The Throne of Bones (44 page)

“Are you insane? The Canal of Swimming Shadows?”

“Go, it’s your only—”

“What are you doing?” The captain loomed over them.

“Comforting the prisoner.”

“Comfort her inside. We have things under control,” he said and gestured at Plistard’s disconnected wreckage with his dripping sword. But he held Zago’s sleeve before he could obey. “Listen: if you see the Archimage, don’t mention his visit to our First Lord’s coronation.”

“Why should I?”

“Good fellow.”

Drawing Glittitia with him, he pounded at the gate as he had done before. It opened as it had done before.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You did what you could.”

“You don’t know.”

As he had never done before, he passed through the gate. The garden was alarmingly tranquil. Among susurrant fountains and murmurous bees, the palace napped like a friendly brown beast. The only person in sight was a gardener with the face of an alert monkey under his wide hat.

“Welcome,” he said. “We don’t get many adult guests.”

Zago felt Glittitia nudge him, but he didn’t know why. He said, “We’ve come to see the Archimage.”

“Ah. Well. He doesn’t see many people, you know.”

“We come from Lord Vendriel the Good, First Lord of the Frothoin, King of Sythiphore and the Outer Islands, Sword to the Gastayne, Scourge of the Thallashoi, Hammer to Morbia, Beloved of Sleithreethra, and Tiger of the House of Vendren,” Zago recited as he had been intensively coached.

“That may impress him. Come along and let’s see.”

When the gardener had gone ahead, Zago whispered: “Why do you keep poking me?”

“It’s
him,
don’t you see? Pretending to be a servant. Wizards are always doing that. Haven’t you read Porpolard Phurn?”

“I don’t read,” Zago said, “but I think he’s only the gardener.” He heard himself mutter, “I’ve never seen anyone so brave as you.”

“Perhaps I should scream and weep, but I feel numb. Let’s get it over with.”

He held her and kissed her in his unskilled way. Then she wept.

The room they entered was vast, but its only other attribute that Zago immediately grasped was stupefying heat. The day was warm, yet a fire blazed in a hearth at the end of the closed and thickly draped room. Still the only soul in sight, the gardener pattered across a black plain of mirror-polished marble until his figure markedly shrank.

Zago crept forward, and Glittitia hung on his arm, preferring the comfort of his presence to the shadows behind them. He felt her gaze on him, though he preferred not to look and verify the feeling. No one had expected hope or help or anything else from him in a very long time, and he hated it.

He had almost accepted her silly notion about the gardener when an angular arrangement of drapery beside the hearth shifted to disclose a face. Glittitia shrieked. Zago might have, too, but a spasm locked his lungs.

Too far off to hear, the servant spoke while the face listened, or perhaps not. It was immobile as a mask of dark wood, and just as inhumanly dry, although the gardener gleamed with sweat from his few moments in the stifling heat. Zago was uncertain whether the Archimage sat in a chair whose covering echoed the muddy tones of his vestments, or if there were no chair, and he stood or squatted in robes that concealed a body of unlikely shape. This remained a puzzle even when they had edged close to the intolerable hearth.

“Zago,” the Archimage whispered. “The children often speak of you.”

The childcatcher tried to disregard this remark as he recited the rigamarole he had memorized about reviving old customs and making new friends. At least he believed he delivered the message, but when he had done speaking, he couldn’t recall what he had just said. It was impossible to think of anything but the browless, lidless, lipless mask that confronted him. While staring into the yellow eyes, he was struck by the queasy fancy that the Archimage was neither sitting, standing nor squatting at all, but had arrayed himself in restless coils. The patterned vestments were perhaps nothing more than his unnatural skin.

“Yes, Vendriel the Good, I know of him. I should have liked to attend his coronation, but the men apparently sent to invite me conferred outside my gate for a while and left without knocking. They stole my cat.” The Archimage brooded on this for a moment, but Zago couldn’t say if he was angry or merely perplexed. “He found his way home, though, none the worse for his adventure.”

Glittitia was surprised that she could laugh, if only bitterly, at Vendriel’s blunder. She regretted the laugh when the mask swiveled in her direction and the voice said, “This is the subject you wish ... treated?”

