The Throne of Bones (28 page)

His habitual expression was a smirk, which he varied with a leer when some cultist struck his fancy. He laughed almost constantly; though sometimes muted to a bass chuckle, his laughter often rose to a maniacal shriek. It stopped only when anger overcame him, and that was a fearful sight indeed, for whatever was vestigially human in his guise would then burn away. His chest swelled to twice its size, the bristles on his arms and shoulders erected, the hair of his head puffed out. His bell-shaped ears folded back, his globular eyes narrowed to yellow slits and the lines of his face ridged into a mask of fury as he bared all the teeth in his massive jaw and howled in the face of some sniveler. Certain toads and lizards achieve a metamorphosis no less complete in their displays of anger, but theirs is only show; his was no less convincing than the tiger’s mask of wrath. Those who provoked this change were dragged screaming into the darker reaches of the cellar, perhaps to await fuller attention at his leisure.

This thing had been known in its human form as Lord Glyphtard, whom I had once seen from a distance, who now styled himself Vomikron Noxis, King of the Ghouls. The high, domed forehead was the same as the living man’s, and the black hair; but the nose was absent and the eyes, ears and jaw were not human at all. It seemed less a caricature of his former appearance than a logical development, as if the human face he had presented to the world for twenty-some years had been the unformed embryo of this horror.

My own courage, or more likely my bemusement, alarmed me when I found myself virtually in the front rank of his servants. All of these were naked, waiting their turns to abase themselves, and my clothing at last made me stand out. To retreat from this point would only draw further attention. But this ghoul would recognize me the instant his eyes chanced to fall on me. I had to withdraw.

At that moment a man edged in front of me: Zephryn Phrein. All his sneering assurance had deserted him. Without his clothing, he seemed awkward and more youthful, even pathetically boyish. I had lost my tremor somewhere along the way, but he shook worse than I had. I found myself wanting to help the poor lout for his own sake. In the presence of real evil it struck me forcibly that his errors were those of youthful bewilderment. Whatever he might be, he was human.

I stepped forward and reached for his elbow. If he objected, I would rap him on the head with my staff, throw him over my shoulder, and bull my way to the stairs. Once I build up speed, I am hard to stop.

As I reached for his left arm, an usher took his right. He was drawn forward to kneel, and I was left standing alone in the lurid glare of the candles, directly in front of the ghoul. A murmur rippled near me. I had been noticed at last: not yet as an intruder, perhaps, but as a bumptious petitioner.

Having made his obscene obeisance, Zephryn said: “O King, I don’t have the boy.”

“I see that. Zephryn—” no human throat could have formed the name as the ghoul’s did, like the buzz of an angry wasp that rose to a shriek of claws on glass—“we chose you for your talent to dupe boys. Have you failed us?”

The smirk was dissolving into the wrathful mask. I eased forward, clutching my staff more firmly.

“Majesty, I haunted the necromancer’s palace for a week, I even crept inside to search. I saw no boy. At last I approached Weymael Vendren and confessed the sort of interest in his ward that he understood. He claims Polliard died from eating tainted food. I believed him, for he wept as he told me.”

“Polliard Phuonsa was a ghoul, you dunce! There was nothing he couldn’t eat ... unless he was subsumed by what he consumed.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It is for the King of the Ghouls to understand, and for you to obey!” The bristling unexpectedly subsided. The fangs retreated behind the thin lips, only to re-emerge in the ghastly leer. This seemed to exhaust the creature’s stock of facial expressions. “If you can’t bring us the boy, Zephrynnnn—” the way he said that name hurt my teeth—“you may bring us your sister.”

My heart leaped out to the youth, for he tottered awkwardly to his feet with the battle-cry of a free man on his lips: “No!”

I was already moving quickly, and before the ghoul could deal with his contumacious slave, I said: “No, Sir, you shall not have her!” I swung my staff with both hands and all my strength against the thing’s left ear.

It was a solid blow, mashing cartilage and perhaps cracking bone, and it toppled the King of the Ghouls, throne and all, in a most unkingly heap.

“It’s the ghoulologist!” someone screamed.

