The Throne of Bones

by Brian McNaughton

  “New deaders more better, I says,” he grumbled. “Leave old bones for dogs, that kisses my ears less whelk-sarding stupidly.”

  An unplanned nap over the acid vintage did nothing to improve his temper or his timetable, and the sun had set behind the barrow before he reached it. The top was still washed with golden light, and the ascent was easy, for the witchgrit seemed reluctant to take root in the slope.

  That it was a human earthwork was now evident, but he doubted that the figure depicted was human. Apart from being three city blocks long, it was taller than a four-story building at its enormous chest, and the sculpted arms and legs showed certain anatomical anomalies. It was impossible at close range to determine whatever features might have remained on the eroded head, but it was definitely broader than human proportion would dictate, and quite neckless.

  At the head, which seemed as likely a place as any for the warlord’s crypt, he began prodding the earth with a stiff wire. His spirits revived; he could be seen by anyone who might be watching from the city, and it amused him to practice his craft in plain view for once, a feat worthy of the legendary Zuleriel Vogg. Perhaps it was his destiny to be a great tomb-robber like Zuleriel, and not a pilferer of trinkets that mourners thought not worth retrieving from their loved ones; or to become the antiquary he claimed to be, donating his less negotiable finds to the City of Fandragord. The local elders might reward his philanthropy with a title and the right to wear a sword.

  “Which would make them snippets think once before laughing on the way I speaks,” he muttered. “Fluting bunch of eel-riggers!”

  The sun had set, and a wiser course might have been to repair to the shelter of the oak, resuming work in daylight, but just then his probe hit a smooth substructure at a depth of four feet. It could have been marble. It could have been the burial chamber.

  His probing grew frenzied as he scurried to find an entrance, and he was soon rewarded by the unmistakable clink of metal. He took up his shovel by the light of a pregnant moon and began slicing the tough earth.

  Laboring like the melonhead of popular myth, who smiles while digging ditches or laying bricks all day without growing tired or thin, Yodeo at last uncovered an object that wiped the smile off his face. A smile is inadequate for a man who finds riches beyond imperial greed. He hooted maniacally and, though he had never known he was capable of dancing, danced on the panel of solid gold.

  Having collapsed on it, having kissed it and stroked it and whispered endearments to it, he began scraping earth from its limits. It was round, some three feet across, suggesting a trapdoor that would give access to the crypt. And if the mere door was gold, what riches lay beneath?

  Oblique moonlight and his scurrying fingertips enabled him to a make out a face embossed on the lid. It flaunted a portcullis of grotesque teeth that might have been the visor of a barbaric helmet. The perimeter bore a raised inscription whose characters defied his linguistic knowledge, admittedly limited. Nevertheless he was struck by a disquieting familiarity, not with the specific image or the letters, but with their arrangement on the disk.

  Yodeo Globb had always been cautious, but a painful hike in the sun, more than an hour of digging, a growling stomach and a galloping heart, all combined to break the lifelong habit. He took a crowbar and, while standing on one edge of the trapdoor, tried to raise the other. His screamed curses cited his own stupidity when the lid pivoted to drop him into black emptiness.

  He woke to pain and the most vile smell he had ever encountered in a career not characterized by sweet odors. He ejected the meager contents of his stomach, but this made him feel no better. In trying to raise his torso from a smooth, cold surface, he discovered that the impossibly heavy gold lid had fallen into the pit with him, crushing and pinning his legs.

  “Oh, mother!” he groaned. “Why for came your Yodi to this wicked, witchy city?”

  The answer was obvious, and it only increased his chagrin. Centuries of feuds and persecutions had taught Fandragorans to be the least inquisitive folk on earth. For that reason, it had seemed a likely place to ply his trade in peace; but for the same reason, no one would come looking for him. His only friends were drawn from a profession where memories are proverbially short.

  The cold moon shone directly into the pit. Reflected dimly by tarnished gold and the dead-white walls of his prison, it allowed him to examine the dome above. He saw a second irregular hole, still stoppered with a gold lid, on a line with the one through which he had fallen.

