The Throne of Bones

by Brian McNaughton

  “That name is not unfamiliar,” Porfat said. He fingered one of his tassels. “He robbed me, perhaps. That must be why I’m wearing this thing.”

  “But that was last week,” Dodont said. “Have you been running around the city in a tablecloth since then?”

  “See here, Sir!” Zara and Dodont both jumped when the doctor slammed his sizable palm on the counter. “I came here for food and drink, not foolish prattle and vexing questions. Bring us pflune.”

  “Are you crazy? No, no, Doctor, forgive me, of course, you’re not. Pflune it is.” He clanked his way among bottles beneath the counter. “We don’t get much call for that.”

  “I hope you don’t mind,” he said to Zara. “I acquired a taste for it from some Ignudo friends.”

  “I’ve drunk it,” she said. In fact it was what Dolton Bose drank when he had no money for anything better, which was most of the time.

  She wanted to ask him how he knew Phylphot and Weymael. She believed he could have explained some of their more obscurely unpleasant remarks. He might be able to determine how she knew Dodont and the man depicted in the bust over the bar; and how she knew him. But she was sure that none of the explanations would make her happy, and she shoved her questions forcibly aside as they talked of nothing in particular, settling at last on the subject of her price. Since he had no money with him, and she had to conceal her ignorance of its value, she trusted him far more than she would have liked.

  * * * *

  She woke from a horrible dream of crawling in tunnels and feeding on the sort of filth Polliard had served her. She clutched desperately at the man beside her in bed, who turned out to be Dr. Porfat. He had apparently been lying awake.

  “You seem to have dreamed you were a ghoul,” he said when she had poured out a confused stream of terrible images.

  “Gluttriel consume them!” she cried, and she was alarmed by the sudden spasm that racked him.

  “I have long tried to make a study of ghouls—and please, my dear, don’t use that superstitious archaism again, I think it must remind me unpleasantly of my demented grandmother—but I discovered that the only people who could give me first-hand information about them were people I couldn’t stand. That’s had a chilling effect on my life’s work.” He sighed heavily. “I keep having a strange dream, too, that I’m a boy trapped inside a mountainous prison of flesh. I can’t convey the rage and terror I feel in this dream, over and over again.... Whenever it seems I am about to find the way out, I wake.”

  She laughed, her fingers encircling flesh that had, incredibly, risen once again. “That was no dream. In fact, I’m convinced you must be a boy in disguise.”

  “Believe me, it’s no laughing matter,” he laughed. “But it was only a dream.”

  VI

  The Tale of the Zaxoin Siblings

  My brother-in-law was lucky to have been born a prince. Whenever I felt the impulse to kick him down the stairs, I would recall the penalty for high treason.

  “You’ve been studying all your life, Doctor,” he said. “Isn’t there a danger your skull will explode if you don’t let some knowledge leak out for the benefit of others?”

  He would rap the table when he barked at his own jokes, signaling everyone to join in. Everyone did, except my sister, Nyssa, who gave me a wry look; and the woman for whom he was dragooning my services, Zephreinia Sleith, who favored me with a smile that seemed sympathetic.

  I didn’t laugh, either. l said, “I allow some of it to leak out during my thrice-weekly lectures at the Anatomical Institute.” I avoided Nyssa’s eye as I said this, for she knew I had been neglecting my duties at the Institute for several months now while trying to recover from the queer mental effects of a would-be murderer’s attack. I was able to face her again as I added truthfully: “Some leakage may also be perceived in the eight books and two-hundred-odd papers I’ve written.”

  “Oh, that.” Prince Fandiel waved as if consigning my life’s work to a bonfire, which I supposed he could do. “You study medicine to help people, Doctor, not to scribble about bones. How many bones are there? You must by now have written two or three papers for each one. You remind me of that story by what’s-his-name, that writer, about the fellow who didn’t do something because he was always doing something else.” He rapped the table again in case anyone failed to hear his raucous guffaws.

  “Forgive me for mentioning it,” Zephreinia murmured in my ear.

