The Throne of Bones (30 page)

To perfect this ghastly charade, I have been convicted of murdering
Phylphot
Phuonsa. I cannot explain the reasoning of the magistrates, I can only retail it: he was last seen with me, my bloody cloak was later found in an alley, I cannot account for my activities during the following week, and no one can now find him; therefore, obviously, I killed and ate him.

I had thought the Empress might intercede for me, since I did recover her necklace, but even that good deed is twisted against me. I was able to retrieve the necklace because I had stolen it. I burned down Gourdfoot’s tavern so no one could disprove my wild tale of a ghoul’s treasure-room beneath it.

At least she has spared me from torture, and I must thank Her Imperial Majesty for that. Weymael has not been spared, however, and the Lord Collector of Tears has extracted from him a detailed confession that names me as mastermind of the conspiracy.

I was very deeply confused when I came here, and I had not yet learned that one must say nothing at all out of the ordinary, not even to those one loves. I asked Nyssa if my warning had been heeded, if Zephryn’s body had been exposed to sunlight for a full day; preferably in Hound Square, where the statue of an ancient goddess is said to have power over ghouls.

“Why would they want to do that, Brother?”

“Because,” I said slowly and with great forbearance, “that was not Zephryn Phrein. He was personated by Vomikron Noxis, King of Ghouls. Do you suppose I would have attacked a man—a wounded man—with such fury? It was a desperate struggle against a superhuman creature, and I used every means at my command. Didn’t they do as I asked?”

She averted her eyes. “No. He was sewn in a shroud and buried in the common pit reserved for criminals. Fandiel has assigned some Cluddites to watch the pit, so—”

“So he’ll have a hearty breakfast when he resumes his terrible form!” I laughed.

“Please, Brother, please! You should be setting your mind at ease, composing yourself for....”

“Death?” I kept laughing. I couldn’t seem to stop. “If they didn’t expose Vomikron’s body to the sun and the goddess, they won’t expose mine, either. So I’m not going to die, I’m going on a journey. I’m glad that dear Vomikron will be there to receive me. At last we’ll see who’s fit to be King of the Ghouls!”

I don’t know what I meant. I raved on in that style until she clapped her hands to her ears and screamed to be let out of the cell. Even when the guards were kicking and clubbing me, I found it hard to stop laughing.

I have since learned to keep my own counsel, and I have tried to resign myself to my fate, although the most bizarre thoughts and images will burst into my mind at odd moments and it is hard not to speak them or write them down.

I just noticed something funny about my hand. It’s not mine. No longer huge and veined and hairy.

No, I take that back, it
is
mine. It’s not old, that’s all, it’s not Porfat’s hand. It’s mine!

To Fillitrella, Empress of All Seelura and the Outer Islands, Scourge of the Thallasshoi, Torch to the Argyroi, Hammer of Gastayne and Beloved of the Fairies, from Fandiel, Prince of the House of Fand, Cmdr., Never-Vanquished, most humble Greetings:

The guards who permitted the regrettable escape of Dr. Porfat maintained that they rushed to his cell when they heard someone other than the doctor laughing. There they found a boy alone in the cell, they said, attempting to destroy the enclosed manuscript by eating it.

If I may direct Your Imperial Majesty’s attention to the most salient fact of this otherwise absurd narrative, it is that Dr. Porfat denies none of the charges brought against him. On the contrary, under the guise of irony intended to delude an “imbecile,” he says outright: “I was able to retrieve the necklace because I had stolen it. I burned down Gourdfoot’s tavern so no one could disprove my wild tale of a ghoul’s treasure-room beneath it.”

This, and the other memoir recovered by Feshard, the agent I inserted into the criminal’s home, do indeed comprise a wild tale, one that is a match for any of the wild tales concocted by that author from antiquity, whose name eludes me at the moment.

The purpose is of course to distract us from a conspiracy of real-life cutthroats, thieves and pornographers. By writing the memoirs and substituting a boy for himself, the doctor hoped to convince us that he was dead, murdered by a henchman of Weymael Vendren; that this boy was an untypical ghoul who normally retained a human form; that the ghoul had, after eating the doctor’s body, successfully personated him for several months; and that he miraculously reverted to his youthful form just in time to escape punishment for the doctor’s crimes.

