When she heard the horse overtaking her, her thoughts were so twisted that she pictured it first as an animated collection of roasts and chops that could be singed hastily over a roadside fire, or even eaten raw. It took a moment for its true significance to register. A horse suggested a rider who might help her; or harm her.
She remembered that she was alone in a desolate spot, and that her garments had shredded away in her long crawl through the tunnels. But she doubted that any man on earth would find her attractive now, scratched and bruised and filthy, still scented with the odors of the tomb. Even as she took heart from her ugliness, instinct made her comb her hair with her fingers and brush the dirt from her face.
The rider approached at a walk, giving her time to entertain misgivings as she spied from the contorted shadow of a cypress. The horse was big and rawboned, but the man was so tall that he suggested an adult clowning with a child’s pony. His great bulk was magnified by a leather coat with bronze scales, poor man’s armor. He was obviously a mercenary, bearing all the tools of his last questionable employment to his next one: a deadly man who knew no god or master, the sort who made her tingle when she read of them in the romances of Porpolard Phurn, but who gave her quaking chills when she saw one on a lonely road at night. Worst of all, he was outlandishly bearded and braided, as if he had just waded ashore for an orgy of murder and rape. Even if he understood her speech, her name and rank might only fuel his lust.
He still had not seen her, and she had a chance to study his face. Oddly, his features were not those of a foreigner, nor did they seem particularly cruel. Despite his savage guise, he looked less warlike than worried, as if he had more serious matters on his mind than ravishing the helpless. He looked old as her father, too, and that gave dim encouragement.
She called out: “Sir! You won’t believe what’s happened to me—I don’t believe it myself!—but I need your help, please, to return to the city and my home. My father is Lord Ruthrent, of the House of Fand, and he’ll reward you well if—”
He started violently at her first word, and his horse reared. His eyes clung to her as he wrestled inelegantly with his mount, and his first expression of shock never left him. His eyes stared wider, his jaw hung slacker, the more she spoke. Had he never seen a naked woman before?
Her mad rage crested again. Everyone was against her, no one could be trusted, they had all conspired to bury her. She hid her feelings and forced herself to extend her hands in supplication, well aware how enticingly this displayed her much-admired breasts. She took a hesitant step forward, stopping in terror and confusion when he drew a battle-ax from over his shoulder.
“Please, sir, I’m Elyssa Fand! I was buried—”
“As well you should be!” he roared, spurring forward, the ax whirling at his side like a wheel of moonlight.
She screamed even before the ax bit through her shoulder and parted one rib after another faster than she could have snapped her fingers six times at a lazy slave. She was wrenched forward, colliding with the wildly neighing horse, when he tried to retrieve his embedded bit. He mashed her face with his boot to tear the ax free.
“Sleithreethra!” she screamed. “Help me!”
He followed as she staggered back and dealt her a second stroke. She screamed at the sight of her severed quarter, twitching and jerking in the dust before her. She felt no pain yet, but she had heard that this was not unusual to even the most gravely wounded. What puzzled her was her failure to die.
Since she still lived, since she had one hand, since she was a daughter of the Dragon, she rushed at him and gripped his cloak, hoping to unhorse him. She never saw the third blow coming, but the moon and the festive courtyards of the city tumbled crazily, and she knew, before losing consciousness at last, that he had chopped off her head.
II
Crondard Sleith glanced uneasily from one part of the cadaver to another until all three had stopped squirming. It seemed to be dead, but he had no wish to get down and verify this.
He permitted himself to breathe again, even to laugh. As he was still shaking, the laugh sounded far from hearty, and he cut it off.
Some of the corpse’s flesh had eroded to reveal bones mottled with decay, but enough was left to classify it as a woman. Furred with moss and trailing streamers of skin, it had seemed at first to be a shaggy ape, shambling forward to intercept him with outstretched claws as it shrilled and gibbered. He had noted the blank holes of its eyes and nose at about the same time he had smelled it.
