The Throne of Bones (16 page)

“Better than when he was farting and puking and telling us all what rotten guts we have. Ar’s crabs!” The barbarian shuddered to recall the poet’s ways.

“Why do you think I put up with him? Now the mayor is coming here today, Lord Vendrard, and a dozen of our currently immortal poets to dedicate—”

“They make enough noise, don’t they?”

It was too early, certainly. The fowls and joints and the suckling pig for the banquet to honor Picote weren’t in the oven yet. But the guardsman was right: a mob had burst tumultuously into Hound Square.

“Ar’s botch! Is that our mayor they’re hoisting to the lamppost?”

The mayor never came. He had recently made a sarcastic riposte to critics who had faulted him for ignoring a rumored plague of ghouls. He saw no need to verify his conviction that the creature hung up on display that morning was only a monstrous hyena. His presence in Hound Square would confuse the superstitious, he said, in excusing himself from the poet’s memorial feast.

By noon, word of the marvel had bounced back and forth across the Miraga and up and down Crotalorn’s five hills. A solid mass of human beings jammed the square and the streets leading into it. None of the other dignitaries felt that the effort of fighting through that mob was justified by either a dead poet or a dying ghoul.

Those who came for a free show were disinclined to pay for drinks; nor did many who had viewed the speared, gaffed and imperfectly disjointed horror as it rotted before their eyes want to sample Dodont’s banquet, even at reduced prices. As the day wore on, closed doors and windows could not keep the smell of the thing from the inn.

“The more it steams away, the more it looks like an ordinary girl,” the Fomor said. “Are they playing a joke?”

If his only customer had much more to drink he would believe that Picote’s bust was an ordinary girl, too, but Dodont poured more wine and said, “A girl wouldn’t be alive. See how it watches the sun.”

The innkeeper ground his teeth as he said this, for the thing’s apparent devotion to Polliel mocked his religion. It would die, said the watchmen who hung it there and refused to remove it, if it spent the full day in the sun; but the abomination seemed entranced by the deadly sight.

When he could tolerate such blasphemy no longer, Dodont went out and fought his way through the crowd to the ring of watchmen. “It keeps mouthing the God’s name,” he protested. “Can’t you stop it?”

“Polliard,”
a watchman said. “That was the name of the boy it would have killed, if some woman hadn’t saved him. She ran off before anyone could thank her.”

“And the boy?”

“To be sold, unless someone claims him. Besides
her.”
He jerked his thumb at the dangling ghoul and laughed.

“Look at that! Look! It’s saying
Polliel,
I tell you!”

“Polliard,” the watchman sighed, and looked away.

In fact Dodont was right. Staring at the sun, Gluttoria was thinking of those gilded candies she had been too tender-hearted to eat as a girl. She might have stared all day in wonder at the beautiful sun if the innkeeper, enraged by her sacrilege and his lost business, had not snatched the inattentive watchman’s bill and poked her eyes out.

I took some satisfaction from slamming the door of my office behind me with all my strength. I would have been better satisfied if the head of the odious dilettante who had thwarted me at the auction had been peeking through it.

Apart from his status as a minor specimen of the Vendren Tribe, I knew nothing about the man, but a reflexive dislike had seized me from the moment I first noticed him loitering at the Anatomical Institute. The sound of his laughter, a staccato wheeze, was merely distasteful, but the sight of it, with its attendant twitches and tics, was nauseous. He could have been a student or even an instructor, but I suspected he was one of those who prowl the fringes of schools for unsavory purposes. I often saw him in the company of a boy whose striking beauty was marred by an air of precocious depravity. Just the sight of those two typically lurking in a shadowy corner, with a group of admiring students hanging on their words, could put me out of sorts for the rest of the day.

My dislike had been unreasonable, perhaps, but today it found a reason.

I am an enthusiast for the work of Chalcedor, an unappreciated genius who flourished two centuries ago. Critics dismiss his vision as provincial, which it was, and pornographic, which it also was; but he gives us a picture of life in Crotalorn as real people lived it in his day, a day more to my taste than the bumptious, tawdry, jostling present. I find his rare manuscripts especially enthralling, since he would doodle in the margins while waiting for inspiration to strike. Often naughty, sometimes whimsical, his sketches let me glimpse the mind of a long-dead man who seems to have been not much different from myself.

Studying an auctioneer’s catalog a week ago, I noticed an unsorted lot of books and papers from the estate of Magister Meinaries, whose name no one but a student of Chalcedor would know, who had lent money to the writer when, as often happened, he fell on hard times. The lot was most likely nothing but law-books and ledgers, but I persuaded myself that it must hold at least one of several lost manuscripts, and I foolishly expanded on this notion aloud while perambulating the quadrangle with an associate.

I did not observe that Vendren person skulking nearby while I babbled, but he must have overheard, for the detestable man came to the auction, and came with much more money than I brought. He paid an absurdly high sum for a box that was, on the face of it, nothing but rubbish, confirming my suspicion that he had filched my intuition.

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, and 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.”