The Throne of Bones

by Brian McNaughton

  “The gray drayhorse in the far stall?” When he had stopped laughing, Nephreiniel said, “You really do have a sense of humor! Don’t worry, we’ll lend you a hunter.”

  * * * *

  Crondard prayed that a brain addled with Fandragoran wine had transmuted a scuffle with an ordinary whore, but the condition of his room turned the prayers on his lips to bile. When he had regained control of his stomach, he forced himself to wad up Elyssa Fand’s clothes with the bedding smeared by her decay. He heaved the bundle over the rail and hurried to dress.

  Fortune had smiled on him, he reflected, in her quirky way. Lord Nephreiniel had been pleased to befriend him, and he saw no chance of ingratiating himself with any other Zaxoin noblemen who might give him employment as a bodyguard, huntsman, or even a dog-handler. Leriel Vendren might be First Lord of all the Frothoin, but it would take him a hundred years of litigation to retrieve a fugitive protected by a lesser lord.

  He used a stick to thrust the bundle into the dungheap, catching himself at the last minute from doing the same with Olycinth’s perfumed cloak. The lord’s party was mounting, with much horn-blowing, spear-clattering and shrill boasts of feats to come, while recent sleepers bawled for quiet from a dozen windows. The hounds escalated the din when Crondard approached and they hailed him as their dearest friend, too long absent.

  “I simply don’t understand it,” Nephreiniel said. “Have these horrid beasts been bewitched to lapdogs?”

  “As your lordship’s father knew, dogs trust a true and honest man,” Crondard said with his most engaging grin, but he had no illusions about the motives of the hounds: they hoped he would feed them another corpse.

  * * * *

  Hogman’s Plain had been named by some fool viewing it from the comfort of a tower in the city, where the abrupt ridges and gulleys might seem only ripples in a blanket of witchgrit and monk’s-rut. These weeds, Crondard’s new friends assured him, flaunted a spectacular display of blossoms for one week in spring, but now in autumn they flourished only thorns like daggers and burrs like spiked flails in their tangles. Lacking the horsemanship of the others, he had reason to be glad of the armor he wore; but more reason for cursing the heavy cage of leather and bronze under a sun that disdained the calendar.

  The dust he saw so much of, wallowing along at the tail of the party, mixed with his sweat and baked him in a red crust that made him look like a cannibal from the Outer Islands, as his cool and spotless companions never tired of observing whenever they let him catch up. Among the occupations he had thought of seeking with Lord Nephreiniel, he had not considered clown, but he believed he was proving himself qualified.

  So far they had seen none of the wild hogs that grew more monstrous and fierce with each anecdote the huntsmen traded, but now the hounds they followed raised the pitch and intensity of their din. Horns brayed, spears flourished, and the dust in his face darkened as the pace quickened to a suicidal gallop. Sour a view though he had taken of this enterprise, he could not keep his heart from racing, nor did he restrain his equally excited mount from dashing headlong into the billowing cloud that whooped and thundered under a jittering glitter of spearheads. Disjointed lines and images from the Fomor epic, The Hunting of the White Hart, rang and racketed through a head emptied of both fear and thought.

  A black shape plunged into the brush to his left, and he swerved to follow it as the others held their course. His mount hurtled down an almost vertical path, but he guided it with his heels as he juggled his spear into position with both hands: a feat he performed with less premeditation than if he were tossing back a drink, but one that would bathe him in cold sweat whenever he recalled it. His heart rose to his throat in the precipitous dive as he set himself to cast the spear at the bolting black mass. It seemed impossible that all the hounds and men could have failed to notice that the boar had cut away from them, but it had happened, and he would redeem his inept antics by having sole honor of the kill.

  The spear was not his weapon, the back of a horse was not his home, but his arm was strong from years of sport and drill, and he made a mighty cast: the spear flew straight. Fortunately the dog, as he recognized his target to be an instant too late, swerved before the spear struck the spot where it would have been. He wrenched his mount to a halt, but the horse was much quicker to obey than Thunderer. It stopped short, and he flew over its head into a wall of witchgrit.

