The Throne of Bones (12 page)

I escaped the narrow streets to the open slopes, where the light seemed even more intense and painful, though in my previous life I would have called this a dark day and ordered lamps to be lit. Lamps! I never wanted to see another lamp.

A shout answered my laugh. Ahead, a man pointed to me, guiding a mob. They were cleverer than I thought, these humans. They had spread the alarm beyond the necropolis and cut off my way home. The watchmen behind me had fanned out. I would soon be surrounded. I leaped onto a stone coffin, dancing from one foot to the other, waving my new, monstrous penis at them and blowing kisses, but coolly choosing an escape-route while I did it.

“Filth!” a man grunted, shockingly close, and my old reflexes would never have escaped his thrusting bill. It grazed me as I rolled off the sarcophagus. I laughed at his wit, though I’m sure he had none, when he said, “I’ll teach you to eat corpses!”

He tried to hook me, but I evaded that by leaping toward him, back onto the coffin. He wore my cloak! My boots! I gripped him by the arm and screamed in his face, “That was very nice!”

He had no idea what I meant. His face was a mask of stupidity and terror, molded from suet. I wanted to explain it to him at leisure, I meant to drag him along with me and add to his considerable knowledge of perversion and cruelty, but I misjudged my new strength, and his arm tore free from his shoulder.

“I’ll eat this later,” I cried, flailing him about the head with the twitching arm, “and I’ll be back tonight for the rest of you!”

Unhappily, I doubt that he understand this threat; his mind was preoccupied. And now the other watchmen were upon me.

By swarming in, they had opened a route to the oldest part of the cemetery. I leaped over their heads, over their raised hooks, and capered away, pausing to hold up the severed arm and make its hand wave good-bye to the screaming owner. I reveled in my new talent for outraging these silly creatures. They took things so seriously! I knew now why my laughter had seemed so
inappropriate
to others. “You think everything is a joke,” people would so often complain, and even I hadn’t known then that everything
was.
“Glyphtard Fand” had been nothing but a clever illusion, I understood at last, but I had finally cast it off like a drunkard’s mask of sobriety.

I let them stay close behind me as I threaded surely through the briers and hidden slabs. The light was less obnoxious here, and I was unwilling to end the game. But I fear that I outsmarted myself. Right across my planned escape-route, but still concealed by tangled forest, I heard horses and clanking metal. Horses could run me down, armor could turn my claws, and the men who used such things, the troopers of Never-Vanquished who had quelled the riots, were no rabble of tanglefoot watchmen.

I kept moving forward, though, for I had let the pursuit come uncomfortably close, and my steps led me to a tomb I recognized by the tree growing from its roof. It was the spot where Exudimord had amused himself with Lord Glyphtard’s wife. It was the tomb of Chalcedor, which concealed the lair of his admirer, my ancestor.

“Grandfather?” I called in a fair imitation of a human voice as I danced up the steps, wringing the watchmen’s arm to make it give up its last drops of blood to the cracked and tilted flagstones. “It’s Glyphtard, dear Grandfather. Come and talk to me. If you dare!”

Better than I had hoped, I heard the rumbles and growls of a disturbed sleeper just inside the vault. The old fool had grown too fat and careless to hide underground.

“King of Ghouls, indeed! King of fat groundhogs, king of worms, king of decrepit idiots! Come out and let me crown you with my foot!” I shouted, still in a manlike voice, but the voice that roared back from the tomb was pure ghoul.

The soldiers heard his roar, and I heard their quiet commands. The mob behind me had marked it, too. They blundered forward more hastily. I dropped the arm across the threshold and leaped to the top of the tomb, then into the tree.

From Glyphtard’s memory, I scarcely recognized the wreck that tottered into the light and stared down at the severed arm. It was ludicrous that Glyphtard had found this slug so fearsome. The drowsy ghoul blinked and scratched and stared even more stupidly at the oncoming watchmen. Then he laughed and brandished his claws. It was clear that they, too, found him fearsome.

Encouraged by their fright, he snatched up the arm and shook it at them as he stalked forward. Being human and therefore blind to my many excellences, not one of them would have doubted that this was the same ghoul they pursued.

