The Throne of Bones Read online

  “I’m sorry, lord, I followed your instructions, but it would seem that I’m stronger than you thought,” he would say, explaining why he had pounded the thing’s skull to porridge after raping it. If that failed, he had a final piece of tackle that he now pulled from its protective sheath: the late pit-fighter’s trident. If the necromancer wants a baby, he thought, let him get his own ghoul.

  He had lowered his eyes to the equipment for no more than a minute or so. He had heard nothing. But when he raised his head over the rim of the ditch, his nerves shrieked like wires stretched to the snapping-point. Almost close enough to touch, a pale form stood over the grave.

  He thought that it might be a woman, no matter how tall, thin and poorly proportioned; but in the next instant, when it squatted and sent dirt flying back between its legs with paws like shovel-blades, he knew what he was looking at. The urge to cower in the ditch and try not to give himself away by whimpering almost overpowered him, until he was distracted by the rippling muscularity of the creature’s buttocks, the sway of its heavy breasts. He was not only capable of raping a ghoul, he realized, he was eager to do it, and a familiar surge swept him up into that heaven where he ruled as an implacable god.

  He had practiced indifferently with the lead-weighted net, for he knew that nothing ever went wrong when he surrendered himself to the guiding genius of his art, and as he rose he cast it with probably more skill than Fast Fandard had ever shown. He drew the running-lines tight to form a bag that shrouded the ghoul down to her knees. He leaped forward and dealt a blow to the head that would have felled a horse, but the only discernable effect was a slight bend in the iron bar.

  Such had been his confidence that he had left both the trident and the needle in the ditch behind him, but he was not ready to panic. He stood astride the ghoul and raised the bar in both hands in preparation for a stroke that would have awed even Fand or Venda of the epics. It never fell, for he was shocked rigid by a sound.

  He had heard some very peculiar noises while lurking at night in the graveyard. Not entirely to his satisfaction, he had explained them as the creaking of old trees, the scuttle of dead leaves across the portico of a tomb, perhaps the distant scrape of a shovel on stone or the baying of a hound; but what he now heard partook of all those sounds and threw his memories into a new alignment that dizzied him with its implications. He knew he would never again mistake the voice of a ghoul for anything else on earth, or under it.

  “Weymael?” it said. “Is that you?”

  To read intent or emotion from such a voice was impossible, but the language of her body was clear as she presented her splotched and bristly rump with an inviting wriggle. Dropping to his knees and fumbling his breeches down, he thrust through an interstice of the net and into her before he answered, “No, you bitch, it’s Quodomass Phuonsa, who would fuck the ghoul that tried to eat his corpse!”

  Expecting an eruption of resistance, he dealt her another fearful blow, but she unleashed a giggle that would have chilled a wretch burning at the stake as she battered his belly with her buttocks. Like nothing he had ever penetrated, she was tough and gristly, her clasp abrasive as sand. He thought at first he was rubbing against the fibrous hemp of the net, but his fumbling fingers confirmed that their organs were joined.

  Ignoring the near-pain of the friction, he twisted and thrust like one trying to stab all the way to her heart. He cursed her and cuffed her and twisted her breasts, firm as melons but disconcertingly slimy, while hammering her skull with the bar. Infuriatingly, she urged him to be less shy and gentle.

  “Quodo!” she grated, and she pounded a further triad of spikes into his brain: “Oh, Quo! Quo! Quo!”

  The muscles of his right arm shrieked for mercy, and he dropped the bent bar from numb fingers as he sagged against her back and tried to suck air through the ammoniac reek of her hide. As she stifled her shriek of completion in the dirt of the grave, he was forced to admit that it was he who had been mastered.

  He backed away cautiously on his knees. He would take no chance with the trident, not until she was unconscious. He pictured the location of his bag. He rehearsed in his mind the action of flipping open the clasp and getting the necromancer’s needle. He knew he could do it in no time at all. She had not yet stirred from her sighing repose.