I tried to pull Zephryn away with me, but he shoved me back with unexpected strength. “Go!” he shouted. “Warn her! Guard Zephreinia! Get out of here, you fat fool, while you still can!”

I saw through his impertinence to the sense in this. Even so, I might have stayed to argue with him, but Vomikron Noxis had staggered upright to pump forth trumpets of rage. Hands plucked at my cloak, blows fell almost unnoticed on my head and shoulders as his followers mobbed me. Before the ghoul could attack, Zephryn grappled with him. Many of the king’s courtiers dashed in to restrain the youth, blocking my way. It would have been harder to go forward than to go back to the stairs.

I went back. But I went back in a rage. I hated myself even more than I hated these scum, for it seemed I had failed Zephryn and his sister, but it was the ghoul’s toadies who suffered for my bad conscience. I plied my staff with a will, pausing to strike a second blow whenever the first failed to satisfy me. I pursued a few who tried to get out of my way, men, women, it made no difference. As a physician, I can judge the sound and feel of a broken skull. I broke a few skulls that night, and I doubt that all of their owners are laughing about it today.

I thought I had done with horrors. Nothing seemed left now but ordinary fear and extraordinary anger. But what had gone before seemed almost commonplace when I discovered that not all of my opponents were human. Some of the draped ushers that I had casually pushed past earlier were ghouls. Worse, some were humans well on their way to that status. Not even the unveiled spectacle of their king had unnerved me so much as the sight of a human face, perhaps one hinting of former beauty, marred by bulbous eyes or porcine tusks. Them I hit the hardest, and so much for my pretensions as a healer.

A curious order of battle prevailed. The true ghouls, for all their fangs and claws and coffin-cracking strength, contented themselves to gibber and shriek in the background. The intermediate cases were only slightly less timid. It was the humans who most boldly blocked my way, who weighed me down by clinging to my legs or my cloak.

I wondered why none of them had thought to use a blade on me. Men of a certain class—mine, but I am an oddity—feel naked without a sword, and no one goes without a knife. Except here. I had seen no one armed, not even in the midst of this fight. Superstition gave me the answer: ghouls fear iron. The king was so uncertain of his subjects that he allowed no iron in his court.

Just as I was hailing a triumph of superstition, I felt the unique and unmistakable pain, the momentary paralysis of mind and body, that attends the sudden and unexpected piercing of one’s hide. I had been stabbed in the back. My attacker still clung to me. I twisted to see him. My theory about iron had not been refuted, but I took small consolation from that, for a ghoul had buried his fangs in my shoulder. I could not swing the staff handily, but I jabbed the butt into his great yellow eye, which burst and spattered me with jellified foulness. He released his grip and dropped writhing to the floor with a scream that matched his king’s.

The knot of ghouls that had formed behind me, waiting to join in the attack if their braver comrade succeeded, fell away to scream insults at a distance. I almost pursued them, I was so sick by this time of being called “ghoulologist” in their skull-scraping ululations.

I had a certain advantage over this mob. While Zephryn fought their king, and the noise from that quarter told me he still did, they had no leader, and they were the sort that needed one. They didn’t fight well. They did nothing well, and that was why they longed to command magical powers, even if it meant eating corpses. They could have crushed me in their numbers, but so could an equal mass of worms. As long as I kept my head and controlled my nausea, I had a chance.

I was within sight of the door to the stairway, and no one had thought to block it or even close it. If I took many more steps in that direction, it would dawn on even the stupidest to seize and defend that door. I feinted to the right, kicking a ghoul who had sneaked up on that side, clubbing a human, and swinging one of the pendulous corpses behind me to block pursuit for a moment. I stirred up a filthy swarm of flies that momentarily blinded me and clogged my nostrils.

“Zephryn!” I shouted, turning back toward the king’s throne. “This way!”

I regretted that ruse. I had no real hope to offer him, no help to give him. I had used his name merely as a diversion, and it worked, for some of my attackers wavered uncertainly toward the throne. But I regretted it even more when the intolerable rasp of Vomikron Noxis replied: “He’s not going with you, Dr. Porfat. He’s chosen to wait here till his sister joins us.”

