Kill the Dead(9)

But in those instants, when all Dro’s considerable powers had been focused on securing the link, the deadalive thing had found the space to win through.

Even as Dro raised the bone toward the jaws of the vise, the ghost was on him. Made corporeal by its long pseudo-existence, it had the energy to drag him down and to fling him over.

Dro heard the clamour of shattered timbers far off, at the same time as thunder passed through his skull. He realized dimly, as a storm of water spat in his eyes, that the ghost had smashed him bodily through the rotten struts of the bridge. Now he hung upside down, but still miraculously caught by knees and calves in the wood above. His body rocked against one of the stony pylons from the gush of the river, which every fourth breath or so went over his head, blinding him and causing him to swallow its fluid. He somehow had not lost the bone, for he could feel it embedded in his hand, but the vise was gone; he had let go of it in the shock of falling.

It seemed a year, but it was less than a minute before he came to understand the brittle texture of the bone, the hard surface of the pylon against which the river was ramming him over and over again. His head was full of choked water, his very brain seemed full of it, and the drumming of his own blood. He swung like a dead crow from a post, into and out of pain, unconsciousness and drowning, but he still remembered enough to start to hammer the brittle psychic bone against the stone of the pylon.

Ridiculously, stunned, he had forgotten about the creature he was fighting. When the blade of a new torture went through his left leg, he stupidly wondered if it was broken.

The dead who lived, like the mirror image, right hand in reverse, tended to attack leftward or sinister. Which made the hearts of men very vulnerable to them. It occurred to Dro quite abruptly that the ghost had fastened its teeth and nails into the calf of his left leg, ripping and gnawing at him.

Knowledge of the true facts of the pain made it unbearable. He began to utter strange long-drawn hoarse hymns of agony. Through these, the ghost kept up its labour upon his flesh, and he, mindless and screaming, clubbed the bone again and again into the stones of the pylon, his hand with it, till both were gaudy with blood.

The bone splintered suddenly, but the agony in his leg did not go away. He thought the ghoul still gnawed on him long after he had destroyed it. And long after the men had carried him away from the bridge, with a white sun scalding in his eyes, he thought so.

And quite often, as now, he would think so again, living through the sequence in the precise recurring format of a dream.

At one time it would have taken him an hour or more, sweating and shivering, to recover from this dream. Now recovery was swift. A minute: less. The only curious result was an impulse to reach down and touch his calf, as if to make sure it was still attached to him. But that was quickly over. Familiarity again. Contempt again. In any case, the crack of window showed a pale blue lake lying placidly in the middle of the village, between the eastern roofs, which was not a lake but the initiation of sunrise.

Nothing and no one but he seemed to be stirring at the inn. He utilized what facilities it had to offer, including the flat, iron-tasting water tapped from a cask in the room below, and another piece of burned loaf. He had left a handful of money, enough to cover his account generously, lying on the mattress where the ghoul had gnawed him in his sleep. Dro was no shorter of cash than he had anticipated. What the minstrel-thief had stolen from him with such artistry was a bag of smooth pebble clinkers. Nor would he be the first pickpocket to be edified by such a haul from Parl Dro’s ill-omened black mantle.

Outside, a scatter of birds were whistling and piping to entice the sun. The lake had mounted higher and overtopped the roofs without spilling. A water rose was unfolding in the bottom of it.

Dro walked up the main street toward the steel-blue road. At one point, where an alley ran off into a yard with a public well, some women were gossiping in hushed voices over their buckets. He meant to be seen, and they saw him, and pointed him out needlessly to each other. A young one, with lily skin, stared at him, then blushed and looked away.

He was glad to have been noticed. It would save him the business of advertising his departure in any other manner.

The lily girl, pursuing him at a safe distance, even beheld him take the curve of the road which led eastward away from the village, and, more importantly, from the house with the tower.

Presently the road climbed up into some low hills. Beyond lay a rolling map of long, softly-pleated lands, tending first through dove pastels and then startling greens as the sun winged higher up the sky; eventually into the dream-like blue masks of distance. That was the route he had been going, would be going on to. But not just yet. Not now.