The Throne of Bones

by Brian McNaughton

  “This is not my mother!” he screamed. “This is a woman!”

  She thought the man’s impressive wealth of tics had been exhausted, but now he began to hum and do a little dance-step as he mumbled, “Yes, well—”

  “You fool!” the boy screamed. “I’ll kill you!”

  “Two gibbering lunatics!” Zara said. “Forgive me, I must—”

  As no child should have been able to do, the boy seized her and hurled her back into the room, where she landed hard on her rump.

  His face softened, but she could no longer confuse that face with any sort of god’s. Seeming to look not just into her eyes but through them, to some other person behind her, he said, “Don’t worry, Mama. I’ll put things right again.”

  * * * *

  It was odd that Weymael Vendren’s ward should be called Polliard. Did she know him, and had his name been on the tip of her tongue? She had felt a certain warmth toward him then; but the more she tried to pin it down, the more it faded. His strength was unnatural, his coarse expression hinted of vice, he was a brat: she could never feel anything for such a creature but distaste. She knew that wizards could plant suggestions in one’s mind, even control one’s thoughts and actions with casual words, and perhaps Polliard, an apprentice wizard, had attempted that by calling her “Mother.”

  When Weymael left, she heard him conferring with another man, but the door was too solid for eavesdropping. She heard a bar sliding home—three of them, in fact—and this was confirmed when she found the door shut tight.

  The six windows of the room were unlocked, but it was a long drop to the cracked flagstones. A tree had taken root among them and grew within reach of one window, but it was like a giant, limber weed that might not bear her weight. The wall itself, carved with fanciful designs, might offer purchase to the toes and fingers of a desperate woman, but it looked ready to crumble rottenly in places. She wasn’t yet entirely desperate, but at least she had alternatives, however slim, to jumping out a window and trusting in Cludd.

  Looking beyond the derelict garden and its wall to the surrounding slum, she wondered if Weymael had told the truth. Crotalorn was a big city, she hadn’t seen every corner of it, but she knew of no old palaces of stone within its limits. The surrounding hills were abundantly forested, and until recently the nobles had contented themselves with mansions of wood, but with the accession of a Vendren king to the throne in Frothirot, that Tribe had succumbed everywhere to a passion for marble architecture. An old marble palace in the city of her birth was an anachronism; any kind of palace for a Vendren like Weymael, whose badges and tattoos were those of a minor knight, was an absurdity.

  Wherever the palace stood (and she suspected Fandragord, ancient home of Vendren wickedness), it was ghastly, at least the garden was, and the ghastliest thing about it were the pale statues that no one had troubled to paint for uncounted years. They looked like ghouls; or, with their broken limbs and missing heads, like corpses gnawed by ghouls.

  “Gluttriel consume them!” she whispered, as the pious should when even thinking of a ghoul. She felt the oddest twinge, but it passed.

  Moving to a window at the front, she saw a group of statuary that shocked her at first and then delighted her. Wait until she saw Crespard Vulnavon and told him she knew that he had copied his celebrated Hours from the work of an ancient master! He would give her some lofty rigmarole about homage to the past, but Zara knew theft when she saw it. Most of the figures were fallen or dismembered, but their attitudes and arrangement were the same as those of the beautiful statuary ornamenting a marble pool in Princess Liame’s garden. These sorry relics disported themselves around a sinkhole crusted with dead leaves.

  She looked for the Hour she had posed for, Midnight, since Crespard had professed to see something dark and witch-like about her. What he had really seen about her, of course, was something moist and furry, which he had explored to the limits of his ability. Midnight had been broken off at the ankles in this older sculpture. She glimpsed something white in the weeds that could have been the rest of it. She was curious to see how the model from antiquity would compare with her face as Crespard had carved it, a very good likeness.