  The horse hurried on its own way. The dog came back to fret over him, even though he cursed it by all the Gods of the Frothoin and the Fomors as he tried to free an arm from an interdependent puzzle of thorny vines. Only when he had done that could he begin to work on the even more complex trap that bound his hair and beard. The dog tried to encourage him by slobbering on his neck and whimpering. Crondard redoubled his efforts, ignoring torn flesh and uprooted hair as he looked forward to the moment when he would have the pleasure of skewering the animal on his boar-spear.

  His anger had faded by the time he was free. The hound had probably abandoned the hunt to follow the scent of a wild bitch, and he could see himself doing the same. Remembering the boarhounds’ perverse notion of play, he dealt this one a cuff that would have knocked some men flat. The dog bounced back with an inspired impersonation of demoniacal fury. Soon they were wrestling in the dust like old friends, more or less evenly matched. The Fomor conceded defeat when he found his throat enclosed gently but very firmly in a rumbling muzzle.

  They sat companionably for a while, panting and listening to the racket of chirps and rattles and whirrs in the lively wasteland. The clatter and hooting of the hunt sounded like a remote war among tinsmiths. The dog snacked on bugs, his teeth snapping smartly. Crondard caught him a few in a hand once quick as lightning, but he had to admit the dog was better at the game. He was too old for it.

  He confronted the hard fact that he had mistaken the dog for a boar because his sight had grown dim, and what use had Nephreiniel for a huntsman who speared his hounds, a bodyguard who slew his catamites, a courtier who doffed his cap with a grand flourish to statues? He lay now at the foot of a tall slope; he could discern individual vines, thorns, and flitting birds in the foreground, but then they washed into a brown and purple cloud. In the cruel blue sky at the top, sooty little creatures drifted slowly, more than he had ever noticed before. A follower of Sleithreethra would say those were the malign entities that constantly besiege us, but a physician had told him they were imperfections normal to aging eyes.

  He rose, rebuked by his creaking knees and by the frisking of the young dog. It made no difference whether he trudged after the hunt or waited for it, but he might find distraction from his thoughts if he kept moving. He resolutely refused to lean on his spear as he picked his way up the brambly hill.

  His ears were still good enough, and he was pleased to hear the hunt approaching. He might not have so long a walk. His pleasure wilted as he noted how rapidly it came. It flew at him like a whirlwind, just over the ridge, a pack of savage hounds, a dozen huge horses ridden by reckless men, and all of that unswerving tonnage hurtling behind a boar with tusks like scythes. The stupid dog beside him agitated the stump of its tail with glee.

  He might climb a tree, ludicrous a figure as he would cut when they saw him, but the nearest tree lay a hundred yards away through thick underbrush. He might take cover behind a particularly thick clump of brush, and there was one near at hand, but the men might ride straight through it, nor would it stop their quarry. He could stand in plain sight, waving and shouting, but the boar might see him as a target. So might one of the men.

  While he dithered over his choices in a way that Akilleus Bloodglutter of the old ballads never would have, the target of the storming horde topped the ridge, and its appearance stunned him: it was a naked boy, fleeing in terror and in the last stumbling gasp of exhaustion. The hound charged him with an exuberant roar.

  “Hold!” Crondard thundered. To his surprise, the dog stopped short and stared back in disbelief. The boy altered his course and
ran toward them.

  He gripped the hound’s collar, which bore the ideogram for its name: Floss. “That’s no kind of name for an overgrown lout like you. Just stand here, that’s a good boy, and I’ll give you a proper name, like Corpse-cruncher, or Lord Frothiriel, maybe ....”

  He talked on, taking no note of what he said, just trying to calm the dog. There was no calming him: he trembled and growled, yearning toward the boy as if his savage spirit would presently burst out of his skin to attack, leaving his body standing obediently behind.

  Crondard risked a look at the boy and beckoned with his spear. He needed no encouragement. The hounds and horses had topped the ridge behind him, and he flew downhill with no trace of his former exhaustion. It took Crondard a moment to accept what he saw, but there was no denying it: the hunters were purposefully pursuing the boy. There was no boar. The hounds were at his heels, the riders glared at him with maniacal eagerness, some with spears already raised for a cast.

