The Throne of Bones (35 page)

Meryphillia raged at the unfairness, the tiresome untimeliness. Most of all she regretted the graceless exit she had made, and right in front of her sisters, of all people. Examining these thoughts, she knew that the moment was upon her, and she rushed her meal. She had hardly started on the tangy kidneys when she glanced at her hand and was shaken by that mixture of emotions few other creatures can know.

The sight of her own hand sickened her, its tiny, maggot-plump fingers so unlike the talons she had grown used to. At the same time Therissa gagged with loathing to see what her dainty hand clutched, what smeared her arm to the elbow.

It took more than a moment to calm themselves. Therissa accepted her death more gracefully than Meryphillia did the alien will that made her wash in the wine and oil provided for a differently envisioned afterlife. Drying herself on an unsullied corner of her gown, Therissa scolded her for not having taken better care of it, for now they had nothing to wear. The ghoul was reminded of her stepmother.

Therissa unwound the clattering bones of an ancient Sleith from their wrapping and swirled it around her. She succeeded in looking more stylish than Meryphillia once would have in her newest clothes.

“I believe in making do,” Therissa said. “Even if I were a filthy ghoul, I’d make the best of it. And I don’t want to spend my brief resurrection moping in a smelly tomb, so let’s go, shall we?”

Part of her wanted to linger over her unfinished remains, but another part refused even to look into the sarcophagus, and both were parts of the same person: who called herself, in her inmost thoughts, Therissa Sleith, but who felt an almost uncontrollable urge to laugh when she did.

Fragador had sacrificed for it and fully expected it, but Therissa’s emergence from the tomb shocked him speechless. She tossed her hair in exactly that heart-stopping way of hers and gazed around the cemetery before spotting him in the shadow of a stone demon. When her face lit up, his heart woke like a sunrise choir of birds.

“You’re not dead!” He laughed wildly. “I knew they had to be wrong, you ....”

The pity in her eyes stopped him even before she said, “No, they were right. Nor am I entirely as I seem.”

“Morella?”

“Please get her name right. Her love for you makes mine seem shallow.”

Love had brought him here, yes, but anger, too, anger with her for slavishly heeding the rules of society; anger with himself for breaking those rules by being poor, and a poet. She had planned to marry a man who had won a contract to build public conveniences for the city.

“You can’t wear sonnets or eat odes,” she had said, “but you can build a fragrant palace from urinals.”

In his maddest moments, he had wanted to resurrect her so he could strangle her. At very least he had meant to ask her, with a suitable flourish at the moon-blazing marble of her tomb, what she thought of her fragrant palace now. In the presence of wonder, however, spite was impossible.

And there was that other to consider, that monstrous but magical being that animated her. In a strange part of himself, he loved her even more than Therissa. Unlike Therissa, she appreciated his art. She had even compared him to Asteriel Vendren, whom the dear, dead dunce had never heard of.

“Meryphillia,” he enunciated clearly as he took her into his arms.

Now that she had known the soft sighs and shouted transports of human love, Meryphillia lamented more bitterly than ever her exile to the underground.

“Why are you crying?” Fragador asked tenderly.

“Nothing. Dust in my eyes.”

“That happens,” he said from the depth of his human wisdom and sympathy, and she wept all the more.

“What if I was vain and frivolous by your absurd standards?” said the voice in her head. “I knew life and love and happiness. Now I shall know peace. Will you ever say such things?”

She was unsure whether these were the words of the fast-fading Therissa or the words she would have put into her mouth. Whatever they were, they bit like truth.

She rose before the transformation could become complete, unwilling to show her true form again to the poet and blight his memory of love. Turning for one last look, she found herself staring into the grinning face of Arthrax.

“Now I can write poems for you,” he said.
“We shall know what the darkness discovers
—how’s that for a start?”

The sight of him had speeded Therissa’s evaporation. Meryphillia scanned the necropolis with all her senses for Fragador, but he, too, had vanished. She demanded, “What have you done with him? Where is he?”

“He contracted with two of us,” Arthrax said. “You, last night. Me, tonight, just before he drank poison.” He grimaced so horribly that even she retreated.

