The Throne of Bones

by Brian McNaughton

  His verses swerved into delirium when the cruel ninny was betrothed to another. The corruption that had always festered beneath his sunniest images tore off its mask as he raved of murder and suicide. Not just a beautiful man, not just a gifted poet, he was a genius, Meryphillia avowed, one who gazed even more deeply into the abyss than had Asteriel Vendren. She loved him, she worshipped him, and now that the incongruous object of his desire had shown herself an even worse fool than had been obvious, she timidly hoped for him. She hardly ate, she never slept, she grew so listless that rats began to eye her with an impudent surmise. She pictured her brain as crawling with busy ants, each ant a notion for declaring her love, until she could have smashed her skull to exterminate them.

  The full moon returned, but the poet did not. She fretted, pacing from the favored statue to the willow and back again. At last she broke the circle and loped to the main gate, to the very fringe of life and light. Springing atop the wall, she peered up and down Citron Street, then leaned perilously far to scan Hound Square, descrying no one but unremarkable stragglers and lurkers. So great was her concern for her beloved that the sight of her festively lit home, the first she had had of it since her transformation, gave her no slightest pang.

  The first note of a shriek told her she had been seen, but she slipped into the darkness so swiftly that it lost conviction and ended as an embarrassed laugh.

  She feared that Fragador had made good the threat of his latest poem and killed himself, but her fear was superseded by fearful desire. She had longed for union with him. What union could be more complete than to be the man himself?

  His grumbled asides had told her that he would be granted no impregnable crypt. She would raid his grave at high noon to beat the greater ghouls to his dear relics. Watchmen be damned! What finer way to end her existence than in the form of her love, to remember the pain of his death even as she saw her own coming, and saw it coming with his very eyes? No passion had ever been so fully consummated. It would cry out in vain for the immortalizing pen of Fragador.

  Fatigued, distraught, but now ever so dimly cheered, she found her way to his favorite tomb and lay down in the moon-shadow of the Goddess of Love, where she slept.

  She was woken by sobbing so bitter that she thought it must be her own. The fat and ruddy moon had decayed to a ghoulish disc above her. Rubbing her eyes, she felt no tears, but the sobs continued. It was he, and her joy nearly drove her to dash forth and embrace him before she thought what effect this might produce.

  “Ghouls!” he suddenly screamed. “Fiends and demons of the dark, attend me! Morthylla, come to me!”

  Before others could respond, she rose.

  “By Cludd!” he gagged, and half his sword appeared like silver lightning from its scabbard. In a like flash, she saw herself in his loathing grimace. A wheel revolved ponderously inside her, leaving something crushed. She crossed her hands to her shoulders and hung her head in suppliance.

  “I did call you,” he said after a long silence. “Your promptness startled me.”

  “Forgive me.”

  “Offense and forgiveness have no meaning, for meaning itself is nonsense. Therissa Sleith is no more.”

  “I’m sorry,” she lied.

  “You would be, of course. Not even a ghoul’s dream could penetrate the sepulcher of the Sleiths.”

  She looked up to protest this misunderstanding, but his face silenced and melted her. Something like wonder had crossed it when he saw her eyes. Her father had always praised them as her best feature, and now they were the most vividly yellow globes in the underground.

  “Are you really...?” he began. “No, it would be mad to ask if you are a symptom of my madness.”

  “You are the sanest man since Asteriel Vendren.”

  “Sleithreethra spare us from literate ghouls!”

  She shuddered. Not even a ghoul would speak the name of that Goddess in a graveyard at midnight, and certainly not with a laugh. He was indeed mad, and it thrilled her. No more to be held than a sob or a last breath, it burst out: “I love you!”

  He stepped forward boldly. “Come down from the tomb, then, Morthylla, and let us speak of love.”

  Her claws clicked with their shaking until they rested in his firm clasp. She whispered, “Don’t mock me.” She added, “And it’s Meryphillia.”

  Correction seemed to irk him, but he took it. “I have heard that a ghoul who eats the heart and brain of a person becomes that person.”

  “I have seen it.”

  “I mean no offense, but this restoration would have no added characteristics? No redundancy of teeth, no odor, no urge to laugh at odd moments?”