  In fact the sculptor would be a good man to look up, and she might even forego the pleasure of calling him a thief. Dolton had been old enough to be her father, and Crespard was old enough to be Dolton’s father. He was gnarled and bent from his work, often dusty and smelly from it, but rich from it, too. He wouldn’t urge her to lie with other men, to be exhaustively quizzed later while he took notes, as Dolton professed his literary endeavors demanded. He wouldn’t ask her to pay the landlord or the grocer or the barkeep with her body, either.

  She had loved Dolton. He had taken her in when her family disowned her for killing her uncle—a stupid accident, really, but would they listen?—and he was always gentle and even-tempered when he was sober. Even when drunk, he could speak like a god as he paid the most elaborate but heartfelt compliments to her beauty, her wit and her discernment. He had never asked her to make love to anyone who repelled her.

  She began to weep for him again, but she was distracted from her grief by an odd memory. She ran back to the window overlooking the original of Crespard’s sculpture. His work had decorated the garden of a Vendren princess who evoked the word cadaverous from many who saw her. Zara thought her lean and beautiful as a rapier. “I didn’t say she wasn’t beautiful,” Dolton said, “I just said she looked cadaverous, that’s all.”

  At the party given to unveil Crespard’s masterpiece, the cadaverous but beautiful princess ignored everyone else to lavish courtesy and attention on Zara. Skin stretched tight as a drumhead over the bone gave some justification to her unhappy epithet, but it was the fairest, most translucent skin Zara had ever seen; nor had any skull ever boasted such a living glory of auburn hair.

  “You shouldn’t let them call you such names, dear,” Liame said.

  Zara started guiltily, for she was thinking of the name so often applied to the princess, but she asked, “Who?”

  “That jumped-up stonecutter-person with the freakish hands and forearms,” she said, thus dismissing the foremost sculptor of the age, as Crespard assured everyone he was. “He called you the jolliest whore in Crotalorn, and you laughed.”

  “Well, that proves I’m jolly! What’s wrong with that?”

  “Even the noblest ladies offer their affections for money at the temple of Filloweela. Anyone who dared call them whores would be bundled off to the Lord Collector of Tears.”

  “Those ladies give the proceeds of their efforts to the Goddess,” Zara said, “and I give them to Dolton Bose. It’s a fine but very real distinction.”

  “You’ve been associating with artists and intellectuals for far too long,” Liame sighed. All the while she kneaded Zara’s thigh with a bony hand in a way that was not at all unpleasant. “You should insist on being called a courtesan, at least.”

  She whooped with laughter. Among the eyes drawn by this outburst—jolly was indeed an accurate word, for her humor was exuberant—were those of her patron, who smiled benignly on the progress of the princess’s fingers.

  “A courtesan would never lie with the likes of our landlord, Princess.”

  “Well, there you are! Don’t you realize that a name is everything? Do you suppose anyone would want to read your precious Chalcedor’s tales if he called himself Flubbard Gloob, or whatever his real name is? Call yourself a courtesan and you’ll win the love of princes. Or at very least—” Zara was pleased to accept the tender kiss she offered—“of princesses.”

  “But how much do you suppose a prince—or a princess, for that matter—would pay such a courtesan?”

  “You certainly have been spending too much time with those people. All artists ever think about is money. That’s what separates them from the aristocracy, who never think of such matters, and so can free their minds for truly deep and beautiful thoughts. Poetry, painting, sculpture—all would be infinitely better
if only the best people had the time to waste on such trifles.”

  Zara gently pushed Liame’s hand back to her thigh. “If I may distract you for a moment from your deep and beautiful thoughts, how much would a princess pay?”

  Liame laughed. “I love you!” she cried, kissing her again. “You’re such a whore!”

  “I adore you, Princess, and I’d almost be willing to do it for nothing but the pleasure and the honor. Almost.”

  “I have a certain special requirement,” Liame said, withdrawing her hands and clasping them together, lowering her eyes as modestly as a girl in a temple less lively than Filloweela’s. “It involves no real risk, it doesn’t hurt much, but some find it repugnant. So I would be willing to pay very well.”

  “It doesn’t hurt much?”