The soldiers now emerging from the rear of the tomb had crossbows, and three bolts tore into his back. He looked down at the steel heads protruding from his chest as if wondering,
Whatever can these be?
He turned to take five more of the missiles, one of them penetrating his skull. That one must have hurt, for he tried to wrench it loose with both hands as he lurched, roaring, in an erratic circle.

The watchmen found their courage. They dashed forward to hook his legs and pull them separate ways. He could still fight, breaking oak bills and heads left and right, but footsoldiers with two-hand swords moved in to chop him like firewood. When the horsemen had threaded their way through the brush, there was little left for them to do but skewer his pieces on their lances and jig them boldly aloft.

Waiting and watching from the corpse-fed oak, I pondered my life and my curious metamorphosis. I felt a poignant regret for Umbra. With her high spirits and her love of death, she might have made a better ghoul than I would, and a fit wife for me now. I hadn’t appreciated her finer qualities. Then I realized that these thoughts must be those of Glyphtard Fand, perhaps his very last. I was a ghoul, who needed no wife, and my deepest regret for Umbra was that I had left so little of her to eat.

After the crowd marched off in triumph and a reasonable time elapsed, I climbed down to rearrange Grandfather’s well-stocked larder, and to rest my eyes before introducing myself to the underground host as the new King of Ghouls. Even if I hadn’t overthrown the old one, the title was surely deserved by a ghoul who knew how to pick locks.

Quodomass Phuonsa prided himself on the variety of unlikely subjects his art had immortalized, and he sorely regretted that he had never practiced it upon a ghoul. The old saying, “He would fuck the ghoul that tried to eat his corpse,” was often applied to him, and he itched to prove this as true as he could without actually dying.

A man who would ravish a ghoul faces three obstacles, Quodomass knew. The first of these is their ugliness. Tales abound of men driven mad by the sight of them. Insofar as the accounts of such eyewitnesses can be reconciled, their form is vaguely human, though grotesquely long and lank. Different stories add to this the jaws of a hyena, the claws of a sloth and the hump of a wild hog, crammed inside a skin whose color and texture evoke comparison with the foulest diseases and even with advanced stages of decay. Quodomass had followed his guiding genius into every sort of thing that he could penetrate, sometimes with the assistance of rough surgery and without regard to signs of life, and his only worry was that ghouls might not live up to a reputation so piquant.

Fear, the second obstacle, could be almost as easily dismissed. Quodomass doubted that ghouls could be anywhere near so savage as the mobs that had lusted to tear him in pieces for his least popular triumphs. He had often diverted himself by joining such mobs to rail against the creator of the masterpiece with more tears and curses than the grieving parent or spouse. Unlike most men, as he saw them, he had the courage to trust his luck.

The only true obstacle was finding a ghoul. So crafty and elusive are these creatures that advanced thinkers have denied their existence. This skepticism is not shared by those who frequent graveyards at night, and all such persons with whom Quodomass ingratiated himself had tales to tell. They had heard the laughter of ghouls, smelled their stench or stumbled upon the leftovers of their slovenly feasts. Although none had actually set eyes on a ghoul, reliable acquaintances of their most trustworthy friends had.

Persistence, he believed, shone brightest among his virtues. He would spend months stalking a human target; he could devote years to an inhuman one. On rainy days, when he found little work as a porter at Crotalorn’s central market, he would wander among the grand tombs and open pits of Dreamers’ Hill, studying the landscape that he began to haunt by night. He justified his nocturnal visits by running errands for the watchmen, and even walking their rounds for those too drunk to function. As he became a familiar figure, he earned bigger tips by carrying burdens for grave robbers. A hard judge of others, Quodomass was scandalized that these criminals should often be watchmen, too, but he hid his disapproval with smiles and an unflagging eagerness to make himself useful.

At such times he thanked the Gods who had fashioned him so cunningly for deception. His compact body belied his strength; his boyish looks took ten years off his age, if he covered his bald spot; his contempt for the frivolities in books masked a superior intellect; and his cheery demeanor hid the fact that his brain was gnawed by fiery maggots. The fear that they might leak out and be seen by others obsessed him, another reason why he always sported a rakish kerchief, and giving rise to his nervous compulsions to brush his shoulders or beat his head with hard objects.

