by Tanith Lee
Myal saw through all of them. Not literally, since they appeared solid enough; their insubstantiality proclaimed itself in other, more insidious ways. Yet his eyes seemed to pierce them all, like any unknown mob, seeking and resting themselves on a single familiar face, which obviously was Ciddey’s.
White as some wicked flower, she sat on a horse which a man in mail had been leading. His face was a blank, as if set there ready to be sketched in with emotion, personality. All their faces were the same. Except for hers.
There was also a man riding close at her side, clothed in an oddly far-off glitter. He must be the duke. Ciddey, not taking her eyes from Myal, made a small gesture to this man, deferring to him. Yet the duke of Tulotef hung there, somehow creditable only because Ciddey included him in her awareness.
And it was Ciddey who spoke.
“Hallo, traitor,” she said to Myal. And then she called him a very foul name. Although Myal had been on the receiving end of it countless times, it unnerved him especially, coming from her kissable lips. But her eyes had gone past him. They had fixed on Parl Dro. “Lord duke,” said Ciddey, “the man in black is the man I told you of. The murderer. He killed my sister virtually in front of me. My darling sister, all I had in the world. I swore to have justice from him. I dedicated myself to it. I came all these miles to your town and your court to ask it.”
The ghost duke stared at Parl Dro. Some vestige of decayed mortal anger marked his countenance, which was firmer now. His long-nailed hands tensed very slightly on the jewelled reins.
“The lady has a grievance against you,” said the duke to Parl Dro. “How are you prepared to answer it?”
“With a politely smothered yawn,” said Dro.
“Your insolence suggests desperation.”
“I’m sorry. It was meant to suggest boredom.”
“I—” said the duke.
Ciddey cut through like a thin white blade.
“Don’t debate with him, lord duke. Kill him.” Ciddey leaned from the horse and clutched the shoulders of the mailed retainer who had led it. “You kill him.”
The retainer tensed, given life. But, “How?” said the duke simply, over Ciddey’s head.
Ciddey snarled. Her long teeth flashed silver. She had stopped being a girl. She had become what she truly was. The hair could not rise on Myal’s astral scalp and neck, but nevertheless he felt it shifting. A movement smoothed over the crowd, also. A brief exploratory movement—testing itself —forward, toward Dro. And Myal could see in it a host of flickering hands, a thousand nails, like long flat blades—the nails that went on growing in a grave, those things of the body which, like the deadalive themselves, refused to acknowledge death. And, as if to complement Myal’s observation, “How?” whispered Ciddey. “Why, just tear him in pieces.”
Myal turned wildly. Parl Dro only stood there, not reacting in any fashion. Myal turned as wildly back again. Like the first chord of a hideous song, Ciddey ordered the crowd to follow her, by willpower and sheer hate. He had lain with that, comforting it and caressing it.
She slid from the horse and started to walk across to them, toward Dro. The crowd surged after, one gluey, mindless, malevolent step at a time.
As Myal moved, it was like plunging into a sea of ice. Breasting their hatred and his own terror, he struck out frantically for a shore he never reckoned to gain.
He stepped between Ciddey and Dro, therefore between the whole ghost crowd and Dro. As he did so, Myal slung the musical instrument off his shoulder and clutched it in his hands, digging his own nails into the wood of the two necks. Ciddey checked instantly, and the rest of them behind her.
He shook the instrument at her—his hands were shaking anyway—and she recoiled.
“Remember what you told me,” Myal said. His voice shook too. He wondered if his legs would give way.
Ciddey smiled. The smile showed only her lower teeth, and suddenly her eyes seemed to melt into black sockets.
“I remember, betrayer,” she hissed. “I told you about my milk tooth and how my father thrust it into the wood to replace a piece of ivory that had fallen out. I remember.”
“The tooth’s your psychic link,” said Myal. He stammered a little. He was now so cold he could barely feel what he held. The instrument might slip through his grasp, evade it as the pebble had. He must not let it. “If I destroy the tooth, you can’t stay here. Can you?”
“No,” she said softly, still smiling.
“I’ll do it,” he said.
“Oh,” she said, “great ghost-killer.” Then she laughed, except there was no sound. Out of her open mouth flew instead a silver blade, which landed on the paved street by Myal’s boots and flopped there. It was his turn to recoil. Ciddey held out her left hand, and stream water dripped from it, trickled, gushed. The water poured around the landed fish, which was whirled up in it. Ciddey held the water there like a silver shawl, and the fish spiralled in the water. “You’ll destroy the tooth, will you?” she said. “First you have to dig it out of the wood with your knife. Or do you have a knife? Perhaps you can borrow Parl Dro’s. The knife he used to pick the locks of my house on the night he killed Cilny. But then,” said Ciddey, twirling the water and the fish in bizarre loops and coils, “but then, I forgot. Even before that, you have to find out which of the pieces of ivory is my baby tooth. They’re all so smooth now, and so yellowed. They all look the same. Don’t they, minstrel?”
