Dead Boys (29 page)

“I said, ‘Our teacher had no teacher,’” said Siham.

“Hum. Well, I suppose you had to say something. And then she was gone! Without an instant’s thought, the Maiden left White City! Since then, the debate over her fate has been fierce. She’s insubordinate—on that everyone can agree. But to develop a brand-spanking-new technique, after so little training! That’s where it got complicated, as no one could agree on how to handle such reckless power.”

“I’m neither fish nor fowl,” said Siham. “Too strong to call Bonemaiden, too unruly to name. But no one named the Poet Laureate of the Underworld, did they? He’d never pass the Meeting’s endless batteries of tests, but without him, all this would be nothing but desert.”

“Nothing?” roared a voice from the eastern archway. “It is you who will be nothing, Siham! As the apple that falls far from the tree is devoured by that tree’s very roots, so shall I grind my student into a shameful powder!”

The skeleton who spoke these words, his ribs as thick as tusks, backflipped all the way from the archway to the central platform, then launched himself into the air to land several feet from Siham, his fists extended on dust-threads so wide they hummed in baritone.

“Your former master, now your enemy, shall forsake his vows to teach you this lesson—but it is a lesson your fragments shall never forget!”

Siham sighed and shook out her arms, letting out a finger from each hand on a thread of dust the length of a bullwhip. “Shailesh, you’re a masochist,” she said as the twin wires began to hum.

“I am a realist,” said Shailesh, “and you, Siham, are a figment of my imagination!”

They sprang into the air, only to be thrown to the floor by the grinding clash of their dust-blades; both landed on their feet, skidding backward only to leap, clash, and rebound again; and so began a spectacle that continued long enough to stultify.

“This is pointless. Why doesn’t she just knock his spine out?” said Leopold after a time to Yasmin, the only member of the audience who was making enough noise to satisfy Master Shailesh’s sense of drama.

“Oh, she can’t use that technique here,” Yasmin said between outbursts. “What if she hit one of the ancients?”

Remington strolled toward the bones in the honeycomb, peering up curiously at their broken forms. He stopped beneath a well-formed skull of obvious antiquity, gazing deep into its eye-sockets and waving a fleshless hand in greeting. “Hi there,” he said. “How’s your day?”

“For Gielgud the Great there have been but three days,” the skull replied. “The first was a blink of my eyes in the Lands Above. The second was cut short in the Battle of the Plains when my own apprentice struck me down. Only the third day has been long enough to be worthy of note, though its only interesting element is the promise of oblivion that lies at its end; unless, perish the thought, the eternalists are right, and bone lasts forever.”

“You guys are veterans? Neat!” Remington looked up at the various bones arrayed in the honeycomb around Gielgud. “Do the rest of them feel the same way as you? Bummed out, I mean.”

“We are unlike this new breed of philosophers and artisans, mystics and scientists. We who people the walls were the first wave of Seekers, the warrior-clan who studied beside the Poet Laureate of the Underworld. Every one of our number was a Plainsman before he scoured. Without the poetry of bone-fighting, eternity for us is a long, gray, joyless journey.”

“So, pretty bummed. All right, let’s cheer you fellas up.” Remington pulled Gielgud from his compartment and solicited his aid in retrieving the bones of those warriors he felt the greatest affinity for. Gielgud, luckily, had a better grasp of anatomy than Remington, and advised him as to the proper placement of various bones, assuming the boy to be a madman, but far from upset by the distraction.

Jacob, meanwhile, was pacing around the edges of Siham’s fight with her master, growing increasingly agitated. Their clashes were monotonous enough to bring Etienne’s eternally combative warrior-women to mind, and Jacob was beginning to suspect that he wouldn’t be able to solve his own problems until Siham had solved hers, for it was clear that the company’s Gordian knot could only be cleaved by a sword of buzzing dust.

Striding directly between the bodies of the fighting Seekers, both of which were skidding backward from a clash of predictably stunning force, he stomped his foot, albeit with more peevishness than power, then shouted, “Would the two of you please resume acting like the skeletons of adult humans?”

“Siham,” said Shailesh, pausing in his assault, “if this shrill personage is the only fruit of your unauthorized seeking, I demand that you concede this argument immediately.”