His most generous employer was a pudgy young nobleman of minor degree called Weymael Vendren. A student of necromancy who collected the relics of ancient masters, Weymael knew a lot about ghouls, and Quodomass once boasted of the saying that was so often applied to him.

“Fuck the ghoul who tries to eat you, eh? That’s not impossible, if you know how to rise from the dead,” Weymael muttered as he plied his instruments on the complex lock of a bronze door. “I could show you how, I suppose, but rising from the dead is usually more trouble than it’s worth.”

“There’d be no physiological problem? I nearly ... I mean, I heard of a fool who nearly did himself a serious injury by attempting to couple with a statue of our Princess.”

“Stop banging your head with the lantern and hold it steady ... yes, right there. No, they’re quite compatible with mortals. Sexually, anyway. They used to be human, you know.” Weymael paused to give him a thoughtful look. “They were people whose filthy habits provoked a monstrous transformation.”

“Then you could kill one? Strangle her, for instance, or cut her in pieces, or take some lengths of heated wire and a pair of pliers—”

A flick of Weymael’s ferrety eyes told Quodomass that he had revealed too much enthusiasm for an academic discussion, but the necromancer returned to his work without quizzing him.

“I suppose you could, but catching her and holding her down, that would be a big enough problem, unless you found one who enjoyed it. Enjoyed sex, I mean, not being strangled.”

“Is that possible?”

“Why not? Male ghouls are supposedly wild about human women, which may be why you don’t see many girls around here at night.” A sound like steam hissing and clacking at the lid of a kettle, Weymael’s aborted laughter, unnerved the porter. It suggested the notoriously mordant mirth of ghouls. “The offspring of such unions are always destroyed, and that’s a pity. I might learn something from studying a demi-ghoul, or perhaps use its services when it grew up. Be sure to tell me if you find a complaisant ghouless, Quodo.”

To abbreviate his name like that, which almost everyone did, was to drive a spike of rage between the eyes of Quodomass Phuonsa, but he concealed the pain with a broader than usual grin. Momentarily distracted, he had no chance to deny his intention of waylaying a ghoul before the lock gave up its secrets and the door swung open on a dank and fetid interior.

“After you,” Weymael Vendren said, as he always did.

Reflecting at leisure, Quodomass believed that the necromancer might help him in his quest, but he found it impossible to break the lifelong secrecy that had spared him from the rack, the block and all the other apparatus of official art critics. Besides, he wanted to catch a ghoul so he could humiliate and torture it, while Weymael Vendren would want to keep it in a cage and take notes on it. But since their ambitions might not be entirely inconsistent, he returned casually to the subject of ghouls whenever they met.

“Nothing attracts them like a corpse,” Weymael said, “which is why the wealthy go to such lengths to keep these stinking tombs sealed. I believe you’ll not find that wine to your taste. It was sometimes poisoned to punish common thieves.”

Quodomass sprayed it out, retching, and inwardly cursed Weymael for keeping silent when he had cracked the jar.

“If you can drink that—hand me the hacksaw, please, this bastard’s neck is tough as wood—if you don’t mind the taste of that, I can give you a potion that simulates death. I’ll have you buried with a net and a hammer in your coffin, and when the ghoul rips it open to get her dinner....”

“No, thank you.” Though he was furious with his clever patron for divining his purpose, and perhaps even his secret nature, he had concluded that he need not fear him. Since adepts of the black arts are masters of delusion, judges at that time thought it pointless to try them. An accusation of witchcraft carried an automatic sentence of death.

“It wouldn’t work, anyway,” Weymael said. “Let me see that hatchet, I’ll get this head off him yet! No, trying to attract just one ghoul to a corpse would be like dropping your pants in a swamp to catch one mosquito. You’d wake up with a hundred of the filthy things fighting over you.”

Quodomass shivered less with fear than with a fearful excitement. He said, “A net would be good, you think?”

“Don’t you go to the fighting-pits? If the netter knows how to use it, he beats the sworder almost every time, and a ghoul’s claws are like swords.” Panting from his exertions, the necromancer tossed him an unexpectedly heavy head, dried to stony hardness. “Put that in your bag and we’ll be skipping along.”