“Are you?”
“Yes. Won’t you play? The duke or the earl of Tulotef might hear you. You could be a court musician.”
“I’ve been that. It didn’t suit me. I—had to leave.”
“You weren’t good enough.”
“I was too good,” said Myal mournfully. “The only thing I can do well, and I do it too well, and everyone hates me.”
“Please play for me, Myal.”
“No.”
“I command you. I am a Soban. You’re just riffraff, a vagabond. Do it. Play!”
“I can’t.”
“Why not.”
“I don’t know.”
Suddenly someone jostled Myal. He and the girl were thrust together. There was a big crowd on the platform. They had been there all the time, unnoticed, or else they had just evolved. They were now completely real and three-dimensional, they even smelled human—leather, sweat, scent, wine. Their object was to view the great procession choking its way through the streets.
“Mind yourself,” someone said to Myal.
Someone else trod on his foot and hurt him.
Ciddey lay shivering on his chest.
With a slow dim panic, he realised that bodies pressed in his back where the instrument should have been. He felt stupidly across himself for the frayed embroidered sling, and it was not there.
He must have set the instrument down and forgotten to take it up. No, absurd. What then? He had only
imagined
he had brought it with him from the ridge? But he had experienced its weight. It had actually slammed into him two or three times. Why then had he replied he could not play it?
The crowd seemed to exist, but had not a moment ago.
The instrument did not exist any longer, but had.
Ghosts’ concepts. The wills and beliefs and fancies of—ghosts.
Ciddey clung to him, pulling down his head toward her face. Jammed in the crowd, he kissed her, his mind wandering around and around behind his closed eyes.
“Parl Dro will follow you,” she whispered, digging her long nails into his arms. “And bring the instrument with him.”
“Maybe. Yes. I can’t tell.”
“He will.” She smiled at him like a wolf. Then, as once before, she grew appallingly defenceless. “Look after me,” she moaned.
A heavy man leaned on Myal drunkenly. Somewhere another girl in the crowd was whispering of a potion she had made to entice a man to come to her. Myal found, inadvertently almost, he had lifted the drunken man’s money bag from his mantle. Ghost money. What did it matter?
They sought an inn, the way travellers might be expected to in an unknown town. The sign was richly painted, its colours shades of pallor, brass and dragon’s blood. In the picture, a maiden held a unicorn helpless by its horn as a warrior in mail sheared off its head. Myal grimaced at it. Near the inn, the usual stream ran down the street. A cat carved of marble sat on one of the stepping stones, and Myal tried to pet it before he realised.
Men sat drinking at the inn tables. Lights burned and a fire, none of them giving glow or heat to the big room, only a hellish localised motion. An innkeeper came, and the thief paid for a room with his stolen money. Ciddey swept up the stair like a great lady. They ordered neither food nor drink. Like the lights of Tulotef, sustenance would be phantasmagorical and unnecessary. And on the stair, Myal asked himself: “The three riders gave me a drink. Or did I imagine it? Ghost-pretend. Surely I’m hungry?” But he was not, and he knew why not. He had died. The dead had killed him. It hadn’t been a faint, but death. Then they had brought him here as a jest. And if Parl Dro came after him, Myal would have to be properly scared, like any other ghost confronted by an adept and professional ghost-killer.
Of course, all returning deadalive must have a link. Myal knew what his must be. The instrument. Which was very bizarre, because Ciddey—
“Don’t suppose,” she said, as they entered the room, “that we’ll share this bed. The incident in the wood was a game. I wouldn’t come near you normally. You can have the chair. By rights you should sleep on the floor, dog.”
The bed had curtains like a black crow’s wings. The narrow window stared toward the lake. The procession still glided by, two streets below. It had gone on and on, for almost two hours. Assuming, of course, it was at all possible to reckon time here. The moon had moved, however. Perhaps it was. Myal peered in the bloodless fire, and wondered why he was not gibbering with terror and despair.
“I’m cold,” said Ciddey from the large black bed. She held out to him her small narrow hand. He was not afraid of her, either, nor did he want her any more. But he went to her, and presently got into the bed with her. They kissed and clung, in a sad, lazy, sensual nothingness. She murmured at his ear, “Cilny would be jealous. My sister would hate me, in bed with a man.” Then, miles of deep and delicious and passionless kisses later: “You mustn’t try to have me. I’m a virgin.”
Obviously she had died a virgin, she could not lose her virginity after death. But he felt only the sort of dislocated concupiscence that came in fever dreams, and was unable to, or undesirous of, acting on it. In a dreary way, the sexual limbo was very pleasant. Certainly he did not want to stop embracing her, just as he did not want to intensify the embraces.
