The Throne of Bones (22 page)

Amazingly, she asked: “You are Dr. Porfat?”

“Er, yes. How—?”

It became clear how she knew when I saw Prince Fandiel and my sister, Princess Fandyssa, among the glittering entourage at her heels. Nyssa was plainly struggling against an urge to throw herself on me, which probably would have been a breech of courtly decorum, while her husband looked oddly sheepish.

“What on earth have you been doing this time?” the Empress asked with a little laugh. “Fandiel has told us so many delightful Porfat stories—how you went to a lecture without your breeches, how you had to be rescued from the roof of the Institute after you wandered there while lost in thought—and I can’t wait to hear what prompted you to take a swim in the Miraga with your clothes on.”

I shot the prince a glare that he avoided as I struggled with the rope still around my chest. The pain in my right shoulder rendered that hand useless, but I thrust my left into my shirt and undid the clasp of the necklace.

I tried to perfect the gesture by rising to my feet, but I found that I could not. “Madame, I believe this is yours,” I said, extending the emerald necklace to Her Imperial Majesty.

I’m sure I would have relished the look on my brother-in-law’s face, but that pleasure was denied me as I lost consciousness.

Delirious with fever for a time, I enjoyed several peculiar conversations with the skeleton of the alleged ghoul that Weymael had stolen from my office. She reminded me that I had acquired her from an innkeeper named Dodont, who had put out her eyes for blaspheming the Sun God. It was the skeleton’s contention that she had been praying, and that her prayer had moved the god to restore her human form after her death. This sounded plausible; the gods love to bestow useless gifts.

As soon as I came to myself—in the Empress’s own cabin, no less, and nursed by her own hand—and gave a coherent account of my discoveries, Prince Fandiel was dispatched to recover Squirmodon’s loot and exterminate the ghouls. Unhappily for both these missions, the fire that started in my cloak had burned down Gourdfoot’s tavern and a dozen buildings around it, burying the former warehouse-cellar in a second layer of debris and blocking access to the treasure and the tunnels.

Amid the universal acclaim I enjoyed, nobody mentioned—not in my hearing, but it may have provided another “Porfat story” to amuse the court—that I had probably destroyed most of the stolen goods I found. The remainder would most likely be carried deeper into the Underworld by the King of the Ghouls before human workmen could reach it.

The workmen may find proof that Lady Glypht is dead, too; unless, of course, her son assuaged his grief by eating her corpse.

I declined Her Majesty’s offer to recuperate in the palace under the care of her physicians, reminding her that I was no mean physician myself, and I was permitted to go home and nurse my wounds in private. Or so I thought. But that Feshard person had installed himself in my lodgings, having given them the same intolerable “tidying” he had given my office, and I was too weak to kill him.

Prince Fandiel, whose advice had saved my life, continued to demonstrate that he might not be a complete imbecile. Although still officially maintaining that Weymael Vendren’s connections put him beyond the reach of the law, he had his men kick down the door of the palace and ransack the premises. There they uncovered enough evidence to have the necromancer burned ten times over; but the prince permitted himself to be bribed with the original manuscript of
Nights in the Gardens of Sythiphore,
which he then delivered to me.

That same day a bailiff appeared at my door to inform me that Gourdfoot was suing me for burning down his tavern.

When Vendriel the Insidiator lay dead on the field at Lilaret, a ghoul ate the king’s corpse and took his place among the living. After a time the mimic tried to shed his borrowed guise, but found that he could not. The Insidiator, although exhibiting some alarming new quirks, lived his life as if he had never died; the ghoul that had eaten him was seen no more.
Moral: Eat no corpse whose spirit is stronger than your own.
—Mopsard,
Fables for the Fabulous.

Dolton Bose hadn’t looked Sythiphorian, but his mother more than made up for it, a fish-faced witch who phlegmily gargled her speech.

“Thou hast fed long enough off the living,” she spat at Zara by Dolton’s waiting grave, where only they, a Cluddite preacher and some unhopeful creditors stood by, “now go feed off the dead! And may Gluttriel consume thee, whore!”

“Mother!” the preacher cried, uneasy from the first to find himself among such people and now thoroughly shocked.

Zara ran, trying to rub the tears from her eyes without smearing her paint. Mourning or not, she had to earn her supper. There was nothing to eat at their rooms in Potash Alley, and Dolton’s mother surely wouldn’t invite her home.

