“This is a very special meal. This will set everything right, Mama. Please—please eat before I....”
“I can’t remember when I’ve so much enjoyed getting the fixings for you, Master Polliard,” Phylphot said. “That arrogant buffoon—”
“Enough! Eat, Mama!”
The candlesticks were too delicate to serve as weapons, but she might use a knife from the table. She smiled at the servant as she uncurled herself from the bed. Disgusting he might be, but he was the first male here who had looked at her with anything like normal appreciation. He blushed and giggled, distracted, as she had hoped, from whatever she decided to do.
“You’ll love the brains, I’m sure,” he said, and he sidled close enough to let her know that he was not the source of the worst odor in the room. Could it be the food itself? “He certainly thought they were the best part.”
“Eat,” Polliard whispered, creeping closer.
The ornate, silver cover of a tray might be her best weapon. If she hit Polliard square between the eyes with the edge, then turned and struck the servant, she might get a running start down the stairs.
Weymael Vendren appeared at the door, blocking her exit, and said as if criticizing her plan, “I don’t think it’s going to work.”
“What do you know about it?” Polliard cried.
“I? What do I know? I’m only the one who found your precious bones in the first place, who planned and executed their theft, who assembled all the graveyard earth and shit and semen and other filthy ingredients, the unborn child and the blood of a Pollian priestess, the rare weeds that no one ever heard of, who calculated the exact moments for fetching them and putting them together, who had the courage to speak those words from the scroll I found beyond Cephalune and achieved—look, damn you, look at her!—a perfect result—”
She doubled over, retching. He must be talking about the stinking food they had tried to serve her in the dark.
“Now see what you’ve done?” Weymael demanded. “Her equilibrium is more delicate than a butterfly’s wing—”
“Damn her equilibrium!” Polliard slobbered now, more like a ravenous dog than a human. “A filthy woman—doesn’t know food when she smells it—”
The boy abandoned his fearful struggle for self-control and attacked the table. He ruined her plan by flinging the cover of the tray to the far end of the room with a resounding clang. The smell that he released was even worse than could be explained by the ingredients Weymael had cited, although the contents of the tray were different: the innards of a large animal, a raw heart and liver and intestines, all of it about to liquefy in greenish decay. Abnormally larger than any pig’s or sheep’s, a brain festered amid the foulness.
She had mastered her nausea because she had no choice. Before the boy could begin gobbling up this horror, she seized the laden tray and hurled it at Weymael. Reacting like a normal person for the first time, he screamed, furiously batting the filth from himself. Polliard fell on him, lapping and biting greedily at the mess on his face and clothing.
The way was clear. Weymael had blundered away from the door, flapping his hands and jittering aimlessly. His face was already clean, although it now bled from the incidental bites his ward had inflicted. As for Polliard, he squatted in the spillage from the tray, stuffing it with both hands into his deceptively capacious mouth.
She hurled herself toward the darkness beyond the door, but she had forgotten Phylphot. He tripped her, fell on her from behind and, with an economy of effort that testified to considerable practice, twisted her arm up behind her back while simultaneously shoving down his breeches. She screamed and tried awkwardly to claw his eyes with her free hand as she clenched her sphincter tightly against a searing intrusion.
“Damn you, damn you!” Weymael screamed, kicking his servant repeatedly without much effect. “Are you crazy? Don’t you know what that is?”
“Yes,” Phylphot grunted, savagely twisting a thick handful of her hair and wrenching her arm even higher. “It’s my payment for butchering your fat fool, which you seem to have overlooked. It’s the nicest bag of meat I’ve ever seen. It’s a tight, dry hole, and I want to get into it! Leave me alone, you idiot!”
“Yet another worthy son of Quodomass Phuonsa!” Weymael cried cryptically to the ceiling. “Oh, if only I had never met that swine!”
He kicked Phylphot’s ribs more viciously, but he only drooled more, grunted more, and thrust harder. The pain of the unnatural intrusion was worse than any that the degenerate could inflict on her arm or her hair, and Zara refused to stop bucking and twisting away from it, cursing all the while.
