The Throne of Bones

by Brian McNaughton

  “Chalcedor!” Lady Glypht cried, leaning against me as if in need of support. “Doctor, I had no idea that our foremost ghoulologist hid such a naughty side.”

  I muttered some inanity about his value as a social historian while the lady giggled and Weymael twitched and wheezed.

  Lady Glypht made no move to withdraw from our intimate contact, and I grew aware of an anomaly that had gone unnoticed in the shadowy room. She must have been at least sixty, but the body pressing my side felt no more than half that age. Having adopted the Frothiran fashions that arrived with the Empress, fashions more suited to the torrid climate and tepid decency of the former capital, she left me in no doubt that her skin was taut, her breasts high and firm. She had seemed unnaturally young at our last meeting; the intervening years had left her seeming even younger.

  I disengaged myself as tactfully as possible, although she pouted, and took a few steps back from both of them lest Weymael should attempt to hug me again.

  “When we last met, you were surrounded by some rather exotic admirers,” I said. “Have you dropped them all?”

  “Exotic?”

  “It pleases the lady to patronize Crotalorn’s most advanced artists and intellectuals,” Weymael said, “but she fears that their habits and conversation might be unsuitable for one of tender years. She never receives guests of that sort when her grandson visits.”

  “Of course, you’re an exception, Doctor. I promise to receive you eagerly anytime you might wish to enter my ... home.”

  She said this with a perfectly straight face and Weymael simpered dutifully. Neither one of them seemed to notice that Polliard guffawed at the innuendo. Being mocked by all three of them was a sore trial of my temper, and I hurried to the point of my visit: “Some of those advanced intellectuals were obsessed with ghoulism. I had hoped to question them about a ghoul-cult that, some say, practices its rites in our city.”

  “How bizarre!” the lady cried. “Have you ever heard of ghouls worshipping anything, Weymael?”

  “Their food,” the ineffable Polliard suggested.

  “No, this cult is made up of human beings,” I said.

  They listened with no more than polite interest as I expanded on this, but when I mentioned my brother-in-law’s plans for the thief, Squirmodon, Lady Glypht said, “They have him in custody? Last week the government confessed that he’d slipped away to Bebros with all his spoils. An assistant minister took the blame and committed suicide.”

  I hardly knew how to respond. The imbecile prince had failed to warn me that I knew a dirty state-secret, and I had just handed it to persons whose connection to the slimy underbelly of the city may have been intimate.

  “If I were a ghoul, I’d just eat him and keep the treasure for myself,” Polliard said.

  “I hope all this disgusting talk hasn’t spoiled your appetite, Doctor. You will stay for a bit of supper, won’t you?” My excuses were half-hearted, and the lady tipped the balance by pointing out that it had started to rain.

  While she went to instruct the servants, Weymael Vendren launched a monologue on the last subject I wanted to hear him discuss, his enthusiasm for Chalcedor. I fumed and fidgeted until it dawned on me that, allowing for the stupidity of certain literary judgments, he knew what he was talking about. I had never even aspired to his grasp of Chalcedoriana, although he admitted that family traditions and private documents had given him a head start; for he was a collateral descendant of Princess Liame, obscurely nicknamed the “Amorous Cadaver” by her contemporaries, who had rescued the writer’s bones from a pauper’s pit and installed them in a fine tomb.

  He had obviously not needed to overhear my guess about the contents of the lawyer’s box to draw him to the auction, and I quietly rejoiced that I hadn’t made an ass of myself by accusing him.

  “I hope it proved to be worth what you paid for it. I was only guessing—”

  “Worth it! Doctor, the box contained a manuscript of Nights in the Gardens of Sythiphore, including the five ‘lost’ tales that no bookseller would touch.”

  I was stunned. I had hoped to acquire some odds and ends for my own very minor collection, but I had almost—if not for Weymael Vendren—gained a fortune. A manuscript that rare, so rare that no one had even suspected its existence, would have bought me a luxurious retirement. I suppose it does me credit that this was not my first thought; although it was surely my second.

  I blurted out my first: “May I see it?”

