The Throne of Bones

by Brian McNaughton

  To his further chagrin, he learned that feathers and trinkets and leather straps are poor attire for desert travel, and that death grants no immunity from sunburn. It tore his heart to see his favorites redden and blister, while their cosmetic plasma jellified in the cruel rays and sloughed off to reveal missing parts, moldy wounds and bare bones. He saw himself as the toy of an ironic demon: cursing and beating the mule on its reluctant way, waving off rot-crazed flies and slashing at bumptious vultures in the remorseless sun, while his remaining slaves took their ease under books and blankets in the back of the cart. As this close confinement accelerated their ripening, even his zest for their aroma faltered.

  The Cephalune Hills bulked black against a feverish boil of a sunset when the exile at last stood at the foot of the cliffs. While he scanned the furtive hearthfires for a tomb that would suit his domestic tastes, an old corpse dropped from the heights to land before him with a crackling thud. He took this for the best of all conceivable omens.

  * * * *

  Angobard the Fomor believed that he might die among the tombs, but he would do it in comfort. He chose a dry and spacious chamber near the top of a cliff and spent the afternoon casting out the debris of earlier squatters and sweeping the dust of centuries with a besom of briers. He believed the job well done, and was brewing an infusion of hallucinatory tubers to while away the evening, when a persistent notion that he was not alone made him bound up the three steps to the massive sarcophagus that dominated his new home. It vexed him to find it occupied by the leathery body of a hermit. Knowing his end was upon him, he had combed his hair, modestly arranged his greasy goat-skins, and laid himself out in a posture of regal composure.

  Angobard would have left this dead wit in peace, but he wished neither to share the tomb nor to search the dangerous cliffs in darkness for another. Already the red wolves of the hills were tuning up a chilling antiphony, so over the side went the desiccated lich, but not without a brief prayer to Uaal for its eternal rest.

  Cleansing his nostrils with the steam rising from his tea, he turned his thoughts to Paridolia. Mere memories wearied him. He had taken to grinding his teeth and snarling when they returned to plague him. A drug-induced vision, fresh and vivid and speaking new words, would be almost as good as his lost love herself; or so he hoped.

  “Love,” he laughed. Love was for boys, for poets, for fools; and although he was quite young, had been known to scribble verses, and had risked his life against seasoned killers in the fighting-pits, he would have excluded himself from those categories.

  Well, fool, perhaps. No one else would have jumped at the chance to earn a few silver fillies by fighting at a private party, where spectators always demanded more than the grunting and clanging, climaxed by a splash of chicken’s blood and a groveling surrender, that satisfied the public. That it was to be a wedding-party should have warned him off. Only the most frivolous and decayed aristocrats would pollute a sacrament with the deaths of men like himself.

  Second thoughts came only when he awaited his turn to perform, sharing an anteroom jammed with lunatics passing for clowns, Ignudo snake-baiters, and acrobatic eroticists from Sythiphore. To the pain of such companions was added the torture of advanced music from the banquet hall, where it sounded as if a giant bronze statue were shrieking and stamping its hollow feet under the assault of chanting imps armed with drills and chisels. He was almost grateful to his chosen opponent, a cannibal from Orocrondel, for tracing the connection between effeminacy and red hair like Angobard’s, and recommending to the other entertainers the gustatory delights, which he soon expected to savor, of caponized white meat. Such gibes focused generalized irritation into a specific itch to braid love-knot’s from one man’s bones.

  At last it was their turn to burst into the room, the Oroc mouthing some gabble and savaging the air with his spear while Angobard whirled his sword into a blurry disk that hovered about him like a guardian spirit. From drunken boredom, the wedding guests bayed for blood; the groom, a lump with bulging eyes and a moist, drooping underlip, too drunk or lazy to bay, impatiently wriggled.

  Angobard sprang, meaning to sever the haft of his opponent’s spear and then his head with a pair of strokes, but the haft was colliding with his chin, or so he supposed it must have been as he goggled from his supine position at the man about to kill him.

