The Throne of Bones

by Brian McNaughton

  I regret to report that the mother and son are not available at this time for further questioning. They were followed after leaving the prison, but they eluded surveillance somewhere in the necropolis of Dreamers’ Hill. The agents who bungled the assignment, Dodont and Feshard, were summarily executed.

  Although the escape of the doctor is unfortunate, it is to be hoped that the executions of Weymael Vendren and a score of peripheral malefactors have demonstrated to the Sons of Cludd that Your Imperial Majesty will not tolerate the activities of necromancers, pornographers, pedophiles, arsonists, cannibals, etc., etc.

  I would respectfully submit once again that the way of containing Cluddite fanaticism is to direct it toward projects with the least potential for public inconvenience. To this end, I dispatched a contingent of them to guard the pit where Zephryn Phrein was buried. Please accept the following terse and rather curious report:

  To Fandiel, called Prince: The ghoul emerged at midnight. Sore beset by the abomination, we were unable to slay it. I thank you for setting us in the path to the Everlasting Light of Cludd, which five of my men achieved. I remain yr. obdt. servt. for the glory of Cludd, Dolton Zogg, Rev. Lord Cmdr., Cludd’s Whirlwind.

  I doubt that the ghoul they encountered had anything to do with Zephryn Phrein, but this is purely my opinion, since it proved impossible, owing to the normal process of dissolution and the activities of scavengers, to find and identify his body.

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  The Vendren Worm

  Wake, Worm!

  A mighty hero is coming

  To try his strength against yours.

  —Richard Wagner: Siegfried

  Penetrating the depths of the Municipal Palace in Crotalorn is not easy. Those who descend from the lobby must stop at the gate of the detention center, where guards will either redirect or welcome them. Only by slipping through an unmarked door at the rear of the tax office can one bypass the dungeons and enter the equally gloomy warren of the maintenance department.

  At this point it seems unlikely that a misdirected visitor could go deeper without meeting a malingering sweep or sulking carpenter, since I must grumble through a clutter of them on my way to work each day. It seems even less likely that one of these civil servants would miss a chance to magnify himself by chasing a stray back into the clutches of the clerks who lord it over the upper floors.

  Why anyone who escapes their notice would persevere in opening unmarked doors, daring treacherous steps and blundering through lightless corridors until he at last stumbles into the archives of the Inspector of Moats and Trenches is a puzzle to me, but they keep doing it, interrupting my work with questions so inapt that I sometimes wonder if the world above me has not gone mad.

  “I have come to inquire,” said a woman who intruded on me a few months ago, after she had made her excuses for misting me with sneezes provoked by tripping over a pile of ancient scrolls and clouding the room with dust, “if, contrary to law and common decency, human sacrifice is still practiced in Sythiphore.”

  I don’t know what they do in Sythiphore, and I don’t care, but I said: “Unfortunately, you are not qualified. Virginity is not essential, but a memory of that state, however dimmed by the passage of time and the reception of multitudes, is. Nor are beauty and intelligence necessary, but one must at least approximate the lowest degrees consonant with being human. No, dear lady, they would spurn you in Sythiphore. I suggest that you go home and hang yourself, offering up this sacrifice to whatever God might be persuaded to accept it.”

  “You dog!” she cried, and she added, as if it were both a mortal insult and a clever discovery, even though my black garments and the heraldic tigers of my badges and tattoos clearly announce it, “You are a Vendren. What name do you go by, that I may report you to my dear friend, Lord Vendrard?”

  “Six Lord Vendrards grace the ruling council of my Tribe,” I said, “but none of them is influential or even sane. I, however, am the only Vendren who bears the name Asteriel.”

  “Murderer! You murdered your dear wife ... twice! Help!” Raising further billows of dust and mold, she screamed her way out of the archives and into the dank maze. For some time after this, her cries of “Help!” and “Murder!,” swelling or fading, announced the contorted path of her underground adventures. At long last I heard no more. She had either found her way out or broken her neck. I resumed my writing.

  As interruptions to my work go, it was a very long one, but not without diversion.