  She averted her misting eyes. “The personation is perfect.” She flared. “My odor offends you?”

  She was instantly sorry, having forgotten that her new face and voice translated petulance as demoniacal fury.

  “Please,” he said when he could speak again. “I meant nothing like that. A dead body, you know. You have an inner beauty, Meryphillia. I see it through your eyes.”

  “Really?”

  “Please don’t laugh, I’m unused to it.” She was unaware that she had laughed. He thrilled her by taking her hand in both of his. “Dear ghoul, I have acquired the key to the tomb of the Sleiths, where Therissa will be interred tomorrow. I wish you to do with her as we said.”

  “But that’s monstrous!”

  His look clearly told her that the word was inappropriate on her nominal lips, but she pressed on: “She would be just as she was in life. If she denied you then—”

  “Her parents denied me, her position denied me, her name denied me; never her heart. If she had but one hour, she might listen to her heart. If I could have a word with her, a look—dare I hope for a kiss?”

  A perverse impulse to refuse seized her. She desired him as she had never desired anyone, but the price he demanded, to transform herself into the sort of person her father and stepmother had wanted her to be, was too high.

  “Please, Meryphillia,” he murmured, and he shocked her by touching his lips to her cheek. She took the key he pressed into her callused palm.

  * * * *

  Near the hour of the tryst, she crept through the flowering precincts of the richest tombs with ghoulish stealth, which makes the hovering owl seem rowdy. Her ears were extended to gather the whispers of moths and the mutter of coffin-worms. Her nasal pits gaped to the fullest, so that each encrypted corpse around her, however desiccated by ages uncounted, announced its discrete presence: none more brightly than that of Therissa Sleith, its decay just a sigh beneath the salt tears and scented soaps of the servants who had primped her for the last time.

  No other ghouls blighted the air with their rancid breath, nor watchmen with their wine, but she crept nonetheless, horrified by a vision of the underground host bursting over her to fill the tomb of the Sleiths, ransacking bones inviolate for a thousand years and scattering Therissa’s shreds into a thousand greedy gullets. If that happened, she could never face Fragador. No, she would creep up from behind, fight down her distaste for unripe flesh, and eat him. Denied the looks and sighs and touches of his love, she would at least know him from the inside of his being.

  She rose to her full height only in the shadow of the doorway, where the terrible motto of Therissa’s tribe was incised beneath an image of Sleithreethra: WHO TOYS WITH US, SHE SHALL FONDLE. The brass key that Fragador had given her slipped from quivering fingers to clatter as loudly, it seemed, as the head of a watchman’s bill, nor could her scrabbling claws at once fit themselves to the human device. She was sobbing with frustration by the time she succeeded in juggling it up to the keyhole and jamming it in.

  The bronze leaves swung inward on oiled hinges. The chain to a gong in the tower had been cut by a watchman with a taste for Fragador’s verse and an even greater gusto for opium, who had been persuaded that the poet contemplated no unusual indecencies with the dead darling of Crotalorn.

  She was lovely, Meryphillia had to
admit when she had ripped the massive lid from the sarcophagus, especially now that the pink tinge of her skin had been replaced with hints of violet. The fatal twist of her head had been all but straightened; she could have been a sleeper who would wake with nothing to complain of but a stiff neck.

  She paused for a moment to admire the elfin nose, so unlike the assertive one she had worn, before biting it off. Uncoiling her razorish tongue, she slipped it in to shred the brain into manageable morsels. Dainty swirls of her smallest claw served to scoop out the eyes. She savored them with restrained whimpers of pleasure before proceeding to the large and tasty breasts.

  Therissa heard her sisters chattering as they returned from the regimental review of Cludd’s Whirlwind. It was their custom to tease the Holy Soldiers with inviting smiles and restless wiggles. The celibate warriors were charged to be on their sternest behavior, and the girls’ object was to make one drop his pike or, worse, raise his staff, offenses that earned the culprit a flogging and a night spent kneeling on pebbles. Why had Meryphillia never had such fun, never even thought of it? She almost wept for her wasted life before recalling that she had done it, as Therissa Sleith.