“No, I don’t wish it,” Zago said. “I spoke the First Lord’s words. If I spoke my own, I would beg you—”

“You’re uncommonly dusty, young man,” the Archimage interrupted.

A heavy hand snaked out of the confusing folds to buffet Zago’s cloak. He had placed little trust in Vendriel’s protective spell, but it dismayed him that it should be sniffed out and disposed of so quickly. He now felt more naked than in the presence of the First Lord. His shoulders shivered and crawled long after the touch had been withdrawn.

“What is it you would beg of me, childcatcher?” Before he could answer this, the wizard gestured with distaste at the dust now defacing his immaculate floor and told his servant, “Fetch a broom. Now, you wish...?”

“That you not eat her soul.”

“Her soul?” The angular face was thrust unbearably close. Neither Zago nor Glittitia could say who was now holding the other upright. “She may still have one. What about you, Ghost Rat?”

Those words tore a hard rind from Zago’s heart, and the pain of his boyhood treachery stabbed him as cruelly as it had on the night when he lay hiding outside the derelict palace of the Ghost Rats, grinding his fists into his ears to exclude the screams of children and thumps of clubs.

The pain almost at once gave way to an indescribable glow of pleasure. He didn’t see the faces of his lost brothers and sisters, nor hear their laughter, nor feel their comforting touch; but a forgotten warmth swelled inside him, the emotion he had known when he was with them. The souls of the Ghost Rats frolicked in this empty room, forgiving him and welcoming him. Impossibly and at long last, he felt he had come home.

The feeling faded, leaving a hollow that not even terror of the Archimage could fill. He had thought it unlikely that he ever would, but he wept for the friends whose souls he had traded for his own. He was on the verge of pleading, “Make me one of them,” but the Archimage forestalled him with the banal remark, “Ah, here’s the broom,” and the childcatcher found the strength to hold his tongue.

“Take it!”
Glittitia whispered. “Do whatever he wants.”

He saw that the servant was offering him the broom to clean up the dust lately buffeted from his cloak. It seemed a strange offer to make a guest, but the ways of the mighty, let alone mighty wizards, were a mystery to him.

“Into the fire, would you?” the Archimage said.

The task was improbably difficult. At first the dust clung to the floor with a will of its own. When he plied the broom with new briskness, it was not at all like sweeping dust, it was more like tumbling a cumbersome bundle before the broom, an object that wriggled to evade him and thrashed back vigorously. It might have been an invisible, angry man, crippled or otherwise constrained, that he shoved ahead of him. The dust fought back even more violently when he reached the hearth, and he had to wield the broom like a club.

The fire blossomed out to singe his beard when the dust hit it, then screamed upward through the chimney in a twisting column.

“I hadn’t known what a filthy hole the Vendren Palace was,” the Archimage observed. “If I were you, I’d fly from it as far as I could. It would be wise to start now.”

Neither paused to question this or make their farewells. Zago reached the door first, but concern for his companion prompted him to leave it open as he sprinted through the garden.

When she found him cowering outside the east gate, Glittitia asked, “What happened to you in there? What did you see?”

“He doesn’t eat their souls. He keeps them safe from the world,” Zago said. “I almost asked him to take mine.”

“It’s a little late for yours, don’t you think?”

“That’s what stopped me.”

After five decades of obscurity, Quisquillian Fesh looked back almost with nostalgia to his one moment in the blaze of universal scorn. Younger stargazers neglected to laugh when he introduced himself; laymen no longer said of a drunkard on a spree that he was “observing Quisquillian’s Comet;” and no one even bothered to mock him anymore when he predicted, as he sometimes did, its imminent return.

He realized that his earlier predictions had deserved mockery when he at last produced an irrefragable calculation based on the numerological value of his name. This time he locked the figures away. When scientists swarmed to his door crying that they had seen his comet and lamenting what fools they had been, he would say, “I know,” and produce the sealed prediction.

