The Throne of Bones

by Brian McNaughton

  Persistence, he believed, shone brightest among his virtues. He would spend months stalking a human target; he could devote years to an inhuman one. On rainy days, when he found little work as a porter at Crotalorn’s central market, he would wander among the grand tombs and open pits of Dreamers’ Hill, studying the landscape that he began to haunt by night. He justified his nocturnal visits by running errands for the watchmen, and even walking their rounds for those too drunk to function. As he became a familiar figure, he earned bigger tips by carrying burdens for grave robbers. A hard judge of others, Quodomass was scandalized that these criminals should often be watchmen, too, but he hid his disapproval with smiles and an unflagging eagerness to make himself useful.

  At such times he thanked the Gods who had fashioned him so cunningly for deception. His compact body belied his strength; his boyish looks took ten years off his age, if he covered his bald spot; his contempt for the frivolities in books masked a superior intellect; and his cheery demeanor hid the fact that his brain was gnawed by fiery maggots. The fear that they might leak out and be seen by others obsessed him, another reason why he always sported a rakish kerchief, and giving rise to his nervous compulsions to brush his shoulders or beat his head with hard objects.

  His most generous employer was a pudgy young nobleman of minor degree called Weymael Vendren. A student of necromancy who collected the relics of ancient masters, Weymael knew a lot about ghouls, and Quodomass once boasted of the saying that was so often applied to him.

  “Fuck the ghoul who tries to eat you, eh? That’s not impossible, if you know how to rise from the dead,” Weymael muttered as he plied his instruments on the complex lock of a bronze door. “I could show you how, I suppose, but rising from the dead is usually more trouble than it’s worth.”

  “There’d be no physiological problem? I nearly ... I mean, I heard of a fool who nearly did himself a serious injury by attempting to couple with a statue of our Princess.”

  “Stop banging your head with the lantern and hold it steady ... yes, right there. No, they’re quite compatible with mortals. Sexually, anyway. They used to be human, you know.” Weymael paused to give him a thoughtful look. “They were people whose filthy habits provoked a monstrous transformation.”

  “Then you could kill one? Strangle her, for instance, or cut her in pieces, or take some lengths of heated wire and a pair of pliers—”

  A flick of Weymael’s ferrety eyes told Quodomass that he had revealed too much enthusiasm for an academic discussion, but the necromancer returned to his work without quizzing him.

  “I suppose you could, but catching her and holding her down, that would be a big enough problem, unless you found one who enjoyed it. Enjoyed sex, I mean, not being strangled.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “Why not? Male ghouls are supposedly wild about human women, which may be why you don’t see many girls around here at night.” A sound like steam hissing and clacking at the lid of a kettle, Weymael’s aborted laughter, unnerved the porter. It suggested the notoriously mordant mirth of ghouls. “The offspring of such unions are always destroyed, and that’s a pity. I might learn something from studying a demi-ghoul, or perhaps use its services when it grew up. Be sure to tell me if you find a complaisant ghouless, Quodo.”

  To abbreviate his name like that, which almost everyone did, was to drive a spike of rage between the eyes of Quodomass Phuonsa, but he concealed the pain with a broader than usual grin. Momentarily distracted, he had no chance to deny his intention of waylaying a ghoul before the lock gave up its secrets and the door swung open on a dank and fetid interior.

  “After you,” Weymael Vendren said, as he always did.

  * * * *

  Reflecting at leisure, Quodomass believed that the necromancer might help him in his quest, but he found it impossible to break the lifelong secrecy that had spared him from the rack, the block and all the other apparatus of official art critics. Besides, he wanted to catch a ghoul so he could humiliate and torture it, while Weymael Vendren would want to keep it in a cage and take notes on it. But since their ambitions might not be entirely inconsistent, he returned casually to the subject of ghouls whenever they met.

  “Nothing attracts them like a corpse,” Weymael said, “which is why the wealthy go to such lengths to keep these stinking tombs sealed. I believe you’ll not find that wine to your taste. It was sometimes poisoned to punish common thieves.”

