The Throne of Bones

by Brian McNaughton

  She had raved her way into the subject that really interested me, and I reached out for her, but she shrugged my hand off and raced deeper into the field of the dead. She stopped, picking a coffin at random, and tried to shove off its lid. She spat furious curses when she failed to budge it.

  She was screaming louder than ever, urging me to come and use my tools. I was tempted to fade into the shadows and leave her to the watchmen. Even if they weren’t cowed by her status, they surely wouldn’t take her seriously enough to arrest her. Instead I hurried to help her and told her to be quiet.

  “I’m sorry,” she said meekly. “I have strong feelings on the subject.”

  “You’ll have strong feelings when they put you on the scaffold and use one your severed legs as a spool to reel out your intestines,” I whispered, but her bright attentiveness suggested a child hearing plans for a jolly outing.

  Once the lid was off, she clambered up to peer inside. “It’s empty!” She began cursing again.

  “It would be, this close to the Institute.”

  “Nonsense. A ghoul could move that lid more easily than you did. That’s why they’re empty.” She adjusted her hat to a more determined angle and scanned the terrain, her eyes resting at last on the higher slopes of the necropolis. “Could we get into one of those mausoleums?”

  “I suppose we could try,” I said, “but only if you promise to be quiet.”

  While we were creeping up the hill, crouching behind sarcophagi and taking advantage of all the hedges and trees I knew, she muttered, “He wants me to keep quiet?” She didn’t explain this, but after a while she said, “You have a wonderful laugh, do you know?”

  “When did I laugh?”

  “When I was telling you how I wanted to be a ghoul.” I didn’t remember laughing, but it would have been my likely reaction to the alarm I had felt. She added, “I think your laugh was what attracted me to you.”

  This was the first encouraging word she had spoken to me, and I tried again to detain her, but she hurried on to the streets of tombs.

  I wanted to choose the tomb, a relatively secluded one that I knew I could open, but she stopped at a miniature temple of Polliel. “This one,” she said, slapping the door. “I hate this bastard God with his great, ugly, peering, prying eye, like a slimy fried egg you get every morning whether you like it or not.”

  I had thought I was getting used to her blasphemy, but I winced. While she puzzled over the seams of the door, I took tools of my own design from my cloak and opened the lock as if I had the key.

  “I knew what you were,” she said, smiling up at me. “That attracted me, too.”

  She had forced me to see that I was a slave to the same superstitions as Mother, and no more so than now: for I had never violated a priest’s tomb, and I realized that I had been irrationally avoiding the wealthiest ones of all. The jeweled vestments and gold chalices and censers and asperges that dazzled me in my first glance, when I had lit a lamp, were worth the loot of twenty ordinary tombs, and my second glance raised that estimate to fifty.

  She went straight to the panel that concealed the priest, higher and more embellished than those of acolytes and temple virgins, and gestured impatiently for my help. When I had opened the coffin I staggered back, gasping and retching, for his had been a fairly recent burial.

  Perhaps she already was a ghoul. She inhaled the stinking fog of decay as if it were perfume before leaning into the coffin and spitting in the corpse’s face. “False priest!” she hissed. “Sleithreethra will destroy your god, night will prevail, darkness will rule forever and ever.” And then I made a protective sign whole-heartedly as she mocked him with the motto of the Goddess’s foul cult: “Joy always!”

  She began hoisting him out of the coffin, cursing when a rotten arm fell off and laughing when a long-trapped pocket of gas erupted like a fatally explosive fart, but with an infinitely fouler odor, a stench that forced me to fling open the door with no thought of caution and vomit on the street outside.

  “Don’t be such a baby,” she said as I sucked gulps of clean air and fought to retain consciousness. “Help me find him one of his cute boys to warm him up.”

  The coffin she chose contained a temple virgin, but she decided to make do with this. It was a much older corpse, the skin browned and drawn tight as a drumskin over the bones, with hair of the unnatural, reddish hue that comes to some of the dead. She stripped off the holy woman’s gown and arranged her head-to-crotch with the priest, snarling when bits of them snapped or sloughed off.

