I could understand why the crazy servant might grow obsessed with bats in such a place. It was he who, at long last, answered my knocking.
“Lord Weymael was called away,” he said, “but he said you should make yourself at home.”
He ignored my ill-mannered laughter and led me with upraised lantern through a once-magnificent hall, now a repository for more bedraggled furniture, battered weapons and the mouldy heads of beasts. I asked, “And what about his son?”
“He’s gone, too. His ward.”
I was relieved to learn that I would not be alone with that strange creature in this strange house, but it told me nothing about last night. Had he found a more suitable home among the ghouls?
“Did Polliard return here last night?” I pressed.
He made no immediate answer, and I expected he would remind me, quite justly, that no gentleman would quiz a servant about his masters. But at last he replied, in a tone bordering on despair, “He always returns.” He added: “He went out with Lord Weymael tonight.” After a further pause, as if straining his memory or imagination, he said: “To help the boy’s mother, who can’t get about on her own anymore.”
Either he was lying or, hardly unlikely, Lady Glypht was, and I had small hope of learning anything worthwhile, but I asked: “Zara?”
He did not so much scratch his head as submit his scalp to an exhaustive entomological census, and we had threaded several dark corridors and arrived at a lighted room before he answered: “I believe I heard another name in connection with that lady, but you may very well be right, Doctor. Should you require anything at all, please ring.”
His vagueness suggested he might be telling the truth, but when I turned to question him further he was picking his nose again, so I gladly let him close the door behind me and quit my sight.
After my tour of the ruined palace, the clean and well-furnished room was a surprise. It seemed the retreat of a thoughtful, bookish man who was far better organized and much wealthier than I. No volumes of wizardly lore lined the shelves, only copies of the standard classics. I saw not a single stuffed owl, human skull or figurine of Sleithreethra, but with the Cluddites so active lately, a genuine necromancer might regretfully dispose of his traditional paraphernalia.
A fire burned cheerily on the hearth, driving back the oppressive dampness of the other rooms, and I was distracted from my uneasiness by a sideboard laden with enough delicacies for a dinner-party. My desire for food vanished, however, when I noticed the scroll on top of a desk between two thoughtfully positioned lamps. This could only be the fabulous manuscript that had lured me here. I took a bottle of a rare Bebrosian vintage and a glass to the desk, where I planted myself and prepared to be awed.
And indeed I was. Those who condemn Chalcedor and all his works are especially incensed by the published version of Nights in the Gardens of Sythiphore. Unconstrained by facts, he created a world of infinite possibilities and pleasures that seems more vibrantly real than the reality, and Sythiphorians revere his memory more highly than any of their own artists. A reportedly shocking statue of the writer entangled with a cluster of nymphs dominates Chalcedor Plaza, and visitors are guided on tours of all the sites he would have frequented if he had ever actually visited that city.
What had been excised from the published version, oddly, were not the elaborately metaphorical descriptions of body-parts and their conjunctions, but a myriad nuances of character and motivation, along with disturbing but wittily phrased speculations on the sexual wellsprings of all human endeavor. I suppose prudes can grudgingly tolerate the antics of stock puppets, however lubricious, in works without artistic skill; when the puppets come to life on the page to feel improper emotions and think subversive thoughts, the shock is intolerable.
I hurried to the long-lost tales, “Animadversions on the Mystagogue,” “The Obtuse Princess,” “The Debility of Globbriel Thooz,” and the others that can now be obtained, if only under the counter and disguised as something else, from any broad-minded bookseller.
I was disappointed—not by the stories themselves, for they are masterly, but by my inability to fall through the parchment and into the gardens of Chalcedor’s fabulous city. I could not forget that I was only the second person who had seen these tales for two centuries, and an obligation to feel suitably humbled distracted my concentration. It was further distracted by my awareness of the person who had seen them first; for no matter how welcome I had been made to feel, this comfortable room lay in the depths of that man’s weird home.