  Ripping down to bare ribs, she opened them like a book: the Book of Love. She gobbled the tough, lean heart.

  How that heart had leaped when, whirling at the head of the stairs to show off her bridal gown, Therissa had felt the hem snag her heel! The floor tilted, the ceiling spun, but she was spared from terror by the knowledge that this could never happen to her. Even if it did (and there could be no doubt now that she was plunging headlong down the stairs) she would suffer only inconvenient bruises. She pitied the chorus of screamers. She wanted to assure them that she was Therissa Sleith, whose youth and beauty were invulnerable...

  ...but who was dead.

  Meryphillia raged at the unfairness, the tiresome untimeliness. Most of all she regretted the graceless exit she had made, and right in front of her sisters, of all people. Examining these thoughts, she knew that the moment was upon her, and she rushed her meal. She had hardly started on the tangy kidneys when she glanced at her hand and was shaken by that mixture of emotions few other creatures can know.

  The sight of her own hand sickened her, its tiny, maggot-plump fingers so unlike the talons she had grown used to. At the same time Therissa gagged with loathing to see what her dainty hand clutched, what smeared her arm to the elbow.

  It took more than a moment to calm themselves. Therissa accepted her death more gracefully than Meryphillia did the alien will that made her wash in the wine and oil provided for a differently envisioned afterlife. Drying herself on an unsullied corner of her gown, Therissa scolded her for not having taken better care of it, for now they had nothing to wear. The ghoul was reminded of her stepmother.

  Therissa unwound the clattering bones of an ancient Sleith from their wrapping and swirled it around her. She succeeded in looking more stylish than Meryphillia once would have in her newest clothes.

  “I believe in making do,” Therissa said. “Even if I were a filthy ghoul, I’d make the best of it. And I don’t want to spend my brief resurrection moping in a smelly tomb, so let’s go, shall we?”

  Part of her wanted to linger over her unfinished remains, but another part refused even to look into the sarcophagus, and both were parts of the same person: who called herself, in her inmost thoughts, Therissa Sleith, but who felt an almost uncontrollable urge to laugh when she did.

  * * * *

  Fragador had sacrificed for it and fully expected it, but Therissa’s emergence from the tomb shocked him speechless. She tossed her hair in exactly that heart-stopping way of hers and gazed around the cemetery before spotting him in the shadow of a stone demon. When her face lit up, his heart woke like a sunrise choir of birds.

  “You’re not dead!” He laughed wildly. “I knew they had to be wrong, you ....”

  The pity in her eyes stopped him even before she said, “No, they were right. Nor am I entirely as I seem.”

  “Morella?”

  “Please get her name right. Her love for you makes mine seem shallow.”

  Love had brought him here, yes, but anger, too, anger with her for slavishly heeding the rules of society; anger with himself for breaking those rules by being poor, and a poet. She had planned to marry a man who had won a contract to build public conveniences for the city.

  “You can’t wear sonnets or eat odes,” she had said, “but you can build a fragrant palace from urinals.”

  In his maddest moments, he had wanted to resurrect her so he could strangle her. At very least he had meant to ask her, with a suitable flourish at the moon-blazing marble of her tomb, what she thought of her fragrant palace now. In the presence of wonder, however, spite was impossible.

  And there was that other to consider, that monstrous but magical being that animated her. In a strange part of himself, he loved her even more than Therissa. Unlike Therissa, she appreciated his art. She had even compared him to Asteriel Vendren, whom the dear, dead dunce had never heard of.

  “Meryphillia,” he enunciated clearly as he took her into his arms.

  * * * *

  Now that she had known the soft sighs and shouted transports of human love, Meryphillia lamented more bitterly than ever her exile to the underground.

  “Why are you crying?” Fragador asked tenderly.

  “Nothing. Dust in my eyes.”

  “That happens,” he said from the depth of his human wisdom and sympathy, and she wept all the more.

  “What if I was vain and frivolous by your absurd standards?” said the voice in her head. “I knew life and love and happiness. Now I shall know peace. Will you ever say such things?”

  She was unsure whether these were the words of the fast-fading Therissa or the words she would have put into her mouth. Whatever they were, they bit like truth.

