The Throne of Bones

by Brian McNaughton

  The mystery of the corpse seemed impenetrable. The only young women in the household were slaves, but not even a Glypht would lay a slave in his family tomb, however much he might have doted on her; nor could I alone have eaten so much of her body. I called my lover again. He must be here! I tried to look inside the coffins, the only places Exudimord could be hiding, but their lids were too heavy to move.

  How did I get here? My last memories made me cringe. I saw Glyphtard’s leather coat coming at me like a falling wall. He had beaten me, but now there were no bruises nor even tender spots on my face or body.

  I considered the obvious possibility, that I was dreaming. Whenever that thought crossed my mind in a dream, I would wake up, but now I didn’t. Besides, I never dreamed such convincingly banal details as the chafing of my heels when I walked in my husband’s boots, the annoyance of a shred of meat caught in my back teeth, the fluttery sound of the lamp as its oil ran low. Unlike the illegible symbols that puzzled me in dreams, the inscriptions on the sarcophagi made sense.

  Other possibilities ... but I hadn’t the courage even to name them. The walls of the tomb drew closer, there was no air! I ran to the door, expecting the worst, but it opened. The night brushed my face with a feather of fine rain. Dripping eaves plashed and pattered. The breeze chilled me, but I could bear to stay in the tomb no longer with my unanswered questions.

  I wobbled back in Glyphtard’s boots to get his cloak. When I took it down, I screamed to find two Glyphts, uglier even than most of them, piercing me with bright eyes. My heart almost stopped before I saw that they were only sculpted heads of the dogs that had whelped the old bitch. That was an apt metaphor: Glyphtard’s grandfather looked as if he should have been kept outside on a chain. And yet I found something in his brutal face that stirred me, a familiarity that was pleasant, but at the same time so disturbing that I turned away and blotted his features from my mind.

  I went out in the dark street and called for my lover. How I wanted him! He had stirred me as no mere man ever had, he had woken me fully from a sleep that my husband had only been able to fret and ruffle, like a restless bedmate, and I always yearned for him, but now my want was close to madness. I screamed for him. I began running down the narrow street, although I had no idea where it would lead me.

  I collided with what seemed a fixed obstacle, but it pinned me with thick arms.

  “What’s this?” the watchman demanded.

  “Unwrap it and see,” a second one laughed.

  “Let me go! I am the chosen one of Exudimord Noxis, King of Ghouls!” I screamed.

  “And I’m the Spring Queen, you addled baggage.” He smelled bad enough from sour wine and sweat, but when he undid his coarse breeches, the stink of his unwashed privates gagged me. “Come dance around my pole.”

  “Oh, look at this!” the second watchman breathed with a lecher’s reverence when he had torn away my cloak. He patted my buttocks, then hooked me unspeakably with a cruel finger. “We must have won the favor of Filloweela, Gorpho. How did we do it, do you suppose?”

  “Don’t question the gods,” the first one said, blindly pushing his hard cock against my belly, “just take their gifts.”

  “Then take this one from Oreema!” I spat in his face as I thrust my knee up between his legs. Tender flesh jammed against unyielding bone. He bellowed and doubled over, releasing me, and I turned to run, but the second one hit me hard enough to make light explode before my eyes with the handle of his bill. I fell to my knees, and I had no strength to resist when he kicked me all the way down and rolled me over. He lay between my legs, and they were useless against him now, but I tried to claw his eyes. When he proved that he could hold both my wrists with one huge hand, I knew the fight was over even before his hurtful probe gouged into me.

  The first one kicked him as he lay grunting and thrusting. “She’s mine!” he bellowed. “She ran into my arms, didn’t she?”

  “You let her go, stupid. She’d be gone if I wasn’t here. Use her mouth.”

  “That’s what your father should have done with your whore of an Ignudo mother,” Gorpho grumbled, but he dropped to his knees by my head.

  “I’ll bite you!” I cried. “If you do, I swear, I’ll bite it off!”

  “Yes, and I may have a sore prick for a week, but you’ll be blind for life, bitch,” he growled, and when he pressed his thumbs on my eyes I believed him. I opened my mouth to his foul-smelling penis.

