Free The Throne of Bones by Brian McNaughton Page B

Lord Glyphtard,” I said, as I very seldom did. “I amuse myself by gardening.”
    “How amusing that must be!” It was clear she believed me not at all. “When will you show me where you found the jaw?”
    “Now?”
    “Don’t be silly. You don’t look for ghouls by daylight. Tonight?”
    As I closed the door behind us, I’m sure she heard the firm click of the lock. She said, “You forgot to leave your note for Dr. Porfat.”
    “I’ll wait until I see him.”
    Umbra Vendren was too observant, she was too smart, and she was even more eccentric than Mother. “Eccentric” might be less than apt. Her ancient Tribe was notorious for cruelty, depravity and madness, even if they all weren’t, as so many believed, witches. I saw no harm in guiding her through the cemetery, though, and perhaps distracting her from ghouls long enough to satisfy my taste for her.
    If nothing else, my way of stumbling into my career as a grave-robber should have taught me that one thing always leads to another.
    * * * *
    She wore black, but Vendrens always do, a garment that fit her like a shadow under her silk cape, and her hair was hidden by a slouch hat with a raven’s feather. You would have spotted her immediately as a grave-robber if she had walked onto a stage; or into a cemetery.
    “Planning on a bit of gardening?” she asked.
    We were a matched pair: I had brought my pick and shovel and crowbar only from force of habit, but I explained, “I thought you wanted to dig up ghoul-bones.”
    “He wasn’t buried. They eat their own dead, too, and the bone you found must have rolled away unnoticed. But I want to see where you found it.”
    Walking through my damp garden into the cemetery, she said, “Porfat thinks ghouls are sick people, that they have a disease you can get from breathing graveyard air. Or,” she added maliciously, “from contact with ghouls, such as playing with their bones.”
    That was nonsense. If graveyard air made you a ghoul, I would have been ten of them. “You handled it.”
    “Do you have it?”
    My find had so delighted me that I carried it like a child’s favorite toy of the moment, and I pulled it from my cloak. She held it up and licked it along its length, and I thought then that sensuous was less the word to describe her mouth than depraved. She eyed me slyly as she tongued the place where its lips might have been.
    “I want to be a ghoul,” she said. “Don’t you?
    She could make me feel less sophisticated than our oldest and silliest servant, and I had to struggle against making the sort of sign that had earned her contempt. “Not really.”
    “Oh, but it would be fun! All these pigs, these fools with their absurd pretensions, their preposterous vanity, their cowardly wish to spin out their empty, stupid, greedy lives forever—” she paused to spit on a handy sarcophagus “—it would show them what they’re good for, living or dead, to eat them!” She kicked another moss-grown coffin hard enough to hurt herself, but she was a typical Vendren, I feared, and pain was beneath her notice. “What do you expect from pigs? Pork, that’s all, pork, and if I were a ghoul I wouldn’t care that it was rancid. I want to tear them up and strew them around, and then I want some great, beautiful monster to drag me down among the mud and the worms and the rot and fuck me!”
    She had raved her way into the subject that really interested me, and I reached out for her, but she shrugged my hand off and raced deeper into the field of the dead. She stopped, picking a coffin at random, and tried to shove off its lid. She spat furious curses when she failed to budge it.
    She was screaming louder than ever, urging me to come and use my tools. I was tempted to fade into the shadows and leave her to the watchmen. Even if they weren’t cowed by her status, they surely wouldn’t take her seriously enough to arrest her. Instead I hurried to help her and told her to be quiet.
    “I’m sorry,” she said