The Throne of Bones (48 page)

He interrupted his hacking to heave a rotten leg over the fence, and the foot he had dropped separately. He hoped to quiet the dogs, but they fought even more noisily over the unexpected treats, and Elyssa shrieked with fury to see her parts so used. He himself howled as a bony hand gripped his ankle like taut wires and kept gripping even after he had severed the arm at the shoulder. He managed to wrench it loose, taking some of his skin with it, and hurled it into the kennel.

“Let’s see you rise from the bellies of hounds, you whore from hell! Let’s see you reconstitute yourself from dogshit!” he raved, but the horror that she just might do it silenced him.

The worst of it came when she began to plead, when she made promises and attempted wiles that would have aroused a statue when she lived. She was not fully convinced that she had become an abomination, and his loathing was mingled with pity. He strove to finish her as quickly as possible, striking with one hand and throwing with the other.

The head was last, and it gave him the most trouble, rolling this way and that to elude him as it mouthed airless curses. It bumped at last into a shadowed gutter. He believed that Liron Wolfbaiter, scourge of ghouls, would have thought twice about sticking his hand in after it, but he told himself that the secret was not to think at all, and he thrust his hand into the blackness with an oath that sounded more like a whimper to his ears. He gripped spongy flesh and flung her head to the dogs in the same motion, but not before it had left a perfect white tooth embedded in his thumb.

Crondard woke to a slimy kiss. The black face of a demon stared into his eyes and gagged him with its foul breath.

“You there, you Sleith person!” He was barely aware of the imperious voice, for a second black bulk had risen on his other side, at the edge of his vision. They surrounded his ... bed? The rim he gripped was made of stone, and he thought that he had died and been laid out, however improbably, in an elegant sarcophagus, for he had dreamed of someone who had been buried alive. Then he realized that Elyssa Fand had been no dream. The undraped sun dazzled him, and his teeth chattered with cold, for the stone box was filled with water.

“Get that fool out of there. What does he think he’s doing? Is he deaf? Are you deaf, fellow? Is that how you sleep in the Fomorian Guards?”

The demon kissed him again. The second one barked, freeing him from his fanciful terror but gripping him in a real one as two more of the ugliest dogs he had ever seen raised their demonic faces on bull necks to view him. He had never seen Zaxoin boarhounds this close, nor had he wished to.

“Don’t be afraid of him, you silly person, get him out of there! I’ve never before seen you shy from a naked man.”

The laughter suggested that he had a audience of five or six men, but only the haughty voice had spoken. It had never stopped. Crondard was unwilling to move even his eyes, but when the second hound licked his neck he was startled upright to face a youth who jumped back in even greater terror, though he did it gracefully.

“Please, sir, his horse-ship would like you to get out of the lords’ trough,” the youth quavered.

“Cludd!” the Fomor cried as blood began to flow through his numb body like acid.

“Very appropriate, but even the Sons of Cludd don’t sleep in freezing water, only on stone floors, or so the dear little bigots would have us believe,” the speaker prattled on. “Are you in training to join them, to show them what a really crazy fanatic can do? They don’t take men with tattoos, and they might burn you at the stake for that Sleith horror.”

Crondard remembered his last waking thought, to wash away the filth of his strange battle. Exhausted, he must have fallen asleep in the trough.

“I was ... drunk,” he managed to gasp as he dared to hoist himself out. He inadvertently splashed the dogs, who took this for a game, leaping away to shake themselves and then bouncing back to roar in his face before slobbering on him with passionate affection. Shivering with cold, he tried to fend them off as forcefully as he could without provoking the notorious anger of the breed; but they grew so exuberant, seizing his arms and legs and worrying them, that their anger could not have been much worse than their play.

“Look at that, would you!” The heraldic symbols on his hunting outfit identified the willowy master of these dogs and men as Lord Nephreiniel. “They would have torn most strangers apart by now. ‘If your dogs love a man, clasp him to your bosom,’ that was the only rational advice my father ever gave me, and I’ve followed it.”

“Would you call them off, please, lord. I don’t want to stand out here—”

“Oh, of course! Forgive me, their behavior quite bemused me.” He flicked his hand, and the disappointed hounds were pulled away. Crondard hid his annoyance when he saw that they had been held on leads all this while, and that the handlers could have recalled them at any time. He returned to the trough to sluice the drool from his limbs.

