Kill the Dead(50)

Scrambling down from the mountain was difficult. The agony it cost him went almost ignored, save when he fell and lay in the slate dust, the stars darkening with the blood behind his eyes. In the end, the descent grew more facile. He became used to staggering on the blazing stick of leg.

Night, and somehow another day were gone, before he reached the clearing in the wood. The wagon was gone, too. In the dark he could not find the wheel ruts traced over the turf and summer-hard soil. He could not even find the remains of the fire.

He began to search, idiotically, about the wood, wandering in circles mostly. Day and night blended. He came on a deserted farm at the wood’s edge. A few roots and other vegetable stuff were coming up wild in the garden patch, and there was a well. It was enough to keep him alive, and gradually to bring him back to logic and fatalism.

He lost track of time again in the farm ruin. Not for many years had he been so indecisive, so plainly lost over the horizons of his own self. The days seemed very hot, the nights interminable. The old house looked out southward from the wood, into the slender valleys that lay between the claws of the southern mountains. Seen mainly by night, they did not seem real either. Indeed, nothing did.

In the end, the idea of the Ghyste came back to him, supplanting other ideas or regrets. To travel across the northern mountain again became imperative—to go after the legend.

The memory of the woman who was like Silky became frankly an embarrassment. Whatever had been done to the crippled leg, it had healed into its usual awful acceptable state. The same could occur with memory.

As he came over the mountain pass, down the steel-blue road in the dusk, toward that leaning macabre house with its stone tower—the house of Ciddey Soban, the house of the ghost—he had a wonderful sharpened sense of returning to reality, and to purpose. The golden woman slipped away from him like a dream.

He could have done nothing for her. Trouble had caged her. He could not have set her free. He had not loved her, certainly. He had never loved, woman or man, place or beast or object. Not even Silky. Silky had only been a part of himself.

CHAPTER TEN

Sable was plaiting her thin iron hair again, as she came into focus for him across the hovel, but the sun no longer shone on the rag bed where Myal Lemyal lay immobile on his back, head still averted toward the right shoulder, the grimy sheet pulled to his Adam’s apple, unruffled by any movement.

“You’ve been away a long while,” said Sable. “Thinking, or else you sleep with your eyes wide open. I could count the times you blinked on the fingers of one hand. Practicing?”

Dro watched her pointlessly busy, agile and magical paws.

“You mean I’d prefer to use my own will, rather than Cinnabar’s drug, to get there? That was always the plan.”

“Then don’t you wonder why she sent this boy in ahead of you?”

“She thought she saw something in the cards she cast. She told me. She insisted Myal must go with me. She persuaded him after me. He had some supernatural baggage with him I could have done without.”

He had grasped Cinnabar’s scheme with slight surprise. That she foisted the musician on him by the means of loaning Myal a horse was eccentric enough. The drug in the clay dog, which had subsequently tranced Myal and loosed his astral body, as near equivalent to a ghost as a live man could go, was a ridiculous ploy.

Cinnabar must have learned from her lover, that ghost-killer who never returned, that the ultimate way into Ghyste Mortua had to be in spirit alone. Those who were dragged in live through the manifested ghost gates of Tulotef invariably died, so the story went. That death would be inevitable to a human taken there quick, with so many deadalive feeding their unflesh hungrily on his life force—even if they did not actually lay their claws on his skin and bones. So, only by releasing astral from physical could a man get in that place and hope to survive. By becoming as near a ghost as the ghosts of the Ghyste. To this end, there were disciplines to be learned, and Dro, who also knew the story, had accordingly learned them, a smattering here, a smattering there, all knotted together by his will. That will of pure iron, which carried him mile after mile, striding on a raging ruin called, euphemistically, a leg. That same iron will, he had believed, could put to sleep Dro’s body’s life and let the spirit out. Could hold the body intact in its trance, and, if any were able to achieve it, could bring the spirit back into the body, when he was done with Tulotef.

But Myal. Flung out in spirit like a handful of dust on the air. Caught by the deadalive, no doubt of that, and by the virgin, the Maid of Vessels, with her fish-cool hate and her illusory streams—Cinnabar had consigned Myal to that, because she had been sure his proximity was in some form vitally necessary to Parl Dro. If Dro must enter Tulotef, then Myal must be there before him. It would have been good to judge Cinnabar as mad, to be irritated by her conviction and methods. But, with unease, Dro had recognized in her one of those mysterious guides the psychic road was liable to produce. And she had reminded him of the golden woman in the wood. Queen of Fires, Queen of Leaves—