A shriek slit down the night.
It came from the topmost room of the tower, on the north side of the house.
Myal and Ciddey were momentarily petrified. The girl broke from her rigor before he did. Leaving the shutter wide, she turned and ran away into the depths of the house.
Myal remained in the yard, glaring wildly between the trees at the one corner of the tower that was visible from this vantage, a constriction in his throat.
CHAPTER THREE
The trees around the house on its north side could have been deliberately planted to give access to the tower. One in particular rested its boughs almost across the sill of the second-story window. Of course, a lame man might not be reckoned capable of scaling trees.
When Parl Dro reached the window, he found it latched from within. Easing the lame leg, which itself did not reckon it should be required to scale trees, Dro produced a slender knife, and slid it through the join between the shutters. In a couple of seconds it had raised the latch, and the two panes of dull glass parted. The room beyond was bare and empty, save for a few skeletal plants dying in dry soil and cracked pots on the floor. Dro entered it and vacated it as swiftly. The possible significance of the pots—herbal witchery—did not concern him, nor any longer the witch, judging by the state of them. Dro moved out through the door onto a steep stair. The top room lay straight above him at the stairhead, closed by a thick wooden door with plates and lock of rusty iron.
The girl was in the house, for he had seen her there soon after sunset, going with her lamp from window to window, latching each. The light had ultimately come to rest in an upper room, a thin thread behind shutters of wood. It was possible that this was a ruse, but he did not judge her so devious as to leave her lamp barely obvious in one place, and creep to another through the pitch-dark house. Besides, she would be hoping he was gone.
Just as he was starting up the tower stair, he heard the poignant unmistakable notes of Myal Lemyal’s wire strings.
Interested, Dro checked, almost pleased. If anything, this was to the good; Myal playing troubador at one end of the building would distract Ciddey Soban from this one. On the other hand, Myal’s purpose was decidedly oblique, maybe even to himself. It had been straightforward to dupe the musician, yet almost simultaneously, he had shown himself possessed of both talent and cunning—a talent and cunning he appeared bored with: or even unaware of. Not every man could have tracked Parl Dro to his cover on the slope that day, and not every man had ambitions connected to Ghyste Mortua. Nor did every minstrel make such music.
The current theme was trivial but not displeasing. Dro listened to it with a quarter ear as he finished the climb up the rest of the stairs, and picked the iron lock of the door at the top with his knife.
When he got into the room, he forgot the music
The aura of the manifested dead was intense and total. That pervasion, like an odour of cold stale perfume. That feel of an invisible active centre, which strove to draw off the energies of life, and of the living, into itself. No wonder Ciddey Soban was pale and slight. His earliest training had taught him that, even where love caused the deadalive to linger, they sucked the vitality of the quick who harboured them. They could not help it, any more than fire could help destroying a stick of wood put into the hearth. It merely happened. It merely had to be stopped.
Sometimes Parl Dro had been paid large sums of money to perform such work as this. Other times, he had slunk in like a thief, as he did now, and sharp pebbles had struck him across the back when the task was done.
The physical aspect of the room was itself depressingly invocational.
It was a bedchamber, or had been arranged to be: A stark canopied bed, maiden narrow, with fluted white drapes. A carved chest, in which he had no doubt Cilny Soban’s garments lay carefully folded amid bags of herbs. An antique mirror of polished silver stood on the chest, and two or three old books. On the inside of the door he had closed hung some tiny charms on a thread. Some of them looked like a baby’s teeth. In a bony chair sat a child’s doll, made of wood with cannily jointed limbs. It was dressed in faded spectral white, like everything else, and had long lank hair of flaxen wool. There was a tapestry on the wall, a rug on the floor, a table with an ewer and basin, some little combs chased with imitation mother-of-pearl, and an open ivory casket with delicate beads and bangles in it.
It was a sad room, and very horrible. It provided the perfect compost from which a ghost might ferment itself and establish its false claims on an earthly existence.
In the darkest comer, something stood off the rug, on the floor. It was a slim, two-foot-high stone jar.
The moment he looked at the jar, he felt her seep into the room. She had not been there when he entered. Cilny had died in the spring, not so long ago. She might need a human presence to rouse her. But also he suspected Ciddey had warned her into hiding. Even now, she was reluctant to evolve, sensing antipathy. A desire for her company, love, even fear, she could feed on. Dro offered her none of these. Yet now, looking at the pot which held her ashes, he began to exert his will on her. He began to drag her, willing or not, into the room.
His spine and the roots of his hair registered her arrival before his eyes did. But in less than half a minute, he could see her quite plainly too.
Frail and blonde she was, mostly transparent. No, she was not a very strong deadalive. She wore the clothing of her death hour, which was quite usual, the long flimsy nightgown the villagers had described, though for some reason the wreath of flowers was absent. Then, in the way of ghosts, unexpectedly and piteously, she touched him—by folding her arms shyly about herself. It was the modesty of a very young girl who had never slept with a man, and discovered herself alone with one in her nightwear. Nor was it contrived: he was fairly sure of that. He said to her gently, “Don’t be afraid, Cilny. Do you know who I am?”
