The Throne of Bones (25 page)

“I am. My patron was buried this morning, and I have no one....” She tried to affect tears and found herself shedding real ones. The stranger left off caressing her to give her a reassuring hug. “I was kidnapped from the cemetery by a vile man, raped by his servant. I don’t know where to begin.”

“You don’t need to. I had a peculiar experience myself today, but I won’t burden you with it. I would be obliged, though, if you would let me get up.”

Her heart sank when she got a better look at him. She had thought he was wearing the ceremonial gown of a priest or royal deputy, but he was draped in a piece of yellowed linen with tassels and fringes that might have been a tablecloth. His feet were bare, too. She had to laugh. She had run for protection into the arms of a deranged derelict.

“Pardon my appearance,” he said a bit stiffly. “I hadn’t known I would have the honor of meeting a female Son of Cludd.”

She laughed even harder at the thought of how she herself must look, and it drew a smile from him. In the next instant he scared her by seizing her jaw in his hand and peering intently as he traced the outlines of her cheekbones and temples. She was again struck by the odd picture of this man picking up her head.

“Amazing,” he said. “Oh. Forgive me. I’m a professor of anatomy, you see, a student of bones, and the structure of your skull bears an incredible resemblance—”

“There you are, you wretched boy! Bring her and come home with me now.”

The stranger ignored this, unable to comprehend that anyone would address him this way, and in the next instant he was staggered by a blow from behind to his shoulder. His assailant, she saw, was Weymael Vendren. She set herself to run.

“You, Sir!” The stranger roared, his face flaming, his jowls puffing out with fury at the sight of Weymael, whom he seemed to know. “You dare to lay hands on me? To call me
boy?
If there be any shred of you left to burn for your crimes when I have done with you, I will arrange it.”

This threat brought out the worst of Weymael’s twitches, but he stood his ground and said, “Stop this nonsense and come home, you fool. And bring your damned mother with you.”

“I’m not
his
mother, either,” Zara cried. “And why you—”

“You don’t know what you are, you stupid whore, or what he is, so just shut your auxiliary cunt—”

“I will thank you not to address a lady in that style, Sir,” the stranger said to Weymael, who was now lying flat on his back with a bloody nose.

“Who smites the Tyger?”
Weymael hissed, quoting the slogan of the Vendrens as he drew a sword from under his cloak.

“Smite?
Smite?
Smiting is for men, Sir, we Fands have a simpler way of dealing with obnoxious toads who hop from a privy!” the stranger cried, and he ignored the sword to deal Weymael a ferocious kick in the face. He then fell on him with one knee foremost, wrenched the sword from his hand and hurled it spinning across the square. He slapped his face forehand and back until Weymael screamed for mercy.

He let Weymael up, propelling him faster on his way with another kick. The man was neither young nor handsome, Zara reflected, but he was wonderful to behold with his gray hair frizzed out like a storm-cloud, a picture of godlike wrath as he shook his huge fist after the fleeing wizard.

“When at last I get a chance to kick that rascal down the street, I’m not wearing boots. Come into that tavern with me, we’ll have something to eat and drink.”

She thought they would immediately be thrown out the door of the Plume and Parchment in their ragamuffin costumes, but the innkeeper, alone in a dim room that looked as if it had recently been visited by a horde of enraged apes, knew her companion. “Dr. Porfat!”

His shock was mixed with pleasure. Hers was not when he moved into the light. She cried: “You!”

“Don’t mind her, Dodont,” the doctor said. “That’s how she greets everyone.”

Dodont eyed her suspiciously, but her attention had been seized by a bronze bust smiling wistfully on the room from behind the bar. She knew that face, too. If she had been brought into the future only this morning, how could she recognize so many people? Why did they not recognize her? She could make no sense of it. She wanted to flee, but her feet refused to move toward the door. Outside, she would be alone with the thin, sinister lamppost. She resisted the urge to peer through a window and verify her fear that it had crept closer to the inn.

“Have you spoken to the prince?” Dodont asked the doctor. “He’s quite beside himself, and one of him is too many, if you’ll forgive me, certainly too many for the peaceful conduct of my business. He tore the place apart.”

“Why?”