  She hadn’t mentioned it to me, she’d mentioned it to my sister, who had then seated her beside me at dinner. I had nothing against examining her, especially since her Frothiran frock had allowed me to make a nearly complete visual examination already; but I objected to being seated next to a lovely young woman who batted her eyelashes at me while she hung on my every word, then to be advised by our host that she wanted medical advice. I objected to being conspired against.

  Unfortunately for my principles, Zephreinia had captivated me. She came from Omphiliot, dreariest of provincial cities. She had told me early in our conversation that her husband remained at his post there as Inspector of Aqueducts. In Crotalorn no more than a month or so, she had adopted a fashion that would have earned her a day in the pillory back home. It revealed an adventurous spirit, to say nothing of splendid breasts.

  “Oh, no, it’s not your fault,” I said, though of course it was, but it’s hard to be stern while simpering. “It’s just that I, I study, you see, I write—” Here she folded the fan that had provided her with a modicum of concealment and touched it to the sensuously intriguing pad of flesh beneath her lip in a pose of pert attentiveness. I forgot whatever else it was that I did with my dull life. “What I mean, a physician more experienced in your body—in examining the human body, I mean, not specifically your breasts—”

  “But no other physician, however experienced he may be, has written Porfat’s Etiology of Ghoulism.”

  “You mean Polliard’s,” I laughed, and then realized I had surpassed my embarrassing slip of the tongue with a truly idiotic blunder. I cast my eyes furtively at the prince, fearing he would soon be regaling everyone with the best “Porfat story” of all, that I had forgotten my own name, but he was absorbed in explaining religion to a priest.

  Ignoring Zephreinia’s bewilderment, I said, “You know of that work? But surely you don’t think that you—”

  “No, no, no.” Her tone was uncommonly somber, but she remembered to laugh as she added: “No. But the book displays such a masterful intellect, such a firm grasp of provocative material—and above all, such nearly godlike sympathy for the poor creatures afflicted with so foul an ailment, that I know you can help. Please, Dr. Porfat.”

  I hadn’t the heart to tell her that my godlike sympathy had withered since writing that book under the strain of actually encountering ghouls. I said, “Well, if you’d care to come—”

  “Come to my place, please, in Sekris Square. Tomorrow at noon?”

  The prince was rapping and barking again, but this time I hadn’t even heard his joke, probably at my expense. I told her I’d be there.

  * * * *

  Feshard was born a servant, so there was no good reason for not kicking him down the stairs, though I never did it. I sometimes wondered why not.

  “Shall I go out and buy you a sword?” he asked.

  “What? What are you babbling about now? Where have you hidden my bag?”

  “Attractive women of thirty or less are the only exceptions to your rule against practicing medicine. Since it’s unlikely that Princess Fandyssa would subject any young, unmarried woman to your company at dinner, the woman you sat next to, and who begged you to have a peek up her dress, must be married. In the unhappy event you’ll have to fight a duel with her husband, you’ll need a sword, and you don’t have one. Shall I go buy one? Or, better still, shall I send your regrets to the lady and refer her to Dr. Beliphrast?”

  “Be buggered with your sword and your regrets, Sir, you and Dr. Beliphrast both! What have you done with my bag, y
ou insolent hound?”

  “I put it in the sedan chair that’s been waiting for you this past hour, as you instructed.”

  Not trusting myself to speak further, lest I should use harsh language, I stamped down the stairs to the street, where I discovered that I had forgotten my hat. As I trudged back, I met Feshard loitering down. He held out my hat with an outrageous display of patience.

  “Trust me, Sir, you’ll regret this,” he said, and I broke my resolution against harsh language.

  * * * *

  I tried to think when I had last been such a fool, and I had to admit it was the last time a pretty woman had taken any notice of me. Such insights are discomfiting to a man in his fifties, if he has the brains to know that few men improve with age. I had once looked forward to the day when the combination of a comely face, a trim figure and a kind word would not enfeeble my intellect and enslave me like a demon’s energumen, but that day had yet to dawn.

  Filloweela had not been kind to me. That Goddess is supposed to oversee the distribution of beauty, and she had omitted to send me any at all. And love, her other area of responsibility—I won’t vex you with prattle about a particularly lovely look in a particularly lovely eye, or about the way the sun struck a certain shade of hair on a certain day in a certain place. I have had two great loves; one died and the other fled. Those sorrows in my early life determined me to get on with my work and put my dealings with the Goddess on a cash basis.