  * * * *

  Yes, I am Asteriel Vendren, but I never had a wife. If I’d had one, I probably would not have killed her for taking lovers, for I am a gentle and forgiving man. It is even less probable that I could have raised her from the dead with nostalgic coition, or that I would have killed her a second time when she took up her old ways in her new life. Yet that stupid woman had believed it all.

  Neither did I, as a youth, toss a cloth soiled by solitary pleasure into a pit behind a slaughterhouse, ignorant that the body of a murdered woman lay buried in the animal refuse; nor did my seed impregnate the morass of corruption to produce a monstrous son who haunts me in hope of a father’s blessing. Other unwelcome guests have fled my office in the mortal fear that this son hulks in the shadows.

  The fault is not mine. It lies with those too literal-minded to grasp that I have breathed new life into the popular tale by making it the storyteller’s own.

  Some day the world will catch up with my genius. In the meantime I must be screamed at by fools, and all because idle pranksters, whenever demented strays ask them for directions, send them straight to me. They resent my being paid as Inspector of Moats and Trenches, when the moats have been dry these two centuries, and the trenches are overgrown lanes.

  They deny it, of course. One doesn’t play jokes on a Vendren, even on a mild one who spends his time writing stories in a cellar; and I’m sure that those morons upstairs believe that I, if I knew who was responsible, would set my son on them.

  In spite of the tales I write and the name I bear, I thought I was the most ordinary and harmless fellow you would ever want to meet, apart from two embarrassing defects. One, whose symptoms I had described to physicians, seemed to be a variant of Frothard’s Debility: a disruption of consciousness, characterized in other sufferers by flailing of the limbs and foaming at the mouth.

  Victims often know when an attack is imminent. They speak of flashing lights, anomalies of smell or hearing, a drastic narrowing of vision. Many accounts show similarities, but no attack I ever heard of was exactly like mine. My first hint would be a vile smell, not unlike a freshly opened grave, not unlike the approach of that son of mine. (Yes, I draw on personal experiences, artfully rearranged, for all my tales. That one is a record of my illness, masked in fable.) I would notice a pattern of glistening cobwebs on the ground, in the air, or even on my person.

  Oddly, my ability to see the strands was determined by the intensity and direction of light when the attack came on. This curiosity puzzled physicians, and some of them, their opinion reinforced by their misunderstanding of my work, tacitly concluded that I was mad. The cobwebs were a product of my mind, they told me, and I should be able to see them in pitch darkness, but I did not. Light should not affect their visibility, but it did.

  I was not totally honest with the doctors, but I must be in this memoir, or it will be worthless. I never revealed that I sometimes saw the strands when no attack threatened. They were visible if the light was strong enough and angled correctly, but so tenuously, so translucently, that I often convinced myself I imagined them. Rather than look closely, I would seek a shadier place. My office, with its thick shadows and real cobwebs, let me ignore them completely.

  Here is the greatest oddity of all: others saw them. No other victim of Frothard’s Debility is warned of an attack when bystanders sense strange sounds, sights or smells, but I have been. When I was a boy, before I learned to shun the light, people would try to brush “lint” from my little bl
ack tunic, never succeeding, and it made them most uneasy. Some recoiled from the touch.

  The true warning sounded when I could not ignore the strands. They thickened, they swelled, they reddened, they pulsated—they sickened me! Gagging and shuddering, I began to see double, but in ways so weird that I feared I was dying or losing my mind. Meanwhile the rancid odor congealed, suffocated. The grave was open, and I tumbled into it.

  What happened then, when the light went out? I never knew. Illness, Mother tried to teach me, is not evil, and sick people must not be condemned, but she had always seemed a finer person than I am. The afflicted disgust me, and I am not alone. My own foaming and mewling, my—Sleithreethra knows what! Whatever it is I did, whoever saw it shunned me forever after. My first seizure gripped me in the presence of my father, and I have not seen him since.

  My mother, too, was present, but her love for me did not falter. She seemed, as I said, a fine person, but she could have schooled foxes in evasion. She never told me what I did that first time, as I watched them in their bed and felt myself losing control.