“Because your bloody cloak was found in an alley nearby. You’d been in here earlier discussing the recovery of a stolen skeleton with a villain called Phylphot, a reputed grave-robber. Everyone assumed he’d murdered you.”

“That name is not unfamiliar,” Porfat said. He fingered one of his tassels. “He robbed me, perhaps. That must be why I’m wearing this thing.”

“But that was
last week,”
Dodont said. “Have you been running around the city in a tablecloth since then?”

“See here, Sir!” Zara and Dodont both jumped when the doctor slammed his sizable palm on the counter. “I came here for food and drink, not foolish prattle and vexing questions. Bring us
pflune.”

“Are you crazy? No, no, Doctor, forgive me, of course, you’re not.
Pflune
it is.” He clanked his way among bottles beneath the counter. “We don’t get much call for that.”

“I hope you don’t mind,” he said to Zara. “I acquired a taste for it from some Ignudo friends.”

“I’ve drunk it,” she said. In fact it was what Dolton Bose drank when he had no money for anything better, which was most of the time.

She wanted to ask him how he knew Phylphot and Weymael. She believed he could have explained some of their more obscurely unpleasant remarks. He might be able to determine how she knew Dodont and the man depicted in the bust over the bar; and how she knew him. But she was sure that none of the explanations would make her happy, and she shoved her questions forcibly aside as they talked of nothing in particular, settling at last on the subject of her price. Since he had no money with him, and she had to conceal her ignorance of its value, she trusted him far more than she would have liked.

She woke from a horrible dream of crawling in tunnels and feeding on the sort of filth Polliard had served her. She clutched desperately at the man beside her in bed, who turned out to be Dr. Porfat. He had apparently been lying awake.

“You seem to have dreamed you were a ghoul,” he said when she had poured out a confused stream of terrible images.

“Gluttriel consume them!” she cried, and she was alarmed by the sudden spasm that racked him.

“I have long tried to make a study of ghouls—and please, my dear, don’t use that superstitious archaism again, I think it must remind me unpleasantly of my demented grandmother—but I discovered that the only people who could give me first-hand information about them were people I couldn’t stand. That’s had a chilling effect on my life’s work.” He sighed heavily. “I keep having a strange dream, too, that I’m a boy trapped inside a mountainous prison of flesh. I can’t convey the rage and terror I feel in this dream, over and over again.... Whenever it seems I am about to find the way out, I wake.”

She laughed, her fingers encircling flesh that had, incredibly, risen once again. “That was no dream. In fact, I’m convinced you must be a boy in disguise.”

“Believe me, it’s no laughing matter,” he laughed. “But it was only a dream.”

My brother-in-law was lucky to have been born a prince. Whenever I felt the impulse to kick him down the stairs, I would recall the penalty for high treason.

“You’ve been studying all your life, Doctor,” he said. “Isn’t there a danger your skull will explode if you don’t let some knowledge leak out for the benefit of others?”

He would rap the table when he barked at his own jokes, signaling everyone to join in. Everyone did, except my sister, Nyssa, who gave me a wry look; and the woman for whom he was dragooning my services, Zephreinia Sleith, who favored me with a smile that seemed sympathetic.

I didn’t laugh, either. l said, “I allow some of it to
leak out
during my thrice-weekly lectures at the Anatomical Institute.” I avoided Nyssa’s eye as I said this, for she knew I had been neglecting my duties at the Institute for several months now while trying to recover from the queer mental effects of a would-be murderer’s attack. I was able to face her again as I added truthfully: “Some leakage may also be perceived in the eight books and two-hundred-odd papers I’ve written.”

“Oh, that.” Prince Fandiel waved as if consigning my life’s work to a bonfire, which I supposed he could do. “You study medicine to help people, Doctor, not to scribble about bones. How many bones are there? You must by now have written two or three papers for each one. You remind me of that story by what’s-his-name, that writer, about the fellow who didn’t do something because he was always doing something else.” He rapped the table again in case anyone failed to hear his raucous guffaws.

“Forgive me for mentioning it,” Zephreinia murmured in my ear.