She had learned from Therissa. No longer inclined to weep, she turned and smiled at the gaping, unguarded sepulcher of the Great House of Sleith. Far off she heard the cackling of creatures like herself born on the night wind, and for the first time she held back nothing as she joined in their laughter.

There is some truth in the folk-tale that the Cephalune Hills hide the way to the Land of the Dead. Over several thousands of years, an ancient race pocked the cliffs with tombs for its better-class corpses. Only the faded ghosts of murals linger to whisper of obscure triumphs, and the tombs are thinly peopled by grave-robbers who cherish the delusion that the richest burial-chambers have yet to be found, including that of Queen Cunymphilia, whose mention elicits smirks from responsible historians. Those who seek the Land of the Dead could find few guides more eager than the misfits of Cephalune to speed them on their way.

It was here that the necromancer, Mobrid Sleith, fled when he had achieved such infamy that not even the folk of Fandragord could stomach him. The elders of his own Tribe were divided only on whether Mobrid could be more discreetly hidden away in a lunatic asylum or poisoned.

Some would argue that restoring a semblance of life to the dead can enlighten the perplexed and comfort the bereaved, but even such liberal thinkers boggled at Mobrid’s practice of killing people for no better reason than to revive them as his slaves. His theory that a cadaver can be made livelier by stoking its ashy lust was universally rejected, too, for the dead are by definition tireless, and some of the hired harlots and volunteer voluptuaries who helped further his research were injured or unhinged in orgies with ardent cadavers.

Even more detested than either his theories or his practices, perhaps, was a vat of feculent slime whose sluggish bubbles popped and siffled in a dim corner of his studio. He boasted that this was a plasma of his own design, replenished with the waste products of his art, which could make the most grossly mangled corpse look better than new. This muck disappeared with Mobrid, and fanciful persons claimed that it transformed itself into a conveyance for his narrow escape: a pallid toad, some said, that he rode like a hopping pony, while others swore they saw him lofted above the city walls by an octopoid bat.

In prosaic contrast to these tales, Mobrid fled under heaps of books and household furnishings in a plain mule-cart attended by his protégés. Although their manner was odd and their dress dictated by the necromancer’s fetishes, they passed unchallenged. This was, after all, Fandragord, and a cartload of rubbish accompanied by immodestly dressed and apparently drug-dazed whores and catamites was just more froth on the passing stream. In streets where garbage vied with dung and beggars to ravish the nose, only a nymph newly whisked from her pristine glade might have sniffed out their odor of graveyard disgorgement.

Even for one steeped to his grizzled locks in horrors, as Mobrid surely was, the tramp through the thorny waste of Hogman’s Plain became a nightmare. Carrion crows and hyenas were not so easily fooled as the watchmen and busybodies of Fandragord. After a few tentative nibbles, they mounted a running attack on the corpse-herd’s flock.

He could never relax his watch, for the dead cannot deal with anything new. When overtaken by disaster, a corpse can but try to match it to confused memories of life. Thus Mobrid, stupefied with exhaustion, ignored a dead woman’s cry, “The bacon is burning!” Recalling too late her mental limitations, he turned to see her torn to pieces by a herd of feral swine. A youth who fretted that he was “late for work” was staggering under the weight of a vulture on his shoulders as it gobbled his eyeballs. The necromancer was kept dashing from crisis to crisis with naked sword; but, having determined the nature of his companions, the impudent scavengers began to scrutinize his own credentials as a living man with the time-honored right to cow them.

To his further chagrin, he learned that feathers and trinkets and leather straps are poor attire for desert travel, and that death grants no immunity from sunburn. It tore his heart to see his favorites redden and blister, while their cosmetic plasma jellified in the cruel rays and sloughed off to reveal missing parts, moldy wounds and bare bones. He saw himself as the toy of an ironic demon: cursing and beating the mule on its reluctant way, waving off rot-crazed flies and slashing at bumptious vultures in the remorseless sun, while his remaining slaves took their ease under books and blankets in the back of the cart. As this close confinement accelerated their ripening, even his zest for their aroma faltered.