  My illness was not an unmixed curse. Not even my Uncle Vendriel (Lord Vendriel the Implacable of Fandragord, not to be confused with those piffling Vendrards who infest our House) could get me a commission in Death’s Darlings, the traditional family regiment. My appointment as Inspector of Moats and Trenches at Crotalorn was the best he could do. He has since avoided me, living proof that his power has limits, but I never cease from blessing his name. The job was made for me.

  * * * *

  I spoke of two defects, and the second is more embarrassing. I did not choose to throw fits, but I do choose to spy. Choose. ..perhaps I am too hard on myself. Does a drunkard choose to drink? Yes, I suppose he does, as a thief chooses to steal, as a bad poet chooses to write, as an inveterate duelist chooses to kill: from all these spring exhilaration and a release from pain that the addict craves. Jam a pillow over my face, and I can’t help myself, I will crave breath.

  Oh, they know it’s wrong, they lecture themselves, they set down rules to avoid temptation, but they always find excuses to drink, to write, to steal, to kill, to spy ... to breathe.

  I have known for quite some time what naked women look like. I have memorized the details. If I could draw, I could draw you one without reference to a model. And if I forgot some aspect, I could run up to the lobby and refresh my memory with the statue of Empress Fillitrella that adorns the central fountain. Were marble not enough, I could travel to Frothirot and buy a ticket to the baths; or to Sythiphore, and stroll through the streets. But in the baths at Frothirot, they do not sell tickets to let you conceal yourself; in Sythiphore, they would laugh if you hid behind a palm-tree to watch the women promenade the beaches. I love to watch, but watching without secrecy and danger blights my love.

  * * * *

  I seldom give readings anymore. I am sick of women who scream or faint, men who grumble, “Barbarous!” or “Obscene!,” sick of the self-righteous show they make of stamping out before I finish. And half of those who remain, of course, will approach me to ask if I really skinned my mistress to preserve her exquisite tattoos, and might they not call on me to examine the artwork? When invited to read, I usually send a slave to recite.

  It would have been impolitic to send a slave to Lord Nefandiel’s palace on the Feast of the Assassination. As head of the city government, he has the power to expel me from my cozy office. It was the sort of gathering I most loathe, though, a swarming of the shallowest illiterates, whose holiday costumes and drunkenness would give them license to abuse me and my work even more than usual. Many would never have heard of me, and some would try hard to persuade me that I had written their favorite story, the tale of the Vendren Worm that my Tribe could invoke with unpredictable results in time of need: an ancient fairy tale, I believed, probably an allegory of our erratic relations with the dragon-bannered House of Fand.

  After the banquet, after the dancers and clowns and sword-fighters had done their turns, the lights were lowered, and I walked to the center of the hall. No one applauded, but I was gratified by the hush that fell over the revelers, followed by a riffle of unease. My appearance, the lord had told me, was to be a surprise, his homage to the tradition of scaring people on this holiday. He had surprised them—shocked them, even. It remained for me to scare them.

  I always feel that the tale I have just written is my best, and that was so now. I was blinded by enthusiasm. It seemed ideally suited for a public reading, since no one could confuse me with the narrator, dead for two hundred years, a Fomorian Guard called Pathrach Shornhand. He tells of the Great Plague that claimed the beloved Fillitrella, and the gruesome comedy attending the disposal of her remains.

  Except for her return as a walking corpse who devours infants, the tale was grounded in historical fact. I was well pleased with myself, and far into the reading, before it occurred to me that Fillitrella was indeed beloved, as none of our rulers before or since. Even the Sons of Cludd, who despise the secular nobility and have no use for women, revere her as a saint; and a reverend lord commander of that order (unless the man’s uniform was meant as a festival costume, but I doubted it) was sitting squarely and sourly in the front of my audience. The Fomorian Guards still glory in the title “Fillitrella’s Own;” and the fishbelly-white redhead lounging behind him, a man so large and muscular that he could have, after a few brisk twists, used me to clean his ears, was obviously one of those merciless shock-troopers, even if he was costumed as a butterfly.

  But more to the point, a point I stuck into myself more intimately with each word I read, was that Fillitrella was a Fand, which Tribe my host ornamented. My hungry corpse was his grandmother, several times removed.