  “Of course, Doctor. Please call on me tomorrow night at about this time—”

  I had been aware for a while of a growing commotion in the background involving Lady Glypht and her servants, but I had paid it no mind at all. Now she thrust herself between us and demanded of Weymael, “Where is Polliard?”

  We were both at a loss. The boy was gone, obviously, but we had been so absorbed in bookish arcana that neither one of us had the slightest notion when he had slipped out.

  “You idiot!” she shrieked, and she struck him. No mere slap, she dealt him an open-handed blow that staggered him. “You let him leave the house. Go find him!”

  “It’s raining! My lungs ... the graveyard, the night air—” I can’t be sure of this, but I think he babbled something about “the King” before she silenced him with the back of her hand, this time drawing blood with her heavy, antique ring.

  She turned on me, and I found myself involuntarily jittering backward after this display of savagery, but she transformed herself into a helpless female in distress as she gripped my shirt and wailed, “Help me, Doctor! The servants are old and even more useless than this creature, and the Cluddites are stupid brutes. Help me find my grandson.”

  I had barely agreed before she all but dragged me into the soggy garden and propelled me through it to the adjoining necropolis. I filled my lungs to call out, “Polliard!,” but the name was garbled by an oath as she viciously pinched my lip.

  “No, he’ll only hide from us, the scamp,” she whispered urgently. “Whatever you do, don’t call his name.”

  The bizarreness of this adventure struck me only now. If any normal boy had romped off into the rain, a normal grandparent would have waited for him to get wet enough to come to his senses and return. One might call out threats or promises from the comfort of a dry house, not stalk him in silence and darkness as if he were an escaped animal. It seemed likely to me that the terrible fate of Lord Glyphtard had deranged his mother in certain areas. The thought of her grandson exploring a graveyard had provoked an onset of madness. The wetter I got, the more bitterly I berated myself for essaying the role of second lunatic.

  I noted rain-smudged lights moving here and there on the hillside above us, and the occasional hoots and whistles that accompanied them were typically those of Zaxoin hillmen. At least a score of Cluddites must have been guarding her house, and the whole platoon had been sent out to find one wayward boy.

  As first step in a plan to escape this circus and go home, I said, “It might be better if we separate.”

  “My own impulse, Doctor, is exactly opposite,” she said and she seized me in her arms.

  Mad or not, she was a remarkably beautiful woman who had been doing her best to stir me up since I walked into her house, and I wanted her even more than I had known. My mind ceased to function, except on the puzzle of the single hook that suspended her Frothiran wisp of a gown, and that was really no puzzle at all. I felt her kicking it away from her ankles as I cupped her bare buttocks in both hands and returned her hungry kisses.

  Just before this lightning of passion struck, I thought I had heard an odd, scraping noise nearby. I had dismissed it as an effect of the pattering rain, or perhaps a branch scuffing against a tombstone, but now I noted it again, somewhat louder, and it had a metallic ring. I tried to pull back to listen, but she would have none of that. She moaned loudly as she kissed me, alternately hissing lecherous enticements, while dragging me down to the wet grass. It seemed almost as if she were trying to muffle the other sound.


  I would have liked to proceed at a mature and civilized pace, but her impatience was nothing less than furious. It was she who saw to my undressing, and she had bared little more than the only part she required before gripping it and plunging it inside her with less tenderness than a suicide might wield a dagger. I cried out. Despite all her apparent ardor, she was physically unprepared, and it hurt.

  “Yes, Porfat, yes, this is how I like it!” she insisted, and her voice rose to a scream as she urged, over and over again, “Deeper! Faster! Harder! Yes, hurt me, I love it!,” interspersed with the sort of expletives that might have brought a blush to the cheek of Chalcedor himself.

  I told her to shut up. She was putting our lives in peril. The Empress suffered the Sons of Cludd to station two regiments in the capital on the condition that they curb their impulse to chastise wicked civilians, but one should never tempt them. As rigid celibates, they reserved their most frenzied transports of condemnation for fornicators. Her cries might draw them down to hack us in pieces.

