by Tanith Lee
“You’ve got me all confused,” shouted Myal.
“Which is, of course, extremely difficult to do.”
Myal stood up. He looked at the ground.
“I’m alive—somewhere.”
“In an old woman’s decrepit hovel, about seven or eight miles from here.”
“That sounds cosy.”
“She’ll take care of you, till you’re able to get back.”
“When will that be?”
“When the drug wears off. And when you’re finished here.”
“If I go to a tree, I walk through it,” said Myal. “Why don’t I sink through the ground?”
“Basic common sense. Probably even your limited perspective can see it would be rather pointless.”
“In other words, you don’t know.”
“In other words,” said Parl Dro, “you can be incorporeal, but only as far as you want to be. You can walk through a stone wall and pick up a plate on the other side. A moment’s adjustment of willpower is all that’s necessary.” He drew the instrument off his shoulder and held it between his hands by its two peculiar necks. Then he raised the instrument and slung it at Myal. “Catch.”
Myal leapt forward, not thinking, guided by a vision of smashed wood and broken ivory. He caught the instrument just before it touched the earth. It was solid and heavy in his arms, the wires vibrating quietly like a cat purring. It did not slip through him. He held it and his legs buckled.
“A practical demonstration is often more effective than a lecture,” said Dro. He sat down on the hillside, straightening out the crippled left calf, and Myal saw the black eyes momentarily go blind with pain.
Myal sat on a jut of rock, the instrument on his knees. He rubbed the garishly painted wood, fascinated, his fingers caressing, as they had always bodily done, the ivory chips sunk in there.
“You’re sure,” he eventually said, “I’m alive?”
“I’m sure.”
“Cinnabar was crazy.”
“Not quite. The story goes that if you’d got into Tulotef physically, they’d have served you for dinner.”
“She thought she was helping, pushing me in this way? Because of my song I wanted to make—”
“I’m afraid she thought she was helping me,” Parl Dro said. He looked out toward the dry mud chasm of the dead lake.
“You called it Tulotef,” said Myal.
“Yes.”
“According to you, that’s supposed to be unwise, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
A melancholy oppression of anticlimax lay over Myal. He traced the patterns on the instrument, but felt no inclination to play it. A silence widened between them. The whole earth was silent where the ghostly clangour of the town had been before. A light wind flapped over the hill and brushed the tops of the forest, but it made hardly any sound, only the sound of emptiness. Even the resins of the forest did not smell so high up, or else the uncanny spot had sucked its perfumes away, eating the life force of the trees, the hill, the land, as it ate the life force of living men who wandered, or were coerced, inside the gates.
“I spent the night,” Myal said at last, “with Ciddey Soban. We didn’t—I don’t want you to think—”
“I’m not thinking anything.”
“All right. But she told me. The link that’s keeping her on earth. If I tell you, I want your word you won’t harm her.”
“Harm?”
“Won’t throw her out of this world. Not until she’s ready.”
“You can guess what my word is worth.”
“I’ll trust you.”
“No, you don’t trust me. Something’s puzzling you, and you want to tell me so it will puzzle you less. That’s all. And you’re prepared to betray Ciddey Soban to me for that.”
“She wants to kill you.”
“She shouldn’t be strong enough yet to try.”
“She’s very strong. She’s used your energy too, to draw on through me. A ghost-killer’s life force must be particularly restorative for a ghost. And she was a witch, too.”
“You underestimate your own psychic force. She didn’t need me. And you don’t get my word.”
Myal gnawed a blade of grass he had found he was after all able to pluck. “I’ll tell you anyway. I still have the advantage. You’ll see why.”
“Because presumably,” said Dro, “Ciddey’s link is located on that instrument I just handed back to you.”
Myal frowned, thunder stolen.
“You’re so intelligent. Know where?”
“I’d thought about the inset ivory,” said Dro, “but so far as I know, she never lost any bones.”
“Not a bone,” said Myal. “A tooth. A milk tooth. She fell as a baby, and it got knocked out. She was just a year old.”
Myal took another deep breath that was pointless. The absurdity of the story upset him, how two of the guidelines of his life had rested on lies.
“Old Soban kept Ciddey’s tooth. Superstition. Then he had a chance to sell something. He was always trying to sell things, heirlooms, furniture, for drink. He was a drunkard, like my sot of a father. That’s probably how they met. In some inn. Didn’t care about being landowner mixing with travelling rubbish, then, drinking each other under the stinking table. Then Soban got my bloody stink of a father interested in buying a unique musical instrument. It came from some foreign country. No one could play it. That was true enough. My drunken boss-eyed father went to Soban’s house, took one look at the instrument, and thought he, being a genius, could master it, and make a fortune. He’d get ideas like that sometimes. So he felt the instrument over, businesslike, and plunked away on the wires, and blew down the reed. And then he said he’d buy it, but there was a bit of ivory missing out of the inlay. What’d Soban take off the asking price?”
