Kill the Dead(68)

The three incorporealities left on the ghost street were transfixed. A last, abbreviated dim wail, one single note, drifted up to them. Then the crash of wood on jagged rock, a wild twanging of wires, scuff of stones, dull dreadful bouncing, slamming, sliding. The soft little rush of shale, a sharp crack. The second crash, total. Feathers of silence came drifting down.

Ciddey spun like a cobweb, the skirts of her dress fanning out, forming insectile wings.

“I wanted it,” she said. “I think I made it happen. I’m glad,” she said. She wept, not the beads of the cold fish stream, only tears. “I want to—” she said. “I want to—”

The darkness spun like a wheel, spinning her away with it. Sometimes it was possible to comfort, to smooth the path. The going through could be calm, even in some cases blissful, thankful.

But Dro stood and looked at the night, feeling only an intense and acrid shame, a rejection of everything he had ever done in the name of his so-called profession.

Automatically, not really meaning to, he put up his arm to block Myal’s blow when it came flailing for his jaw. Automatically, Dro returned the blow, light as a cat. Myal sat down on the street, cursing him.

Though he dreaded it, Parl Dro now had his own confession to make.

“You can’t, you couldn’t be my rotten father. Unless you started very young. I suppose you could have. I was too scared to—there was never any opportunity —no, I was too scared. A carter’s wife seduced me when I was twenty. Twenty. She was the first. I was grateful. You must have been at it when you were fourteen. Or less. And with a mature woman. That doesn’t seem very salubrious. Did it with her and strolled—sorry, hobbled—off and left her. Left her with my drunken pig of a father—only he wasn’t. No wonder he hated me. Whenever he thumped me, he was thumping you. I don’t blame him. I’d like to smash your head in. Father. Travelling ghost-killer. Can do clever tricks with knives. You’ll have to teach me that one. Padding, metal plate, fake blood. Or is it the knife that’s the trick, the blade bends or something? You really will have to teach me, Daddy. You owe me something. If it’s even true.”

“It s true.”

“Well I’ve only got your word for it. And either way, what’s your word worth? I’ve lost the only thing that was any use,” said Myal. “It’s down the slope, in pieces.”

“Where you originally tried to throw it to save me from Ciddey and Tulotef,” said Dro. “I realised then, you’d have to be told.”

“I don’t want to hear anything else,” Myal said.

“And, frankly, I don’t want to tell you anything else,” Dro answered.

“Great. We’ll keep it that way.”

Myal got up. His head bowed forward, eyes on the ground, he strode away, long fast strides that Dro’s crippled leg should have some trouble competing with. And then Parl Dro was standing directly in front of him. Myal pulled up, eyes swimming.

“What—how did you manage that?”

“The same way I managed the knife. The same way I got from Sable’s hovel in the forest to this hill in less than a minute.”

“You tranced yourself, after all,” said Myal. “You’re here in the astral, just like I am.”

“There’s a low wall behind you. Sit on it.”

Myal retreated a step, and the wall caught the backs of his knees. He sat, not entirely meaning to. “All right.”

“Now,” said Dro, “if you can keep quiet, I’ll explain. Despite the fact I may not want to, and you may not want to hear.”

Myal gripped his hands together, and stared at them trembling.

“Why do it, then?”

Dro did not reply. He sat on the wall half a yard away and presently began to speak in a low still voice that did not hurry or slur a single word.

Parl Dro, from the age of seventeen a practicing exorcist, had turned forty when he walked into the wood below the mountain in the dusk, and found a woman with Silky’s golden hair, a woman who was Silky, still alive and matured to an age that was just a few years less than his own. He had not loved her, but he had found her. And she, responding to some resonance of that finding, or to the simple hunger of her own sparse existence, had come to meet him on the inevitable road. The outcome might have been anything, a parting, or a continuance. But the outcome had not been permitted to create itself, it had been forced by the arrival of the showman with the drunkard’s face and belly and the inappropriately stylish musician’s hands. He had been away that night, bargaining for the unique musical instrument which that other drunkard, Soban, had offered him. The showman had meant to bed in a brothel, but in the end the price of drink, and the price of the instrument, had taken all his cash. With the prize in a leather sack, he careered home, all the while wondering if he had been a fool, to his wagon and his wife. And discovered someone had called in the night. “Come on, I don’t care,” the showman had said. Maybe in those moments, with the philosophical detachment of liquor, he did not. But sobering and caring caught him up. He climbed into the wagon then and selected a weapon. It was actually a meat cleaver. He got back on the horse and went after Parl Dro, up the mountain, tracking him by pure animal instinct born of hate. And when he reached Dro, the showman swung the cleaver with an unerring intuition, attacking the weakest point, Dro’s crippled leg. The razor-like blade sheared straight through flesh, sinew and bone, as it was its job to do. The leg was severed just below the knee.