Kill the Dead(56)

“Shut up.”

“Remember Cinnabar? The kind redhead who loaned you a horse?”

“The kind redhead who loaned you her—”

“She gave you a clay dog which you put in your shirt pocket. There was a drug in the dog which soaked out and into you. A drug to induce cataleptic trance.”

“To induce what?”

“The life activities of the body are slowed to the minimum, and the astral state can then be triggered. It seems Cinnabar thought you psychically capable enough to release your own astral persona voluntarily, under the right conditions. But not adept enough to produce the trance unaided.”

“You’ve got me all confused,” shouted Myal.

“Which is, of course, extremely difficult to do.”

Myal stood up. He looked at the ground.

“I’m alive—somewhere.”

“In an old woman’s decrepit hovel, about seven or eight miles from here.”

“That sounds cosy.”

“She’ll take care of you, till you’re able to get back.”

“When will that be?”

“When the drug wears off. And when you’re finished here.”

“If I go to a tree, I walk through it,” said Myal. “Why don’t I sink through the ground?”

“Basic common sense. Probably even your limited perspective can see it would be rather pointless.”

“In other words, you don’t know.”

“In other words,” said Parl Dro, “you can be incorporeal, but only as far as you want to be. You can walk through a stone wall and pick up a plate on the other side. A moment’s adjustment of willpower is all that’s necessary.” He drew the instrument off his shoulder and held it between his hands by its two peculiar necks. Then he raised the instrument and slung it at Myal. “Catch.”

Myal leapt forward, not thinking, guided by a vision of smashed wood and broken ivory. He caught the instrument just before it touched the earth. It was solid and heavy in his arms, the wires vibrating quietly like a cat purring. It did not slip through him. He held it and his legs buckled.

“A practical demonstration is often more effective than a lecture,” said Dro. He sat down on the hillside, straightening out the crippled left calf, and Myal saw the black eyes momentarily go blind with pain.

Myal sat on a jut of rock, the instrument on his knees. He rubbed the garishly painted wood, fascinated, his fingers caressing, as they had always bodily done, the ivory chips sunk in there.

“You’re sure,” he eventually said, “I’m alive?”

“I’m sure.”

“Cinnabar was crazy.”

“Not quite. The story goes that if you’d got into Tulotef physically, they’d have served you for dinner.”

“She thought she was helping, pushing me in this way? Because of my song I wanted to make—”

“I’m afraid she thought she was helping me,” Parl Dro said. He looked out toward the dry mud chasm of the dead lake.

“You called it Tulotef,” said Myal.

“Yes.”

“According to you, that’s supposed to be unwise, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

A melancholy oppression of anticlimax lay over Myal. He traced the patterns on the instrument, but felt no inclination to play it. A silence widened between them. The whole earth was silent where the ghostly clangour of the town had been before. A light wind flapped over the hill and brushed the tops of the forest, but it made hardly any sound, only the sound of emptiness. Even the resins of the forest did not smell so high up, or else the uncanny spot had sucked its perfumes away, eating the life force of the trees, the hill, the land, as it ate the life force of living men who wandered, or were coerced, inside the gates.

“I spent the night,” Myal said at last, “with Ciddey Soban. We didn’t—I don’t want you to think—”

“I’m not thinking anything.”

“All right. But she told me. The link that’s keeping her on earth. If I tell you, I want your word you won’t harm her.”

“Harm?”

“Won’t throw her out of this world. Not until she’s ready.”

“You can guess what my word is worth.”

“I’ll trust you.”

“No, you don’t trust me. Something’s puzzling you, and you want to tell me so it will puzzle you less. That’s all. And you’re prepared to betray Ciddey Soban to me for that.”