Worst of all, the horrible woman was probably right. Dolton had died from a catastrophic attack of the botch. She knew he was unfaithful, he was a swine, but she had most likely brought him the disease. Women often showed no symptoms.

She gasped, faltering. Perhaps running had brought on those symptoms. She was ill. She had never felt worse. She fell in the tall grass, retching, curling into a ball against the fire in her stomach.

Before the world folded in upon itself and fled down a long, dark tunnel, she had time to reflect that this was like no symptom of the botch she knew. It was more like a hunger that blotted out all thought, all feeling, that blotted out awareness itself, a hunger that could never be satisfied, not in a hundred years, nor two hundred.

A sweating moon hung over her. It looked deeply concerned, even frightened.

A fist pounded continuously on a door.

“Stop it, stop it, stop it!” the moon screamed.

“I’m not well, am I?” Zara whispered.

The moon withdrew, became the twitching face of a man. “Oh,
you’re
all right. You look healthy enough.”

His glance bounced over her naked body. She felt an urge to scrub herself, for suffering his shifty gaze was like being pelted with mouse-droppings. He, in turn, seemed appalled by the sight of her. When she sat up, however, she saw nothing to appall a normal man.

The pounding resumed.

“Cover yourself,” he said.

“Why? I’m not cold.”

“The boy. He’s not used to nude women.”

She laughed. “I thought they were a boy’s constant study.”

“I forgot. Things were different—
are
a bit different where you come from.”

“Where am I?”

“In Crotalorn.”

“Are you mad? I was born in this city. I live here.”

“Forgive me, I’m not myself.” She thought that he had been stricken by a mortal attack of asthma. It took her a moment to understand that he was laughing. When at last he could speak, he said, “You’re not yourself, either.”

“I must leave.” She slid hastily off a bed that was rather splendid, although the bedding was frayed. The room might have been elegant without the dust and cobwebs. A massive statuette overlooking the bed, a cowled owl or an owlish priest, seemed oddly familiar.

“No, no, no,” he said, pushing her back on the bed. Zara was taller than he, and strong, but she allowed herself to be pushed.

He asked, “What are you laughing at?”

“I just thought up a fine epitaph for myself.”

“It’s a bit late for that.” The cryptic remark chilled her laughter. Before she could demand an explanation, he screamed: “Stop hammering! All in good time!”

“I want to see my mother!” a muffled voice wailed.

“His mother?”

“Yes. Explanations are difficult. You’ve been ill, very ill, perhaps more ill than anyone has ever been before. Rest now. We’ll talk later.”

“I don’t want to rest. I want to go home.” This was true. She crackled with life and energy. Even that terrible hunger, the last thing she remembered, had vanished. “Let me go. My patron, Dolton Bose, will pay you well for nursing me.”

His mouth fell open. “I don’t ... Dolton
Bose?”

“Yes. Why do you stare?”

“It’s an unusual name. A unique name, I had thought. A Cluddite from Sythiphore?”

“His father’s ancestors came from there a long time ago. His horrible mother was a recent import. But his father had been a Son of Cludd and gave him a Cluddite name. He never liked it.”

“This is fantastic!” He suffered another long siege of giggles. “And he wrote, didn’t he ... under a different name?”

“You know him? He calls himself Chalcedor.”

“I know something about him. You are that same Zara who stuck with him for so long?”

“It’s strange enough you should ever have heard of
him!”
She wondered why he should gawk at her as if she had announced her true identity as Queen of the Frothoin.

“You were with him when he wrote
Nights in the Gardens of Sythiphore,”
he stated. “Do you know what happened to a tale he may have written for that book, ‘The Abstemious Necrophage?’”

“That? It was horrible! I made him burn it. Where on earth did you hear about it?”

His pallor grew ghastly, his twitches more disruptive. “I owned the manuscript of the book once, but it was stolen. I still don’t have it, even though the thief has paid dearly indeed.” Although that seemed to amuse him, his voice grew suddenly cold as he demanded: “Did you persuade him to burn anything else?”