Then, languidly, between the long, long, purposeless kisses, they began to talk.
“I think I’m dead,” he said. “I really must be.”
“Ssh. Don’t. Kiss me. You’re not dead.”
“But that’s—mmm—yes, that’s how I know. But I want to ask you—”
“No. Don’t ask me. Kiss.”
“Yes. Oh Ciddey.... I want to ask you about the musical instrument. About the link.”
“Myal....”
“It’s my link to life. And Parl Dro’s got it And he’s coming here because—well, because I just suppose he’s a ghost-killer and he’s obsessed with Tulotef, so he’ll have to come here. But why you?”
“Why? Darling—”
“Darling. Why is the instrument your link, too?”
“So clever. Myal Lemyal’s so clever. And so lovely.”
“Ciddey—I wish you’d tell me.”
“I will. You’re only riffraff, but I love you. There, I’ve told.”
“Dro burnt your shoe. And there was nothing else I had that could have been yours. I don’t see how the instrument my father murdered a man to get can have anything to do with you. But it does. I was your energy source to get back, and your hatred of Dro was your motive. But the instrument was the link.”
“So clever. How did you know? Ah—”
“Oh—I played a song to you on it in my sleep, and you arrived. When I played it backwards you went away. And when I went with you into the wood, I took it with me, or I thought I did. And when we were here, you wanted it played. When you realised it was an illusion, you were afraid—”
“Stop it. I don’t want to discuss it. Kiss me.”
“Yes... Ciddey? Let’s stop pretending we’re alive. It can’t hurt if we tell the truth to each other.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too. Only I’ll wish I hadn’t said it now. Because I don’t. At least—”
“Myal—”
For a long while then there was just the mandragora kisses. The pulse of the unwarm fire in the grate casting neither shadow nor light, the gems of torches and lamps on the window similarly unconductive. The drowned noise of bells.
They might melt into the bed. They might freeze and become a gray statue, forever kissed together. He did not mind. Then she said, her voice small and thin as her little hands locked on his back: “When Dro comes, we must be strong and fight him. If you promise you’ll help me fight him, I’ll tell you. If you’ll help me kill him. Will you? For my sister’s sake.”
It did not seem a huge thing to kill Parl Dro. It seemed a depressing thing, a vile thing, but quite possible.
“If I say yes, I may not mean it.”
“When I—when I... after the stream... you would have killed him then.”
“I was sick.”
“Promise.”
They writhed slowly, and he promised her, from some dark dungeon-deep ecstasy, and he did not mean it. And then she told him, like a trusting child, about the instrument, puzzling him a great deal, so he questioned her awhile, between the long rollers of their deadalive and timeless and unimperative love.
There were really two very atrocious aspects on which his recognition foundered. And in the end, when he was convinced, he felt ridiculous. Even as a ghost. A couple of the idiotic and perverse mainstays of his life were gone. But since he was dead, maybe that was only right
By then, something peculiar was beginning to happen in the room.
It originated at the window, and was a sort of steady drawing, a bleeding away of substance. Myal became, for the first time since realising his condition, nervous.
“What is it?” he demanded. Then he understood without getting an answer from the girl. They both reacted quite intuitively, falling apart like two tired pages in a book. And they lay, the lovers, in the tomb of the bed, watching the manifestation of dawn at the window.
It was not like any dawn he had witnessed when alive. It had neither colour nor light. It simply sucked the world away, consumed it, in an invisible conflagration.
“What happens,” Myal said eventually, “to us?”
“What do you mean?”
“In the daylight”
“Oh, day’s unimportant.”
He was frightened, and lay rigid by her listlessness, waiting to lose consciousness. True, he had heard of ghosts who moved about by day, just as he had told Parl Dro, but they were rare, perhaps eccentric. Night was the canvas the deadalive required. Certainly the town of Tulotef required it.
The room was like a vague sketch. The bed was a billow of dark mist. And Ciddey—she turned on her side as if to sleep, and dissolved. And as this happened, for a moment, he thought he saw a fish leap through her hair.
With his horror ready, Myal glanced at his own body, and was astonished to find it still opaque. Surely by now his awareness should be fading out.
