The exodus had stranded a number of whores, some of whom eyed Crondard with listless surmise. For a place that was neither especially lively nor pretentious, the Sow in Rut boasted an unlikely wealth of flesh to let.
“Are they yours?” he asked when he was arranging for a room.
“They showed up to try their luck with Lord Nephreiniel and his hunting party,” the landlord said, “but to their dismay, his lordship is a virtuous fellow, and the young men who fawn on him appear to be equally high-minded.”
It dismayed him that he had picked an inn whose landlord enjoyed gossipy innuendoes, but it was too late to seek other quarters. He asked, “A hunting party?”
“I thought the boars of Hogman’s Plain might have drawn even you yourself from far-off Ashtralorn,” his host said. “I’m afraid I’ll have to put you over his lordship’s hounds.”
“I’m weary enough to share their kennel....” He forgot what he was saying as he happened to glance at the landlord. The furred ears of a jackass drooped to his shoulders, their junction with his head hidden by shaggy hair. If he was trying to get a laugh, his glum expression concealed it, nor was anyone laughing. To mention the ears, Crondard suspected, would make him the butt of some joke that the man regularly played on strangers. He deliberately ignored the bait as he continued, “Though maybe I can do a bit better.”
The girls who lounged at the rear of the room seemed innocent only of clothing. Apart from a scattering of transparent veils, their bodies were covered only by tattoos where one could decipher their trade and shop for specialties among a riot of floral designs.
He strolled among them, exchanging lewd banter, accepting playful slaps and punches as he felt the merchandise, but his attention soon fixed on the only one who ignored him. She stood slightly apart, untypically draped in a plum cloak that clung to a slim but large-breasted figure. Under her hood he glimpsed a cheek of porcelain delicacy and a curl of bluish-black hair.
“What’s your fee?” he asked, slapping her rump and liking what he felt, but recoiling in the next instant from a look that reflected not just anger, but concentrated hatred. At the same time he was almost awed by the aristocratic beauty of her face.
“Do you take me for a common whore?” she rasped in a high-born accent.
They had an audience of disgruntled sluts who resented her as an unknown intruder, probably a bored noblewoman playing at their trade. Crondard felt almost compelled to apologize, but for their benefit he said, “I don’t happen to have one, but I’ll take you for this,” and he tossed a silver coin at her feet.
Trapped in the flash of her amber eyes, he set himself for the sport of fending off her claws. But she joined in the laughter, as if making a quick decision to step back into her role, and stooped to retrieve the coin.
“Filloweela grant you’re not such a giant in every way,” she said with a grin.
Crondard called for someone to show him to his room. This provoked only a heated but whispered discussion between the landlord and his servants. The maids, then the stableboy, and finally a cook fetched from the kitchens seemed to be protesting their ignorance of the floor-plan.
“Do you know of another inn close by, one with fewer mad people in it?” the Fomor asked his companion.
“This one suits me,” she said.
“You’re mad, too, are you?” he said, and she smiled without amusement.
Fardel reappeared, made pale and very nearly thoughtful by whatever he had seen, but he brightened when the landlord gave him a lamp and pressed him into service as a guide.
“She was naked, all right, but someone had torn away all the good parts,” he told Crondard, who told him to shut up.
He risked a last glance at the innkeeper. Sagging against the bar, he fingered one of his ass’s ears fearfully, looking less like a frustrated joker than a soldier palpating his final wound.
Fardel guided them through a musty warren that amazed and oppressed the Fomor. Adjoining buildings had been connected in different epochs by architects who had shared only their ineptitude. Corridors changed level or direction every half-dozen steps, and no two floors followed the same pattern. They passed stairways and passages that served no visible rooms before ending at blank walls, although their carpets were every bit as worn as the one they trod.
Crondard stopped at one intersection and peered in disbelief down a hallway that even the New Palace in Frothirot would have been hard put to contain. It was frugally lit by only a few sconces, and the illusion of length might have been produced by mirrors, but mirrors of the necessary size and quality would not normally have been found in a cheap inn. The girl dragged him on before he had satisfied his curiosity, as it seemed that their dim guide might leave them behind.
