Dead Boys (24 page)

Hours passed. Boredom trickled between them like drizzling rain. Jacob could hear the debtors moving and barking, preparing their departure, he supposed, but could see nothing but bare rock and the girl.

For a time, Jacob couldn’t look directly at her. Her gleaming bones reminded him that he was on his way to disassembly, that his quest was dissolving, moment by moment, in this acidic silence. And how disgusting it was to see an entire skeleton, up-close and utterly unclothed, lacking the promise of impending preservation, without even the meager accessories of a Hordesman! He lifted his hands to his face to shield himself, however briefly, from the sight of her, but upon feeling his fingertips clack against bone, he realized that his skull was as naked as hers. Ashamed, he was attempting to summon the bravery to greet her when he spotted a sudden lurching on the path and froze in place.

It was the Leather Masker tumbling down the path like some rotting primate—loose, compact limbs flailing under his robe, skull hidden away behind a luchador mask embroidered with a second, stylized skull, nothing of his body visible but grinning teeth and empty eye sockets. In moments he’d rolled up to the cage and pounced onto its bars, slapping gloved hands around them, turning his head sideways to peer within.

“So this is ‘im, Jean-Luc? The Clock-Thief ‘imself?” He snorted, and Jacob was afraid, not that the Masker would attack him, but that in his tumbling and growling and snuffling he would ferret out the truths that Jacob was hiding. A terrible question occurred to him: what would they do if they learned of Remington’s talents? Even if they’d witnessed the monster’s construction, they clearly hadn’t drawn the right conclusions. Were Remington captured, would he resist, or could he, in his naïveté, be convinced to make something even more monstrous than the Last Man Standing?

With a sudden resolve, Jacob promised himself that they’d never find out. Leopold and Etienne were already suffering for his mistakes; he’d not add Remington to that list.

The Leather Masker pointed a gloved finger at his face. “This is ‘im who’s cost us all this effort—and what is ‘e now that ‘e’s ‘ere? No master criminal, just another turd circlin’ the bottom of the bowl.” Clanging a fist across the bars, he shouted, “Perk up there, Clock-Thief! We’ll require a better show than this, after all we’ve spent.”

“He does not know, Monsieur,” said Jean-Luc. “He does not know what time and care you have put into his capture. But I think he should!”

“Jean-Luc thinks you should,” said the Leather Masker, tumbling onto the dusty path, where he sprawled extravagantly, digging a hand into his robes. “I guess ‘e’s got a point,” he said, pulling out a pair of dice and rattling them in one hand. “Probably curious ‘ow we even knew to look for your knob, innit? Thought you were so careful.”

“It was I who discover this detail,” said Jean-Luc, strutting around the Masker, who began rolling his dice repeatedly in the dirt. “My master, the Gambler, it was he who put me in charge of searching your clock-tower, for it seem impossible to him that the ringer himself should simply disappear—with no face, and a debt-stamp right in his forehead?
Impossible
! So I inspect every last pebble within, and am finally bother by this hole in the wall you know so well. ‘A window to nowhere,’ I say, ‘and the only escape for our Clock-Thief.’ So I volunteer to climb down into the dark, and there I find the hole you have beat out of the stone!”

“Cracked that tower right open, so we did,” growled the Masker, still busy with his dice, “and found both ‘alves of the ringer you broke in two. That’s a treason right there, desecratin’ the corpse of one of the Magnate’s own debtors! Spoke ‘ighly of your bravery, ‘e did, but not so ‘ighly of your aim.”

“You see,” said Jean-Luc, “when you pull off his head, you shoot at this window to nowhere, and you miss—and this is when his head roll between your legs, giving him a look up your robe at your
protubérance
! Oh, if only you had wore some trouser, Monsieur, you would be free today.”

The Masker scooped up his dice and tumbled to his feet. “Looked all about for the man with a statue for a cock, so we did. Nearly ‘ad you in the Tunnels, too. You escaped for the nonce, but snarin’ you was a mere matter of persistence.

“Built us a raft ‘alf as wide as Lethe. Brung out thousands of debtors from the Pool to tug it upstream, enough to canvass the underworld twice over, should we ‘ave needed to. Them ‘eadless decoys by the cave were a lovely touch, but we’d an army to conduct our search. And now ‘ere we are. And ‘ere are you. And now I want to know, Leopold.” The Masker leapt at the bars. “Ah, yes, we know your name! John Tanner gave you up, with joy.”