  Glancing back at last, he was startled by a line of shadows at the rim of the ditch. He supposed that their frenzied copulation had turned him the wrong way, and that he no longer faced the ditch, but he paused to puzzle over those objects. They could have been a row of misshapen cabbages, unlikely as that seemed in a graveyard. He was about to reach out and touch one when the dim luminance of the fog gleamed on its suddenly bared fangs.

  Then all the ghouls rose from the ditch.

  Put your trust in Cludd, the necromancer had told him—and unless one happened to be a Son of Cludd, that was a sardonic catch-phrase for abandoning all hope—and run for the temple. So desperate was his desire to follow this advice that he believed he was doing it. He heard the racket of someone running in the swamp. That could have been no one but himself. The pale forms that blocked his escape as they shambled toward him were only hallucinations. How could he be kneeling here, waiting to be torn to pieces, when he heard himself running?

  Impossibly, the sound of his splashing steps receded. He caught a glimpse of the running figure before the fog swallowed it completely: a fat man with a robe hiked inelegantly to his knees, a man nothing like himself but very much indeed like Weymael Vendren, who had apparently felt obliged to observe the first stage of his experiment. Quodomass screamed his name, but the footsteps never faltered. What was more bitterly disappointing, not one of the ghouls took this hint to pursue the fleeing scientist.

  Ransacking his recollection of love-songs and romantic tales for words he had never used, Quodomass scrambled back to fling himself on the mercy of Gluttoria. She rose and parted the fighter’s net as easily as a bride would part her veil. “Please!” he cried as he stumbled to his feet and embraced the filthy creature. “I love you—I want you—be mine forever! Yes, we come from different worlds, but love conquers all. Doesn’t it? Tell them!”

  As she drew him to her breast with claws that slipped through to his ribs, Quodomass tried to unleash a scream that would leave the distant temple guards in no doubt whatever of his location or his desire, but her lipless mouth darted forward as if for a kiss. He found it impossible to scream without his tongue or lower jaw, which she began to chew before his eyes.

  * * * *

  Before the underground host could fling itself on the flailing body of the rapist, Vomikron Noxis, King of Ghouls, decreed that they save his virile member for last to see if he could live up to his reputation. Gluttoria claimed it as her prize when it became obvious that Quodomass Phuonsa’s proudest boast had been an empty one.

  III

  The Ghoul’s Child

  Even if they were not immediately eaten by their mothers, the offspring of ghouls would be short-lived, for they are typically formless things that seem less the product of parturition than pathology. It therefore roused great envy among the mining community when one of their number gave birth to a perfectly formed baby boy; who would have looked rosy, had anyone been so perverse as to light a lamp in the dank niche where he was born.

  “Kill it,” said Vomikron Noxis, King of Ghouls.

  “No,” said the mother, Gluttoria.

  “Let me kill it, then. We’ll store it till it’s ripe, when the flesh begins to drip sweetly from the translucent bones—”

  Not even a ghoul can stand the full-throated shriek of another one in their narrow tunnels. The King wriggled backward, clutching his blasted ears.

  New mothers, he recalled, have whims, and he assumed Gluttoria would come to her senses. After a time he peeked in on her with what he believed to be his most charming grin.

  “That’s smart, letting it grow a bit,” he said. “There’ll be more meat, perhaps even some to share with your old lover—�
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  He closed his eyes against shrieks even more piercing, and was thus unprepared for the whirlwind of fangs and claws that ravaged his face. He abandoned his dignity and ran, screaming for mercy.

  “Slut!” he roared, when he believed he was safe. “Virago!” And to his sniggering subjects he muttered, “Whoever kills us that aberration will have the key to our larder.”

  Some ghouls tried to snatch the child away, losing eyes, ears or hands for their trouble. Though she was big and strong, Gluttoria couldn’t stay awake forever; nor could she survive on a diet of eyes, ears and hands while nursing the child. She stole away with her baby to an area of Dreamers’ Hill where her kind seldom venture.

  * * * *

  Gluttoria had no idea if Vomikron Noxis had been her lover, since ghouls usually ignore such trivia. She knew he hadn’t sired the child. Most unusually, she remembered her encounter with the father, and that was partly to blame for her odd behavior.