  “Hardly at all. I would want to open—just the tiniest slit, nothing serious—a little vein in your wrist, perhaps, or in your ankle, and drink some of your blood.”

  Liame was right, a name was everything, and Zara remembered that this woman’s name was Liame, Princess of the House of Vendren, Beloved of Death’s Darlings, Mistress of Tigers, Initiate of Sleithreethra, to cite only its short version: a name to make intractable maniacs quail. And this woman was proposing a deed that witches, most of whom were Vendrens, did; that ghouls—may Gluttriel consume them!—did; that revenants and marticoras and other black agents of the night did, a deed that might destroy Zara’s spirit or bind it in thrall.

  “No!” she cried, springing to her feet. “Never!”

  “Oh, don’t be such a baby. How do you know you won’t like it—”

  “No, what?” Dolton asked, coming up to slip his arm about Zara’s waist. “Never, what?”

  She was proud of him for standing up for her so boldly. But, as was the case with so many of Dolton’s proud moments, it swiftly degenerated. He was drunk, and he launched a tirade against aristocrats, against sexual deviants, against any number of grievances that had nothing to do with the present situation. He was thrown off the grounds, spared a beating only by Zara’s intercession. She was asked to stay, but she left, too.

  She never told Dolton, but after the encounter had preyed on her mind for several days, she returned to Liame’s fine palace on Vendren Hill. She paused by the fountain, wondering if she really looked anything like the magnificent figure of Midnight frozen with the others in the complex steps of a never-ending dance.

  “It’s you,” the princess said, gliding up beside her unnoticed. “I come out and pray to you every night at that hour.”

  “I don’t think I should do it for money.” Zara was careful in articulating her long thoughts on the subject. “I want to do it because I love you, and to give you pleasure. It must be only once. It should be special.”

  “It is.”

  “And I want you to promise that you won’t use it to bewitch me or enslave me to your will.”

  “As you have me?” Liame said, but saw that her flippancy displeased. “No, of course not. I need it, you see, to draw strength, because of an illness I have. A chronic condition, actually, not at all dangerous to anyone else, but it’s the only thing that gives me relief and refreshment. You won’t suffer for it in any way.”

  “And don’t ever say a word to Dolton.”

  “That is by far the easiest of your conditions.”

  As Liame had promised, the drawing of blood hardly hurt at all. It was only a very small part of the experience, though it gave the princess great pleasure. Toward morning, when Zara concluded that it had all been fun but, generally speaking, she would rather make love to a man, Liame began slowly to construct an elaborate masterpiece of the senses that ended with Zara’s transfiguration.

  Having squandered the rhetoric of rapture on her paying customers, Zara could only murmur, “Oh, my.”

  “Listen to me,” the Vendren princess said. She had been sucking at Zara’s ankle again, and she paused to wipe the blood from her mouth and lick her fingers. “Contrary to your fears, I am yours now. If you ever need me, you have only to call me, for I am bound to you forever. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” she lied. She silently congratulated herself on not asking the one question that had been uppermost on her mind all night: Are you really alive?

  She could have sworn she hadn’t spoken aloud, but Liame said, “Only insofar as you make me so.”

  * * * *

  Gazing down at the ruined fountain, she made a disturbing discovery. Weymael’s garden, if one could give that name to this rubbish-heap, was laid out exactly as Liame’s had been. The fountain and its pool stood in the same relation to the palace. From what she could see of this decayed building, it seemed to duplicate that palace. If she leaned out the window, she would see the spot corresponding to the one where she had held her conversation with the princess on a stone bench.

  She leaned out the window. A stone bench stood far beneath it. By willing it, she could almost see the figures of two women, one alive and one perhaps not, engaged in mutual seduction.

  “And who’s alive now, I wonder!” she cried, and she laughed until the sound of her laughter began to frighten her.

  She cast her eyes wildly over the ramshackle buildings huddled beyond the wall. It was much too easy to discern the shape of Vendren Hill beneath the jumble, to replace the tenements with stately homes and temples.