The Cephalune Hills bulked black against a feverish boil of a sunset when the exile at last stood at the foot of the cliffs. While he scanned the furtive hearthfires for a tomb that would suit his domestic tastes, an old corpse dropped from the heights to land before him with a crackling thud. He took this for the best of all conceivable omens.

Angobard the Fomor believed that he might die among the tombs, but he would do it in comfort. He chose a dry and spacious chamber near the top of a cliff and spent the afternoon casting out the debris of earlier squatters and sweeping the dust of centuries with a besom of briers. He believed the job well done, and was brewing an infusion of hallucinatory tubers to while away the evening, when a persistent notion that he was not alone made him bound up the three steps to the massive sarcophagus that dominated his new home. It vexed him to find it occupied by the leathery body of a hermit. Knowing his end was upon him, he had combed his hair, modestly arranged his greasy goat-skins, and laid himself out in a posture of regal composure.

Angobard would have left this dead wit in peace, but he wished neither to share the tomb nor to search the dangerous cliffs in darkness for another. Already the red wolves of the hills were tuning up a chilling antiphony, so over the side went the desiccated lich, but not without a brief prayer to Uaal for its eternal rest.

Cleansing his nostrils with the steam rising from his tea, he turned his thoughts to Paridolia. Mere memories wearied him. He had taken to grinding his teeth and snarling when they returned to plague him. A drug-induced vision, fresh and vivid and speaking new words, would be almost as good as his lost love herself; or so he hoped.

“Love,” he laughed. Love was for boys, for poets, for fools; and although he was quite young, had been known to scribble verses, and had risked his life against seasoned killers in the fighting-pits, he would have excluded himself from those categories.

Well, fool, perhaps. No one else would have jumped at the chance to earn a few silver fillies by fighting at a private party, where spectators always demanded more than the grunting and clanging, climaxed by a splash of chicken’s blood and a groveling surrender, that satisfied the public. That it was to be a wedding-party should have warned him off. Only the most frivolous and decayed aristocrats would pollute a sacrament with the deaths of men like himself.

Second thoughts came only when he awaited his turn to perform, sharing an anteroom jammed with lunatics passing for clowns, Ignudo snake-baiters, and acrobatic eroticists from Sythiphore. To the pain of such companions was added the torture of advanced music from the banquet hall, where it sounded as if a giant bronze statue were shrieking and stamping its hollow feet under the assault of chanting imps armed with drills and chisels. He was almost grateful to his chosen opponent, a cannibal from Orocrondel, for tracing the connection between effeminacy and red hair like Angobard’s, and recommending to the other entertainers the gustatory delights, which he soon expected to savor, of caponized white meat. Such gibes focused generalized irritation into a specific itch to braid love-knot’s from one man’s bones.

At last it was their turn to burst into the room, the Oroc mouthing some gabble and savaging the air with his spear while Angobard whirled his sword into a blurry disk that hovered about him like a guardian spirit. From drunken boredom, the wedding guests bayed for blood; the groom, a lump with bulging eyes and a moist, drooping underlip, too drunk or lazy to bay, impatiently wriggled.

Angobard sprang, meaning to sever the haft of his opponent’s spear and then his head with a pair of strokes, but the haft was colliding with his chin, or so he supposed it must have been as he goggled from his supine position at the man about to kill him.

The Fomor came to himself and rolled aside just in time to avoid the spear-head as it struck the floor with a strangely hollow ring. The frenzied howling of the spectators, not bored at all now, seemed to echo down a well. He slashed at the Oroc’s legs, but the savage avoided the strokes as nimbly as a child skipping rope while trying to set himself for a fatal thrust. Fully restored at last, Angobard scuttled away crabwise and was about to regain his feet when a kick to the groin undid him.

Given his injury, he almost accepted the feminine shriek that pierced the universal roar like a bell as his own, but it couldn’t have been, for he was unable to breathe, much less scream. The voice was so clear, so pure that he was compelled to turn his eyes even from the toothy grin of his own doom. Just as he had heard one voice in the din, so he saw one face in the crowd: in which the formless desires of his youth found form. She might have been a silver statue in an ape-cage.