Having observed Porfat during the time of the alleged “personation,” and having known him for years, I can confidently assert that this is nonsense, regardless of whatever my distraught wife, his sister, may say about it. My view is supported by Dr. Beliphrast, now our foremost ghoulologist, who has examined the boy and pronounced him normal in every respect.

The condemned necromancer, Weymael Vendren, attempted to delude us with similar lies, but recanted them under repeated interrogation and admitted that Porfat had concocted the plot in order to discourage pursuit. Needless to say he is being actively hunted, and an arrest may be expected soon.

Although only such tortures as are deemed suitable for children were employed, the boy confirmed that Weymael Vendren arranged to free Dr. Porfat and insinuate him into the cell with the help of the guards, who were summarily executed. The boy has been identified as Polliard Phuonsa, the necromancer’s missing “ward,” although he insists that he should be called by the noble name of Glypht or Vendren. Since he was apparently duped and bullied into his acts by the real criminals, he was provisionally released in the custody of his mother.

This mother, a common whore called Zara (although she also claims membership, as yet unverified, in the Tribe of Glypht) at first denied kinship with the boy. Only after a private interview with Polliard, from which she emerged notably pale and shaken, did she own up to her son. She identified his father as one Quodomass Phuonsa, deceased. Her knowledge of these events seems slight, and whatever value she might have had as a witness would have been vitiated by her marked peculiarities of speech and demeanor, to say nothing of her ill repute.

I regret to report that the mother and son are not available at this time for further questioning. They were followed after leaving the prison, but they eluded surveillance somewhere in the necropolis of Dreamers’ Hill. The agents who bungled the assignment, Dodont and Feshard, were summarily executed.

Although the escape of the doctor is unfortunate, it is to be hoped that the executions of Weymael Vendren and a score of peripheral malefactors have demonstrated to the Sons of Cludd that Your Imperial Majesty will not tolerate the activities of necromancers, pornographers, pedophiles, arsonists, cannibals, etc., etc.

I would respectfully submit once again that the way of containing Cluddite fanaticism is to direct it toward projects with the least potential for public inconvenience. To this end, I dispatched a contingent of them to guard the pit where Zephryn Phrein was buried. Please accept the following terse and rather curious report:

To Fandiel, called Prince: The ghoul emerged at midnight. Sore beset by the abomination, we were unable to slay it. I thank you for setting us in the path to the Everlasting Light of Cludd, which five of my men achieved. I remain yr. obdt. servt. for the glory of Cludd, Dolton Zogg, Rev. Lord Cmdr., Cludd’s Whirlwind.

I doubt that the ghoul they encountered had anything to do with Zephryn Phrein, but this is purely my opinion, since it proved impossible, owing to the normal process of dissolution and the activities of scavengers, to find and identify his body.

Wake, Worm!
A mighty hero is coming
To try his strength against yours.
—Richard Wagner:
Siegfried

Penetrating the depths of the Municipal Palace in Crotalorn is not easy. Those who descend from the lobby must stop at the gate of the detention center, where guards will either redirect or welcome them. Only by slipping through an unmarked door at the rear of the tax office can one bypass the dungeons and enter the equally gloomy warren of the maintenance department.

At this point it seems unlikely that a misdirected visitor could go deeper without meeting a malingering sweep or sulking carpenter, since I must grumble through a clutter of them on my way to work each day. It seems even less likely that one of these civil servants would miss a chance to magnify himself by chasing a stray back into the clutches of the clerks who lord it over the upper floors.

Why anyone who escapes their notice would persevere in opening unmarked doors, daring treacherous steps and blundering through lightless corridors until he at last stumbles into the archives of the Inspector of Moats and Trenches is a puzzle to me, but they keep doing it, interrupting my work with questions so inapt that I sometimes wonder if the world above me has not gone mad.

“I have come to inquire,” said a woman who intruded on me a few months ago, after she had made her excuses for misting me with sneezes provoked by tripping over a pile of ancient scrolls and clouding the room with dust, “if, contrary to law and common decency, human sacrifice is still practiced in Sythiphore.”

