She hung there, still smiling vilely at him. Then her smile went away, and she too slid away, back and back and back, as the inescapable force of Dro’s will pushed her.
She opened her mouth in a soundless cry, and lifted her hands again. Her nails were already very long. She fought him, but he was used to such fighting, and she was not. He thrust her all the way to the wall, seeming to press her, like a phosphorescent imprint, into the whitewash. Her hair blew or fanned out like a misty colourless sunburst–moonburst–on the bricks. He held her pinned like that, and then, never taking his eyes from her, he fastened one pitiless hand over Myal’s throat, squeezing the windpipe until, gagging and choking, the musician flailed into consciousness.
Dro unfastened the stranglehold. Myal croaked a number of expletives and accusations. Dro cut him short, dragging Myal’s head around by the hair toward the wall.
“Look.”
Myal froze, petrified, rigid as a stone in Dro’s grip.
“What–what is it?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Ciddey—it’s Cidd—”
“Don’t keep naming her. She has enough of a hold on you as it is. How do you feel?”
“I feel sick.” A ludicrous note of reproach crept into Myal’s voice. “I haven’t been well.”
“You’ll be less well if she goes on feeding off you.”
“Feeding–”
“She’s using your life energy to supplement her own. Can’t you feel it?”
“I... Something. I feel terrible.”
Dro let him fall back on the mattress. Dro never once let his own eyes slip from the apparition, stapled like a moth to the wall. Even as he spoke, three quarters of his mind and a great deal of his strength were being utilised to keep her as far from her life source, Myal, as possible. To prevent her, also, from flight. For she might come to see that flight was her only current ploy.
“What did you bring with you, Myal,” Dro said, “from the stream?”
“What
?”
“The stream where she died. You took something from her body. A lock of hair, a ribbon–
something.”
“No.”
“Don’t conceal it. It’s her link. Look at her. She’ll kill you, one way or another. Either persuade you to die to appease her jealousy of your life. Or draw your life out of you, moment by moment.”
“I think,” said Myal. He coughed. “I think I brought one of her shoes. I don’t know why. I forgot I had. They were cloth, very small. I trod on one on the bank. I was already getting sick. Didn’t know what I was...”
“Where?”
“The instrument. Where is it? Somebody must have put it somewhere.”
“It’s there by the bed. Reach over and hand it to me.”
“I can’t. I’m too weak to move.”
“You’ll move.”
“All right—I’ll—try—”
Myal floundered around. His arms were trembling so much he could hardly get hold of the sling, but he managed it, and lugged the grotesquery of wood and strings onto the mattress. To touch it steadied him. But the shoe, crumpled together, had been shoved into the opening over the sound box, and through into the hole of the instrument. Invisible. He could not remember doing this. Yet, somehow, he could....
Still not looking at him, Dro tore the shoe out of Myal’s hand.
“Whatever happens now, stay where you are, and stay quiet.”
“What’s liable to happen?”
Myal cringed and shot a glance at the blocked door. But his head swam. He flopped on his face, hiding his eyes.
Parl Dro stood midway between the bed and the door. He dropped the little shoe on the ground. The sole had cracked where Myal had palmed it into a ball. Pathetic, desolate little shoe.
Dro took the tinder from his shirt and struck a flame. At the rasp of flint and fire, Myal burrowed more deeply in the bolster. Dro stooped, awkward from the crippled leg, and set the shoe alight, bracing himself as he did so for the ghost’s dying frenzy. Which did not come.
As the flame fluttered around the shoe, destroyed it, and expired on the flags, Dro stared at what was left of Ciddey Soban, plastered, insectile and beautiful, on the wall. She never moved. With vast extinguished eyes, she gazed at him. And then she melted like frost. And she was gone.
The dungeon chill swilled instantly off the room and down some supernatural drain.
Parl Dro drew a deep breath. The familiar exhaustion clambered on his back, dragged him down. Exhaustion, and something else. Something–something–
Outside, the noise of the crowd had mounted, now the eerie barriers were gone from the air. Footsteps ran across the compound, and the door rocked to blows. There had been enough people in the street, and concentrating hard enough, to form a kind of composite pseudo seventh sense. Sufficient to guess when the exorcism was complete.
He pulled the chair away from the door.
Myal groaned. “Is it over? Whatever it was?”
“I hope it is.” Dro checked, hand on the door, appalled by what he had just said. Never before had there been any doubt.
CHAPTER SIX
The drinking party went on into the small hours.
Most of the village had heard, many had been spectators. Spectators who had actually
seen
nothing, only felt, and half understood. The priests filed solemnly through the hostel, now it was safe, blessing it and sprinkling unguents. They blessed and sprinkled Myal, too. Pale and shaking, clinging to the sling of the instrument, he said to Parl Dro: “I’m sorry.”
“You’re not only sorry, you’re a damn fool,” said Dro. He had walked out into the night and the village had borne him away to an accompaniment of shouts and clanking flasks. He was too tired to resist. No, it was not that he was so tired. He wanted to drown something, worse than nagging pain, a nagging doubt. So he sat with the village and tried to get drunk, while they tried to get uncanny anecdotes out of him. Mainly he fended them off; they fell to recounting their own ghost stories
–
factual or imaginary. They told him the fortress on the meadow was haunted. When he said he had slept there the previous night, they exchanged wise looks. He knew better than to attempt convincing them there had been no haunt in the fortress. No one without the seventh sense could normally tell ghost from brick.
