years in dank barrooms in the service of idle conversation, revising my persona from room to room until I felt more natural in my adopted self than the one I’d strangled.

“Slowly, as I became a polyglot and an expert in Dead City culture, I became certain that I would need to find an informant before I could gain access to the secrets of the Magnate’s rule. After months of searching, I found the right corpse for the job in a pub called the Rag-and-Bone Shop, a man whose hands looked fifty years more decrepit than his face.

“‘Was I a debtor?’ said the man, swabbing the inside of his cup with his finger and rubbing the last drop of swill on his teeth. ‘Sonny, I been a debtor so long I don’t remember what you call the thing I was before. In fact, I don’t remember a thing that happened before they scrubbed me, not in life, death, nor dreamland.’

“‘How odd!’ I cried, laughing rather more uproariously than the occasion merited.

“‘It’s odd, all right,’ said the man, cheered by his own apparent wit. ‘I might have been born with a skull for a head, for all I can recall!’

“‘Oh, indeed!’ I cackled, jerking my head like a ball on a string while paying for the man’s next round with an account-stone that would keep him drunk for a year. ‘Now tell me: how well do you recall your indenture?’

“‘Where that’s concerned, sonny, it’s etched as deep in my memory as the debtor’s code in my skull,’ said the man, knocking his knuckles on the loose skin of his brow. ‘Torture like that no man can forget.’

“To be brief,” Leopold went on, slipping the pocket watch into its pouch, “this corpse served for decades as a bell-ringer, a post that combines the mind-numbing boredom that is every debtor’s lot with regular installments of shattering noise. His assignment was to stare for fifty-nine minutes at a time at a small collection of watches, noting any deviations from the norm to keep the Magnate’s time-keepers aware of any necessary adjustments. When the watches neared the hour, he was to bring one to his bell—a fanciful moniker, as he rang the hour on an uneven slab of scrap metal—which he struck thrice for three a.m., fourteen times for two p.m., and so forth.

“His only solace was that midnight was marked not by twenty-four bells, but twelve; it was also the last bell he rang at the end of every week-long shift, for the developers of the time-keeping system had concluded that no human mind could endure such repetitive clangor for more than seven days before job performance was adversely affected by certain mental eccentricities. Thus, his weekly break was spent in the Debtor’s Pool, where he was debriefed, then stultified into mental fitness before being relocated to another bell tower where some other ringer was at the end of his own workweek.

“I was thrilled by the news of this changing of the guards, not to mention that the city was full of such bell-towers, each with a wealth of watches inside! I endeavored to hide my eagerness from this ex-debtor, though it scarcely mattered. He’d loathed this detail so much that the slightest hint of mischief made him a willing informant, and as soon as our interview was over I hastened to the surface, eager to explore the tower he’d described as ‘begging for a break-in.’

“Back in the city, I was delighted to discover that my combination lock, aided by the noise pouring into my building from the bell tower across the way, had kept my apartment uninhabited in my absence, and by way of celebration I gathered the bulk of my possessions and took them to Lazarus Quay to trade. Returning with a bundle of black cloth and a clay pot full of river-water, I sat down against the wall and put the shard of mirror to my throat, sawing my neck open from nape to Adam’s apple. After peeling off my face, I scrubbed my skull clean of flesh and gristle with the river-water and a wire brush, then checked my handiwork in the mirror before carving a debtor’s stamp in my brow with the edge of a chisel. As the alphanumeric code carved into the average debtor’s skull was unknown to me, this fanciful carving of a lemniscate was not intended to pass close inspection, but I hoped its presence would satisfy the glance of a ringer greeting me in exhaustion at the end of a shift.

“I tried on my robes then, arranging their cowl to hide my broomstick and scarf, then dressed and undressed repeatedly until I was certain I could do it blind. I replaced my face, which had already begun to feel like a mask, and changed into my frippery; tucking the black bundle beneath my belt, I descended into the Tunnels, where I sought out the bell tower my informant had named.

“If Dead City’s buildings truly are brought in by the floods, then this bell tower must have been carried on the crest of a mighty wave and plunged like a lancet into the boil of Rottening Green, for its base was buried deep in the streets of that district, its dungeon sunk below the Tunnels. Luckily, the dungeon’s walls were so compromised by the collision that I was able to climb into a crawl-space below the floorboards of a neighboring pub and slip right in.

“Winding my way through murky passages and finding no access to the upper levels besides an unreachable trap-door, I located that architectural quirk that my informant had so helpfully described: a long, narrow cistern running the length of the tower. I attacked it with chisel and mallet, beating on a single stone until the skin chafed off of my palms; and although the regular noise and vibration produced by this method continued long enough to deliver the eccentricities the ringer had described (fancies, figments, and fakeries of the mind that distorted my living youth into the stuff of waking nightmare), I persisted, cursing, moaning, and babbling, until the block of stone crumbled into the dark floodwater below.

“Grateful that I’d punctured the cistern higher than the waterline, I wiggled inside, wedged my limbs into the shaft, and began to inch my way up toward a distant point of sepia light. I felt nothing, saw nothing but bare rock, and had no sense of distance above or below; the figments multiplied in that claustrophobic darkness, subjecting me to a hell that only the unwavering strength of my ambition could propel me through. It was a trial so severe that I would have believed years had passed by the time I reached the hole through which ancient scholars had dropped their buckets.

