by Tanith Lee
“This morning,” she said, “awhile before sunrise, I saw a girl go up the street. There was no one else about. She went right by under my window. I didn’t recognise her, but it was dark still. Then I saw something shining. She was leaving wet footprints on the street. She went toward the priests’ hostelry. When she got close to the wall of the compound, the first light started to come, and I could see the brickwork right through her back.” The woman stood looking at the rain.
Presently he spoke.
“Maybe you should alter your trade.”
“Maybe I have. I played the riddle-blocks later. I cast the King of Swords, that’s you. And in the Zodiac, the water sign of the Two Fish, and the air sign of the Harp–that’d be your sick friend, probably–the sign of the weakling and the genius. She was there, too. The Virgin, riding on the unicorn, gripping the chain around his neck. Watch out, handsome hero.”
“All right,” he said. “Thanks for the warning.”
“If you want me,” she said, “for anything, it’s the house behind the potter’s shop. I’m called Cinnabar.”
“I’ll remember.”
“See you do.”
During the afternoon, when smooth rain shadows slicked the hostel, Myal’s fever had lifted him on firework wings. He had chattered at great length, and one by one the priests had stolen in to listen. They heard quite a few unusual things as, under the pretence of stoking the brazier, bringing fresh coals, blankets, aromatics and wet cloths to moisten the storyteller’s burning lips, they clustered at the bedside.
They heard of strange predilections of the Cold Earl’s, of moonlight falling on naked maidens astride the backs of stallions. They learned of the Gray Duke’s daughter, and a certain sequence in a wood. They learned of court orgies and romps. And sad seasons when leaves ran yellow in the streams and money came in the shape of other men’s pockets. They learned of Myal’s drunken father, bloody-eyed and strap in fist, and of all the bullies who had assumed that father’s shape in later years, dukes, innkeepers, stewards and jailers. The priests clotted close to Myal as ants on honey. They gaped and gasped, and held their breaths and squeaked. As they were thrashed with Myal, and seduced with Myal, and chased with Myal. As they cowered and thieved and played music and made love and lay in the corners of prisons with Myal.
As the dark day thickened and declined, they sagged feebly all about the sick bed, almost dead of second-hand living.
Then a break came in the western overcast, and a ray of low amber sun sheered through a window. Exactly on this cue, Myal’s tidal fever smashed itself to pieces on some high and fiery shore. With a sudden sigh, he dropped still and dumb on the mattress, every muscle relaxed, his breathing soft and rhythmic as a low quiet song. A song without words.
The brothers shook themselves dolefully. They praised a higher authority, in disappointed voices, for the traveller’s cure. All but one, duty-bound to remain, hurried away.
The last priest dozed, dreaming of dinner, which gradually became dinner in the Cold Earl’s hall. A naughty girl on a black horse cantered up the room, throwing flowers and fruits to the diners. When she reached the priest, she threw a furious jailer, brandishing a leather belt, into his lap.
The priest woke with a start.
It was dark, the sun down and the windows deep blue. He was about to rise and light the candles when he felt again the extraordinary sensation of a separate live entity on his knee. Not a brutish jailer, certainly, it was too light. He chuckled to himself, thinking one of the puppies had strayed into the hostel. He put out his hand gently to pat the beast–and encountered a cool scaly flapping.
With a yelp, the priest started up, overturning his chair. As he did so, a beam of light, falling across the room from the half-open door and the refectory beyond the compound, caught a vague pale swirling in the area of the traveller’s bed. It was rather like smoke, more like water, and in the midst of it something slowly turned and floated.
The priest felt a horrible drawing sensation like faintness, and he became icy cold.
Somehow he tottered to the door and out of it. He had no thought for his patient, indeed few thoughts at all until he staggered into the lamp-lit refectory.
The inn was filling up with evening trade. The Ghost-Killer was seated on a bench in a corner. He had eaten frugally half an hour before sunset. The flask of wine was two-thirds full and stoppered. He was drinking water when the two priests hurried in.
Everyone looked. Though all the priests drank heartily, they did not do it in the sinful public house.
More interesting yet was the way the brothers rushed immediately to the stranger in the black mantle.
“Answer me,” cried the fatter of the two priests–both were reasonably fat– “Are you the man we reckon you to be?”
“Let’s start again,” said Dro lazily. “Who do you think I am?”
“One of those lawless and unholy–” rattled off the lesser fat priest.
The other swiped him, “Be quiet, you fool.” He added to Dro: “We reckon you to be one skilled in the exorcism of undead spirits.”
Dro watched them.
“And so?”
The fatter priest contained his dignity. “And so, we require your services, my son.”
The room eyed them, ears pinned back. Even the row of cats, perched on the beer barrels, listened, wide-eyed.
