The Throne of Bones (43 page)

Forgetting that he continued to stare as he shaped his plan, he failed to observe that he was melting the childcatcher to a sniveling accumulation of tics. Zago believed that the necromancer was trying to see if he, too, could eat a soul, and that he was succeeding brilliantly.

Noticing the long silence at last, Vendriel said, “Do you believe that he eats their souls?”

“I—” Zago could no longer speak. He saw many slaves at the periphery of the court, gray among the noble peacocks. Dully awaiting orders, they looked as spiritless as the ones he collected from the Archimage. He meant to point them out, to suggest that the First Lord see for himself, but he could only jerk and flail like an idiot.

Vendriel grasped his meaning. “No, we wouldn’t keep
his
products about us. These are the honest dead.”

As if the court were one gorgeous jellyfish, it shrank in all its parts from contact with the slaves. The courtlings knew what the slaves were, but they hated being reminded. Those who served Vendriel the Good too well, whom he couldn’t bear to lose, could anticipate a dim sequel to their butterfly lives; those who served him poorly might earn the same reward sooner. Trying to strike the fine balance, as they told anyone who would listen, made their lives hell.

Vendriel raised his voice to address the court at large: “It was once the custom to send not only redundant children but also lazy servants and other criminals to be stultified. This custom fell into disuse under the Empire, when it was thought too lenient, and when the Archimage began to cloak himself more darkly in his private concerns. But that personage came forth in humble form to bask in the radiance of our coronation, suggesting a desire to take his place at our feet; and in the absence of any lenient punishments, justice lacks its most effective tool, the power to shock. We have therefore determined to renew the custom.”

Zago had experimented with breathing again during what seemed a typically boring speech, but its meaning at last trickled to his heart and stopped it. “No, Lord, please! What have I done? Maybe I deserve death, but—”

“Not you, fool. You will have the honor of escorting the malefactor we select to the west gate of the Archimage’s garden—”

“Thank you, Lord!”

“—and through that gate. We wish you to deliver the offender personally with our message, and to observe closely what happens to him. Or her.”

Although Zago had bullied a wailing herd through that gate every week or so for a decade, each visit scared him more. To pass through the gate himself was a horror he faced only in nightmares, but this time he would not be able to scream himself awake.

Those urchins whose nightmares he himself haunted might have been gratified to see Zago faint.

The childcatcher was not alone in his terror that morning, for the least of the First Lord’s skills was seeming to speak pointedly to each member of a crowd. Even some of the dead slaves had to be revived after he swirled his cloak about his lank frame and stalked from the hall. Every man knew he was the malefactor whose soul would be eaten; every woman deemed herself damned by his ictic addendum.

None believed this more strongly than Glittitia. Her lord’s normal coolness had grown glacial. He had called for her only three times in the weeks since her lapse with Flindorn, and then only to assist a new favorite in the most demeaning ways. Worse, whenever his new sword-bearer bungled an execution in more than usually ludicrous style, Vendriel would slide exasperated glances her way while ranting at Gnepox, as if impatient to reach her name on his long list.

But she was delighted with the sentence that had appalled everyone else, for it held the first hope she had dared entertain. She was a native of Sythiphore, with the ivory skin, almond eyes, black hair and general cast of features that led the Frothoin to boast they couldn’t tell one Sythiphoran from another. She was also an avid reader of Mopsard’s tales, and particularly loved the one about the princess who persuades her executioner to substitute the heart of a swineherd’s daughter for her own and bring it to her wicked stepmother. She chose not to dwell on the fate of the princess when she later meets the Three Vengeful Pigs of the tale’s title.

Substituting another woman for a beheading would be impossible: the substitute would surely make some inapt comment before the blade fell. But one whose soul had been eaten would say only what she was told to say. If Vendriel noticed any difference in the one Zago brought back, he might ascribe it to the process of stultification. She would let them argue about it, for she would be long gone.

It remained to subvert Zago, and she thought of that as child’s play until she tracked him down to the exercise room where he was coaching Gnepox in the use of the manqueller. Her heart sank when she observed how the childcatcher clung to the handsome youth while guiding his strokes, how his hand lingered in patting the novice headsman’s muscular rump.

