The Throne of Bones

by Brian McNaughton

  The Cluddite turned red as the pile of bricks he resembled, and he cleared his throat like a man choking on a fishbone, but she was oblivious to his distress. I should have fled, but even in that moment of despair I was hypnotized by the swells and planes of her mostly bared back. All colors but its rose and gold and cream had been deleted from the universe.

  “That horrible son of his—have you read that vile story? Well, I’m sure his son would be much less of a monster—” here she laughed, a delicate tinkle of chimes in a torture chamber—“if he had taken more after his mother!”

  One of her companions, more direct than the Cluddite, said: “He’s standing behind you.”

  She turned, and I had to admire her: eyes flashing, chin thrusting, she attacked. “Your stories are garbage, sir. If the Sons of Cludd had their way, they would be burned, and you along with them.”

  Take this for proof of the brutal honesty of this memoir, that I am willing to reveal myself as a worse fool than anyone else. I said: “If the Sons of Cludd had their way, lady, they would make you cover your porcine rump in public.”

  One doesn’t strike a Vendren, at least that is what Vendrens always say, parroting our motto: Who Smites the Tyger? Her response to that boast rang through the hall. It was such a shock that I stood and gaped, examining the pain of her slap with more curiosity about a new sensation than the outrage I should have felt, as she swirled away. I had once more become the center of attention in a silent throng.

  The reverend lord commander gripped my arm. Dueling is forbidden to the Holy Soldiers, but so is attending parties like this one, and I thought he meant to lead me outside. Humiliation gave way to terror.

  “’Of making many books there is no end,’” he quoted from his Book of Cludd, “’but there one day will be.’” Inappropriate as that quotation was, I think he meant it to comfort me. Perhaps it was the only one relating to literature that he could think of; and perhaps he felt only the concern that one feels for a marked victim. He gave my arm a comradely squeeze and walked away.

  * * * *

  Except for a few sidelong glances and snickers, my disgrace was forgotten as the company gaily organized itself for the candlelight procession to the graveyard, where, on this night, one traditionally sees demons, posthumes and ghouls who may be questioned about the future. These would be mummers, of course, hired by Lord Nefandiel to titillate his guests. I overheard the cruel nymph plead a headache to our host, excusing herself from this romp. I hurried to bribe a servant, who told me her name, Vulnaveila Vogg, and the location of her room. Planning nothing, guided by my feet, I sped upstairs and concealed myself in her wardrobe.

  The itch had mastered me, you see, the irresistible need to breathe. I wanted to pay her back for shaming me, too. She would never know I had examined her as thoroughly as I might examine a slave offered for sale while commanding one of her intimate garments to fondle me, but I would know. She might wonder, if I met her again, how I could meet her eyes and perhaps even smile into them as I savored my secret revenge. You need not tell me how sordid this seems, for my own spirit cringed from me as I crouched among her scented silks and furs.

  I felt much as I had the first time, spying on my parents as they conjured up a beast with two backs: one whose hateful but fascinating existence I had never suspected, the beast with feet at either end. My first attack struck me then; and now I saw my cobwebs in the dimness of the wardrobe. O Gods! The woman I had wanted, who had reduced me to a child in front of the company, would witness my further reduction to a puling infant when she entered her room. Never mind the shame and the loss of my cozy office: for this abuse of his hospitality, Lord Nefandiel would have me racked and gutted, and my quaking remains diced.

  I should have known better. The thrill of spying often provoked a fit. My previous targets had been mostly sluts, who would not raise an outcry upon discovering a man of the sword-bearing class twitching and drooling outside their windows. For whatever reason, I had never been denounced as a criminal pervert. I would always regain consciousness on my way home, never dogged by municipal guards, solicitous strangers or angry lovers. I had been very lucky. But a driven man cannot choose his doom, and I had been driven to possess Vulnaveila with my eyes.

  I had just begun to creep from concealment when the door to the hall opened. I had no choice but to hide again.