I suppose he wanted me to attack him, and I was tempted, but no one now stood between me and the door. I dived for it, slammed it behind me, and had pounded halfway up the stairs before I saw my error. The framework bent, the tortured wood screamed louder than my pursuers. But it was too late to be cautious. I scrambled the last few steps on my hands and knees and clawed my way into the upper room as the stairs collapsed under the added weight of pursuit. My own blowing and wheezing seemed louder in my ears than the dismayed screams or the splintering crash of the staircase.

I lay still for a moment, bleeding from the bite in my shoulder and a score of lesser wounds I hadn’t noticed. I knew it was no place to rest, however, and I had started to rise when Vomikron Noxis, so strong and agile that the missing stairway posed no barrier, bounded through the door after me.

I believed that my death had come, that it towered above me in this animated cesspool of human ills and fears and sins, but it was a death that would give me no rest, no peace, no clean and irreparable snipping of the fragile thread. This thing would eat me, and then it would prowl the world in my form for a span, thinking my thoughts and speaking my words as it polluted and destroyed everyone I cared for: foolish Fandiel, jolly Zara, my own, dear little sister, Nyssa.... My shame is so great that I must wedge my fist against my mouth now to keep from screaming as I recall it, but I pleaded with the ghoul in the most abject way, I begged him to spare me.

His leer faded. He did have a third facial expression, no less fearful, but what it meant, I have no idea. I screamed. For an instant I seemed to be in peril of physically slipping off the world and falling into the great yellow globes of his eyes. He saw deep into me.

“I
know
you!” he said, and his voice roused me from my sick trance of passivity. Yes, he knew me, he had pawed and fondled my secrets, my most precious dreams and my most miserable shames. He had stirred filth to the surface that even I could not recognize, except to know that it must be mine. Even if he never laid his claws on me, he had mauled me and crippled me forever by wrenching my perception of myself into a sickening shape, by altering the very thing that had always said, “I.”

And then he threw back his horrible head and
laughed!
“Now,” the King of the Ghouls howled, “now, boy, at long last, it’s your turn to kiss my—”

“With pleasure, Sir! Here’s a kiss for you!” I cried, and I thrust the gnarled head of my staff at the very part his subjects had so honored. He clutched his battered member, doubled over, and fell back into the pit, shrieking all the while in a voice to make a statue cringe.

I hurled myself out into the prickling fog that had succeeded the rain. When I stumbled over unknown obstacles in Algol’s Close and the alley beyond it, I didn’t pause to pick myself up, I just crawled or thrashed or rolled until I was running again. But how far must I run before I reached the limit of that enormous cellar, and the limits of the burrows that might join it to other cellars? In my terror, it seemed that the solid cobblestones were but a thin shell between me and the Underworld, and that the ghoul could track me as surely as iron filings track a magnet through paper. I dared not stop to test my conviction that the echoing clatter of my footsteps masked the noise of subterranean pursuit. Every blot of deeper blackness in the night seemed a hole from which Vomikron Noxis might burst.

At last I fell and could not rise, even though I was nearing an intersection where a dim glow stained the fog from a mass that might have been a tavern. The stones beneath my ear were cold and wet, but I pressed it harder against them to listen. I heard only the roar of my own blood.

I knew I must get up and push on, but the will to try had drained from me. Sleep promised a respite from the wretched spell the ghoul had cast. That spell denied me any good reason to live, but the mere habit of life was strong enough to raise my weary body to its hands and knees.

I heard a cry of distress that chilled me: “Doctor! Dr. Porfat, where are you?”

Although it was Zephryn’s voice, I didn’t answer. He was probably dead. The king must have assumed his likeness. Fighting against the human impulse to reply, I got up and staggered away from the voice as quickly and quietly as pain and despair and vertigo would allow.

“Doctor!” The cry was closer, more anguished, and now I heard more than one set of running footsteps. “Help me!”

I sagged into a dark doorway and waited. Zephryn stumbled past, still calling out, though his failing breath and abraded throat could now produce little more than a pitiable whisper.

The man—or thing—had been wounded. His twisted left arm hung useless, and he lurched on an injured leg. Blood clothed his pale body in dark lace. Old wives’ tales, my sole source of knowledge about such matters, told me that a dead man personated by a ghoul always appears to be whole and sound.