Free The Throne of Bones by Brian McNaughton Page A

It grew harder to feign as I noted eyes the odd, dark blue of plums, slack and sensuous lips, breasts that were rather small but rose at a presumptuous angle. Although she wore the egalitarian motley of a student, the shadowy, tiger-stripe tattooing of her neck and cheeks proclaimed her the grandest sort of Vendren.
    “He’s not here,” I said. “I was leaving a note.”
    Her initial fright gone, she stared suspiciously. “May I help you?”
    A thief or scholarly spy wouldn’t have carried a ghoul’s jaw, and I unwrapped it to show her. “I wanted his opinion of this.”
    From the watchmen’s reaction and hers, I was almost ready to grant the bone magical properties, for she cast down her burden of books and papers to snatch it from me. She turned it hurriedly this way and that, staring more avidly than my great-grandfather at his skull. It gave me the chance to stare at her in similar style.
    “Sleithreethra,” she whispered with appalling reverence, and I made the appropriate protective sign against that Goddess. I regretted this superstitious lapse, for it earned me a glance of disdain.
    “Where did you get this?”
    Her tone said that I had shrunk from menacing intruder to halfwit errand-boy. “In the refectory, where else?” I said, but I gestured out the window.
    My joke earned me only a grimace of impatience. “Will you show me?”
    “If you like. It’s a ghoul, isn’t it?”
    She turned to search among the papers she had dropped, some of them probably lost forever among Dr. Porfat’s rubbish, and she returned with some scrolls that she gave me to unwind. When I made no move to roll them out, she came close beside me, as I had hoped she would, to do it herself.
    When I tore my eyes from a close study of her curly, auburn hair, I saw that they were pen and ink sketches, and they were ludicrous: not from lack of skill, for she was an accomplished draftsman, but from her preposterous notion of ghouls. Those creatures, gorging on carrion, burrowing through graves, haunting the night and fleeing the sun in dank tunnels, were lower vermin than their closest associates, the rats and worms; for if the legends had any truth, they were humans who had rejected their humanity.
    In her vision, the lank and distorted limbs were graceful, the brutish heads with their fanged muzzles noble as those of fine dogs. I never would have imagined that a female with tusks jutting up to her nostril-pits could have enticed me, but one nude freak draped languidly on a tomb hardened me even further than the artist had. Most of the images were less sexual than absurdly romantic, of ghouls as outsized elves who spent the enchanted midnight gazing at the moon with bright globes of eyes that echoed its beauty.
    “Have you seen them?” I asked.
    “As a child, I thought.... Well, I heard them, I’m sure of that, and I’ve never forgotten it. It was Dr. Porfat who described them for me when I brought him my first drawings, and I wanted to see if these were more accurate.”
    I studied the jaw without comment. Comparing it with her artwork was like comparing tales of chivalry with the iron weight of a spike-headed flail.
    She surprised me by saying, “I’d like to draw you.”
    “Why? Do I look like a ghoul?”
    She gave that question more thought than I believed it warranted before she said, “No, not really, but you do look unusual. It’s mostly your body that interests me.” She shocked me, but didn’t displease me, by squeezing my arms with her tiny hands and tracing the contours of my chest. She batted my hands aside when I tried to reciprocate.
    “You’re better than most of the models we get.”
    “I play dwelth.”
    “That’s the sort we get, and you’re not like that at all. It takes hard, repetitious labor to develop your sort of muscles. Are you a soldier? I know! You’re a gravedigger, aren’t you? That’s how you found the jaw.”
    You may imagine how little I cared for this deduction. “I am called