  She hesitated at the threshold, scanning the room in disquiet. I thought at first that I had left some trace, that I was about to be discovered. No: her nose wrinkled prettily. She smelled it, that graveyard odor of my coming attack. She knelt to look under the bed. She examined the chamber-pot and was puzzled to find it clean. The odor still bothered her. A proud woman, as I knew she was, would go straight to her host and demand another room, and I prayed that she would do so before I lost control. No, the silly creature flung open the casements! I jammed her silks into my mouth to muffle my cries; I knotted them clumsily around my arms and legs to restrain my thrashing. I wept, for this was going so wrong, so terribly wrong. She shed her costume as easily as one passing from shadow to sunlight, and for a moment I forgot my danger. She was perfect, achingly perfect. Her nipples were like bold bosses on the shields of conquering heroes. For calling her rump porcine, I could have torn out my tongue and ground it under my heel.

  Now I felt like a carpenter whose hammer conceives the notion of beating him to death. Irony is the hammer of my craft, and it turned on me and savaged me as she picked up a book from the bedside table and snuggled down with a smile of anticipation to resume reading it. It was a volume of my own tales.

  She did not trouble to cover herself against the unseasonably warm breeze from the windows. Staring at the fur-cradled center of her secrets was like staring at the sun, so my eyes lowered for a moment to the carpet. It held a confusing pattern of red and yellow strands. One of the red strands twitched, betraying its slimy thickness. The final alarm had sounded. The vileness of the odor redoubled, and I retched against my gag.

  The door to the hall opened.

  “Who are you? Leave at once!”

  Blinking away my tears, I saw that my companion—or so Lord Nefandiel had thought him—had entered the room in his demon’s mask. Was it a mask? If so, it was most cunningly made. Cobwebs on his garment writhed, they seemed connected to those in the rug, just as mine were. I had never before seen these strands on one of my supernumeraries. But I had never retained consciousness for so long, either, not after all the usual warnings, perhaps because I was struggling so hard to contain myself.

  That a man in my position should try to rescue a woman from an intruder was ludicrous. That I might learn anything from him, when I was about to fall down in convulsions, was stupid. These motives nevertheless drove me to step out of the wardrobe.

  At that moment my double vision assaulted me. Superimposed upon the door to the hallway was the open door to the wardrobe. I saw Vulnaveila’s beauty from two angles at once, and you might think this was a spy’s dream come true, but it frightened and sickened me. I saw myself through the intruder’s eyes, and him through my own, at the same time.

  Vulnaveila hurled my book, and her aim was good, it struck squarely between the eyes, but the result was nightmarish. The head split and melted aside as a monstrous growth erected. The neck metamorphosed into a tubular creature, a pale worm, whose red mouth sucked and slurped at the air as it writhed.

  I shrugged out of my makeshift bonds, but she and I could only watch as the prodigy elaborated itself. The neck swelled, subsuming the man beneath it, and his garments, too: black and orange swirls on the pale hide suggested his clothing, a distorted eye and a cluster of unformed fingers recalled the man on the upright worm. It bloated to impossible size, arching, its bristly hump brushing the ceiling and its mouth poised over her head. Tendrils squirmed in that edentulous maw, their obscene red shading to an even viler purple.

  Crystals of drool spattered her perfect body, and this broke the spell. As she tried to scrub them from her flesh,
she screamed.

  I have witnessed executions that I would hesitate to describe in one of my tales, botched executions whose cruelty and duration exceeded anything envisioned by law. Living as I do in an unfashionable section of the city, I sometimes hear citizens assaulted by thieves, degenerates, or religious fanatics. I am not unfamiliar with screams of pain and terror. Never have I heard a scream quite like Vulnaveila Vogg’s. It was not loud, it was muted by her rising gorge, but her gagging cry conveyed more fear than a full-throated shriek.

  Weakling and pervert though I be, I am still a Vendren, heir to the Insidiator, and I had my sword. What a happy tale this could have been: my quirk justified, the monster slain, the woman mine. Oh, for the pen of Feshard Thooz! But my trade is in that foulest of wares, truth. I am no sworder, whose weapon is part of his hand; my tiger-hilted rapier is only a social ornament; and with my eyes locked on the unfolding horror, I failed to find it when I groped for it.