“Ar’s balls!” he cried at the memory of his terror, and he flung his befouled ax away in a reflexive gesture of disgust that he instantly regretted. His swordsmanship was indifferent, as several dueling scars testified, but almost thirty years in the Fomorian Guards had taught him how to handle a battle-ax: twirling it flashily was part of their drill. He laughed again, struck by the irony that this first victim of his ax had been already dead.
He found it some distance up the road. Looking back to make sure that the dim mounds of rotting flesh remained still, he dismounted and scrubbed the filth from the blade with gritty dust. His captain would have thrown a screaming tantrum to see him thus marring the mirrorlike surface, but his captain had been the first victim of Crondard’s sword. It had been a fair fight—more than fair, considering their relative skills as sworders, until Crondard had evened the odds by tripping the arrogant puppy with an upended chair, kicking him in the face when he tried to rise, and sticking the blade down his gullet while gripping his perfumed locks—but try telling that to the Lord Commander of the Fomorian Guards! Drawing on your captain, to say nothing of killing him, is punishable by torture and death. That the captain had ordered Crondard, as senior sergeant, to have every third man in the company flogged because someone had sketched his caricature in the latrine; and that he had spat in Crondard’s face and hit him with an ink-pot when he protested the order, would be no defense. Nor would it help his case if investigation revealed Crondard himself as the offending artist.
He shook off sweet memories of the captain’s last, plaintive gurgle and stared down the moonlit road. He could not swear to it, but the alignment of the three foul heaps seemed to have changed, as if they were creeping toward one another. He scrambled onto the nag and urged it to totter faster. He kept scanning the graveyard slope for other untimely strollers, but he resisted the impulse to look back at the one he had dispatched. If it yearned for its mockery of life fervently enough to reassemble itself, he wished it well. He was beyond reach of its faltering gait.
Welcome to Fandragord! He had heard about it all his life: scary tales for children are invariably set in that malefic city. “But of course,” his mother would say as she tucked him in after the last story, “such things can’t happen here.”
“Here” was Ashtralorn, where descendants of the Fomors, imported centuries ago as mercenaries, pretended that they were still hardy and guileless barbarians, although they had so enthusiastically embraced the local customs and women that they were not much different from the Frothoin neighbors they were always quarreling with. Those big enough, like Crondard, or fair enough to resemble their foreign ancestors found their way to the capital for careers in the Fomorian Guard. That once-fearsome regiment was now little more than a marching museum, a costumed choir that sang bloodthirsty songs in a tongue its ranks but dimly understood.
Although the songs could bring a tear of misplaced nostalgia to his eye, although his back hairs sparked when tales of the real Fomors like Shornhand and Deathmaker were retold, he thought of himself as a citizen of Frothirot, even more cynical than the natives. Nothing in his experience, and certainly not childhood fairy tales, had prepared him for the reality of walking corpses.
Ironically, he owed his un-Fomorian name to an ancestor called Liron Wolfbaiter, who had tracked the notorious ghouls of Crotalorn to their underground dens and exterminated them after they had dared to desecrate the tomb of the Great House of Sleith; or so the story was told, one which Crondard scoffed a
t. For that service, or for whatever it was he had really done, Liron and his descendants had been adopted into the Sleiths. The city of Crotalorn was a plain of ashes, the Sleiths were no longer strong or numerous, but Crondard wore the tattoos of that ancient Tribe.
If he scoffed at stories of ghouls, why should he accept walking corpses? He had often amused himself by browsing among the disputing philosophers in the capital’s Market Square, where he had been persuaded that even a young man’s eyes and ears can lie more outrageously than merchants or lovers, and his own sight and hearing were beginning to show the effects of long use. As he pictured himself trying to relate his adventure to Mantissus the Epiplect, the most mordant of those savants, he began to suspect that someone had made a fool of him. Perhaps highwaymen had rigged the corpse with wires as a way of stopping travelers. Since no highwaymen had sprung out to take advantage of his shock, pranksters were to blame. He decided he had behaved well. He had spoiled not only their joke, but their corpse.