“The fact is, my son,” said the lesser fat priest, unbending from his distaste, “we’re probably mistaken, but–”
“But we’ve had a strange occurrence in the hostelry where your friend is being nursed. We feel that you owe us some responsibility, my son.”
“I concede,” said Dro, “that one of you may have got out over the wall some night. But to accept both of you as fathers would be biologically unsound. Besides, I think the woman misled you. Try a little arithmetic. I’d say I was unlikely to be the son of either of you, unless you conducted a courtship prior to the womb.”
The room in general made a little explosive crowing noise. Both priests changed colour. The lesser snapped,
“He’s a rogue and a devil. Leave him alone. The idiot brother in the hostel was half asleep. Here we are, letting ourselves and our habit be insulted, just because some imbecile dreamed there was a live fish in his lap.” He flung about, glaring at the room and its inadequately suppressed laughter. He jumped when Parl Dro walked past him and out of the door.
Scrambling the same way, the two priests observed Dro crossing the street by the stepping stones and going around the wall and through into the compound. They hurried after him. In groups, drinkers from the inn began to follow, halting however at the compound gate.
That stretch of street, and the space before the religious building and its subsidiary architecture, grew bright and cheery with struck tinders, drink and shouted inquiry. Crowd attracted crowd. A hundred persons soon blocked the thoroughfare. Priests swarmed like cream bees back and forth, ordering the crowd, as they struggled through it, into temporary areas of silence. No direct information was supplied, but fragment by fragment the tale grew. There was a ghost in the hostel.
The priests kept their distance from the hostel door, staying actually outside the compound, as the crowd had done. Parl Dro had paused in the compound of necessity, since the brotherhood had nervously barricaded the hostel door with logs, posts and baskets—as if a ghost would normally fear to pass straight through such domestic trivia. Dro tossed and thrust these items aside, then crashed open the door, crashing it shut again as soon as he was inside.
The hostel was black now, with black starless cavities of windows. Picking up the priest’s toppled chair, Dro slung it against the door timbers, a barricade with a new purpose—to keep any other live thing out.
The room was cold and dripping—dank as someone’s dungeon.
At first, there was nothing else, except that the racket of the swelling crowd in the street seemed unduly muffled and far away.
Dro’s eyes dilated to pierce the gloom. S
oon, he was seeing well, via the cat-sight of the extra seventh sense. He did not touch the candles or the tinder box. Now and then a dart of light from the host of tinders outside would streak over the wall. But slowly, the brightness of these darts grew dull. Then he began to hear the melodious winnowing of sound, the sound of the stream below the mountain. Cilny’s stream. And Ciddey’s.
Myal, whom the priests had courageously abandoned–more, trapped inside with the unknown terror–had remained oblivious. He lay on the bed, peacefully slumbering. It was a peace that filled Parl Dro with iron rage.
Dro took one stride forward, but in that second, the manifestation began to return.
She formed, little by little, in the shade just over the far edge of Myal’s bed. She was visible from the knees upward, and below her knees, across the mattress and Myal’s body, flowed the smoky convolutions of the water. She was mainly transparent. Even so, Dro could see she showed none of the rigours of drowning, though plainly, if unconsciously, she recollected exactly how she had died. Her face was calm and empty at first, but as she looked at him, focused on him, her face altered. Her eyes seemed to sink and to enlarge into mere sockets. She grinned, and her grin was terrible, unspeakable, showing only her lower teeth. She raised her hands, and she held a freshwater fish in them. She bore it to her mouth as if to kiss it, then sank her teeth into its squirming living back. A trickle of pallidly gleaming blood ran down her chin.
It was an illusion, the fish. She was even more a witch, dead, than she had been alive. She fashioned such forms to intimidate him. When she perceived he was not intimidated, the fish, the trickle of blood, even the swirl of the ghostly stream evaporated.
She hung there, still smiling vilely at him. Then her smile went away, and she too slid away, back and back and back, as the inescapable force of Dro’s will pushed her.
She opened her mouth in a soundless cry, and lifted her hands again. Her nails were already very long. She fought him, but he was used to such fighting, and she was not. He thrust her all the way to the wall, seeming to press her, like a phosphorescent imprint, into the whitewash. Her hair blew or fanned out like a misty colourless sunburst–moonburst–on the bricks. He held her pinned like that, and then, never taking his eyes from her, he fastened one pitiless hand over Myal’s throat, squeezing the windpipe until, gagging and choking, the musician flailed into consciousness.
Dro unfastened the stranglehold. Myal croaked a number of expletives and accusations. Dro cut him short, dragging Myal’s head around by the hair toward the wall.
“Look.”
Myal froze, petrified, rigid as a stone in Dro’s grip.
“What–what is it?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Ciddey—it’s Cidd—”
“Don’t keep naming her. She has enough of a hold on you as it is. How do you feel?”
