When she drifted down the stair, he already had the candle alight. She glanced at it wonderingly, then took up a slate and a scrap of chalk. He was not amazed that she could hold them in her unreal hands, the shock came when she showed him what she had written. Not that he could read it He would have needed a reflective surface for that. For, in the way of her kind, she had written unhesitatingly from right to left, back to front, in mirror writing. If he had needed any further sign, she had supplied it.
When he drew the packet of her hair from his belt, her eyes and mouth widened in frightful demented shapes. He had his first glimpse into hell, then, as the first of the great white moths dashed itself against him, throwing the filaments of its wings over his face, tearing him with the shards of its nails and its frantic unhuman cries–
The burning packet of hair fell from the candle onto the tiles.
And as he destroyed her, in that minute he learned, and learned forever, that yes, it could be possible, and essential, and unbearably horrible, to kill the dead.
It was his very last lesson in that schoolroom, as it was his last night in that town or on that stretch of land.
When the rainwater, dripping through from above, quenched the smouldering ashes, he ran away into the undergrowth of night. He had been running from things since sunrise. Running from them, and toward them. Now too, he ran toward his future, and his trade. Although he did not know it, and just then would have wept if he had.
The fire was low. A crimson branch had broken open, whistling as the sap bled from it. The fortress wall hid the lights of the village from Parl Dro the man. Only the mild passage of the river at its summer low was audible, and sometimes a treacly chorus of frogs.
He was thinking the endlessly repeated question. Did I simply curtail her dead-life because she would have robbed me of my human one?
The answer came, as it always did, soothing him, never quite enough: He had not destroyed her in rage, not even merely in terror. He had grasped, or some part of him had, that this thing which would murder him, for whatever reason, could only be an echo, and a defiled echo at that, of the girl he had been companion to, the girl who had had such rights to love, whose human life he would have equated with his own. Wherever she had gone to, she had gone away from being that, that parody of herself.
The moon was up. A vixen screamed, miles off. He heard the muffled scrunch of a boot scraping on the brick causeway he had crossed hours earlier.
The imperative present had arrived.
Parl Dro sat, back to the wall, not moving. The meadow contained the footsteps which would now be negotiating it. Once there was a brief stumble. If he had not known, Dro might have taken it for some night beast tussling with rival or prey in the grass. Then the feet shambled over the uneven ground where the outer walls had come down. The stumbling was very evident now. Abruptly a voice cried out to him.
“Dro! Parl Dro! Are you here?”
Pitching his voice to carry as well, or better, than that cry, Dro said, “I’m here, Myal Lemyal.”
The feet erupted into an uncertain gallop. Suddenly, around the wall, the musician careered into view. His face was dead white, his eyes appeared as black as Dro’s. His hair streaked his forehead, plastered with sweat, and his sleeves flapped absurdly. Seeing Dro directly in front of him, he checked.
“So you’re here.”
“Unless, of course, you’re imagining me.”
Myal Lemyal jerked his head crazily. He drew the instrument off his shoulders and laid it carefully down. Then, with a hoarse bleak howl, he ran through the fire at Dro. There was a sharp stone in his right hand, the other was a stranglehold aimed for Dro’s neck.