The Throne of Bones

by Brian McNaughton

  I stormed out of the auction-house in high dudgeon. I think I would have crossed the street to kick a stray dog or beggar, but fortunately none presented themselves on my way to the Institute. I stamped up the many and tortuous stairs to my office and, as noted, derived some satisfaction from slamming the door.

  Even this small relief was short-lived, for the impact of the door loosened some rickety shelving overloaded with books and osteological specimens. These fell against a towering heap of crates filled with notes and correspondence that, in turn, fell against a second, similar heap, and a disastrous avalanche would have ensued if I hadn’t reacted with more agility than I thought I commanded. I blocked the collapse, flinging out my hands and somehow finding just the right spots to support. It was one of those rare moments when I am pleased to be almost abnormally tall and wide.

  But the issue was still in doubt. My footing was slippery as I leaned across the door, the piles were enormous, and my arms began to tremble from the strain of supporting the mass. A cloud of dust had been stirred up, and I struggled painfully to suppress a sneezing-fit that would have provoked a catastrophe.

  An uninformed person might say that my office was a mess. My dear sister has gone so far as to say that my true life’s work has been to construct a wonderfully complex playground for rats and cockroaches. But I knew precisely where everything was in this apparent disorder. I could put my hand in an instant on any book, manuscript or specimen I might require. It took care and luck to retrieve them, of course, but I knew where they were, and I would have lost them forever if my sister sent in her servants to “tidy up,” as she sometimes threatened.

  Now I was in danger of losing this system to a fit of my own ill temper, and this knowledge did nothing at all to improve it.

  Having for a moment mastered the urge to sneeze, I began analyzing the unbalanced mountain. Moving with great care and deliberation, I just might be able to disassemble it a piece at a time to prevent total collapse. I stretched as far as I could, reaching to the very top of the pile that loomed above me.

  Using the head of a stick or a sword in an irksomely officious way, someone rapped sharply on the door.

  “Wait!” I cried. “Don’t open the door, whatever—”

  “Eh? Eh! Porfat, good, you’re hiding in there!”

  Since my imbecile brother-in-law was a prince, he didn’t just open doors and walk in, he hurled them open to reveal himself, though perhaps it would be more accurate to say, “since my princely brother-in-law was an imbecile.” The door knocked my feet out from under me, the foremost pile fell on top of me, the other heaps collapsed. Previously unaffected mountains of boxes and shelves and books and scrolls in remote parts of the office were sucked into the universal disaster, though I didn’t witness their ruinous fall. Buried in papers as I was, I could only groan at the din that raged throughout the scrupulously maintained order of my files.

  “You need to have someone in here to tidy up this mess,” Prince Fandiel said, after he had shoved enough debris aside to haul me to my feet. “Nyssa mentioned that she wanted to lend you some servants, but I really didn’t imagine....” He surveyed the chaos with distaste. I think he believed that my office had always looked like this, even though loose papers still wafted lazily in mid-fall from the crash he had provoked.

  I might have assaulted any other intruder, but even if the prince hadn’t been owed the consideration due Nyssa’s husband, he always managed to put me off balance. His heroic figure and impeccable turnout would have accentuated the squalor of my office on its best day. I normally thought of myself as middle-aged, overweight and unstylish, whenever I bothered to think about such superficialities at all, but in the presence of this warlike demigod I was no more than old, fat and slovenly. I imagine he had a similar effect on everyone. I could almost hear his military superiors muttering to one another, as they promoted him to posts of ever-higher responsibility, “You don’t suppose he really can be an imbecile ... do you?”

  “Ghouls, Porfat,” he said, perfecting the devastation by shoving the contents of my desktop to the floor so he could perch on it. “Ghouls.”

  “Indeed,” I sighed. “I know something about them.”

  “Well, then, where do I catch one?”

  “I’ve been trying to do just that for forty years. I may once have come close, but.... Why do you want one?”