  I turned my thoughts deliberately, as I seldom did, to Zara, whom I maintained in a cozy suite at the Plume and Parchment. She was a handsome woman with a keen intelligence and an exuberant sense of humor, who would do anything I wished and pretend to enjoy it. Some thought her eccentric for affecting the speech and manners of an earlier age, but I have been accused of the same quirk. She liked me well enough for myself and even boasted of me, her patron who wrote books.

  Then why had Zephreinia’s praise been so important, why did I crave her further approval, why did I want to look into her eyes when I could direct my chairmen to the tavern and gaze into Zara’s, which were equally bright and equally blue? I didn’t know, I would never know, I would go to the grave with some such futile question on my quivering lips and an equally futile tingle in my desiccated loins.

  * * * *

  Sekris Square had been so renamed for one of the Lord Admiral’s victories, but most Crotalorners thought the Lord Admiral was a homicidal halfwit and persisted in calling it Peartree Square. Because Zephreinia had used the new name, and because each word she had spoken was a delight I yearned to recapture, I directed the chairmen to Sekris Square. They consequently assumed I was a tourist and tried to charge me twice the usual fare when I alighted. This led to hard words.

  “Dr. Porfat, what are you doing?” Zephreinia cried, running halfway down her stairs as words became blows. She diverted my attention fully, permitting one of the cowards to send me sprawling. “Zephryn, come quickly, help him!”

  “I need no help, lady!” I called. Invigorated by her presence, I kicked one of them off his feet and regained my own. The other tried to attack me from behind, but I fell back to pin him against the fallen chair with my not inconsiderable bulk.

  “No, please! Help me! Please, Sir, I’m sorry, don’t crush me!” the chairman sobbed.

  “Which one shall I help?” a young man asked Zephreinia. He spoke through his nose in the annoying way of Omphiliot, and I took a dislike to him even before he said: “The poor lout beneath the whale is getting the worst of it. Do you fancy him?” The first of the thieves, seeing the newcomer’s naked sword, ran off, pausing to fling oaths and cobblestones. I kicked the other on his way.

  As Zephreinia fretted and exclaimed over me and I dusted myself off, I covertly studied the young man with the sword. The shadows under his eyes and the slack-lipped sneer that seemed his habitual expression suggested unhealthy habits, as did his boneless, can’t-be-bothered-to-stand-up slouch against the railing of the areaway. Worst of all, for I assumed he was Zephreinia’s lover, he was more handsome than I had ever been. It consoled me slightly that his bones would pay for his idle posing, and that he would be a twisted wreck by the time he was my age, if drink or his loose tongue failed to kill him first.

  “Doctor, this is my brother, Zephryn Phrein,” Zephreinia said, and no words she had yet spoken gave me such unalloyed joy. They dote upon the Z-sound in the former kingdom of the Zaxoin, and I had not realized that the names of this brother and sister made the kind of match that parents of a whimsical bent find irresistible. I embraced and pummeled the young man as I gripped his hand. In my elation it took me a moment to grasp that he detested this.

  We went in to a lunch where the sister flirted, the brother sulked and I beamed on both of them, although I regretted that Zephreinia had traded her bold fashion of the evening for modest daytime dress. Last year only a Frothiran or a faddist would have seated a naked guest at the dinner table, and now I met them at the palace of Prince Fandiel. That the world was going to hell, I reflected, might not be an unrelieved disaster.

  Closer study suggested that Zephryn was her younger brother, perhaps no more than twenty, although he had seemed at first an older man. The immoderate quantity of wine he drank while cutting his food in bits and pushing it around his plate suggested one cause of his deterioration, but I thought there must have been others.

  “Well,” I said when food and conversation grew thin, “you wanted to consult me, lady? If we might retire to—”

  “Doctor, not I! I thought I made that clear. It’s my brother I want you to look at.”

  I wish I could have seen my face at that moment, for I felt it collapse. Actors wishing to portray a character whose fondest hopes have been dashed might have studied it with profit.