  The boy himself defied explanation. His hair was copper, his eyes were blue, his skin was several shades paler than Crondard’s own. He looked, in fact, like a pure Fomor, like the child Crondard himself might have produced with the very fairest woman in Ashtralorn, a child whose non-existence he sometimes bemoaned when he drank. But even if one accepted that the boy was a Fomor, and that he was here on Hogman’s Plain, where no one lived, why was he not burned black by the sun or painted red by the dust?

  Floss quivered even more tensely, and Crondard felt his own knees tremble. He could ignore his unanswerable questions for a moment, but he could not ignore the icy fingers that caressed his heart as he saw the way those sooty entities swarmed near the radiant child. When the boy smiled and opened his arms, running faster now that he was only a few yards away, Crondard’s hairs crackled as if he stood in the path of a thunderbolt.

  “Liron is here!” he shouted, and it was surely the first time he had ever used Wolfbaiter’s war-cry without ironic intent as he fell to one knee and braced the butt of his spear against the earth. At the same time he released Floss, who launched himself at the boy like a bolt from a crossbow.

  Even now Crondard had doubts. He screamed with horror as the child ran headlong onto the spear, as Floss clamped his throat in bone-crushing jaws. Blood sprayed over the white skin, the eyes widened in horror, but the spear bowed as if receiving a weight ten times heavier than the child. The mouth opened in a scream and kept opening impossibly wide, revealing teeth like sabers. Crondard was flung back as if he were the child, buried under the stinking weight of a humped swine half the size of a horse.

  “Is that how you Fomors do it?” Lord Nephreiniel quivered with anger at being denied the kill, and so unconventionally. “No wonder there are so few of you.”

  Crondard was pinned beneath the boar, but he had no taste for asking help from the fluttering fops who ringed him. He craned his neck to stare down at the monster that still twitched and bled on him as Floss finished tearing out its throat.

  More to himself than anyone else, he said, “Things are not what they seem lately.”

  “When were they ever?” Lord Nephreiniel said.

  IV

  The austere provincials insisted, to Crondard’s chagrin, on segregating the sexes at the public baths, and he was required to scrub himself twice before enjoying a hot soak in the pool. Restored, though, and with his gear furbished while he bathed, he returned to the Sow in Rut with a spring in his step, but he lost it as soon as he entered. He thought he had blundered into the wrong inn.

  He stepped outside, ignoring the crowd that jostled him, an inconvenient rock in its babbling eddies. By daylight, the sign over the door looked even more tasteless and crudely executed, but it clearly identified the place. It seemed unlikely, but he might have approached the inn from a different street last night. He remembered that street only as a silent array of shuttered facades, empty but for menace.

  The shutters were open now, and sleazy wares overflowed onto the footway. Merchants bounced and bubbled as they chivvied passersby into bargains on candles that had been stored in hot attics or carpets retrieved from flooded cellars. All this jolly bustle confused the memory of his first impression, more suited to the evil fame of the city. Except for the pervasive black granite of the underlying hill, reshuffled and dealt into paving stones and building blocks, it could have been one of the seedier commercial streets in Frothirot.

  He entered the tavern again: not into an oppressive passageway, but directly into the taproom. Unlike the room he remembered, its far end lay open to the courtyard. What he could see of the building around the court was smaller and tidier than the ramshackle sprawl he had seen last night. Patrons began drifting out of the room as he entered.

  In his bewilderment he failed to note soon enough that three armed men were also moving to guard the exits. They wore the tower-and-thunderbolt emblem of the city on their helmets and breastplates. At least they had not come from Frothirot, but it was clear that they had come for him, and he drew his ax with a sigh of resignation. His condition had suffered an ironic reversal: their hooked bills would give them the advantage of hunters ringing a boar with spears.

  Their officer, a puffed princock who vividly recalled his late captain, had no bill, nor did he deign to draw his sword as he strutted up to the glowering Fomor. He forestalled Crondard from splitting him with the amazing question, “Are you the murderous necromancer who calls himself Liron of Ashtralorn?”

  “I am Liron Wolfbaiter,” he said. He was chilled to recognize the plum cloak that the officer held at arm’s length, but he went on: “I am a mercenary soldier on my way to Zaxann.”

