The Throne of Bones (34 page)

This was the ghoulish equivalent to a delicacy that a banquet-guest would have exclaimed over before daintily sampling; but Meryphillia, with claws scraping her back, elbows gouging her ribs and jaws stretching over her shoulder to seize her prize, could only stuff it into her mouth, grind it hastily, and gulp it down.

Hunched between Lupox’s gnarly knees, she then beheld the strangest vision: of herself, standing up straight, as her father had so often told her to; with her hair pushed out of her eyes, as he had so often pushed it; and with an unlikely smile dimpling cheeks not nearly so gaunt as they had been. The vision glowed with love, tinged only slightly by the acid of vexation and fixed forever beneath a glaze of sorrow.

She realized whose grave she crouched in, but, being what she was, could only scrabble for more and leave her feelings to sort themselves out. Her next find was a hand, one that held a far clearer imprint of her stepmother’s buttocks. It proved a timely antidote to the first course.

In her preoccupation with life, Meryphillia relapsed into her solitary ways. She was allowed to. No one suspected her of hiding food. The ghouls thought her as odd as humans once had. Like them, her new companions were grateful for a respite from her brooding silences, her inappropriate observations and her reluctance to join in a good laugh.

Lurching one night along a path she used to glide with her recorder, she nearly stumbled over a man who had come neither to loot tombs nor kill himself. He was declaiming verses to the full moon with such rapt fervor that he failed to notice her slip hastily into the tent of a willow’s branches.

This was the poet Fragador, which she learned from his own lips, for he gave himself credit for each poem as if afraid the moon would confuse him with someone else:
“On the Hands of Therissa Sleith,
a sonnet by Fragador of Fandragord,” he would announce, or,
“For Therissa Sleith on Her Birthday,
an ode by Fragador, poet and tragedian, lately of Fandragord.”

It would be an inconstant moon indeed, she thought, that would forget his name. He was the most beautiful man she had ever seen; but she viewed him with the eyes of a ghoul, unaware that many people thought him ghoulishly pale and thin. Her heart, so still even before her present state, startled her like a hammering visitor at her breast.

His subject pleased less than his voice. Therissa Sleith was the darling of Crotalorn, and had often been held up to her as an example of what she was not. Fragador desired her as ardently, though perhaps not quite so hopelessly, as Meryphillia desired him.

He visited the graveyard as often as she used to, and always with a new batch of poems praising the wit, grace and beauty of the same unsuitable person. When the moon had other obligations, he would recite his verses to a statue of Filloweela that reclined complaisantly on one of her cleric’s tombs, unaware that the lavish form of the Goddess hid a quivering horror that yearned to give him everything Therissa withheld.

How she loathed that name! It figured in every verse he wrote, and his voice would falter and throb on its snaky nastiness. She learned to anticipate its occurrence, and she would whisper her own name just loudly enough to bar the syllables from her ears, even though this lamed his elegant scansion. Sometimes she would speak too vehemently, and he would clear his throat, clean his ear, or peer uneasily into the shadows.

His heart heard her name, however imperfectly, for one night he thrilled her by declaiming a poem to “Morthylla,” whom his poetic intuition identified as a lurking spirit of night and death, and whose help he invoked in softening Therissa before her lithe limbs should go to feed the ghouls. Meryphillia would recite the lines to herself while wishing that those limbs were in fact within reach of her coffin-cracking jaws.

They were so alike, or had been, she and Fragador, with their delight in horror, their flirtation with death, their love of shadow and solitude. If only she had met him—but she withered her wish: even if she had stood up straight and combed her hair, even if she had twittered pleasantries and smiled now and then, no man drawn to the pert face and nubile form of Therissa Sleith would have spared her a glance.

His verses swerved into delirium when the cruel ninny was betrothed to another. The corruption that had always festered beneath his sunniest images tore off its mask as he raved of murder and suicide. Not just a beautiful man, not just a gifted poet, he was a genius, Meryphillia avowed, one who gazed even more deeply into the abyss than had Asteriel Vendren. She loved him, she worshipped him, and now that the incongruous object of his desire had shown herself an even worse fool than had been obvious, she timidly hoped for him. She hardly ate, she never slept, she grew so listless that rats began to eye her with an impudent surmise. She pictured her brain as crawling with busy ants, each ant a notion for declaring her love, until she could have smashed her skull to exterminate them.

