The Throne of Bones (8 page)

“Have you ever seen anything like this?” I demanded, thrusting the jawbone under his nose.

“Cludd!” he cried, backing away. “That’s a ghoul. Leave it, sir, put it down! To touch one of them—you don’t know what it might do.”

I laughed. “There are no ghouls,” I said, mocking the wisdom of the Anatomical Institute.

He shook his head violently. He was a big, red-faced brute, but he looked as if he might weep or faint. “You don’t know, sir, you don’t know!” Still backing away, he waved a weighty arm in the direction of my grandparents’ tomb. “I heard one of them laughing just last night.”

Last night I had briefly seen myself taking a battle-ax down from the wall and giving the Anatomical Institute the housecleaning it deserved. As judges are more apt to be lords than scholars, I probably would have suffered nothing worse than banishment from the city for a few years, and would have returned to enjoy a piquant notoriety. In my absence the students would have thought twice about puking on our steps.

Such roaring deeds were alien to my nature, however, and my strange discovery jolted me back to my true self. Next day, instead of going to the Institute to bathe in the blood of scholars, I trotted up the steps to consult them politely about the jawbone wrapped under my arm.

I paused before my great-grandfather’s statue, letting the scholarly swarm find paths around me while I studied it attentively for the first time. I had remembered it as being odd beyond its depiction of a wise old head with the body of a young athlete, for that was a convention of public sculpture. My memory suggested that he sat on a bench, but now I saw that his seat was a coffin with the lid suggestively shoved aside. He examined a skull in his hand, surely a fit occupation for the patron of the Institute, but his expression was queerly unscientific. With great subtlety the artist had hinted that he was not so much meditating on the skull as leering at it. If the statue had come to life, he might in the next instant have kissed it, or gnawed it.

I dismissed these fancies and began my search for Dr. Porfat’s office. The other scholar’s contempt had raised him in my esteem; and if derision were a good gauge, he rose higher each time I asked the way. I wondered if the name were not some comic catchword, not only from the smirks or giggles, but also from the imaginative directions it evoked. After climbing marble stairs, then wooden ones, then a metal ladder or two, and at one point creeping across a precipitously sloped roof of loose slates, I found my way to a door under the cobwebbed eaves of the remotest tower, where the hieroglyph for Porfat had been burned into the wood many years ago. The door was locked, and no amount of knocking produced a response, so I opened it.

Except for more dust than any tomb, and for towers of books and bones and papers, some of them seeming to support the high ceiling and others wavering ominously to my steps on the uneven floor, the room was empty. One of the windows was not entirely blocked by heaped manuscripts, and one grimy pane commanded a misguided toymaker’s view of the necropolis. I lingered there a long time, picking out likely tombs I had not entered and marking concealed pockets and byways of the rumpled terrain whose existence not even I had suspected. I took some notes on the back of a handy paper.

“Dr. Por—oh!”

I kept writing as I glanced up with feigned annoyance. It grew harder to feign as I noted eyes the odd, dark blue of plums, slack and sensuous lips, breasts that were rather small but rose at a presumptuous angle. Although she wore the egalitarian motley of a student, the shadowy, tiger-stripe tattooing of her neck and cheeks proclaimed her the grandest sort of Vendren.

“He’s not here,” I said. “I was leaving a note.”

Her initial fright gone, she stared suspiciously. “May I help you?”

A thief or scholarly spy wouldn’t have carried a ghoul’s jaw, and I unwrapped it to show her. “I wanted his opinion of this.”

From the watchmen’s reaction and hers, I was almost ready to grant the bone magical properties, for she cast down her burden of books and papers to snatch it from me. She turned it hurriedly this way and that, staring more avidly than my great-grandfather at his skull. It gave me the chance to stare at her in similar style.

“Sleithreethra,” she whispered with appalling reverence, and I made the appropriate protective sign against that Goddess. I regretted this superstitious lapse, for it earned me a glance of disdain.

“Where did you get this?”

Her tone said that I had shrunk from menacing intruder to halfwit errand-boy. “In the refectory, where else?” I said, but I gestured out the window.

My joke earned me only a grimace of impatience. “Will you show me?”

“If you like. It’s a ghoul, isn’t it?”

