The Throne of Bones (7 page)

I had seen plenty of rats and dogs on my expeditions, and I carried a stout stick for protection against them on my tours of the necropolis, but I longed to see ghouls. I took to haunting the most desolate and ominous sections, even sneaking out at night to do so, without finding a trace of one—with the possible exception of a broken tusk that, according to one of the scientists at the Institute to whom I excitedly brought it, came from a wild boar. He was not impressed by my argument that some few people had claimed to see ghouls, but no one had ever claimed to see a wild boar within the city limits of Crotalorn.

“You want to talk to Dr. Porfat,” he said with a dismissive contempt that convinced me Porfat probably knew more about it than he did, but I was never able to find that scholar in his office.

Necropolis,
city of the dead, is not too fancy a word for Dreamers’ Hill. Thousands upon thousands have been buried there, and its upper slopes are very like a city. Elaborately rendered in miniature, palaces and temples line streets that would take days to explore and years to appreciate.

Even if those buildings were not cubicles for moldering corpses, if they carried no morbid associations whatever, but had been erected through artistic whim, their effect would be disquieting. The place is like a bad dream, in that it is so like real life but so arbitrarily different. Space has been compressed, the distance we expect between one house and another is missing, for the dead have no need to take the sun in their gardens, they have no use for privies or stables or servants’ quarters or any of the other clutter that surrounds a home.

At night, when I took to wandering those streets, there were no idle strollers, either, and few human sounds but my own footsteps among the still little buildings. I heard strange noises that I ascribed to night birds, to contentious cats or curiously articulate dogs, and some that I could ascribe to nothing on earth, but what frightened me more than any sound was the unnatural scale of the houses and the insane perspective of every vista. Surrounded by so much unreality, how could I believe in a real world to which I might return?

Under the circumstances it was ironic that I should sometimes have been jerked back from the brink of panic by the tramping of the watchmen and their raucous bawling of tasteless songs:

Got a bone for a head, got a bone for a dick,
Got worms in my bed, and I’m feeling damned sick,
I’m dead.

Under the circumstances,
I say, because I had become one of those for whom the watchmen watched; or, more accurately, whom they tried to scare off with their noise. My passion for collecting had expanded to include desiccated corpses in their entirety, those which struck my fancy either through freakishness, through some dim hint of former beauty, or through mad contortions suggesting the horror of untimely entombment. Now that my collection numbered more than five hundred specimens, I was very particular in my selection; and if I found no human relic worth taking, I would justify my time and trouble by gathering up a necklace or a few rings. By the age of eighteen, I, Lord Glyphtard, had become a grave-robber.

Mother encouraged me, but it would be unfair to say that she meant to. She had once been beautiful, or so she often told me, the child of her middle years, and she was still absurdly vain. She gadded about in outfits that would have been thought frivolous or immodest on a woman thirty years younger. She was childishly fond of jewelry, and her delight in any cheap trinket I gave her could transfigure her for a day. Since giving her such gifts seemed to be the only way I could please her, I regretted that I could do it so seldom.

So my first harvests of the tombs went to Mother: gold rings, a ruby brooch, a silver necklace, all in a heavy, antique style that appealed equally to her love of glitter and her sense of whimsy. I would tell her I’d found them, and although she never questioned this, the explanation sounded increasingly thin to my own ears. I began selling gold plates and silver statuettes to sly shops near Ashclamith Square, where no questions were asked. There I would pick up anklets and amulets of porphyry and chrysoprase for Mother, telling her I had won bets on dwelth matches.

I never needed a better lie, not even when I had the roof fixed and the chimneys swept, or bought a fine horse and some pretty slaves, for she knew that I played dwelth with people who wagered enormous sums. She had fretted over my playing, fearing broken bones and even death, but I had sung back her favorite song to her, the one about “doing something healthier than moping in the graveyard and playing with skulls,” and what could be healthier than dashing around a field all day in the open air, kicking other young noblemen and bashing them with a club?

