Dead Boys (37 page)

“As usual, the Poet Laureate of the Underworld is in a class of his own,” said Siham. “Nice work if you can get it.”

“Tell me,” said Jacob carefully, “why do you think it is that he encounters no resistance? Is it simply because he was here first?”

“I don’t think that’s a fair assessment,” said Siham. “It’s not like they were fawning over him the last time he came down. His latest poems were controversial, and he stuck around for a good bit of the controversy. He takes his knocks, he just kind of has this knack for deflecting. I think it’s the pentameter. No one’s got a snappy comeback for a heroic couplet.”

“I’d imagine that practice helps, too. He’s been at this for a while, hasn’t he?”

“Sure. And I’d be willing to bet there were as many arguments in the old days as there are now. People tend to smooth those things out of the official story after a while.” Siham began pacing around his worktable, hefting a carving of a crumpled automobile and tossing it between her hands. “It’s like the Seekers need change, but they still can’t stop themselves from resisting it. Anything that alters the fabric of their culture provokes this collective hissy-fit, but they end up changing all the same. It’s really unpleasant for everyone involved, but I keep feeling like it’s something they have to go through, you know? Like growing pains.” Jacob cringed as she slammed the carving down. “So maybe it’s
me
who needs to step up to the plate. Right?”

“Are you suggesting—”

“I’m done suggesting,” she said. “I’m anointing myself. Hey presto—I’m a full-fledged Seeker, and I get to do what I need to, with or without the Meeting’s permission! There you go. That was my graduation ceremony.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks. Now I’ll head out on my own, just like the Poet did. Making the path ahead my poem. Blazing a trail for the Seekers to come. I’ll show these ninnies what a real seeking looks like!”

“Splendid,” said Jacob, leaping up to join her. “When do we leave?”

“We?” Siham stopped pacing. “Whoa there, killer. It’s been fun and everything, but this is a one-woman show. I mean, it’s not the Poet and his sidekick up there. No offense.”

“None taken,” he said, without much conviction. “My mistake. It’s just that what you described sounds so much like my plan to reach the Lands Above that for a moment I thought it might be a natural fit. A wearer needs a carrier, after all.”

“Well.” Siham hopped onto his table and sat for a while, dangling her legs. “As far as vision goes, I can see where you’re coming from. That’s a humdinger of a quest you’ve got there, and it would take me as far
out
as I need to go. But it’s also, and don’t get bent out of shape here, completely impossible, at least for the foreseeable future. I mean, you’ve got no Crown of Bone, and no way of dreaming. And I can’t hang around here any longer. This place is getting to me.”

“Of course. You need to dash through the nearest gate and find your path as you walk it.”

“Exactly.”

“Just like you did last time.”

“Exac—hey.”

“And I suppose it wouldn’t interest you to know that Remington is, at this very moment, retrieving the Crown of Bone from the cloud.”

Siham unfolded her arms. “Okay, a little. I am marginally interested.”

“Or that he believes he’s found a way to teach me to dream.”

She slid off the table and started pacing again, more slowly this time. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to hang out for a
little
longer. Just to see what happens when the kid returns.”

“Oh, I’m back!” came a voice from above.

They stood, expecting to see Remington’s skeleton clambering over the wall, but found, unaccountably, nothing.

“Remy?” called Jacob, disconcerted. The voice was unmistakably the boy’s, but he couldn’t isolate its source. “Where—where
are
you?”

“Whoopsie-daisy. I forgot to be solid. Sorry, it’s been a weird week.”

Thick, patient tendrils of dust corkscrewed down from the top of the wall, pooling in two distinct spots on the floor, then filtering up, slowly and transparently, into the rough shape of a human skeleton. “Turns out you can really speed up the whole scouring thing if you set your mind to it! It was taking too long to find all the bits of the Crown by wandering around in my skeleton body, so I set the dust to work grinding down my bones.
Yak-ak-ak-ak-ak-ak
! Once you get going, it doesn’t take much time at all.” A small, hovering cloud was filling in his outlines now, chugging down until his form was opaque. “Then my dust reached out into all the rest of the dust in the cloud, and we asked the Crown if it would come back and help you get to the Lands Above.” His transparent hand reached up and knocked on the back of his own skull, and as it fell away he looked, at a glance, like the Remington Jacob was accustomed to. A glance into his eye sockets, however, revealed tiny, swirling sandstorms crackling with energy. “Good news! The Crown said yes.”

