The Throne of Bones

by Brian McNaughton

  When she found him cowering outside the east gate, Glittitia asked, “What happened to you in there? What did you see?”

  “He doesn’t eat their souls. He keeps them safe from the world,” Zago said. “I almost asked him to take mine.”

  “It’s a little late for yours, don’t you think?”

  “That’s what stopped me.”

  * * * *

  After five decades of obscurity, Quisquillian Fesh looked back almost with nostalgia to his one moment in the blaze of universal scorn. Younger stargazers neglected to laugh when he introduced himself; laymen no longer said of a drunkard on a spree that he was “observing Quisquillian’s Comet;” and no one even bothered to mock him anymore when he predicted, as he sometimes did, its imminent return.

  He realized that his earlier predictions had deserved mockery when he at last produced an irrefragable calculation based on the numerological value of his name. This time he locked the figures away. When scientists swarmed to his door crying that they had seen his comet and lamenting what fools they had been, he would say, “I know,” and produce the sealed prediction.

  He stayed late in bed with earplugs and a sleeping-mask on the designated day, intending to be at his best for the midnight return of the unique star-traveler. This apparently caused him to miss a fire or massacre or other popular diversion, for when he emerged in the evening, the street outside his house pullulated with quidnuncs.

  He tottered to accost a stranger, who babbled that the end of the world was at hand, for a manlike head with a fiery train had been seen to arc steeply through the sky at noonday. Some said it had fallen with a hissing column of steam into the Canal of Swimming Shadows, which was a pity, since nothing that fell into that canal was ever retrieved.

  “That was mine!” the stargazer cackled. “That was Quisquillian’s Comet! I predicted it! Come and see my calculations! They may be off by twelve hours, but—”

  “Let me go, old man! You’re crazy!” the stranger said, as did everyone else.

  Whatever the prodigy had been, it was soon forgotten in a frenzy of speculation over the First Lord’s absence from public functions.

  Gossip only intensified with the reappearance a few days later of a much-diminished Vendriel the Good. Above a body that seemed thin to the point of incorporeality, only his pallid features moved, and only with the most apparently painful difficulty. His flowing white hair and beard were clearly false. Fanciful observers said that nothing remained of the necromancer but a head propped on a stick-figure in his black clothes.

  During his long convalescence, he dictated a list of those he wished beheaded. It filled a scroll the length of a dwelth-field, and included all childcatchers, Sythiphorans, Death’s Darlings and orange cats. Gnepox boasted of impressive progress on the cats before his mysterious disappearance.

  As soon as Gnepox dropped from sight, Vendriel recovered more than fully. His pasty look had always brought dough to mind, and now his body filled out overnight like dough left to rise. He was seen to leap about like a man only one-third his age, though in much the clumsy style of his missing headsman.

  * * * *

  Zago learned how tiresome it is to live with a person one has betrayed, even if the victim never knows. And Glittitia, begging scraps from strangers and suffering ecstasies from an oaf, watched herself turn sour and shrewish.

  They made their way to Sythiphore, among whose ivory-skinned and black-haired mobs she easily gave him the slip. He struck up a friendship with a young pit-fighter whose general cast of features reminded him of Glittitia, and before long he forgot most of what she had taught him about women.

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  The Return of Liron Wolfbaiter

  I

  Young persons usually sleep soundly, but none slept with the fierce determination of Elyssa Fand. Calling her or shaking her were useless. She had to be tumbled about like a baker’s dough, propped on her feet and shouted at. Even after she had grumbled that, yes, she was indeed awake, even after she had correctly given her name and named the day of the week, she had to be watched, or she would subside to the bed and to an even deeper slumber.

  “That storm was enough to wake the dead!” her mother had cried, hastily making a sign to prevent some malicious god from taking her literally, one morning when Elyssa had peered out the window and asked why the ancient oak lay across the well, its roots clawing empty air.

