The Throne of Bones (49 page)

He gripped the hound’s collar, which bore the ideogram for its name:
Floss.
“That’s no kind of name for an overgrown lout like you. Just stand here, that’s a good boy, and I’ll give you a proper name, like Corpse-cruncher, or Lord Frothiriel, maybe ....”

He talked on, taking no note of what he said, just trying to calm the dog. There was no calming him: he trembled and growled, yearning toward the boy as if his savage spirit would presently burst out of his skin to attack, leaving his body standing obediently behind.

Crondard risked a look at the boy and beckoned with his spear. He needed no encouragement. The hounds and horses had topped the ridge behind him, and he flew downhill with no trace of his former exhaustion. It took Crondard a moment to accept what he saw, but there was no denying it: the hunters were purposefully pursuing the boy. There was no boar. The hounds were at his heels, the riders glared at him with maniacal eagerness, some with spears already raised for a cast.

The boy himself defied explanation. His hair was copper, his eyes were blue, his skin was several shades paler than Crondard’s own. He looked, in fact, like a pure Fomor, like the child Crondard himself might have produced with the very fairest woman in Ashtralorn, a child whose non-existence he sometimes bemoaned when he drank. But even if one accepted that the boy was a Fomor, and that he was here on Hogman’s Plain, where no one lived, why was he not burned black by the sun or painted red by the dust?

Floss quivered even more tensely, and Crondard felt his own knees tremble. He could ignore his unanswerable questions for a moment, but he could not ignore the icy fingers that caressed his heart as he saw the way those sooty entities swarmed near the radiant child. When the boy smiled and opened his arms, running faster now that he was only a few yards away, Crondard’s hairs crackled as if he stood in the path of a thunderbolt.

“Liron is here!” he shouted, and it was surely the first time he had ever used Wolfbaiter’s war-cry without ironic intent as he fell to one knee and braced the butt of his spear against the earth. At the same time he released Floss, who launched himself at the boy like a bolt from a crossbow.

Even now Crondard had doubts. He screamed with horror as the child ran headlong onto the spear, as Floss clamped his throat in bone-crushing jaws. Blood sprayed over the white skin, the eyes widened in horror, but the spear bowed as if receiving a weight ten times heavier than the child. The mouth opened in a scream and kept opening impossibly wide, revealing teeth like sabers. Crondard was flung back as if he were the child, buried under the stinking weight of a humped swine half the size of a horse.

“Is that how you Fomors do it?” Lord Nephreiniel quivered with anger at being denied the kill, and so unconventionally. “No wonder there are so few of you.”

Crondard was pinned beneath the boar, but he had no taste for asking help from the fluttering fops who ringed him. He craned his neck to stare down at the monster that still twitched and bled on him as Floss finished tearing out its throat.

More to himself than anyone else, he said, “Things are not what they seem lately.”

“When were they ever?” Lord Nephreiniel said.

The austere provincials insisted, to Crondard’s chagrin, on segregating the sexes at the public baths, and he was required to scrub himself twice before enjoying a hot soak in the pool. Restored, though, and with his gear furbished while he bathed, he returned to the Sow in Rut with a spring in his step, but he lost it as soon as he entered. He thought he had blundered into the wrong inn.

He stepped outside, ignoring the crowd that jostled him, an inconvenient rock in its babbling eddies. By daylight, the sign over the door looked even more tasteless and crudely executed, but it clearly identified the place. It seemed unlikely, but he might have approached the inn from a different street last night. He remembered that street only as a silent array of shuttered facades, empty but for menace.

The shutters were open now, and sleazy wares overflowed onto the footway. Merchants bounced and bubbled as they chivvied passersby into bargains on candles that had been stored in hot attics or carpets retrieved from flooded cellars. All this jolly bustle confused the memory of his first impression, more suited to the evil fame of the city. Except for the pervasive black granite of the underlying hill, reshuffled and dealt into paving stones and building blocks, it could have been one of the seedier commercial streets in Frothirot.

He entered the tavern again: not into an oppressive passageway, but directly into the taproom. Unlike the room he remembered, its far end lay open to the courtyard. What he could see of the building around the court was smaller and tidier than the ramshackle sprawl he had seen last night. Patrons began drifting out of the room as he entered.

