The Throne of Bones (27 page)

I would withhold pity for her degenerate brother until he had been castrated and flogged, but I ground my teeth and held my peace.

“Doctor, he’s looking for happiness, as are we all, he’s trying to express the nature that the gods gave him. Do those human traits make him less than human?”

I still didn’t trust myself to speak. I now seethed over her remark about “all boys,” which suggested a low opinion indeed of my sex. I never did such things as a boy. I would have bloodied the nose of any boy who dared suggest such foulness; as, come to think of it, I once had.

At length I said, “And so you removed him from Omphiliot, where the Cluddites would have burned him alive if they’d caught him at his tricks, and brought him to Crotalorn, where he might get away with them?”

She nodded jerkily, biting her lip, unable to meet my eyes.

“Why didn’t you take him to Frothirot, where they would have put him in charge of an orphanage?”

She let out a wail of pain that tore my heart. I admit it, I was too hard. It did her no discredit that she could love such a brother. I got up and made soothing noises as I patted her shoulder, leaning awkwardly over her chair, for this time she didn’t rise to embrace me.

I remembered my earlier thought about the quirky ways of the gods in blessing us. Was I being tested? I had presumed to sacrifice to Filloweela; and whatever men and nations may choose to do, that Goddess condemns nothing. She is the fire, and we, however twisted and fantasticated our separate shapes may be, are all her lamps.

“Burn brightly,” I muttered, quoting a hymn without thinking of it.

She caught the reference. She looked up joyously through her tears, seized my hand and pressed her wet cheek against it. “I knew you’d help him!”

“Some things are shocking, that’s all, that’s all there is to it,” I grumbled, pacing. “What do you want me to do? What on earth
can
I do, if that’s what he is? At least he slept last night, didn’t he?”

“The medicine had no effect. I put it in his wine, as you said, but he went out before midnight and looked even ghastlier than usual when he woke this afternoon.” As if to ease the pain of speaking, she picked up one of the books I had dropped and leafed through it. “He does that—he goes somewhere, I can’t imagine where, and returns looking worse each time.”

She paused to inspect an illustration from a different angle. “Would this book help him, do you suppose, by diverting his mind from his usual desires?”

I went to her side and saw to my chagrin that I had been scribbling my thoughts about ghoulism in the margins of Chalcedor’s
Lives of the Wicked Apricants,
a justly notorious work. When I tried to take it from her, she gripped it and insisted on browsing the engravings. I knelt before her chair to guide her study of the book laid flat in her lap. The pictures made her smile, a welcome respite from all the tears I had caused. She even giggled.

“Have you ever tried this?” she asked, using her fingertip to decipher the parts of one tangled couple. Pretending not to notice what I did, she had allowed me to push her dress above her hips and ease her thighs apart.

“No,” I lied.

“Let’s.” She put the cold, dry, odorless, colorless, hairless and tasteless picture from her lap. It had concealed a reality whose every attribute was precisely opposite.

I was right: the Goddess had sent a test with her gift, and I had passed it. I resolved to buy her a lamb. Not today, though.

Like all sensible people, Empress Fillitrella hated the former capital. As soon as decently possible, she had brought her crown home, resisting pleas and threats from the Council of Lords. They wanted to prop her up in Frothirot like a mummy in a silver mask, whispering in her ear those hieratic oracles a ruler was permitted to intone; she wanted to gad about Crotalorn or hunt in its surrounding hills, saying whatever she pleased. Unfortunately, Frothirot followed her. Strangers clogged our streets, mangled our language, and changed our ways.

Many a time had I crossed the Miraga on the Victory Street Bridge to be exhilarated by the panorama of broad river and many-spired city, but not on this drizzly evening, and perhaps never again. Space had grown so scarce in the city that on either margin of the bridge a congeries of sheds and stalls had risen fast as fungi, blocking the view and smothering the senses with the plucking hands of Frothiran merchants, their shrill gabble, their relentless bell-ringing and gong-banging, and the reek of their nauseous cookery.

I suppose I should have been grateful for their whirl and dazzle. It did more to conceal me than the black cloak and slouch hat I had thought suitable for trailing Zephryn Phrein, until queer looks had persuaded me otherwise. A helpful passer-by might have told the young man he was followed by a vengeful stalker from melodrama. He would never have spotted me on his own, for as he hurried onward he kept his eyes on the footway.