I am by no means high-strung, nor am I given to sensing the activities of ghosts, but I started more than once at noises of indeterminate origin. The fire on the hearth, the settling of the foundations, the servant’s distant activities or perhaps even those of his bats: they were probably responsible for most of these sounds, but some scrapes and sighs and flutters were less easily dismissed. A faint, recurrent clicking was especially disturbing. I could not imagine what it was, and I began almost to dread its recurrence.
Restless, I got up and prowled to the casements at the end of the room, where I noted wind-blown branches whipping the face of the waning moon, but none of these tapped the panes. The imagined chill of the night outside, perhaps, made me shiver.
Pouring wine from a second bottle, and nibbling on some of the sausages and cheeses from the sideboard, I gave the room a more detailed scrutiny. My first impression of neatness, I was gratified to note, had been wrong. Books and papers, loose clothes, even some used plates and cups had been shoved behind or under any chair or table that might conceal them. When I trod on a lump in the rug and lifted its edge to investigate, my suspicion was verified: the servant had swept dust and scraps under it.
Prosperella, never at a loss for unpleasant tricks to play on me, must have been at my shoulder and nudged me to take a longer look. When I did, I noticed the ideogram for “Meinaries” on a crumpled ball of paper at my feet. Of course this was none of my business, but the thought of finding proof that Weymael had overheard my speculations about the auction and made a note of them was an irresistible temptation. I picked it up and partly unwadded it.
“Meinaries says he stored the Chalcedor materials in boxes marked C-100 to 105 at the Orocrondel Company’s number two warehouse.” Nothing odd there: Meinaries, though defunct, could “say” that in a letter or ledger that had come Weymael’s way. The next sentence, however, alarmed me: “He insists he did not reclaim these before his death.”
I hesitated before smoothing out the rest of the sheet. Did I really want to know more? But of course, unhappily, I did.
A different pen and a more agitated calligraphy had been used for the rest of the page, which may have been torn from a record of the necromancer’s research: “M. persists in denying knowledge of those boxes after he stored them. He may be telling the truth, but Emerald Street is hopelessly dangerous. I should give him to P., the brute, who may learn more, and who lusts to eat his head. He believes Lady G.’s malicious lies and would acquire legal knowledge for his claim to the G. fortune, ha ha ha.”
Though I detested even to touch this note, I put it in my pocket for later study. “P” could only be Polliard, and his desire to “acquire legal knowledge” by dining on a dead lawyer raised disturbing questions. I had never heard of a ghoul who could go about consistently in human form, but I doubted this would be the only shock awaiting anyone who delved into the secrets of the Glyphts.
Chalcedor or not, I had no wish to remain here any further, but my curiosity got the better of me. Unless he was a madman, Weymael Vendren was a necromancer, who could raise the dead to extract their secrets; and although I had seen several persons executed for this hateful crime, I had never seen one whose guilt was clear. It seemed odd indeed that his private library should be furnished with nothing more sinister than the epics of Pesquidor, the dramas of Fronnard Vogg and the vertiginous cosmology of Trisophrodes the Lesdomite.
The most suspect work was that of Morphyrion, the mad po
et, in seven volumes. I discovered that these were not books at all, only their spines, concealing a panel that opened with a little pushing and prodding.
Behind it lay a box filled with the scrolls used by an earlier age—a far earlier age, indeed, by the look of them. I am no expert, but they appeared to be written in the language of the shadowy civilization that once flourished in the Cephalune Hills beyond Fandragord.
When I went to replace the box, I saw that something lay hidden behind it: a sort of bird-cage, although more strongly built. The lock that held its two halves together had been broken open, and it was empty.
The volumes of Trisophrodes were no more than they seemed to be, but the works of Fronnard Vogg concealed another secret compartment and another box of scrolls. These were ancient, but written in plain Frothen, and the first began with such a horrendous invocation to Sleithreethra that I rolled it quickly shut.