“Come to help us practice?” Gnepox said with a laugh when he saw her. “You’re just what we need!”

Infuriatingly, Zago didn’t even look up from his rapt kneading of the young man’s shoulders, but Glittitia’s eyes bored into him and willed him to notice her slinking forward in her artfully disordered gauze.

“Leave us,” she ordered. “I require a word alone with this wretched creature.”

Zago at last looked up with a cool insolence she hadn’t thought he could command. “Go ahead and talk to him,” he said. “I won’t listen.”

This tickled Gnepox, and the pair of them whooped like giddy boys while Glittitia raged. Her one word in Vendriel’s ear could formerly have squashed a dozen Zagos, but she had thrown that power away. Forcing her eyes back to her goal, she swallowed her bile.

“Gnepox, please. Have I ever asked you a favor?”

He swung his big sword in a whickering wheel not far from her neck. “You soon will.”

The slum-vermin parodied a lordly gesture of dismissal that he had probably observed for the first time that morning. This further amused Gnepox, who winked at his new friend and sauntered out. Zago stared at her even more insolently as he folded his sinewy arms and said, “Know, Lady, that I have no use for girls.”

Glittitia let her nominal garment waft away and slid close. Her deft fingers woke fully what Gnepox had stirred.

“Then let me teach you one for a woman,” she breathed.

To Zago, sex required no more preparation than spitting in someone’s face or kicking his backside. It was accomplished almost as quickly, and the effect was often the same. But to Glittitia, who had never known such rude treatment, it was a perverse ecstasy. It was as if a step onto a low and familiar stool had been transfigured into a breathtaking flight to a cloud. She could have torn out her vocal chords for all the inanities they squealed in the span of ten fluttering heartbeats.

Preoccupied with a study of human parts he had never much noticed before, he failed to sense her disgust. She shifted away from his fumbling touch. His childish curiosity annoyed her as much as anything, and she tried to distract him.

“How does one become a—” the word was so distasteful that she feared it might offend him, too, but no euphemism existed—“a childcatcher?”

She breathed again when he stopped behaving like a suspicious housewife at a poulterer’s and addressed the question: “I was once a Ghost Rat. That’s what we called ourselves, and it was a fine thing to be. We lived in a ruined palace, one of those half-sunken ones on the Canal of Six Delights. We shared what we stole and drowned anyone who tried to steal it back. I suppose I had a mother and father, but the Ghost Rats were all I ever knew. We stole children sometimes, so perhaps that’s how I got there.”

“Maybe you were stolen from a noble family,” she said, perking up at the similarity to a romance by Porpolard Phurn. “Maybe you’re the true heir to some fabulous estate. Is that a birthmark?”

“No, someone’s boot did that yesterday. My mother was no doubt a whore and my father one of her clients.”

It was impossible to connect this dull beast with the thrill he had inflicted on her. She recalled his unseemly conduct at the audience, his unsavory show with Gnepox. Once more she had to swallow her exasperation before it could spoil her plan. She urged him to tell her more.

“Many children of that class escape being rounded up,” he said, “but when they reach puberty, there’s no escape. They must go to the Archimage, and everyone turns them in. I shaved, I pretended my voice hadn’t changed, but I was big and loud and couldn’t hide well. If no one else did, the Ghost Rats would have betrayed me to earn special treatment. So I betrayed them first. I arranged an ambush for the whole lot. My reward was apprenticeship to a childcatcher.”

Sythiphoran faces are notoriously hard to read, but he read hers. He said, “Yes, it was a bad thing to do, and I’m a wicked man, but I’m alive, and I’ve still got my soul, whatever that is.”

“Oh, Zago!” Thinking of her own peril, she wept.

Unlike any man she had ever known, he ignored her tears. “Teach me more about the uses of women.”

“No, Zago! No, I ... oh,
very
well.”

The childcatcher agreed to her plan, or pretended to, but that evening as she made ready to visit the Sythiphoran enclave to look for a double, she was seized and confined to

her rooms. No explanation was given.