A few hours later, most of them were sprawled in various stages of stupor. Dro was still sober, though his nerves hummed quietly, as if they felt they should, from the alcohol in his blood.
He went out of the inn and down the street in the star-slit darkness, to clear his head, or to make believe that it needed clearing. While he could pretend he was a little drunk, he could partake of the drunkard’s privilege and not think.
The rain clouds were gone. The moon was leisurely sliding down the slope to the belfry.
The woman called Cinnabar sat at the front of the potter’s shop. Queen of Fires. A dull glow lingered in the eye of the kiln, and she was in its way, catching the light on cheek and breast and hair, and on her moving hands.
She was pinching out a little clay dog by moonlight. She glanced up and saw Parl Dro standing by the unlocked gate, watching her.
“You look tired to death,” she said.
“Aren’t we all.”
“Sometimes.”
“Can I come inside?” he said.
She looked down, almost shyly.
“Didn’t I say you could?”
He stepped into the shop. It smelled of baked clay, and of some warm subtle perfume she was wearing. He had not noticed it on her before.
“I’ll offer you my bed again,” she said to the dog. “This time, just to sleep in. It’s a rare bed. Feather mattress deeper than sixteen seas piled one on the other. It’ll do you good. You look properly done up. But I remind you of someone, don’t I?”
He stood by her. Her fingers were very agile with the dog. It looked quite real, almost familiar, as if it might wag its tail, cock a leg or bark at any minute. He leaned down and gently kissed her temple. Her hair had a gold edging from the fire, and the marvelous scent came from her hair.
“You’re very talented, Cinnabar,” he said, “and you have a beautiful smell.”
Her fingers left the dog.
“My man gave me a comb from some foreign place. The scent’s in the wood, and when I comb my hair, my hair takes the scent, too.”
“I’m sorry you lost him,” he said.
“You’re not,” she said. She rose and turned and looked at him. Her eyes were bright with tears. “Or maybe you are. I’m ashamed of myself,” she said. “Making up to a stranger. Or am I a stranger to you? Am I so very like her?”
“You’d prefer me to go.”
“No,” she said. “The beds at the inn are full of vermin.”
“Perhaps suitable company.”
“Oh, you,” she said. Her tears seeped away again into their fount.
He kissed her in a rich dark forest of hair. The unique comfort of human flesh bound both of them tightly together for some while after the kiss had finished.
“Tomorrow, before you leave,” she said, “there’s something
–
I’ll tell you. Is your companion well enough to travel?”
“What companion?”
“The boy at the hostel. The man the ghost was visiting.”
“He’s nothing to me.”
“Ah,” she whispered, “don’t be too sure.”
She kissed him this time, smoothing his hair in long, repeated, serene and sensuous caresses. Presently she took his hand, and led him up the little stair, along the passageway, and into the feather bed sixteen seas deep.
The strains of music spearing out of the hostel door were wonderful to the extent almost of sorcery. They fell in the compound in shards, like the morning sunlight. Pigeons paraded, cooing in bemused fascination. A cat lay not far off, eyes narrowed, belly tilted to the sun, apparently a music lover and not hungry.
As he made the music, a sense of glorious well-being invaded the musician. When he left off, high waters of debility swept back in on him. Panting and dizzy, he set the instrument aside and curled on the bed. Silence. A cat leaped past the door, and the pigeons leaped into the air. A woman with terracotta hair came over the threshold.
Myal looked at her uneasily. Most women intrigued and scared him. Quite a few men too, for that matter. But then he relaxed. The woman had a sweet and satiated look. Her heart belonged somewhere that was not here. She was totally unobtainable: safe.
“You’ve a great knack with music,” she said.
“Oh, thank you.” Myal smiled modestly.
“Parl Dro,” said the woman, “left the village an hour before sunup.”
Myal’s face flattened with dismay. He sat up, went white, and lay down again. “That’s that then.”
“Not necessarily. If you were fit to travel by tomorrow.”
“I won’t be, anyway. Anyway, I can’t catch him up again. Anyway, what’s in it for you?”
He could guess what
had
been in it for her. So this was the type that attracted King Death. Very nice too. But why was she interested in Myal?
“I read the blocks. They showed the two of you. There’s a balance that needs you both.”
“Did he tell you about
–?
”
“Ghyste Mortua? I know about it. I have reason to bear a grudge against the deadalive in that place.”
“It’s all a story,” said Myal slyly.
“Like the thing in here last night?”
Myal involuntarily glanced behind him. Despite the unguents of the priests, despite the exorcism, he had not slept easily in this room. Only illness had let him sleep at all, drugging him with inertia.
“Well, a
good
story. Maybe true.”
“There was a town,” she said, low, staring at him, seeing not him, but images in her mind. Myal, lying dizzily watching her, began to see them too.