“Polliard!” she screamed in her ultimate desperation, but her self-styled son, crouching an arm’s-length away, only added nervous giggles to the disgusting sounds he was making with his food. Remembering a promise that had once been made in this very room, she grasped at a straw that seemed so flimsy that she couldn’t the muster the confidence for a proper scream and all but whispered: “Princess Liame! Help me!”
“You stupid bitch!” Weymael roared, and now he abandoned his assault on Phylphot to kick Zara in the ribs. “Do you have any idea of the hell I’ve gone through to keep that impossible woman out of my home? And now you’ve probably ... oh, no.”
The candles blazed up suddenly and then went out, but this phenomenon had no effect on anyone but Weymael, who stopped kicking her and kept perfectly still. Phylphot’s ground on, Polliard ate with undiminished gusto.
“Your Highness,” Weymael muttered. “I had no idea, really, if I had known—”
Phylphot screamed. This might have been his usual style, for the sound coincided with a pathetic dribble into her torn rectum, but it was also accompanied by a sharp, cracking noise behind her, as of a branch being snapped. The rapist began to jerk and flail wildly as he lost control of his bowels and bladder. He did not resist when she shoved him off and staggered to her feet. She could not at first imagine how the fallen man managed the incredible feat of simultaneously presenting both his slack face and beshitten breech to the moonlight.
Tears of rage and nausea oddly distorted the moonlight, rendering one patch paler than the rest. It was this patch that seemed to murmur with Liame’s voice, “You should have called me sooner.”
Unable to credit that a moonbeam was speaking to her, Zara wiped her eyes clear and tried vainly to find another source for the voice. She yearned to run into the arms of the princess and beg her to make everything right again. “Where are you?”
“Where, unhappily, I am adjured to cease from troubling,” Liame sighed, her voice no more substantial than her shape. “You must run now, for I can stay no longer to protect you.”
Phylphot was dead, she could get no satisfaction from him, but Weymael cowered on his knees, sobbing obsequiously to the phantom and citing the elaborate genealogy that connected them. She knew she should leave while she had the chance, but she wanted to hurt him first. If she could lift the owl by the bed, it would make a good club.
But another presence blocked her way. It had to be Polliard, because it squatted where he had, it scavenged among the filth as he had, but it was no longer a boy. Its pallid bulk seemed larger even than a man’s. Unwilling to face any further horrors, she turned and fled the room without even thinking to thank Liame.
No one pursued her, luckily, as she picked her blind way through the junk-shop that had been Liame’s palace. She decided she had time to wade through the dead leaves and scrub herself in the questionable waters of the fountain. Her eyes were drawn irresistibly to the fallen figure of Midnight in the weeds. Once, twice she started toward it, then thought better of the impulse.
She had almost worked up the courage necessary to examine the face when something lurched out the palace to the shadowed portico. It was the pale giant that had seemed to replace Polliard. She ran.
* * * *
She no longer questioned that she had been wrenched into the future. The cold stones under her feet and the throbbing pain o
f Phylphot’s legacy gave continuous assurance that this was no dream. She surprised herself with her calm acceptance of fate, but she saw no point in weeping. The addled wizard and his kept boy could not be typical of Crotalorn’s new denizens; she would still have a trade. Until the gods revealed the reason for suspending their laws on her behalf, she would watch and listen.
“Hide thy shame, woman!”
Some things hadn’t changed. The cheap, leather-and-bronze armor of this Cluddite were like those of the preacher at Dolton’s grave. Even the mad, starved look, a scary mask with a bewildered boy behind it, was the same.