  I thought they might let me go after sating their desire of the moment, but their male itch to outdo each other burned in them more hotly even than honest lust. No more to them than a ball hurled back and forth in their disgusting contest, I was beaten and used for what seemed like all time.

  They granted me a longer respite than usual. I tried to stop sobbing with shame and pain so I could hear their whispers.

  “ ... cut her throat.”

  “ ... Vendren tattoos.”

  “Even if she is crazy, we can’t let her live to tell.”

  “No!” I shrieked, trying to run. “Exudimord! Help me!”

  My scream choked on blood as the first hook bit into my neck. The second caught me in those parts they had so cruelly used. I had thought I could feel no more pain there, but I was very wrong.

  My last thought was an absurd one: that I had suffered these wounds, or ones very like them, before.

  * * * *

  I, who have told my tale as Glyphtard Fand, have told you those things as Umbra. I saw them with her eyes, felt them with her body and knew them with her mind, even her second death.

  When I woke, male that I was, I instantly clutched my male parts to make sure they hadn’t been invaginated like a glove. To a touch made clumsy by my distracted state, those parts seemed not merely present but transformed to outrageous proportions, even though I still shivered and retched with loathing at the imprinted memory of phallic thrusts. I felt no pain from the wounds I—she—had suffered, but I remembered them, too. It seemed unlikely I would ever forget them.

  How could such things be? A ghoul, not a man, adopts the identity of the corpse whose brain and heart it eats, or so the stories said, and I was a man. Then why had I eaten her? Perhaps I was the victim of a last prayer or curse mouthed by my wife to her foul Goddess.

  The scum who had raped me in Umbra’s guise had stolen my cloak and my boots and thrown me down a stairway to the sunken entrance of a tomb, there to be rained on all night. I was cold and wet, but the worst discomfort, oddly enough, came from the wan light of the damp day. It was like gritty dust on my eyeballs, and I squinted to the verge of blindness as I mounted to the street. Consequently, before I knew what I was doing, I blundered among mourners in solemn procession.

  Now it’s true that we provincials have a much less casual attitude about nudity than Frothirans, for instance, but the appearance of a naked man hardly called for such an ear-splitting chorus of horror and outrage.

  “Good people, forgive me, I was robbed and beaten—I had no thought to desecrate your obsequies—”

  Incomprehensibly, my mild words stirred only more anger and fear. “Keep it from Mother Ashtrella’s coffin!” a voice shrieked beside me, and that cry was taken up by dozens of screamers. I took my hand from my eyes—more screams, as if I conducted a choir of lunatics—and saw the white gowns of Ashtareeta’s clergy flapping and fluttering about me like pigeons harried by a dog.

  “Good ladies—” I began, but a brick bounced off my skull, and I roared with fury. The cry drove them mad. The mob tried to escape the clogged street, but it could do so only over the bodies of its members. I watched in amazement as the holy women trampled their fallen sisters. The coffin fell. One woman flung her body over it to protect the corpse, whom she presently joined in death.

  Obviously, the religious hysteria that Umbra started had only lain dormant, waiting for a jolt to revive it. Their terror-stricken, backward glances told me that they didn’t see me as a man at all, but as some demon of their fantasies, newly risen fr
om the underground. I played the role in which they cast me by fleering and gibbering, and I laughed like a true demon when that perfected their panic.

  Armed watchmen were fighting their way toward me. I grimaced and shook my fists, laughing at the way they struck aside the women they rushed to defend. I tripped across the street on the heads of packed mourners, like one crossing a brook from stone to stone, and leaped from the last shrieking skull to the roof of a tomb.

  I had no idea how I made such a leap, or what possessed me to know I could. I was an athlete, a fairly good one, and the tombs were not so tall as houses, but it was impossible that I should have done that with the ease of a cat springing onto a table. More flung bricks and slates distracted me. I leaped to another roof and dropped into the next street of the necropolis.

  Given a moment, I raised a hand to my bruised head; and screamed at the sight of that hand. It was twice as broad as it should have been, and the fingers sprouted claws. My new, misshapen body was suited to the hand. Leaning against the wall of a tomb, I felt that my back was ridged and bristly as a hog’s. My screams of horror became horrifying laughs.

