The Throne of Bones by Brian McNaughton

over her. “Whatever you do, don’t add her to your collection,” she said. “You must bury her as quickly as possible, then give out your story about her infidelity. That may satisfy the Vendrens, especially if we grant her the honor of proper burial in our family tomb. But we don’t want them to see her body.”
    “You have some experience with this sort of thing,” I said, referring to that which was never mentioned, the family massacre.
    She tried to wither me with her displeasure and stare me down, but I was no longer the little boy who persisted in repeating a naughty word. She dropped her eyes first. She said as she made to leave, “I have to organize the servants to clean up your mess.”
    “It’s time we spoke of this,” I said, blocking her way to the ladder.
    “It has nothing at all to do with you,” she said. “Get out of my way!”
    “Nothing at all to do with me? That my own grandparents and my father were taken from me, one way or another, by violence?”
    “With this, I mean, with what you’ve done to your crazy whore of a wife. That’s your only problem now. Keep your mind on that, why don’t you?”
    “And why should it have anything to do with this? Keep talking, Mother, you’re telling me things. Did you imagine that I believed I killed Umbra because Grandfather happened to be a ghoul?”
    That was no random shot. I had at last connected the face of Umbra’s lover with the sculpted head it had caricatured: my grandfather’s. I had no idea why, or how, but Mother could tell me some of it, that was plain from her dismay. She rolled her eyes with the wild stare of a panicked horse, looking for some other exit from the loft, but I gripped her frail shoulders.
    “No!” she cried. “That’s not true, that’s vile to say that! He suffered from a ... a growth disorder, that’s all, his bones kept growing, he became grotesque, and his mind was affected. His own father had endowed the Institute in the hope they would find a cure for him, but he wanted no part of those mountebanks, he wanted his palace back, as I do, as you do. He was like you. He had a scientific turn of mind. He collected specimens from the graveyard, too, the bones of fellow-sufferers.”
    “A ghoul,” I groaned, dropping my hands and turning away. “Sleithreethra!”
    “No!” she shrieked, making the protective sign. “No, he wasn’t!”
    “He nevertheless murdered all the others, didn’t he?”
    Her escape route was clear now, but she didn’t take it. She said, “We locked him up most of the time, toward the end, but he had his good days. He seemed entirely his old self on the night we had him down to dinner, but he complained about the food, especially the saddle of lamb. He would chew some and spit it out, making truly horrible faces, then chew some more and spit it out.... We could see he was working himself up to a violent state, and Mother was about to call the servants to take him back to his room, but.... He said, ‘I’ll show you what kind of meat I crave!’, and he seized your father. There was nothing we could do. It was over before I could rise from my chair, and with those jaws of his, and those hideous hands—he tore your father apart before my eyes, and ate him.
    “Mother tried to stop him, but he struck her just once and broke her neck. The servants, too, he fought them off and killed two of them without interrupting his ... his meal.
    “I had a dagger at my belt, a silver dagger that he himself had given me, and I plunged it into his back, but he clawed at it and pulled it out. And then he turned to me. I thought it was the end, I couldn’t move, but he extended the dagger to me, hilt first, and said in his most charming way—it was ghastly, to recognize his normal, courtly self behind that face—he said, ‘I appreciate your effort to help me, dear girl, but it won’t do any good.’ And he laughed.
    “He had taught me to use the dagger, to stab upward for the heart, and that’s