“Do you hunt?” Nephreiniel asked.

At that moment a chambermaid passed them bearing a bucket to the dungheap beyond the stables, and she slyly inspected the naked Fomor. Favoring her with a wink he would not usually have given a woman so broad or plain, he replied, “Avidly.”

“I believe you’re making a joke, aren’t you? How marvelous! Dogs love him, and he’s droll, too. What is your name?”

His tattoos could be easily deciphered, but military life had taught him to stick with a story once chosen. He said, “I am known here as Liron Wolfbaiter.”

“And so you shall be known to us, if that is your whim. Give him your cloak, Olycinth, before someone misreads his tattoos and calls him Crondard Sleith, or mistakes him for the senior sergeant of Company ‘Ironhand’. Will you hunt with us today, Wolfbaiter?”

“My horse is not suited to the sport,” he said as he draped himself with limited gratitude in a pink cloak, embroidered in a primrose pattern that was nothing less than exquisite.

“The gray drayhorse in the far stall?” When he had stopped laughing, Nephreiniel said, “You really do have a sense of humor! Don’t worry, we’ll lend you a hunter.”

Crondard prayed that a brain addled with Fandragoran wine had transmuted a scuffle with an ordinary whore, but the condition of his room turned the prayers on his lips to bile. When he had regained control of his stomach, he forced himself to wad up Elyssa Fand’s clothes with the bedding smeared by her decay. He heaved the bundle over the rail and hurried to dress.

Fortune had smiled on him, he reflected, in her quirky way. Lord Nephreiniel had been pleased to befriend him, and he saw no chance of ingratiating himself with any other Zaxoin noblemen who might give him employment as a bodyguard, huntsman, or even a dog-handler. Leriel Vendren might be First Lord of all the Frothoin, but it would take him a hundred years of litigation to retrieve a fugitive protected by a lesser lord.

He used a stick to thrust the bundle into the dungheap, catching himself at the last minute from doing the same with Olycinth’s perfumed cloak. The lord’s party was mounting, with much horn-blowing, spear-clattering and shrill boasts of feats to come, while recent sleepers bawled for quiet from a dozen windows. The hounds escalated the din when Crondard approached and they hailed him as their dearest friend, too long absent.

“I simply don’t understand it,” Nephreiniel said. “Have these horrid beasts been bewitched to lapdogs?”

“As your lordship’s father knew, dogs trust a true and honest man,” Crondard said with his most engaging grin, but he had no illusions about the motives of the hounds: they hoped he would feed them another corpse.

Hogman’s Plain had been named by some fool viewing it from the comfort of a tower in the city, where the abrupt ridges and gulleys might seem only ripples in a blanket of witchgrit and monk’s-rut. These weeds, Crondard’s new friends assured him, flaunted a spectacular display of blossoms for one week in spring, but now in autumn they flourished only thorns like daggers and burrs like spiked flails in their tangles. Lacking the horsemanship of the others, he had reason to be glad of the armor he wore; but more reason for cursing the heavy cage of leather and bronze under a sun that disdained the calendar.

The dust he saw so much of, wallowing along at the tail of the party, mixed with his sweat and baked him in a red crust that made him look like a cannibal from the Outer Islands, as his cool and spotless companions never tired of observing whenever they let him catch up. Among the occupations he had thought of seeking with Lord Nephreiniel, he had not considered clown, but he believed he was proving himself qualified.

So far they had seen none of the wild hogs that grew more monstrous and fierce with each anecdote the huntsmen traded, but now the hounds they followed raised the pitch and intensity of their din. Horns brayed, spears flourished, and the dust in his face darkened as the pace quickened to a suicidal gallop. Sour a view though he had taken of this enterprise, he could not keep his heart from racing, nor did he restrain his equally excited mount from dashing headlong into the billowing cloud that whooped and thundered under a jittering glitter of spearheads. Disjointed lines and images from the Fomor epic,
The Hunting of the White Hart,
rang and racketed through a head emptied of both fear and thought.