When her captor’s eyes were not flitting here and there, when they bored into her with black intensity, she realized that he could be menacing. Dolton had no devoted following. His manic secretiveness would prompt him to tell any lie rather than admit he had slept well last night or planned to go for a walk this afternoon. Only a wizard might have known the details of his career and of their life together. She was forced to admit that this man, who had seemed only an absurd nuisance at first, looked like one.

“I persuaded him not to use my name in all his stories.” She smiled wryly. “He used everything else, though.”

He studied her deliberately from head to toe and back again. She was not unused to such evaluations, but this one made her flesh crawl, it was so thorough and so cold. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he had produced one of Dolton’s books and compared the written description with its subject.

It surprised her to learn, as it sometimes did when she was nervous, that she was still talking: “ ... and I would draw in the margins of his manuscripts to tease him, he said it was embarrassing to bring them to the bookseller with all the silly pictures cluttering—”

False concern throbbed in his voice as he interrupted, “I’m sorry to tell you, he’s dead.”

“Yes, I know. He couldn’t have paid you anything, either. I really do want to leave, that’s all. Please”

Slowly, like one instructing a child, he said, “He’s been dead a long time.”

“This morning.... May I—”

She meant to ask for a mirror, but the need for one was too urgent, and she had noted a pier-glass by the door. She sprang from the bed and dashed to it.

“That won’t tell you much,” he said.

“It tells me you’re lying!” she laughed. Her hair was thick and lustrous, her eyes were undimmed, no unfamiliar lines marked her face. She knew she was thirty, and she looked no older. “So much for long-dead Dolton! So much for giving birth to some boy without remembering it! Forgive my bluntness, Sir, but you are a lunatic, and I must leave you to gibber alone.”

“Wait—”

But she had unbolted the door and yanked it open. Her heart leaped. Impulsively, she cried, “Poll—!”

Perhaps she had meant to invoke the Sun God, for this golden boy was so like a vision of Polliel. His eyes yearned to her. She almost reached out to him. Then his face crumpled. Oddly, his obvious pain evoked no sympathy. It was the pain of a demon; she sensed that he meant to pass it on.

“This is not my mother!” he screamed. “This is a
woman!”

She thought the man’s impressive wealth of tics had been exhausted, but now he began to hum and do a little dance-step as he mumbled, “Yes, well—”

“You fool!” the boy screamed. “I’ll kill you!”

“Two
gibbering lunatics!” Zara said. “Forgive me, I must—”

As no child should have been able to do, the boy seized her and hurled her back into the room, where she landed hard on her rump.

His face softened, but she could no longer confuse that face with any sort of god’s. Seeming to look not just into her eyes but through them, to some other person behind her, he said, “Don’t worry, Mama. I’ll put things right again.”

It was odd that Weymael Vendren’s ward should be called Polliard. Did she know him, and had his name been on the tip of her tongue? She had felt a certain warmth toward him then; but the more she tried to pin it down, the more it faded. His strength was unnatural, his coarse expression hinted of vice, he was a brat: she could never feel anything for such a creature but distaste. She knew that wizards could plant suggestions in one’s mind, even control one’s thoughts and actions with casual words, and perhaps Polliard, an apprentice wizard, had attempted that by calling her “Mother.”

When Weymael left, she heard him conferring with another man, but the door was too solid for eavesdropping. She heard a bar sliding home—three of them, in fact—and this was confirmed when she found the door shut tight.

The six windows of the room were unlocked, but it was a long drop to the cracked flagstones. A tree had taken root among them and grew within reach of one window, but it was like a giant, limber weed that might not bear her weight. The wall itself, carved with fanciful designs, might offer purchase to the toes and fingers of a desperate woman, but it looked ready to crumble rottenly in places. She wasn’t yet entirely desperate, but at least she had alternatives, however slim, to jumping out a window and trusting in Cludd.

Looking beyond the derelict garden and its wall to the surrounding slum, she wondered if Weymael had told the truth. Crotalorn was a big city, she hadn’t seen every corner of it, but she knew of no
old
palaces of stone within its limits. The surrounding hills were abundantly forested, and until recently the nobles had contented themselves with mansions of wood, but with the accession of a Vendren king to the throne in Frothirot, that Tribe had succumbed everywhere to a passion for marble architecture. An old marble palace in the city of her birth was an anachronism; any kind of palace for a Vendren like Weymael, whose badges and tattoos were those of a minor knight, was an absurdity.