  “Look at?” her brother echoed with his intolerable sneer. “He’s been looking at me all through the meal, when he could spare a moment from thrusting his great red turnip of a nose down your bodice and peeking at your tits, dear sister.”

  “Sir!” I rejected the many words that might have offended Zephreinia and said only, “You try me!”

  “Zephryn, please, you know you haven’t been able to sleep for a week—”

  “It’s not that I can’t sleep, I don’t choose to sleep,” he whined as he sprang to his feet and kicked his chair away. “And whatever I do, what have you or this prosing old jackass got to do with it?”

  I gathered up my bag and prepared to retire, the sole course I could take that would not be irreversible, but Zephreinia clung to my arm. No matter how deceitfully she had used it on me, her charm still worked.

  “Please, Dr. Porfat—”

  “Porfat?” Her brother seemed astounded, as if in his arrogance or drunken confusion he had not heard my name before. In a tone that flew as far beyond respect as his earlier one fell short of it, and no more endearing, he said, “The famous ghoulologist?”

  “I despise that name even more than your manners, Sir. Never speak it to me again.”

  He laughed. “Porfat? I completely agree. I might have enjoyed hearing what you have to say about ghouls, Doctor, if only as a relief from all the inanities you’ve blithered. Rather than suffer any more of your sententious nattering, I’ll leave you to wallow in this bitch-infested hellhole and grub for my sister’s twat under the table until chance takes pity on your failing memory and guides your fat fingers.”

  I might have struck him at last, but his parting shot so shamed me that he got away. It was true that I had patted Zephreinia’s thigh from time to time in making a point, and I had taken no small pleasure from this. I must have been crude and obvious indeed.

  “Forgive me,” I said, disengaging my arm. “I’ve behaved inexcusably.”

  “You? Oh, Doctor, no! My brother has, certainly, but please don’t abandon him. Sometimes his ways are abrasive, but he doesn’t mean to offend.”

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” I said, “and he doesn’t want me to know. There are physicians
who can catch an elusive patient, they make it their business to know such tricks, but I don’t. As I told you, my work is with books and bones.”

  “And with ghouls,” she said. “Doctor, he prowls the dark, he haunts strange places, he has odd friends. Must I recite all the symptoms from your own book?”

  I could not deny this. His sardonic manner and his lack of appetite were also consistent, though hardly conclusive. During my slow convalescence I had noted similar peculiarities in my own habits, and I was surely no ghoul. But if she had wanted to seize my interest, she might have done so more surely by telling me these things than by misleading me with her wiles. I wanted nothing further to do with either of them, and I told her so.

  “At least give me something, Doctor, something to make him sleep. He’s killing himself.”

  And good riddance, I thought, but I gave her a small bottle of the laudanum I had prepared to treat my own illness and advised her to consult Dr. Beliphrast. I tried, too, to give her some hope: “If he were afflicted with ghoulism, he wouldn’t be running out into the daylight so eagerly at this stage.”

  “I know. But you wrote that nothing about the disease is certain.” She smiled wanly. “I really did read your book.”

  * * * *

  Next day it rained, and I seized the excuse to relapse into my new habit of sulking at home. I could see that Feshard, as he dusted around me, itched to comment on the book I had chosen to idly peruse, my own Etiology of Ghoulism, but he sensibly restrained himself. Reading my work had soured my temper. As I remembered the book, my brilliance should have curled and ignited the pages as I turned them. It did not.

  Experience had refuted my fatuous assertion that a graveyard miasma caused the disease. I had crawled through the tunnels of the ghouls; to my everlasting disgust, I had been clawed by one. If it were infectious, I would now be breakfasting on something quite different from pears and cheese and Fandragoran wine.

  I was not ready to abandon the work of a lifetime and join the fools who ascribed the condition to diabolism. I now inclined to the theory that it was hereditary. Lady Glypht, a far greater authority than I had ever been, had claimed that she ensured her son’s ghoulism by the incestuous concentration of her degenerate bloodline. Without intending to, I began making notes in the margins for a revised edition. The notes sprawled onto the backs of letters, to crumpled papers from the pockets of my robe, to blank pages of any other books that came to hand. When I called for a second bottle of wine, I was so absorbed that I neglected to study Feshard’s manner for signs that he disapproved of the request.