Kill the Dead

After a while, he was not dead. He was lying over the back of a small horse, watching the ground—high grasses, small stones, wild flowers—jog by between its hoofs. On the other side from his dangling face, upside down, two long black-booted legs walked, unevenly, and a black mantle swung.

“Where are we going?” asked Myal. He was having a lucid moment, he was fairly sure. He could tell the lucid moments, because they were the moments when he felt most ill. Yesterday—or had it been longer?—he had followed Parl Dro into the east. To start with, he had assumed Dro would stick to the road. Then, when Myal reached the track, he had been perplexed. It looked raw going for a lame man. On the other hand, the road ran off to the south. Stories of Ghyste Mortua tended to locate it east or north of east. By then, the itching, gnawing discomforts of Myal’s body had turned into a bright blaze. Though his head ached, he felt intelligent and eager for some kind of action. His unformed fantasies of murdering Dro, gray and sickening before, had grown courageous, inspiring. He bolted off onto the track almost without thinking. After sunset, lost in the wood, he shouted at the trees. But Dro seemed to have left an imprint of his warped and blackened soul on them, which, as the fever worsened, slowly emerged.

When Myal saw the red spirit of the fire rising in a thin streamer from the fortress over the marsh, he picked up a sharp stone from the wayside. But something had gone wrong. Something always went wrong.

“Ciddey,” he said to the ground.

“That’s your reason, is it?” said the King of Swords.

Myal looked at the king’s boots.

“She was very young to die,” Myal said sentimentally. Tears ran out of his eyes. As each tear formed it blinded him, and then his sight returned as the drops dropped straight from the sockets onto the turf. One hit the upturned face of a flower. He could imagine it thinking: Ah! Now I have to contend with salt rain.

“If you’d just left them alone,” Myal said. “She put her shoes on the bank. She fell back in the water. I tried to get to her, but when I got her out she was dead.”

He abandoned himself once more to the fever. He lay, wrapped in misery, waiting for his consciousness mercifully to go out again. Then King Death was shaking him. Or seemed to be. The horse had stopped.

“What did you say?”

“What did I say? Don’t know. You sure I said anything? Maybe just a delirious babble. You shouldn’t take me too seriously–”

“Ciddey Soban. Are you telling me she’s dead?”

“Oh,” Myal yawned. Fresh tears dropped from his eyes. “She drowned herself. It was your fault, you damned bastard.”

But something about Dro’s voice, though quite flat, quite expressionless, brought Myal to the realisation that of course the Ghost-Killer could not have known till now about Ciddey. It would have been stupid, after all, to slaughter a man for a crime he was unaware of having committed.

“With her sister gone, she had nothing left to live for,” Myal explained.

Dro stood, looking away into the spaces of the morning. By twisting his head, Myal could see him, but it was too much of an effort to retain this position. Eventually Dro said,

“I’m glad for your sake your music isn’t as trite as your dialogue.”

The horse began to move again.