Myal stared at her, then at the instrument. Of course it was true. All those tiny chips of bone—he had never even counted how many—
Ciddey flung her shawl of water over him. He jerked aside at the vivid sting of its wetness, while the tail of the fish, completely palpable, horrible, thrashed his cheek. Then the crowd of dead things was pushing by, a single pulsing entity. He was smothered, trodden down, kicked, panicking and yelling, and then abruptly, thrusting through, surfacing, denying their force could affect him.
He struck bodies, cloaks, mail and hair out of his way. He had somehow a bright and detailed image of himself, as if a mirror were hung up in the air—a lunatic, teeth snarling, irises encircled by white, and he was sprinting. He wondered what he was doing, and before he had the answer he had already reached the end of the street where the overlaid roofs tumbled down across each other’s backs. Or seemed to. Where, in fact, the bare hillside dropped off into the night. His arms were out, throwing something violently away. It seemed to be himself he was throwing, but then a weight was gone, and he was left behind it. A sharp cry of loss broke from him. But then the cry was covered by what seemed to him the most awful noise he had ever heard.
Flung into space, falling fast toward impact and death, the musical instrument screamed.
It was a shrill tearing scream, slender, fearsomely melodious, composed of many notes sounded all together and without pause. Its very soul seemed crying. It had been cobbled together, a drunkard’s jest. It had come to life slowly as the boy Myal began stupidly, improbably, to play it. It had grown a spirit as a child grew length of bone and breadth of skin. It had grown life. It had belonged to Myal, and now he had killed it, and as it tore down the nothing of the atmosphere toward destruction, it shrieked to him. He knew it was only the air rushing up through the stops of the reed. He knew that. It made no difference.
He stood upright, but moaning ceaselessly, as if he had been hurt. He had. He did not even think to look back, to watch Ciddey Soban crouching in terror, tensed for the crash and the splintering which would shatter the linking tooth along with everything else. Myal had forgotten her, forgotten Tulotef, and Parl Dro. He merely wanted the scream to end, wanted the instrument’s agony of fear to end in the quickness of the death blow.
Then the scream cut off, and Myal, spreading out his hands as if to fly, nearly pitched off the hillside in the instrument’s wake.
It was Ciddey’s mocking voice which brought him out of wherever it was his emotions had taken him, her voice crisp as the sound of a coin ringing on the street.
> “You could never do anything right, Myal Lemyal, could you? Not even that.”
Then he realised, too stunned to be glad or afraid, that he had not heard the impact after all of wood on stone. So he peered into the abyss, and saw, no longer than his thumbnail, the instrument suspended, caught by its frayed sling. From the bracket of the inn sign, streets below. For a moment his reason was outraged, for the inn, its sign, the bracket, were as insubstantial as the rest of Tulotef. Then he recalled the stunted little tree which had appeared where the inn had been in the morning. It was the tree which had arrested the instrument’s fall. He could almost make it out, now he knew.
And behind him Ciddey, her link to living death unbroken, was saying to Parl Dro, just as Myal once had: “Lend me your knife. I can kill you with it.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Parl Dro stood and looked at the ghost girl, at her sad and evil and lovely face. He was aware the ultimate moments had arrived, inevitable as if they had been making love together, not hate. He had already braced himself. Despite the procrastination he had offered Myal, Dro had known this event was unavoidable when he sat in Sable’s hovel. Maybe he had known all along, as maybe he had known it all. He had used Ciddey inexcusably, not from a fastidious loyalty to his trade, but to cement his own damaged psyche. And so what came now was just enough, though not exactly the justice she craved.
Quietly, he took out the knife she had asked him for and handed it to her, the hilt toward her hand.
She accepted it doubtfully, however. Even the deadalive could know surprise, as they could know any state that suited their basic pretence of life.
“Thank you,” she said. But then: “It will be nice to stab you with your own blade.”
“Good.”
“Where should I strike,” she said, “to hurt you the most, and leave you alive the longest? You see, I want Tulotef to have you, too.”
He looked beyond her. To him, they were only a vague tumult, like mists boiling on the hill—archaic, stagnant ghosts. Their buildings were half-drawn in soft gray chalk against the sky. Beside the phantoms of the Ghyste, Ciddey looked very human. And Myal—he looked flesh and blood, kneeling on the hill’s edge, the dark-gold hair, the patchwork showman’s clothes, the pale face eaten alive with fright and personal trauma.
“Try for the guts,” said Dro to Ciddey. “It might be messy. Twist the knife a little, and it will be messier. If you get it right, a man can last up to three quarters of an hour, puking blood most of the time.”
He saw her drain whiter than her own whiteness and her eyelids flickered as if she were going to faint. She could kill, naturally, but the description had unnerved her.
“Maybe I will,” she said, biting her lip. “As you die, you’ll feel their claws. But you know what that feels like already, don’t you, if the stories about your damaged leg are true? I heard that story about you when I was a child. The kiss of claws and teeth.”
“Be careful,” he said, “you’re getting close to admitting your condition. You stole a lot of strength from Myal, and his inherent psychic powers let you become strong more quickly than is general. But to be a total success, you still have to believe you’re wholly alive. At least, for a while. Until you’ve settled in. And then you’ll find—”
“You’re talking too much for a ghost-killer,” said Ciddey. “I think I’ll stop you.”
