The Throne of Bones

by Brian McNaughton

  The number of windows troubled him, too, for it seemed unlikely that the inn could hold so many rooms. He tried counting the windows of the first floor in one section, but the result fell short of his impression. Trying again, he got a different number. His third attempt produced a third answer. He was willing to admit that he was no mathematician, but he knew he should have done better than that. Trying a fourth time, he was nearly overcome by dizziness. His eyes told him that he was looking at a patched and crooked wall, but his stomach believed that he was gazing into an abyss.

  He tore his eyes away from the courtyard. Far off, beyond the inn’s crazy tangle of chimney-pots, the Vendren palace rose near the top of the hill. His recent tour had revealed it as a shabby ruin, but distance and a sunset worthy of the Last Day contrived to dress the palace in malign splendor. It was inseparable from the enormous clouds of blackest purple that hung behind it.

  A credulous man might believe that he had wandered into the landscape of someone else’s dream. Crondard tried hard not to believe this. His memory was beginning to betray him, that was all, just as his eyes and ears were. Once he escaped this malefic city, once he found a place where he could rest from flight, he would be his old, rational self. He hurried on to the stables.

  He hesitated beside the fence of the kennel where he had disposed of Elyssa Fand. Something moved behind the fence, and then the boards burst outward in a shower of splinters. Whatever his logical mind believed, his instinctive cringe said that she had risen once more from the dead, and he screamed when a weight thrust him to the flagstones with a clang of his shiny new armor. He twisted toward his attacker, and his face got a thorough slobbering. Hammering Floss’s solid skull with his fist staggered the dog for an instant, but he rebounded with all his lust for play awakened.

  Floss having prevailed and run off to give the four corners of the courtyard a triumphant spraying, Crondard climbed wearily to his feet and trudged toward the stables. The only horse now quartered there was the absurd Thunderer, named for one of his viler habits, and Nephreiniel’s “handsome gift” could only be that dimwitted hellhound. Had he remembered how to weep, he believed he would have done so.

  Absently scratching Thunderer’s ear, he recalled the landlord’s prank with the ass’s ears. One who believed Morphyrion’s ravings might believe that the Sow in Rut had been as important to Zornard Glypht in his waking life as the Vendren palace.

  “No dogs inside,” the landlord said automatically. Glancing up to meet the Fomor’s eye, he added, “Except, of course, yours.”

  “Wine for everyone,” Crondard said. When his was poured, he pushed it back and watched the landlord take a sip from the mug before he picked it up. He ignored the cheers and thanks of the drinkers, and the landlord’s muttering, as he watched Floss include the limits of the room in his territory. Approaching the farthest corner, near the front entrance, the dog stopped. He began to advance again, but paw by dainty paw, with fangs bared and fur crackling erect, his intense gaze fixed on an empty chair.

  Crondard asked Fardel, “What’s wrong with that corner?”

  “It’s a bit drafty—” the innkeeper started to say, but Crondard silenced him with a chopping gesture as Fardel said, “That’s where the poet always sits.”

  “Sat, he means,” one of the oaf’s companions said. “The poet’s been dead for a while.”

  Careful as the dog, but being less obvious about it, Crondard circled toward the empty table. A swarm of motes drifted against the pale wall. Drawing his ax and striking in the same motion, he shouted, “Liron is here!,” and kept striking until the table and its four chairs had been demolished. Floss joined in, worrying the debris and flinging it around the room with scrabbling claws.

  As if correcting him, Fardel said, “No one’s there now.”

  “Do you know where the poet is?”

  “I don’t know. In his room?” Fardel had perfected nature’s blunder with drink. He rolled his head around at unlikely angles, searched with unfocused eyes, and provoked a general rush for the doors by yelling, “Zornard!”

  Crondard resisted the impulse to join the stampede and asked, “He has a favorite room, does he?”

  “Oh, he’s dead. He bought me drinks and never laughed at me, and so I never laughed at his poems.”

  Crondard went to the innkeeper, whose head was buried in his hands. Floss followed with a table-leg in his mouth for a souvenir.