The full moon returned, but the poet did not. She fretted, pacing from the favored statue to the willow and back again. At last she broke the circle and loped to the main gate, to the very fringe of life and light. Springing atop the wall, she peered up and down Citron Street, then leaned perilously far to scan Hound Square, descrying no one but unremarkable stragglers and lurkers. So great was her concern for her beloved that the sight of her festively lit home, the first she had had of it since her transformation, gave her no slightest pang.

The first note of a shriek told her she had been seen, but she slipped into the darkness so swiftly that it lost conviction and ended as an embarrassed laugh.

She feared that Fragador had made good the threat of his latest poem and killed himself, but her fear was superseded by fearful desire. She had longed for union with him. What union could be more complete than to be the man himself?

His grumbled asides had told her that he would be granted no impregnable crypt. She would raid his grave at high noon to beat the greater ghouls to his dear relics. Watchmen be damned! What finer way to end her existence than in the form of her love, to remember the pain of his death even as she saw her own coming, and saw it coming with his very eyes? No passion had ever been so fully consummated. It would cry out in vain for the immortalizing pen of Fragador.

Fatigued, distraught, but now ever so dimly cheered, she found her way to his favorite tomb and lay down in the moon-shadow of the Goddess of Love, where she slept.

She was woken by sobbing so bitter that she thought it must be her own. The fat and ruddy moon had decayed to a ghoulish disc above her. Rubbing her eyes, she felt no tears, but the sobs continued. It was he, and her joy nearly drove her to dash forth and embrace him before she thought what effect this might produce.

“Ghouls!” he suddenly screamed. “Fiends and demons of the dark, attend me! Morthylla, come to me!”

Before others could respond, she rose.

“By Cludd!” he gagged, and half his sword appeared like silver lightning from its scabbard. In a like flash, she saw herself in his loathing grimace. A wheel revolved ponderously inside her, leaving something crushed. She crossed her hands to her shoulders and hung her head in suppliance.

“I did call you,” he said after a long silence. “Your promptness startled me.”

“Forgive me.”

“Offense and forgiveness have no meaning, for meaning itself is nonsense. Therissa Sleith is no more.”

“I’m sorry,” she lied.

“You would be, of course. Not even a ghoul’s dream could penetrate the sepulcher of the Sleiths.”

She looked up to protest this misunderstanding, but his face silenced and melted her. Something like wonder had crossed it when he saw her eyes. Her father had always praised them as her best feature, and now they were the most vividly yellow globes in the underground.

“Are you really...?” he began. “No, it would be mad to ask if you are a symptom of my madness.”

“You are the sanest man since Asteriel Vendren.”

“Sleithreethra spare us from literate ghouls!”

She shuddered. Not even a ghoul would speak the name of that Goddess in a graveyard at midnight, and certainly not with a laugh. He was indeed mad, and it thrilled her. No more to be held than a sob or a last breath, it burst out: “I love you!”

He stepped forward boldly. “Come down from the tomb, then, Morthylla, and let us speak of love.”

Her claws clicked with their shaking until they rested in his firm clasp. She whispered, “Don’t mock me.” She added, “And it’s
Meryphillia.”

Correction seemed to irk him, but he took it. “I have heard that a ghoul who eats the heart and brain of a person becomes that person.”

“I have seen it.”

“I mean no offense, but this restoration would have no added characteristics? No redundancy of teeth, no odor, no urge to laugh at odd moments?”

She averted her misting eyes. “The personation is perfect.” She flared. “My odor offends you?”

She was instantly sorry, having forgotten that her new face and voice translated petulance as demoniacal fury.

“Please,” he said when he could speak again. “I meant nothing like that. A dead body, you know. You have an inner beauty, Meryphillia. I see it through your eyes.”

“Really?”

“Please don’t laugh, I’m unused to it.” She was unaware that she had laughed. He thrilled her by taking her hand in both of his. “Dear ghoul, I have acquired the key to the tomb of the Sleiths, where Therissa will be interred tomorrow. I wish you to do with her as we said.”