  In that moment of unforgivable clumsiness the worm struck: the mouth descended, capping her head and shoulders, while the tendrils clutched and probed her in unspeakable ways. Kicking and squirming, she was lifted from the bed.

  The monster contracted itself to a fat barrel as it held her, flailing legs up, and swallowed her by steady degrees, through a loathsome alternation of stretches and compressions. The shape of her body remained visible, as in a crude rendering of wet clay. Abrupt bulges and dimplings in the flexible monstrosity suggested that her struggles never ceased. The sucking and squelching were intolerable.

  I was helpless. Her splendid feet had vanished, and with their disappearance an immovable weight fell on my soul. If the worm had attacked me next, I could not have moved. Not fear, but a conviction of total futility, immobilized me. The fit came on me at last. My next memory is of striding through darkness toward my home.

  * * * *

  I buried myself in my office and my work. The servant I had bribed would talk, his testimony would link me to the missing woman—but nothing happened as two weeks passed, then three. I had just begun to breathe more easily when a young officer from Never-Vanquished appeared at my door. His expression alarmed me until I realized that a scar had set his mouth in a permanent sneer.

  Then I looked into his cold eyes, and my alarm returned.

  The usual visitors sent me by the jokers upstairs are silly matrons, doddering simpletons, callow youths. I knew that this capable young man with his hand on his sword had not come to chat with me about ghosts, fairies or flying ships.

  Over the centuries, my office has become the final resting place for rubbish from the floors above: tax forms, trial records, thumbscrews and gibbet-irons. Bracketed on the wall was one of the two-hand swords that Death’s Darlings wield, or at least wear, called a manqueller. I doubted that anyone could actually use such a large and heavy weapon. I nevertheless rose from my writing desk and drifted toward it, knowing that I stood no chance against him with rapiers.

  “Sir, I want to ask you about my betrothed, Vulnaveila Vogg,” he said.

  I knew him. He had changed his appearance, as he always did, and was no longer short and old, or bald. His hair was long and wild, like hers, like the woman he had devoured. He was my nemesis, he was the worm.

  I pulled the manqueller from the wall with a great scraping clang and spun with it, nearly overbalancing. Contrary to my belief, it could be used, and with great effect. It split him right down to the wishbone. No worm burst out, foiled by my cleverness: only an explosion of the distasteful fluids and solids one would expect from a split man.

  After cleaning my office as well as I could and dragging my victim to a niche where no one would ever think to look, I rode all night and half the next day. Mother! She knew, and I would make her tell. The inn where I first stopped had no fresh horse immediately available, so I drank myself senseless. I needed to forget the peddlar who trailed me.

  The green mountains around Crotalorn gave way to farmlands, flatlands. I remembered horses, carriages, ferries, and I remembered mountebanks and pilgrims and mercenaries who seemed to follow me, but none of them clearly. I think I killed another man on my journey, a mendicant monk whose persistence grew suspect.

  I rode at last in dark streets cut from the black rock of the underlying hill. “Witch-cursed,” Feshard Thooz would call it, “demon-haunted” Fandragord, and he would be right. When the Sons of Cludd occupied the city, it is said, you could not see your hand before your face at noontime for the greasy smoke of burning sinners, and I suppose many of them cursed it as they burned. As for the demons, they are the Vendrens and Fands, not at all like the polite folk you meet elsewhere, but always ready to avenge a long-cherished insult against their great-great-grandfathers with a riot or a murder. It is a dismal and dangerous place, and I had rejoiced to be free of it, but I was home.

  “Astri!” my mother shrieked with delight, which moderated as she took a second look. “What on earth have you been doing to yourself? And what is that for?”

  The manqueller was strapped to my back. It is terribly heavy, yes, but effective.

  “I am a Vendren, am I not?”

  She accepted that answer with a wry smile as she drew me into the great hall. Pale servants and slaves drifted along with us, attentively lurking. I scanned them, wondering which one she would pick as “my companion,” but I could not tell.