“I’ll admit, Jacob’s a little high-strung. But he’s a Seeker if any of us are, Shailesh. He just needs someone to help him through his existential crisis. I brought him here for guidance, but I’m starting to wonder if you have any to offer. It’s not like you had much for me.”

Roaring out his wroth, Shailesh leapt into the air, slamming his whirring bones against Siham’s a good half-dozen times before thudding back to the ground, where Jacob had withdrawn, shaking his head.

“Is
this
what Seekers are all about?” said Leopold at his side. “Terribly sorry, Campbell. If all you wanted was to witness passionate squabbling over eternally moot points, you could easily have stayed behind in Dead City. At least in the Tunnels they serve refreshments with the show!”

“Leopold’s right,” said Jacob, “which ought to concern you both deeply. With all this
power
you have—power that’s desperately needed elsewhere—is this really the path you’ve chosen?” Siham and Shailesh paced around him, crouching low and gathering their dust into compressed balls that sounded like nests of hornets simultaneously struck by slingshots.

It was in the midst of the resulting clamor that Remington raised his hands from Gielgud’s skull and intoned the words, “Easy-peasy lemon-squeezy.” The newly assembled Seeker, of whom Gielgud was now a part, leaped to his feet, suppressing a triumphant bellow that would have caused the ancients to tremble in their cubby-holes. Raising a finger to silence Remington’s excitement, the warrior launched himself up the wall, scaling the honeycomb as nimbly as a lizard and pulling himself onto the sill of a great window, from whence he flung himself between Shailesh and Siham, letting out a swashbuckling yodel as he struck both combatants square in the brow. Their heads flew so far from their spines that their dust-threads were forcibly retracted as they slid across the floor.

“Gielgud the Great!” cried Shailesh, too punch-drunk to right himself. “No: head of Gielgud. Ribs of Rahel. Scapulae of Abernathy, right leg of Lamia, left arm of Luther—but how can this be? It is an amalgamated ancient!”

“It’s the boy,” said Siham, lifting herself into a woozy crouch. “He’s got some out-there mojo I knew the Meeting would go nuts over. I would have introduced you, but you were too busy erupting with machismo.”

“The boy?” Shailesh took to his feet and whirled around, pointing an accusatory finger at various members of the company. “I see many boys! Which one is responsible for this audacious and impossible act?”

“He is,” said Gielgud, pointing to Remington.

An orgy of explanation followed, in which Siham’s prior indiscretions were, at least for the moment, set aside. A smattering of elders were summoned, and many Seekers of more recent vintage arrived and could not be driven out. Within a few hours there were so many skeletons in the Plaza that its former stillness was replaced by rambunctious clamor.

“What we must all set our minds upon,” shouted an elder with an oblong head, “is the question of how Remington’s gifts can exist. No one doubts that your power is legitimate, my boy, but it has never before been seen. It flies in the face of all that we hold dear!”

“Oh, sure,” said Remington. “While you’re talking, though, can I put the rest of the veterans together? There might be an extra bone here and there, but Gielgud can help me figure out where to put them.”

“Caution, Boneman,” said Mistress Ai. “Until we understand the nature of your gift, it shall not be used at all.”

“To the winds with your caution!” said Shailesh. “He’s no apprentice, Ai—if any Seeker is deserving of a name, it is he, who has developed this preposterous technique without scouring!”

“I grant you that he is more than an apprentice,” said Ai, “but his privileges must be restricted. The boy still wears his flesh.”

“And imagine the power he’ll have when he’s out of it,” said Siham, stepping into the elders’ circle to the shocked whispers of the crowd. “Nobody’s made such strides on his own, not since the first wave of Seekers, all of whom developed their techniques without the benefit of this Meeting’s approval. Why should we have to pass your arbitrary tests when the ancients never did?”

Jacob looked up sharply, wondering if he ought to involve himself further in this argument, but before he could make up his mind, his attention was drawn to Etienne’s voice, which had gradually quieted to a whisper. Could catatonia be far behind?

“Let us focus on the matter at hand,” said an elder. “How can this young Boneman have dominion over bones that are not his own? I issue a challenge to the group: let silence reign until truth emerges.”