In his bewilderment he failed to note soon enough that three armed men were also moving to guard the exits. They wore the tower-and-thunderbolt emblem of the city on their helmets and breastplates. At least they had not come from Frothirot, but it was clear that they had come for him, and he drew his ax with a sigh of resignation. His condition had suffered an ironic reversal: their hooked bills would give them the advantage of hunters ringing a boar with spears.

Their officer, a puffed princock who vividly recalled his late captain, had no bill, nor did he deign to draw his sword as he strutted up to the glowering Fomor. He forestalled Crondard from splitting him with the amazing question, “Are you the murderous necromancer who calls himself Liron of Ashtralorn?”

“I am Liron Wolfbaiter,” he said. He was chilled to recognize the plum cloak that the officer held at arm’s length, but he went on: “I am a mercenary soldier on my way to Zaxann.”

“On your way to a bonfire, more likely.” The men got a laugh out of this, but Crondard’s innards went hollow. “We burn necromancers here, you know. Do you deny that this garment belonged to a seamstress named Fanda, found dead and partly eaten last night near the temple where she was employed? Or that you were observed concealing it behind the stables this morning, along with her dress?” Drawing closer, growing more heated—the officer perhaps saw a future for himself as an examining magistrate, and was practicing his technique—he shouted: “Is it not true that you performed these heinous acts of murder and cannibalism as a diabolic ritual to revive certain bones, which you attempted to dispose of in the kennels?”

Crondard cursed the inept dogs, but he said, “Bones? What bones?”

Indulging a flair for melodrama, the officer flipped back the cloak to reveal the skull, now picked clean of flesh and missing its lower jaw, of Elyssa Fand. “Ha! See how he shies from it,” he called to his men. “Remember that when the magistrate questions you.”

The Fomor willed himself to wake from this nightmare to a world where the inn would be as he remembered it, a world where he would no longer be pursued by the irrepressible Elyssa Fand. Remembering how they had seemed to see, he could not tear his gaze from the empty holes of her eyes. The men with their bills edged closer.

“Wait! I know nothing of murder or necromancy. That cloak belongs to a whore who called herself Fanda, yes, whom I took to my room last night. The landlord....” He glanced toward him and was startled to see that his ears were of quite normal size and shape. Even before he had played that trick with the ass’s ears, they had looked freakish, but they had seemed to be his own.

The innkeeper said, “He was shopping for a whore, but I didn’t see him pick one.”

“And where did this Fanda go without the clothes that you were observed burying?” the officer asked. He jerked the skull at Crondard, making him jump. “And whose is this?”

The Fomor saw that he had let himself be surrounded. He was within reach of any of the bills leveled at him. As a frequenter of taverns, he was familiar with the techniques of law enforcement. The men would presently thrust out to hook his neck, an arm, and a leg, while the officer clubbed him into submission with his iron glove. If he struggled at that point, he could be torn limb from limb. His only chance lay in striking first.

“This temple where the seamstress worked, you say—which one was it?”

“The Temple of Sleithreethra, as you well know,” the officer said, and he raised his hand to make the required sign that would fend off the attention of that Goddess.

“Liron is here!” Crondard roared in his face, and the man was arrested in mid-sign as the Fomor’s ax splintered his skull. His helmet, containing the upper portion of his head, clanged on the ceiling and showered them with blood. The man to his right had kept both hands on his bill, so Crondard dealt with him next, driving his left eye deep into his brain with the butt of the ax-helve.

The remaining two, religious as their captain, were fumbling to regain a grip on their weapons when Crondard kicked one in the balls and demolished the other’s face with the back of his ax. Though it was illogical, and he knew it at the time, he turned next to the thing that his screaming nerves insisted posed the worst threat of all. With a series of lightning-strokes, he smashed the skull that had rolled from the officer’s hand. He scuffed the fragments with his boot to every corner of the room.

The man he had kicked was now struggling to rise, but Crondard beheaded him. Not thinking at all, impelled by some memory of the old ballads of Bloodglutter and Shornhand, he picked up the head by the hair, its face still twitching, and carried it with him as he strode out under the awning to the courtyard with his dripping ax over his shoulder.

