Kill the Dead(58)

“He used to say,” said Myal, “‘You learn to play this, you ugly cretinous little rat. I killed a man because of this. I killed him good and dead.’”

“Yes,” Dro said.

His own eyes were wide open, but they looked shut. Like the eyes of a man who has just died.

Myal’s father’s image slid off from Myal. He surfaced from it, sighing, as if coming up from deep water.

“What is it?” he said to Dro.

“It’s a dry lake,” said Parl Dro. “And we’re going down there.”

“What?”

Parl Dro began to walk away, picking down over the slope, the wrecked leg swinging itself with a stiff, agonised elegance.

Bemused, Myal scrambled, forgetting that no incorporeality need ever scramble, after him.

The shelves of the lake were hard-baked, already partly petrified, composing a terraced effect of powdery stone, like the earthworks of some extraordinary, inverted castle. Here and there, the antique slimes and marshes the lake had tried to transform itself into as it emptied, had grown weird trees and thickets which, in turn, had perished and calcified. It did not seem to be only the going of the water, however, which had made the place so inimical to what tried to live there. Probably the upheaval in the hill which had slain living Tulotef, was also responsible for the draining of the lake. There had been laval activity deep down to complement the earth-shake above. As a result, some fluid poison or other, some literal scum of the earth, had processed itself into the waters of the lake. So that, as it died, it also killed.

There was nothing beautiful anywhere, nothing to resemble the beauty of a ruin. Even the beauty of a wilderness or a waste was absent. Close to, more than anything, the corpse of the lake and its vitrified channels looked like some horrid amateur sculpting in river clay, set in the sun, and then magnified beyond all belief and all reason.

It was a couple of hours’ climb down to the topmost shelves. Then they walked about there for a couple of hours, or glumly sat, staring into the abyss, not speaking. It was like a mouth into hell, with none of hell’s hellish glamour, not even the warmth of flames.

Later, they went out along a cracked dancing floor of natural brick, observing the sticky shadows that still stuck to the river bottom. Those inadequate waters had been poisoned too. You saw the bones of fish lying thick as fallen leaves, ribbed into the petrifying mud far below. Myal noted that the forest, where it touched the edges of the lake and its channels, was also dying. Dead trees stood nude, like fishbones grown to great heights. There were no birds, and no beasts on the ground.

Nowhere was there any sign of the Tulotef which, the landslide behind it, had poured away into the lake.

They sat on a fallen tree as the afternoon began to come, stringing out their shadows artistically on panes of sun.

“Where is it, then?” asked Myal. It was the first thing either of them had said, beyond occasional invective, for hours. The conversation on the hill above loomed over them, but they had left it there, convincingly inaccessible as the grass, till they should climb back. Myal carried the instrument in the old way. He could no longer walk through things, as if the instrument, being solid, prevented him.

“If you mean the town,” said Dro, “you’re looking at it.”

“No, I’m not. If the lake’s gone, there should be a ruin lying down there, exposed. Broken roofs and snapped vertebrae.”

“They’re there. You can’t see them because either the weather and the water’s all but rotted them away, or they’re changing into stone along with the banks.”

“Oh.” Myal picked up a handful of loose flints, glad he could, and tossed them over into the smear of liquid in the river. They struck with turgid little plops, or cracking sounds where they did not reach the water and rapped fish spines instead. The cold white crags beyond the forest stared at the blue sky. The only live thing seemed to be the sky. Myal did not look back at the hill where he had lain most of the night, with his astral body plastered to Ciddey Soban. “I deduce,” said Myal, “you’ve got some outrageously sagacious plan for destroying them. I mean what’s left of the ruins.”

“No.”

Myal shifted, looking at Dro warily.

“But they’re the psychic link for Tul—for the Ghyste, aren’t they? You have to destroy them.”

“The key to releasing the ghost is to change the link. Metamorphosis. The bone has to be smashed. The shoe has to be burnt.”