A cage lay in the depths of this one, too, but it was occupied: by a human head.
It was very old, little more than a skull with the hair and parchment-like skin adhering. A much stronger lock had been used to secure its cage, but this lock had been twisted and scratched by determined efforts to force it. I replaced everything as I had found it.
Much time had passed, and I feared that Weymael and his wretched ward might return at any moment, but I was arrested by the sight of some thick books on the highest shelf that purported to be the writings of Magister Meinaries. These proved to be another disguised panel. By stretching on tiptoe, I was able to pull out the box it concealed.
Unlike the others, this was packed with loose sheets, most of them scribbled with Weymael’s hasty shorthand. One was a letter from the house that had auctioned Meinaries’ box, telling Weymael that it had come from an innkeeper named Gourdfoot, of Emerald Street.
Unwilling to study most of these sheets, which appeared to be further records of a blasphemous interrogation, I let myself be diverted by a much older document on parchment. This was a detailed map of the section known as Blackberry Bank: quite useless, since the orderly streets had been destroyed in a great fire. The section was now a notorious slum whose existing tangle was partly depicted with black lines designated as streets in Weymael’s hand: Algol’s Close, Burntwitch Alley and Emerald Street. The latter cut through the corner of a large square that the original map-maker had identified as the number two warehouse of the Orocrondel Company.
Weymael had added a second group of lines in red that ended at the river and would probably have converged on Dreamers’ Hill if that had appeared in the map. Three of them twisted through the site of the former warehouse and were here and there labelled with the ideogram for an entrance. One of these lay at the intersection of a red line with Emerald Street. I clicked my teeth together, as I sometimes do when lost in thought.
The habit is so old and deeply ingrained that I never notice when I indulge in it unless someone—usually Nyssa, with annoyance—calls it to my attention. You might say that someone called my attention to it now and had, in fact, been trying to call my attention to it all evening. The clicking that had unsettled me earlier was repeated, far more loudly, and in time to my own tooth-clicking.
It was louder, obviously, because the secret compartment behind the false books of Meinaries hung open.
I wanted, as I have wanted few things in my life, to fling the box back into the compartment, slam the panel shut and flee the palace with no delay. I was reasonably sure that I already knew what waited for me in the hidden compartment. But curiosity overcame me. By shoving a chair into position and standing on it, I could look directly into the secret place.
It was a severed head in a cage, as I knew it would be. Although eyeless and noseless, although dead for two centuries, it could still click its teeth. And although it had no lungs, it could squeeze a faint breath of fetid air past its leathery lips to whisper: “Bury me.”
I astounded myself by saying, “Yes. Of course, Sir,” and perhaps to explain to myself why I should plunge deeper into this nightmare, I added: “Thank you for lending money to Chalcedor when he needed it.”
The head was silent. Had I dreamed or imagined—no, in an even flimsier whisper, it repeated: “Bury me.”
My hand shook when I seized the cage and jerked it out. The head thumped appallingly against the bars from my haste and clumsiness, but I could not bear to look at it. Nor could I bear to hear it, and the first thing I did was to muffle it thoroughly in the cloak I had thrown over a chair.
To delay discovery and the threat of an immediate pursuit, I restored the box of notes to the compartment and closed the panel behind it. I had barely finished congratulating myself on my cleverness when I saw that I had left the map out on a table. Rather than take the time to move the chair and open the panel again, I stuffed it inside my shirt.
My eye fell on the lost manuscript of Chalcedor. I was already stealing from the necromancer, was I not? That was rightfully my manuscript, was it not, since I had traced it without resorting to diabolical means? Although I hated to do it, I left it where it lay.
I hurried out without taking a lamp, trying hard to restrain my oaths when my toes or shins collided with invisible junk. I heard nothing from Phylphot Phuonsa, but he was not my worst fear. I conceived the notion that Weymael and his ward had returned quietly, and that Polliard was watching me with his ghoul’s eyes from the blackness. The skin crawled between my shoulders, where I fully expected a dagger to fall at any moment.