  I tried to accept her frightfulness as a natural albeit extreme extension of girlish doll-play while I chose the best items to steal. It would have been foolish to try selling the cloth-of-gold vestments or other religious paraphernalia, but I cut loose the largest of the emeralds, sapphires and rubies from the robes and dropped them in my bag. They could have come from anywhere, they could be sold anywhere, and just one of them would maintain my household in style for a year.

  “Well?” she said, reminding me that I was not alone with my account-books. “I thought you wanted me.”

  I turned to see that she had shed her clothes and was lounging in the priest’s coffin, her chin propped on her hand, her head angled winsomely. The pose and expression suggested a mischievous child playing at seductress in a bathtub. I saw that she was younger than I’d thought, but that didn’t make her less insane; nor did it make me less eager to have her.

  In some ways it was a vile experience. Leakage from the corpse had permeated the porous stone, and the coffin trapped the odor, so that it was barely possible for me to breathe whenever I lowered my face to kiss her. I had no idea how she was able to lie in the bottom with a smile, but she did. To cup her buttocks with my hands, I had to work my fingers through a film of slime that held unspeakable shreds, and some of them could move. All the while I made love to her, my stomach churned.

  “Tell me when you’re coming,” she said, “so I can change back to a corpse.”

  “Don’t,” I gagged.

  I hardly knew whether I meant, “Don’t say it,” or, “Don’t do it,” so different was she from any woman I’d known. She was pleased by my efforts, but oddly detached, and nothing I did could touch her deepest feelings. She kept making little jokes about what we were doing, so I shut her mouth with kisses and tried all the harder to touch her, but my best efforts earned me only a languid sigh, no more than the reaction you might get by scratching someone’s back in the right place.

  “Very nice,” she said, working her way out from under me and leaving me to lie in the filth. Her pretty bottom was smeared with my handprints in human decay, and as she padded across the room a crushed maggot dropped loose from one flexing cheek.

  She took up where she’d left off, scrawling obscene words on the walls with rare pigments from the priest’s toilet. After watching her for a while I climbed out of the coffin and threw her over a table, taking her from the back without preliminaries, almost brutally, but she didn’t especially mind; nor was she especially moved.

  “That was nice,” she said.

  When I had filled my bag with loot and she had glutted her appetite for sacrilege, we scraped the filth from our bodies with the vestments and put on our clothes. I made to close the door behind us, but she stopped me.

  “No,” she said, “leave it open for the ghouls.”

  “And how will they know to come?”

  If she meant to punish me for humoring her, she succeeded. Her shriek of laughter burrowed through my teeth and augured all the way down my spine. It was so reckless to make such a racket in these silent streets that I, too, laughed. For the first time she kissed me impulsively and with feeling.

  * * * *

  With variations of danger and depravity, we played the same theme on succeeding nights. The servants of no god were safe from her, or me, except possibly those of the Joyful Goddess; but then her cult has no monuments on the Hill. By finding religion I earned far more in six nights than I had in six
years of secular looting, but my success drove me out of business. It set the city writhing in convulsions of holy delirium. Mobs of maniacs surged back and forth through the streets, seeking rival sectarians to stamp flat, for Umbra’s scrawled messages would give one god credit for the outrage to another. Sleithreethrans suffered most of all, but this delighted her, for her cult forever seeks to validate its nihilism.

  Crowds came to the Hill at night with torches and bonfires to guard the tombs of their clergy, burn suspects, and continue their street-battles. It was no place for a quiet thief like me, but Umbra went there every night to scribble slogans, spread rumors and cheer on the factions.

  These events convinced me beyond doubt that ghouls not only existed, but that they were numerous and active. In all the tombs we left open, the bodies were either missing or mutilated, even those in coffins we hadn’t disturbed, whose covers could never have been lifted by animals. My skin crawled when I pictured the invisible entourage that must have trailed us every night, and I wondered if I could ever bring myself to return to the cemetery, even at noonday. Despite their superhuman stealth, I decided that they must be a species of ape, stupid by human standards.