“I was walking up and down the streets in search of the wicked, and lo, it was granted unto me to find a woman flaunting her sinful enticements for all to see,” he preached, more to the blank walls of the street than to her, and he alarmed her thoroughly by drawing his hand-me-down sword. “She shall lure no more into her pit of foulness, Father Cludd, for thy lowliest servant, Cluddax Umbren, will thrust into her bare body with holy iron, again and again, tearing out the sources of her shame and stamping—”
She had often wished that Dolton would not quote at extravagant length from The Book of Cludd when he was drunk, but now she thanked him for it. “’All thy worldly goods, save only thy sword, are on loan from the poor,’” she quoted sternly, and added: “So please give me back my cloak.”
It was hard not to laugh as he goggled at her and said, “It doesn’t mean that!”
“It says that. Either give me your cloak or take me to your reverend lord commander, that I may tell him how Cluddax Umbren quibbles with Scripture. That I may tell him how he refuses to clothe a naked woman so he can gawk at her. And put that up. ‘Show not thy sword to the wretched and the hungry, lest I show thee My fist.’”
Confounded by a woman who could quote his Book, Cluddax tried to take off his cloak and sheathe his sword at the same time, dropping both. He tripped, but managed to gather up the rough woolen garment and extend it at extreme arm’s length to a creature who probably alarmed him more than would a talking cat. She left him struggling manfully to pick up his sword, apparently unaware that he was standing on it.
* * * *
She knew that she could find food and shelter at one of the temples on the other side of the Miraga, but her feet kept her on this side. They took her around Dreamers’ Hill to Hound Square. The closer she got the more fearful she became, but she could put no name to her fear. She told herself that the square would be a good landmark for finding Potash Alley, where she had lived, and that was why she followed this route; but she could think of no good reason for going to Potash Alley, either.
The square was still dominated by a very ancient statue of a hound, crude by the standards of her day. Most people claimed it had been erected to honor a dog whose barking had saved the city from a surprise attack, but Dolton said it was really an idol that the Frothoin had worshipped before the true gods revealed themselves: Yelkeh, the Hound Goddess. The snarling beast seemed the center of the indefinable menace that filled the place, and she kept an uneasy eye on it as she crept around the edges of the square, still wondering why she had come here.
The buildings were different. As elsewhere, brick had largely replaced wood, and the facades seemed unduly austere without the fanciful carvings that had once rioted along the streets. Perhaps it was unfair to judge the people of this new world by their architecture, but it seemed fit for a race of lock-stepping blockheads.
She stayed off the new, brick-paved footway, keeping her feet on the familiar cobblestones, smoother now than they had been. They belonged to her world, and she willed them to convey some message through their feel or sight. But they were just cold stones, and not very pretty to look at.
Looking up, she gasped. She stood by a lamp-post, and it was this, not the statue, that concentrated the menace in Hound Square. She had the irrational fear that the post would seize her and drag her up, screaming, to hang from its cap. She couldn’t breathe.
Turning to run, she collided with a very large man and knocked him down in the gutter. She fell sprawling on top of him.
“You!” she cried.
“Indeed it is, madame. What led you to that remarkable deduction?”
She scanned a face as familiar as Dolton’s or Crespard’s, but a face she could put no name to.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Weren’t you kind to me once? Didn’t you look after me during a long illness?”
Weymael had told her she’d been ill, but she’d had no memory of him at all by her bedside until today. She remembered this man gazing down at her with sympathy, talking to himself and ... picking up her head? Oddly, this image held no fear. If it had happened—and of course it could not have happened—it had been unremarkable in its context. She must be recalling a bizarre dream.
“I’m sure I would have been kind to you,” he said. Unsurprisingly, for he was a man, he had quickly discovered that she wore nothing under her cloak. She believed she had found the new protector she badly needed, and his words confirmed this: “May I do you any sort of kindness now? You seem to be in distress.”
“I am. My patron was buried this morning, and I have no one....” She tried to affect tears and found herself shedding real ones. The stranger left off caressing her to give her a reassuring hug. “I was kidnapped from the cemetery by a vile man, raped by his servant. I don’t know where to begin.”
“You don’t need to. I had a peculiar experience myself today, but I won’t burden you with it. I would be obliged, though, if you would let me get up.”