He stayed late in bed with earplugs and a sleeping-mask on the designated day, intending to be at his best for the midnight return of the unique star-traveler. This apparently caused him to miss a fire or massacre or other popular diversion, for when he emerged in the evening, the street outside his house pullulated with quidnuncs.

He tottered to accost a stranger, who babbled that the end of the world was at hand, for a manlike head with a fiery train had been seen to arc steeply through the sky at noonday. Some said it had fallen with a hissing column of steam into the Canal of Swimming Shadows, which was a pity, since nothing that fell into that canal was ever retrieved.

“That was mine!” the stargazer cackled. “That was Quisquillian’s Comet! I predicted it! Come and see my calculations! They may be off by twelve hours, but—”

“Let me go, old man! You’re crazy!” the stranger said, as did everyone else.

Whatever the prodigy had been, it was soon forgotten in a frenzy of speculation over the First Lord’s absence from public functions.

Gossip only intensified with the reappearance a few days later of a much-diminished Vendriel the Good. Above a body that seemed thin to the point of incorporeality, only his pallid features moved, and only with the most apparently painful difficulty. His flowing white hair and beard were clearly false. Fanciful observers said that nothing remained of the necromancer but a head propped on a stick-figure in his black clothes.

During his long convalescence, he dictated a list of those he wished beheaded. It filled a scroll the length of a dwelth-field, and included all childcatchers, Sythiphorans, Death’s Darlings and orange cats. Gnepox boasted of impressive progress on the cats before his mysterious disappearance.

As soon as Gnepox dropped from sight, Vendriel recovered more than fully. His pasty look had always brought dough to mind, and now his body filled out overnight like dough left to rise. He was seen to leap about like a man only one-third his age, though in much the clumsy style of his missing headsman.

Zago learned how tiresome it is to live with a person one has betrayed, even if the victim never knows. And Glittitia, begging scraps from strangers and suffering ecstasies from an oaf, watched herself turn sour and shrewish.

They made their way to Sythiphore, among whose ivory-skinned and black-haired mobs she easily gave him the slip. He struck up a friendship with a young pit-fighter whose general cast of features reminded him of Glittitia, and before long he forgot most of what she had taught him about women.

Young persons usually sleep soundly, but none slept with the fierce determination of Elyssa Fand. Calling her or shaking her were useless. She had to be tumbled about like a baker’s dough, propped on her feet and shouted at. Even after she had grumbled that, yes, she was indeed awake, even after she had correctly given her name and named the day of the week, she had to be watched, or she would subside to the bed and to an even deeper slumber.

“That storm was enough to wake the dead!” her mother had cried, hastily making a sign to prevent some malicious god from taking her literally, one morning when Elyssa had peered out the window and asked why the ancient oak lay across the well, its roots clawing empty air.

Her mother had gone on to describe the continuous raging of thunder, lightning that turned night to noon, the sky that became a sea and broke over the house in waves. Elyssa was delighted. She hardly ever dreamed, and this troubled her, but her mother’s words stirred a dim memory of dreaming about a man walking on the roof in heavy boots.

She had slept through the noise of that terrible night last spring, but the odor that assailed her now dragged her from a sleep even more profound. More than a simple stench, it was an atmosphere compounded of every foulness she could name, and of some that were nameless. Not just her nose was offended: it burned her eyes, soured her stomach and clogged her lungs. Each breath was a struggle, as if she sucked the air through folds of moldy wool.

As she wiped her stinging eyes, a fearful suspicion gripped her. It was winter, she recalled, but no coals glowed in the grate. Even on the darkest nights, she could dimly discern the rectangles of her bedroom windows. Darkness now was total.

“I’m blind!” she screamed. “I’ve gone blind!”

Although her screams sounded more like rasping croaks in a voice untuned by sleep, they were loud enough to have brought a slave running, perhaps even to have woken her mother. No one stirred. She thought of screaming again, but her first effort had drained her lungs of the foul air, and the noise of her breath was almost as unpleasant as the labor it cost to catch it. Equally disturbing was the absence of other sounds: no cries from the streets, no distant barking, only the ragged rustle of her own, unfamiliar breathing. She was almost never ill. She believed she was now very ill indeed.