She turned to search among the papers she had dropped, some of them probably lost forever among Dr. Porfat’s rubbish, and she returned with some scrolls that she gave me to unwind. When I made no move to roll them out, she came close beside me, as I had hoped she would, to do it herself.

When I tore my eyes from a close study of her curly, auburn hair, I saw that they were pen and ink sketches, and they were ludicrous: not from lack of skill, for she was an accomplished draftsman, but from her preposterous notion of ghouls. Those creatures, gorging on carrion, burrowing through graves, haunting the night and fleeing the sun in dank tunnels, were lower vermin than their closest associates, the rats and worms; for if the legends had any truth, they were humans who had rejected their humanity.

In her vision, the lank and distorted limbs were graceful, the brutish heads with their fanged muzzles noble as those of fine dogs. I never would have imagined that a female with tusks jutting up to her nostril-pits could have enticed me, but one nude freak draped languidly on a tomb hardened me even further than the artist had. Most of the images were less sexual than absurdly romantic, of ghouls as outsized elves who spent the enchanted midnight gazing at the moon with bright globes of eyes that echoed its beauty.

“Have you seen them?” I asked.

“As a child, I thought.... Well, I heard them, I’m sure of that, and I’ve never forgotten it. It was Dr. Porfat who described them for me when I brought him my first drawings, and I wanted to see if these were more accurate.”

I studied the jaw without comment. Comparing it with her artwork was like comparing tales of chivalry with the iron weight of a spike-headed flail.

She surprised me by saying, “I’d like to draw you.”

“Why? Do I look like a ghoul?”

She gave that question more thought than I believed it warranted before she said, “No, not really, but you do look unusual. It’s mostly your body that interests me.” She shocked me, but didn’t displease me, by squeezing my arms with her tiny hands and tracing the contours of my chest. She batted my hands aside when I tried to reciprocate.

“You’re better than most of the models we get.”

“I play dwelth.”

“That’s the sort we get, and you’re not like that at all. It takes hard, repetitious labor to develop your sort of muscles. Are you a soldier? I know! You’re a gravedigger, aren’t you? That’s how you found the jaw.”

You may imagine how little I cared for this deduction. “I am called Lord Glyphtard,” I said, as I very seldom did. “I amuse myself by gardening.”

“How amusing that must be!” It was clear she believed me not at all. “When will you show me where you found the jaw?”

“Now?”

“Don’t be silly. You don’t look for ghouls by daylight. Tonight?”

As I closed the door behind us, I’m sure she heard the firm click of the lock. She said, “You forgot to leave your note for Dr. Porfat.”

“I’ll wait until I see him.”

Umbra Vendren was too observant, she was too smart, and she was even more eccentric than Mother. “Eccentric” might be less than apt. Her ancient Tribe was notorious for cruelty, depravity and madness, even if they all weren’t, as so many believed, witches. I saw no harm in guiding her through the cemetery, though, and perhaps distracting her from ghouls long enough to satisfy my taste for her.

If nothing else, my way of stumbling into my career as a grave-robber should have taught me that one thing always leads to another.

She wore black, but Vendrens always do, a garment that fit her like a shadow under her silk cape, and her hair was hidden by a slouch hat with a raven’s feather. You would have spotted her immediately as a grave-robber if she had walked onto a stage; or into a cemetery.

“Planning on a bit of gardening?” she asked.

We were a matched pair: I had brought my pick and shovel and crowbar only from force of habit, but I explained, “I thought you wanted to dig up ghoul-bones.”

“He wasn’t buried. They eat their own dead, too, and the bone you found must have rolled away unnoticed. But I want to see where you found it.”

Walking through my damp garden into the cemetery, she said, “Porfat thinks ghouls are sick people, that they have a disease you can get from breathing graveyard air. Or,” she added maliciously, “from contact with ghouls, such as playing with their bones.”

That was nonsense. If graveyard air made you a ghoul, I would have been ten of them. “You handled it.”

“Do you have it?”

My find had so delighted me that I carried it like a child’s favorite toy of the moment, and I pulled it from my cloak. She held it up and licked it along its length, and I thought then that
sensuous
was less the word to describe her mouth than
depraved.
She eyed me slyly as she tongued the place where its lips might have been.