  He had been a human being named Quodo, who said he was overcome by love, an emotion most un-ghoulish. It was unthinkable that a man would want to lie with a ghoul, but Quodo had. So deranged had he been by desire that the puny human had actually believed he was raping her.

  Gluttoria had dim memories of love from her human life. The first man to make tender advances to her had been an uncle, when she was of an unseemly age. She had tripped him on the stairs in a spirit of fun that seemed to suit his jolly groping, but the fall broke his back.

  She had thought that giving up love was no loss until Quodo offered it to her in her new and infinitely less lovable guise. Her feelings had so confused her that she tore the poor man to pieces. Ghouls do not weep, but she sometimes did when she recalled that unthinking moment.

  Had the child been an ordinary ghoul, or even an ordinary boy, her fond regrets might have provoked nothing more than a heartfelt sigh between the two bites needed to wolf him down. But to her the baby was a prodigy that outshone the boasts of the most addled parent. Poignant music was insipid beside his screams, rapturous poetry was bombast to his gurgles. His hair was yellower than her eyes, his eyes bluer than her vestigial lips. He reminded her of the confectionery images of the infant Polliel that are eaten on that God’s birthday, except by little girls like Gluttoria, who had thought them too pretty and would burst into tears to see other children eat them.

  She named the baby Polliard, seldom speaking this presumption above a whisper for fear of offending the ghouls, who hated the Sun God, or the God, who was believed to feel the same about ghouls.

  * * * *

  Gluttoria fled with her baby to the summit of Dreamers’ Hill, where the tombs of the Great Houses gleam among spacious gardens. Behind a very old tomb of the Fands, less well tended than others, she found a derelict charnel for the remains of servants. Her comrades had never discovered it, even though the lock had been broken long ago by a grave-robber seeking only gems and gold. It was packed with a wealth of dried food, though, and Gluttoria abode there for many months, reveling in the leisure to play with her son and guide his first steps.

  She discovered that mummified flesh could be restored to a semblance of freshness by soaking it for a day or so in the blood of animals or, better still, stray children. She weaned Polliard on pre-chewed scraps of such food, while he found all the toys a boy could wish for among the litter of skulls and bones.

  One skull he called “Dada,” his first word, and this never failed to get a laugh from his mother; but she was a ghoul, and almost nothing failed to get a laugh from her. Polliard early developed a similar sense of humor.

  Reminders of Quodo, however, turned her thoughts to a pressing need that wasn’t at all funny. Ghouls are neither solitary nor chaste by nature, and she had long ago reached the limit of satisfaction she could get from faded memories of dalliance imprinted in the old meat she ate.

  * * * *

  After a long evening at the Willing Lepress in Hound Square, Picote Phrein would often cut across Dreamers’ Hill to his room in Bloodstone Close, where he wrote poetry and, with more success, begging letters to relatives. He claimed to have witnessed weird scenes inside the graveyard, but he claimed to have seen marvels everywhere else, too, so his tales aroused as little interest as his poems.

  In fact he skulked through the cemetery in hopes of seeing one special sight that he never spoke of, though he wrote poems about it. He would describe it as the struggle of an eight-limbed, two-headed monstrosity, with much rhythmical grunting and writhing, to split itself into separate human beings. He depicted its fission in triumphant terms, for he shrank from physical contact. His own pleasures were solitary; versifying aroused him more than the sights that inspired it.

  He could usually find something worth seeing near the watchmen’s lodge, but the watchmen were fat and their sweethearts tended to be stringy whores. Less often, but more to his aesthetic taste, he would descry troopers of Never-Vanquished with elegant young ladies in the weeds near the oldest tomb of the Fands, and that was where his unsteady steps led him this night.

  He found nothing in the usual bowers. Worse, he strayed too near some carcass left to rot unburied. The smell so sickened him that all the wine he had drunk on credit blew forth to feed the azaleas.

  Having wiped his lips with his kerchief, he waved it vigorously before his face to flap away the nauseous odor, but it clung as persistently as if he’d stepped in its source. Trying to sniff his sandals, he lost his balance and sat down heavily. The odor grew stronger by the minute. He ascribed this to a change in the wind until he realized that the wind was still.