  The landlord looked up and anticipated his question. “He had a room, yes, but it was eliminated.”

  “Eliminated?”

  “I burned the place down last year, or most of it, after things—” he gestured dismally at their surroundings and then sneaked his fingers to one of his ears, checking—“got out of hand. The inn was rebuilt ... although you’d never know it, to look at it now ... and that man’s favorite room no longer exists. It shouldn’t, anyway.”

  “Why didn’t you do a thorough job, and move?”

  “It’s all I know, all I have. It belonged to my father, and his before him, and it used to be a jolly place when ... that person you referred to was alive.” He brightened ever so slightly, like a leper with a new hat, as he said, “You might not believe it, but our difficulties have attracted customers. Of a certain sort.”

  “Where was this room of his?”

  While the landlord alternately scratched his head and chin to suggest perplexity, Fardel piped up: “It was next to the one I showed you the other night. The noisy one.”

  “It seems I have even more to thank you for than I thought, innkeeper.”

  “Well, you wanted a room, didn’t you? Nobody who knows the place wanted that one. I told you, we were crowded.”

  “Your wine, at least, is an ordinary nightmare,” Crondard growled. “Pour it.”

  Night had fallen by the time he persuaded himself to return to the courtyard. The peculiar inn was lit by a continuous flicker of pallid lightning. Beyond the Vendren palace, a full third of the sky was gripped by an electrical cataclysm. Dragons of flame writhed among three cloudy continents, whipped above them, exploded behind them. Not a whisper of thunder reached him, and a deformed moon drowsed overhead, but the breeze scurried this way and that in timid confusion. He tried to avert his mind from a curious fact: that the reflections flashing from the windows around him were not synchronized with the lightning. Only one of the many rooms showed an inner light. Directly above the kennels and beneath the roof, it was the one he had shared with Elyssa Fand.

  The clatter he had taken for music grew louder as he approached the rickety stairway. He recognized it now as the relentless clatter of pots and pans he had heard from the room next to his. Zornard Glypht’s torturers had made such a din in an effort to keep him awake. A disciple of Mantissus would spout some gabble about coincidence, but he now damned all philosophers to the kind of hell that Lord Morphyrion might preside over. His only hope was to succumb to the local madness that had obviously infected him, too, and seek out the dead dreamer. But if he found him, how would he kill him?

  “Ar’s clap,” he muttered as he trudged upward. Halfway up the stairway, he appended an apology. This was not the time and place to offend any Gods.

  No one had tidied the room. His knees trembled at a hint of decay in the close air. Floss searched eagerly for its source, perhaps remembering his feast, and found it in the stained mattress. He began to rip it apart. The lamp with its floating wick looked no different from the one Fardel had set on the table two nights ago, but still burning.

  The crashing and banging of metal was even louder than Crondard remembered, and it burst upon his ears painfully when he flung wide the door to the hallway. The transverse passage was no longer outside the door, however; he stood at the entrance to the infinitely long corridor, lighted by dim sconces. He clutched the door, fighting the urge to run. He took heart from the courage of the hound, who trotted forward without hesitation to sniff the carpet.

  He walked cautiously forward, wiping his sweating pal
ms on his cape and taking a better grip on his ax. He planned to go only far enough to descry the end of this passage, but that proved impossible. The farthest lamps showed nothing of the hallway; they might have been stars hung in emptiness, and he grew convinced that they were exactly that. The passage led beyond the inn, beyond the city, beyond the earth itself: to the home of the Gods, as an unlettered Fomor would say, and of the dead.

  The real lamp beside him died so suddenly that he reacted by striking at hazard with his ax. The blade sank into a yielding substance that was nothing like wood or plaster. Under the infernal racket of clashing metal, he heard a sob or a sigh from the wounded wall. Floss dashed forward eagerly and began to tear at it with his fangs and claws. He was eating the wall.