  “If they had any brains,” I told Umbra, “they would shut the doors of the tombs behind them. Nobody would know that the priests’ bodies had been stolen. They’ve spoiled a good thing for themselves.”

  She laughed in my face. “Do you think so? They’re not only smarter than you, they have a better grasp of politics. Come see all the corpses from last night’s riots. If any are left.”

  With the tombs beyond our reach, I pandered to her necrophilia by showing her my museum. She was wild about it; she moved into the loft. When not inciting riots, she spent hours sketching or playing with my curiosities. It amused her to be intimately stroked with a dead hand, to be mounted while she kissed a corpse, but she was no more than amused, and I could not touch her heart. My fascination with her grew each day. I was in love, but she wasn’t.

  After she had been living with me for a few weeks a delegation of Vendrens came to call, some of them in the terrifying regalia of Death’s Darlings, all of them shadowed with tiger-stripes. I found myself engaged to be married.

  Mother disdained the class from which I might normally have drawn a bride, and Umbra was far above our station, but that carried no weight at all. Her nose was too big, her lips too full, her eyes too far apart, her teeth crooked, she walked with a stoop; her feet were too big, her legs too skinny, her hips too wide; she probably dyed her hair, she probably had Ignudo blood, her drawings were obscene, she talked like a washerwoman and ate like a pig. Put all Mother’s offhand sparks together in a sustained flame, and the beautiful, high-born and sometimes well-mannered girl I loved would have stood revealed as a freak escaped from an exhibition. Like a bird’s, Mother’s voice was pleasant enough when you disregarded the nonsense it twittered.

  * * * *

  Despite my efforts to coax her out after we were married, my bride stayed in the loft. She liked living with my collection and expanded it into more pungent bywaters than I ever might have charted.

  The riots ended when a detachment of Never-Vanquished, a crack regiment with a non-sectarian tradition, was posted near the Hill to break heads impartially. Umbra again grew eager to violate tombs. She promised we would do it discreetly this time, she indulging her passion for playing with the dead, I filching their trinkets. Unfortunately, after our few nights of looting the clergy, I no longer needed to rob graves. Instead of giving me time to do whatever I wanted, wealth burdened me with obligations. My new in-laws took me up, putting me on to brokers and merchants. I found myself underwriting cargos of emeralds, apes and opium, and getting richer by the day.

  By the day, in fact, for now I had to stay awake while Umbra slept, and afterward I had no taste for creeping among the tombs all night. I didn’t want her to go scavenging alone, at the mercy of watchmen and grave-robbers and those religious fanatics who might still linger after the disturbances, but I would have had to chain her to the bed to stop her.

  Parroting the prattle of our servants, I warned her that ghouls notoriously lust for human women.

  “It isn’t true.” Her tone of dejection wounded me.

  I brooded my way into the certainty that she would deceive me. She never denied me when our schedules allowed us time to make love, but she would lie inert with a languid smile, probably dreaming she was dead. Her whimpers over a well-cooked dish seemed more heartfelt than any I could evoke. Touching her heart had been a challenge, but a challenge remains a pleasure only while hope lives that it can be met. She was like a riddle posed by a demon, whose answer changed each time I cried, “I know it!”

  After weeks of unsuccessful searching, I began to find fresh bruises and scratches each time she bared her body. She laughed them off as the results of diving into a prickly hedge to avoid the watch or falling into a concealed crypt. I knew that she had found someone more to her taste, a medical student who could do clever things with corpses, or some lusty grave-robber of the lowest type, perhaps a whole gang of them.

  “I thought I was escaping all my dull, daylight relatives when I married you,” she said, not troubling to deny a thing when I accused her, “and you’ve turned out duller than any of them.”

  * * * *

  I lurked behind a clump of adomphadendrons where I could watch the stable. Its flinty walls were silvered by the kind of moon she favored in her art, a vast and perfect globe that floated low on the horizon, tinged with blood and mottled with blue mold. It was a fit night for her elfin ghouls to romp, a night whose pull she couldn’t resist, for I myself felt it drawing me to the Hill. I might have abandoned my purpose and gone ahead to prowl the graveyard on my own if she hadn’t picked that moment to come out.