“To which,” said Dro, staring at the lake, “Soban replied he could replace the ivory. And he took the thing upstairs and got the milk tooth and rammed it into the wood where the hole was.”
“That’s it. Ciddey knows, because her father made a great history out of it. She said it shamed her. Till I came back on the same road my father did, and it turned out so useful for her.”
“But there’s more,” said Dro.
“Yes. There’s this big joke. I suppose it is fairly funny. Soban had a trick. He used to get bits of things, and weld them or carpenter them together. The instrument...” Myal clutched suddenly and convulsively at the two wooden necks resting against him. “...the instrument was like that, too, you see. He got two stringed bodies—guitars, mandolins, something, and carved them up and then joined them together. And the reed he threw in as an afterthought, to make it more—more bizarre. The joke was, nobody was meant to be able to play the damn thing. Nobody should be able to play it. And my father used to smash me from one end of the wagon to the other, when he was drunk, learning me how he’d teach me when he was sober.”
“And you can, of course, play it exquisitely.”
“It makes me sick. It really does. And the other thing.”
“Which is?”
“My bloody father. How he used to sit over it, polishing the wood and twanging the wires, and say he’d killed the man who’d owned the instrument He never killed Ciddey’s father for it. He never even stole it. He paid for it.”
“Which disappoints you.”
“No. It’s just—I based my life on my screaming fear of his violence, on his capacity for murder, maybe. And he didn’t. Which is odd, because he looked like he meant it when he said it.”
Dro got up. Myal glanced at him. Dro said slowly, “Do you remember what he actually said?”
“The exact words? Yes, I do. He said them often enough.”
“Say them.”
Myal twisted uncomfortably, reacting to an insidious tremor of tension on the air. A tension which had been there all along, of course, which was now growing, swamping both of them.
Finally, Myal looked down and touched the strings. Perhaps unconsciously, astra
l or not, he switched himself over into his past, over into the skin of that hated, terrible man, whose minstrel’s hands had clamped on the instrument, whose small pig’s eyes had congealed in a cold red blankness. Savouring, tasting what had been, what he had done.
“He used to say,” said Myal, “‘You learn to play this, you ugly cretinous little rat. I killed a man because of this. I killed him good and dead.’”
“Yes,” Dro said.
His own eyes were wide open, but they looked shut. Like the eyes of a man who has just died.
Myal’s father’s image slid off from Myal. He surfaced from it, sighing, as if coming up from deep water.
“What is it?” he said to Dro.
“It’s a dry lake,” said Parl Dro. “And we’re going down there.”
“What?”
Parl Dro began to walk away, picking down over the slope, the wrecked leg swinging itself with a stiff, agonised elegance.
Bemused, Myal scrambled, forgetting that no incorporeality need ever scramble, after him.
The shelves of the lake were hard-baked, already partly petrified, composing a terraced effect of powdery stone, like the earthworks of some extraordinary, inverted castle. Here and there, the antique slimes and marshes the lake had tried to transform itself into as it emptied, had grown weird trees and thickets which, in turn, had perished and calcified. It did not seem to be only the going of the water, however, which had made the place so inimical to what tried to live there. Probably the upheaval in the hill which had slain living Tulotef, was also responsible for the draining of the lake. There had been laval activity deep down to complement the earth-shake above. As a result, some fluid poison or other, some literal scum of the earth, had processed itself into the waters of the lake. So that, as it died, it also killed.
There was nothing beautiful anywhere, nothing to resemble the beauty of a ruin. Even the beauty of a wilderness or a waste was absent. Close to, more than anything, the corpse of the lake and its vitrified channels looked like some horrid amateur sculpting in river clay, set in the sun, and then magnified beyond all belief and all reason.
It was a couple of hours’ climb down to the topmost shelves. Then they walked about there for a couple of hours, or glumly sat, staring into the abyss, not speaking. It was like a mouth into hell, with none of hell’s hellish glamour, not even the warmth of flames.
Later, they went out along a cracked dancing floor of natural brick, observing the sticky shadows that still stuck to the river bottom. Those inadequate waters had been poisoned too. You saw the bones of fish lying thick as fallen leaves, ribbed into the petrifying mud far below. Myal noted that the forest, where it touched the edges of the lake and its channels, was also dying. Dead trees stood nude, like fishbones grown to great heights. There were no birds, and no beasts on the ground.
Nowhere was there any sign of the Tulotef which, the landslide behind it, had poured away into the lake.
They sat on a fallen tree as the afternoon began to come, stringing out their shadows artistically on panes of sun.
“Where is it, then?” asked Myal. It was the first thing either of them had said, beyond occasional invective, for hours. The conversation on the hill above loomed over them, but they had left it there, convincingly inaccessible as the grass, till they should climb back. Myal carried the instrument in the old way. He could no longer walk through things, as if the instrument, being solid, prevented him.