  Her mother had gone on to describe the continuous raging of thunder, lightning that turned night to noon, the sky that became a sea and broke over the house in waves. Elyssa was delighted. She hardly ever dreamed, and this troubled her, but her mother’s words stirred a dim memory of dreaming about a man walking on the roof in heavy boots.

  She had slept through the noise of that terrible night last spring, but the odor that assailed her now dragged her from a sleep even more profound. More than a simple stench, it was an atmosphere compounded of every foulness she could name, and of some that were nameless. Not just her nose was offended: it burned her eyes, soured her stomach and clogged her lungs. Each breath was a struggle, as if she sucked the air through folds of moldy wool.

  As she wiped her stinging eyes, a fearful suspicion gripped her. It was winter, she recalled, but no coals glowed in the grate. Even on the darkest nights, she could dimly discern the rectangles of her bedroom windows. Darkness now was total.

  “I’m blind!” she screamed. “I’ve gone blind!”

  Although her screams sounded more like rasping croaks in a voice untuned by sleep, they were loud enough to have brought a slave running, perhaps even to have woken her mother. No one stirred. She thought of screaming again, but her first effort had drained her lungs of the foul air, and the noise of her breath was almost as unpleasant as the labor it cost to catch it. Equally disturbing was the absence of other sounds: no cries from the streets, no distant barking, only the ragged rustle of her own, unfamiliar breathing. She was almost never ill. She believed she was now very ill indeed.

  “It’s a dream,” she muttered to herself. “In one night, I’m making up for all the bad dreams I never had ... but I don’t like it!”

  She had screamed. Wheezing and gagging, she resolved not to do it again.

  She groped for the tinderbox on her bedside table. It was gone: not just the box, but the table. Rolling to search with her right hand, she rolled off the bed and fell to the floor. Moaning curses as she rubbed her bruised knees and elbows, she could no longer doubt that she was awake.

  The thick carpet of her room was missing. The floor was of stone, like those downstairs, but it was cold and damp, even slimy. She shivered with loathing when she raised her fingers to her nose and smelled a potent concentration of the stench that had woken her. She wiped her hand so hard on her linen nightdress that the cloth parted.

  Rising, she groped for the surface where she had lain. It was not her bed. It was higher. More alarming, it was no bed at all, it was a bare slab.

  She backed away, and something poked her shoulder. She recoiled again, then reached for it. It was not stone. Wood? Its surface was more like dry, cracked leather. She traced its protrusions. It was shaped like—no, it was in fact a human hand: a long-dead one.

  She tried to thrust it away, but she had twined its fingers in hers. She shook it vigorously, and the hand and part of its arm fell rattling to the floor as separate bones. She kept her resolution not to scream, but she could do nothing to contain the dry sobs that racked her. She knew where she was. Her worst fear had come true.

  Years ago, her great-great-grandfather, Umbriel Fand, had traveled to Frothirot for the investiture of Vendriel the Good as First Lord. The strain of suppressing the curses that he longed to howl snapped some vital connection, and he dropped dead in the crowd that pressed around the Spider Gate to view the progress of the abomination. Although he was unknown to the Frothirot Fands, his rank entitled him to be buried in their ancestral vaults, and so he was.

  More than a week passed be
fore the news reached Fandragord, where it was recalled that the old man had suffered in his youth from fits that mimicked death. A dreadful possibility suggested itself to his loved ones. His youngest son set out immediately and reached the capital in three days and nights of riding, a feat never since equalled. Explanations were offered in feverish haste, the tomb was opened, and Umbriel sprawled out as if he had been crouching with his ear to the door. The blood was still wet on his fingers, abraded to the bone by his efforts to claw through marble, and physicians estimated that death had truly touched him only hours before. He was nevertheless brought home and put to bed, where his family took turns defending him from flies and mice until his odor and appearance had so degenerated as to blight even the most sure and certain hope.

