The Throne of Bones (20 page)

I soon spied Weymael Vendren and his ward perched on the seat of a thoroughly prosaic cart, drawn by a mule, like a pair of farmers coming to market; but of course it was no load of yams they had just dug out of the earth. After dismounting, they hauled an oblong box from the bed of the cart. From the way they managed it, it seemed unusually light for a coffin, but of course a ghoul would be far stronger than a normal boy.

Polliard seemed to be fretting, urging more care, and at last Weymael cried: “Damn you, it’s not a sacred relic of Filloweela, you know! And after all the ill treatment it’s had already....”

Polliard spoke quietly, and Weymael cried, “But what if the cursed thing decides to eat me?” Unfairly, since he was making most of the noise, he added: “And be quiet, can’t you? That fatuous, posturing, overstuffed humbug is probably still here, swilling my wine and masturbating over my manuscript.”

They disappeared into the palace before I could hear more.

I supposed Magister Meinaries would want his head to be buried with his body, but that was a far nobler deed than I had any intention of doing. I would have had to bring it home while I researched the location of his tomb. As a professor of anatomy, I could have explained its presence easily enough, but only if the thing kept still. I had no wish to lecture it on the need for caution, to hide it under my bed, nor even to keep it with me for one instant longer than absolutely necessary to keep my promise. I hurried toward the ravine.

The street at the edge of the cliff was deserted. I felt safe in reclaiming my cloak and setting the cage on the parapet. Unless I found a direct way of getting across the gap to the necropolis, where I intended to do whatever I could for Meinaries, I would have to spend the rest of the night walking there by a circuitous route.

It spoke. “What?” I asked, forcing myself to lean closer, and the head whispered: “He never repaid me.”

I guessed he meant Chalcedor, and it shocked me that he could still be capable of resentment. I suppose we expect only wisdom from the dead because they can no longer display the pettier side of their humanity, and Meinaries, through no fault of his own, was denied this advantage.

“Consider your rescue from the necromancer as repayment,” I said.

“Don’t you have some money?”

I bit back an oath and abandoned this conversation. Considering all he had suffered, it would be no wonder if he were stark mad.

The moon had set, and I reconsidered my plan as I peered into the blackness below. Negotiating the slope as I remembered it would have been difficult in broad daylight, and now I could see nothing. I stepped back hastily at a loud rustling from below, as of something determinedly rushing upward. At the same time Meinaries’ hateful teeth began to chatter frantically. I turned toward his cage in time to see something explode from the darkness. I thought it might be a pale bird taking flight, it came up so swiftly, but it seized the cage and pulled it back, like the hand of a preternaturally swift and sure climber. A louder scrambling and rustling receded into the depths, accompanied by a cry of terror so thin that I may have imagined it.

I found Prince Fandiel at breakfast, as I hoped I would, and outlined my discoveries after my plate had been sufficiently laden. “So if you really want to enlist a ghoul into the police force, round up young Polliard,” I concluded, “or behead Squirmodon and have Weymael Vendren interrogate the head. And then, if you want my further advice, burn them all at the stake.”

“Haw!” The prince had an odd habit: he had never learned to laugh properly, so he signified high spirits by barking and rapping on a convenient surface, in this case, the table. My irony must have amused him greatly, for the plates danced and a tumbler smashed on the floor.

“The position of our cousin—” he meant the Empress—“is so tenuous that I can’t burn Vendrens at the stake, even minor ones, much as they might need it. Nor should anyone indulge too freely in accusations of ghoulism and necromancy. The Cluddites would love that. They’d fall into the spirit of the thing and treat us to an uncontrollable bloodbath. We’d have to kick them out of the city, and they are of great value to Her Imperial Majesty as a counterbalance to Death’s Dildos.” He meant the regiment known as Death’s Darlings, virtually a private Vendren army.

“Then Squirmodon—”

“Is an academic question, unfortunately. Without legs or arms, and with the anchor-chain from a galley around his neck, he managed to burrow out of his dungeon. He was famous for staging such feats, and his guards believed in this one to their dying breaths. It’s more likely that someone burrowed in, although the collapsed state of the tunnel makes it hard to tell. It’s likeliest of all that the guards were bribed to let him go and start a bogus tunnel to confuse us. It’s not dissimilar to the case of that fellow, you know, in history, who supposedly escaped from somewhere or other.”