“When I’d climbed close to this aperture, I waited to hear the ringing of the hour: it was seven p.m. I waited in the shaft like a human cannonball until midnight came and went.

“Since no debtor replacing the ringer on duty had passed on the stairs, which I could see through the bucket-hole, I persisted until the day grew long enough that its bells provided cover for my entry. At last, as noon rang, I hurried through the bucket-hole and chose a chamber off the central stair, where I changed into my costume, keeping still unless the bells were ringing and avoiding the windows.

“I remained in that chamber for three full days.

“At moments before midnight on the fourth, I heard my cue: a shuffling of robes on the stairs below.

“The sound of the ringer’s replacement sent the bone-rush through me like a sudden flame, for to escape detection, I would have to dispatch and replace him in the space of twelve bells.

“As the ringer above me dragged his hammer across the floor, I launched myself around the bend, suffused with a savagery familiar to any Plainsman.

“As the first bell rang, I sprang down the steps; at the second, I crashed into the ringer, who was so shocked that he made not a sound; at the third bell, I heaved his body over my shoulder; at the fourth, he was screaming blue murder; at the ringer’s fifth strike, the replacement covered my eyes with his scrabbling hands; at the sixth, I crashed headlong into the wall of my chamber, knocking the replacement to the floor; at the seventh bell, I climbed atop my adversary, planting my knees on his chest; at the eighth, I twisted his head off his neck, crying out in glee at that wicked little snap; as the ninth bell rang, I stood and shot his head at the bucket-hole, astonished that he could still scream as he flew; and horror! as the tenth bell rang, his head had struck the bucket-hole’s edge, and rolled back between my legs; as the eleventh and penultimate bell tolled, I scooped up his head and shot again, ignoring his slurred curses; and as the twelfth and final bell was struck in the chamber above, the replacement’s head plunged howling into the cistern, tumbling to its doom as the bell’s last reverberations echoed down the stairs.

“I hurried back to the steps, swallowing my excitement: head down, shoulders slumped, I plodded up the stairs like a man on the brink of a hated chore.

“The ringer above had no sooner finished his twelfth strike than he’d dropped his hammer and begun descending, and he passed me without so much as glancing at my fraudulent debt-stamp.

“Dazed, I reached the top of the bell-tower, saw the rotting card-table where the watches lay, swept them into the pouch I’d purchased at the Quay, hurried down the steps, stowed my clothing beneath my robe, and stuffed the headless body of the ringer down the bucket-hole before descending an inch at a time toward the Tunnels.

“The heist was flawless, unlike the rest of my plan: for I had overestimated the strength of Dead City’s black market and was sentenced to squander month after ticking month searching for a fence capable of converting these stolen goods into credit, for I required a vast quantity of time to bankroll my scheme. As fate had it, I could find no buyer brave enough, and so I turned my ambition beyond city limits, down-river and into these very wilds, where at last, with your help, my destiny shall be realized. Rest assured, your part in my timely ascension shall not be forgotten when my foes have been ground to dust beneath the mighty pestle of Leopold l’Eclair!”

The crow squawked irritably at the close of this monologue, which it had now heard twice in its entirety. Leopold kicked a spray of sand in its direction, but the crow only clacked its beak and continued staring.

“Interesting,” said the cross-legged merchant sitting before them, inspecting the dagger he’d been sharpening all the while, then laying it on the straw carpet between them with exaggerated care. “This story, with the snatching and the crawling and the derring-do, it’s good at a museum, on a laminated placard, or maybe at an antiques shop, to help the hand find the wallet, but it is not, I think, so useful to us at Mahmoud’s. My offer stands, Mr. Eclair, right where it stood, unless you let me nail this odd little bird to a board and sell it as a curio. Then I throw in a chess set.”

Mahmoud the merchant, naked but for a paisley waistcoat, his oblong head standing at the apex of so tall and precarious a frame that he trembled when he spoke, sat in the midst of a dozen carpets, curtains, and lengths of upholstery laden with unbroken blades and armor, above which a dozen well equipped and faultlessly silent warriors stood: Mahmoud’s Guard.

“You are as displeased as your blackbird,” said Mahmoud over the crow’s indignant cawing, “but consider the fate of the merchant: in order to exchange these watches for something I can use, I have two choices: I can wait here for the city folk, the blade-traders, who are not so easy to impress with tales of adventure as a simple man like myself, and who will drive such hard bargains that I will thank myself for holding to my offer; or, if I feel like having an adventure myself, then I must roll up my carpets, pay my servants with their blades, trade in my stock for city-goods, and make the long hike down the Bazakh Bypass to Dead City, where I will try and pawn these dirty goods without attracting the attention of your, ah, nemesis, as you have tried and failed to do already. Either way, the risk is mine, and your story, which you hope will drive my offer up, only gives me more to worry about; and since worry takes time, and time, more than ever, is money, I really ought to lower my offer to compensate. Therefore you can put your mind at ease, for since I hold to my initial offer, it is the same as if I had given you more, do you understand? Of course you do; we are both reasonable men.”