I don’t know what they do in Sythiphore, and I don’t care, but I said: “Unfortunately, you are not qualified. Virginity is not essential, but a memory of that state, however dimmed by the passage of time and the reception of multitudes, is. Nor are beauty and intelligence necessary, but one must at least approximate the lowest degrees consonant with being human. No, dear lady, they would spurn you in Sythiphore. I suggest that you go home and hang yourself, offering up this sacrifice to whatever God might be persuaded to accept it.”

“You dog!” she cried, and she added, as if it were both a mortal insult and a clever discovery, even though my black garments and the heraldic tigers of my badges and tattoos clearly announce it, “You are a
Vendren.
What name do you go by, that I may report you to my dear friend, Lord Vendrard?”

“Six Lord Vendrards grace the ruling council of my Tribe,” I said, “but none of them is influential or even sane. I, however, am the only Vendren who bears the name Asteriel.”

“Murderer! You murdered your dear wife ...
twice!
Help!” Raising further billows of dust and mold, she screamed her way out of the archives and into the dank maze. For some time after this, her cries of “Help!” and “Murder!,” swelling or fading, announced the contorted path of her underground adventures. At long last I heard no more. She had either found her way out or broken her neck. I resumed my writing.

As interruptions to my work go, it was a very long one, but not without diversion.

Yes, I am Asteriel Vendren, but I never had a wife. If I’d had one, I probably would not have killed her for taking lovers, for I am a gentle and forgiving man. It is even less probable that I could have raised her from the dead with nostalgic coition, or that I would have killed her a second time when she took up her old ways in her new life. Yet that stupid woman had believed it all.

Neither did I, as a youth, toss a cloth soiled by solitary pleasure into a pit behind a slaughterhouse, ignorant that the body of a murdered woman lay buried in the animal refuse; nor did my seed impregnate the morass of corruption to produce a monstrous son who haunts me in hope of a father’s blessing. Other unwelcome guests have fled my office in the mortal fear that this son hulks in the shadows.

The fault is not mine. It lies with those too literal-minded to grasp that I have breathed new life into the popular tale by making it the storyteller’s own.

Some day the world will catch up with my genius. In the meantime I must be screamed at by fools, and all because idle pranksters, whenever demented strays ask them for directions, send them straight to me. They resent my being paid as Inspector of Moats and Trenches, when the moats have been dry these two centuries, and the trenches are overgrown lanes.

They deny it, of course. One doesn’t play jokes on a Vendren, even on a mild one who spends his time writing stories in a cellar; and I’m sure that those morons upstairs believe that I, if I knew who was responsible, would set my son on them.

In spite of the tales I write and the name I bear, I thought I was the most ordinary and harmless fellow you would ever want to meet, apart from two embarrassing defects. One, whose symptoms I had described to physicians, seemed to be a variant of Frothard’s Debility: a disruption of consciousness, characterized in other sufferers by flailing of the limbs and foaming at the mouth.

Victims often know when an attack is imminent. They speak of flashing lights, anomalies of smell or hearing, a drastic narrowing of vision. Many accounts show similarities, but no attack I ever heard of was exactly like mine. My first hint would be a vile smell, not unlike a freshly opened grave, not unlike the approach of that son of mine. (Yes, I draw on personal experiences, artfully rearranged, for all my tales. That one is a record of my illness, masked in fable.) I would notice a pattern of glistening cobwebs on the ground, in the air, or even on my person.

Oddly, my ability to see the strands was determined by the intensity and direction of light when the attack came on. This curiosity puzzled physicians, and some of them, their opinion reinforced by their misunderstanding of my work, tacitly concluded that I was mad. The cobwebs were a product of my mind, they told me, and I should be able to see them in pitch darkness, but I did not. Light should not affect their visibility, but it did.

I was not totally honest with the doctors, but I must be in this memoir, or it will be worthless. I never revealed that I sometimes saw the strands when no attack threatened. They were visible if the light was strong enough and angled correctly, but so tenuously, so translucently, that I often convinced myself I imagined them. Rather than look closely, I would seek a shadier place. My office, with its thick shadows and real cobwebs, let me ignore them completely.