“I feel sick.” A ludicrous note of reproach crept into Myal’s voice. “I haven’t been well.”
“You’ll be less well if she goes on feeding off you.”
“Feeding–”
“She’s using your life energy to supplement her own. Can’t you feel it?”
“I... Something. I feel terrible.”
Dro let him fall back on the mattress. Dro never once let his own eyes slip from the apparition, stapled like a moth to the wall. Even as he spoke, three quarters of his mind and a great deal of his strength were being utilised to keep her as far from her life source, Myal, as possible. To prevent her, also, from flight. For she might come to see that flight was her only current ploy.
“What did you bring with you, Myal,” Dro said, “from the stream?”
“What?”
“The stream where she died. You took something from her body. A lock of hair, a ribbon–something.”
“No.”
“Don’t conceal it. It’s her link. Look at her. She’ll kill you, one way or another. Either persuade you to die to appease her jealousy of your life. Or draw your life out of you, moment by moment.”
“I think,” said Myal. He coughed. “I think I brought one of her shoes. I don’t know why. I forgot I had. They were cloth, very small. I trod on one on the bank. I was already getting sick. Didn’t know what I was...”
“Where?”
“The instrument. Where is it? Somebody must have put it somewhere.”
“It’s there by the bed. Reach over and hand it to me.”
“I can’t. I’m too weak to move.”
“You’ll move.”
“All right—I’ll—try—”
Myal floundered around. His arms were trembling so much he could hardly get hold of the sling, but he managed it, and lugged the grotesquery of wood and strings onto the mattress. To touch it steadied him. But the shoe, crumpled together, had been shoved into the opening over the sound box, and through into the hole of the instrument. Invisible. He could not remember doing this. Yet, somehow, he could....
Still not looking at him, Dro tore the shoe out of Myal’s hand.
“Whatever happens now, stay where you are, and stay quiet.”
“What’s liable to happen?”
Myal cringed and shot a glance at the blocked door. But his head swam. He flopped on his face, hiding his eyes.
Parl Dro stood midway between the bed and the door. He dropped the little shoe on the ground. The sole had cracked where Myal had palmed it into a ball. Pathetic, desolate little shoe.
Dro took the tinder from his shirt and struck a flame. At the rasp of flint and fire, Myal burrowed more deeply in the bolster. Dro stooped, awkward from the crippled leg, and set the shoe alight, bracing himself as he did so for the ghost’s dying frenzy. Which did not come.
As the flame fluttered around the shoe, destroyed it, and expired on the flags, Dro stared at what was left of Ciddey Soban, plastered, insectile and beautiful, on the wall. She never moved. With vast extinguished eyes, she gazed at him. And then she melted like frost. And she was gone.
The dungeon chill swilled instantly off the room and down some supernatural drain.
Parl Dro drew a deep breath. The familiar exhaustion clambered on his back, dragged him down. Exhaustion, and something else. Something–something–
Outside, the noise of the crowd had mounted, now the eerie barriers were gone from the air. Footsteps ran across the compound, and the door rocked to blows. There had been enough people in the street, and concentrating hard enough, to form a kind of composite pseudo seventh sense. Sufficient to guess when the exorcism was complete.
He pulled the chair away from the door.
Myal groaned. “Is it over? Whatever it was?”
“I hope it is.” Dro checked, hand on the door, appalled by what he had just said. Never before had there been any doubt.
CHAPTER SIX
The drinking party went on into the small hours.
Most of the village had heard, many had been spectators. Spectators who had actually seen nothing, only felt, and half understood. The priests filed solemnly through the hostel, now it was safe, blessing it and sprinkling unguents. They blessed and sprinkled Myal, too. Pale and shaking, clinging to the sling of the instrument, he said to Parl Dro: “I’m sorry.”
“You’re not only sorry, you’re a damn fool,” said Dro. He had walked out into the night and the village had borne him away to an accompaniment of shouts and clanking flasks. He was too tired to resist. No, it was not that he was so tired. He wanted to drown something, worse than nagging pain, a nagging doubt. So he sat with the village and tried to get drunk, while they tried to get uncanny anecdotes out of him. Mainly he fended them off; they fell to recounting their own ghost stories–factual or imaginary. They told him the fortress on the meadow was haunted. When he said he had slept there the previous night, they exchanged wise looks. He knew better than to attempt convincing them there had been no haunt in the fortress. No one without the seventh sense could normally tell ghost from brick.
A few hours later, most of them were sprawled in various
stages of stupor. Dro was still sober, though his nerves hummed quietly, as if they felt they should, from the alcohol in his blood.
He went out of the inn and down the street in the star-slit darkness, to clear his head, or to make believe that it needed clearing. While he could pretend he was a little drunk, he could partake of the drunkard’s privilege and not think.