Kill the Dead(5)

“Obviously.”

He stood beyond her range, continuing to look at her.

“What do you want?” she spat at last.

“I told you. A drink of water.”

“You don’t want water.”

“How odd. I thought I did. Thank you for putting me right.”

She blinked. Her long lashes were almost gray, her eyes a hot, dry tindery color, nearly green, not quite.

“Don’t try word games with me. Just go. Or I’ll call the dogs.”

“You mean those dogs I’ve heard snarling and barking ever since I came through the gate.”

At that, she flung the knife right at him. It was a wide cast, after all; he judged as much and let it come by. It brushed his sleeve and clattered against the side of the well. He had had much worse to deal with a few days back.

“Too bad,” he said. “You should practice more.”

He turned and walked off and left her poised there, staring. At the gate he hesitated and glanced around. She had not moved. She would be shocked, but also dreaming that she had got rid of him. It was too soon for that.

“Perhaps,” he called, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Leaving her knife lying by the well, she flashed back into the house and slammed the door. In the stillness, he heard the sound of bolts.

He pulled the hood over his head.

His face was grim and meditative as he turned again onto the road and started toward the village.

The village was like a hundred others. One broad central street which branched straight off the road. The central street had a central watercourse, a stream, natural or connived, that carried off the sewage, and in which strange phosphorescent fish swam by night. Stepping stones crossed the water at intervals, and at other intervals alleys as narrow as needles ran between the houses. Most of the buildings facing on the main thoroughfare were shops, their open fronts nocturnally fenced in by locked gates. Houses on the thoroughfare had blind walls, keeping their windows to the rear, save for the rare slit that dropped a slender bar of yellow gold onto the ground.

The three inns, however, made up in light and noise what the village, mute and dark amid its grain fields and orchards and the vineyard scent of late summer, otherwise lacked.

The first inn Dro bypassed. It was too loud and largely too active for his requirements. The second inn was but two doors away, and plainly served also as the village brothel. There had been enough trouble with women. As he went by, a sly-eyed curly girl shouted from the open entrance the immemorial invitation, and, when he ignored her, screamed an insult connecting virility, or lack of it, to a limp. That made him smile a moment. The final inn stood on a corner formed by the central street and an adjacent alley. It too was loud and bright, but to a lesser degree. He found the writing on the sign was virtually illegible. The door was also shut, as if to say: I am not actually inviting any of you to enter.

When Dro pushed the door wide enough to be admitted, the entire roomful of occupants turned to see who was coming in. Their reaction on learning was disturbed, but vague.

Parl Dro’s fame, or perhaps infamy, tended to precede him. It was quite probable some here would surmise his identity. It seemed likely the girl in the leaning house had done so. But if the diners and drinkers of this inn divined who had come among them, they were not eager, or had no reason, to act upon it. Even the singing, which was concentrated at the far end of the room, about the hearth and its cumbersomely turning spits, had not faltered.

Dro let the door reel shut behind him. He stood a few extra seconds, allowing more determined gawpers to satisfy themselves. Then he walked, slow and scarcely lame, quietly to one of the long tables. As he seated himself, the slightest, softest, most involuntary of sighs escaped him as the turmoil in the crippled leg subsided to mere pain.

The others seated at the table shifted, like grass touched by a breeze, and resettled. They eyed each other over their cups and bowls, the bones they were chewing, the cards or dice or riddle-blocks they were gaming with. An elderly looking boy in a leather apron came up, a meat knife through his belt, a bottle and cup in his hand.

“What’ll you have?”

“Whatever there is.”

“There’s this,” said the boy. He dumped the cup on the table and poured a rough glycerine alcohol into it from the bottle. “And that,” he added, pointing to the spits, the stew pot, the shelves of hot loaves and baking onions stacked over them.

“Don’t waste your time,” said one of the gamesters at the table. “He doesn’t eat.” He picked up and showed the card he had just dealt. It was the King of Swords, its four black points painted on like thorns, the hooded high-crowned monarch brooding between them. The death card, Bad Luck.