“If you mean the town,” said Dro, “you’re looking at it.”
“No, I’m not. If the lake’s gone, there should be a ruin lying down there, exposed. Broken roofs and snapped vertebrae.”
“They’re there. You can’t see them because either the weather and the water’s all but rotted them away, or they’re changing into stone along with the banks.”
“Oh.” Myal picked up a handful of loose flints, glad he could, and tossed them over into the smear of liquid in the river. They struck with turgid little plops, or cracking sounds where they did not reach the water and rapped fish spines instead. The cold white crags beyond the forest stared at the blue sky. The only live thing seemed to be the sky. Myal did not look back at the hill where he had lain most of the night, with his astral body plastered to Ciddey Soban. “I deduce,” said Myal, “you’ve got some outrageously sagacious plan for destroying them. I mean what’s left of the ruins.”
“No.”
Myal shifted, looking at Dro warily.
“But they’re the psychic link for Tul—for the Ghyste, aren’t they? You have to destroy them.”
“The key to releasing the ghost is to change the link. Metamorphosis. The bone has to be smashed. The shoe has to be burnt.”
“Well how are you going to burn and smash all that?”
Dro looked back at him. He appeared older than any line in his face, and charismatic as a gaunt black cat.
“I’m not, Myal. I don’t have to. Most of it’s been changed already. Most of it’s crumbled or ossified. That’s sufficient. And what hasn’t, soon will. Another couple of winters’ snows, another hot summer, and there won’t be any link left here that Tulotef s collective ghost can hold on to.”
“Wait a minute.”
Dro gazed at him with enormous courtesy.
“I was up there,” said Myal. “It was real. They’re strong in—up there. A whole busy town, and men looking as lifelike as you.”
“Or you,” said Dro.
Myal looked slightly uncomfortable.
“Are you going to explain?”
“Yes, I’ll explain.”
Dro spoke carefully and steadily, watching Myal. Myal could not always meet the older man’s gaze. There were about fifteen years between them in age, but it felt like a century. It felt like a hurt, a wound that had never healed and never would.
Tulotef had appeared strong and whole to Myal because he had expected it to be, and because he himself was no longer inside the fleshly envelope of mundane human life. The streets, the crowds, the great procession; the man he had robbed, the innkeeper, the bed—even the three riders and their horses in the wood—everything had been there, but where he, and for that matter dead Ciddey, had seen facts there had been only echoes.
“It’s the stories that are strong, that have got stronger, even as Ghyste Mortua itself has decayed. The stories Cinnabar believed, after her man started playing with magic and ran off with someone else. The stories you hear told all over this end of the country. Yes, the ghosts have got more irrepressible year by year—in legend. In reality, they’re just a few papers left blowing about in the woods, and on the hill.”
Dro told Myal about Sable in the forest, living so near the Ghyste.
“She frequently sees the ghosts of the Ghyste. They’ve grown solid. She anticipated seeing them even by day. But that was because she reckoned on seeing them that way. Or wanted to, and imagined it, for all I know. The giveaway was that she lived close enough to have been easy prey, if they could take her. In the tales, Tulotef abducts any live human in the vicinity to feed off his energy. Cinnabar’s belief again. And mine, long ago, when I studiously learned how to project my spirit out of my body, in order to come in safely at their gate. No. They’re harmless now to the living. The only victim they can seize on is someone who couldn’t be a victim at all, someone in the same state as themselves. Or near it. Ciddey, or you.”
“But,” said Myal.
He fell silent, remembering how the persons in the town had sometimes been there, sometimes not. Remembering the aimless repetitive activities. Even the three bullies in the wood, who had dragged him from the pool, had seemed to appear out of nowhere. And their grisly jibes about necrophilia between mortal and deadalive, their turning from Ciddey to him and back again—as if the two new ghosts were so fresh, so vital by comparison, the riders might be mistaking one, or both, for the genuinely living.
“But,” said Myal again, “you thought, or you wouldn’t have come here—”
“When I started out, I had go
od reason to credit a malevolent, sorcerous ghost town at the peak of its powers. Then, to reach here became a compulsion. It was a place I had to get to. But I’ve suspected, over the past days of travelling, what I might find.”
“Didn’t sound like it.”
“No.”
“So what will you do?”
“Let it finish dying on its own. It already practically has.”
“That doesn’t sound like a ghost-killer talking.”
“It isn’t, anymore.”
Myal went cold. He was not sure why. He stared at Dro, and now Dro smiled and looked away.
“So you needn’t worry about the only real ghost left here. I mean Ciddey,” said Dro. “I’m afraid her sister didn’t escape my vengeful headlong zeal. Which is maybe just as well. But Ciddey... she can be your problem.”
“Thank you. You said she’d feed off me.”