  Quodomass sprayed it out, retching, and inwardly cursed Weymael for keeping silent when he had cracked the jar.

  “If you can drink that—hand me the hacksaw, please, this bastard’s neck is tough as wood—if you don’t mind the taste of that, I can give you a potion that simulates death. I’ll have you buried with a net and a hammer in your coffin, and when the ghoul rips it open to get her dinner....”

  “No, thank you.” Though he was furious with his clever patron for divining his purpose, and perhaps even his secret nature, he had concluded that he need not fear him. Since adepts of the black arts are masters of delusion, judges at that time thought it pointless to try them. An accusation of witchcraft carried an automatic sentence of death.

  “It wouldn’t work, anyway,” Weymael said. “Let me see that hatchet, I’ll get this head off him yet! No, trying to attract just one ghoul to a corpse would be like dropping your pants in a swamp to catch one mosquito. You’d wake up with a hundred of the filthy things fighting over you.”

  Quodomass shivered less with fear than with a fearful excitement. He said, “A net would be good, you think?”

  “Don’t you go to the fighting-pits? If the netter knows how to use it, he beats the sworder almost every time, and a ghoul’s claws are like swords.” Panting from his exertions, the necromancer tossed him an unexpectedly heavy head, dried to stony hardness. “Put that in your bag and we’ll be skipping along.”

  As they left the violated tomb behind them, Quodomass thought he heard a rustling in the bushes. He gripped Weymael’s arm and gestured him to silence. More than one creature was furtively afoot, many more than one, a mass convergence on the unlocked tomb.

  “Yes, there they go,” the necromancer said, unperturbed. “Want to go back and check out the pretty ones?”

  Quodomass stared hard at the tomb, but he could barely separate its decayed outline from the moonless darkness. He thought he saw a dim flickering at the door; he heard what might have been a shrill giggle and its hollow echo.

  He was terrified, but not even his terror could preclude a sudden and urgent erection. Nevertheless he shouldered his bag and walked quickly away from the unholy swarming while Weymael followed, hissing and clacking to himself.

  * * * *

  The porter was disappointed with his noble patron for even knowing about the fighting-pits, much less discussing them like a connoisseur. The pits were illegal in Crotalorn, and as Quodomass prided himself on his good citizenship in most respects, he avoided them. His work in the market had given him a wide circle of lax acquaintances, though, and it was easy enough to find someone willing to sell him a net made for trapping men.

  “I’ll throw in the trident for another two silver fillies,” said the grim old man as he hefted that vicious weapon. “It has drunk deep.”

  So had he, to judge by his red eyes, and Quodomass deplored drunkenness. He also disapproved of the name “filly” for the coin bearing Princess Fillitrella’s image, though even the Princess herself had been heard to use it. Buying the trident would lend credence to his guise as the sort of moron who would collect souvenirs of the pits, but he wanted to disoblige the disrespectful old sot, so he smiled and said, “No, thank you.”

  “What do you want the net for, catching girls?”

  “No, of course not!” Quodomass caught himself brushing his shoulders vigorously, and he forced his hand down to clench his knee. He met the man’s contemptuous stare with a grin as he said brightly, “These weapons were the ones you used?”

  “I had thought such an ard
ent follower of the sport as yourself would call them tackle, not weapons. No, they belonged to a man called Fast Fandard, who in the end proved not quite fast enough.” At last he turned his pitiless gaze toward the window of his squalid hutch, permitting Quodomass to relax his grin before it could collapse in a flurry of twitches. “He was my son, and I need the money to bury him.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” Quodomass looked suitably solemn, even though he felt like grinning now. He had a patron whose passion for anatomical studies was limited to athletic young men, and he would pay enough for this information to reimburse him for the “tackle.” “When is the funeral?”