“You have a gift for lending depth to any subject, dear, with your wealth of cultural allusions, just like what’s-his-name, the poet,” Nyssa said mischievously, and to me: “I have a surprise for you, brother.”

“You didn’t tell anyone that we had Squirmodon in custody, did you, Doctor?” the prince asked. “I thought I made it clear that was a secret.”

“What sort of surprise?” I asked, turning my full attention to my sister.

She refused to tell me, and it surely was a surprise when I later opened the door that should have led to my office and found myself standing bewildered in a strange room, huge and full of light. I thought at first I had climbed the wrong tower, but then my eye fell on the myriad bottles and jars that contained my own anatomical specimens. They had been dusted and polished and, as never before, arranged on shelves.

An intruder, a lank, gawky fellow, was even now polishing skulls. I shouted, “You, there, Sir! What are you?”

“Your servant, Doctor.”

“Yes, yes, yes, and I yours, but who are you, and what do you think you’re doing?”

“My name is Feshard, Sir. Lady Fandyssa has directed me to serve you.”

I recognized this impudent rogue from Nyssa’s household and recalled her boast that he was one servant I would never be able to bully. I would see about that! “Go and tell Lady Fandyssa that you are not required here. Get out!”

“I’ve been instructed to obey you in all things, Doctor, except that one.”

I stalked heavily to one of the tall windows, meaning to open it and throw him out. I was about to warn him of this, but I was distracted by the broken latch of the casements. It struck me that Weymael Vendren’s servant had yesterday made a show of securing this very latch.

Leaning out to examine the eaves that had so interested him, I noted a pair of stout hooks driven into the beams a few feet apart. They seemed new, not at all weathered or rusted, and a pulley hung from one of them.

“I don’t suppose you have anything to do with this, do you?” When he hesitated to lean out the window, I grabbed him and shoved him halfway through. “Look, Sir, look! What do you make of that?”

“Someone was lifting something to the window?”

“Or lowering it,” I said, letting him go. He squeaked distractingly as he struggled to fall back inside the room.

I believed I knew what would be missing. The box containing the bones of the presumptive ghoul was nowhere to be found. Feshard insisted he had seen no such box while ransacking my belongings.

I stamped down the stairs, wondering where I could borrow a sword before presenting myself at Weymael’s palace to demand the return of my skeleton. Halfway across the quadrangle it occurred to me that my righteous outrage was compromised: I had, after all, stolen his skull. Worse, I had lost it. A moment’s reflection persuaded me that this was not the sort of argument one should start with a necromancer. I decided reluctantly not to press my claim.

I had stolen his map, too, and I still had it in a pocket of my cloak.

A very large man should avoid taverns like Gourdfoot’s, in Emerald Street, for small drunkards will see his mere existence as a challenge to be met head-on. At least two such began to bristle when I stooped to enter a room where midnight prevailed at high noon, but as soon as I began asking the innkeeper about the cellar, they returned their attention to racing cockroaches at their table.

“I sell junk from cellar, yes, when wall fall down and men come fix, but nothing more down there now no more.” Without being asked, Gourdfoot poured me a glass of
pflune,
a searing liquor popular only with Ignudos, our willfully unenlightened aborigines; and with criminals on their way to the scaffold, who want a strong anesthetic with no regard to consequences. As my eyes grew more accustomed to the dark, I saw it was the only drink he sold, and that he and his customers were Ignudos.

“It was once the cellar of a warehouse, wasn’t it?”

“Something like that, I guess maybe. Whole block, all buildings, share same cellar, so we keep door locked. They say you can walk through all Blackberry Bank without once seeing light of day—”

“No, what they say is, if you try it you never see daylight again,” one of the cockroach-racers put in, to general merriment.

“—but I don’t know if that true.”

Gourdfoot passed me a vial of ammonia, which one is supposed to sniff after drinking
pflune
to counteract the taste. It was not effective.

“May I have a look at it?”

