Kill the Dead(57)

“She wants to kill you.”

“She shouldn’t be strong enough yet to try.”

“She’s very strong. She’s used your energy too, to draw on through me. A ghost-killer’s life force must be particularly restorative for a ghost. And she was a witch, too.”

“You underestimate your own psychic force. She didn’t need me. And you don’t get my word.”

Myal gnawed a blade of grass he had found he was after all able to pluck. “I’ll tell you anyway. I still have the advantage. You’ll see why.”

“Because presumably,” said Dro, “Ciddey’s link is located on that instrument I just handed back to you.”

Myal frowned, thunder stolen.

“You’re so intelligent. Know where?”

“I’d thought about the inset ivory,” said Dro, “but so far as I know, she never lost any bones.”

“Not a bone,” said Myal. “A tooth. A milk tooth. She fell as a baby, and it got knocked out. She was just a year old.”

Myal took another deep breath that was pointless. The absurdity of the story upset him, how two of the guidelines of his life had rested on lies.

“Old Soban kept Ciddey’s tooth. Superstition. Then he had a chance to sell something. He was always trying to sell things, heirlooms, furniture, for drink. He was a drunkard, like my sot of a father. That’s probably how they met. In some inn. Didn’t care about being landowner mixing with travelling rubbish, then, drinking each other under the stinking table. Then Soban got my bloody stink of a father interested in buying a unique musical instrument. It came from some foreign country. No one could play it. That was true enough. My drunken boss-eyed father went to Soban’s house, took one look at the instrument, and thought he, being a genius, could master it, and make a fortune. He’d get ideas like that sometimes. So he felt the instrument over, businesslike, and plunked away on the wires, and blew down the reed. And then he said he’d buy it, but there was a bit of ivory missing out of the inlay. What’d Soban take off the asking price?”

“To which,” said Dro, staring at the lake, “Soban replied he could replace the ivory. And he took the thing upstairs and got the milk tooth and rammed it into the wood where the hole was.”

“That’s it. Ciddey knows, because her father made a great history out of it. She said it shamed her. Till I came back on the same road my father did, and it turned out so useful for her.”

“But there’s more,” said Dro.

“Yes. There’s this big joke. I suppose it is fairly funny. Soban had a trick. He used to get bits of things, and weld them or carpenter them together. The instrument...” Myal clutched suddenly and convulsively at the two wooden necks resting against him. “...the instrument was like that, too, you see. He got two stringed bodies—guitars, mandolins, something, and carved them up and then joined them together. And the reed he threw in as an afterthought, to make it more—more bizarre. The joke was, nobody was meant to be able to play the damn thing. Nobody should be able to play it. And my father used to smash me from one end of the wagon to the other, when he was drunk, learning me how he’d teach me when he was sober.”

“And you can, of course, play it exquisitely.”

“It makes me sick. It really does. And the other thing.”

“Which is?”

“My bloody father. How he used to sit over it, polishing the wood and twanging the wires, and say he’d killed the man who’d owned the instrument He never killed Ciddey’s father for it. He never even stole it. He paid for it.”

“Which disappoints you.”

“No. It’s just—I based my life on my screaming fear of his violence, on his capacity for murder, maybe. And he didn’t. Which is odd, because he looked like he meant it when he said it.”

Dro got up. Myal glanced at him. Dro said slowly, “Do you remember what he actually said?”

“The exact words? Yes, I do. He said them often enough.”

“Say them.”

Myal twisted uncomfortably, reacting to an insidious tremor of tension on the air. A tension which had been there all along, of course, which was now growing, swamping both of them.

Finally, Myal looked down and touched the strings. Perhaps unconsciously, astral or not, he switched himself over into his past, over into the skin of that hated, terrible man, whose minstrel’s hands had clamped on the instrument, whose small pig’s eyes had congealed in a cold red blankness. Savouring, tasting what had been, what he had done.