Glittitia had pictured spending her last hour as a cogitant woman in bittersweet contemplation of Frothirot’s airy spires while the million catches and dirges and ballads of its noisy citizens rang across the canals where her funeral boat glided. She would stand tall and proudly indifferent, a doomed empress of romance. No one would notice the tear that glittered on her cheek as she thought of her far-off home in Sythiphore, and of all that might have been.

She had never imagined these precious moments soiled by thoughts of how fine Zago looked with his hair and beard curled and his broad shoulders draped in the gray traveling-cloak of the household regiment. Nor had she imagined being distracted by the slaves who rowed the boat: not the dead ones that Vendriel the Good kept prudently close at home, but incogitants who smiled and bobbed their heads each time she glanced their way. They didn’t know it, but she was going to be made just like them, and their brainless eagerness to please seemed cruelly ironic.

She gave in to a temptation that had nagged her since leaving the Vendren Palace and made to brush Zago’s shoulders, but the captain of their escort batted her hand away.

“But he’s
dusty!”
she protested. “You’re a soldier, surely you can see that.”

“Orders.” The man was grimmer even than Death’s Darlings were supposed to be, as if this were his own last voyage. She supposed he was outraged to see a childcatcher dishonoring his uniform.

“I was told that the First Lord put a protective spell on this cloak.” Zago muttered with unmoving lips, like a fellow prisoner. “I’m not to disarrange it in any way.”

“Let me wear it.”

He squeezed her hand. She cursed herself for finding this not just comforting but thrilling. He kept the enchanted cloak, though.

The touch thrilled Zago, too, and he again caught himself stupidly counting the guards. They still numbered the total of three hands’ fingers, each was bigger than he, each had the hilt of a manqueller angled high above his helmet. He might snatch one of those swords and surprise a few of the soldiers, but then numbers would tell. Glittitia might swim away, but he would sink straight to the bottom in his ironbound boots.

The only thing to do with sources of confusion, he had found, was to eliminate them quickly. Glittitia confused him more than anyone ever had, so he had quickly reported her dimwit escape-plan to Gnepox. Vendriel the Good had relayed him his eternal gratitude, for whatever that was worth. That should have settled the matter, but she still confused him. He prayed that he could see his mission through without doing something stupid, but suicidal plans for saving her hopped through his mind like a plague of toads.

The traffic of boats and barges thinned, then vanished completely as they entered the Canal of Swimming Shadows. Zago studied the oarsmen, who smiled at him and bowed. He couldn’t say if he had caught any of these slaves as children. If so, they didn’t hold it against him. Neither would Glittitia. Once her soul was wizard-food, she would sing
Hurrah for Zago!
the marching ditty he had composed for his flocks on their way from the Archimage’s garden, if he told her to. Much as he loved that song, he doubted he would have the heart to hear her sing it.

They moored at the dock of the umber palace, where he guided the group up to Bruised Jasmine Street and the westgate. It was the most familiar place in his workaday life, but visiting it in this strange company, in such strange clothes, wrenched it into the world of unpleasantly vivid dreams. The door to his worst fears looked less menacing than shabby, grimed by the fists of childcatchers and by so many small fingers that had tried to find a last grip among its intricate carvings.

Completing the strangeness, a yoked troop of children rounded the corner and shuffled toward them. A brute whose strut proclaimed him to be either the Emperor of the Thallashoi or a complete lunatic brought up the rear, prodding them with a hooked bill. He stopped short and stared in bewilderment at the armed strangers. Obviously he didn’t recognize Zago, but Zago knew him as a colleague called Plistard. They were not friends.

Glittitia gripped his hand with all her strength. Perhaps he saw with her eyes, perhaps he had become a different person, but he had never noticed how piteous the children looked, how utterly despairing. Though some of them sobbed, the tears had long dried on their dirty faces.

“Free those scum,” Zago told the captain. “We don’t want them cluttering up our mission, do we?”

“Free those other scum,” the captain told his men.

Bellowing, Plistard laid into the meddlers with his bill. A soldier fell with a cracked head, swords flashed, loose children scrambled everywhere.

“Back to the canal!” Zago whispered, giving his prisoner a shove. “You can swim, can’t you?”