  The Fomor came to himself and rolled aside just in time to avoid the spear-head as it struck the floor with a strangely hollow ring. The frenzied howling of the spectators, not bored at all now, seemed to echo down a well. He slashed at the Oroc’s legs, but the savage avoided the strokes as nimbly as a child skipping rope while trying to set himself for a fatal thrust. Fully restored at last, Angobard scuttled away crabwise and was about to regain his feet when a kick to the groin undid him.

  Given his injury, he almost accepted the feminine shriek that pierced the universal roar like a bell as his own, but it couldn’t have been, for he was unable to breathe, much less scream. The voice was so clear, so pure that he was compelled to turn his eyes even from the toothy grin of his own doom. Just as he had heard one voice in the din, so he saw one face in the crowd: in which the formless desires of his youth found form. She might have been a silver statue in an ape-cage.

  “Don’t kill him!” she cried to the pile that was the bridegroom. He gave a half-wave, as if his wrist were unbearably heavy. If this was a signal for mercy, it came too late. Angobard saw his death-blow arrive. Gallant to the end, as Fomors are expected to be, he offered the goddess an ironic smile and mouthed, “Had I lived....”

  * * * *

  He didn’t die, but that was not at all apparent to him when he woke. Not even the questionable vintages that he was wont to pour down his throat by the two-handled urnful after a night’s fighting had ever scoured the brains from his skull and replaced them with a bundle of spikes that threatened to burst through his forehead if he dared to move. The enormous throbbing in his groin suggested that he would henceforth need a bag to contain the pulp of his manly parts. He had heard gossip lately about the cantrips of a foul necromancer, and he suspected that his corpse had been imperfectly revived by that villain.

  “How do you feel?” the goddess from the ape-cage said at his bedside, and he promptly answered, “Fine!”

  She laughed: a stylized, birdlike laugh that noblewomen were taught to perfect. However much it enchanted him, he was unable to keep from wincing as its crystal shards abraded his vertebrae.

  Blinking back tears, he forgot the pain. The thin, straight nose, the strong jaw, the downward-sloping eyes, the slim delicacy of a figure that was yet voluptuous: these so plainly asserted her place in the grandest aristocracy of the Frothoin that the tattoo overflowing her left breast, the dragon of the Great House of Fand, was superfluous. Her every gesture and inflection resonated with a thousand years of culture, of privilege, of fabulous loves and legendary deeds; and, a small voice tried to warn him, with an equally ancient heritage of monstrous atrocities.

  * * * *

  It didn’t surprise him that Lady Paridolia was the bride whose nuptials he had helped enliven, nor that the heap of ordure who had spared him was her husband, Lord Phormiphex. A dozen times a day his brain was replaced by dizzying gas, just because he happened to see her husband whisper in her ear or touch her hand. The cure for his malady was obvious, and he tried again and again to take it. “I must go,” he would say, and she would say, “Please, don’t go,” and her words would bind him to their palace with another golden chain.

  Having recovered from his beating, he fell into a lackey’s role. His duties included shoving common people out of her way when she visited the shops, sparing her the effort of carrying the flowers she picked and applauding when, with endearing ineptitude, she fingered the clavier.

  He tried hard not to picture the couple making love, but his unruly mind frisked toward that filth like a puppy. Convinced that most positions would prove impossible for his patron, he was tortured by a persistent visi
on of Paridolia’s lithe body bouncing astride the tiny apex of rigidity on a rippling, gurgling mass of amorphous pallor. He wondered how much it would hurt, and for how long, to fall on his sword.

  * * * *

  As she did every night, Paridolia crept into his bed. Even though he was dreaming, Angobard knew that she would soon become a wad of bedclothes, and that he would wake in solitary besmirchment. This was strange knowledge to have in a dream, and he took advantage of it by racing with brutal haste against his banishment to the real world.

  “Oh!” she cried. “You hurt me!”

  “I hurt myself,” he gasped.