“Where is it?” said Siham.

“Oh, the other me must have it. Hold on, I’m coming!”

They could only gape as Remington’s ghostly double opened the door, twirling a thin oval on one finger. The two Remingtons waved, saying, “Hiya!” in unison, then stepped into each other, merging without a sound. The skeleton that coalesced where they’d collided looked as solid as any other Seeker.

The others followed: Adam, bearing Etienne’s skull, and Eve, upon whose shoulder the reconstructed crow preened its brilliant feathers. Jacob lifted a hand to its wing and was shocked at its solidity, for the bird had been rebuilt, from beak to tail, out of powdered bone.

“Here’s your Crown, Jake,” said Remington, tossing it high in the air to land on Jacob’s wrist. Whisper-thin, it was composed of intricate braids that held together no matter how hard he tugged.

“A Crown of Dust,” Jacob murmured. “But there’s still one problem to tackle. The wearer has to dream, and I can’t very well nod off. Unless you’ve decided to come along, Etienne?”

“I have no desire to return to Earth as a severed head,” rumbled Etienne from under Adam’s arm. “Nor is there anything left for me to return to. But if I could learn to dream in death, you could, too, I suppose. My catatonia was not altogether pleasant, but it was a subconscious state full of strange visions. I believe it would suffice for the purposes of the ritual.”

Jacob peered at him, concerned. Etienne’s voice sounded every bit as gravelly and morose as it had when he’d first awakened.

“Should be pretty easy,” said Remington, lifting Etienne with one hand and laying the other on Jacob’s skull. “We’ll just sync you guys right up.”

“Etienne,” said Jacob, “are you quite sure—”

But it had already begun. The storms in Remington’s skull were spinning fast enough to whine, and Jacob’s frame jolted as if struck by lightning.

He saw himself through Etienne’s eyes, stripped of flesh, grinning and bare.

Is this who I am now?

Is this who I always was?

He felt a powerful urge to launch himself back into his own body. But he remembered what was at stake, and then the rest came rushing in.

Jacob saw through his own eyes and Etienne’s at once. Their skulls stared at one another, sensations mingling, memories and abilities arcing through Remington’s dusty frame. The knack of deathly dreaming was surging into Jacob’s marrow, but with it came a surge of memory that seemed somehow hotter, more urgent than anything he’d seen in the cloud.

The stump of his neck rested on a tablecloth. The seer’s hands were gripping his hair. He couldn’t shut his eyelids tight enough to block out the sight of the customer before him.

He’d never forget her red hair hanging limp in her withered face as she’d flung gobbets of his flesh through the fetid air. He’d never forget any of his murderers. How could he, when so many of them had returned to ask his advice? This one had lost her lover between life and death, and she wanted Etienne to find him.

But a curious thing was happening: the hotter the embers of his anger burned, the quieter he grew, until he could feel the answer rising, blotting out the world.

He’d disappear inside himself, where none of them could ever find him. He’d go silent. He’d go to sleep.

As Remington released him, Jacob fell to his knees. “We haven’t helped you at all, have we? I had hoped that scouring would set you free.”

“Free?” whispered Etienne through his teeth. “Oh, I’m free. Free to sit on a shelf with the ancients while the rest of you gallivant through the worlds. Free to be carried around like a damaged antique, dispensing advice from the shadows. Free to watch this wretched world destroy hundreds upon thousands of afterlives. Free to disintegrate slowly, like every other corpse damned to consciousness. I am as free, Jacob, as I can possibly be. But the burden of my freedom isn’t yours to bear, and never was.”

Jacob grasped his own ribcage. “Then what Clarissa said, what she showed you in the storm, brought you no peace.”

“You really think it should have?” said Remington. “I mean, Ma could have helped him. When she found him. When those drunks attacked him. With that baby’s powers, she could have helped a lot of people.” He shrugged. “She wasn’t really big on looking out for anyone but her baby.”

“It makes no difference. This isn’t about forgiving her. I never blamed her. The truth is,” Etienne muttered, “Clarissa and I are built of the same stuff. Sequestered in self-pity, begging to be excused from the constant judgment on how we choose to spend our time. Both of us only want the impossible.