  “As soon as I come up with six fillies for those flap-kneed Sons of Cludd. Until then they’ll keep the poor fool’s body in their temple and drone hymns over it. He was giving them his money from the pits so he could join the Order, did you ever hear anything so outrageous? Those bigots condemn pit-fighting, but they gladly took the money he earned there. If they had finally condescended to admit him, they would have made him repent his wicked occupation for the next thirty years.” He again proved his perspicacity by adding, “But you don’t want to hear this anymore than he did.”

  Quodomass was delighted. Cluddites were buried in shallow graves to facilitate their resurrections, and in a cheap section that was ignored by watchmen and robbers alike. The father wanted six fillies for the net and trident, but Quodomass invoked his talent for shedding tears at will and pressed eight on him, hoping to gain his trust and later learn the particulars of the funeral. The student of anatomy would pay him twice that, and digging up Fast Fandard would be no work at all.

  The father was an ungrateful boor. He sneered into the porter’s tearful face as he handed over the trident and said, “Watch you don’t sit on it.”

  * * * *

  “Going fishing?” Weymael Vendren asked, laying a book aside when a slave ushered in Quodomass Phuonsa with his clumsily wrapped purchases.

  The book, Quodomass saw, was no volume of monstrous spells, but a collection of tales by the pornographer Chalcedor. Not a single skull or dried bat ornamented the bright room, open to the scented airs of a garden, where Weymael lounged in a brocaded robe with a tray of cordials and tidbits at his elbow. It was the first time the porter had dared to call on him at his home, and his impersonation of a social parasite was flawless.

  Quodomass waited pointedly for his host to dismiss the slave before answering. They waited, too, staring at him until he felt the prickle of thoughts creeping from his brain. He clamped a desperate hand to his head, and was on the verge of fleeing when he noted Weymael’s encouraging nod and interpreted it correctly: he was expected to remove his kerchief. He pulled it off reluctantly. A surreptitious glance revealed only a few hairs, whose loss he could ill afford, clinging to the grease of continuous use. He refused to surrender it to the slave, however, and Weymael consulted the frescoes of the ceiling before waving her away.

  Quodomass at last answered, “Yes, fishing for a ghoul. You say nothing attracts them like a corpse, right? And what better bait for a female ghoul than the corpse of a handsome young athlete?”

  Asking about Fast Fandard in the Market, he had learned that the fighter was better known for his looks than his skill. If he had not been treating the gallery to a display of his heroic profile, everyone said, he might have noticed that his last opponent had revived and was swinging an ax at his spine. Struck by inspiration, Quodomass had decided to give up the money he might get from the anatomist and use the body to obtain his heart’s desire.

  Until now, their conversations about ghouls had been held on the fanciful level of drinking companions who joke about robbing a palace. Quodomass now revealed his artistic credentials, citing several unsolved crimes and a few that had been considered solved by everyone but the wretches whom the public executioner had deprived of progressively more essential organs.

  He had never imagined that anyone could make Weymael Vendren shiver, and it pleased him that he had. “I don’t doubt that you’re a monster, Quodo, but you don’t realize: ghouls are even more loathsome than you are.”

  “That’s the point, lord! Sex with a ghoul would disgust me as not even a human being can anymore, and I’d want to smash it and tear it—” He cut this outburst short when he noticed how the other’s jaw hung slack. Wrenching his flicking hand away from his shoulder, he said with his most engaging grin, “It would be a challenge, don’t you see, to my artistic professionalism?”

  “Yes, I believe I do see. But what have I to do with your refreshingly original perversion?”

  “You are surely the wisest man I know, and—”

  “I wonder about the other wise men you know, if you think I’ll swallow such gabble. What is it you want, Quo?”

  The spike of anger at this further diminution of his name nearly blinded him, and he let it show as he snapped, “You know about ghouls. I think you even know ghouls. And I know you’d rather help me than help fuel a bonfire.”

  Quodomass could hardly credit the stupidity, the uncharacteristic stupidity, of his own words. They had betrayed his lifelong labor to make everyone love him. He would often give his victims a reassuring pat and remark what nice hair or eyes they had just before striking the final blow, and those who persisted to the end in calling him vile names had no idea that he would forever after cringe from the memory of their hatred. But Weymael Vendren, who numbered ghouls among his acquaintances and was on speaking terms with dead wizards, could find means more hurtful than name-calling to vent his spleen.