  “The thief known as Squirmodon. You’ve not heard of him? Amazing! He murdered and robbed any number of wealthy people, and now that we’ve caught him, he refuses to tell us where he hid his loot, despite the most relentless interrogation. He is to spite what what’s-his-name, you know, that martyr fellow, was to ... whatever it was he died for.”

  Since the Empress had moved her court to Crotalorn, the regiment known as Never-Vanquished had taken over the maintenance of order in the city, and Prince Fandiel was its commander. I had assumed he confined his police work to politically motivated slogan-painters when he wasn’t engaged in more congenial functions, such as laying out parade-routes to cause the greatest inconvenience to the public. The image of my brother-in-law as a thief-catcher bemused me.

  “And what has this thief got to do with ghouls?” I said.

  “Among the lower orders, the belief is common that a ghoul can discover a man’s secrets by eating part of him.”

  “This is nothing new,” I said. “Superstitions of all sorts gather around these creatures. In the absence of any evidence—”

  “Ah, but this is new! A cult that worships a so-called King of the Ghouls has sprung up in the city. Like all cults, its true object of devotion is cold cash. You can chop off the ear of your partner in crime, feed it to the King, and for a price he will tell you how grossly you were cheated on your last robbery.”

  “You know more about this than I do. Why haven’t you found them?”

  “They don’t want to be found, at least not by the authorities. But everyone I’ve spoken to knows someone who knows someone else who’s actually witnessed one of their obscene ceremonies. Everyone believes it. Take Squirmodon. The wretch has been broken on the wheel and deprived of all but his most essential parts. He scarcely seems to notice anymore when the Lord Collector of Tears visits his cell with the hot pincers. But when I suggested to him that the King of the Ghouls might be enlisted to discover his secrets, he flew—or rolled, actually—into a paroxysm of rage and terror. If he still had his teeth, I might have suffered a serious wound to the ankle.”

  “Superstition,” I repeated. “Students of madness have described a mental ailment called Fornikon’s mania, the morbid fear that a ghoul will eat your corpse and personate you to your loved ones. This would seem to be a universal outbreak of that delusion, probably caused by overcrowding, high prices, and the decline of manners in our sorry age.”

  “Doctor, they can’t all be crazy, not every single sneak-thief and cutthroat in Crotalorn. But they all believe it. And from what I’ve heard, I’m forced to believe in the existence of the cult, though I’ll reserve judgment on its usefulness until we’ve found it. And found a part of Squirmodon remaining that we can safely cut off. But if anyone can track them down, it’s surely you.”

  I had to laugh, although the prince was not used to being laughed at and obviously liked it not one bit. “Do you know what that is?” I asked, gesturing toward a corner of the office.

  “A pile of rubbish,” he snapped, and I had to admit he was right. Grumbling, I trudged over to remove the weight of disordered papers he had dumped on the prize of my collection.

  “No, look here,” I said, when I had uncovered an oblong box and pushed its lid aside. “After years of haunting graveyards, exhuming bones and questioning witnesses, this is the closest I’ve yet come to a ghoul.”

  “A skeleton,” he said, peering over my shoulder. “Rather a large one, but it appears to be female.”

  “A human skeleton,” I amended, and he agreed. “But according to the testimony of a score of witnesses who saw it while it lived, a
nd of hundreds more who saw it hanging from a lamp-post in Hound Square, it was a ghoul. A few believed it was an ape or hyena, or even a cross between them, but not one witness averred that these human bones came from a human woman.” I picked up the skull and the lower jaw, drawing his attention to teeth that were white and regular. “I suspect she may even have been beautiful, but a mob crazed by drink and blood-lust deluded themselves into believing her a monster.”

  “Two explanations readily suggest themselves, Doctor. Either someone gave you the wrong bones, or else she changed back to her human form when she died. Ghouls were once human beings, weren’t they?”

  “Such is my theory, but it has no room for miraculous reversions. Ghoulism is a natural disease, and you could no more reverse its effects than you could regenerate a missing limb. When you eventually get around to burying Squirmodon, do you suppose his body will be whole?”

  “No, of course not,” said the prince, “but he’s not a ghoul.”