I reached the portico safely, and I had just begun to take what would have been my first breath for a very long time when I heard the creak and rustle of a cart over rough ground, a sedate clopping of hoofs. It was coming up the path toward me.
Despite the intervening cloak and cage, I was loath to clutch the head against my chest, but I fought down my rising gorge and did so as I hurried to the end of the porch and picked my way into the weeds and brambles of the garden. I felt reasonably safe when I was crouching behind the rim of a stagnant pool where broken nymphs cavorted.
I soon spied Weymael Vendren and his ward perched on the seat of a thoroughly prosaic cart, drawn by a mule, like a pair of farmers coming to market; but of course it was no load of yams they had just dug out of the earth. After dismounting, they hauled an oblong box from the bed of the cart. From the way they managed it, it seemed unusually light for a coffin, but of course a ghoul would be far stronger than a normal boy.
Polliard seemed to be fretting, urging more care, and at last Weymael cried: “Damn you, it’s not a sacred relic of Filloweela, you know! And after all the ill treatment it’s had already....”
Polliard spoke quietly, and Weymael cried, “But what if the cursed thing decides to eat me?” Unfairly, since he was making most of the noise, he added: “And be quiet, can’t you? That fatuous, posturing, overstuffed humbug is probably still here, swilling my wine and masturbating over my manuscript.”
They disappeared into the palace before I could hear more.
I supposed Magister Meinaries would want his head to be buried with his body, but that was a far nobler deed than I had any intention of doing. I would have had to bring it home while I researched the location of his tomb. As a professor of anatomy, I could have explained its presence easily enough, but only if the thing kept still. I had no wish to lecture it on the need for caution, to hide it under my bed, nor even to keep it with me for one instant longer than absolutely necessary to keep my promise. I hurried toward the ravine.
The street at the edge of the cliff was deserted. I felt safe in reclaiming my cloak and setting the cage on the parapet. Unless I found a direct way of getting across the gap to the necropolis, where I intended to do whatever I could for Meinaries, I would have to spend the rest of the night walking there by a circuitous route.
It spoke. “What?” I asked, forcing myself to lean closer, and the head whispered: “He never repaid me.”
I guessed he meant Chalcedor, and it shocked me that he could still be capable of resentm
ent. I suppose we expect only wisdom from the dead because they can no longer display the pettier side of their humanity, and Meinaries, through no fault of his own, was denied this advantage.
“Consider your rescue from the necromancer as repayment,” I said.
“Don’t you have some money?”
I bit back an oath and abandoned this conversation. Considering all he had suffered, it would be no wonder if he were stark mad.
The moon had set, and I reconsidered my plan as I peered into the blackness below. Negotiating the slope as I remembered it would have been difficult in broad daylight, and now I could see nothing. I stepped back hastily at a loud rustling from below, as of something determinedly rushing upward. At the same time Meinaries’ hateful teeth began to chatter frantically. I turned toward his cage in time to see something explode from the darkness. I thought it might be a pale bird taking flight, it came up so swiftly, but it seized the cage and pulled it back, like the hand of a preternaturally swift and sure climber. A louder scrambling and rustling receded into the depths, accompanied by a cry of terror so thin that I may have imagined it.
* * * *
I found Prince Fandiel at breakfast, as I hoped I would, and outlined my discoveries after my plate had been sufficiently laden. “So if you really want to enlist a ghoul into the police force, round up young Polliard,” I concluded, “or behead Squirmodon and have Weymael Vendren interrogate the head. And then, if you want my further advice, burn them all at the stake.”
“Haw!” The prince had an odd habit: he had never learned to laugh properly, so he signified high spirits by barking and rapping on a convenient surface, in this case, the table. My irony must have amused him greatly, for the plates danced and a tumbler smashed on the floor.
The Throne of Bones Page 15
