Dead Boys (36 page)

“I can offer you nothing more than my future,” he said. “In exchange for the freedom of all whose company I’ve exploited, I offer eternity. Every hour of my existence is yours.”

The Magnate paced slowly down the face of the heap. While the Gambler looked on like an actor whose last line had been spoken, he tossed Althea’s skull to Shailesh and pulled Leopold’s face from his trembling hands. “So be it,” said the Magnate. “Our men will depart White City within the hour.”

“And what of the damage you’ve done?” said Ai.

“Don’t be coy,” said the Magnate. “I’ve spent months spying on your men. Filling great expanses of time with activities of debatable utility is all you people do.”

As the crow launched itself into the air, the metal-men closed around Leopold, withdrawing him so brusquely from the courtyard that he was shocked when, after they’d climbed over the scaffolds that joined White City’s walls to the Rim, they deposited him gently into a litter filled with cushions liberated from river-stained couches and bowed as they left him unguarded.

“This is unexpected,” murmured Leopold, starting as the crow landed on the litter’s embroidered roof. Moments later, the Magnate climbed in, reclining so close to Leopold that a thrill of discomfort ran through him. “Now, that was elegant!” said the Magnate, and then the Gambler tumbled in after him. “Ta,” he grunted. A team of debtors lifted up the litter and began, slowly and evenly, to stalk through the human debris of the Plains.

“I do appreciate a classy abdication,” said the Magnate, “especially after all we’ve been through lately. This one was the last of us to give up in style, and that was three hundred and sixty years ago now.”

“Say it ain’t so!” growled the Gambler. “Feels like a fortnight.” Then he found the zipper at the back of his leather mask and slapped it onto the floor between their feet.

Leopold stared. The skull before him bore the same marking as his own: the sideways symbol of infinity.

“It’s just delightful to welcome someone to the team who instinctively understands the protocol,” said the Magnate, attempting to work his own mask free. “To have carved your own forehead with the loop-de-loop in advance! (We’ll have that touched up when we return, by the way: your lemniscate is a trifle lopsided.) Well, it’s just like I said before we invaded, ‘This Clock-Thief will bring us back to our roots, gentlemen! He has what we began with, and what we most need restored: panache.’”

Leopold drew himself into a sitting position, cramming himself against the cushions on the far side of the litter, holding up a hand as if to brace himself against their revelations. “To welcome someone to the—”

“To the team, yes! Why, do you mean to tell me that was in earnest? Oh, wonderful! Say, would you give me a hand here?” The Magnate leaned over to the Gambler, who helped him undo the straps at the back of his mask. “I beg you, don’t be offended; it’s just so—so refreshing to speak like this, on the level, with someone so—well, so fresh! Imagine that, the confession of guilt, the falling to your knees, the voluntary defacement: and all of it genuine! And here we thought the entire act was being submitted as a part of your resumé. Why, I’ll be asking to swap masks with you in no time; I don’t mind spoiling that secret.

“But you don’t seem excited. Don’t tell me you’ve never wanted to play the Magnate? I thought that’s what all this song and dance was for. Here, try it on!” As the Gambler finally pried it free, the Magnate removed his metal mask and handed it to Leopold, who was so startled he immediately dropped it to the floor, where it landed directly atop the leather one.

“Uh-oh,” said both of his captors in unison.

“Uh-oh?” said Leopold.

“Well, look at us!”

“Can you tell the difference?”

“I can’t!”

“Mix up our masks and we’re all in a muddle.”

“Is he confused? I think he’s confused.”

“He won’t be when he’s been around as long as we have!”

The stillness that Leopold’s body achieved when they scooped up their masks lasted only a moment, replaced by a horrified trembling when he saw that they’d swapped them.

“This is ‘ow it works, y’see,” growled the Gambler, who had only recently been the Magnate.

“The only men we can possibly trust are long-time debtors,” proclaimed the Magnate, who’d just been speaking in the Gambler’s brogue. “All our highest-ranking staffers have given up as much time as we’ll let them. Only the men at the top are worthy of taking on the Infinite Debt: like you, Clock-Thief!”