  But those homes could have fallen, the garden could have grown, the palace could have decayed, only if the Hours had pursued their dance around the fountain a thousand times, ten thousand times, ten times ten thousand times—

  “No!” she screamed.

  * * * *

  Zara believed she had dozed off for only a moment, and she reached out to reassure herself that the princess still lay beside her. She was eager to share her scary dream about a far-future age when the palace on Vendren Hill would house a lunatic-asylum.

  Liame was gone, but Zara’s sense of her presence was strong. When she fumbled among the bedclothes, thinking the princess might be playing a game with her, she stirred a mouldy smell from threadbare cloth. She was still trapped in that nightmare.

  Now that feeble moonlight concealed its dirt and decay, she knew that the room was the same one where she had visited Liame. She recognized the staring, stylized owl that had overlooked the princess’s bed. Perhaps its looming presence helped to account for the powerful impression that she was not alone.

  “Gluttoria,” a voice whispered, and she screamed, clenching herself into a quaking ball at the head of the bed. The voice continued, “Can’t you see me?”

  It was the voice of the boy, not the man, but that was no comfort: he was strong enough to overpower her, old enough and strange enough to harbor any of those foul urges of which she had been warned by women grown old in the service of pleasure.

  “Of course I can’t see you! What did you say? What did you call me?”

  “Gluttoria.” He seemed to choke on the name, as well he should have. It was an absurdity derived from the name of the God of Death, at once an insult to her and a blasphemy to the god.

  “That’s as foolish as naming someone ‘Polliard,’ and even more offensive,” she said

  “It once suited your sense of humor.” Did he have an odd laugh, like his patron? Or could it be that the brat was repressing sobs?

  “I never had a ghoulish sense of humor.” She added hastily, “Gluttriel consume them!”

  He yelped. Perhaps her surprise at this and the shrillness of his cry accounted for the sudden queasiness that she herself felt.

  “Mama—” he began.

  “Don’t call me that! That’s far worse. Once and for all, I am not your mother.” Unaccountable tears welled up when she thus disowned him. Why should it pain her to be honest with this demonic child? She summoned up her coldest voice and said, “Go away!”

  She screamed when he scrambled out of the shadows and onto the bed beside her. She tried to pull away, but his embrace was unbreakable as he babbled urgently in her ear: “Mam
a, Vomikron Noxis wants to kill me. He hates me for taking you away from him, but he hates me even more for my human appearance, and you’re the only one who can intercede for me. Lady Glypht pretends to be my protector, she tells everyone she’s my grandmother, but she only does that to annoy him, and Weymael Vendren is an ass. Please, Mama, I need your help!”

  This was spoken most plaintively, and she had the unpleasant feeling that it would all make perfect sense if she allowed her grip on the real world to falter. She hardened her heart against him.

  “Go away, I said! Better still, let me go. I don’t know any of you people, I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t want to know you. I want to go home!”

  “Unlikely,” he sighed, releasing her and sagging back on the bed. With one of the jarring changes of tone that characterized these mad people, he said casually, “You must be hungry. Shall I call for the servant?”

  She supposed she was, but that was a minor concern. The servant would bring light with the food, allowing her to locate a suitably solid candlestick or fire-iron. Life had taught her that the best defense is an unexpected blow from behind.

  “Phylphot!” Polliard called.

  The door opened and a darker shadow entered. Squeaks and rattles suggested the wheeling of a decrepit cart. That all this should take place without any light hinted of some abnormality beyond madness, but she kept the fear from her voice as she demanded, “Am I supposed to eat in the dark?”

  “It once pleased you well enough. Phylphot, bring light.”

  The servant fetched candles that revealed him for a shaggy-haired tatterdemalion whose appearance would have blunted her appetite even if his smell hadn’t. As he fussed with the setting, he destroyed her desire for food completely by thrusting his free hand inside his breeches, the better to scratch himself.

  She averted her eyes to Polliard, who positively leered at the table, who advanced toward it by hesitant steps as if struggling against an irresistible hunger.