by Tanith Lee
“Maybe she won’t. I’ve realised something. It doesn’t always happen that way, or not permanently. She’s already manifested out of your vicinity, in Cinnabar’s village street. When Ciddey’s strong enough, she may always be able to maintain herself, without—” Dro broke off.
“This isn’t you talking,” Myal said.
Dro stood up again and walked off. Myal got up and followed. Halfway back along the natural brick dancing floor, Dro turned.
“Why don’t you go and write your damned song?”
“Or, put it another way, get lost.”
“What a talent you’re developing for words, Myal Lemyal.”
“It’s being with you,” Myal snapped back. “It rubs off. I’ll start limping next.”
“All right,” said Dro. “I’ve seen you physically housed. I’ve told you you can get back into your body. I’ve explained Tulotef. What else do you want?”
“You think explaining is enough? Telling is enough? I want some proof.”
“What proof?”
“Wait till nightfall. Then meet me in the town. Just as you are, without any bloody trance like the one your redhead dumped me in without a may I or a shall I. Flesh and blood, a reformed ghost-killer. In Ghyste Mortua after sunset. Safe.”
Something ran over Parl Dro’s face.
“I decline.”
“You’re afraid.”
“Yes. Probably. But not of what you think.”
“I’m not thinking. My mind’s a blank.”
Dro said nothing, not even the inevitable retort.
“After sunset,” Myal repeated. He struck a pose, and did not feel foolish doing so. “If I’m still there,” he announced, “I’ve got a feeling you have to be.”
“Your magnetic personality,” said Dro. He was recovering.
“Not quite. But it occurs to me you either come after me or leave me enough help so that I can follow you, one way or another.”
“Which must mean I need you for something.”
“Right.”
“I wonder what it could possibly be.”
“Cinnabar knew.”
“Cinnabar probably supposed you were my fancy boy.”
Myal took half a step back.
“And I suppose that’s what you think it is, too.”
“What is?”
“The fact that I—I’m drawn—that I—” Myal blushed, and very painfully. He turned, scooped up another flint and hurled it at the hill of Tulotef where once the flints had crashed on uplifted faces in a deadly rain. His body lay in a hovel eight miles away, yet the astral body could still burn with embarrassment. Or seem to, feel as if it did. “I’ll see you up there in the town after sunset,” said Myal. He strode away toward the hill, leaving Dro standing still as if ossifying along with the lake, the land, the bones of the fish.
A few minutes after the sun had submerged, carelessly smudging the horizon, Ciddey Soban found herself lying in a great bed, under a raven-wing canopy, alone.
The smoke-pink shades of sunfall made no impression on the room. Dusk was identified by a solidifying of furnishings, walls, thoughts. Ciddey sat up in the tomb-cold sheets, and understood that Myal, who had been with her a moment ago—before the brief blending of day had interrupted them—was gone. And not only gone. The paranoia of her condition instantly overwhelmed her with the apprehension of bad news.
Parl Dro was in Tulotef, and Myal had gone to meet him.
Myal was Dro’s accomplice. Apprentice, maybe.
And she, lonely and lowering herself, wrapped in the warm arms of Myal, had betrayed herself to him. She had felt a sinister joy as she told him. But she had been unwise.
Stupid to think the dead were a fraternity. Myal would be loyal to his master, Dro. Even in death, Myal would stand beside Dro, against her.
Ciddey beheld her sister’s lovely childish face floating bloated in water. That was why Ciddey kept dreaming she herself was dead. Identifying herself with Cilny. Foolish. Ciddey was not dead. The well, the stream—no, she was alive. It was Myal who was dead. Myal who had made her come with him to this strange town.
The day had gone so quickly. Why could she not remember it?
Somewhere, music played on the streets, and bells began tenderly to gild the darkness. A drop of blanched almond yellow hung in the window, slid away, was replaced by another. Ciddey recalled the procession in which the town’s duke, or earl, would be riding.
Defenceless and alone, and well-born, she must appeal to him for protection. The murderer could not touch her then. Indeed, she might ask for vengeance. Dro had killed her sister. Yes, she had pursued him to exact payment for that. And now she would. She must.
She flung herself from the bed and ran through the closed door, not noticing, and down the curiously deserted stairs of the inn, on to the black-lit streets.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The procession blew down the wide street. The lamps and candles hung from it like pale fruits, but it came like a long wave of sombre weather, a dark wind. The priesthood wore dull crimson habits and dull gold cowls, tarnished as if under water. Censers smoked and imparted an oily fragrance. Boys in livid white sang in high voices above the bells. A carriage passed behind funeral horses with stained-glass eyes, then another, and another. The earl or duke rode among armed mailed men. A greenish storm of cloaks swirled about them.
Where the wide street led into another a flight of broad stairs came down from an upper thoroughfare. Ciddey stood on the stairs, holding herself upright, waiting.