Myal made an incoherent sound.
Dro glimpsed him jumping up, staggering, running toward Ciddey. Dro saw Myal’s hand snatch at her arm from too far off, and the snatch passing through her sleeve, missing a grip on ghostly muscle or bone. Dro saw Myal’s expression of utter non-comprehension as the knife thumped home in Dro’s chest. Despite her words, as on the first occasion, she had aimed for the heart.
The blow had pushed Dro, but no more than that. He stood, and went on watching. He watched the red blood spread from the sides of the blade, which quivered like a metal leaf buried almost to the hilt in his flesh. He took a desolate interest in it. He had expected pain, but there was none. He had presumably gone beyond any new pain by now.
Ciddey had retreated. Amusingly, she had backed into Myal, and they had each shifted aside to let the other pass. Dro half anticipated they would beg each other’s pardon. Now she poised there, staring. Myal stared, too. This continued for about a minute. Finally, Dro reached up and pulled the knife out of his heart. It was thick with blood. Ciddey coughed out a toneless little screech. So far Myal was too shocked, or too astrally oriented, to throw up.
Behind them, the misty boilings of Ghyste Mortua were fading out. They had recognised, if no one else had, the futility of brute force. Maybe they had even figured out why.
Dro let the bloody knife drop to the ground. As if it were a cue, Ciddey dropped on her knees. She crawled to Dro over the street. She had forgotten the ghost duke and his retinue, just as they had let go of her and the guide she gave them back into partial reality. Her hands fastened on Dro’s ankles and she shuddered.
“You’re an avenging angel,” she said. “Not a man, not a ghost-killer. An instrument of retribution.”
“I thought that was you,” he said.
“You’re not even—not even—”
“Not even bleeding anymore,” he finished, helping her. “The mark of the knife will fade in a few days. Perhaps less.”
“I must confess to you,” she said. She cried tears on his black boots. “Will I go to hell?”
“There isn’t a hell,” he said.
He felt unbearably tired and shut his eyes. He hardly listened as she made her confession to his boots.
She told him in any case those things he had gradually come to understand when sorting his reactions to the leaning house, the room in the stone tower, the dark well, her devouring vindictiveness. Ciddey had not simply mourned her sister Cilny’s death, she had caused it. They had had one of those frequent squabbles the village reported. It was hardly different from a hundred others, but its upshot was that Ciddey had pushed Cilny into the well. The younger sister had fallen across the rusty chain, clung to the bucket, but Ciddey had unwound the chain. It had been a long brevity of malice. When the struggles in the water had ended, Ciddey had woken as if from a nightmare. She had been overcome by horror. With a maniacal strength she had hauled up bucket and chain once more, the lightweight dead weight draped across it. Ciddey had flung her sister onto the paved yard. She had tried to cudgel the water from her lungs. Weeping more needless water on Cilny’s drowned face, Ciddey had sat and rocked her in her arms, confronting the ultimate loneliness of the deranged house of Soban. But in the night, Ciddey had carried and dragged her sister’s corpse to the stream below the mountain. Ciddey had woven her sister a wreath of yellow asphodel, but Ciddey still hoped the current would bear her sister away, out of sight and mind. Cilny, though, being absolutely dead, sank heavily to the stream’s floor. Even the fierce spring wash of melted snow did not move her. When the men found her and brought her back to Ciddey, Ciddey shaped her misery and her guilt into another thing. She bore Cilny’s ashes into the tower and worked witchcraft with them. She brought Cilny back to her, and cherished her dead as she had seldom done alive. Parl Dro the exorcist had sundered that expiation, and all the murk in Ciddey’s soul transferred itself to him. But she had found out now, Dro was not to be punished in her stead. Only Ciddey remained vulnerable, to be her own scapegoat. She lay on the street of Ghyste Mortua, and waited for nemesis.
But Parl Dro, who was not the sombre angel of divine wrath, did nothing, said nothing.
At last, Ciddey lifted her head. She experienced then a strange wave of emptiness, or was it more a sense of lightness, of the weight of Cilny slipping from her neck?
“I shall be punished,” she said with curious dignity. “Will you do it? What will happen?”
“You’ve been punished,” Dro said. He looked at her wearily. “You’ve punished yourself.”
“I must suffer in hell,” she said stubbornly. But a clear hard tensi
on was melting from her face, her body.
“There isn’t any hell.”
“Where shall I go, then?’
“Somewhere,” he said. “Somewhere not here.”
“Perhaps nowhere,” she said. She stood up. Suddenly, everything she had fought for, or against, no longer mattered to her. She did not see, but the tips of her pale fingers, her long pale hair, became in that moment transparent again, as at her first manifestation.
“Somewhere,” Dro repeated.
“Well,” she said, “you’d know.” She stared about her. An expression of uninterested incredulity crossed her face. “They’ve gone,” she said. “The ghosts of the Ghyste.”