It was dark, the sun down and the windows deep blue. He was about to rise and light the candles when he felt again the extraordinary sensation of a separate live entity on his knee. Not a brutish jailer, certainly, it was too light. He chuckled to himself, thinking one of the puppies had strayed into the hostel. He put out his hand gently to pat the beast–and encountered a cool scaly flapping.
With a yelp, the priest started up, overturning his chair. As he did so, a beam of light, falling across the room from the half-open door and the refectory beyond the compound, caught a vague pale swirling in the area of the traveller’s bed. It was rather like smoke, more like water, and in the midst of it something slowly turned and floated.
The priest felt a horrible drawing sensation like faintness, and he became icy cold.
Somehow he tottered to the door and out of it. He had no thought for his patient, indeed few thoughts at all until he staggered into the lamp-lit refectory.
The inn was filling up with evening trade. The Ghost-Killer was seated on a bench in a corner. He had eaten frugally half an hour before sunset. The flask of wine was two-thirds full and stoppered. He was drinking water when the two priests hurried in.
Everyone looked. Though all the priests drank heartily, they did not do it in the sinful public house.
More interesting yet was the way the brothers rushed immediately to the stranger in the black mantle.
“Answer me,” cried the fatter of the two priests–both were reasonably fat– “Are you the man we reckon you to be?”
“Let’s start again,” said Dro lazily. “Who do you think I am?”
“One of those lawless and unholy–” rattled off the lesser fat priest.
The other swiped him, “Be quiet, you fool.” He added to Dro: “We reckon you to be one skilled in the exorcism of undead spirits.”
Dro watched them.
“And so?”
The fatter priest contained his dignity. “And so, we require your services, my son.”
The room eyed them, ears pinned back. Even the row of cats, perched on the beer barrels, listened, wide-eyed.
“The fact is, my son,” said the lesser fat priest, unbending from his distaste, “we’re probably mistaken, but–”
“But we’ve had a strange occurrence in the hostelry where your friend is being nursed. We feel that you owe us some responsibility, my son.”
“I concede,” said Dro, “that one of you may have got out over the wall some night. But to accept both of you as fathers would be biologically unsound. Besides, I think the woman misled you. Try a little arithmetic. I’d say I was unlikely to be the son of either of you, unless you conducted a courtship prior to the womb.”
The room in general made a little explosive crowing noise. Both priests changed colour. The lesser snapped,
“He’s a rogue and a devil. Leave him alone. The idiot brother in the hostel was half asleep. Here we are, letting ourselves and our habit be insulted, just because some imbecile dreamed there was a live fish in his lap.” He flung about, glaring at the room and its inadequately suppressed laughter. He jumped when Parl Dro walked past him and out of the door.
Scrambling the same way, the two priests observed Dro crossing the street by the stepping stones and going around the wall and through into the compound. They hurried after him. In groups, drinkers from the inn began to follow, halting however at the compound gate.
That stretch of street, and the space before the religious building and its subsidiary architecture, grew bright and cheery with struck tinders, drink and shouted inquiry. Crowd attracted crowd. A hundred persons soon blocked the thoroughfare. Priests swarmed like cream bees back and forth, ordering the crowd, as they struggled through it, into temporary areas of silence. No direct information was supplied, but fragment by fragment the tale grew. There was a ghost in the hostel.