The progress of the uncertain lamp made the shadows leap and gambol through this geometer’s delirium, and some of the stranger forms afflicted Crondard with the same unaccountable disquiet he had felt for the corner table in the taproom. He distracted himself by fondling his companion, who rubbed against him like a happy cat. She seemed not at all affected by the atmosphere he found so sinister.
They came to an irregular room that may have been the noisiest spot in Fandragord. Hounds barked and howled below, a lunatic diverted himself with a collection of pots and pans next door, while unfeminine oaths and unmanly shrieks racketed around the courtyard.
The room secreted a concentration of a moldy odor he had noticed throughout the inn, and he opened a door onto what he thought was a balcony. This proved to be a landing on a rickety stairway. Directly opposite at ground level, he saw a rear entrance to the taproom.
He turned to Fardel to demand why they had been led on a tour of Fandragord’s dankest innards when they could simply have crossed the yard and climbed the stairs, but the idiot had left his lamp and fled; and Crondard forgot him completely as he watched the girl shed her cloak and plain linen dress. He had expected that her tattoos would not be those of a slut, nor were they, but he was shocked to see that they prominently featured the Dragon of Fand, symbol of one of the greatest of the Great Houses.
“Must I address you as ‘my lady,’ or do you require something grander?” he asked as he unbuckled his gear.
“Oh, this? I’m only a common girl called Fanda, and this is my whim.”
That sort of whim, a green and gold dragon elaborately twined around her thighs and torso, could have led a common girl to the block. He smiled and said nothing.
In the next instant she outdid his reaction by starting violently at the image of Sleithreethra, symbol of the House of Sleith, on his chest.
“You don’t like Sleiths?” he asked mildly.
“Everyone must be named something, I suppose,” she said, her style confirming her status, “but they told me you were called Wolfdown Ratbane, or something similarly absurd.”
He had no use for further conversation as he picked her up and carried her to the bed, but he reflected that what most people disliked was not the House of Sleith but its divine patron. Instead of making a protective sign and averting her eyes, as most would, she traced the image with her fingertips curiously, even fondly.
Of course Fandragord was the ancient center of the Goddess’s cult, and he should not be alarmed to find worshippers here, especially among the Fands and the Vendrens; but he was disquieted as they lay on the bed by the way she kissed the image, as if finding it more to her taste than the man who wore it.
He reclaimed the initiative, tonguing the green and gold scales of her breasts and her belly, and then the pale ground of a thicket where the Dragon had not ventured.
“Let me taste you,” she murmured, trying to draw him by his buttocks.
Something restrained him. He was not fully aroused yet, a condition unhappily not without precedent in recent years, but he ascribed it less to his own decline than to the doomful intimations that thronged around him. His passion for rationality had resisted them before, but that passion was hard to maintain with his head between a pretty g
irl’s thighs, and forebodings crawled on him. Thin in his veins though it ran, the blood of demon-haunted barbarians screamed that he had blundered into a blackness deeper than the night beyond a northern hearth.
Fandragord was only the outer ring of the evil, the inn was a tighter circle, but he had fallen into the very center of the vortex ... in this room? No, the hairs on his neck and the galloping of his heart told him that it was even closer: that it was the woman trying to draw him to her mouth. He tried to ease away, but her claws dug deep, her legs clenched. He tore his head free, and a chunk of her thigh slipped loose with it. He saw maggots writhing in the wound as a strangling odor burst around him.
The fabric of the real world had parted as easily as an old corpse’s shroud, dropping him into an unknown abyss, and he screamed like one falling as he thrust himself from the reeking heap in his bed. Her teeth missed their intended target, but they met through the flesh of his thigh. He drove his massive fist at her belly and felt it sink to the wrist in slime as even fouler stenches erupted.