Her voice was hardly more than a rustle, dry papers or blown leaves.
“Ciddey told me of a man, a lame man in black”
“What did she say?”
“That you’d kill me.”
“Cilny,” he said quietly, “how can I kill you? You’re already dead.”
“No,” she cried in her rustling voice. Panic made it stronger, “No—no—” She stared at him. “Ciddey woke me. I was asleep and she woke me.”
“She shouldn’t have awoken you. You should have woken in your own time and gone on your own way, to the place you have to go to.”
“No. I’ll stay here. I want my sister. I want Ciddey.”
He did not wish to be rough with her. Sometimes it was possible to comfort, to smooth the path. The going through could be calm, even some cases blissful, thankful. But this one would plead and whimper at him. He was steeled to the hurt, but to prolong the hurt for her would be no sort of kindness.
He took a step towards the pot of ashes, and then the ghost-girl shrieked.
The shriek had attained a dumbfounding strength. It thrilled through the room, through his ears, through stone. He knew Ciddey would have heard it.
Dro lunged towards the jar. To reach it, he had to go right by the ghost, partly through her. A debilitating chill sank over him as he did so. But he paid no attention to it. He kneeled and wrenched off the cover of the jar and threw it away. She came all about him in that moment, a white gale, a pale insect whipping him with frantic opalescent wings. Primeval horror strangled him, swarming over his skin. He could smell only the grave, and phosphorescent worms crawled across his eyes. He wanted—needed—to lash out, beat her insubstantiality away, run yelling from the room—well-known sensations he was accustomed to controlling.
Vaguely, beyond it all, he heard a door flung open lower in the tower.
Her ashes were Cilny’s link to mortal life.
The link had always to be destroyed, or at least altered. The means were as various as the links themselves. The bone must be smashed, air mingled with its fragments. The scarf, the glove must be charred in fire, flames mingled with the cloth. Change was the key.
The ashes lay far down in the stone pot. He could see them, even through the whirlwind of pallor and dark. He unhooked the flask of white brandy from his belt and pulled the cork. Luckily, it did not take very much to render Myal Lemyal drunk. There was enough left for the enterprise.
Dro poured the libation with a careful steady hand, covering all the floor of the jar. There was a brief smoke, as if from acid.
Suddenly the swirling nightmare dispersed from about him. It was as if a great noise had fallen silent.
He stood up slowly, and looking around him saw Cilny’s face staring at him, huge-eyed, desperate, but it was the doll in the chair. Cilny was gone.
She had not cried out again. Perhaps she could not summon the power. Or perhaps, at the very last, she had seen beyond the gate, seen that the land she must journey to was unknown, alien, yet not terrible after all, not to be feared.
For a second, Parl Dro felt weak and drained to the threshold of illness. At such times, his will expended like a loss of blood, he was inclined to believe the adage that for every ghost a ghost-killer returned to its death, he moved himself a little nearer to his own.
He leaned his shoulder on the wall and watched the door, waiting for it to burst aside. Which it presently did.
The two sisters were very similar, yet Cilny had an elusive quality Ciddey did not, or was it that Ciddey’s elusiveness was more quickly translatable.
She darted a white raging glare about the chamber. She did not ask why he was there, or what he had done. She knew, naturally. She too would scent the vacancy where the dank perfume of the ghost had lain so heavy.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He was not. It was a courtesy, and really just a facet of his perverseness to offer it. For this was no hour for courtesies.
The girl reacted in a shocking, predictable fashion. She launched herself straight at him, actually springing off her feet towards his face or throat like an attacking cat. It should have been nothing to catch and hold her, but she had acquired the force and fury of the possessed. Two nails raked down his cheek before he got her hands. Probably fortunately she was too naive, well bred or fastidious to aim for the traditional kick at him any street woman could have taught her.
When he did have hold of her, she struggled, struggles which ran down like clockwork as her violence ran out. Then she wept, and he held her through that, too. It did not always happen this way, but sometimes it did. He no longer bothered to assess what he felt at such an instant. Years before he would have identified regret, guilt, compassion; even self-satisfaction, even sex. But all these twinges of aftermath were basically meaningless. He let them travel their course, like the girl’s tears, mainly unheeding, completely uninfluenced. It was a kind of ritual.
When she eventually pushed away from him as fiercely as if she meant to strike at him again, that was ritual too.
She walked across the room to the chair. She lifted the doll and sat down with it, taking it on her lap. She looked at the doll.
“Well,” she said, “you’ve got what you came for.” Her voice was choked from crying, but otherwise completely level. “I do trust you don’t expect paying for it.”
“No.”
Abruptly she tossed the doll off her lap onto the floor. She looked at the floor then. “Such a great man,” she said. “So erudite. So clever.”
Parl Dro limped towards the door.
Ciddley said, “I want you to meet someone who—”
“Don’t dirty your mouth with a lot of gutter phrases you don’t properly understand,” he said. “It won’t make any difference, to either of us.”
She waited until he was through the door, then she called softly, “Have you ever thought about how many must loathe you, how many must wish you ill, want your suffering and despair? Don’t you ever feel it on your back, don’t you ever feel it in your belly, eating you alive, Parl Dro?”