“The position of our cousin—” he meant the Empress—“is so tenuous that I can’t burn Vendrens at the stake, even minor ones, much as they might need it. Nor should anyone indulge too freely in accusations of ghoulism and necromancy. The Cluddites would love that. They’d fall into the spirit of the thing and treat us to an uncontrollable bloodbath. We’d have to kick them out of the city, and they are of great value to Her Imperial Majesty as a counterbalance to Death’s Dildos.” He meant the regiment known as Death’s Darlings, virtually a private Vendren army.
“Then Squirmodon—”
“Is an academic question, unfortunately. Without legs or arms, and with the anchor-chain from a galley around his neck, he managed to burrow out of his dungeon. He was famous for staging such feats, and his guards believed in this one to their dying breaths. It’s more likely that someone burrowed in, although the collapsed state of the tunnel makes it hard to tell. It’s likeliest of all that the guards were bribed to let him go and start a bogus tunnel to confuse us. It’s not dissimilar to the case of that fellow, you know, in history, who supposedly escaped from somewhere or other.”
“You have a gift for lending depth to any subject, dear, with your wealth of cultural allusions, just like what’s-his-name, the poet,” Nyssa said mischievously, and to me: “I have a surprise for you, brother.”
“You didn’t tell anyone that we had Squirmodon in custody, did you, Doctor?” the prince asked. “I thought I made it clear that was a secret.”
“What sort of surprise?” I asked, turning my full attention to my sister.
* * * *
She refused to tell me, and it surely was a surprise when I later opened the door that should have led to my office and found myself standing bewildered in a strange room, huge and full of light. I thought at first I had climbed the wrong tower, but then my eye fell on the myriad bottles and jars that contained my own anatomical specimens. They had been dusted and polished and, as never before, arranged on shelves.
An intruder, a lank, gawky fellow, was even now polishing skulls. I shouted, “You, there, Sir! What are you?”
“Your servant, Doctor.”
“Yes, yes, yes, and I yours, but who are you, and what do you think you’re doing?”
“My name is Feshard, Sir. Lady Fandyssa has directed me to serve you.”
I recognized this impudent rogue from Nyssa’s household and recalled her boast that he was one servant I would never be able to bully. I would see about that! “Go and tell Lady Fandyssa that you are not required here. Get out!”
“I’ve been instructed to obey you in all things, Doctor, except that one.”
I stalked heavily to one of the tall windows, meaning to open it and throw him out. I was about to warn him of this, but I was distracted by the broken latch of the casements. It struck me that Weymael Vendren’s servant had yesterday made a show of securing this very latch.
Leaning out to examine the eaves that had so interested him, I noted a pair of stout hooks driven into the beams a few feet apart. They seemed new, not at all weathered or rusted, and a pulley hung from one of them.
“I don’t suppose you have anything to do with this, do you?” When he hesitated to lean out the window, I grabbed him and shoved him halfway through. “Look, Sir, look! What do you make of that?”
“Someone was lifting something to the window?”
“Or lowering it,” I said, letting him go. He squeaked distractingly as he struggled to fall back inside the room.
I believed I knew what would be missing. The box containing the bones of the presumptive ghoul was nowhere to be found. Feshard insisted he had seen no such box while ransacking my belongings.
I stamped down the stairs, wondering where I could borrow a sword before presenting myself at Weymael’s palace to demand the return of my skeleton. Halfway across the quadrangle it occurred to me that my righteous outrage was compromised: I had, after all, stolen his skull. Worse, I had lost it. A moment’s reflection persuaded me that this was not the sort of argument one should start with a necromancer. I decided reluctantly not to press my claim.
I had stolen his map, too, and I still had it in a pocket of my cloak.
* * * *
A very large man should avoid taverns like Gourdfoot’s, in Emerald Street, for small drunkards will see his mere existence as a challenge to be met head-on. At least two such began to bristle when I stooped to enter a room where midnight prevailed at high noon, but as soon as I began asking the innkeeper about the cellar, they returned their attention to racing cockroaches at their table.
