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.