  She ignored my command. I thought about withdrawing and running away from the madwoman, but at this point none of my thoughts carried much weight. I labored more vigorously in the hope of getting it over with quickly, but fear and distraction retarded me. When I pressed my hand over her mouth, she bit it, then redoubled her lecherous screams.

  Her noise was overwhelmed by a roar that not even a scandalized Cluddite could have delivered. In fact it was not human. No tiger had been seen near Crotalorn in living memory; I could think of no other beast that might produce such a volume of angry noise. But when I turned my head, it was to see a pale shape that was more like a man than any beast.

  My impressions are imperfect, because the thing instantly struck me with paralyzing force and lifted me by the shoulders as easily as I might lift an empty shirt. I remember an intolerable smell, but I remember nothing else.

  * * * *

  I woke up in a blaze of lanterns lancing off naked swords and brass buckles.

  “Zornard!” I cried, actually glad to see the wretched zealot.

  “I am he, blasphemer. The Lord Cludd on High sent a ghoul to rebuke you for mocking the Scripture, but it fled from our honest iron.”

  “The lady...?”

  “The ghoul shrieked all manner of foulness in a woman’s voice, and it drew us here. As,” he added with heavy disapproval, “it must have lured you. We saw no lady.”

  I could barely contain myself as I staggered to my feet. After forty years of futile effort, I had finally come face to face with a ghoul, but my face was not the part I had presented. I had glimpsed it for only an instant over my shoulder. I ransacked my dizzy brain for details, but the most I could retrieve was an image of a large, pale form that might have been a man. That it was not a man I knew by its voice, its strength, and the nauseous smell that lingered in the air.

  I called for the Cluddites to bring their lanterns closer as I scrabbled in the wet grass for footprints or other evidence, but I found nothing. I sensed that my rescuers were growing agitated, never a good sign, and at last one of them ordered, “Hide your shame, sinner!,” reminding me to do up my breeches.

  Quizzing these witnesses was equally useless. The ghoul had been a manifestation of evil, in their view, and to dwell on the details of any such manifestation would be sinful. They had accidentally stumbled upon the object of my long ambition, to see a real ghoul, and their one desire was to put it completely out of their minds. When my questions began to irritate them seriously, I gave up and left them to say their prayers.

  They let me borrow a lantern, and I threaded my way through the tombstones to investigate the odd noise I had heard just before Lady Glypht launched her distracting performance. The ghoul had attacked me from the left, and that noise had come from my right. Some twenty paces in that direction I came upon a corpse that had been pulled from a partially opened grave. Its lower half was still buried, so that it seemed to be taking its ease in the hole. Something had been chewing on its head.

  I failed to restrain a most sinful oath when Zornard said at my elbow, “The ghoul was feeding when you disturbed it.”

  “Perhaps,” I said. “Why did Lady Glypht hire you?”

  “She says a foul ghoul plots to abduct her grandson. We stand guard when the boy visits, for all evil things fear our righteousness.”

  “And your iron weapons,” I said.

  He agreed to this, but it puzzled me further. He had not noticed the shovel lying near the despoiled grave. No ghoul would need a shovel, nor would one use—and I checked this after Zornard had reclaimed his lantern and returned to his companions—an iron shovel.

  * * * *

  At the Institute next day, I wasted an unconscionable amount of time peeking from the corner of the window that overlooked the Glypht home. I saw neither the lady nor her grandson, and no Cluddites were visible. Callers occasionally came and went, but it was beyond my powers of deduction to determine whether they were tradesmen, policemen, acquaintances, or ghouls personating human beings.

  Sometimes a servant would dodder outside and stand for a while in puzzlement until a less senile specimen would dodder out and lead her back in. I repressed the fancy that these had only last week been healthy young girls, their vitality leeched to feed the unnatural lithesomeness of the witch.

  I itched to know what had happened to her, and to her grandson. I could easily have sent her a bland note thanking her for her hospitality and inquiring about her health, but I had resolved to stay clear of her. Even if she was only what she seemed to be, I had no wish to admit an eccentric wanton into the constrained but comfortable life that I had, after a long and painful series of missteps, defined for myself.