“What, the
cellar?”
He was stunned, but his commercial instinct stayed intact: “It cost you many silver fillies.”

“Why?”

“For all trouble of unlock cellar door, then lock after you. And remember, it my cellar. I keep anything you find.”

“Not anything, Gourdfoot,” the humorist shouted, but he was overridden by another one: “No, no, Gourdfoot get to keep
anything
he find. Maybe dogface wizard find
glybdi
slut to work back room.”

The second comic had misjudged his audience. A sudden, nervous silence fell.
Glybdi
is the Ignudo word for ghoul.

I parted with a ridiculous sum for the privilege of touring the cellar, then learned that this did not include the lantern I had to buy. After he had undone a redundancy of bolts and bars, some of them so solidly mated with the floor that they required the help of his customers and their bargemen’s hooks, he heaved up the trapdoor on a dank abyss. He lowered a ladder for me, but as soon as I stood in water to my ankles at the bottom, he retrieved it.

“Wait—”

“When you want come up again, you go someplace else,” Gourdfoot said, dropping the lid. A flurry of grunting and hammering followed as they struggled to secure the door.

I began to entertain doubts about the wisdom of this adventure. I had been goaded to it by Weymael’s insults—fatuous, posturing, masturbating humbug, indeed! If that catamiting Vendren popinjay could sit back and collect one priceless manuscript by tormenting the helpless dead, I would use Fand enterprise and courage to bring back ten of them. Perhaps I should have reflected, as I did now, that in the master’s tales similar motives always lead a hero to his doom.

Poor Meinaries told Weymael he had stored six boxes in the warehouse, and only one of them had recently come to light, according to the auctioneer who obtained it. Neither the auctioneer nor the necromancer had investigated this site personally, perhaps because they were quite sensibly unwilling to venture among the Ignudos.

The savages’ fear of their own cellar, however, and its association with “glybdi,” cast sinister light on Weymael’s note that Emerald Street was “hopelessly dangerous.” Those red lines on the map that ran here from Dreamers’ Hill: could they be
tunnels?
And could the entrances—one of them at this very spot—signify junctions between the world of men and the underworld of the ghouls?

I sighed ruefully and unshuttered the lantern, which revealed a cavern not unlike Weymael’s home. Two centuries of rubbish had not completely hidden massive bales of once-rich fabrics, now thoroughly rotted, and scorched beams fallen from the original warehouse. My vision of a singlehanded search seemed even more foolish: a mining operation by a horde of workmen was required.

I waded to a cleared space where the foundation had been hastily patched with new bricks. The priceless box might have been found among the trash and building-rubble shoved aside for this work, but the bales and baskets and broken barrels had been jammed together to form an almost solid wall, and none of its components looked promising.

Some of it yielded to the poking and prying of my staff, so I put aside my cloak and attacked it more vigorously. I redoubled my efforts when an interlocked jumble of crates was revealed. Feverishly levered out, these proved to contain nothing but old clothes and broken dishes. A box of papers made my heart leap, but these were the ledgers of a long-dead purveyor of bone-meal and horse-manure.

I took no note of time until I realized that my limbs trembled with fatigue and my hands were bloody from tearing crates open without tools. I had spent hours of unaccustomed, physical labor, all of it for no purpose than to convert junk to wreckage and rearrange it. I was not ready to give up, but I was more than ready to leave and rethink my plan, preferably over a hearty meal. I would even be willing to settle for the sort of dinner I might get upstairs, pigfeet with cabbage and a bottle of
pflune.

Bending to retrieve my lantern, I tripped and fell against a jam of rubbish I had not yet disturbed. I ended on the floor, soaked with foul water and dazed from a painful knock on the head. When I raised my light, I saw that I had revealed an unsuspected doorway.

A dry and relatively clear passage led upward, perhaps all the way to street-level by another route. I decided to explore this for a short way in preference to pounding on the trapdoor with my staff until I overcame the Ignudos’ fears or died of exhaustion. I was soon shivering, both from my soggy clothes and from contact with an ancient city of cobwebs and its madly scrambling citizens. I spent more time cursing and pounding spiders from my limbs than I did looking where I was going, with the result that I tripped again.