  She rose before the transformation could become complete, unwilling to show her true form again to the poet and blight his memory of love. Turning for one last look, she found herself staring into the grinning face of Arthrax.

  “Now I can write poems for you,” he said. “We shall know what the darkness discovers—how’s that for a start?”

  The sight of him had speeded Therissa’s evaporation. Meryphillia scanned the necropolis with all her senses for Fragador, but he, too, had vanished. She demanded, “What have you done with him? Where is he?”

  “He contracted with two of us,” Arthrax said. “You, last night. Me, tonight, just before he drank poison.” He grimaced so horribly that even she retreated.

  She had learned from Therissa. No longer inclined to weep, she turned and smiled at the gaping, unguarded sepulcher of the Great House of Sleith. Far off she heard the cackling of creatures like herself born on the night wind, and for the first time she held back nothing as she joined in their laughter.

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  Reunion in Cephalune

  There is some truth in the folk-tale that the Cephalune Hills hide the way to the Land of the Dead. Over several thousands of years, an ancient race pocked the cliffs with tombs for its better-class corpses. Only the faded ghosts of murals linger to whisper of obscure triumphs, and the tombs are thinly peopled by grave-robbers who cherish the delusion that the richest burial-chambers have yet to be found, including that of Queen Cunymphilia, whose mention elicits smirks from responsible historians. Those who seek the Land of the Dead could find few guides more eager than the misfits of Cephalune to speed them on their way.

  It was here that the necromancer, Mobrid Sleith, fled when he had achieved such infamy that not even the folk of Fandragord could stomach him. The elders of his own Tribe were divided only on whether Mobrid could be more discreetly hidden away in a lunatic asylum or poisoned.

  Some would argue that restoring a semblance of life to the dead can enlighten the perplexed and comfort the bereaved, but even such liberal thinkers boggled at Mobrid’s practice of killing people for no better reason than to rev
ive them as his slaves. His theory that a cadaver can be made livelier by stoking its ashy lust was universally rejected, too, for the dead are by definition tireless, and some of the hired harlots and volunteer voluptuaries who helped further his research were injured or unhinged in orgies with ardent cadavers.

  Even more detested than either his theories or his practices, perhaps, was a vat of feculent slime whose sluggish bubbles popped and siffled in a dim corner of his studio. He boasted that this was a plasma of his own design, replenished with the waste products of his art, which could make the most grossly mangled corpse look better than new. This muck disappeared with Mobrid, and fanciful persons claimed that it transformed itself into a conveyance for his narrow escape: a pallid toad, some said, that he rode like a hopping pony, while others swore they saw him lofted above the city walls by an octopoid bat.

  In prosaic contrast to these tales, Mobrid fled under heaps of books and household furnishings in a plain mule-cart attended by his protégés. Although their manner was odd and their dress dictated by the necromancer’s fetishes, they passed unchallenged. This was, after all, Fandragord, and a cartload of rubbish accompanied by immodestly dressed and apparently drug-dazed whores and catamites was just more froth on the passing stream. In streets where garbage vied with dung and beggars to ravish the nose, only a nymph newly whisked from her pristine glade might have sniffed out their odor of graveyard disgorgement.

  Even for one steeped to his grizzled locks in horrors, as Mobrid surely was, the tramp through the thorny waste of Hogman’s Plain became a nightmare. Carrion crows and hyenas were not so easily fooled as the watchmen and busybodies of Fandragord. After a few tentative nibbles, they mounted a running attack on the corpse-herd’s flock.

  He could never relax his watch, for the dead cannot deal with anything new. When overtaken by disaster, a corpse can but try to match it to confused memories of life. Thus Mobrid, stupefied with exhaustion, ignored a dead woman’s cry, “The bacon is burning!” Recalling too late her mental limitations, he turned to see her torn to pieces by a herd of feral swine. A youth who fretted that he was “late for work” was staggering under the weight of a vulture on his shoulders as it gobbled his eyeballs. The necromancer was kept dashing from crisis to crisis with naked sword; but, having determined the nature of his companions, the impudent scavengers began to scrutinize his own credentials as a living man with the time-honored right to cow them.