  “On your way to a bonfire, more likely.” The men got a laugh out of this, but Crondard’s innards went hollow. “We burn necromancers here, you know. Do you deny that this garment belonged to a seamstress named Fanda, found dead and partly eaten last night near the temple where she was employed? Or that you were observed concealing it behind the stables this morning, along with her dress?” Drawing closer, growing more heated—the officer perhaps saw a future for himself as an examining magistrate, and was practicing his technique—he shouted: “Is it not true that you performed these heinous acts of murder and cannibalism as a diabolic ritual to revive certain bones, which you attempted to dispose of in the kennels?”

  Crondard cursed the inept dogs, but he said, “Bones? What bones?”

  Indulging a flair for melodrama, the officer flipped back the cloak to reveal the skull, now picked clean of flesh and missing its lower jaw, of Elyssa Fand. “Ha! See how he shies from it,” he called to his men. “Remember that when the magistrate questions you.”

  The Fomor willed himself to wake from this nightmare to a world where the inn would be as he remembered it, a world where he would no longer be pursued by the irrepressible Elyssa Fand. Remembering how they had seemed to see, he could not tear his gaze from the empty holes of her eyes. The men with their bills edged closer.

  “Wait! I know nothing of murder or necromancy. That cloak belongs to a whore who called herself Fanda, yes, whom I took to my room last night. The landlord....” He glanced toward him and was startled to see that his ears were of quite normal size and shape. Even before he had played that trick with the ass’s ears, they had looked freakish, but they had seemed to be his own.

  The innkeeper said, “He was shopping for a whore, but I didn’t see him pick one.”

  “And where did this Fanda go without the clothes that you were observed burying?” the officer asked. He jerked the skull at Crondard, making him jump. “And whose is this?”

  The Fomor saw that he had let himself be surrounded. He was within reach of any of the bills leveled at him. As a frequenter of taverns, he was familiar with the techniques of law enforcement. The men would presently thrust out to hook his neck, an arm, and a leg, while the officer clubbed him into submission with his iron glove. If he struggled at that point, he could be torn limb from limb. His only chance lay in striking first.

/>   “This temple where the seamstress worked, you say—which one was it?”

  “The Temple of Sleithreethra, as you well know,” the officer said, and he raised his hand to make the required sign that would fend off the attention of that Goddess.

  “Liron is here!” Crondard roared in his face, and the man was arrested in mid-sign as the Fomor’s ax splintered his skull. His helmet, containing the upper portion of his head, clanged on the ceiling and showered them with blood. The man to his right had kept both hands on his bill, so Crondard dealt with him next, driving his left eye deep into his brain with the butt of the ax-helve.

  The remaining two, religious as their captain, were fumbling to regain a grip on their weapons when Crondard kicked one in the balls and demolished the other’s face with the back of his ax. Though it was illogical, and he knew it at the time, he turned next to the thing that his screaming nerves insisted posed the worst threat of all. With a series of lightning-strokes, he smashed the skull that had rolled from the officer’s hand. He scuffed the fragments with his boot to every corner of the room.

  The man he had kicked was now struggling to rise, but Crondard beheaded him. Not thinking at all, impelled by some memory of the old ballads of Bloodglutter and Shornhand, he picked up the head by the hair, its face still twitching, and carried it with him as he strode out under the awning to the courtyard with his dripping ax over his shoulder.

  His choices were limited. If he fled on the pathetic Thunderer, he would not get beyond the city wall before pursuit overtook him. The finest mounts were Lord Nephreiniel’s, but if he stole one of those, he could hardly flee to Zaxann. Or would it be considered theft to take a man’s horse and ride it to his home?

  While he weighed these questions, his eye fell upon the trophy of that day’s hunt, hanging from a hook at the far end of the courtyard. Its throat torn out, its breast opened by a spear, it was the body of a fair-skinned youth with coppery hair whose eyes now stared at him as the breeze idly stirred it. Closer examination revealed that its face was not just that of the son he might have had. Though slackened by death and crawling with flies, it was the face that he himself had worn as a boy.