  I bit my lip to hold back a cry, or perhaps a laugh, of pain; she wore nothing, and her beauty tore at my innards like a clawed hand. The moon had carved her from its own substance, and nothing existed but those two white fires, the one walking to rejoin the other. Her step was languid but purposeful. I could almost feel her nipples tightening, her nostrils flaring to savor the scents of honeysuckle and bloodstrange as the night worked its spell on her.

  She was no less attainable than the moon itself. I could run up behind her and make myself known, I could kiss her and feel her and throw her on the grass, I could fuck her till I spent blood, and she would sigh and tell me it was “very nice.” I ground my fists into my temples until the moon and her daughter blended in a lens of tears.

  Taking control of myself, I crept forth to follow her, tiptoeing and dodging among the furred sarcophagi. I carried no tools tonight but a sword, and I had slung it over my back to avoid clangorous missteps.

  She led me into the longest-neglected slum of the necropolis, a savage place of fallen slabs and flourishing brambles. If this was her nightly haunt, it explained the welts and scratches on her alabaster skin. To go without sandals at least among the thorns, among the concealed pits of splintered bones, was mad, but of course she was mad, it had always been part of her attraction. The least of her dangers was a fall or a pricked foot. She was at the mercy of any wild animal or twisted lurker. I should go with her always and protect her. I would give up my pretense of respectability and become the rogue she had mistaken me for. Even if I had to become a ghoul to do it, I would make her happy.

  I was jolted from my warm bath of sanctimony by her shrill cry: “Exudimord!”

  I had no idea what that meant, but the gladness in her voice chilled me, and I feared it was a name, an uncouth, foreign name. The fear grew as she called more loudly, “Exudimord Noxis, come to me! I am here!”

  “To me, too, Exudimord Noxis,” I muttered under my breath as I drew my broadsword.

  She cried out happily and ran toward a once-splendid tomb that had been ravaged by the growth of an oak. She was as pretty a sight as anyone had ever seen, a woman clothed only in the warmth of her lust as she ran through the moonlight to m
eet her lover.

  Then I saw my rival, and I sighed with exasperation. Nothing but a marble statue squatted on the portico, a white gargoyle mottled with fungus. The sculptor had viewed ghouls more rationally than she did, and he had rendered the beast in the full flower of its foulness. Indecorously by modern standards, he had given his creation an engorged phallus whose ridges and warts suggested an instrument of torture. The face, I thought, was a vicious caricature of some personage I knew from other sculpture, a hero or politician who had provoked the artist to wrath. I was about to rise from concealment to interrupt my mad wife’s tryst with the statue when it moved.

  My feelings were like a breaking wave that tumbled me end over end, turning the world upside down and back again, sweeping me I knew not where. Horror, yes, terror, of course, but wonder and scientific curiosity, too, and morbid curiosity, and prurient curiosity, and jealousy, oh, yes, excruciating jealousy, they were only a part of the witch’s brew that boiled in my skull.

  When my vision cleared, Umbra was on her knees with her mouth glued to the monster’s most monstrous attribute, adoring it, mumbling muffled endearments and squeals of delight. Nothing could be more different from her languid, inattentive style with me. The stroking of its foul claws set her quivering like the strings of a lute. Her excitement erupted into a frenzy of passion when the ghoul tumbled her over and took her like a dog. She sobbed, she howled with ecstasy at each thrust, she clawed the earth and chewed the grass as she rammed alternating hindquarters back to slap his hipbones.

  I didn’t dash out and attack them by surprise, as I should have. I stood up and advanced with the deliberate steps of a sleepwalker. My feelings had coalesced into a rage so terrible that nothing could have stood against it, or so I believed. I walked with the invulnerability of the zealot on his way to the stake, for absolute justice guided my steps and righteous wrath powered my arm.