by Tanith Lee
Dro had never loved anything, anyone. Not even Silky, who had only been a part of himself, as Myal was.
“I’m sorry about the instrument,” said Dro matter-of-factly.
“Damn the instrument.” Myal cried harder, for he had loved the instrument. He tried harder to hide the crying. He tapped the wall with his long neurasthenic fingers. It did not look like a wall any more. It was a ridge of the bare hill. The building and the blank yellow lamps were gone, and the bells and wheels and hammers and songs. Maybe they had exorcised Tulotef after all. Just talked it away by a recital of cruel truths.
“I’m sorry about everything,” said Dro.
“But you told me.”
“It’s your right to know.”
“But not my right to hope anything good will ever happen.”
Parl Dro picked up a flint. Idly, but swiftly, on the ridge he scratched his name. Backwards.
“And now I’m going,” Dro said.
“Don’t—” Myal looked up. He was afraid.
“Get out of this place, and walk back to Sable’s hovel. You’ll find it easy to locate, because you’re there, in the flesh. By tomorrow, you should be able to get into your body again. You’re stronger than you think.”
“I’m not as strong as you think. You think I can take all this and stay sane. Well I can’t. Where will you go?”
“Just somewhere to wait”
“What for?’
“To die. In my entirety. Ghosts do die. I’ve learned that from Tulotef. Particularly with no incentive, it could be quite quick.”
“Why not,” said Myal flippantly, “wait till I die. The link would break then, wouldn’t it?”
“You might live a long time. I hope you do. But I’ve got no right to be here. Think about my problem. I spent my life killing for a cause. I can’t refuse to kill myself for the same ethics.”
“You bastard.”
“Try to learn some new dialogue,” Dro said.
“More like yours,” Myal sneered.
“Preferably more like your own.”
Myal started to say something, but the sentence stayed in his mouth, because Parl Dro, handsome Death, the King of Swords, had vanished between one breath and another.
For ten minutes, Myal charged about the hill. He shouted to Dro, or against Dro. Then he stumbled and slid, and when he came to rest hard against a spike of rock that seemed to have been set there purposely to impale him, he felt something snap under his shoulder. He looked, and found he was lying on the shambles of the broken instrument.
“You learn to play this, you ugly cretinous little rat,” Myal’s father had affectionately said to him—but not his father, after all, had he not always suspected? “I killed a man because of that. I killed him good and dead.”
Myal supposed it was because of the instrument. Because of his father—his unfather—being away to buy the instrument, Dro had slept with Myal’s mother.
“I killed him good and dead.”
Myal held the broken sound box in his arms, and wept in the dead black country of the night.
CHAPTER ONE
As the sun westered, it dyed the great branched candelabra of the trees. Trunks and boughs were steeped in patches of yellow-amber. The leaves were shining saffron, a prophecy of the autumn, no longer so far away, for the westering of the day allegorised the westering of the whole year. The end of summer was an arid scent, like the dust along the road.
Myal walked at a rhythmic pace. At each step, the bag on his shoulder jounced. There was a stringed instrument in the bag, nothing odd about it, a battered vintage guitar he had diced for in a ramshackle village, and, to his surprise, won. He had been thinking about the best way to portion and cut the body when he could find a twin for it and how to cut the twin too. Then there was a suitable reed to come by, and all the carpentry which these things would require, to fix them in place. He did not make the plans quite lightly, either, for remembrance of their forerunner still gnawed at his heart. It always would. He had buried the bits of wood and wire on the hill of Tulotef. The first grave made there for centuries. Certainly, the first grave to be mourned.
But grief did not have to jeopardise other emotions. The awareness of being inside real flesh made him secure, just as practicing the trance state of astral release exhilarated him. There had also been some luck in the past month. Gambler’s luck and minstrel’s luck. Even luck with a girl in a lowland cottage, a girl who wanted only a day and night, and not all his days and nights thereafter. Maybe the old woman in the hovel had blessed him. He had given her a present of three of the silver pegs from the dead instrument, since she had cared for him so well during his... absence. She had also sewn his shirt together where she had cut it previously, searching for the drug that tranced him. Actually, her name was not Sable. That was just the scrawl on the door which related to a former tenant. Parl Dro had not been right about everything. This notion had cheered Myal, as, with a droll cunning, he set out on his quest. He had been cheered as well by the memory of how he had achieved success before, against greater odds, when he was delirious with a fever and the onslaughts of two greedy deadalive.
