Kill the Dead(13)

“I want,” Myal swallowed and lost his head completely. “I want to warn you.”

“Don’t trouble. I know the village. They’ll behave themselves. They still respect the name of Soban.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean the man called Dro.” He heard her catch her breath. She was lovely. He wished he was a thousand miles away. “He made out he was leaving, but he’ll be back—if he isn’t back already. He was going to Ghyste Mortua—I think. But he reckons he’s got dealings to settle with you first. You and—your sister.”

“Go away!” cried the girl in the window.

Myal jumped, but felt more familiar ground under his feet at her tone of anger and threat. “Only trying to be helpful. Sorry I spoke.”

“Wait,” said the girl. She was suddenly, appallingly defenceless. “What do you know about him?”

“Only that he’ll be back. If you want my advice, not that you do, you’d run for it”

“Where could I go?”

“Maybe—with me.”

He stared up at her, shivering at the romance of it all and wishing he could shut himself up. To his chagrin and his relief, the girl laughed at him.

“You. Who are you? Besides, what about my dead sister? Where is she to go? With you, too?”

“Perhaps,” Myal shuddered, “Parl Dro made an error there. Perhaps I don’t believe in ghosts.”

A shriek slit down the night.

It came from the topmost room of the tower, on the north side of the house.

Myal and Ciddey were momentarily petrified. The girl broke from her rigor before he did. Leaving the shutter wide, she turned and ran away into the depths of the house.

Myal remained in the yard, glaring wildly between the trees at the one corner of the tower that was visible from this vantage, a constriction in his throat.

CHAPTER THREE

The trees around the house on its north side could have been deliberately planted to give access to the tower. One in particular rested its boughs almost across the sill of the second-story window. Of course, a lame man might not be reckoned capable of scaling trees.

When Parl Dro reached the window, he found it latched from within. Easing the lame leg, which itself did not reckon it should be required to scale trees, Dro produced a slender knife, and slid it through the join between the shutters. In a couple of seconds it had raised the latch, and the two panes of dull glass parted. The room beyond was bare and empty, save for a few skeletal plants dying in dry soil and cracked pots on the floor. Dro entered it and vacated it as swiftly. The possible significance of the pots—herbal witchery—did not concern him, nor any longer the witch, judging by the state of them. Dro moved out through the door onto a steep stair. The top room lay straight above him at the stairhead, closed by a thick wooden door with plates and lock of rusty iron.

The girl was in the house, for he had seen her there soon after sunset, going with her lamp from window to window, latching each. The light had ultimately come to rest in an upper room, a thin thread behind shutters of wood. It was possible that this was a ruse, but he did not judge her so devious as to leave her lamp barely obvious in one place, and creep to another through the pitch-dark house. Besides, she would be hoping he was gone.

Just as he was starting up the tower stair, he heard the poignant unmistakable notes of Myal Lemyal’s wire strings.

Interested, Dro checked, almost pleased. If anything, this was to the good; Myal playing troubador at one end of the building would distract Ciddey Soban from this one. On the other hand, Myal’s purpose was decidedly oblique, maybe even to himself. It had been straightforward to dupe the musician, yet almost simultaneously, he had shown himself possessed of both talent and cunning—a talent and cunning he appeared bored with: or even unaware of. Not every man could have tracked Parl Dro to his cover on the slope that day, and not every man had ambitions connected to Ghyste Mortua. Nor did every minstrel make such music.

The current theme was trivial but not displeasing. Dro listened to it with a quarter ear as he finished the climb up the rest of the stairs, and picked the iron lock of the door at the top with his knife.

When he got into the room, he forgot the music

The aura of the manifested dead was intense and total. That pervasion, like an odour of cold stale perfume. That feel of an invisible active centre, which strove to draw off the energies of life, and of the living, into itself. No wonder Ciddey Soban was pale and slight. His earliest training had taught him that, even where love caused the deadalive to linger, they sucked the vitality of the quick who harboured them. They could not help it, any more than fire could help destroying a stick of wood put into the hearth. It merely happened. It merely had to be stopped.