“Tanner?” said Jacob, infuriated by the very mention of his competitor’s name.

“That’s got ‘im goin’!” barked the Masker to Jean-Luc. “Aye, John Tanner, whose name you’d given as your own in the Crowded Car, offered up all we needed to know. Except for one damn thing that’s been botherin’ me all this while. Wormin’ in and out of me skull until me sane ‘alf’s gone ‘alfway barmy.” He rapped his gloved knuckles against his masked skull. Jacob heard a rattle, and wondered if the man’s head were stuffed full of dice. “All I want to know, Clock-Thief, and the only thing that will ‘elp me reckon what to
do
with you now, is the answer to one question:

“Why?”

“
Oui, pourquoi
?” Jean-Luc echoed, striding to the Masker’s side. “
Pourquoi
?”

Jacob stared at them, trembling. “Why—why what, exactly?”

They exchanged an incredulous glance. “Why’d you take the bloody watches? T’was a damn fool thing to do. And I’m an expert on the subject of damn fool things, as anyone who knows me knows. You might ‘ave gambled your lifetime on a throw when you was moments dead—leastways, that’s the rumor—but
I
gambled
eternity
to get where I am. Every stinkin’ grain of sand in the glass.” He rattled the dice in one gloved fist. “And knowin’ a thing or two about gambles, I know that every gambler ‘as ‘is reasons. Secrets ‘e whispers to Fortuna, ‘oping she’ll choose ‘
im
from the crowd. So tell me, Clock-Thief, one fool to another. Why’d you do it?”

Jacob’s mind had seized, offering no answer to this question. “A moment. A moment to gather my thoughts.”

The Masker grunted. “S’pose we’re ‘ardly in an ‘urry.”

In the overlong pause that followed, one truth emerged: Jacob’s continued existence, and that of his companions, depended upon how he answered this question.

His mind raced. He had no way of knowing why Leopold had stolen from the Magnate, beyond an obvious hunger for power. And there was no point in trying to convince these men that he wasn’t Leopold, as Leopold’s unique genitalia had provided them with all the evidence they’d require.

The truth wouldn’t help him now. Anything remotely resembling it would lead them, in time, to Remington.

He was shaking by the time the Leather Masker disengaged from the bars of his cage and plopped down in the dirt, resuming his incessant rolling. Something about the action caught Jacob’s eye, some oddly insistent precision. It reminded him of the way Ma Kicks had rolled her own dice, so full of intent, and more: full of
ritual
. Then he heard the Leather Masker muttering a number under his breath before each roll, and saw his body stiffen with triumph when the dice matched his guess.

Jacob had his answer.

“Why does any gambler roll the dice?” he said, taking to his feet in an imitation of Leopold’s confident strut. “That’s the question, isn’t it? Why does any man gamble, and were my reasons any different from those of the braying crowd at Caesar’s?” He knelt close to the bars, pushing his skull against them to peer down at his captor. “Which is another way of asking: are yours?”

The Leather Masker scooped up his dice, cocking his head.

“It may occur to us that we can’t control the choices we take,” Jacob went on, “but that doesn’t mean we
believe
it. Instead, we have faith in chaos—faith that the dice we throw will fall at random—or we turn Fortune into our goddess, hoping that our behavior might sway her whims in our favor. But you’re too wily for either of those excuses, and so am I.”

The Leather Masker shook his head, and resumed his rolling. “Audacious, I’ll give you that. Comparin’ yourself to me, with your feet a-thumpin’ on the gallows floor!”

“I’d already be swinging if you hadn’t made the comparison yourself,” said Jacob, steadying as he warmed to his role. “It’s clear after moments of meeting you that you understand what
really
governs the pips on those dice. What appears to be chance, or the caprice of a goddess, isn’t random at all. It’s physical. The way those dice fall depends upon a host of minute forces: gravity, air pressure, irregularities in their shape and weight, the way they sit in your fingers, the angle of your hand when you toss them, the force, the spin, the surface of the ground itself. Thus, winning is not an art, but a science so maddeningly precise that no ordinary man could hope to learn it in his lifetime.

“But you’re no ordinary man. And you have far more than a lifetime at your disposal. You can throw those dice for the rest of history. You can throw them until you master every variable on that long list, and then, in the end, chaos will have no choice but to serve you.

“Just like a god.”