The last of the room went suddenly, like a swath of smoke blowing off the hill. He glimpsed the revolting inn sign whirling in the wide air like a cumbersome bird. And then the mattress under him was rock, and the fires of dawn broke through abruptly into his sight, blinding him with their mortal violence.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
All the colours in the spectrum raced, like an enraged mob, over the hill, trampling through Myal’s eyes. He felt he could not stand it, after the murks and smoulders and quarter tones of the Ghyste. He also felt a keen insecurity at being left behind. The night had pulled out from shore, like a huge boat laden with its passengers, and somehow he had missed it. Was he then, incredibly, still quick? No. For trying to pick up a pebble on the slope, his perfectly fleshly-looking hand went through it. And when the sun was higher, he got up, having selected a stunted little tree that had apparently been poking through the canopied bed all night, unnoticed, and he walked at it, and, with a desolate wretchedness, right through it.
With a cry of fear, he stood and listened to his heart pounding where there was no heart to pound. He supposed if he stopped believing in his heart, it would stop beating, and hastily he tried to avoid that ultimate loss. He glanced around wildly in an effort to distract himself. And was duly distracted by the bare hillside of sere pallid grass and weather-burnished rock, naked among the thousand black fur backs of the forest which framed it. There was no town anywhere by day. Not even rubble, not even the scars of the great landslip remained. Everything that had been had dropped into and beneath the lake. Then he looked inadvertently down toward the shore, caught his breath—unnecessarily, kidding himself like all ghosts—and swore.
The broad waters of the star-rayed lake were gone. There was only a sprawl of chasm, arid, eroded mud that was hardening into stone, from which five bleak gulleys ran away.
Myal leaned out from the empty hill, staring. Like a big well, the lake had gone dry. Either the river had failed it at its source, or some internal plug had been pulled. Thirty years or more, the bed had been drying out. The night waters of Tulotef were also a ghost. But what of the tumbled town which had, in all the myths, rumours or tales, lain on its floor?
“Pretty, isn’t it?” said Parl Dro’s softly articulate, unmistakable voice, about ten feet behind him.
Myal attempted to spin around, lost his balance, skidded down the hill. He ended on one knee, clawing at the turf he could not actually grasp.
Dro watched him. Black mantle, black hair, black eyes against the scald of blue sky. Impassive. Myal’s musical instrument hung by its sling across his black shoulder.
Myal grimaced.
“Well, get on with it.”
Dro raised both eyebrows.
“I mean,” said Myal, angry in his fright, “I’m here. You’re here. You’ve got the link—my link—the instrument. So destroy it. Get rid of me. What the hell’s keeping you?”
Dro’s long eyebrows levelled like the death black eyes under them. There was no playful cruelty at all in his face.
“You seem to be very sure of my next move.”
“I should be. I’ve listened to enough of your damned boasting. Pull out the dead like rotten teeth. The deadalive must die. I’m not fighting you. Get on with it.”
“How convenient for me, professionally speaking,” said Dro, “that you happen to be one of those unusually strong-willed, witch-gifted ghosts who are able to manifest in broad daylight.”
“Look,” said Myal shivering, wondering bewilderedly how he was able to, “I’m a coward, right? And what I really can’t bear is waiting around for something awful to happen. So will you please do it now? Or is this what makes you feel good? Sadistically terrorising the dead.”
“You’re not dead.”
“Just,” said Myal. He paused. “What?”
“You are not dead.”
“Ha,” said Myal. He smashed his hand through a rock. “Look. See? I’m dead.”
“You’re out of your body, but your body’s alive. You can go back to it eventually. Not necessarily inspiring, but a fact.”
“Shut up,” said Myal. He put his face in his hands. “I always said you were a bastard.”
“So far as I know, I was conceived inside wedlock. Your own situation may be a little more complex.”
“Shut up.”
“Remember Cinnabar? The kind redhead who loaned you a horse?”
“The kind redhead who loaned you her—”
“She gave you a clay dog which you put in your shirt pocket. There was a drug in the dog which soaked out and into you. A drug to induce cataleptic trance.”
“To induce
what
?”
“The life activities of the body are slowed to the minimum, and the astral state can then be triggered. It seems Cinnabar thought you psychically capable enough to release your own astral persona voluntarily, under the right conditions. But not adept enough to produce the trance unaided.”
“You’ve got me all confused,” shouted Myal.
“Which is, of course, extremely difficult to do.”
Myal stood up. He looked at the ground.
“I’m alive—somewhere.”
“In an old woman’s decrepit hovel, about seven or eight miles from here.”
“That sounds cosy.”
“She’ll take care of you, till you’re able to get back.”
“When will
that
be?”
“When the drug wears off. And when you’re finished here.”
“If I go to a tree, I walk through it,” said Myal. “Why don’t I sink through the ground?”
“Basic common sense. Probably even your limited perspective can see it would be rather pointless.”
“In other words, you don’t know.”