  However ugly, my feet were fast and sure, and I used their skill when the watchmen boiled out of an alley just then. I began to revel in my new agility. I danced away from the catching hooks and thrusting points of their bills as Umbra hadn’t been able to, taunting them, playing out the game from street to street and rooftop to rooftop, jibing or farting at them whenever they seemed in danger of losing me.

  If only the light didn’t vex me so! I had to get home. I would lose them; they wouldn’t have recognized me as Lord Glyphtard. I could hide in the stable and enjoy all that food I had prudently stored while deluding myself that I was assembling a scientific collection. Mother would help me hide. Mother.... She had known, when she warned my wife to beware of Chalcedor’s tomb, that Umbra saw “keep out” signs as warm welcomes. She had known, when she told me that fairy tale about her father’s death, that he was alive and well beneath the tomb. A cynic would say that Mother, for any number of unsavory reasons, had played procuress to her father with my wife; and few ghouls are not cynics. I needed to have a talk with her.

  I escaped the narrow streets to the open slopes, where the light seemed even more intense and painful, though in my previous life I would have called this a dark day and ordered lamps to be lit. Lamps! I never wanted to see another lamp.

  A shout answered my laugh. Ahead, a man pointed to me, guiding a mob. They were cleverer than I thought, these humans. They had spread the alarm beyond the necropolis and cut off my way home. The watchmen behind me had fanned out. I would soon be surrounded. I leaped onto a stone coffin, dancing from one foot to the other, waving my new, monstrous penis at them and blowing kisses, but coolly choosing an escape-route while I did it.

  “Filth!” a man grunted, shockingly close, and my old reflexes would never have escaped his thrusting bill. It grazed me as I rolled off the sarcophagus. I laughed at his wit, though I’m sure he had none, when he said, “I’ll teach you to eat corpses!”

  He tried to hook me, but I evaded that by leaping toward him, back onto the coffin. He wore my cloak! My boots! I gripped him by the arm and screamed in his face, “That was very nice!”

  He had no idea what I meant. His face was a mask of stupidity and terror, molded from suet. I wanted to explain it to him at leisure, I meant to drag him along with me and add to his considerable knowledge of perversion and cruelty, but I misjudged my new strength, and his arm tore free from his shoulder.

  “I’ll eat this later,” I cried, flailing him about the head with the twitching arm, “and I’ll be back tonight for the rest of you!”

  Unhappily, I doubt that he understand this threat; his mind was preoccupied. And now the other watchmen were upon me.

  By swarming in, they had opened a route to the oldest part of the cemetery. I leaped over their heads, over their raised hooks, and capered away, pausing to hold up the severed arm and make its hand wave good-bye to the screaming owner. I reveled in my new talent for outraging these silly creatures. They took things so seriously! I knew now why my laughter had seemed so inappropriate to others. “You think everything is a joke,” people would so often complain, and even I hadn’t known then that everything was. “Glyphtard Fand” had been nothing but a clever illusion, I understood at last, but I had finally cast it off like a drunkard’s mask of sobriety.

  I let them stay close behind me as I threaded surely through the briers and hidden slabs. The light was less obnoxious here, and I was unwilling to end the game. But I fear that I outsmarted myself. Right across my planned escape-route, but still concealed by tangled forest, I heard horses and clanking metal. Horses could run me down, armor could turn my claws, and the men who used such things, the troopers of Never-Vanquished who had quelled the riots, were no rabble of tanglefoot watchmen.

  I kept moving forward, though, for I had let the pursuit come uncomfortably close, and my steps led me to a tomb I recognized by the tree growing from its roof. It was the spot where Exudimord had amused himself with Lord Glyphtard’s wife. It was the tomb of Chalcedor, which concealed the lair of his admirer, my ancestor.

  “Grandfather?” I called in a fair imitation of a human voice as I danced up the steps, wringing the watchmen’s arm to make it give up its last drops of blood to the cracked and tilted flagstones. “It’s Glyphtard, dear Grandfather. Come and talk to me. If you dare!”

  Better than I had hoped, I heard the rumbles and growls of a disturbed sleeper just inside the vault. The old fool had grown too fat and careless to hide underground.

