Read Online The Throne of Bones by Brian McNaughton - Free Book Online

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