“I sell junk from cellar, yes, when wall fall down and men come fix, but nothing more down there now no more.” Without being asked, Gourdfoot poured me a glass of pflune, a searing liquor popular only with Ignudos, our willfully unenlightened aborigines; and with criminals on their way to the scaffold, who want a strong anesthetic with no regard to consequences. As my eyes grew more accustomed to the dark, I saw it was the only drink he sold, and that he and his customers were Ignudos.
“It was once the cellar of a warehouse, wasn’t it?”
“Something like that, I guess maybe. Whole block, all buildings, share same cellar, so we keep door locked. They say you can walk through all Blackberry Bank without once seeing light of day—”
“No, what they say is, if you try it you never see daylight again,” one of the cockroach-racers put in, to general merriment.
“—but I don’t know if that true.”
Gourdfoot passed me a vial of ammonia, which one is supposed to sniff after drinking pflune to counteract the taste. It was not effective.
“May I have a look at it?”
“What, the cellar?” He was stunned, but his commercial instinct stayed intact: “It cost you many silver fillies.”
“Why?”
“For all trouble of unlock cellar door, then lock after you. And remember, it my cellar. I keep anything you find.”
“Not anything, Gourdfoot,” the humorist shouted, but he was overridden by another one: “No, no, Gourdfoot get to keep anything he find. Maybe dogface wizard find glybdi slut to work back room.”
The second comic had misjudged his audience. A sudden, nervous silence fell. Glybdi is the Ignudo word for ghoul.
I parted with a ridiculous sum for the privilege of touring the cellar, then learned that this did not include the lantern I had to buy. After he had undone a redundancy of bolts and bars, some of them so solidly mated with the floor that they required the help of his customers and their bargemen’s hooks, he heaved up the trapdoor on a dank abyss. He lowered a ladder for me, but as soon as I stood in water to my ankles at the bottom, he retrieved it.
“Wait—”
“When you want come up again, you go someplace else,” Gourdfoot said, dropping the lid. A flurry of grunting and hammering followed as they struggled to secure the door.
I began to entertain doubts about the wisdom of this adventure. I had been goaded to it by Weymael’s insults—fatuous, posturing, masturbating humbug, indeed! If that catamiting Vendren popinjay could sit back and collect one priceless manuscript by tormenting the helpless dead, I would use Fand enterprise and courage to bring back ten of them. Perhaps I should have reflected, as I did now, that in the master’s tales similar motives always lead a hero to his doom.
Poor Meinaries told Weymael he had stored six boxes in the warehouse, and only one of them had recently come to light, according to the auctioneer who obtained it. Neither the auctioneer nor the necromancer had investigated this site personally, perhaps because they were quite sensibly unwilling to venture among the Ignudos.
The savages’ fear of their own cellar, however, and its association with “glybdi,” cast sinister light on Weymael’s note that Emerald Street was “hopelessly dangerous.” Those red lines on the map that ran here from Dreamers’ Hill: could they be tunnels? And could the entrances—one of them at this very spot—signify junctions between the world of men and the underworld of th
e ghouls?
I sighed ruefully and unshuttered the lantern, which revealed a cavern not unlike Weymael’s home. Two centuries of rubbish had not completely hidden massive bales of once-rich fabrics, now thoroughly rotted, and scorched beams fallen from the original warehouse. My vision of a singlehanded search seemed even more foolish: a mining operation by a horde of workmen was required.
I waded to a cleared space where the foundation had been hastily patched with new bricks. The priceless box might have been found among the trash and building-rubble shoved aside for this work, but the bales and baskets and broken barrels had been jammed together to form an almost solid wall, and none of its components looked promising.
Some of it yielded to the poking and prying of my staff, so I put aside my cloak and attacked it more vigorously. I redoubled my efforts when an interlocked jumble of crates was revealed. Feverishly levered out, these proved to contain nothing but old clothes and broken dishes. A box of papers made my heart leap, but these were the ledgers of a long-dead purveyor of bone-meal and horse-manure.