  You can’t argue with logic like that.

  * * * *

  I thought about restoring order after the prince left, but the task was so overwhelming that the most I could do was shuffle through the mess, sighing and making despairing gestures. I couldn’t decide where to begin. My surroundings were an apt metaphor for my long efforts to become an expert on ghouls.

  I sat on the edge of the “ghoul’s” coffin and stared gloomily at her pretty skull, which mocked me in the time-honored tradition of skulls. Could the prince be right, that someone had given me the wrong bones? I forgot exactly how I had come by them, although the written details of the acquisition were ... somewhere in this mess.

  To my best recollection, the ghoul had been chasing a woman and child across Dreamers’ Hill in broad daylight. The woman had sought to save the child by throwing it to a crowd of mourners. Ignoring the woman, the ghoul pursued the child and ran headlong into a flurry of swords. The many wounds she suffered were still evident in these bones, and they suggested she had died instantly, but witnesses insisted she clung to life long after her body was hoisted on public display.

  I wished now I had investigated the incident more rigorously. As far as I knew, no one had ever come forward to claim or identify the remains. What became of the woman she attacked? And the child? After the passage of twelve years or so, it was unlikely that answers could be found to even the simplest questions raised by this unlikely story.

  A scroll that I failed to recognize had fallen among the woman’s ribs, and I withdrew and unrolled it. I soon wished I had not.

  A few years before this mass hallucination, I had conceived a passion for an art student called Umbra Vendren. She led me on cruelly, and I could regale you with endless illustrations of my heartsick buffoonery, but you all know stories of mature men enslaved by fickle girls and can supply your own jokes.

  Shortly after dropping me, Umbra married the notorious Lord Glyphtard. I took no comfort at all from her subsequent murder at his hands. If he had survived her by more than a day, I would have surely sought him out and—yes, time for another “old fool” joke—challenged him.

  Like most Vendrens, Umbra was preoccupied with morbid fantasies. She was obsessed with ghouls. But whereas I sought to study the malady known as ghoulism for the advancement of science, she glorified the sufferers in her art. The scroll I now held was one of her pictures—ludicrous, wrong-headed, uninformed—I caught myself sobbing as I thrust it angrily aside.

  Struggling to master my emotions, I paced to the north window of my study, the last place I should have gone. Thanks to my brother-in-law, a heap of books and bones no longer obstructed its view of Dreamers’ Hill and, in the foreground, the woebegone mansion where Lord Glyphtard had lived.

  Odd, the similarity of the young lord’s fate to that of the woman in the box. After slaughtering Umbra, he had run mad through the necropolis and metamorphosed into a ravening ghoul. Evidence for the truth of this story was persuasive, however: he had left a welter of dead men in his wake, torn limb from limb in a way no ordinary mortal, no matter how maniacally energized, could have done. Armed soldiers ran him to ground and treated him in the same style. None of his relics, unhappily, survived; they had been burned by stupid priests.

  To pay my condolences—and to investigate, as tactfully as I could, the history of this peculiar young man—I had visited his mother, Lady Glypht. Admittedly, my mind was much disordered by grief and bitterness then, but I was struck by the unwholesomeness of a dank and gloomy house that seemed to exude a thicker miasma than the graveyard around it. The lady had surrounded herself with the scum of the Institute and its neighboring gutters in her hour of mourning, morbid scribblers and daubers, reputed witches and necromancers, proselytes of pernicious theories and followers of properly outlawed sects. Some time ago a colleague had made up a mocking name for my special field of study, ghoulology, and few words can irk me more, but this mob fawned on me and pelted me with respectful but foolish questions when Lady Glypht introduced me as “the celebrated ghoulologist.” Given his home and his mother, it would have been a wonder if young Glyphtard hadn’t grown up to become a ghoul.

  It was all Umbra’s fault, according to Lady Glypht. She had led her son astray, perverted his scientific investigations of the cemetery, perhaps even bewitched him with a Vendrenesque spell. She had seemed almost amused by this account of her son’s death as she clutched my hands to her bosom and batted her eyelashes at me. I recalled that her husband and her father had been murdered years ago under circumstances never plausibly explained. I took my leave abruptly, having learned nothing.