The name of the town had been Tulotef. It stood on the side of a tall hill, above a valley where a wide river ended in a curious star-shaped lake with four subsidiary stretching channels. Forest bloomed over the uplands. Distant crags, pale as winter, towered from the trees. The ways to Tulotef were limited and occult. It was, besides, a town good to itself alone. Other towns it had greeted with swords and fusillades; retaliatory armies came to have the boiling juice of almonds and olives dashed on their heads. The walls of Tulotef, sloping, slaty, crenellated, might be opened only voluntarily and only where there were gates. Those within were declared to be witches. From the highest to the lowest, all had some smattering of spells, and many, a large compendium. That was the legend. The vernacular said:
When we dance in Tulotef.
Which meant:
Never.
Then something did get into Tulotef, something did bring it down, towers, roofs, walls, gates. One summer night, there was an earth-tremor, not in itself unheard of, nor in itself disastrous. But there was, so the tale went, a fault that ran around the upper gallery of the hill on the side of which Tulotef was built. Unseen, the fault had lain in wait, weathering the sun, the snow, the wind, and all the shocks of the earth, for hundreds of years, like a dragon under water. Then came this ultimate tremor, slight in itself, which sliced through the last hair-fine joists that remained to hold the hill. Not long past midnight, when the town was loud with bells and processions and feasts for some occasion sacred to itself, the watchmen spied a vast black bird that lifted from the hilltop, spreading enormous wings.
To picture the moment was not hard. The sudden cessation of all sound, the lifted heads, raised faces, pointing hands, all in the glitter of lamps and candles, the dying notes of bells, the sparkle of ornaments and eyes. Then the gigantic thunder, the unconscionable geographic growl, as the top of the hill snapped off, disintegrated, burst. A rain of particles, boulders, rubble crashed on Tulotef. Onto the screaming faces, dainty fires. Then the inexorable tons of granite and stone and streaming earth itself, marched down the hill against the city. It was the last army. It gushed like a tidal wave against the walls and broke them, the gates and splintered them. It rolled through the town and the town was gone, its life crushed and its fires put out. And then, a huge burial mound, the town itself began to move. It slipped from its foundations, and fell away down the hill into the star-shaped lake.
Not one living thing survived.
And yet, if the legend were a fact, all had survived. In a way. Now the spot was called Ghyste Mortua, for on particular nights the dead came back to the void where Tulotef had been, some thousands of witch-gifted, hating, evil ghosts. And in the lake below, held pristine and inviolate, their linkage to the world, every link they could desire; their treasures, their bones, the bricks and mortar of their town.
They abducted the living, enticed the living, fed from them, slew them. They tore up graves, they worked spells. The very land stank of wickedness.
If any of it was true.
“I know this,” said the red-haired woman, “whoever goes that way, never comes back.”
“Rather stupid to go there, then,” remarked Myal. His hands trembled, though it was really only what he had heard before.
“Parl Dro is going there. And you.”
“Me? You’re joking. I wouldn’t be seen dead there. Oh. What I mea
n
is
—
’’
“It’s a compulsion. I know. I’ve seen it before. There’s always a reason you find for yourself, an excuse
—
a legend to prove or disprove, a battle to engage, a poem or a song to create
—
but it’s the place itself, issuing a challenge. A war game. It used to call armies to fight it. Now it calls certain men. At certain times. Certain women, too.”
“You’re not
–
” said Myal.
“Not me.”
Myal pulled the musical instrument to him by the sling and put his arms around the wooden body.
“I knew,” she said, “he would leave today, before he knew it. And you’ll leave tomorrow. You owe him a debt, don’t you? He paid the priests for your care.”
“I owe him a knife in the ribs,” said Myal.
The woman laughed. Myal glanced at her in astonishment.
“Rest well,” she said. “Tomorrow at first light I’ll bring you a horse. Not one of the priests’ horses, but my own. I’ll set you on the way as well; I know the start of it. You’d probably find him anyhow, but to be sure. If you give the horse her head, you’ll catch up to him before tomorrow’s sunset.”
“I can’t afford a horse,” said Myal.
“I’m not selling a horse. When you reach him, you must let her graze a while, then turn her and send her back to me. She knows the way, too.”
“I can’t afford to hire a horse, either,” said Myal pompously. He held the instrument as tightly as if someone were trying to drag it away from him. His arms quivered with the tension.
“No fee, no hire. A loan.”
“What’s the snag?”
“You’re very suspicious.”
“I’ve learned to be.”
“Then unlearn it.”
She smiled at him. Her smile was like a ray of sun. She went out.
He lay stiff as a knotted twig, for about an hour, terrified of everything, and of himself. Then the terror went off. Securely alone, he bragged to himself. The woman liked him after all. She wanted to help him because she fancied him. As for Dro, who could be so useful being so famous, Myal could get around him. As for Ghyste Mortua, that was just a wild romantic fantasy, the sort a minstrel had to have, had to pretend to believe in. And the wonderful song he would make of the ghostly town, its shrivelled towers, the greenish fireflies spinning in its endless dusks
–
the song was already partly formed in his head, his fingers. The quest was all he needed. To travel hopefully. Certainly, not to arrive.