  Again he was struck by a horrid familiarity, but only when he had traced a third hole, below and between them, and beyond that a rack of tusks that beggared the aspirations of elephants, did he realize that he was lying inside a monstrous skull; and that the gold trapdoor that would hold him here forever was nothing but one of the coins traditionally placed on the eyelids of a corpse.

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  Vendriel and Vendreela

  Lord Vendriel had descended to the crypt to bid farewell, in that wicked man’s singular way, to his beloved mother: to bid her farewell for the last time, for even though he could evoke in her a glowworm-glint of life’s memory, her skin had begun to slip from her flesh and her flesh from her bones like a fowl’s, too long boiled.

  * * * *

  Many of the House of Vendren have ruled our land, and almost as many were called Vendriel, so they took epithets to mark one from another. That one called the Insidiator, when our island was beset on three coasts by the Thallashoi, struck each army in a separate stroke, hacked each into chips and cracked each chip to splinters. Some named Vendriel did well; none was good.

  But the Vendriel Vendren of whom I write was called the Good: so called with no hint of irony by anyone who prized his fortune, his sanity and his life; addressed as “Good Lord Vendriel” with no twitch of the lip or shift of the eye by anyone who feared the devastation of his household, down to his meanest slave’s unhatched nits.

  It was this Vendriel who built the New Palace, shunned since the ultimate metamorphosis of his great-granddaughter, Lady Lereela, although its construction is ascribed to her reign by historians less scrupulous than I. So black is the shadow cast by that Lady, last of the Vendren rulers, that it has leeched the blackness from the names of her ancestors. It is to restore the foul name of Vendriel the Good to its full foulness that I write.

  * * * *

  Ascending from the crypt to the gloom of the New Palace, where the heat and light of our city dare not intrude, Vendriel was embraced by his consort, Lady Ailissa. She quickly broke the embrace.

  “Good my lord, forgive me, but you smell ... odd.”

  Absently chinking a pair of teeth in his palm, he stared at her. She quaked to recall her thoughtless words.

  “My lady, you are dreaming.”

  She laughed and clapped her hands. The First Lady perceived that her husband, the New Palace and all within it, her parents and children and friends, the geography of our land, the history of our race, the wisdom of our philosophers and the folly of our fools, all the works of the gods, and indeed, the gods themselves, were products of her extraordinary imagination.

  “How complex!” (I think I am safe in saying that she was the only person who ever tweaked Lord Vendriel’s nose.) “How vivid!”

  She followed the subsequent elaboration of her dream with interest and, for a while, detachment. She could even congratulate herself—for she, too, was a Vendren—on the exquisite perversity of her fancy. But at last she willed to wake, she prayed to wake. When her screamed prayers ascended to a pitch and constancy that troubled Vendriel’s ears, ever sensitive, he woke her.

  * * * *

  The lady woke to know that she was a rat who had dreamed of being human. At a change of light and shadow, the flirt of a palm-frond, the fall of a pebble in a distant stone-clock, she would dash headlong for a hole, most often inadequate. If she remained conscious, she would bite anyone who offered help, how courtly and decorous soever his approach. Her successes with n
oble toadies emboldened her. She became a deadly menace in the kitchens.

  After she had savaged his concubine of the moment in a dispute over a plum pastry, Lord Vendriel ordered her confined to a bamboo cage. He patiently taught her to take nuts, drupes and bits of cheese from his hand without biting it. She even grew affectionate, but her constant chittering and nose-twitching became tiresome, so he directed that she be freed in a section of the dungeons antedating the palace: where, he said, among the cisterns, oubliettes and heaps of ancient bones, she would find congenial companions. She was seen no more.

  When the First Lord had been dead for five years and his enemies felt reasonably safe in whispering against him behind locked doors, they hinted that he had set out poisoned baits in those remote catacombs; which he had. But Lady Ailissa’s story has a curious sequel, and I shall relate it in due time.