We believe whatever suits us, and it suited her to believe in my unlikely luck in order to pursue one of her obsessions with a clear conscience. Even more than the house we lived in, she wanted to prettify her father’s tomb. It was one of the mansions on the upper slopes, weirder to me than most of them because it was an exact miniature of the Institute I saw every day from our windows. My grandparents were the only occupants, earlier ancestors having been buried in a crypt beneath the real palace, and it more than met their needs, but Mother had always lamented that it held none of the luxuries that the fashionable corpse requires. Hardly a week passed that she didn’t ask for a staggering sum to buy the sort of gold toothpicks or toenail-clippers that I was busily stealing from other people’s tombs. It would have been more economical to take her shopping-list with me to the cemetery, but such mean calculation would have made me feel like a thief, and I lacked the honesty to admit to myself that I was one. I preferred giving her the money and posing as a sporting genius.

I was curious how she was spending my money, so one night I entered the miniature Institute. I no longer needed a crowbar. I had taken a few sample locks home for a scientific study of their mechanisms, and now I could open almost any door without a key. I shut this one firmly behind me: of a piece with other nonsense about the afterlife, it was meant to open from the inside.

Entering the miniature palace and lighting a lamp, I found not a tiny lobby dominated by a figurine of my great grandfather, as some warped edge of my mind expected, but a parlor of cozy but normal proportions. Only the marble panels in the wall where windows might have been suggested that I was not intruding on a richly furnished home. In anyone else’s tomb I would have rejoiced in the dyed garments out of Lesdom, the ivory elbow-scrapers inlaid with lapis lazuli, but here I could only grumble at the extravagance. My grandparents watched me disapprovingly, two of those realistic funeral busts that follow you everywhere with their eyes of polished gemstone. Grandfather, with his thrusting chin and craggy brow, looked even odder than his own father in the statue at the Institute, but I had to admit that I shared his vaguely canine cast of features.

I looked handsome, however, in the portrait that Mother had put up for the edification of the stone heads: rather like a poet of the gloomy and self-indulgent sort with my pale skin, long black hair and the somber clothing I favored. Mother looked downright beautiful, and at least forty years younger; she might have been my little sister. The dual portrait had obviously been painted from earlier pictures; but with sardonic anachronism, she wore one of the antique necklaces I had stolen from a neighboring tomb. For all eternity, or until the painting rotted, my grandparents would be forced to gaze on evidence of my misconduct.

I was chuckling over this when I hoisted the panel that concealed Grandfather’s sarcophagus and rolled out the shelf that held it. Corpses that had met with violent ends intrigued me, and none more than his, a victim of the massacre in my own home. It wasn’t my intention to steal his skull, merely to have a look at it. Perhaps I meant to compare it with my own, to see if I was less handsome than I hoped.

When I had at last succeeded in pushing the ponderous lid aside, I stared for a minute into the black void, then went and got the lamp to confirm what I knew. I still couldn’t believe my eyes, and I reached inside for some evidence that the coffin wasn’t completely empty, but I found none. He was gone.

I’m sure this tomb had never heard such laughter, and I was grateful the walls were thick and solid, for I couldn’t restrain it. My laughter was often inappropriate by others’ lights, and now it had nothing to do with mirth. Another would have wept or roared with fury, but this was my only available response to the ironic perfection of the outrage. If I could have put my hands on him at that moment, I’m sure I would have kept laughing while I tore the malefactor limb from limb.

Poor, silly Mother, from reverence for her beloved parents, and perhaps from uneasiness at the good progress she herself was making toward the afterlife, had spent a few days out of every week making this little home comfortable for a tenant who was long gone and would never return. She didn’t know, certainly; she would never have committed the sacrilege of having the stone lid removed for a peek at the old corpse.

I knew whom to blame: henchmen of the hated Anatomical Institute, as a way of spitting on our family. Her father’s bones now decorated a classroom, if they hadn’t been jumbled into a bin or thrown out with the garbage. Perhaps the learned men still got a snigger out of their secret insult when Mother came to complain about the noises, sights and smells their students inflicted on us.