“In other words,” said Parl Dro, “you can be incorporeal, but only as far as you want to be. You can walk through a stone wall and pick up a plate on the other side. A moment’s adjustment of willpower is all that’s necessary.” He drew the instrument off his shoulder and held it between his hands by its two peculiar necks. Then he raised the instrument and slung it at Myal. “Catch.”
Myal leapt forward, not thinking, guided by a vision of smashed wood and broken ivory. He caught the instrument just before it touched the earth. It was solid and heavy in his arms, the wires vibrating quietly like a cat purring. It did not slip through him. He held it and his legs buckled.
“A practical demonstration is often more effective than a lecture,” said Dro. He sat down on the hillside, straightening out the crippled left calf, and Myal saw the black eyes momentarily go blind with pain.
Myal sat on a jut of rock, the instrument on his knees. He rubbed the garishly painted wood, fascinated, his fingers caressing, as they had always bodily done, the ivory chips sunk in there.
“You’re sure,” he eventually said, “I’m alive?”
“I’m sure.”
“Cinnabar was crazy.”
“Not quite. The story goes that if you’d got into Tulotef physically, they’d have served you for dinner.”
“She thought she was helping, pushing me in this way? Because of my song I wanted to make—”
“I’m afraid she thought she was helping me,” Parl Dro said. He looked out toward the dry mud chasm of the dead lake.
“You called it Tulotef,” said Myal.
“Yes.”
“According to you, that’s supposed to be unwise, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
A melancholy oppression of anticlimax lay over Myal. He traced the patterns on the instrument, but felt no inclination to play it. A silence widened between them. The whole earth was silent where the ghostly clangour of the town had been before. A light wind flapped over the hill and brushed the tops of the forest, but it made hardly any sound, only the sound of emptiness. Even the resins of the forest did not smell so high up, or else the uncanny spot had sucked its perfumes away, eating the life force of the trees, the hill, the land, as it ate the life force of living men who wandered, or were coerced, inside the gates.
“I spent the night,” Myal said at last, “with Ciddey Soban. We didn’t—I don’t want you to think—”
“I’m not thinking anything.”
“All right. But she told me. The link that’s keeping her on earth. If I tell you, I want your word you won’t harm her.”
“Harm?”
“Won’t throw her out of this world. Not until she’s ready.”
“You can guess what my word is worth.”
“I’ll trust you.”
“No, you don’t trust me. Something’s puzzling you, and you want to tell me so it will puzzle you less. That’s all. And you’re prepared to betray Ciddey Soban to me for that.”
“She wants to kill you.”
“She shouldn’t be strong enough yet to try.”
“She’s very strong. She’s used your energy too, to draw on through me. A ghost-killer’s life force must be particularly restorative for a ghost. And she was a witch, too.”
“You underestimate your own psychic force. She didn’t need me. And you don’t get my word.”
Myal gnawed a blade of grass he had found he was after all able to pluck. “I’ll tell you anyway. I still have the advantage. You’ll see why.”
“Because presumably,” said Dro, “Ciddey’s link is located on that instrument I just handed back to you.”
Myal frowned, thunder stolen.
“You’re so intelligent. Know where?”
“I’d thought about the inset ivory,” said Dro, “but so far as I know, she never lost any bones.”
“Not a bone,” said Myal. “A tooth. A milk tooth. She fell as a baby, and it got knocked out. She was just a year old.”
Myal took another deep breath that was pointless. The absurdity of the story upset him, how two of the guidelines of his life had rested on lies.
“Old Soban kept Ciddey’s tooth. Superstition. Then he had a chance to sell something. He was always trying to sell things, heirlooms, furniture, for drink. He was a drunkard, like my sot of a father. That’s probably how they met. In some inn. Didn’t care about being landowner mixing with travelling rubbish, then, drinking each other under the stinking table. Then Soban got my bloody stink of a father interested in buying a unique musical instrument. It came from some foreign country. No one could play it. That was true enough. My drunken boss-eyed father went to Soban’s house, took one look at the instrument, and thought he, being a genius, could master it, and make a fortune. He’d get ideas like that sometimes. So he felt the instrument over, businesslike, and plunked away on the wires, and blew down the reed. And then he said he’d buy it, but there was a bit of ivory missing out of the inlay. What’d Soban take off the asking price?”
“To which,” said Dro, staring at the lake, “Soban replied he could replace the ivory. And he took the thing upstairs and got the milk tooth and rammed it into the wood where the hole was.”
“That’s it. Ciddey knows, because her father made a great history out of it. She said it shamed her. Till I came back on the same road my father did, and it turned out so useful for her.”