“She imagines her baby playing happily in the nursery she’s built, forever innocent of the city below. But you could punt me all the way back to Southheap to accept her apology with all the lavish sentiment I could summon, and she’d still be no closer to achieving it.”

“What is it that you want, then?” Jacob said.

“I want to find my family. To tell them my story, and to hear theirs. Not because I believe I’ll be any happier when it’s done. Because this is how the Book of the Rassendren clan says I might leave my boyhood behind, and I’ve realized that, despite all the time that’s passed in the underworld, I’m still the child I was when I arrived.

“But look at me. What was once my calling is now nothing more than a dream, the faint flickering of a candle in the depths of my mind. I’ll watch it gutter out, and you can leave me to it with your conscience clear.”

“Let’s just slow those horses down a minute,” said Siham. “If what you really want is to keep looking for your family, there are ways to get that done. There’s a whole Plaza full of partial warriors who’d love to hit the road again.”

Etienne ground his teeth. “After what I suffered in the Plains, the thought of joining my will to a collection of fragmentary strangers with a history of violence sounds like a recurring nightmare.”

“You’ve already made up your mind,” said Jacob, beginning to grasp the fiery determination he’d seen in Etienne’s skull. “As soon as we depart, you’re planning on tunneling back into yourself. You’re going to end up just like—”

“A floater,” said Etienne. “That’s all I can be. On the river or on a shelf, it makes no difference so far as I can see. I can’t have peace, but I will have quiet.”

“Yikes,” said Remington, and the laboratory fell into a brooding silence.

In the end, it wasn’t broken by speech, but by motion.

First Eve, then Adam clattered down to the laboratory floor. Eve reached out for Etienne’s skull, lowering it onto her severed spine, where a line of her dust snaked up and locked him in place. She stood, twirled, hooked an eye-socket in one finger, then tossed him to Adam, who caught him lightly and set him atop his own frame.

“Oh, good idea, you two!” said Remington. “E, you could bounce back and forth between them. You can trust these guys as much as anyone. I don’t even think you’d have to merge. I could just let them see through your eyes the way they see through mine.” Adam and Eve pumped their fists.

“That’s very generous of you both,” said Etienne, startled, “but I have no idea where we’d even begin. The Seekers say there are five chambers in the Land of the Dead, and my family could be in any of them, or none. It could take centuries. No, I won’t ask that of anyone. It’s better for all of us if we never have to face that failure.”

Eve waved a hand to dismiss him, then flung herself full on the ground, stretching her bones into a kind of skeletal rope, at the end of which one hand rose, giving a thumbs-up.

“The longer the path, the better,” Jacob translated. “I couldn’t agree more. Good lord, Eve, how much dust do you have?”

“More than me,” said Siham. “Girl’s got moves.”

“I’m just gonna give you the option,” said Remington, extending three tendrils of dust from the center of his skull. “You guys can figure this out on your own.” Each tendril brushed against one of their skulls, and a sudden crackle of static electricity intimated that the job was done.

Etienne looked down at the body that now served as his vehicle, flexing the fingers on Adam’s hand. He let out another heavy sigh, but his movements—a jouncing on the tips of the toes, a sudden sweep of the arm, a long look from side to side at the tops of the walls in the laboratory—betrayed his fascination. “I should have known you wouldn’t make this easy on me. We’ll debate this amongst ourselves. No one will mind if we take our time hashing it out, I suppose.”

“Not in these parts,” said Siham. “But where does that leave you, Remy? Are you coming with us?”

Jacob felt a thrill rush through his bones.
Us
. He said nothing, convinced that speaking would startle her into changing her mind.

“Who, me?” said Remington softly. “Oh, I’m going up the mountain. I could use a break, you know? And I want to be the first one to hear the Poet’s new poem. I think we’d have a lot to talk about, cloud-wise.

“There’s a lot of adventure still ahead. A lot for me to explore. But I need a nice quiet spot to do it, and a couple of hundred years.”

Jacob lifted the Crown to his head. “I wonder if I’ll even recognize you when we meet again,” he was saying. The Crown didn’t settle so much as it clicked into place. “I wonder if we ever will.”