He was not apprehensive now, not even desperate anymore. Merely determined, like any heir to a fortune, to claim his birthright. Dro had only one thing of worth to offer Myal, and that was the acid elixir of his own company; his erudition, his harsh judgment, the razors of his tongue and his mind. Myal had grown up in a beast pit, and the earth had gone on looking that way. He was tired of it. He needed a new vantage. He understood Dro could give Myal his own self, or show him where his self was to be found. He did not intend Dro, who had sown him accidentally, and abandoned him in death, to get away with it. Myal had acquired the trick from women he had had trouble with, maybe. But it was still a valid trick, and he had the knack of it: blackmail.
For the rest, he knew Dro would no longer vampirise him. Dro was independent to a fault, and had learned to fuel himself, like some volcanic fire, once ignited. Myal’s other role, as Parl Dro’s reason for life—or reminder to live—Myal accepted gladly, and with amused pride and a desire to please. It was fine, even funny, that till Myal died, Dro would not. Improvising on the humour, Myal had now one mad recurring vision, which tended to make him giddy with laughter. It concerned himself at fifty-five or so, and Parl Dro, his father, still looking the age of the hour of his death, some fifteen years younger than his son. Or perhaps Dro would age now, logically, a master of all life’s disguises.
“It’s easy to follow you,” Myal had said to Parl, beside the fire in the ruined fortress, as the night shook with fever. “You leave a kind of shadow behind you. I can’t see it with my eyes, but I know it’s there. I can find you simple as breathe.”
It was admittedly a little harder to trace a man permanently in astral form, once he had decided to remain mostly invisible. Yet here and there, the beacon sent out its ray, the habit of corporeality proving too much for even Parl Dro’s fortitude. And meantime, the link itself was the best guideline in the world. And what would Myal say when he caught him up? It was still difficult to be sure how to get around someone like Dro. Though, of course, now he believed he could do it. Somehow.
The sun burned in the black flames of poplars.
The high sky was only a clear luminous parasol. No cloud. Not even a bird. Not yet even a star.
But the unseen shading was vivid. It had led him over a hunchbacked hill, off the road, down a meandering track and farther into the trees. The light began to go suddenly, like water running through the fingers.
“You’re a magician,” Myal could say to Parl. “You can kid anyone you’re only a man, but you can walk through walls. You’re invulnerable to death by blade or rope or poison or any other normal agency. You could get in a king’s vault and steal anything you felt like. And you want to throw all that away? As a professional thief, I resent that.”
And he could say to him, “I never had a father. I had a thing with a leather strap in its hands
.”
And he could say to him, “You knew I’d come after you, like before. Stop making grand gestures and face facts. All right, you’re guilty about the others you sent off. But you’re determined to survive however you possibly can.”
The fulvous leaves softened into dark greens and umbers, and the branching stems were cool as ash. The glade was empty, or appeared to be.
Myal stopped, and looked at it, swallowing his heart as usual, glancing casually at a particular vacant area between two trunks.
“Well,” said Myal, his voice light and carrying, with an exquisite diction.
In the area between the trees, the unseen shadow emerged, dim and formless.
“I said,” said Myal, “well.”
And then he fired sheer will across the glade, the psychic’s instrument of intent and survival. It hit the place between the trees, bound and held, and hauled. And Parl Dro evolved, filled in by velvet blacks, till the paler sculpture of the face was firmly marked between ebony mantle and raven’s hair.
Parl Dro looked at Myal with slight anger and mild interest. His disapproval was almost comic in that instant, his foreboding beauty almost touching; his despair, if he did despair, was hidden.
And Myal laughed at him, and Myal looked himself beautiful and ruthless as a gold angel fallen straight from the setting sun. Just like the prince he had always really known he was.
“Well,” drawled Myal for the third time, knowing now what to say. “Fancy meeting you.”