  None of this made sense. He should feel no pain in a dream, nor pleasure: either sensation would normally have woken him, but he dreamed on. Neither did it make sense that Paridolia, the loveliest woman that had ever enchanted the earth with the imprint of her pretty feet, should have remained untouched, even by so sodden a husband, after two months.

  “It doesn’t really hurt all that much,” she said. “You don’t have to stop on my account. You may proceed. Go on. Please?”

  He braced himself up and stared at her, shining in the moonbeam that fell through his window. The black pools of her dark-adapted eyes gave her beauty a touch of the weird, but this was no dream.

  “Enu!” he cried, not as an idle oath but a heartfelt prayer of thanks to his Goddess, who in turn reminded him to be gentle and granted him the self-control to persevere for a few more precious strokes.

  Even so, it was over too quickly. “If I had known—”

  “I didn’t know, myself. My husband—”

  Conjured by that vile word, the ogre himself squeezed from behind an arras like a colorless maggot from a shroud.

  “Well done, my boy!” His chuckle had never so closely resembled the eructations of a clogged drain. “Get off now, please, and let me have my turn.”

  All the pain and rage and shame came later. At the moment, the Fomor coolly pondered which one to kill first. Since it was Paridolia who had so cruelly betrayed him, she should suffer her terror longer. But in the time it took to wring the fat man’s neck, no time at all, he had relented. Killing her might provoke the wrath of Enu, who had formed her so perfectly, but who had neglected to grant her the decency of a reptile.

  “I loved you, you stinking whore!”

  “You don’t understand—”

  “I understand. Oh, I understand! A show for your husband.”

  He snatched up his sword. He meant to run, and his sword was the only possession a Fomor valued. Misunderstanding his intention, she screamed, and she was still screaming when he leaped onto the bed beside her and through the window.

  * * * *

  And so Angobard sat alone in a derelict tomb, courting a vision of the love that still obsessed him. When a bony hand fumbled out of the darkness to grip the threshold, and the hermit’s corpse that he had heaved out of his new home pulled itself into the light and staggered toward him, he merely glared at it.

  The drinker of moonspite-root who would avoid such horrific visitations must fast and purify himself, and this he had omitted. He had taken the drug in haste and selfishness. Its tutelary demon was exacting payment.

  “Go away,” he said, dashing the hot drink at the hallucination.

  Now this was odd: instead of flying through the vision, the tea splashed to a stop in its face and ran glistening over its cracked lips. A blackened hook that might once have been a tongue creaked out to scrape the droplets. The corpse cast a convincing shadow across him, and its odor was persuasive. Even before his mind could sort the evidence, Angobard’s body knew that he faced a real threat, for the fine hair of his head rose weightlessly. He sprang to his feet and swung his sword.

  Among the Fomors a few sworders are fabled to have mastered the Thunder of Ar, purported to divide an opponent in eight pieces before the first of them hits the ground. Angobard had never imagined he commanded this skill. He was astounded to realize that he had destroyed the revenant with a flawless demonstration.

  Instead of bloody sections, it exploded into flakes of parchment and scraps of bone, but mostly into a cloud of yellowish dust that hung in the air for a moment, during which moment Angobard could have sworn he heard a ghostly sneeze and a thin complaint about a draft. He paid no mind to this, for other shapes were hauling themselves through his door.

  He feared that the Tribe of Fand had tracked him down to avenge the murdered lord, but now he saw that the border guards from the Land of the Dead had come to welcome him. That they were mostly females, primped and painted in ghastly seductiveness, suggested the fearful explanation that he had fallen victim to the wrath of Enu. He had called his love a stinking whore, which she was surely not, and the Goddess had undertaken to show him precisely what those words meant.

  “Ar! Ho! Uual!” he roared, calling on the masculine side of his pantheon to counter his female damnation, as he attacked in a frenzy of terror and despair.

  His blows were prodigious, they would have hewn armor, but they were unnecessary: he was carving meat that shed its bones as if it had simmered all week in a stock-pot. But he was too frightened to be cautious, and his sword whipped through his opponents to clang and spark against stone walls until his arms passed beyond agony to numbness.