He forgot his weapons in his dash to the outside door. He remembered only just in time that he was four flights above the stones of the courtyard. He tried to stop short, but his feet shot out from under him and beyond the landing. He grabbed the rail. It cracked, but it held. Balanced at the brink on the small of his back, clutching a flimsy and half-broken rail, he did not dare to move. Beneath him, the dogs went mad.
Sobbing shamelessly, he twisted his head to watch his pursuer. Slowly and unsteadily, but inexorably, it kept coming. It was still recognizable as a caricature of the girl called Fanda; and recognizable, too, by the unclosed lips of rents in its deliquescent flesh, as the thing he had chopped on the road.
“By all the Gods, why?” he cried. “What have I done to you?”
“Know, animal, that I am Elyssa Fand, buried alive by my cruel family in the full bloom of my youth. I lived, I escaped, I begged for your help, but you struck me down, and I swore by the Goddess you blaspheme with your impertinent tattoo that I would pay you back. How I still live after your murderous attack, none but the Goddess knows, but she restored me to life....”
Her voice faltered, and then her steps. She held out her hand and seemed to be studying its rotting fingers with her runny eye-sockets. A sound such as Crondard had never heard, and hoped never to hear again, escaped her eroded mouth. He believed it was a sob.
“Elyssa—Lady Elyssa—you may have been buried alive, I don’t know, but you were dead when I met you—long dead—and whatever it was I did to you, it would have been merciful if only I had been more thorough—”
“You lie!” she shrieked, and she lurched at him.
He lifted his legs and, against his expectations, managed to squeeze them under the rail. Rolling back on his shoulders, he kicked her with both feet. The impact flung her into the room, but she recovered and weaved toward him as he staggered upright. He could not summon the will to overcome his disgust and touch her again. Trapped in the corner farthest from the stairs, his back to the creaking rail, he had nowhere to retreat. When she hurled herself at him, he fell flat and covered his head with his arms.
Her foot mashed nauseously against his ribs, but she kept on going. He heard the rail splinter under her weight, heard a croaking scream, and then a wet slap on the stones below as if a baker had flung a great wad of dough from the roof.
The foot lay where it had snapped off. His belly convulsing, he shoved the twitching lump after the corpse before stumbling into his room and seizing his ax. He was mad with terror, but his terror threw him naked down the stairway in pursuit of the dead thing. He had to finish it this time, he had to destroy it utterly, for he would rather kill himself than live with the fear that Elyssa Fand might find him again.
She had fallen by the fence of the kennel, and its boards rattled and bowed at the onslaught of the savage boarhounds inside. They were driven beyond rage by the abnormality whose fall had disturbed them, that even now scrabbled and crawled its way to its knees, but he suspected they would settle for living flesh and blood if they broke free. He began swinging the ax in a way that would have made his arms-master weep, but the wild strokes worked.
He interrupted his hacking to heave a rotten leg over the fence, and the foot he had dropped separately. He hoped to quiet the dogs, but they fought even more noisily over the unexpected treats, and Elyssa shrieked with fury to see her parts so used. He himself howled as a bony hand gripped his ankle like taut wires and kept gripping even after he had severed the arm at the shoulder. He managed to wrench it loose, taking some of his skin with it, and hurled it into the kennel.
“Let’s see you rise from the bellies of hounds, you whore from hell! Let’s see you reconstitute yourself from dogshit!” he raved, but the horror that she just might do it silenced him.
The worst of it came when she began to plead, when she made promises and attempted wiles that would have aroused a statue when she lived. She was not fully convinced that she had become an abomination, and his loathing was mingled with pity. He strove to finish her as quickly as possible, striking with one hand and throwing with the other.
The head was last, and it gave him the most trouble, rolling this way and that to elude him as it mouthed airless curses. It bumped at last into a shadowed gutter. He believed that Liron Wolfbaiter, scourge of ghouls, would have thought twice about sticking his hand in after it, but he told himself that the secret was not to think at all, and he thrust his hand into the blackness with an oath that sounded more like a whimper to his ears. He gripped spongy flesh and flung her head to the dogs in the same motion, but not before it had left a perfect white tooth embedded in his thumb.