  Dreading an eruption of the gnawing creatures he had stirred up, he jammed his kerchief back on his head as he groveled on the floor before the necromancer and babbled of the demon that had seized control of his tongue. Hearing an inhuman hissing and snorting through the thudding of his forehead against the parquetry, he feared that his patron had summoned such a being, but when he dared to look up he saw that Weymael himself was making the noise as he writhed in the throes of his queer laugh.

  “You want me to pimp for a ghoul? Thank you, Quodomass Phuonsa! You’ve done more to cheer me on a dreary day than a whole troupe of clowns ever could. Very well, I’ll help you. If you’ll help me.”

  “Beloved master, my life is yours—”

  “That goes without saying,” Weymael interrupted. “Forget about smashing it and strangling it and all that other depraved lunacy. Just amuse yourself with the wretched thing, and then bring it here. And don’t use that damned fish-fork on it, either.”

  “Oh, this? It came with the tackle. I planned on using a cudgel to subdue her.”

  “You’ll need an iron bar, and don’t hesitate to use all your strength, or you’ll regret it. Better still, I’ll give you a needle dipped in a certain potion. Just prick her, and she’ll sleep almost as soundly as your bait.”

  “I want her awake, or nearly so.”

  “Then use it afterwards, or you’ll never be able to drag her here. Would you trust that butterfly-net to hold a tiger?”

  When Quodomass left, Weymael escorted him to the door. This courtesy flattered the porter until it struck him that he was no longer trusted to be alone with the slaves, most of them young and female, who attended the fat man.

  * * * *

  Waymael’s warnings haunted Quodomass like the aftertaste of tainted food as he clutched his frayed net in the ditch where he had been hiding since sunset. The Cluddite graveyard lay so far down Dreamers’ Hill as to be almost part of the swamp beneath it, and Weymael had told him it was seldom visited by ghouls, who preferred to stay close to their hidden trapdoors and burrows on the farther slope. News of a corpse that had been permitted to ripen above ground would lure them almost anywhere, however, and the necromancer had promised to whisper that news into the hound-like ear of a ghoul called Gluttoria. Her fondest wish, he said, was to enjoy a quiet meal by herself.

  “They all spy on one another and try to follow any ghoul suspected of knowing something they don’t,” he had said. “So should y
ou see, should you even suspect the presence of a second ghoul, you’ll soon have them on you like lice. Don’t kiss her good-bye, don’t bother to pull up your drawers, just put your trust in Cludd and run for his temple.”

  Before sunset, he had watched the tiny figures of the celibate warriors bustling in and out of that squat building or marching like animated toys on the adjacent parade ground. They might have seen him, too, if he had raised his head above the level of the grass, and he had frequently cursed the god and his inconvenient temple on his long and painful crawl to a drainage ditch that lay near the newest grave. But as darkness fell and a milky fog breathed from the swamp, he began to regret its distance. The guards at the door might hear his loudest cry, but by the time they determined where he was and what he wanted, he could have been distributed into a hundred greedy gullets.

  It was more than fully dark, now that the fog had crept up the slope, and he checked his equipment again, but there was little to check beyond a net and an iron bar.

  “The skull undergoes a drastic transformation,” Weymael had said, “making it fit to butt aside rocks, and to support the muscles of the lower jaw, so don’t worry about breaking it. If you want to stun her, you’ll have to swing as if you mean to send her head flying. Take my advice and use the needle, first thing.”

  He examined the needle now, sheathed in fine leather, before stowing it in his shoulder-bag and sealing it away. He had no intention of furthering Weymael Vendren’s obscene research. The necromancer was helping him, he suspected, in the hope that he would impregnate the beast. The thought of success, of his unnatural offspring raised by that snickering, corpse-filching, upper-class fop, sickened him even more than the worst fantasies generated by his own brain-worms.