“Liron is here, ghouls!” he shouted at the crumbling tombs on the slope. “Do your worst!”
The hollow echoes of his voice chilled him. He tried to pretend that he had kicked Thunderer by accident, but he did nothing to discourage its brisker wobble.
* * * *
Within the ruins of the city wall, the first inn he came to was called the Sow in Rut, but he had not expected elegance in the provinces. Shaking the gate of the adjacent mews and shouting did no good, so he went to hammer on the iron door of the inn itself. A panel shot back to give him a glimpse of light and the noise of a crowd, both unexpected behind a visored front in an empty street.
“What do you want?” The voice issued from an extravagantly eared head that blocked the light.
“What does anyone want from an inn? Food, drink, a bed, care for my horse.”
Silence followed, as if such unprecedented requests had stunned the innkeeper. At length he said, “Who are you?”
“Liron Wolfbaiter.” Crondard suppressed an ironic smile at his own, nearly automatic choice of an alias.
“A foreigner?”
“From Ashtralorn.”
“A foreigner,” the landlord stated as he shut the panel.
Before Crondard could pull his ax and demonstrate serious hammering, he heard a clatter of bolts and bars and chains. A boy emerged to take his horse to the mews, and the Fomor stooped through the door to a shadowed entryway, decorated with cracked and soiled frescoes of hunting scenes and the moldy heads of beasts. He paused to examine a mural depicting Vendriel the Good, whose surviving images were few. The sardonically-named lord seemed to be pursuing a whale with tentacles, although it could as easily have been a boar, for it was impossible to say where the artist’s work ended and a water-stain began.
The passage led to a low but extensive room where every eye was fixed on him: not so much insolently as apprehensively. He wondered if he had not chanced upon a gang plotting treason.
“We have a lord and his retinue staying with us, Lord Nephreiniel of Omphiliot.” With the snobbery that only commoners command, the innkeeper spoke the names with less engagement than a man flicking lint; a hairy vagrant from Ashtralorn should bless the luck that got him past the door. “Our best rooms are taken.”
“We can haggle about that later. Wine, now.”
Two tables near the door were vacant, and he made for the one in a dark corner, but a menace radiating from the darkness stopped him cold. As an amateur of philosophy, he would normally have defied the impulse to shun that corner, but his recent shock had earned him the right to indulge it.
“You don’t want to sit there,” someone called even as he turned to retreat.
The speaker grinned foolishly from a nearby table, where his companions tried to pretend they were thinking deeply about serious matters, though one of them sniggered his way into a coughing-fit. Crondard was tempted to flout the warning and take the corner table, probably the favorite of some locally notable brawler, but he resisted. A fight could entangle him with the police.
Ignoring the speaker and his friends, he took the table closer to the door and leaned his ax against the wall beside him. Chair and table had been designed for smaller men, and he knew that he cut an intimidating figure, but that hardly accounted for the pall he had thrown on the room. Some whispered behind their hands now, still staring. The landlord had promptly relocked the door. If this mob chose to rush him, he would never fumble his way through the unfamiliar bolts and bars in time to make a run for it.
Twenty years ago he might have taken on a dozen or so armed civilians, but the innumerable aches of his hard journey assured him that this was not twenty years ago. He vividly remembered all the trouble he had recently had trying to kill just one stunted pipsqueak of a captain. He glowered through shaggy eyebrows and bunched his wide shoulders. The gawkers pretended they never would have thought of staring at him.
“What’s the matter with these people?” he asked the innkeeper when he returned to fill a mug from a stone jar.
“The matter?” He gazed around in amiable bewilderment, as if this crew normally behaved like demonolators caught in mid-sacrifice.
Crondard drank. The frightening stories about the local wine were true, too, but he was thirsty.
“Have I intruded—” he started to ask, but something nipped his arm. He stared in speechless outrage at the oaf who had previously spoken, who had now sneaked up and pinched him.
“I think he’s real,” the oaf said, and everyone laughed.