III
Crondard woke to a slimy kiss. The black face of a demon stared into his eyes and gagged him with its foul breath.
“You there, you Sleith person!” He was barely aware of the imperious voice, for a second black bulk had risen on his other side, at the edge of his vision. They surrounded his ... bed? The rim he gripped was made of stone, and he thought that he had died and been laid out, however improbably, in an elegant sarcophagus, for he had dreamed of someone who had been buried alive. Then he realized that Elyssa Fand had been no dream. The undraped sun dazzled him, and his teeth chattered with cold, for the stone box was filled with water.
“Get that fool out of there. What does he think he’s doing? Is he deaf? Are you deaf, fellow? Is that how you sleep in the Fomorian Guards?”
The demon kissed him again. The second one barked, freeing him from his fanciful terror but gripping him in a real one as two more of the ugliest dogs he had ever seen raised their demonic faces on bull necks to view him. He had never seen Zaxoin boarhounds this close, nor had he wished to.
“Don’t be afraid of him, you silly person, get him out of there! I’ve never before seen you shy from a naked man.”
The laughter suggested that he had a audience of five or six men, but only the haughty voice had spoken. It had never stopped. Crondard was unwilling to move even his eyes, but when the second hound licked his neck he was startled upright to face a youth who jumped back in even greater terror, though he did it gracefully.
“Please, sir, his horse-ship would like you to get out of the lords’ trough,” the youth quavered.
“Cludd!” the Fomor cried as blood began to flow through his numb body like acid.
“Very appropriate, but even the Sons of Cludd don’t sleep in freezing water, only on stone floors, or so the dear little bigots would have us believe,” the speaker prattled on. “Are you in training to join them, to show them what a really crazy fanatic can do? They don’t take men with tattoos, and they might burn you at the stake for that Sleith horror.”
Crondard remembered his last waking thought, to wash away the filth of his strange battle. Exhausted, he must have fallen asleep in the trough.
“I was ... drunk,” he managed to gasp as he dared to hoist himself out. He inadvertently splashed the dogs, who took this for a game, le
aping away to shake themselves and then bouncing back to roar in his face before slobbering on him with passionate affection. Shivering with cold, he tried to fend them off as forcefully as he could without provoking the notorious anger of the breed; but they grew so exuberant, seizing his arms and legs and worrying them, that their anger could not have been much worse than their play.
“Look at that, would you!” The heraldic symbols on his hunting outfit identified the willowy master of these dogs and men as Lord Nephreiniel. “They would have torn most strangers apart by now. ‘If your dogs love a man, clasp him to your bosom,’ that was the only rational advice my father ever gave me, and I’ve followed it.”
“Would you call them off, please, lord. I don’t want to stand out here—”
“Oh, of course! Forgive me, their behavior quite bemused me.” He flicked his hand, and the disappointed hounds were pulled away. Crondard hid his annoyance when he saw that they had been held on leads all this while, and that the handlers could have recalled them at any time. He returned to the trough to sluice the drool from his limbs.
“Do you hunt?” Nephreiniel asked.
At that moment a chambermaid passed them bearing a bucket to the dungheap beyond the stables, and she slyly inspected the naked Fomor. Favoring her with a wink he would not usually have given a woman so broad or plain, he replied, “Avidly.”
“I believe you’re making a joke, aren’t you? How marvelous! Dogs love him, and he’s droll, too. What is your name?”
His tattoos could be easily deciphered, but military life had taught him to stick with a story once chosen. He said, “I am known here as Liron Wolfbaiter.”
“And so you shall be known to us, if that is your whim. Give him your cloak, Olycinth, before someone misreads his tattoos and calls him Crondard Sleith, or mistakes him for the senior sergeant of Company ‘Ironhand’. Will you hunt with us today, Wolfbaiter?”
“My horse is not suited to the sport,” he said as he draped himself with limited gratitude in a pink cloak, embroidered in a primrose pattern that was nothing less than exquisite.
The Throne of Bones Page 37