  * * * *

  Having persuaded himself that any woman he loved would end by offending either his senses or his dignity, Vendriel the Good set out to create one who would be both incorruptible and uncritical. He was a master of the Lesser Art, the casting of enchantments. He sought now to master the Great Art, the unweaving and reweaving of the world’s web. At great peril he consulted with the spirits of earth and air, of fire and water. He knew something; he learned more.

  What price Lord Vendriel paid to gratify his desire, only a third-degree initiate into the worship of Sleithreethra, Goddess of Evil, could begin to understand. I, Squandriel Vogg, a mere sifter of facts, and one who would not set foot inside her Temple of Thought for all the gold skilliglees in Frothann, do not know the price; nor, I daresay, did the First Lord understand it.

  * * * *

  As Lord Vendriel’s studies progressed, an unknown distemper struck certain inmates of the New Palace. This or that courtling would wake to find that he had suffered a loss of weight, sometimes drastic or disabling, overnight.

  Some did not at once perceive this as an evil. We Frothoin tend to plumpness. But as they did in so many things, the court of Vendriel the Good defied nature and decreed by fashion that men and women should be lean, even cadaverous. Some victims thought the ailment to be the blessing of a kindly divinity, but few survived.

  As the afflicted sickened, however happily, and died, physicians were surprised to discover that the weight they had lost was not just fat, but muscle, bone and even vital organs.

  A stalwart young hero named Crespard, of the regiment Never-Vanquished, having died in his sleep, it was determined that his heart was missing. It had not been cut out. It had vanished.

  Istreela Fand, whose long legs had inspired sonnets, statues and suicides, leaped from her hammock one morning with characteristic zest to assure Polliel, the Sun God, that she still ornamented his view. Expecting the thud of her springy heels on the parquetry, she heard instead a thump, as of a load of wet washing flung down by a laundress. Thus she heard; what she felt is known now only to Oreema, Goddess of Pain. The bones of her perfect legs had been filched.

  Stranger abstractions from the riches of the court were noted: she who had laughed as readily as wind-chimes grew dour; she whose hair was midnight on the sea in one light, slickenside coal in another, yet in whose blackness Polliel could smelt bronze and strike gold, went gray as a sunless fog; she whose skin was old ivory washed with honey and kissed by the shadow of a rose appeared one morning white as bone.

  Fancies overwrought by these real horrors might have inspired reports of less tangible thefts. The critic Ailiel Fronn wrote that certain lines from Pesquidor’s Seeluriad, those describing the emergence of Filloweela, Goddess of Love, had gone unaccountably flat. The words were the same but the music had fled. Others professed dismay at a hitherto unseen insipidity in the erotic paintings of Omphiliard and the sensuous sculptures of Melphidor.

  Least credible of all, but believed to the point of general panic, was the assertion that the one perfect day of spring granted our capital city of Frothirot, when the steam of the rains has burned off but the parching of summer not yet ignited, that this perfect day, so beloved of poets and pubescents of the randier sort, and popularly known as Filloweela’s Birthday, had absented itself from the calendar for the past several years.

  * * * *

  The First Lord suffered with his subjects, although some said that his loss of weight and ravaged countenance were the natural result of neither eating nor sleeping. He kept to his chambers, tinkering with and muttering over an arrangement of crystal prisms, rods and balls that tended to fuddle anyone who gazed at it too long.

  During the general rash of thefts, the skull of his beloved mother, Lostrilla the Thrice-Damned, disappeared from the crypt, but no one dared report this to Vendriel the Good. Also, the two human teeth that the First Lord wore in a gold setting on a chain about his neck were no longer seen, but no one remarked to him on this, either. The only person who had ever asked Vendriel to explain the provenance and significance of these teeth, a silly courtier named Siriel Fesh ... but it would be unconscionable of me, in a work that may be studied by persons of tender years, even to hint at the doom of Siriel Fesh.

  Any minister, messenger or maid admitted to those chambers where Vendriel the Good had become a virtual hermit would later whisper of an inner room where an object lay beneath saffron silk: an object that seemed to grow from one visit to the next. They talked, too, of smells and scurryings and clandestine titterings, of shadows that fell where no shadows should fall. Those who defended Vendriel the Good—and almost everyone felt a pressing need to do so—argued that ministers and maids alike are given to fanciful gossip, that messengers tend to be excited and fatigued.