As the priests and the carriages unfurled, she tossed away her hair, combing it with her fingers. When she saw the mailed men, she searched their ranks, looking for her assailants of the previous night. But she found it hard, nearly impossible to recall their individual appearances. Within the processional crowd every face looked blurred. Even the face of the duke-earl, riding in his rich regalia among his men. He was expressionless, his features like old embroidery in a faded tapestry.
Nevertheless: “My lord!” Ciddey cried out, raising her small fists. “I beg your mercy! My lord, hear me!”
And then, in a terrible series of moments, she became aware the procession was unhaltable, that she was to be ignored. She felt both panic and bruised ego. She uttered a scream of frustration and flung herself off the stair against the nearest horse.
For a second, she could not seem to catch hold of it, could not even seem to feel it. Then her senses came clear, and she clung to a mane, and to a booted leg. Looking up, she recognised after all the face of one of the bravos from the wood.
“Sir,” she called, “I beg you. Please listen to me.”
The man looked down, and gradually seemed to see her, as if he revived from a strange insomniac sleep. But if he remembered their former dealings he gave no signal. He tried to thrust her away.
“Sir,” she wailed, “I’m well-born. I need to speak to your lord. I must warn him. He’s in danger.”
“Oh yes,” said the mailed rider. A red jewel dazzled gruesomely, as it had beside the pool when he had lifted the broadsword to slash at her. As it had when the sword had somehow, miraculously, done her no harm. “They all say that. Let me speak to the lord, they say. Just five minutes. We have penalties for obstruction here.”
Insanely, clinging to the horse and to his leg, she was being pulled backward, borne away with the procession. The rider had stopped trying to dislodge her. He leered at her.
“You don’t understand. Someone’s coming to your town. He’s a murderer. He’ll kill us all.”
“Up you come,” said the rider, and hauled her onto the saddle in front of him. He had done that last time, too. Did he really not recall? “I might kill him first,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, “I’d like that.”
“What else do you like?”
“Let me speak to your master.”
“You’re a newcomer. You can’t speak to the duke.”
“I’m Ciddey. Don’t you recall me?”
“This is Tulotef. I can’t recall every girl I’ve nodded to on the street.”
It was curious. The man seemed to have grown more positive, more human, the more she talked to him. And the riders around her were also less indefinite. They were laughing together now, or staring about, with hauteur. The horses snorted. Even the bells sounded more intense. Ciddey tried to turn her head, but the rider cuffed her. A sentence rose to her lips, and she could no longer deny it, though she shied from its meaning as she said it.
“The man who is coming here. His name is Parl Dro. Have you ever been told what—a ghost-killer is?”
An extraordinary thing happened. She had spoken softly, yet her words seemed to intensify as they left her mouth. They blossomed, spread, enveloped the street, hitting the walls of the houses, the stunned sky, like frightened birds thrown from an opened cage. And all at once, the unhaltable procession had halted. It appeared to petrify. The riders sitting bolt upright, the horses’ heads reared forward. The choir of boys’ voices died away just as the bells fell quiet, as if a wind had dropped.
Ciddey trembled, or she felt she did. And then, behind her, that man with the tapestry face coming unstitched spoke aloud.
“Bring her here to me.”
Ciddey’s rider turned his horse smartly and shouldered back through the stylised tableau. No one looked at them. If an eye blinked, a tassel fluttered, a bead gleamed, she might only have imagined it. There was no noise in all the town.
The duke of Tulotef sat and gazed at her.
“Who are you?”
“A Soban. Ciddey Soban.”
“I’ve never heard the name.”
She was suddenly icy cold, and lonely, lonely. Among strangers, without friends. There was no one to turn to after all.
“I wanted to warn you. A traveller is coming who is—”
“Yes,” said the duke. He was like a rag doll. His face was all undone now, and he seemed ready to unravel from head to toe, and be rolled up into some other dimension.
She wanted to go home. She wanted not to be afraid, or in search of vengeance. No longer a heroine. She wanted obscurity, loss of identity, peace. She wanted an answer to some question she did not understand how to ask. But Myal—Myal and Parl Dro—
“You must destroy him. You’ve got the power. There are enough of you,” she said bitterly, not really sure what she was bitter about, or talking about. “It’s you or him. He’s very accomplished at his trade. I’ve watched him at work. I know.”
This man, this duke, had ruled in Tulotef on the night the hill fell on him.
When she drowned, he had already been returning to this place for centuries. She lowered her eyes. She tasted water, then ashes. She said again, “Destroy him.”
When the sun had gone and the dead town began to come back it did not look quite as it had. The stone streets were less absolute. The tops of the towers were cloudy and the scalloping of the roofs below seemed bathed in a soft lake fog. For, of course, the lake had returned also, filling up its basin and its channels, as though the world bled water. Yet even the lake was subtly altered, as if it had frozen over in the late summer dusk, become a sheet of luminous, motionless ice. Myal observed these things and their difference to him almost impatiently. He felt an odd relaxation, because everything had become a farce. He, alive yet a spirit, standing in a ghost town with a real wooden instrument on his shoulder, the other shoulder resting on the corner of a phantom house that felt quite real also. In such a situation, either madness or sublime indifference would result His temperament had automatically chosen the latter. So he leaned there, and watched the endless procession swim by down in the streets below, and even entertained the notion of improvising a melodic counterpoint to the bells and the songs, but somehow he never got as far as bringing the instrument forward where his fingers could reach the strings.
