Kill the Dead(66)

He saw her drain whiter than her own whiteness and her eyelids flickered as if she were going to faint. She could kill, naturally, but the description had unnerved her.

“Maybe I will,” she said, biting her lip. “As you die, you’ll feel their claws. But you know what that feels like already, don’t you, if the stories about your damaged leg are true? I heard that story about you when I was a child. The kiss of claws and teeth.”

“Be careful,” he said, “you’re getting close to admitting your condition. You stole a lot of strength from Myal, and his inherent psychic powers let you become strong more quickly than is general. But to be a total success, you still have to believe you’re wholly alive. At least, for a while. Until you’ve settled in. And then you’ll find—”

“You’re talking too much for a ghost-killer,” said Ciddey. “I think I’ll stop you.”

Myal made an incoherent sound.

Dro glimpsed him jumping up, staggering, running toward Ciddey. Dro saw Myal’s hand snatch at her arm from too far off, and the snatch passing through her sleeve, missing a grip on ghostly muscle or bone. Dro saw Myal’s expression of utter non-comprehension as the knife thumped home in Dro’s chest. Despite her words, as on the first occasion, she had aimed for the heart.

The blow had pushed Dro, but no more than that. He stood, and went on watching. He watched the red blood spread from the sides of the blade, which quivered like a metal leaf buried almost to the hilt in his flesh. He took a desolate interest in it. He had expected pain, but there was none. He had presumably gone beyond any new pain by now.

Ciddey had retreated. Amusingly, she had backed into Myal, and they had each shifted aside to let the other pass. Dro half anticipated they would beg each other’s pardon. Now she poised there, staring. Myal stared, too. This continued for about a minute. Finally, Dro reached up and pulled the knife out of his heart. It was thick with blood. Ciddey coughed out a toneless little screech. So far Myal was too shocked, or too astrally oriented, to throw up.

Behind them, the misty boilings of Ghyste Mortua were fading out. They had recognised, if no one else had, the futility of brute force. Maybe they had even figured out why.

Dro let the bloody knife drop to the ground. As if it were a cue, Ciddey dropped on her knees. She crawled to Dro over the street. She had forgotten the ghost duke and his retinue, just as they had let go of her and the guide she gave them back into partial reality. Her hands fastened on Dro’s ankles and she shuddered.

“You’re an avenging angel,” she said. “Not a man, not a ghost-killer. An instrument of retribution.”

“I thought that was you,” he said.

“You’re not even—not even—”

“Not even bleeding anymore,” he finished, helping her. “The mark of the knife will fade in a few days. Perhaps less.”

“I must confess to you,” she said. She cried tears on his black boots. “Will I go to hell?”

“There isn’t a hell,” he said.

He felt unbearably tired and shut his eyes. He hardly listened as she made her confession to his boots.

She told him in any case those things he had gradually come to understand when sorting his reactions to the leaning house, the room in the stone tower, the dark well, her devouring vindictiveness. Ciddey had not simply mourned her sister Cilny’s death, she had caused it. They had had one of those frequent squabbles the village reported. It was hardly different from a hundred others, but its upshot was that Ciddey had pushed Cilny into the well. The younger sister had fallen across the rusty chain, clung to the bucket, but Ciddey had unwound the chain. It had been a long brevity of malice. When the struggles in the water had ended, Ciddey had woken as if from a nightmare. She had been overcome by horror. With a maniacal strength she had hauled up bucket and chain once more, the lightweight dead weight draped across it. Ciddey had flung her sister onto the paved yard. She had tried to cudgel the water from her lungs. Weeping more needless water on Cilny’s drowned face, Ciddey had sat and rocked her in her arms, confronting the ultimate loneliness of the deranged house of Soban. But in the night, Ciddey had carried and dragged her sister’s corpse to the stream below the mountain. Ciddey had woven her sister a wreath of yellow asphodel, but Ciddey still hoped the current would bear her sister away, out of sight and mind. Cilny, though, being absolutely dead, sank heavily to the stream’s floor. Even the fierce spring wash of melted snow did not move her. When the men found her and brought her back to Ciddey, Ciddey shaped her misery and her guilt into another thing. She bore Cilny’s ashes into the tower and worked witchcraft with them. She brought Cilny back to her, and cherished her dead as she had seldom done alive. Parl Dro the exorcist had sundered that expiation, and all the murk in Ciddey’s soul transferred itself to him. But she had found out now, Dro was not to be punished in her stead. Only Ciddey remained vulnerable, to be her own scapegoat. She lay on the street of Ghyste Mortua, and waited for nemesis.