  He admitted that he was lost, a condition not unfamiliar to the night-prowling poet. He normally would have slept where he sat and found his way home by daylight, but an invisible tangle of briers oppressed him and a nearly palpable fog of decay threatened to poison him. Even if he grew used to breathing the stench, he would be tormented all night by images of worms boring through the heap of carrion, rats gnawing it while lice and fleas sucked their blood. At this minute a cosmos of vermin might be turning infinitesimal footsteps his way.

  He sprang to his feet, beating his clothes and suppressing screams that nevertheless slipped through his teeth as squeaks of panic. The phantasmal tickles that multiplied to vex his whole skin could be nothing but the strutting and preening of corpse-gorged flies. That thought shattered him like a mirrored image of a man. He hurled himself into hopeless battle with the whips and claws of the bushes.

  “Please!” he screamed when he fetched up against a solid figure. Rebounding off bones and hard muscles, he cried, “My name is Phrein, I mean no harm!” He grasped that the person was naked and female, but whatever assurance this gave him was offset by her looming height and stony solidity. “I wasn’t spying. I lost my way, that’s all.”

  Picote’s attraction to women was neutralized by a distaste for all creatures, himself not excluded. Not even the comeliest parcel of skin could wipe away an image of the tubes and sacs of feces, urine and blood it secreted, the ghastly bones and slimy organs it held, the foul gases and sweats it exuded. The prettiest belly was forever at work grinding dead flesh to muck. He tried to minimize the nastiness of life by eating only vegetable food. This diet confirmed his prejudice by making his own functions even more disgusting.

  But he could sometimes overcome his revulsion for others in total darkness, and it wasn’t difficult with a well-built young woman who never spoke a word. She was not unlike one of his solitary fantasies. By pretending that she was, he began to enjoy her embrace.

  She seemed friendly, although her intentions were as dark as her appearance. She was young, and her breasts were large and firm as those of a sculpted goddess. How drunk was he? He stroked her belly; his fingers ventured into the coarse hair beneath it. He hadn’t been deluded by a statue.

  “No!” he cried, for she apparently had a knife, and she used it to slit his breeches and free his thickening member. As if in apology, she dropped to her knees before him. Her tongue—but could
that be a tongue? It was dry, it was grittier than his cat’s, it very nearly hurt. He touched hair whose greasy snarls distressed him, but before he could explore her face with his fingers and verify that she was using her tongue, she batted his hand aside with appalling force. He tried to stifle unmanly whimpers as he speculated on the nature of an overgrown woman who would assault him with a knife in a graveyard and force him to accept the most intimate kiss. The lunatic asylum was but a short sprint from here.

  The encounter had distracted him from the nauseous odor, but now that gagged him. It seemed to rise directly into his nostrils from the kneeling woman. He sniffed the fingers that had fondled her. They smelled as if he had slipped them into the core of all foulness.

  His hand shot to her face before she could anticipate the move, and he learned that it was nothing like a human face. The mouth that caressed him, however tenderly at the moment, was a trap of fangs.

  “Ghoul!” he screamed, and her bloodcurdling laugh avowed it.

  “Speak kindly to me, man. Tell me how you love me.” Her voice put him in mind of a large dog, growling as it pushed against a door with rusty hinges.

  “I love you as I love my life!” Picote cried fervently, but he tried to pull away.

  It was futile. Her hands held his buttocks, and when her claws dug in, he realized that she had needed no knife to cut his clothes. She flung him flat on his back and mounted him with brutal efficiency. He felt himself clutched in a tube even grittier than her tongue. Black against the sparkling dust of the galaxy, her lank body and malformed head made a sight to match her smell.

  “You’re not hard anymore,” she rasped. “You don’t love me!”

  Picote couldn’t refute the evidence she held. He had disdained human women for polluting their innards with lamb or veal, and he lay in the grip of a creature that supped on maggoty men. Her loathsomeness had not just withered his erection, it had killed it, and he might as profitably have spent his prayers and wishes on compelling a noodle to stand tall.