  But I suspected that she was much more than she seemed to be, and that disorder and inconvenience were the very least of the ills in her train. She had not wanted me last night, she had wanted only to distract me from some dark doings in the graveyard. She had known that the ghoul would be abroad, for she had hired Cluddites to keep him from the boy. Her cries of feigned passion had summoned it. Whether it killed me or not was all the same to her.

  Speculating on her secrets was unpleasant, but I preferred that to thinking about Polliard. Someone had been opening a grave when we approached. Someone had begun to eat the corpse. Her son had been a ghoul, and perhaps her grandson had determined to honor the family tradition.

  Who had his father been? The story of a second son whose name could not be mentioned in her home, when she had no qualms about mentioning the unspeakable Glyphtard, was so feeble that she must have thought me an idiot. The real question might be, Who had his mother been? Taken from a beloved wood-nymph, “Zara” was the commonest of female names, just the one she might have chosen for a hasty lie. The lady herself might be Polliard’s mother.

  My speculations were interrupted by a servant in unmatched castoffs of Vendren livery, who rather loftily introduced himself as Phylphot Phuonsa. I would have advised him that I had no wish to clutter my head with the names of errand-boys, especially not one so inharmonious and silly that it would probably persist like a mnemonic radish to my dying day, but he distracted me with a bow and a flourish that brushed the edge of sarcasm as he presented a weighty envelope. He picked his nose and toured my office with brazen inquisitiveness while I studied the message. It was addressed in the sort of fanciful, old-fashioned calligraphy that is favored by people I detest.

  I hoped this message from Weymael Vendren would at least tell me if the lady and her grandson still lived, but he wrote as if none of last night’s alarming events had occurred. It was no more than a graciously worded renewal of his invitation to visit him that evening and view his manuscript.

  By now I had remembered hearing the name Weymael Vendren as that of a reputed necromancer, and this seemed not unlikely, given the man and his associates, but I could not refuse the chance to examine his find. I turned to instruct the servant when I saw to my astonishment that he was leaning half out of a win
dow, apparently studying the overhang of the roof.

  “You, there! What do you think you’re doing?”

  He made a show of refastening the window before dusting off his hands, excavating an ear with a fingertip, and examining the results. Then he said, “Bats, Sir. I hate bats.”

  “And did you find any?”

  “Not a one, Sir, you’re very lucky, but you really should have someone come and tidy up the mess in here. It attracts them.”

  * * * *

  Weymael Vendren lived, oddly enough, on Vendren Hill, a stronghold of that Tribe long ago, which had since passed into the hands of people with no names at all, or none they wanted known. The rickety tenements stacked onto its steep slope, until they should tumble into the Miraga and float out to sea, held every sort of failure: blind painters, tone-deaf musicians, illiterate writers, generous whores, squeamish cutthroats and honest lawyers. Weymael’s deference to Lady Glypht made him seem a timid Vendren, a fit match for such neighbors.

  An exasperatingly indirect course took me up stepped alleys and down misleading lanes to the top of the hill and over it, where it dropped off sheerly beyond a parapet. Dreamers’ Hill loomed across a wild and twisting ravine. I tried to discourage the fancy that this wasteland separating the defeated from the dead would be a likely place for ghouls to congregate; the absence of night-prowlers on this side of Vendren Hill suddenly seemed less reassuring. I held my staff at the ready as I puzzled my way to Lunule Street.

  A palace was the last thing I expected to find off that crooked alley, but when I had picked my way over the rusted bars of a fallen gate and into a forest that had once been a garden, I was confronted by a marble fantasy in the baroque style of the Late Kingdom, when Chalcedor himself had lived. Fallen and dismembered statues testified to the vivid history that had intervened.

  The palace looked less grand up close. Roofs had collapsed, one wing had been gutted by fire, and little of the building seemed inhabited or even inhabitable. A broken bedstead, a wheel-less chariot and some seatless chairs sprawled among the junk clogging my way on the portico where Vendren lords and ladies had once strolled in elegance and wickedness.