I put back the empty coffin with more reverence than I’d taken it out and opened the panel that held Grandmother. Here I made a stranger discovery. The lid appeared to have been undisturbed, it fit seamlessly; the sarcophagus had been carved from a single block of stone without fissures: yet Grandmother’s incomplete skeleton was disordered, the remaining bones had been gnawed and broken. No matter how badly her killer had used her, her remains wouldn’t have been dumped into the coffin any old way. Rats may be smart, but they don’t take the lid off a sarcophagus, eat the corpse, and replace the lid.

After resealing Grandmother’s remains, I collapsed into a sandalwood chair and stared at the busts. Were the people of the previous age more stern and righteous than we are, or did their artists merely make them look that way? This pair would never have laughed at the atrocity. They wouldn’t have found my own activities amusing, either. Grandfather looked like the sort of dutiful tyrant who would have held me down, however regretfully, while the executioner performed his long task.

My eyes kept straying to the panels behind which Mother and I would lie. I had always been impatient with superstition. If I ever met a god I would apologize for disbelieving in him, but not until then. For all I cared some use could be made of tainted meat by feeding me to the dogs when I died.

Or so I had always believed that I believed. However irrationally, I shuddered to think that some larval physician would one day rummage through my corpse and try to match my liver and spleen against a diagram; and I wept for my poor, stern fool of a grandfather, who had already suffered that indignity.

I felt that some ringing declaration was in order, but all I could do was mutter, “Vengeance,” with my eyes averted from Grandfather’s fixed stare. Vengeance, indeed! If I took revenge, if I made an accusation, even if I asked a few clever questions with the utmost tact, people would talk, Mother would hear, and the truth would destroy her.

Odd, how fresh air and open space can clear the mind in an instant. Once I was strolling downhill beneath the stars, I had the answer to the puzzle, hardly a puzzle at all. A pair of oafs had been dispatched from the Institute to collect my grandparents. The two of them had carried Grandfather off, imprudently leaving the door ajar and the second sarcophagus uncovered. After delivering the first body, lingering for a good laugh with their fellow students and perhaps a few toasts to the corpse, they had staggered back up the hill to find that some animal had beaten them to Grandmother’s remains. Having routed the dogs, the panther, whatever, they had found that Grandmother no longer met their standards of anatomical coherence, so they had resealed her coffin and the tomb behind them and gone home. No supernatural agency was needed to read the riddle, and certainly no ghouls.

It was about then that I tripped over the ghoul’s jaw.

I didn’t know what it was, of course, only an inconvenient object that had tangled my foot and sent me tumbling with a horrifyingly loud clatter of tools. I lay absolutely still for a time, my ear pressed to the ground for any hint of hurrying footsteps, before I dared rise on hands and knees to find what had tripped me.

There was no moon, but I could have counted the hairs on my hand by the radiance of Filloweela in her guise as morning star, and I instantly spotted the white bone jutting from the earth. It was half a jaw, with most of the teeth attached, and one of these was a curved lower canine as big as my thumb. It was exactly like the tusk I had taken to the Institute a few years earlier. The jaw was more massive and elongated, the huge molars looked fit for grinding stones, and there was still that bizarre fang to be accounted for: but the jaw and its dentition were like those of a man. No scientist could have mistaken it for a wild boar.

Forgetting the watchmen and the impending dawn, I took my pick from my bag and swung it with a will against the hard soil. I broke up the chunks and sifted them through my fingers, I dug to the depth of my knees in a circle wide as I was tall, but I found not so much as another tooth or sliver of bone.

Although it was by then fully light, I recklessly walked up the hill for anyone to see, for this was an open field of raised sarcophagi below the more fashionable streets of mausoleums. I gave this no thought at all as I searched for a likely spot where the jaw might originally have lain. I was poking my shovel around the base of a stone coffin when a voice said at my ear, “Have you lost something, sir?”

I didn’t mark until later the heavy sarcasm. I forgot that he was a watchman and I was a grave-robber whose conviction could mean public dismemberment. In my single-minded excitement I acted guiltless, even with a bag of questionable tools slung over my shoulder and a shovel in my hand, and my manner disarmed him completely.