  The story was retold frivolously at family gatherings. Her ancestor had become a figure of fun. If a kinsman passed out at a festive table, her father would tell the servants to “put Grandfather Umbriel to bed,” provoking roars of mirth. They even laughed at the ultimate horror, which had forever disgraced her branch of the Tribe: Umbriel had survived his confinement only by feeding on a corpse that had preceded him into the tomb by a month. “Grandfather Umbriel’s favorite,” her father would cry when the holiday pig or goose was brought steaming from the kitchen, “Frothirot Fand!”

  The tale had horrified Elyssa when she first heard it, and each retelling only deepened her horror. She concealed her feelings, for her loutish brothers would have pounced gleefully on such a weakness. She had trained herself to pluck their snakes from her bed and their toads from her shoes with no more than a sigh of impatience, and so she was able to laugh with the others when Umbriel’s name came up. But in the privacy of her vivid imagination she had relived each and every one of the wretched man’s last hours. She felt his terror, she agonized with him over the unthinkable alternative to starvation, she felt her own nails rip as he clawed the unyielding wall. She had struggled to fight off the notion that her deep slumbers were an echo of his illness, and that she would one day wake up in the very tomb where he had been finally buried, but the notion became an obsession; and now it was a fact. Perhaps the bones she had scattered on the floor belonged to the flesh-tearing, marble-torn claw of her ancestor.

  She screamed now. She raved. She raged through the tomb, strewing bones in her wake, tearing limbs and heads from desiccated bodies. She hated the dead. She hated the living even more, those who had abandoned her and still breathed the open air. Most of all she hated Lereela Vendren, heiress to Vendriel the Good. Everyone in her family knew that Grandfather Umbriel’s fatal fit, suffered after years of normal health, had not been naturally caused. The wizard-lord had sensed his unspoken thoughts in the crowd and swatted him with a casual spell. And now his great-granddaughter had done the same to her.

  “Ah,” Lereela had said when they were introduced as children, “the ghoul’s granddaughter?”

  Elyssa had flown at her with the intent of scratching out those absurdly crossed eyes, which silly men now professed to find attractive, but she unaccountably stumbled and broke her wrist before she could reach her target. She would never forget the chime of Lereela’s laughter, audible even through her howls of pain and rage, as she was taken from her own birthday party.

  “Be nice to Lereela,” her mother later advised her. “No one can afford not to.”

  She took that advice, greeting the witch’s vicious smirks with polite smiles, pretending to misinterpret her sly insults as compliments. But on the eve of Lereela’s departure for Frothirot to be received at court, Elyssa had been unable to resist taking a jab.

  “You have no idea how glad I am to see you go, Lereela,” she said; and paused pointedly before continuing, “to take your place, of course, as the brightest star at court.”

  “And even if that should happen, dear sister,” Lereela answered, pausing for precisely the same length of time, “I shall never, ever forget your words.”

  Elyssa’s screaming rage subsided to cold fury, silent except for the paper-crumpling rattle of her struggling lungs. Lereela had left ... a week ago? Her memory of events preceding her last sleep were hopelessly tangled.

  She would survive, however, she would escape, because no hatred like hers could be held by mere walls. There were powers greater than Lereela’s, and she would learn to command them if it took her fifty years. She was a Fand, of the Dragon-bannered Tribe that had battled the Vendrens as often with sorcery as with swords. She prayed to Sleithreethra, whom her parents had always timidly neglected. She promised Lereela to that Goddess, along with her own mother and father and brothers, too stupid or uncaring to see that they were burying a living girl.

  Sorcery would be too impersonal for Zornard Glypht, and poison too indirect. She would grip in her own hand the dagger that cut out his heart, after she had used it to remove parts that were regrettably more familiar. He said he loved her, but where had he been when they sealed her tomb? Moping over his memory of Lereela Vendren, no doubt; he had once roused her fury by venturing that the cast of the witch’s eyes was “not entirely disfiguring.”

  Absorbed in her vengeful devotions, she grew conscious of a draft, but it was some time before she recognized its significance. When she did, she brought her prayers to a hasty but scrupulously respectful end and crawled toward the source of the air-current.

  One of the flat stones of the floor had subsided near the wall, leaving a gap just wide enough to insert her fingers. Beyond it she felt nothing, only empty space—and a sudden incision of teeth like chisels.