The Leather Masker stopped rolling. He left the dice in the dirt and crept, with uncommon care, to the side of the cage. “And?” he rumbled. “What’s any of that ‘ave to do with you, Clock-Thief?”

“With—with me? Right. Of course.” Jacob had been so excited by his idea that he’d utterly forgotten where it was leading. Having nothing in reserve, he focused on saving his hide. “I ask only for the chance to serve you, at—at the side of chaos. Let me be your acolyte. Let me be your worshiper. Above all, let me continue to
be
.” Falling to his knees, he grasped the bars, desperately hoping that theatricality would save him where his wits had failed. “Don’t grind me to dust, my liege, I beg of you!”

The Leather Masker stood perfectly still. Jean-Luc was watching, rubbing his hands together slowly.

That’s it, thought Jacob, I’ve bungled it. Imagining his body broken beneath the weight of the Pestle, he was on the verge of dropping the act when the Leather Masker began to chuckle.

“What, the Mortar and Pestle, that’s what you’re on about? Punitive deconstruction and that? You surprise me, Clock-Thief. After all this time and energy spent, you think we’d just grind you up and toss the remains into an ashtray? You’ll not be so lucky, I’m afraid!” Scooping up his dice, he clapped Jean-Luc on the back, sending the lanky debtor sprawling. “We’ve got somethin’ special planned for this one, ‘aven’t we?”

“Of course, Monsieur!” his lackey cried, scrambling up again.

“Right, then—saddle up!”

Jean-Luc fell to the task with relish, arranging eleven other debtors in two rows beside himself, where they began, in two rows of harnesses, to pull. The Gambler trailed behind the cage, stopping every so often to roll his dice and mutter, and Jacob, exhausted and with no idea whether he’d succeeded or failed, fell to the floor of his cage.

The road flattened as it approached one of the great, vertical flanks of the Wall of the World. Jean-Luc urged the debtors to bring the box as close to the end of the path as they could, then had them remove their harnesses. He and the Masker squatted in conference beside the Wall, consulting a yellowed scrap of paper on which a kind of constellation was drawn. At length, the debtors were arranged in a bizarre configuration before the bare rock, standing on one another’s backs and shoulders, forming towers and pyramids with their bodies and stretching their arms to their utmost limits in order to reach those tiny, barely visible indentations that were their goal.

“Very good,” said Jean-Luc when all were arranged just so, “and we depress on
trois
.
Un, deux, trois
!”

A loud click was followed by a bassy rumbling as a slab of mountainside shuddered behind a well-disguised seam, opening a dank tunnel through the rock. As Jean-Luc hollered, his debtors secured their harnesses and lumbered into the dark. Jean-Luc took the lead, inspecting the ground ahead for cracks and pits.

Jacob stared as the Masker led the way, feeling surprisingly little relief. There was no point in wondering what would come when they returned to the city: his existence was now completely beyond his control. He laid back on the floor of the cage, staring up at the roof of the tunnel until it melted into sky.

Days passed, maybe weeks. All the ground the company had covered on the current of the River Lethe passed by again, this time at a snail’s pace. His captors left him alone, and his fleshless neighbor never moved.

The silence became oppressive. Hating the sight of the debtors, disturbed by the very presence of the Leather Masker, depressed by the slowly-passing landscape, he began to stare, unabashedly, at the skeleton girl.

He’d thought of her as his mirror, but he couldn’t ignore their differences any longer. She’d been sitting perfectly still for miles and miles of bumpy road, while Jacob couldn’t keep himself from fidgeting. Every time his mind wandered, he caught his right hand picking at the skin that drooped from his throat, loosened by the knife of the debtors who’d taken his face. Each time he saw a bit of his own flesh pinched between thumb and forefinger, he gasped in disgust, tossed it through the bars, and tried his best to emulate the skeleton girl’s stillness.

After unconsciously tearing another hunk from his throat, he slapped his hands on the cage’s wooden floor and said, more loudly than he’d meant to, “However do you sit so still for so terribly
long
?”

The skeleton girl didn’t budge. For a moment he was afraid he’d offended her. Then boredom drove his fingers back to his neck.

“I’m asking out of genuine curiosity,” he said, grasping his right wrist in his left hand and forcing it into his lap. “It’s a talent I’ve never mastered. Stillness, that is. I get uncomfortable, and then I start to move. As if action, any action whatsoever, might save me from the void. You’re familiar with the sensation, I assume?” He stared at her placid skull. “Or perhaps not.”