The Throne of Bones

by Brian McNaughton

  * * *

  Wildside

  http://www.Wildsidepress.Com/index2.Htm

  Copyright ©1997 by Brian McNaughton

  * * *

  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

  * * *

  About the Author

  Brian McNaughton was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, and attended Harvard. He worked for ten years as a reporter for the Newark Evening News and has since held all sorts of other jobs while publishing some 200 stories in a variety of magazines and books. The Throne of Bones won the World Fantasy and the International Horror Guild awards in 1998 for best collection.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  THE THRONE OF BONES

  Brian McNaughton

  WILDSIDE PRESS

  Berkeley Heights, New Jersey

  Originally published in 1997 by Terminal Firght Publications

  Copyright © 1997 by Brian McNaughton

  Wildside edition copyright © 2000 Brian McNaughton. All rights reserved.

  The Throne of Bones

  A publication of

  Wildside Press

  www.wildsidepress.com

  SECOND EDITION

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  For Gene DeWeese,

  W. Paul Ganley, and Robert E. Briney,

  who know where the portals lie.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  CONTENTS

  Brian McNaughton and the Stories that Compelled Him

  Ringard and Dendra

  The Throne of Bones

  The Vendren Worm

  Meryphillia

  Reunion in Cephalune

  The Art of Tiphytsorn Glocque

  A Scholar from Sythiphore

  Vendriel and Vendreela

  The Retrograde Necromancer

  The Return of Liron Wolfbaiter

  Afterword

  Brian McNaughton

  and the Stories that Compelled Him

  Rich, Phantasmic, Creepy as Sin

  The first I ever heard or saw of Brian McNaughton was when Rick Hautala addressed him as though he were a ghost come back to type among the living.

  This happened in one of those computer network-places where the horror writers congregate. The person who kept the gate posted a note that he was letting Brian in, and Rick Hautala wrote, “Son of a bitch! It’s Brian McNaughton!” I know Rick pretty well, and as he typed that I could just imagine his eyes wide and his mouth hanging open, and I wondered who the heck this Brian McNaughton was.

  So I asked around a little bit. Only the old timers—folks who’d been writing and reading horror since before the last big bust—had even heard of him.

  This doesn’t reflect on Brian so much as it reflects on the nature of the market for horror fiction. The horror business ebbs and flows regularly, and radically; the low tide goes so low that it drives most all horror writers out of business—and out of memory, too.

  A thought experiment, for knowledgeable readers: off the cuff, how many major horror writers can you recall who were writing in 1965?

  Let me assure you: there was commercial horror fiction in distribution in 1965. There were writers writing the stuff, there were readers reading the stuff; we don’t reside here in a context that bursts already in full bloom from the brow of Stephen King.

  I can think of a couple, very quickly: Sarban and Robert Bloch.

  Compare this with, say, SF: how many minor SF writers can you recall who were writing in 1965?

  I could name a dozen without really trying. (But will refrain: most of them are still around, still working, and would bludgeon me for describing them as minor SF writers from the 1960s.) It’s not hard to remember well-known SF writers from the thirties, even the twenties.

  The horror business eats writers alive.

  Brian got hit hard in the horror bust of the early eighties. And almost at the end of it he threw up his hands and wandered away to labor in a steel mill in New Jersey, or a printing plant in Maine, or a shoe factory in Rhode Island—some dreary place or other; I hate remembering which.

  I hate to think how long it was before he started writing again, too. Two years? Three? Five at most. And then he found a used typewriter someplace, and started writing—almost against his will.

  You hold in your hands a book of stories that forced Brian McNaughton back to work. They’re rich, fascinating stuff—creepy and unsettling and phantasmic. They’ll make the same demands on you that they made on Brian: they will demand and compel you, and fill you full of terrible wonder. When you’ve finished them you’ll find yourself wanting more.

  * * * *

  These aren’t horror stories, exactly—but they aren’t entirely innocent of horror, either.

  These stories take place in a world ... hmmm. Imagine what Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings would have been if Tolkien had tried to tell that story sympathetically from the point of view of the human denizens of Mordor.

  That’s the book you hold in your hands. It’s special stuff.

  When I said this to Brian he took issue with me. “Tolkien and the Tolkienites,” he said, “have never been my cup of tea ... my world is certainly not unique in its darkness, no darker than Robert E. Howard’s world or any of several created by Tanith Lee. Compared to Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique, it is Carnival in Rio all the time.

  “And my memory may not serve me over the vast gulf of time that has intervened since I read it, but I think E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros was set in a pretty ghastly milieu. And then there’s William Hope Hodgson’s Night Land or the Dreamland of H.P. Lovecraft, as in Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.”

  And certainly he’s right, so far as that goes. But all those things he names come from the wide thick root of traditional literary fantasy—a root that manifests nowadays mostly as horror fiction. Modern commercial fantasy, where it grows out of traditional literary forms at all, grows almost exclusively out of Tolkien’s work. What Brian’s done here is something very interesting: he’s grafted this rich, phantasmic, traditional, and dark material back onto the monochromatic trunk of the modern genre.

