The Throne of Bones (17 page)

“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 between 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.”

“Chalcedor!”
Lady Glypht cried, leaning against me as if in need of support. “Doctor, I had no idea that our foremost ghoulologist hid such a naughty side.”

I muttered some inanity about his value as a social historian while the lady giggled and Weymael twitched and wheezed.

Lady Glypht made no move to withdraw from our intimate contact, and I grew aware of an anomaly that had gone unnoticed in the shadowy room. She must have been at least sixty, but the body pressing my side felt no more than half that age. Having adopted the Frothiran fashions that arrived with the Empress, fashions more suited to the torrid climate and tepid decency of the former capital, she left me in no doubt that her skin was taut, her breasts high and firm. She had seemed unnaturally young at our last meeting; the intervening years had left her seeming even younger.

I disengaged myself as tactfully as possible, although she pouted, and took a few steps back from both of them lest Weymael should attempt to hug me again.

“When we last met, you were surrounded by some rather exotic admirers,” I said. “Have you dropped them all?”

“Exotic?”

“It pleases the lady to patronize Crotalorn’s most advanced artists and intellectuals,” Weymael said, “but she fears that their habits and conversation might be unsuitable for one of tender years. She never receives guests of that sort when her grandson visits.”

“Of course, you’re an exception, Doctor. I promise to receive you eagerly anytime you might wish to enter my ... home.”

She said this with a perfectly straight face and Weymael simpered dutifully. Neither one of them seemed to notice that Polliard guffawed at the innuendo. Being mocked by all three of them was a sore trial of my temper, and I hurried to the point of my visit: “Some of those
advanced intellectuals
were obsessed with ghoulism. I had hoped to question them about a ghoul-cult that, some say, practices its rites in our city.”

“How bizarre!” the lady cried. “Have you ever heard of ghouls worshipping anything, Weymael?”

“Their food,” the ineffable Polliard suggested.

“No, this cult is made up of human beings,” I said.

They listened with no more than polite interest as I expanded on this, but when I mentioned my brother-in-law’s plans for the thief, Squirmodon, Lady Glypht said, “They have him in custody? Last week the government confessed that he’d slipped away to Bebros with all his spoils. An assistant minister took the blame and committed suicide.”

I hardly knew how to respond. The imbecile prince had failed to warn me that I knew a dirty state-secret, and I had just handed it to persons whose connection to the slimy underbelly of the city may have been intimate.

“If I were a ghoul, I’d just eat him and keep the treasure for myself,” Polliard said.

“I hope all this disgusting talk hasn’t spoiled your appetite, Doctor. You will stay for a bit of supper, won’t you?” My excuses were half-hearted, and the lady tipped the balance by pointing out that it had started to rain.

While she went to instruct the servants, Weymael Vendren launched a monologue on the last subject I wanted to hear him discuss, his enthusiasm for Chalcedor. I fumed and fidgeted until it dawned on me that, allowing for the stupidity of certain literary judgments, he knew what he was talking about. I had never even aspired to his grasp of Chalcedoriana, although he admitted that family traditions and private documents had given him a head start; for he was a collateral descendant of Princess Liame, obscurely nicknamed the “Amorous Cadaver” by her contemporaries, who had rescued the writer’s bones from a pauper’s pit and installed them in a fine tomb.

He had obviously not needed to overhear my guess about the contents of the lawyer’s box to draw him to the auction, and I quietly rejoiced that I hadn’t made an ass of myself by accusing him.

“I hope it proved to be worth what you paid for it. I was only guessing—”

“Worth it! Doctor, the box contained a manuscript of
Nights in the Gardens of Sythiphore,
including the five ‘lost’ tales that no bookseller would touch.”

I was stunned. I had hoped to acquire some odds and ends for my own very minor collection, but I had almost—if not for Weymael Vendren—gained a fortune. A manuscript that rare, so rare that no one had even suspected its existence, would have bought me a luxurious retirement. I suppose it does me credit that this was not my first thought; although it was surely my second.

I blurted out my first: “May I see it?”