“I want to be a ghoul,” she said. “Don’t you?

She could make me feel less sophisticated than our oldest and silliest servant, and I had to struggle against making the sort of sign that had earned her contempt. “Not really.”

“Oh, but it would be
fun!
All these pigs, these fools with their absurd pretensions, their preposterous vanity, their cowardly wish to spin out their empty, stupid, greedy lives forever—” she paused to spit on a handy sarcophagus “—it would show them what they’re good for, living or dead, to
eat
them!” She kicked another moss-grown coffin hard enough to hurt herself, but she was a typical Vendren, I feared, and pain was beneath her notice. “What do you expect from pigs? Pork, that’s all,
pork,
and if I were a ghoul I wouldn’t care that it was rancid. I want to tear them up and strew them around, and then I want some great, beautiful monster to drag me down among the mud and the worms and the rot and fuck me!”

She had raved her way into the subject that really interested me, and I reached out for her, but she shrugged my hand off and raced deeper into the field of the dead. She stopped, picking a coffin at random, and tried to shove off its lid. She spat furious curses when she failed to budge it.

She was screaming louder than ever, urging me to come and use my tools. I was tempted to fade into the shadows and leave her to the watchmen. Even if they weren’t cowed by her status, they surely wouldn’t take her seriously enough to arrest her. Instead I hurried to help her and told her to be quiet.

“I’m sorry,” she said meekly. “I have strong feelings on the subject.”

“You’ll have strong feelings when they put you on the scaffold and use one your severed legs as a spool to reel out your intestines,” I whispered, but her bright attentiveness suggested a child hearing plans for a jolly outing.

Once the lid was off, she clambered up to peer inside. “It’s empty!” She began cursing again.

“It would be, this close to the Institute.”

“Nonsense. A ghoul could move that lid more easily than you did. That’s why they’re empty.” She adjusted her hat to a more determined angle and scanned the terrain, her eyes resting at last on the higher slopes of the necropolis. “Could we get into one of those mausoleums?”

“I suppose we could try,” I said, “but only if you promise to be quiet.”

While we were creeping up the hill, crouching behind sarcophagi and taking advantage of all the hedges and trees I knew, she muttered, “He wants
me
to keep quiet?” She didn’t explain this, but after a while she said, “You have a wonderful laugh, do you know?”

“When did I laugh?”

“When I was telling you how I wanted to be a ghoul.” I didn’t remember laughing, but it would have been my likely reaction to the alarm I had felt. She added, “I think your laugh was what attracted me to you.”

This was the first encouraging word she had spoken to me, and I tried again to detain her, but she hurried on to the streets of tombs.

I wanted to choose the tomb, a relatively secluded one that I knew I could open, but she stopped at a miniature temple of Polliel. “This one,” she said, slapping the door. “I hate this bastard God with his great, ugly, peering, prying eye, like a slimy fried egg you get every morning whether you like it or not.”

I had thought I was getting used to her blasphemy, but I winced. While she puzzled over the seams of the door, I took tools of my own design from my cloak and opened the lock as if I had the key.

“I knew what you were,” she said, smiling up at me. “That attracted me, too.”

She had forced me to see that I was a slave to the same superstitions as Mother, and no more so than now: for I had never violated a priest’s tomb, and I realized that I had been irrationally avoiding the wealthiest ones of all. The jeweled vestments and gold chalices and censers and asperges that dazzled me in my first glance, when I had lit a lamp, were worth the loot of twenty ordinary tombs, and my second glance raised that estimate to fifty.

She went straight to the panel that concealed the priest, higher and more embellished than those of acolytes and temple virgins, and gestured impatiently for my help. When I had opened the coffin I staggered back, gasping and retching, for his had been a fairly recent burial.

Perhaps she already was a ghoul. She inhaled the stinking fog of decay as if it were perfume before leaning into the coffin and spitting in the corpse’s face. “False priest!” she hissed. “Sleithreethra will destroy your god, night will prevail, darkness will rule forever and ever.” And then I made a protective sign whole-heartedly as she mocked him with the motto of the Goddess’s foul cult: “Joy always!”