Kill the Dead(62)

“Bring her here to me.”

Ciddey’s rider turned his horse smartly and shouldered back through the stylised tableau. No one looked at them. If an eye blinked, a tassel fluttered, a bead gleamed, she might only have imagined it. There was no noise in all the town.

The duke of Tulotef sat and gazed at her.

“Who are you?”

“A Soban. Ciddey Soban.”

“I’ve never heard the name.”

She was suddenly icy cold, and lonely, lonely. Among strangers, without friends. There was no one to turn to after all.

“I wanted to warn you. A traveller is coming who is—”

“Yes,” said the duke. He was like a rag doll. His face was all undone now, and he seemed ready to unravel from head to toe, and be rolled up into some other dimension.

She wanted to go home. She wanted not to be afraid, or in search of vengeance. No longer a heroine. She wanted obscurity, loss of identity, peace. She wanted an answer to some question she did not understand how to ask. But Myal—Myal and Parl Dro—

“You must destroy him. You’ve got the power. There are enough of you,” she said bitterly, not really sure what she was bitter about, or talking about. “It’s you or him. He’s very accomplished at his trade. I’ve watched him at work. I know.”

This man, this duke, had ruled in Tulotef on the night the hill fell on him.

When she drowned, he had already been returning to this place for centuries. She lowered her eyes. She tasted water, then ashes. She said again, “Destroy him.”

When the sun had gone and the dead town began to come back it did not look quite as it had. The stone streets were less absolute. The tops of the towers were cloudy and the scalloping of the roofs below seemed bathed in a soft lake fog. For, of course, the lake had returned also, filling up its basin and its channels, as though the world bled water. Yet even the lake was subtly altered, as if it had frozen over in the late summer dusk, become a sheet of luminous, motionless ice. Myal observed these things and their difference to him almost impatiently. He felt an odd relaxation, because everything had become a farce. He, alive yet a spirit, standing in a ghost town with a real wooden instrument on his shoulder, the other shoulder resting on the corner of a phantom house that felt quite real also. In such a situation, either madness or sublime indifference would result His temperament had automatically chosen the latter. So he leaned there, and watched the endless procession swim by down in the streets below, and even entertained the notion of improvising a melodic counterpoint to the bells and the songs, but somehow he never got as far as bringing the instrument forward where his fingers could reach the strings.

On an opposite wall there was some scribbled graffiti. Myal’s limited education made him dismiss the fact he could not read it. Then he realised he could not read it because it was written mirror fashion, back to front.

He was waiting for Parl Dro—initially, with glib certainty, which masked a vague unease. After about half an hour, with a nervous agitation that masked alarm, rage and a curious unaccountable anguish.

Myal was not sure why he had demanded Dro’s appearance in Tulotef. The argument he had given was dramatic and inane—proof. Proof of what, and who wanted it? No, Myal was conscious that he had merely been forcing the issue. And that, as from the very start of their acquaintance, if such it could be called, Myal had felt a foolish magnetism to Dro, one way or another. The magnetism worried Myal for a number of reasons. At first, it had seemed just another of his impulsively fatal fascinations with the element of danger. He had had, besides, the excuse of wanting to make a song of Ghyste Mortua. But when had that idea first taken hold of him? Could he really pin it down as being before he tried to rob the ghost-killer in the mountain valley village? It seemed to Myal now that there had been some faintly unsavoury destiny that had directed him over the mountain pass and into the village, only four or five days before Parl Dro also limped the same way. Unsavoury and supernatural. For not only had Myal’s wandering advent meant a meeting with Dro, but also the ultimate revelation about the instrument—no longer a rare terpsichorean mystery, but a jest, a con trick, the toy of a clown. The coincidences that belaboured the plot Myal’s recent days seemed to have become niggled him. Dro and he, and Ciddey Soban come to that, seemed tangled like strands of wool.

Something unprecedented was happening to the procession. He had not been watching it with all his attention, but in retrospect, it seemed to have stopped, and now it seemed to be changing course like a demented river—