  Worst of all was the way these corpses took their dismemberment. An epicene cadaver that he had bisected and bifurcated and blasted with his wheel of steel lisped that it had thrown its back out. A severed head complained that it had slaved all day over its hair, “And now look what you’ve done!” What could he do with such foes?

  His sword shattered against the sarcophagus, and with it all his courage. Whimpering and shrieking, he clawed the walls for an exit that he knew did not exist. He could only sob when a squirming weight of filth heaped him. The mass bore him down until his splintering ribs pierced his lungs. As a final indignity, he was neither torn nor bitten, he was fondled, caressed and loathsomely penetrated. He was forced to take a last kiss from lips that worms had pricked.

  * * * *

  Anyone who might have rejoiced in Mobrid’s exile to the wilderness would have been annoyed to see how well he took it. Allowing for the complexity of his wickedness, he was a simple man. A cave in the Cephalune hills was as much home to him as his palace in Fandragord, as long as he had a few choice books, some obedient corpses and his degenerate imagination. When he bothered to look at the blank blue sky or the crystalline profusion of stars framed by the door of the tomb, they pleased him neither more nor less than the clutter of chimney-pots he would have seen from the window of his studio back home.

  He was unknown here, too, and for the first few days fellow expatriates would come calling. Later these callers might be seen fetching water for his bath, gathering sticks for his fire or lying in wait with preternatural patience to welcome new company.

  Mobrid was an artist, and such impromptu homicides and resurrections meant no more to him than an out-to-lunch sign, hastily scrawled for the door of his studio, would have meant to a master-painter like Omphiliard. He reserved his genius for the restoration of his two masterpieces, a female pit-fighter known as Aryana Axkiller and a beautiful youth called Syssylys.

  The latter had been the favorite of the Apricant of Fandragord. That princeling-priest had decreed, after his ward’s mysterious death, that all statues of the Sun God have their heads sawn off and replaced with likenesses of his late incarnation. The decree provoked a minor religious war that ended with the restoration of the statues’ heads and the removal of the grieving priest’s. The monstrously extravagant sepulcher of the youth remained a shrine for heretical pilgrims, however, who would have been outraged to learn that his adored corpse had for some years been lounging about Mobrid’s palace, communing with a looking-glass and complaining of boredom.

  Aryana’s original death had disordered her leonine body, and Mobrid’s repairs had dissolved in the desert sun, but as a better fighter dead than Angobard alive, she had suffered little from h
er posthumous scuffle. Syssylys’s death, effected by discharge of subtle poison from the golden dildo that Mobrid anonymously sent him, had left no blemish; he had spent the trip to the hills in a box to avoid recognition; but then he had pranced guilelessly into the Thunder of Ar. His hands had later twitched through the tomb in search of a looking-glass until Mobrid nailed them down, and his head had whined of boredom until the exasperated necromancer submerged it in a jar of honey, which persevered in bubbling pettishly.

  Mobrid envisioned a third masterpiece in the Fomor who had so inconvenienced him. As a dead man, he couldn’t be made to suffer, but Mobrid would wrench as much pleasure from him as possible when he had been revived. He could set him to fight the ferocious Aryana every night and spend every day repairing him. He had never determined how extensively a corpse could be patched with his plasma and retain a glimmer of life, but Angobard might provide the answer.

  Perhaps to the future distress of Fandragord, he had dumped most of his plasma down a sewer, retaining only a bottle of mothery slime. With the addition of pure spring water, the blood and bones of the now-superfluous mule, and the remains of his least prepossessing visitors, he soon had a new batch brewing in the sarcophagus.

  His work went well enough, but the weather of his soul suffered a shift. He slept hardly at all, misliking the swarm of phantom faces that waited to rush the breach between waking and sleep. He caught himself listening for intelligible words, and very nearly hearing them, in the piping of the wind among the vermiculated cliffs, in the flatulence of his plasma, in the shuffle of dead feet about the floor of the tomb. Even the howling of the wolves quavered on the brink of articulate speech, although it threatened to become the speech of apocalyptists.