I took no note of time until I realized that my limbs trembled with fatigue and my hands were bloody from tearing crates open without tools. I had spent hours of unaccustomed, physical labor, all of it for no purpose than to convert junk to wreckage and rearrange it. I was not ready to give up, but I was more than ready to leave and rethink my plan, preferably over a hearty meal. I would even be willing to settle for the sort of dinner I might get upstairs, pigfeet with cabbage and a bottle of pflune.
Bending to retrieve my lantern, I tripped and fell against a jam of rubbish I had not yet disturbed. I ended on the floor, soaked with foul water and dazed from a painful knock on the head. When I raised my light, I saw that I had revealed an unsuspected doorway.
A dry and relatively clear passage led upward, perhaps all the way to street-level by another route. I decided to explore this for a short way in preference to pounding on the trapdoor with my staff until I overcame the Ignudos’ fears or died of exhaustion. I was soon shivering, both from my soggy clothes and from contact with an ancient city of cobwebs and its madly scrambling citizens. I spent more time cursing and pounding spiders from my limbs than I did looking where I was going, with the result that I tripped again.
I must have knocked my head again, too, this time more seriously, for I had passed from the real world into that of Chalcedor’s tale about the young man who stumbles upon the magic words that open a thieves’ cave. I stood in a room where a wealth of jewels and coins, gold statuettes and silver dinnerware lay tumbled. The locked chests of gold-chased ebony and sandalwood hinted at even more wealth than the thief had troubled himself to count.
The thief himself lay scattered on a floor of uneven stones that he had stained with his blood. Nothing about his skeletal remains suggested his identify, except that the legs and arms were missing; but the iron collar and massive chain—not the anchor-chain of a galley, but I had suspected that Prince Fandiel exaggerated—persuaded me that these were the relics of the unfortunate Squirmodon.
His loot had been treated with slovenly indifference. I discovered a painting by Lutria of Ashtralorn lying face-down on the floor of the mouldy cellar. An instinct for the fitness of things prompted me to dust it off and prop it upright. It was hard to imagine a thief so stupid or uncaring that he would do less; and from what little I knew of Squirmodon, he had been both intelligent and discriminating. Alive or dead, he must have been dragged here from his dungeon and eaten by a ghoul. His treasure had then been retrieved by a second thief.
Nothing was arranged for private gloating, except one object, but this exception disclosed the very heart of that second thief as a cesspool of depravity, mockery, blasphemy and treason. A bust of Sleithreethra, carved from obsidian and rendered even more hideous with ruby eyes, had been placed neatly on a plain wooden pedestal; the latter not part of the loot, obviously, but dragged from some other part of the cellars for the specific purpose of honoring the abomination. About its neck hung a string of progressively larger emeralds, the lower ones large as hen’s eggs, with a massive gold pendant representing the Dragon of Fand.
I had seen this necklace last year—and there could be no other like it—when a new wing at the Anatomical Institute had been dedicated by the lady who had worn it, Empress Fillitrella. Although contact with the bust made me retch, I muttered a hasty prayer to Polliel, made a protective sign, and took the necklace. I put it around my own neck for safekeeping and fastened my shirt over it.
A second room led off this one. I stiffened my resolve and stepped forward, but I immediately faltered, nearly overcome by an urgent desire to scramble back and pound desperately on Gourdfoot’s trapdoor. What almost unmanned me was an odor I could never forget, the stench of the ghoul that had assaulted me in the graveyard. I made very sure the room was empty before I tiptoed in.
The most intentionally frightful object here left me unmoved. It was a throne made of bones, mostly human, although I noted some tusks that might have come from wild boars. Yellowed and broken, patched with bits of wood and wire, its effect was less terrifying than childish. The phrase “King of the Ghouls” came unbidden to my mind.
This small, dank space hardly seemed a fit throne-room for even a king like that. By one wall lay a compressed heap of papers and rags, partly covered by a fabulous carpet of Phyringian workmanship. Aside from that carpet, probably loot from the next room, it looked like the sort of mattress favored by derelicts. It even held the hard-packed imprint of a large body. Perhaps the king was only storing his throne in this, his shabby bedchamber.