  Make no mistake about that: despite Brian’s denial, the work of Tolkien and the Tolkienites clearly informs his fantasy. This is modern fantasy, the sort of fantasy that attracts broad modern audiences—because Brian, whatever his deliberate literary influences, is as much a captive to his context as any of us are.

  Delightfully so. Fascinatingly so. You and I are very lucky to have this book to read. The things that compelled Brian to return to the career he’d abandoned are powerful things indeed.

  * * * *

  Which brings us back to Brian’s life and his lifework.

  When I finished reading the manuscript for this collection, I asked Brian where I could find copies of his older books.

  He waved me away.

  Back in the seventies, he said in a letter a few weeks ago, he used to write books with Satan in their titles. He’s doing something very different now; none of that work really matters.

  My foot, I said.

  But there was no arguing with him: He wouldn’t tell me anything more.

  He’s equally shy with his biography. Here and there in the five years or so I’ve known him, I’ve heard Brian mention old fannish horror types in whose youthful company he committed fanzines—but when I asked him point-blank about fan-ac he responded very coyly. “None of my bio seems terribly important or interesting,”
he said, “except for the literary influences cited above. Smith, whom I discovered around 12, was my foremost influence, one that I certainly hope I have outgrown—as a direct influence, that is, not my taste for his work, which is still strong—and absorbed.”

  “But I was born in Red Bank, NJ, in 1935, went to school there and to Harvard, where I dropped out after a couple years. At the time I thought of myself as a poet, but that ambition never got very far and I became a newspaperman instead.” He smiled sardonically. “When the paper (the Newark Evening News) folded around 1970—having given me an education in politics and other areas of human depravity that I have since profitably converted into fiction—I set out to make my living as a writer of fiction. Most of this stuff, mostly for men’s mags and under a variety of pseudonyms as well as my own name, is pretty reprehensible and forgettable. I think even all those novels with Satan in the title are best forgotten that I wrote in the 70s and early 80s.”

  So far as I can tell, those books are out of print and unfindable, completely lost in time. I would like to see those books. I suspect that we’d all be richer if we could find them.

  Alan Rodgers

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Ringard and Dendra

  The most extravagant rumors of the stranger’s ugliness had been nothing but plain truth. A further rumor had yet to be investigated, that he was a fiend whose mother had made a fool of herself with a snake. I dismounted and walked towards him, my hand resting on the hilt of the manqueller that hung by my saddle.

  As if we had been chatting all day, he asked, “This used to be the slope of a hill, didn’t it?”

  That was obvious. The Sons of Cludd had sheered it right off, leaving the cliff of bare earth that towered above us. I assumed they had planned to build a retaining wall, for destabilizing gullies already scored the cliff, but they had abandoned the picks and shovels that lay rusting about us and run off to hunt witches.

  I tried to restart our conversation on a formal basis: “I am Lord Fariel.”

  “Of the House of Sleith,” he stated, and I managed not to flinch when he swung his eyes at me. “You didn’t lay your own land waste, did you?”

  Except for their extraordinary sadness, his eyes were those of an ordinary old man. It was their setting that had upset everyone, tattoos like the patterned skin of a reptile. Not even his eyelids and his lips had escaped the needle. The scaly effect was accidental, because the details depicted nothing more sinister than exotic flowers and fungi.

  However odd, a human garden was pleasanter than a human snake, and I answered him less stiffly: “The Empress wanted the Cluddites out of her hair, so she sent them to fortify the border. They tell me this will be a supply road.”

  He nodded absently as he scanned the pines at the top of the cliff, then turned and pondered the hardwood forest on the interrupted slope. He seemed to be looking for lost landmarks.

  I said, “You don’t come from here, do you?”

  “I do. My wife may have been your kinswoman. Dendra Sleith?”

  I gaped as I would at a confessed elf, for he was a creature found only in fireside tales and songs. My Aunt Dendra had long ago been kidnapped on her wedding-night by a woodcutter’s son named: “Ringard?”

  “The same.”

  My father would have killed him on the spot. Less impetuous relatives would have deferred his death, the better to savor it, but I felt only curiosity about a man whose stature in our provincial gossip was mythic. Disfigurement aside, he was bald and bent and ordinary as an old boot. He looked hard and lean, but so does the oaf who slops out my stables, and nobody would ever sing rousing ballads about him.

  He stared at me with the dignity of a hound too weary to fawn or cringe. If I’d struck him, I don’t think he would have been impressed. He had been struck before.

  Contrary to his expectations, I was concerned for his safety. “You had better come with me,” I said. “The Cluddites are in the grip of a witch-craze, they’ve misused some of my people already, and your appearance....”

  His smile was an angry twitch. “Like many others who served with Lord Azaxiel, I was shipwrecked on the coast of Tampoontam, where the savages gave me the choice of joining their tribe by either adoption or ingestion. You might say that I earned these decorations in the service of our late Emperor.”