A black shape plunged into the brush to his left, and he swerved to follow it as the others held their course. His mount hurtled down an almost vertical path, but he guided it with his heels as he juggled his spear into position with both hands: a feat he performed with less premeditation than if he were tossing back a drink, but one that would bathe him in cold sweat whenever he recalled it. His heart rose to his throat in the precipitous dive as he set himself to cast the spear at the bolting black mass. It seemed impossible that all the hounds and men could have failed to notice that the boar had cut away from them, but it had happened, and he would redeem his inept antics by having sole honor of the kill.

The spear was not his weapon, the back of a horse was not his home, but his arm was strong from years of sport and drill, and he made a mighty cast: the spear flew straight. Fortunately the dog, as he recognized his target to be an instant too late, swerved before the spear struck the spot where it would have been. He wrenched his mount to a halt, but the horse was much quicker to obey than Thunderer. It stopped short, and he flew over its head into a wall of witchgrit.

The horse hurried on its own way. The dog came back to fret over him, even though he cursed it by all the Gods of the Frothoin and the Fomors as he tried to free an arm from an interdependent puzzle of thorny vines. Only when he had done that could he begin to work on the even more complex trap that bound his hair and beard. The dog tried to encourage him by slobbering on his neck and whimpering. Crondard redoubled his efforts, ignoring torn flesh and uprooted hair as he looked forward to the moment when he would have the pleasure of skewering the animal on his boar-spear.

His anger had faded by the time he was free. The hound had probably abandoned the hunt to follow the scent of a wild bitch, and he could see himself doing the same. Remembering the boarhounds’ perverse notion of play, he dealt this one a cuff that would have knocked some men flat. The dog bounced back with an inspired impersonation of demoniacal fury. Soon they were wrestling in the dust like old friends, more or less evenly matched. The Fomor conceded defeat when he found his throat enclosed gently but very firmly in a rumbling muzzle.

They sat companionably for a while, panting and listening to the racket of chirps and rattles and whirrs in the lively wasteland. The clatter and hooting of the hunt sounded like a remote war among tinsmiths. The dog snacked on bugs, his teeth snapping smartly. Crondard caught him a few in a hand once quick as lightning, but he had to admit the dog was better at the game. He was too old for it.

He confronted the hard fact that he had mistaken the dog for a boar because his sight had grown dim, and what use had Nephreiniel for a huntsman who speared his hounds, a bodyguard who slew his catamites, a courtier who doffed his cap with a grand flourish to statues? He lay now at the foot of a tall slope; he could discern individual vines, thorns, and flitting birds in the foreground, but then they washed into a brown and purple cloud. In the cruel blue sky at the top, sooty little creatures drifted slowly, more than he had ever noticed before. A follower of Sleithreethra would say those were the malign entities that constantly besiege us, but a physician had told him they were imperfections normal to aging eyes.

He rose, rebuked by his creaking knees and by the frisking of the young dog. It made no difference whether he trudged after the hunt or waited for it, but he might find distraction from his thoughts if he kept moving. He resolutely refused to lean on his spear as he picked his way up the brambly hill.

His ears were still good enough, and he was pleased to hear the hunt approaching. He might not have so long a walk. His pleasure wilted as he noted how rapidly it came. It flew at him like a whirlwind, just over the ridge, a pack of savage hounds, a dozen huge horses ridden by reckless men, and all of that unswerving tonnage hurtling behind a boar with tusks like scythes. The stupid dog beside him agitated the stump of its tail with glee.

He might climb a tree, ludicrous a figure as he would cut when they saw him, but the nearest tree lay a hundred yards away through thick underbrush. He might take cover behind a particularly thick clump of brush, and there was one near at hand, but the men might ride straight through it, nor would it stop their quarry. He could stand in plain sight, waving and shouting, but the boar might see him as a target. So might one of the men.

While he dithered over his choices in a way that Akilleus Bloodglutter of the old ballads never would have, the target of the storming horde topped the ridge, and its appearance stunned him: it was a naked boy, fleeing in terror and in the last stumbling gasp of exhaustion. The hound charged him with an exuberant roar.

“Hold!” Crondard thundered. To his surprise, the dog stopped short and stared back in disbelief. The boy altered his course and ran toward them.