I regretted this errand more with every step, but Zephreinia had threatened to do it herself if I refused. I could never have stood by for that, since Zephryn was surely headed for some boy-brothel, and such dens festered in the vilest slums. A pretty woman unfamiliar with our city would likely be knocked on the head and shipped to Sythiphore with the next barge-load of hapless tourists.

If my suspicion was confirmed, and he entered such a place, what then? I took more notice of the boys who swooped and shrieked through the crowd than he did as I tried to puzzle my way into his mind. I could barely suffer to share the public street with the impudent, snot-nosed beasts. To share a bed with one would have been not just loathsome but ludicrous. Mere opinions, however, were unlikely to change his ways.

We passed through Hound Square, where habit almost turned my steps into the Plume and Parchment. Another example of universal decay: the inn had formerly called itself the Willing Lepress, but now it was dominated by the bust of a bad, dead poet and, if I picked the wrong night, by the vaporings of his all-too-worthy successors. It would be more sensible to go in out of the rain, as the drizzle had become, and consider Zephryn’s problem over a bottle, perhaps with Zara’s help as a woman of experience. But I had promised his sister, so I pressed on.

He took that exit from the square I feared he would, down a stepped alley and into the dismal tangle of Blackberry Bank. I, a lifelong resident with some taste for the odd, never ventured here at night. Lights and street-signs were rare, but the visitor from Omphiliot kept his head down like a man hurrying home.

He cut through the gates of gardens become refuse-heaps, refuse-heaps become rooming houses and rooming houses become fighting-pits. Alleys narrowed into tunnels only to widen into rooms where the most exotic foreigners cooked, lounged, gambled or primped their goats. I brushed past lately-cannibal Orocs and fish-faced Duzai, past savages from Tampoontam whose tattooing was so extensive they felt no need of other covering. If one of these had unexpectedly strolled through my parlor, I would at very least have stared at him, but they were more sophisticated: neither Zephryn nor I aroused the slightest interest.

The Bank squeezed between the river and Dreamers’ Hill, and it was upward toward the necropolis that his steps tended. Somewhere near here I had endured a perilous venture into the tunnels of the ghouls. The entrance I found had been destroyed, and the map I once possessed had been lost. Although I had come back to search the neighborhood with some capable men from the prince’s regiment, I never found another way in. Now I began to notice details—a yellow door, a snarling stone dog with one ear missing, a sign at a dank areaway that commanded, “EAT,” in the angry calligraphy of a lunatic—that whispered of memories deliberately mislaid. I was treading perilously close to the border of the Underworld.

The way grew narrower and even darker as the high houses yearned to fall into one another’s embrace. When the clutter of carved eaves and fanciful chimney-pots permitted a glimpse of the sky, it seemed that the enormous graveyard hill hung there, not before me but above me, and that the innumerable, pale blots that were its tombs might presently tumble down on my head with the rain.

When I saw a sign that read Potash Alley, each further step required a separate act of will. When Zephryn slipped into a black fissure marked Algol’s Close, my will and my strength deserted me, for I recalled now from the lost map that an entrance to the catacombs of the corpse-eaters lay near. I longed for the sight, now friendly and familiar, of a scarred cutthroat or naked savage, but the street was empty. No light shone in any house.

It was ironic that Zephreinia had tried to pique my interest in her brother by hinting at ghoulism. I had dismissed the notion, but it was true. I doubted he had the disease, but he was likely one of those that itched to catch it. Believing ghouls to be masters of forbidden magic, such depraved nitwits sometimes sought me out as the prophet who might point them to their idols. They most often found themselves gifted with the magical power to fly, assisted by my foot.

I believed I could find my way back to this street in daylight. Prince Fandiel would again lend me some of his troopers, who had welcomed my last expedition as a humorous break in their routine. I was about to turn and leave when I heard footsteps approaching, and voices. I stepped back into a doorway.

Out of the darkness the elements of a crowd emerged to coalesce around the hole that had swallowed Zephryn. The conversations I overheard comprised banal complaints about the weather and the neighborhood, or tedious discussions of the latest dwelth-match. Except for the surrounding squalor, I might have been eavesdropping on fashionable theater-goers in Ashclamith Square.

