Kill the Dead(12)

“Why does a surgeon draw a man’s tooth when it’s decayed?”

“Issen the same. Not attall. I’ve heard of you, and your kind. Poor liddle ghosts driven sobbinganscreaming out’f the place they wanna be most.”

“It’s necessary. What’s dead can’t go on pretending it’s alive.”

“Anthasswhy you wannagetter Ghyzemortwa—”

When the light began to go, Myal Lemyal was already gone, blind drunk on white brandy and passed out in the clover. Senseless, however, one hand had fallen on the sling of the grotesque instrument, and mingled with it in a firm and complex clutch.

Of Parl Dro there was no longer any sign.

When he woke and saw the stars scattered like dice overhead, Myal knew he had made yet another mistake.

There was a clean fragrant wind blowing on the hills. It helped soothe his pounding headache. But it did not help much in the other matter. He had lost the King of Swords, handsome Death, Parl Dro the Ghost-Killer. Of course, it was inevitable that he would ruin this chance too. Myal considered his first slip-up had been in getting born. He had gone on wrecking his chances systematically ever since.

The worst thing was that he was still drunk. Despite the headache and an inevitable queasiness, he still felt inclined to roll about in the grass howling with insane laughter. His own inanity irritated him. He put the instrument on his shoulder and staggered down the slope, alternately giggling and cursing himself.

He was detouring by the village and stumbling across the fields to rejoin the road beyond it, making for the faintly glowing cutout of the mountain, before it dawned on him why. Though Dro had abandoned him, Dro would not have abandoned the leaning house and its two sisters, one quick, one dead. Sooner or later Dro would be revisiting that house. Myal had only to be in the vicinity to freshen their acquaintance. Perhaps another tack might be in order. “I never had a big brother. Never had anyone to look up to, learn from.” He could hear himself saying it, and winced. It was difficult to be sure how to get around someone like Dro.

The house was leaning there, in its accustomed position of decline, when he re-emerged on the road. Starlit, the moon still asleep, and dominated by its trees, it did look ghostly.

Myal shivered, scared and also romantically stirred by the idea. He had glimpsed the live sister, Ciddey, five evenings ago, when he first exhaustedly arrived here over the mountain. She was a true lady, like one of the Cold Earl’s women, or the Gray Duke’s, or a damsel of any of those endless succession of courts he had flitted in and out of, mothlike, scorching his wings. Ciddey was like a moth too. Pale, exquisite, fragile. And somehow inimical, eerie... abroad by night with unhuman glittering eyes—

Myal began to know the itching panic of a babe alone in unfamiliar darkness.

He looked at the house among its trees, and hugged himself in an infantile intuitive search for comfort. Naturally, Parl Dro would come along the road and find him this way, quivering with fright. But there was as yet no evidence of Dro or his inexorable exorcism.

Suddenly Myal had a wild impulse. He was accustomed to them; they were usually misguided and mostly led to mishap. Their phenomena had also commenced with him in childhood. The perverse directives the brain was sometimes capable of—to drop the tray loaded with priceless glass, to leap the too-wide gap between a pair of speeding wagons, to spit in the face of the landowner’s steward—such contrary notions, normally suppressed by the average person, had always proved irresistible to Myal. They were not caused by reckless bravery, either, for Myal was not brave, but merely by the same chemistry that had forced him, so unwisely, to be conceived.

The current impulse was driving him across the road, toward the iron gate, into the umber yard. That achieved, he sat, trembling slightly, on the edge of the stone well. He swung the instrument forward, and began to sing Ciddey (or was it Cilny?) a love song. His voice was an unpowerful but attractive tenor. In the silence it seemed very loud. The strings popped under his fingers, and the notes struck the walls like uncanny sideways rain.

When the shutter slapped open overhead, Myal’s heart practically stopped.

He glanced up, keeping the song going. A pallid bolt of light hung in the ivy, the shape of a single moth’s wing.

The girl leaned through the light. It was the live one—probably. Her braided hair was like moonshine.

Myal gasped and left off singing. He was half in love with her, and frozen with fear.

“What is it?” said the girl. She stared at the instrument. Slender little hands like fox paws gripped the sill. “What do you want?”