His choices were limited. If he fled on the pathetic Thunderer, he would not get beyond the city wall before pursuit overtook him. The finest mounts were Lord Nephreiniel’s, but if he stole one of those, he could hardly flee to Zaxann. Or would it be considered theft to take a man’s horse and ride it to his home?

While he weighed these questions, his eye fell upon the trophy of that day’s hunt, hanging from a hook at the far end of the courtyard. Its throat torn out, its breast opened by a spear, it was the body of a fair-skinned youth with coppery hair whose eyes now stared at him as the breeze idly stirred it. Closer examination revealed that its face was not just that of the son he might have had. Though slackened by death and crawling with flies, it was the face that he himself had worn as a boy.

He faltered backward and felt his skull explode: not so much with pain as with the paralyzing anticipation of pain to come. It was not the first time in his life he had been felled with a bung-starter, and he guessed as the stones of the courtyard rushed up to meet him that it was the landlord who had laid him low.

It was some time before he could spare sufficient attention from the pain in his head to wonder where he was, and then he faced a puzzle. He assumed that city policemen were taking him somewhere, and he was bound hand and foot, but unaccountably gagged. Lying on cushions in a dark enclosure, progressing feet first, he thought he might be in a coffin, and that they intended to take revenge for their comrades by burying him alive. The rhythmic jolting suggested that his pallbearers were trotting, though, and it was hard to accept that image.

He could hear their deep but easy breathing, and the slap of bare feet on stone, which he doubted he would have heard so clearly inside a coffin. Forcing his eyes a little wider, he saw that this box was larger. Openings on either side were covered with dark but not fully opaque curtains.

He breathed a little more easily. He was in a litter, it seemed, and being carried along by barefoot slaves, surely an odd way to be haled before a magistrate. He tried to sit up so he might look through the curtains, but he was tied to the frame, and so securely that he was unable to rap on the litter with his feet or elbows.

He told himself he should enjoy the unaccustomed ride and wait to see where it led, but he was unable to accept that advice. Being carried along on a pole, as intractable prisoners usually were, would have been less frightening than this mystery. He suspected he was being kidnapped. His desperate struggles only tightened his bonds.

What little light had sifted through the curtains now failed as the way led downward. The air grew cool, then positively dank. The slaves trotted less swiftly as their footfalls echoed in drafty spaces.

At last the litter was set down among odors of mold and dust. The slaves departed softly. He heard only water dripping; and, very distantly, a tinny clashing that might have been someone’s notion of music. Footsteps approached, and one of the curtains was jerked aside.

The face of a man long dead, or so he had thought, looked down on him. Long and wolfishly lean, white as a tombstone by moonlight, and with eyes of pitiless topaz, it was the face of Vendriel the Good.

As if divining the nature of his captive’s terror, this apparition was quick to say, “I am Lord Morphyrion,” but this gave scant reassurance: he was grandson of the wizard-lord and head of the infamous Fandragoran branch of the House of Vendren.

With remarkable prescience, or perhaps merely with a sardonic glance at their family tree, his parents had named him for a notorious madman of antiquity.

He gestured with a hand so disproportionately large that it looked like an independent creature. Crondard was struck by the fancy that the lord’s black garments contained only the wires necessary to manipulate his head and hands, for he was thin to the point of incorporeality.

Men in the black livery and tiger emblems of the Tribe obeyed the gesture and unbound him, but he was in no hurry to get out of the litter. He knew the search would be hopeless, and so it proved, but he felt about him for his weapons. Pulled forth roughly, he clenched his jaw against the pain of standing more or less erect.

“A Fomor.” The lord studied him for a moment and frowned thoughtfully. “You
are
a Fomor? It is said that your folk can see through the veil of the material world.”

So it was said, mostly by Fomors like his mother, who spent more time in conversation with ghosts, sprites, oracles and divine messengers than with real people. As a disciple of Mantissus the Epiplect, he had outgrown such nonsense, but he had entertained second thoughts since coming to Fandragord.