“And ‘ere,” said the Gambler, pulling a briefcase from beneath his seat, “is the new identify you’ve earned. We recommend you startin’ with what you’ve shown us already.”

“Time will take care of the rest,” said the Magnate as the Gambler snapped open its clasps. “When enough years have passed, you’ll simply forget the difference between yourself and your mask. This effacement is inevitable, after a decade or two.”

The Gambler turned the briefcase around to Leopold, who stared down at his new face: a plastic skull, stamped with carnival colors for the Day of the Dead.

“Don’t be put out ‘cause it ain’t classical,” said the Gambler.

“Quite right,” said the Magnate. “Plastic is ubiquitous, exciting, and all but immortal. The Gambler’s always having to replace his leather, but your mask will last forever, if we’re careful with it. Go ahead: try it on!”

Leopold regarded the mask with uncertainty, twanging its rubber band. “I must say that neither of your skulls looks quite as old as I’d expect.”

“Don’t they?” growled the Gambler, digging in his pockets. “I s’pose they wouldn’t. We must ‘ave been other Maskers before we swapped. These things ‘appen, once you’ve been dead longer than you lived. I say, mate, ‘ave you got me dice?”

“I must have!” said the Magnate, reaching into his own pockets to withdraw them. “These masks, you see, they’re solutions to a problem that time causes. Or else they’re answers to a question that time asked. Anyway, the story starts and ends with time, though what doesn’t?”

“It’s like this,” said the Gambler. “The Magnate rules for eternal time, yet eternal time robs ‘im of ‘is will to reign. Sad old story, but the best we’ve got.”

“You’ll see it yourself,” said the Magnate. “The years that pass blunt your memories first, then your feelings, then your very will; we call it ‘flattening,’ because it leaves a man feeling like a paper doll. At first, one can lean into his mask, drawing strength from his role, if you will, but after a decade or two of that, well, the mask itself begins to seem like the problem. Curious longings beset you: now that infinite power’s been won, you find yourself longing to cast it off! Isn’t that a twist?

“Hence the masks. These days, when I grow so tired of the years upon years of rule that I can no longer face the tolling of the bells, I can simply trade masks with the Gambler and be brusque and reckless instead. We began the practice centuries ago, except that, as you say, my actual bones aren’t old enough for that to have been me, are they?”

“Then that’s why you’ve gone to all this trouble?” said Leopold. “To add me to your collection, as some sort of antidote for senility?”

The Gambler guffawed. “Ain’t that a way of puttin’ it, Mags? No, Clock-Thief, I don’t think we’re senile. But the best way to revitalize a flaggin’ rulership is to let it swaller up a mouthful of resistance.”

The Magnate nodded eagerly. “The new ideas that surge forth from a corpse as fresh as you can be folded into our reign, and they always make it stronger; it was that way with the Gambler, whose brutality restored our hold on Dead City when it had gone a little limp. We simply harnessed his challenge and made it a part of our strength! As his moniker suggests, he had a weakness for the Dens, and so we hired an actor to bet against him, then ran him so far into debt that he proposed, all on his own, a bet of eternal time. He lost, of course, since we’d loaded the dice, and then he was ours: the Gambler joined the Council.”

“But after a century or two even my tune changed,” said the Gambler sadly. “I’ve yet to meet a will the years can’t flatten.”

“And so I traded masks with him, or rather the man who was wearing the Magnate’s mask did, and it turned out that a man only playing at being the Gambler was even
better
at being the Gambler than the Gambler had been!”

“Wasn’t long before all of us swapped ‘em around so much that we forgot who was who, but after a time even that weren’t enough. That’s when we looked at ‘iring from outside the group.”