  It hurt, but her shriek was one of rage. Instead of jerking her fingers back from the rat’s teeth, as the old Elyssa would surely have done, she rammed her whole hand through the opening until she found a grip on its body. It squealed and clawed, but she squeezed it, giggling softly, until its bones cracked and its life shivered away. She offered it to the Goddess, who had obviously heard her prayers, as a token of greater gifts to come.

  She heard chittering cries and a patter of claws beneath the slab. The rats had tunneled below the tomb to undermine this stone in a project that must have taken them generations. About to celebrate their triumph by feasting on Fands, they had been attacked from an unexpected quarter. She understood their terror and confusion. If she listened hard enough, she believed, she could have understood their very words.

  She shrieked to frighten them away as she ripped up the stone and screwed her way into the narrow hole, but they were not easily frightened. Thick as mosquitoes in Frothirot, they gnawed her fingers, nipped her arms, scratched her face. Powered by fury and despair, she clawed and bit more savagely than the rats. She knew in a cold part of her mind that she had gone quite mad, but this part averted its gaze like a squeamish spectator at the baiting-pits and placed its wager on madness.

  The overmatched rats fled, their chirping chorus fading in the hollow distance. She strained her eyes into the darkness, but all she could see were dim smears of phosphorescence that vanished when she stared at them directly. Her nose told her more than her eyes about the ordeal before her. Fouler than the acid dankness of clay unknown to the sun, the tunnel smelled of graves that had long since drained their liquefied tenants into these deeper depths. But the only alternative to going forward was to remain in the tomb forever. She began to crawl.

  At times the earth seemed as tight around her as the skin of a sausage, but her wriggling progress never faltered. When the tunnel branched, as it often did, she always seemed to know which branch to take. Even when the path sloped away from the sun and air she yearned for, she obeyed her instinct and followed it. At one point a clutter of roots clawed her, and she took this for a hopeful reminder that she was close to wholesome trees that reached for the free sky. She realized that the objects were the withered limbs of corpses, that she was squeezing her way through a mass grave from some plague or persecution. Here the rats had tunneled through compacted bones rather than earth. Her groping hands crushed worms fat as her fingers, but they greased her way.


  The tunnel entered an empty tomb, where at last she could stand erect, rejoicing to see cold moonlight slicing through a door that hung ajar on broken hinges. She stumbled forward and flung it wide on the cemetery, laughing at the vastness of the sky and the glory of the light. Night-birds and insects fell abruptly silent.

  The clutter of Fandragord rose before her, but so strange from this angle and at this hour that she thought for a moment she had emerged into fairyland. A history scrawled in blood had dictated that its buildings face inward, presenting only grim walls to the streets. Viewed from the cemetery, a thousand normally unseen courtyards twinkled with torches and colored lanterns. By daylight, the breached walls and toppled towers were constant reminders of sorry decline, but moonlight and haze combined to veil the city’s scars and restore its grandeur. And, while all the happy people she pictured laughed in their splendid city, she had fought rats and crawled through corpses. The tide of rage that had buoyed her thundered back.

  She stood on an older slope of the graveyard, its ruts and stones concealed by an overgrowth of brambles, but a ribbon of road gleamed palely below her, and that seemed the shortest way out. By the time she had half-struggled and half-tumbled to the foot of the slope, the roadside ditch looked more inviting than her own soft bed at home. She would have fallen gladly into it if hunger and thirst had not clawed her innards so savagely. She prayed now for one scrap from all the cakes she had nibbled politely and set aside, one sip of the water she had once squandered merely to cool her temples.

  Stumbling and weaving forward, she recalled with less distaste the rats she had recently killed and the bodies she had torn. Her thoughts alarmed her, but they fed her hatred for those who had warped her mind with the story of Grandfather Umbriel. Daggers and poison no longer figured in her images of revenge; her weapons would be her teeth. She hungered for the proud neck of Lereela, the faithless heart of Zornard.