She hadn’t mentioned it to me, she’d mentioned it to my sister, who had then seated her beside me at dinner. I had nothing against examining her, especially since her Frothiran frock had allowed me to make a nearly complete visual examination already; but I objected to being seated next to a lovely young woman who batted her eyelashes at me while she hung on my every word, then to be advised by our host that she wanted medical advice. I objected to being conspired against.

Unfortunately for my principles, Zephreinia had captivated me. She came from Omphiliot, dreariest of provincial cities. She had told me early in our conversation that her husband remained at his post there as Inspector of Aqueducts. In Crotalorn no more than a month or so, she had adopted a fashion that would have earned her a day in the pillory back home. It revealed an adventurous spirit, to say nothing of splendid breasts.

“Oh, no, it’s not your fault,” I said, though of course it was, but it’s hard to be stern while simpering. “It’s just that I, I study, you see, I write—” Here she folded the fan that had provided her with a modicum of concealment and touched it to the sensuously intriguing pad of flesh beneath her lip in a pose of pert attentiveness. I forgot whatever else it was that I did with my dull life. “What I mean, a physician more experienced in your body—in examining the human body, I mean, not specifically
your
breasts—”

“But no other physician, however experienced he may be, has written Porfat’s
Etiology
of
Ghoulism.”

“You mean
Polliard’s,”
I laughed, and then realized I had surpassed my embarrassing slip of the tongue with a truly idiotic blunder. I cast my eyes furtively at the prince, fearing he would soon be regaling everyone with the best “Porfat story” of all, that I had forgotten my own name, but he was absorbed in explaining religion to a priest.

Ignoring Zephreinia’s bewilderment, I said, “You know of that work? But surely you don’t think that you—”

“No, no, no.” Her tone was uncommonly somber, but she remembered to laugh as she added: “No. But the book displays such a masterful intellect, such a firm grasp of provocative material—and above all, such nearly godlike sympathy for the poor creatures afflicted with so foul an ailment, that I know you can help. Please, Dr. Porfat.”

I hadn’t the heart to tell her that my godlike sympathy had withered since writing that book under the strain of actually encountering ghouls. I said, “Well, if you’d care to come—”

“Come to my place, please, in Sekris Square. Tomorrow at noon?”

The prince was rapping and barking again, but this time I hadn’t even heard his joke, probably at my expense. I told her I’d be there.

Feshard was born a servant, so there was no good reason for not kicking him down the stairs, though I never did it. I sometimes wondered why not.

“Shall I go out and buy you a sword?” he asked.

“What? What are you babbling about now? Where have you hidden my bag?”

“Attractive women of thirty or less are the only exceptions to your rule against practicing medicine. Since it’s unlikely that Princess Fandyssa would subject any young, unmarried woman to your company at dinner, the woman you sat next to, and who begged you to have a peek up her dress, must be married. In the unhappy event you’ll have to fight a duel with her husband, you’ll need a sword, and you don’t have one. Shall I go buy one? Or, better still, shall I send your regrets to the lady and refer her to Dr. Beliphrast?”

“Be buggered with your sword and your regrets, Sir, you and Dr. Beliphrast both! What have you done with my bag, you insolent hound?”

“I put it in the sedan chair that’s been waiting for you this past hour, as you instructed.”

Not trusting myself to speak further, lest I should use harsh language, I stamped down the stairs to the street, where I discovered that I had forgotten my hat. As I trudged back, I met Feshard loitering down. He held out my hat with an outrageous display of patience.

“Trust me, Sir, you’ll regret this,” he said, and I broke my resolution against harsh language.

I tried to think when I had last been such a fool, and I had to admit it was the last time a pretty woman had taken any notice of me. Such insights are discomfiting to a man in his fifties, if he has the brains to know that few men improve with age. I had once looked forward to the day when the combination of a comely face, a trim figure and a kind word would not enfeeble my intellect and enslave me like a demon’s energumen, but that day had yet to dawn.

Filloweela had not been kind to me. That Goddess is supposed to oversee the distribution of beauty, and she had omitted to send me any at all. And love, her other area of responsibility—I won’t vex you with prattle about a particularly lovely look in a particularly lovely eye, or about the way the sun struck a certain shade of hair on a certain day in a certain place. I have had two great loves; one died and the other fled. Those sorrows in my early life determined me to get on with my work and put my dealings with the Goddess on a cash basis.