  The Cluddites wouldn’t say that. They would assume that old Ringard had dined and worshipped in the fashion of his adoptive brothers. Burning an idolatrous cannibal might strike them as a diverting respite from burning witches. While I considered how to warn him tactfully, he asked, “What set them off?”

  “One of their preachers, of course. An owl hooted, a wolf howled, the wind sighed among the trees—they don’t like any of that. They’re mostly from Zaxann, this bunch, swineherds and ploughboys, but they seem afraid of the woods.”

  “The gulf between a woodsman and a farmer is as great as that between a grand lord like yourself and a common sailor.” He gestured at the raw gap the Holy Soldiers had cut through the hill. “Farmers hate trees.”

  While we talked he had led me toward a pile of felled trees, tall as the cliff, that the Cluddites had pushed aside. He circled the heap, climbed it easily as a monkey, peered into it as if searching. Once or twice he called softly, though I could not hear the words.

  “Have you lost a dog?”

  “No.” He gave no explanation, but he caught the hint that his behavior was odd. He scrambled down and accepted my offer of food and shelter.

  * * * *

  My household had cheered me for riding forth alone to confront the infamous Snake Man who had scared them even more than the witch-hunt. Their enthusiasm cooled when I brought him home for dinner. My wife and sisters absented themselves from the table and banished the children to the nursery.

  The servants who attended him at trembling arm’s length averted their eyes from his fantastic decoration, so I was kept hopping to spare him from being scalded or carved. He was, after all, my long-lost uncle, for kidnapping is an acceptable form of marriage in our part of the world. The social gulf in the couple and Aunt Dendra’s status as someone else’s bride suggested quibbles, but I was no lawyer. He hardly noticed my efforts as he attacked his food in the style of a woodcutter turned sailor and adopted by cannibals. Some of my more legitimate uncles had worse manners.

  Finished, unselfconsciously stuffing bread and imperfectly stripped bones into his pockets, he asked, “Do you remember Dendra?”

  I had often asked myself that. I think my memory of the fair-haired girl with the sly smile who had joined me in romping with the hounds or making mud-castles, when she should have been practicing the lute or counting her jewels, derived from stories I had been told, and from a portrait I found in a storeroom. I did remember a sudden lack in my life, a moment beyond which my childhood no longer seemed so happy. That, I think, was my only true memory of Dendra.

  I wanted to let him talk, so I said merely, “I don’t think so.”

  “If you remembered her, you would know,” he stated. “She was ... entirely herself. Her hair was the color of rain when the sun shines.”

  While his eyes turned inward, I noticed that the children had defied their mother’s order and were peeking at my fabulous guest from a shadowed gallery. I pretended not to see them. Later, when I should have chased them to bed with assurances that he was only telling a story, I had forgotten them, so I was blamed for their nightmares; and for their fear, not yet overcome, of the woods around our home.

  When his silence had continued for some time, I prompted, “Was?”

  “Oh, yes. I assume she’s dead. I certainly hope so, for the alternatives are unthinkable.” He treated me again to that angry twitch he used for a smile. “I searched in Crotalorn, but the palace of Dwelphorn Thooz has been eradicated. Even Amorartis Street is gone, buried under the mosaic paving of a spacious new square.”

  I called for more wine and suggested, to my everlasting regret, that he begin his stor
y at the beginning.

  * * * *

  Even as a child (Ringard said), I loved trees and grieved that my father chopped them down so that louts like us could suck hot soup. I would often sneak outdoors at night to avoid sharing the fire. In the hisses and crackles so comforting to everyone else, I heard tiny shrieks of agony.

  Each tree was different, even each oak or larm or hemlock from the others of its kind, and I believed that certain trees spoke to me. I followed my father to work each day: not as other small boys would, to play at woodcutter, but to watch with grave disapproval and make sure he left my special friends standing.

  It was no use beating this nonsense out of my head, though he tried often enough. He was finally persuaded by one of our neighbors, a woman whose wisdom was ordinarily viewed with suspicion, that I was favored by the godlings who lived in trees. Even my stolid father used charms to fend off the snits of dryads his work might discommode, so the wise woman’s explanation, though not welcome, was accepted. My mother imagined I would grow up to be a priest, and I encouraged her delusion.

  As it does to us all, time callused my finer senses. I grew deaf to the voices of trees. I couldn’t bring myself to chop one down, but I would guide the oxen that hauled it out of the forest. I even overcame my qualms about splitting and stacking wood, although that would once have been as distasteful to me as cording human corpses.

  One day I was chopping kindling in our yard when I noticed a piece that looked like a wolf—no, not exactly: as if a wolf were trapped in the wood, and I could free it by knocking off the irrelevant parts. It was a very poor likeness that I carved, but my father recognized it. My mother displayed it over the hearth, refusing my pleas to replace it with any of the better figures I was soon making.

  In every stick I saw hidden shapes, and I became obsessed with revealing them. My father fretted that I meant to ruin him by turning his valuable firewood into whimsies. I perversely maintained that my carvings had more worth than kindling, that they even justified the sacrifice of living trees. Those captive owls and trout were really there. Why would the gods let me see them, if not to set me the challenge of liberating them?