  Crondard glanced back the way he had come, no more than a few steps, and his nerves screamed as he saw the appalling distance stretching to the door of the room. One by one, other lamps in the intervening space began to die. He grabbed the reluctant dog’s collar and tried to run back, but the floor yielded queasily under each step. He could progress only at the halting gait of a man laboring through a swamp. The sighing walls wavered and seemed to melt. Right angles dissolved as the passage became a rounded tube, and he slogged his way up an increasingly steep incline. No longer resisting, Floss dragged him forward with his surer footing on a surface that had become decidedly slimy.

  A sickly gurgling, punctuated by irregular slapping sounds, forced him against his better judgment to look back. Bulges in the wall heaved and shifted. Some of these would periodically succeed in detaching themselves from the parent mass and flop to the floor. Pink and shapeless, they crawled clumsily after him, recalling Morphyrion’s account of his nightmare-plagued palace.

  He tried to cling to the belief that this was an hallucination planted in his mind by the mad lord, but Morphyrion had said nothing about a shadowy figure that lurched behind the foul offspring of the living walls, a figure that Crondard was sure, if he dared to look for an instant longer, he would recognize as Elyssa Fand. Whimpering snatches of dimly remembered prayers and charms, mingled with curses against the philosophers who had stuffed his head with dangerous nonsense, he clawed and kicked his way upward in the steadily constricting passage.

  Floss squeezed through the end of the tunnel first and turned to seize Crondard by the arm, dragging him out. The Fomor staggered to his feet to slam the door and bolt it, gagging at the muffled thuds and slitherings against the other side. After his ordeal in the corridor, he had never seen any sight more welcome than this hateful room and the nightmare-twisted inn beyond it, never breathed any air more sweet than that tainted by the lingering odor of Elyssa’s corpse.

  The jangling and crashing from the room next door had risen beyond the level of pain and noise to become a twisting auger inside his brain. He battered the wall with his fist.

  “Wake up, Zornard! Wake up and die!” he roared in the parade-ground voice that had made recruits soil their kilts. “I had no quarrel with you, but you’ve tried to kill me once too often, and now a Child of Nightmare is upon you! I’ll show you what a bad dream can be, you son of a bitch!”

  Swinging his ax with the strength of both arms, he hewed through the flesh-like substance, here only a thin layer over real wood. Barking to match his master, Floss tore at the wall with his claws. Soon they had uncovered joists scaled with charcoal, and behind them a dark space smaller than an average closet, a corner boarded over during the rebuilding. As Crondard tore aside the beams to widen the opening, the metallic racket faltered and began to fade, though his ears still rang painfully.

  Lightning filled the room with a flickering twilight, but it was night inside that hole. Crondard forgot to breathe as he strained to penetrate the darkness, and for once even Floss held back, growling. An intenser shadow in one corner could have been a bag of forgotten laundry, but now it stirred. A dim glitter resolved itself into a pair of eyes in a fire-blackened skull.

  “My best dream yet,” a voice rasped, and the dry rattle that followed might have been meant for a chuckle. “I never before dreamed of being a pathetic wreck with heroic delusions.”

  A fearful weakness gripped him, more than could be ascribed to desperate demands on an aging body. He felt less solid than the shadow in the corner. His mind refused to focus as his anger guttered like an empty lamp. This was what he had imagined death would be, when his fear of it dwindled. Even his memories began to fade; his life before the moment when he had encountered Elyssa Fand on the lonely road became faint and confused as dreams. He scrabbled for one clear image of Frothirot’s cloud-piercing spires, for a memory of just one of the million songs he had heard ringing across her twisting canals, but they slipped away like minnows in a stream.

  “From a nightmare, you have wakened me,” that gritty voice continued, “and now, from that dream, you must ... depart.”

  “Wish again, dead man,” Crondard gasped, raising his ax with hands that seemed more than numb, that seemed hardly to exist, but that he knew he must trust in with more unquestioning faith than a Fomor woman squandered on Gods or ghosts. He could barely whisper, “Liron is here!”