Yasmin leaned over. “How exciting!” she whispered. “A challenge is serious indeed. We might be among the elders for weeks of contemplation!”

“What I wouldn’t trade for the power to nap,” said Leopold.

In moments, the entire Plaza settled, all of its standing Seekers dropping with a clattering rearrangement of bones into half-lotuses. Awkwardly, the company joined them, each one wrangling his legs into some semblance of a meditative posture, then falling silent. The crow wheeled down to land on the sculpted branches of the willow, causing a tinkle of stone leaves as it looked around the Arena. Remington, peeking out at the Meeting through the crow’s eyes, found himself able to dial the thoughts of the Seekers like distant radio stations. At rare moments, he could feel all of them stumbling into silence at once, and in that calm he could feel another, larger silence just beyond White City’s boundaries.

That’s where he wanted to be—past the walls, where the quiet was
moving
. He was about ready to stand up and start walking toward it when he noticed Jacob rocking beside him, his distress steadily deepening.

In Jacob’s lap, the skull of Etienne Rassendren had stopped whispering, having fallen so far into suffering that he was now unreachable. Etienne’s quiet, so unlike all the other silence in the Plaza, rose like a wall between the Meeting and the truth it sought.

But before either Jacob or Remington could decide what to do, Siham stood. “The source of Remington’s power has been in front of us all along,” she said. “It isn’t his at all: it belongs to the underworld. It belongs to us all. But Remington, for some reason, isn’t getting in its way.

“That’s a truth that belongs to every Seeker in this city. The Poet explained it to us long ago. We tried to return his gift, but nothing could be simpler than his words:

The response was immediate and explosive. Over the ensuing debate, Leopold shouted, “What could possibly be so controversial about a couple lines of doggerel?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” said Yasmin. “One can’t help but have some kind of feeling about the Poet’s recent work.”

“One
can
if one hasn’t a clue who he is,” said Leopold.

“Why, you’ve never heard of the Poet Laureate of the Underworld?” she cried, drawing horrified glances from the Seekers around them. “But he’s the first Seeker! The first corpse to pass through the Moving Desert, the first to be reborn through scouring.” She raised her hands in twin mudras, saying serenely: “By maintaining his focus on the marrow of his inmost being, he survived the sandstorms intact and climbed up White Peak to compose the first of his great poems, a work that took him a century to complete.

“Just as he left, two Plains warriors, disconsolate after losing their arms to Inpu the Faithless, wandered up to White Mountain. When they saw the Poet’s bony little figure, they knew they’d found their guru. They sat at the base of the mountain waiting for him to descend, speaking not a word for a hundred long years.

“When the Poet finally returned, he recited the poem he’d been composing on the mountain. (History does not tell us whether they understood it, but I doubt it.) When he was done, he brought them into the Moving Desert, where they experienced the rapture of scouring and gained insights into one another’s wills in a way that only those who scour together can. The Poet then understood so much about being a warrior that he climbed right back up the mountain to write his first great battle-poem, the Book of Bone, while Hamish and Althea stayed below and developed the art of bone-fighting.

“Anyway, the point here is that his early works are beloved by all Seekers, but things have changed in the past century or so. His last two poems have been confusing, to put it mildly, and Ai says they’re actually blasphemous!

“The first, the one the Bonemaiden was quoting from, was the Infinitesima, which he composed about fifty years ago. It’s all about dust. I mean, literally about nothing but dust, hours and hours of verses about it, and not about cutting or threading or anything interesting, but about dust in sunbeams and dust settling on surfaces and dust blowing around in houses with the windows left open. Some Seekers say it’s about what will happen to our bones eventually, and that’s why it became so controversial, because some of us believe that so long as we practice marrow-grip we never have to break down.

“When the poet returned to the mountain, Mistress Ai spoke out against the Infinitesima. She said that maybe spending so much time out in the Moving Desert was to blame for the Poet losing his touch, maybe even his mind, and she got together a group of elders who developed the creed of the eternals.

“While this was going on, the Poet was composing on the mountain for an awfully long time. In fact, he only returned a few months ago to present the Liminal Ode, which made even his defenders think he’d gone senile. Cosmic dust, giant creatures in the worlds between worlds, all kinds of strange things. Even Master Shailesh calls it a delusional fantasy.”