  “Am I not?” I repeated with heavy emphasis.

  She studied me quizzically. The gray streaks in her hair suggested a young woman’s whim, effected with dye. Instead of answering, she batted her eyelashes and giggled, but I had steeled myself against her usual stratagems.

  “Years ago—” My prepared speech was interrupted by her calls for food and drink, a bustling of underlings, my fussy placement at the head of the table.

  “Years ago, I spied on you and father—”

  “Oh, Astri, that’s forgotten.”

  “Fangs of the Goddess! I have not forgotten it. It was wrong, I regret it, but it happened, and my father left us. Why? Where is he? Did something kill him?”

  “Something?”

  Imagine my difficulty. I wanted to say: “When I lost consciousness, did someone enter the room, transform himself into a giant worm, and eat my father?” Fandragord boasts one of the largest and least enlightened lunatic asylums on earth. She used to take me there on holidays as a child. Although deploring the popular sport of throwing refuse at the inmates, she had been unable to resist hurling a few eggs at a common madman who claimed to be our grandest ancestor, Vendriel the Insidiator. Would she come and throw rotten eggs at me?

  I hit upon a saner but perhaps even more pointed question: “When I was a child, why did you never tell me the old fairy tale that every other child knows, the one about the Vendren Worm?”

  “I never told you any such stories, Astri. Don’t you remember how they frightened you, when a playmate or a foolish nurse told them?”

  The hall was full of cobwebs, most of them real. But some of them were mine. And some of them—that glistening strand on her left breast—were hers.

  “Mother!” I cried. “Tell me....”

  “Do you have the feeling that you are not alone, Astri?”

  I sprang to my feet and kicked back my chair. Her pale servants had grouped around us like a fairy-ring, so symmetrical, so neatly spaced; and as she spoke, each of them simultaneously spoke her words.

  The foul worm writhed forth—but a different worm from the one that had eaten Vulnaveila. Can a monster be elegant, a horror beautiful? They can, for I marveled at these qualities in its swaying posture and in the complex pattern and colors of its verminous hide. I drew my manqueller, but I could not strike, for the creature squirmed from the dissolving body of my mother.

  “What are you?” I screamed. “And what am I?”

  “I am your mother,” the pallid chorus around me said in duplications of her tender voice, “and you are my beloved son, who goes by the name of Asteriel Vendren among the apish flocks we tend. Cast
off that ugly guise, cast off your false knowledge of the world, and embrace me at last as—”

  I remember these words now, I can read them on the stone of my heart, but at the time I felt them only as the bites of the stone-cutter’s chisel. They were meaningless, they pelted me like hail, these words in the voice that had once crooned me to sleep, and would you blame a man in a hailstorm for shielding his head with his hands? The same sort of unthinking impulse sent the manqueller in a great whirring arc that began at my heels and ended deep in the wood of the table. Midway through that arc swayed the lovely abomination: swayed, then tumbled in two segments.

  What had I done? I think I asked this question aloud, and it instantly received more answers than I could grasp. The chorus of attendants jittered in erratic circles, their skin blackening and bubbling, their voices a discord of wheezes and whistles. The halved worm tried to transform itself into my mother, but failed in increasingly more ghastly ways. Her face, bloated beyond human proportion, would be split by the feeler-crawling maw of the worm; the legs would knot and coil; the breasts would swell and burst, spattering a vile fluid before reforming and swelling again. Its death agonies sucked up flooring-blocks that ten men could not have lifted and crushed them to gravel. Ancient armor, which no sword ever dented, racketed through the hall in tinkling shards as it was splintered by a flailing worm-tail or a giant mother-hand.

  I could not flee. I was surrounded by a heaving ring of pustulence that had been the bodies of the servants. Pimples constantly rose in the mass, bursting into holes that vented unspeakable odors. It seemed no less dangerous than the worm, and I could not bring myself to wade through it. Instead I struggled to wrench the manqueller free from the table and strike again.