  A burst of light poured through the door and windows behind him, as if the noon sun had suddenly appeared in the western sky. It revealed the charred corpse, surrounded by a galaxy of swirling black motes; it cast the shadow of the hound against the wall behind Zornard’s body; but it failed to cast Crondard’s own shadow. Someone, some philosopher whose name escaped him, had taught him to doubt the evidence of his own eyes, and he refused to believe that he did not exist as he swung the ax in an arc that drove it through Zornard’s skull, cracking it to a myriad flakes of charcoal. At the same time a sound like hell’s roof collapsing seemed to lift him off his feet, a clap of thunder timed to his stroke.

  Floss now felt brave enough to dash forward. His claws raked the ruin of the body in search of hidden bones, but he succeeded only in crushing the blackened scales to dust. Trembling, Crondard forced himself to look up. He could see his shadow now, cast by the dimming light behind him. He held up his gnarled and hairy forearm. Contrary to his expectations he saw it, and it felt solid to the touch of his other hand.

  “The power of suggestion,” he explained to the dog, for he was eager to hear his own voice. “He tried to kill me with it. When you’ve studied the works of Mantissus, you’ll understand better what I’m talking about.”

  Floss gave him further reassurance that he existed by grinning slackly as he gazed up and wagged his stump. Crondard delighted in making as much noise as possible with his new boots as he strode to the door. The room was not the same. The bed and other furniture were neatly arranged, and it smelled no worse than what he would have expected from any sour hole at the Sow in Rut.

  His survey was cut short as he looked up and saw the source of the light, much diminished, but still an impressive conflagration. Flames rose from the palace of the Vendrens, or what remained of it. To produce that ball of sun-like fire, its very stones must have ignited in one sudden burst.

  He suspected that Zornard Glypht’s ultimate dream had come true.

  * * * *

  Crondard knew that this inn was no place to celebrate his triumph, but one round, one song and one story had led to another. It irked him that not everyone shared his high spirits; the landlord was gloomy as ever, brooding over all the breakage, and Fardel said he liked the inn better the way it used to be.

  He was sitting in Zornard Glypht’s old corner with a slut on either knee when a noisy party burst into the taproom. They were Fands, but he thought nothing of this until a large young man, red with drink and bloated with arrogance, swaggered over to inspect him.

  Sneering at the Vendren emblem on Crondard’s chest, he said, “I thought all the yellow pussies went into hiding when their master died.” He called to his companions, “I’ve found one! What do you say we send it swimming in a sack?”

  Crondard was not at his brightest. He said, “Who died?”

&nbs
p; “Morphyrion, the foul wizard who fed you your daily mice. The Gods finally got around to striking him with lightning.”

  This talk of animals reminded Crondard of Floss, and he asked one of the sluts, “Where’s my dog?”

  “You tied him in the courtyard, remember? After he bit the innkeeper?”

  “Did you call me a dog?” the Fand warrior bellowed, tugging clumsily at his sword.

  “Shit,” Crondard said as the news finally sank in. “I’m not going to be Lord Commander of the Fomorian Guards.”

  “A dead pussy with its yellow hide stretched on the door, that’s what you’re going to be!”

  As the news sank in deeper, he realized that Lord Morphyrion could no longer protect him from the charge of desertion, the local charges of murder and necromancy, and the vengeance of the police; nor from Fands like this one, pining for an ancient feud. He had seen the palace burn, but it had not occurred to him that such a wicked old man could die. Instead of wasting time celebrating, he should have been fleeing for his life.

  The young man’s companions had been urging him all this while to rejoin them, but no one did anything to restrain him until he at last succeeded in disentangling his sword from his green and gold cloak. Then a woman dashed over to hang on his arm.

  “No, Cousin Leodri! Come back and have a drink.”

  “Ar’s crabs!” the Fomor cried, and the whores and the table tumbled to the floor as he sprang to his feet and fell back against the wall, groping for his ax. The woman was the one he had known as Fanda: the living Elyssa Fand.

  Except for his quivering knees, he was frozen when she stared into his eyes. She seemed only slightly less shocked than he was.

  “I know you ... don’t I?” she whispered.

  “You can go to his funeral, then,” her cousin growled, swinging her from side to side as he tried to free his arm. “We’ll hold it tonight on the nearest dung-heap.”

  “You were dead!” Crondard managed to gasp.