Forced for the moment to remain, I weighed my impulse to run. A promise to Zephreinia was like a promise to the willful and whimsical Goddess who had sent her to me, and I had promised I would help her brother. My every instinct screamed that he needed help now, this minute, not whenever I chose to find my way back with armed men. However much I wanted to, I could not run away.

My costume was not out of place here, where everyone was shrouded in black. I tilted my hat lower, waited for a suitable break in the pedestrian stream, and stepped out as smartly as if I belonged. I regretted that I hadn’t let Feshard buy me a sword, but I carried a sturdy staff.

The only light in Algol’s Close struggled feebly to escape an open door. A man and woman passed through it ahead of me, joking about the ancient images of prostitutes that decorated the moldy walls of a derelict brothel. I followed, shaking in every limb, and no amount of silent scolding or measured breathing helped me. Odd: I didn’t know I was terrified, but my body did.

Passing beyond the light of the single candle, I took note of an odor that had first hinted its presence at the outer door, the unmistakable smell of rotting flesh. It steadily thickened as I approached the door to the cellar. Although there are worse smells, none is fraught with more terrible associations for me but one. I smelled that one, too. My nose told me there was a ghoul in the cellar.

I waited until those ahead of me had picked their way down the decrepit stairs. This caused a pileup behind me, but no one objected when I raised my hand for patience. They continued to exchange the murmured commonplaces you would hear on any line. In such close quarters they must have noticed how badly I shook, but no one denounced me as a spy.

The way was clear. I had no further excuse to delay. The stairway creaked and swayed to my steps. It vibrated from my tremor with an alarming rattle, as if the rotting wood cackled at my fear.

The cellar room spread far beyond the house above it and even beyond the other buildings in the alley. How far I could not say, for my view was confused by the uncertain light of candles, by an underground forest of brick pillars, and by a multitude of men and women, not all of them living. In varying stages of putrefaction, the dead hung here and there by hooks through their ankles, less like a butcher’s orderly stock than a casual display of trophies.

Some of the gathering had stripped naked as the corpses, although my hat and cloak were not out of place. Making my way toward the focus of attention was surprisingly easy, despite the thickness of the intervening crowd. However depraved these necrophiliacs might be, it was the rare one that denied a rotting corpse, with its attendant flies and maggots, ample space to dangle. I followed a route marked by these hanging carcasses, elbowing aside the living less often than the dead.

I strove for professional detachment as I covertly inspected the bodies, but my profession had never exposed me to such evidence of torture and mutilation. These wretches had been whipped, broken and branded; eyes and genitalia were missing, as were the breasts of the female corpses. Copious bloodstains suggested that the atrocities had been inflicted on living victims. Heads, hands, and chunks of muscular tissue had been bitten off later.

I still trembled, and now my stomach threatened to rebel, but the worst lay before me. Even in the fog of decay, I smelled the ghoul, and that smell was strongest where the greasy candles sputtered most thickly. When I saw it, I gripped the corpse before me for support; I turned my face for a moment against the slimy flesh of its buttocks to block a sight even more loathsome.

I had intruded upon a foul parody of some grand lord’s audience. The ghoul lounged naked on a throne of bones that I recognized from my earlier visit to the underworld, toying shamelessly as might an idiot with his gigantic phallus. To describe this organ, which seemed in a permanent state of inflamed erection, would require a specialist in the maladies said to be inflicted by Filloweela on those who earn her hatred. The pimpled and knobbed and suppurating obscenity served the ghoul as a lord’s scepter. One by one, suppliants were led forward to petition him by ushers, swathed and hooded in black. All were first required not just to humiliate themselves but to demonstrate their total contempt for cleanliness and decency by kissing this rod of office.

In some nightmare where I might have been called upon to play physician to the ghoul, the botch of Bebros and Lushirion’s discharge would have seemed the least of his afflictions. His dead white skin was eaten by molds and fungi and verminous infestations, he bore the lesions of cancer and leprosy, his body was gaunt as any gibbeted felon’s; and yet, consistent with nightmare, his manner was one of exuberant vigor. Feeding on the dead, he thrived on the ills that had carried them off.