  “King of Ghouls, indeed! King of fat groundhogs, king of worms, king of decrepit idiots! Come out and let me crown you with my foot!” I shouted, still in a manlike voice, but the voice that roared back from the tomb was pure ghoul.

  The soldiers heard his roar, and I heard their quiet commands. The mob behind me had marked it, too. They blundered forward more hastily. I dropped the arm across the threshold and leaped to the top of the tomb, then into the tree.

  From Glyphtard’s memory, I scarcely recognized the wreck that tottered into the light and stared down at the severed arm. It was ludicrous that Glyphtard had found this slug so fearsome. The drowsy ghoul blinked and scratched and stared even more stupidly at the oncoming watchmen. Then he laughed and brandished his claws. It was clear that they, too, found him fearsome.

  Encouraged by their fright, he snatched up the arm and shook it at them as he stalked forward. Being human and therefore blind to my many excellences, not one of them would have doubted that this was the same ghoul they pursued.

  The soldiers now emerging from the rear of the tomb had crossbows, and three bolts tore into his back. He looked down at the steel heads protruding from his chest as if wondering, Whatever can these be? He turned to take five more of the missiles, one of them penetrating his skull. That one must have hurt, for he tried to wrench it loose with both hands as he lurched, roaring, in an erratic circle.

  The watchmen found their courage. They dashed forward to hook his legs and pull them separate ways. He could still fight, breaking oak bills and heads left and right, but footsoldiers with two-hand swords moved in to chop him like firewood. When the horsemen had threaded their way through the brush, there was little left for them to do but skewer his pieces on their lances and jig them boldly aloft.

  Waiting and watching from the corpse-fed oak, I pondered my life and my curious metamorphosis. I felt a poignant regret for Umbra. With her high spirits and her love of death, she might have made a better ghoul than I would, and a fit wife for me now. I hadn’t appreciated her finer qualities. Then I realized that these thoughts must be those of Glyphtard Fand, perhaps his very last. I was a ghoul, who needed no wife, and my deepest regret for Umbra was that I had left so little of her to eat.

  After the crowd marched off in triumph and a reasonable time elapsed, I climbed down to rearrange Grandfather’s well-stocked larder, and to rest my eyes b
efore introducing myself to the underground host as the new King of Ghouls. Even if I hadn’t overthrown the old one, the title was surely deserved by a ghoul who knew how to pick locks.

  II

  The Lecher of the Apothegm

  Quodomass Phuonsa prided himself on the variety of unlikely subjects his art had immortalized, and he sorely regretted that he had never practiced it upon a ghoul. The old saying, “He would fuck the ghoul that tried to eat his corpse,” was often applied to him, and he itched to prove this as true as he could without actually dying.

  A man who would ravish a ghoul faces three obstacles, Quodomass knew. The first of these is their ugliness. Tales abound of men driven mad by the sight of them. Insofar as the accounts of such eyewitnesses can be reconciled, their form is vaguely human, though grotesquely long and lank. Different stories add to this the jaws of a hyena, the claws of a sloth and the hump of a wild hog, crammed inside a skin whose color and texture evoke comparison with the foulest diseases and even with advanced stages of decay. Quodomass had followed his guiding genius into every sort of thing that he could penetrate, sometimes with the assistance of rough surgery and without regard to signs of life, and his only worry was that ghouls might not live up to a reputation so piquant.

  Fear, the second obstacle, could be almost as easily dismissed. Quodomass doubted that ghouls could be anywhere near so savage as the mobs that had lusted to tear him in pieces for his least popular triumphs. He had often diverted himself by joining such mobs to rail against the creator of the masterpiece with more tears and curses than the grieving parent or spouse. Unlike most men, as he saw them, he had the courage to trust his luck.

  The only true obstacle was finding a ghoul. So crafty and elusive are these creatures that advanced thinkers have denied their existence. This skepticism is not shared by those who frequent graveyards at night, and all such persons with whom Quodomass ingratiated himself had tales to tell. They had heard the laughter of ghouls, smelled their stench or stumbled upon the leftovers of their slovenly feasts. Although none had actually set eyes on a ghoul, reliable acquaintances of their most trustworthy friends had.