  * * * *

  Then Lady Vendreela appeared from nowhere, and all losses seemed restored. The lines of Pesquidor, the tints of Omphiliard, the curves of Melphidor, even the lithe legs of Istreela Fand: such losses lost meaning with the emergence of the enchantress. Men and women did not merely adore her or desire her, depending upon individual proclivity, they wept at the sight of her.

  Birds fluttered from the trees, not to take tidbits from her hand, but to delight in its touch. The green asp, deadliest mite in creation, slithered up to her lap and begged to be fondled.

  One day a tiger padded boldly through the Sassoin Gate and up the Avenue of Bruised Jasmine, emptying all adjacent streets. The party of hunters and soldiers organized to deal with the monster found it squirming on its back, purring and playing with its toes at the feet of Lady Vendreela, to whom it had come to pay its obeisances. She waved the mighty men away with a laugh that enslaved them forever and escorted her stripy admirer back to the jungle.

  It was given out that Lady Vendreela came from Ashtralorn. Anything at all may come from that wild city in the northern hills, but few Vendrens are found there; yet she was said to be a daughter of that ancient and evil House. Those who argued that she was patently a Vendren, whose long head, slanted eyes and sharp canines recalled Lostrilla the Thrice-Damned to the very oldest courtiers, when she was a young girl and still known as Lostrilla the Parricide, were actively discouraged by Lord Vendriel from pressing this line of argument.

  When the Elders of the House questioned the First Lord on her suitability as consort, he presented them with her genealogy in fifty scrolls, transcribed in the quirkish dialect and orthography of the north. The Elders gave conditional approval; but if any Vendrens be left unburned after the Cluddite Protectorate, they may still be trying to puzzle out those scrolls.

  Lady Vendreela became First Lady of the Frothoin. She had so won the hearts of all the people, whatever might have been whispered of her origin, that joy, long confined during the reign of Vendriel the Good, burst upon the world like Filloweela’s Birthday. Vendreela displayed, however, one odd habit. Years passed, during which she showed an equally odd reluctance to age, before it became a disabling quirk.

  * * * *

  Never had Lord Vendriel heard the words, “I love you,” spoken with such fervor as Lady Vendreela spoke them. The birds, th
e asp, the tiger—minor miracles, for she charmed that evil old man himself. He knew that it was he who had lived all his days in a dream, to be wakened at last to beauty and love everlasting. Neither asked nor commanded, she did what he required. As he was now quite old, he mostly required her to look beautiful, gaze adoringly and keep quiet. Yet flame sometimes sprouted in the ashes of his days, and her flesh was grass.

  He would discuss affairs of state with her, marveling at her aptitude for arriving so promptly at his own, correct conclusions. One day he was explaining his policy for the pirates of Orocrondel, old allies grown irksome, when he detected an annoying harmonic in his voice; or more properly, perhaps, a false echo in his unreliable ears.

  Over the days this phenomenon became an obsessive nuisance. He heard the overtone in no one else’s voice, and no one would admit to hearing it in his. Like the panther of Mopsard’s fable, who was cautioned by the goat that his left paw always struck first and who consequently was immobilized by self-consciousness, Vendriel hesitated to speak. He feared that his ears had at last failed, if not his mind. Laconic by nature, he grew virtually mute, and even more terrible to those forced to approach him.

  As a master of the Lesser Art, he could have deluded himself that his faculties were unimpaired, but he had always prided himself on eschewing self-delusion. And he dared not cure himself by attempting the Great Art a second time.

  He instead consulted the court physician, who advised him by slow degrees and with infinite tact that the fretful harmonic was the voice of Lady Vendreela. She had always echoed his opinions; now she spoke his very words even as they fell from his lips. In a single, fatal lapse from tact, the physician compared that lady, the sole candle in Vendriel’s dark cosmos, to a very quick parrot. The First Lord spoke a few words. Flapping his arms and screaming nonsense, the physician hopped from the highest pinnacle of the New Palace, a very high pinnacle indeed.