Forgetting how sore and tired he was, forgetting that this man was a native in a crowd of neighbors, the Fomor exploded from his chair and slammed him against the wall. Suspending him off his feet by a handful of his shirt and still shaking with fury, he had second thoughts. The grin persisting on his rubbery face declared that he was a genuine idiot. Crondard was acutely conscious that his back was now turned to the brighter cowards who had probably egged him on. He had no choice, though, but to hold his belligerent course.
“Have you never seen a Fomor?” he demanded loudly enough to be heard by all.
“No, but I have seen nightmares while waking.”
Crondard turned with him and shoved him away. Pinwheeling his arms for balance, the fool swerved toward his companions and upset their table. Crondard took a step forward. They decided to laugh it off.
“This horse-piss must be better than it tastes,” he said, grabbing up his mug and draining it. Now that he had turned the joke against the innkeeper, everyone laughed more easily.
He wondered how a Fandragoran idiot should know that the Fomors, in their own tongue, were called Children of Nightmare. Looking at him now—his companions were making a show of cuffing him, to prove he had acted on his own—Crondard thought it unlikely that he should know even his name from one day to the next.
“What did he mean by that?” he asked the innkeeper.
His question was quiet, but the man answered to the room at large: “Don’t mind Fardel. As a boy, he fell in love with a cruel cow who repaid his devotion with a kick in the head.”
Even Fardel, delighted by all the attention he was getting, laughed at this. Crondard had no wish to further the landlord’s comedic ambitions, so he kept his questions to himself.
He dipped his thick forefinger in his mug and drew a line on the table to assist his meditations. Though perfectly straight, the line symbolized the ragged Zaxoin border. The bandits, religious lunatics and near-savages in the wild hills beyond it were subjects of the First Lord in Frothirot, but that was where fugitives generally fled to escape his long hand, or to die.
A cockroach scurried toward the line. He imagined it was Lord Frothiriel, Commander of the Fomorian Guard, hot on his trail. He took pleasure in squashing him with his fist. The innkeeper brushed the nobleman’s remains to the floor without a thought when he set down the assortment of sausages and chops that Crondard had ordered.
Hungry though he was, he stopped chewing for a moment, arrested by his view of
the departing landlord. The man’s ears were so large that they nearly qualified him as a freak, and Crondard had avoided staring at them, but he was struck by the fancy that they had subtly changed in shape. Fardel was gaping at the innkeeper, as if he, too, saw something odd. That put his own notion in its proper perspective. He forgot the landlord and his ears.
A hammering at the iron door even more insistent than his own made him grab his ax, half believing that his idle game had magically summoned Lord Frothiriel. It took him a moment to grasp that the innkeeper knew the person he scolded through the panel as he undid the redundant fastenings.
His relief was short-lived, for the breathless arrival began babbling about a naked woman who had just been found dead. This had to be his walking corpse. These provincials would be too stupid to realize that she had been dead for a year or two. He might go to the block for chopping up a cadaver. Perhaps the prank had been more convoluted than he imagined.
“Where?” Crondard demanded.
Terrified to start with, the man recoiled and seemed about to faint at the question, barked in his face by an uncouth stranger, but he managed to stammer, “In Grabgroin Alley, behind the Temple of S-s-s—”
“Sleithreethra?”
The newcomer’s head jerked assent as both he and the landlord made protective signs. Crondard returned to his seat and resumed mopping his plate with bread as others crowded around with questions. The places were unknown to him, but they had to be far from the lonely road where he had left the corpse.
The crowd thinned as drinkers rushed out to view the prodigy. As if his ill use at Crondard’s hands had made them friends, a phenomenon not unfamiliar to the former sergeant, Fardel paused by his table to ask, “Don’t you want to see the naked dead woman?”
“I prefer live ones.” He gestured toward the women at the rear of the room.
No child would have giggled more delightedly at the sight of coupling dogs than the halfwit did at his reply, and he kept repeating garbled variants to his companions as they left.
The Throne of Bones Page 36