“And here you are,” said the Magnate with admiration. “And so you see, all this pursuit has been by way of evaluation. The tower bit was good enough to get our attention; the escape downriver was downright inspired; but it was using the Seekers against us that made us discuss your inclusion in the group. And the use of your friend as a decoy! Well, that sealed it, and just in the nick of time. Overall, it was your flamboyance that swayed us, for at this juncture we need more than another man in the shadows: the Council, like the city it serves, needs
spectacle
.”

“A figurehead,” said Leopold.

“A mask to stand before the Maskers!” cried the Gambler. “To deal directly with the citizens of Dead City. Throw ‘em parties and such. Swill and circuses.”

“It’s the role of an afterlife,” said the Magnate, leaning forward. “But don’t forget, should you ever tire of it, you have but to ask, and one of us will gladly trade.”

“Think of me,” said the Gambler, patting Leopold’s knee. “I’m sure you’ll agree, Clock-Thief, that I’m uniquely suited to bein’ you.”

Leopold stared down at the mask, then out at the walls of White City, receding into the empty Plains. “How far away it seems already,” he muttered. “What a long, long way from the company we’ve come, in such a short time. And why shouldn’t we travel farther from them still? Why, isn’t this the fate I was aiming for all along?

“This may be redundant, chaps, considering that you own me for time eternal, but I accept.”

“Lovely,” said the Magnate, lying back on his cushions. “Just lovely. But don’t think of it as us owning you, Clock-Thief. In our organization, everyone is owned by everyone else.”

Leopold and the crow stared at one another in a long, wordless farewell. At last, using its black, beady eyes as a pair of convex mirrors, he fit the plastic mask over his skull, taking a careful moment to arrange its open mouth over his bare teeth: a man without lips doing his utmost to smile.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Infinitesima

J
acob held his hand flat before his empty sockets for the umpteenth time that afternoon. Through the spaces between the gleaming bones he saw the scarred surfaces of the laboratory he’d appropriated, then cleaned of rubble, some days or months before. As he summoned the dust to the joints of his hand, it occurred to him that this new workspace bore a certain resemblance to the tilted flat he’d once kept in the building called the Leaning Dutchman, in the neighborhood known as the Preservative District.

What a long way he’d come, only to find himself rebuilding the very place he’d started from. There was comfort in the familiar, after all he’d been through. If he weren’t careful, if he didn’t get the help he needed, this might well be his journey’s end.

But the dust will never settle here, he thought to himself.

His phalanges separated, seeming to float in the air as he focused his vision on the broad marble tabletop where he’d been learning to carve marble with his buzzing threads of dust. Slowly, he waved his hand, watching the digits undulate as he bid a silent farewell to this facsimile of his past.

“Again!” cried Siham, slamming the thin marble door behind her and startling him so thoroughly that his hand snapped back into shape. “Jacob, it happened
again
. Another idea that cuts the time they take on reconstruction in half; another demand that I be brought before the Meeting for testing. I can’t even walk down the street here without someone challenging my right to exist.” She flounced against a wall, her skeleton twisting in midair, reassembling as it landed. “Everything’s an argument,” she murmured from the floor, her legs already locked into a full lotus. “It’s like the holidays at my mother’s house, except everyone’s a martial arts genius.” She slid her hands over her sockets. “We could be learning so much from each other. But it’s never going to stop, is it?”

Now was as good a time as any. Jacob slid down to join her, though he maintained his standard bodily structure. His training was going passably well, but it was clear his talent lay in dust-carving, not bone-fighting. “It does seem as if the Seekers have a certain double standard where the most powerful members of their community are concerned.”

She dropped her hands. “How do you mean?”

“You’re the one who made the argument. ‘My teacher had no teacher,’ wasn’t it?” He pointed up through the laboratory’s open ceiling at the spire of White Mountain, a gnarled finger in the sepia sky. “A Seeker with no more credentials than you or me sits on that mountaintop for a century at a time, free to compose and commit to memory his epic poetry without interference. Then he descends into White City to sit under a willow and recite, knowing full well that whatever he’s written will throw the society that’s formed around his legend into absolute chaos.”