I pulled back the carpet for a closer look and was repelled by a staggering concentration of the stench that had frightened me. The old and crusted stains in various shades of brown and yellow conjured up the image of a creature worse than any animal, one that would lie in its own filth over and over again.
I gripped the carpet, meaning to fling it back on this mass of putridity, and I wish I had, but I was stopped by a glimpse that broke my heart. The oddments that the monster had torn and crumpled and wadded down for its comfort included a scrap of parchment bearing an unmistakable fragment of Chalcedor’s marginalia: a tiny, winged fairy alighting on the tip of a monstrous phallus.
Poking and peeling a bit deeper, I came upon more scraps: some containing a word or a phrase in his hand, others a fragment of a drawing that might have been his. But I reached the point where I simply could not bear to root deeper into foulness, not without long-handled tongs, plugs for my nose and a bucket to puke in now and then. I had uncovered enough to know that the King of the Ghouls had found my missing boxes and used their precious contents, rat-like, to fashion his foul nest.
I slipped the scraps I had found into my pocket and sat back on my heels as I tried to sort out my anger and grief. That I had found Squirmodon’s loot and solved the puzzle of his disappearance paled to insignificance beside this disaster, but I knew others would think my findings important. Much as I might hunger to track down the King and wring his neck—damned unlikely, of course, but that was my desire—I owed it to those others to bring back the truth.
My thoughts were interrupted by an ordinary sound, but surely the last one I ever expected in this place, and therefore all the more horrifying: a woman’s voice in ordinary, animated conversation: “And did you?”
What answered might have been a voice, although it sounded at once like scraping metal, boorish flatulence and brutish growls. I could make out no clear words.
I got up hastily and raised my lantern. I had not noticed the other doorway to this room, a smaller one that gave onto stone stairs leading downward. The voices were ascending those stairs, and they were close. I hurried back to the treasure-room and shut the lantern completely; but in the utter blackness of the cellar, the light leaking from the seams was caught by every polished gem and gold surface to produce an effect worthy of an Imperial ball. Unwilling to put out my only light, I muffled the device in my cloak and put it aside. I sn
atched up Squirmodon’s chain, the nearest thing to an iron weapon at hand, and held it ready.
“ ... expected of you,” the woman was saying.
“Expected by whom? By what, I should say, by the sort of scum whose parents should have been drowned in a rain-barrel at birth? Vomikron Noxis, King of the Ghouls, indeed! The ghouls laugh at this—yes, yes, of course, they laugh at everything, but they laugh at this most of all—for I am ruler only to a festering of human perverts and malcontents, people I would have murdered for presuming to lick the dirt from between my toes when I was mortal, people who want to become ghouls, people who want me to eat their grandmother’s nose so I can tell them where she lost her diamond ring, people who merely want to seem dangerous and wicked. This throne of ebony and crystal from the tomb of King Ashclamith is too good for them, of course—skinning alive with twigs would be too good for them—but it pleased me to use it.”
I heard a resounding thud. I assumed he had set down the piece of furniture he described. They had entered the room, but they had brought no light with them. They could see in the dark. How would I know if they spotted me? Near the door I hugged the wall of the treasure room with my back, willing my flesh to seep into the pores of the stone.
“Whatever you might think of them, they are your subjects, your only access to power in the world above. They’ve adored the Throne of Bones ever since your father had it made to his specifications.”
“My grandfather was a drooling idiot, and nothing proves it more than that stupid throne.”
“Your father!” she shrieked, and I believe she slapped him. “Does it make you feel less guilty about murdering him, calling him your grandfather?”
He paid her back for the slap somehow, because she screamed, and that unforgettable sound confirmed her identity as Lady Glypht.
“Father, grandfather, great-grandfather, too—if I had all three of him here, I’d kill him again. And laugh.” He demonstrated his laugh. I prayed fervently that he would not do it again. “I don’t know why I don’t kill you.”
The Throne of Bones Page 16