  * * * *

  I had grudgingly promised Prince Fandiel that I would try to find his ghoul-cult for him. If it existed, its membership would surely be represented among the necrophiles who fluttered moth-like around the dark flame of Lady Glypht. Gossip had it that she still befriended amateurs of the macabre.

  But when I approached her home on the following evening I saw that things had changed since my last visit. Lights had burned everywhere then. Misfits had infested the house, spilling over into the gardens and the neighboring graveyard. Now the windows were shuttered and barred, and only a few dim lights glowed in a downstairs room. I chuckled at my ironic observation: it looked as if someone had died.

  “Like unto him that lieth with himself, he that laugheth with himself shall slay himself,” quoted an alarming apparition that suddenly clanked to life in my path.

  “See here, Sir! When and where I choose to laugh or lie or die are none of your damned business. Doesn’t it say somewhere in your Book that he who jumpeth up in front of people in dark places might getteth his empty head broken?”

  “I know not that,” the Cluddite said. “Know you those words, Cluddrod?”

  Even more alarmingly, he was answered by a second one at my shoulder: “Those words are not. He is a mocker, Zornard, and a scoffer.”

  “And a blasphemer. Tell us your name, that we may ask our reverend lord commander to write it down against the day when you are called forth to answer.”

  “My name is my own, Sir. Stand aside, or I’ll have Lady Glypht set her dogs on you.”

  Most oddly, my threat placated the fanatic confronting me. Behind me I heard a source of retroactive terror, a sword scraping back into its scabbard.

  “Your name is your own, but your face is in my eye, blasphemer,” Zornard said. “If you have business with the witch, pass and be damned.”

  Losing my temper at the outset had given me more confidence than I had any right to feel, and now I wanted only to escape these homicidal rustics. For some strange reason of their own, the Sons of Cludd adored Empress Fillitrella, and more and more of them were cluttering our streets and haranguing passersby every day. I was baffled by their presence here, but I had no wish to prolong a discussion with men so heavily armed and lightly civilized. I hurried forward, trying to make my abject flight seem like impatience to be on my way, as one of them quoted loudly, “A fat man is but a shortcut betwee
n the pigsty and the graveyard.”

  “Dr. Porfat!” Lady Glypht cried with delight when a servant ushered me into a large and ill-lighted room. “Why have you neglected us for so long?”

  Some idle gallantry was required, but I was too upset to attempt it. “Do you know that Cluddites are out there, screening your callers?”

  “Why, yes, I hired them. The poor boys need something to keep them occupied, and one can’t be too careful nowadays.”

  “They—” Whatever I meant to say drained from my mind as I saw that her door-keepers had let her down badly. That person who had outbid me at the auction watched me from the shadows. His unsavory young companion lurked by him, staring with what might have been called insolence in any normal boy, but that in this one conveyed the reptilian disdain of a grand and ancient lord.

  “Doctor, have you met Weymael Vendren?” I believed I had heard the name in some unpleasant connection, never associating it with this man, but I was boggled by the next introduction: “And my grandson, Polliard?”

  Could this be Umbra’s child, and Glyphtard’s? No, of course not, he was too young.

  “I had thought—”

  “Yes, that Lord Glyphtard was my only son. He had a brother, though, whose very name has been banished from this house. When Polliard’s mother, a common person called Zara, died rather inconveniently, I put the boy in Weymael’s care.”

  I wanted to say that I would not trust Weymael Vendren to mind a dog overnight, much less raise a child, and the wretched result seemed to justify this opinion. At a loss for any suitable alternative to such words, I stood silent as I endured Weymael’s effusive greeting. The man actually embraced me.

  “Dr. Porfat and I share a scholarly passion,” he said. “I hadn’t believed that anyone in Crotalorn knew enough about Chalcedor to connect him with Magister Meinaries, but the Doctor did, and very nearly stole a treasure from under my nose.”