On an opposite wall there was some scribbled graffiti. Myal’s limited education made him dismiss the fact he could not read it. Then he realised he could not read it because it was written mirror fashion, back to front.
He was waiting for Parl Dro—initially, with glib certainty, which masked a vague unease. After about half an hour, with a nervous agitation that masked alarm, rage and a curious unaccountable anguish.
Myal was not sure why he had demanded Dro’s appearance in Tulotef. The argument he had given was dramatic and inane—proof. Proof of what, and who wanted it? No, Myal was conscious that he had merely been forcing the issue. And that, as from the very start of their acquaintance, if such it could be called, Myal had felt a foolish magnetism to Dro, one way or another. The magnetism worried Myal for a number of reasons. At first, it had seemed just another of his impulsively fatal fascinations with the element of danger. He had had, besides, the excuse of wanting to make a song of Ghyste Mortua. But when had that idea first taken hold of him? Could he really pin it down as being before he tried to rob the ghost-killer in the mountain valley village? It seemed to Myal now that there had been some faintly unsavoury destiny that had directed him over the mountain pass and into the village, only four or five days before Parl Dro also limped the same way. Unsavoury and supernatural. For not only had Myal’s wandering advent meant a meeting with Dro, but also the ultimate revelation about the instrument—no longer a rare terpsichorean mystery, but a jest, a con trick, the toy of a clown. The coincidences that belaboured the plot Myal’s recent days seemed to have become niggled him. Dro and he, and Ciddey Soban come to that, seemed tangled like strands of wool.
Something unprecedented was happening to the procession. He had not been watching it with all his attention, but in retrospect, it seemed to have stopped, and now it seemed to be changing course like a demented river—
“Enjoying yourself?”
As before, Myal nearly overbalanced. He whirled around with a yell of startled vexation and of relief. Parl Dro stood under one of the yellow lamps, still as if carved. As on the hill, there had been no discernible prologue to his arrival.
“You like giving me heart failure, don’t you,” said Myal.
“Not particularly. It’s too easy.”
“Well, you’re here.”
“So I am. Now what do we do?”
“I—don’t know,” said Myal slowly. “I think we just wait. Something’s going to turn up.”
“Yes, something’s bound to do that.” Dro looked away over the slope to the muddled writhing of the procession. “You realise your psychic abilities,” said Dro, “undisciplined and infantile as they are, have persuaded you to precipitate a crisis.”
“Oh, don’t give me that.”
“I’m afraid that’s exactly what I have given you.”
The procession was spooling up into an alleyway. Myal was suddenly reminded of a flock of sheep, and let out a crow of laughter. The duke-earl of Tulotef, and all his ghoulish court, were coming this way. Insubstantial or not. Harmful or not. Certainly, a crisis.
On the road, they would pass by the inn where Myal and Ciddey had lain together. Maybe that was significant He had noted the inn sign jutting out across the street between the roofs quite some way down. And though he could not see it, the girl would still be trapping the unicorn by its horn and the mailed warrior slashing off the unicorn’s head. A castration symbol? Or maybe a simple omen. Myal turned back to Dro.
“I think Ciddey’s with the procession. If so, she’s said something about you to their ruler here—about your line of work. You said Tulotef was weak, but how weak is Tulotef s weak? They could kill you, could they?”
“Unless I was here in astral shape only, as you are. As I originally planned to be. As you dissuaded me from being, did you not?”
“I’m sorry. I thought—you said—”
“They don’t kill. Not randomly any more. They haven’t the energy left to do it, and there’s no true incentive. Except with an exorcist. That hate goes as deep with the deadalive as fear of the deadalive goes with most humans.”
Myal choked down presumably imagin
ary nausea, and said, “Get going. Run.”
“Run? You forget I’m a cripple,” said Dro very graciously.
“Well hobble then. I’ll stall them.”
“With what? Handstands? Communal singing?”
“I’ll think of something. They can’t hurt me. Can they?”
“Probably not. I wouldn’t swear to it, under the circumstances.”
“I know you’ve got a death wish,” said Myal coldly. “Any kind of murderer has. But don’t indulge it here and now. Go on.”
“While you bravely fight them off. That’s what it will come to.”
“Go.”
“Have you ever fought the deadalive?”
“Will you—”
Parl Dro stood like an emperor, watching the tide of death sweep around corners, between walls, up steps. Myal shouted at him, then muttered, then ceased communication of any sort. He too watched, with a fundamental sinking of his non-present vitals, until the crimson spectres of Tulotef s priesthood brimmed up into the street, directly in front of him. Priests, a choir, even the carriages had somehow negotiated the route. Then everything folded aside, and a wedge of mailed riders came pushing through.