“But that’s monstrous!”

His look clearly told her that the word was inappropriate on her nominal lips, but she pressed on: “She would be just as she was in life. If she denied you then—”

“Her parents denied me, her position denied me, her name denied me; never her heart. If she had but one hour, she might listen to her heart. If I could have a word with her, a look—dare I hope for a kiss?”

A perverse impulse to refuse seized her. She desired him as she had never desired anyone, but the price he demanded, to transform herself into the sort of person her father and stepmother had wanted her to be, was too high.

“Please, Meryphillia,” he murmured, and he shocked her by touching his lips to her cheek. She took the key he pressed into her callused palm.

Near the hour of the tryst, she crept through the flowering precincts of the richest tombs with ghoulish stealth, which makes the hovering owl seem rowdy. Her ears were extended to gather the whispers of moths and the mutter of coffin-worms. Her nasal pits gaped to the fullest, so that each encrypted corpse around her, however desiccated by ages uncounted, announced its discrete presence: none more brightly than that of Therissa Sleith, its decay just a sigh beneath the salt tears and scented soaps of the servants who had primped her for the last time.

No other ghouls blighted the air with their rancid breath, nor watchmen with their wine, but she crept nonetheless, horrified by a vision of the underground host bursting over her to fill the tomb of the Sleiths, ransacking bones inviolate for a thousand years and scattering Therissa’s shreds into a thousand greedy gullets. If that happened, she could never face Fragador. No, she would creep up from behind, fight down her distaste for unripe flesh, and eat him. Denied the looks and sighs and touches of his love, she would at least know him from the inside of his being.

She rose to her full height only in the shadow of the doorway, where the terrible motto of Therissa’s tribe was incised beneath an image of Sleithreethra: WHO TOYS WITH US, SHE SHALL FONDLE. The brass key that Fragador had given her slipped from quivering fingers to clatter as loudly, it seemed, as the head of a watchman’s bill, nor could her scrabbling claws at once fit themselves to the human device. She was sobbing with frustration by the time she succeeded in juggling it up to the keyhole and jamming it in.

The bronze leaves swung inward on oiled hinges. The chain to a gong in the tower had been cut by a watchman with a taste for Fragador’s verse and an even greater gusto for opium, who had been persuaded that the poet contemplated no unusual indecencies with the dead darling of Crotalorn.

She was lovely, Meryphillia had to admit when she had ripped the massive lid from the sarcophagus, especially now that the pink tinge of her skin had been replaced with hints of violet. The fatal twist of her head had been all but straightened; she could have been a sleeper who would wake with nothing to complain of but a stiff neck.

She paused for a moment to admire the elfin nose, so unlike the assertive one she had worn, before biting it off. Uncoiling her razorish tongue, she slipped it in to shred the brain into manageable morsels. Dainty swirls of her smallest claw served to scoop out the eyes. She savored them with restrained whimpers of pleasure before proceeding to the large and tasty breasts.

Therissa heard her sisters chattering as they returned from the regimental review of Cludd’s Whirlwind. It was their custom to tease the Holy Soldiers with inviting smiles and restless wiggles. The celibate warriors were charged to be on their sternest behavior, and the girls’ object was to make one drop his pike or, worse, raise his staff, offenses that earned the culprit a flogging and a night spent kneeling on pebbles. Why had Meryphillia never had such fun, never even thought of it? She almost wept for her wasted life before recalling that she had done it, as Therissa Sleith.

Ripping down to bare ribs, she opened them like a book: the Book of Love. She gobbled the tough, lean heart.

How that heart had leaped when, whirling at the head of the stairs to show off her bridal gown, Therissa had felt the hem snag her heel! The floor tilted, the ceiling spun, but she was spared from terror by the knowledge that this could never happen to her. Even if it did (and there could be no doubt now that she was plunging headlong down the stairs) she would suffer only inconvenient bruises. She pitied the chorus of screamers. She wanted to assure them that she was Therissa Sleith, whose youth and beauty were invulnerable...

...but who was dead.