  Halfway through the story, Lord Nefandiel turned even whiter than the Fomor, who had himself begun experimenting with ever-darker shades of red. No one cried “Shame!” or “Treason!” They were stunned. No one screamed, but four persons did faint, not all of them women. The reverend lord commander’s hand seemed glued to his sword, which revealed itself from the scabbard by slow but steady increments. I doubt that the plague-pit of my story could have displayed so many slack jaws and fixed stares as faced me now.

  I thought of editing my work, but that was impossible. Once a story is finished, I can no more take out a word than I can take out my own liver. I considered adding an idiotic epilogue in the manner of Feshard Thooz—“But it was all a dream!”—but an artist would rather die first.

  And, as my host whitened, as the barbarian reddened, as more steel gleamed in the Cluddite’s lap, it appeared that I might indeed die. I began inching backward, intending to turn and run when I had read the last word, throwing the manuscript down with the hope that they would vent some of their fury on the scroll before pursuing its author.

  The last word was read, and I could not but look up to see their reactions. We were frozen, the rabbit ringed by wolves, none of us able to move in an eternal moment of suspense. Then Lord Nefandiel began to applaud, and so did they all, even the Fomor and the Cluddite.

  “I never knew all that about my illustrious ancestor,” my host told me when I went to accept his congratulations. “Imagine that!”

  “You don’t look at all like a Fomor,” Lady Fandrissa said. “And you seem so young to have been alive then!”

  “Your friend hasn’t eaten, has he? We could have something brought out,” Lord Nefandiel said.

  * * * *

  Yes, the Feast of the Assassination, when you scare people: and my host had just scared me more than he had during my reading.

  I should have said that I have three defects, and the worst may be my talent for attracting supernumeraries. In any crowd like this, there will be one who cannot be accounted for, and everybody will assume that he came with me. I am a singularly single man, a haunter of the dark, an outsider, and yet I always have the sense of being followed, because I always am.

  Walking home in the small hours down Potash Alley, a soiled wrinkle
in the street-map that is never busy even at noon, I have many times turned to confront unlikely followers, each of them different, each with a plausible excuse for being there, but each following me, no matter what he might say.

  I had never before seen the one that Lord Nefandiel indicated, a short, bald man with a demonic mask. I might have gone to demand who he was if, at that moment, a wall had not fallen on my back.

  “You think like Fomor,” said the giant butterfly, who had amiably mangled my shoulder with his paw. “How you do that?”

  In twenty years of unappreciated writing, this was the most astute question I had ever heard, and I addressed it seriously while Akilleus Bloodglutter nodded and growled. I have no idea if he understood me, but he seemed pleased and vowed to send me the head of the very next prisoner he took.

  Meanwhile, the man with the demon mask had vanished.

  * * * *

  Whenever I read, I look for one attentive face and ignore the others. Ignoring that mob had been impossible, but I found someone who seemed sympathetic, and I did my best to read only to her. The wonder in her wide eyes, the parting of her pink lips, the flush of excitement that tinged her cheeks like the first light of dawn on apple-blossoms, suggested a child enthralled by a bedtime story, but she was no child. Dressed, or nearly so, as a nymph, she wore a coronet of yellow flowers on her artfully disordered hair.

  I saw her again and angled through the crowd. I believe in the redemptive power of love. I had always hoped that one or more of my defects might be cured by the love of a good woman, or at least by the tolerance of an attractive one. I began to feel awkward as a boy, my head light, my extremities tingling. My store of words flounced away like a jealous mistress, and I knew that when I spoke, I would sound less urbane than Akilleus Bloodglutter, but I kept sliding toward her as if the room had tilted to abase itself at her pretty feet.

  The man who faced me in her knot of admirers, the same Cluddite officer who had so intimidated me, began to shrug and grimace. Failing to read his signals, she continued: “ ... worse than I expected, a skinny, twitching gawk, as if some inept taxidermist tried to stuff a raven, then hid his mistake away in a damp cellar for years. Do you suppose the cobwebs on his clothes are part of his act, or does he sleep in a tomb?”