Her heart sank when she got a better look at him. She had thought he was wearing the ceremonial gown of a priest or royal deputy, but he was draped in a piece of yellowed linen with tassels and fringes that might have been a tablecloth. His feet were bare, too. She had to laugh. She had run for protection into the arms of a deranged derelict.
“Pardon my appearance,” he said a bit stiffly. “I hadn’t known I would have the honor of meeting a female Son of Cludd.”
She laughed even harder at the thought of how she herself must look, and it drew a smile from him. In the next instant he scared her by seizing her jaw in his hand and peering intently as he traced the outlines of her cheekbones and temples. She was again struck by the odd picture of this man picking up her head.
“Amazing,” he said. “Oh. Forgive me. I’m a professor of anatomy, you see, a student of bones, and the structure of your skull bears an incredible resemblance—”
“There you are, you wretched boy! Bring her and come home with me now.”
The stranger ignored this, unable to comprehend that anyone would address him this way, and in the next instant he was staggered by a blow from behind to his shoulder. His assailant, she saw, was Weymael Vendren. She set herself to run.
“You, Sir!” The stranger roared, his face flaming, his jowls puffing out with fury at the sight of Weymael, whom he seemed to know. “You dare to lay hands on me? To call me boy? If there be any shred of you left to burn for your crimes when I have done with you, I will arrange it.”
This threat brought out the worst of Weymael’s twitches, but he stood his ground and said, “Stop this nonsense and come home, you fool. And bring your damned mother with you.”
“I’m not his mother, either,” Zara cried. “And why you—”
“You don’t know what you are, you stupid whore, or what he is, so just shut your auxiliary cunt—”
“I will thank you not to address a lady in that style, Sir,” the stranger said to Weymael, who was now lying flat on his back with a bloody nose.
“Who smites the Tyger?” Weymael hissed, quoting the slogan of the Vendrens as he drew a sword from under his cloak.
“Smite? Smite? Smiting is for men, Sir, we Fands have a simpler way of dealing with obnoxious toads who hop from a privy!” the stranger cried, and he ignored the sword to deal Weymael a ferocious kick in the face. He then fell on him with one knee foremost, wrenched the sword from his hand and hu
rled it spinning across the square. He slapped his face forehand and back until Weymael screamed for mercy.
He let Weymael up, propelling him faster on his way with another kick. The man was neither young nor handsome, Zara reflected, but he was wonderful to behold with his gray hair frizzed out like a storm-cloud, a picture of godlike wrath as he shook his huge fist after the fleeing wizard.
“When at last I get a chance to kick that rascal down the street, I’m not wearing boots. Come into that tavern with me, we’ll have something to eat and drink.”
She thought they would immediately be thrown out the door of the Plume and Parchment in their ragamuffin costumes, but the innkeeper, alone in a dim room that looked as if it had recently been visited by a horde of enraged apes, knew her companion. “Dr. Porfat!”
His shock was mixed with pleasure. Hers was not when he moved into the light. She cried: “You!”
“Don’t mind her, Dodont,” the doctor said. “That’s how she greets everyone.”
Dodont eyed her suspiciously, but her attention had been seized by a bronze bust smiling wistfully on the room from behind the bar. She knew that face, too. If she had been brought into the future only this morning, how could she recognize so many people? Why did they not recognize her? She could make no sense of it. She wanted to flee, but her feet refused to move toward the door. Outside, she would be alone with the thin, sinister lamppost. She resisted the urge to peer through a window and verify her fear that it had crept closer to the inn.
“Have you spoken to the prince?” Dodont asked the doctor. “He’s quite beside himself, and one of him is too many, if you’ll forgive me, certainly too many for the peaceful conduct of my business. He tore the place apart.”
“Why?”
“Because your bloody cloak was found in an alley nearby. You’d been in here earlier discussing the recovery of a stolen skeleton with a villain called Phylphot, a reputed grave-robber. Everyone assumed he’d murdered you.”
The Throne of Bones Page 19