The priests kept their distance from the hostel door, staying actually outside the compound, as the crowd had done. Parl Dro had paused in the compound of necessity, since the brotherhood had nervously barricaded the hostel door with logs, posts and baskets—as if a ghost would normally fear to pass straight through such domestic trivia. Dro tossed and thrust these items aside, then crashed open the door, crashing it shut again as soon as he was inside.
The hostel was black now, with black starless cavities of windows. Picking up the priest’s toppled chair, Dro slung it against the door timbers, a barricade with a new purpose—to keep any other live thing out.
The room was cold and dripping—dank as someone’s dungeon.
At first, there was nothing else, except that the racket of the swelling crowd in the street seemed unduly muffled and far away.
Dro’s eyes dilated to pierce the gloom. Soon, he was seeing well, via the cat-sight of the extra seventh sense. He did not touch the candles or the tinder box. Now and then a dart of light from the host of tinders outside would streak over the wall. But slowly, the brightness of these darts grew dull. Then he began to hear the melodious winnowing of sound, the sound of the stream below the mountain. Cilny’s stream. And Ciddey’s.
Myal, whom the priests had courageously abandoned–more, trapped inside with the unknown terror–had remained oblivious. He lay on the bed, peacefully slumbering. It was a peace that filled Parl Dro with iron rage.
Dro took one stride forward, but in that second, the manifestation began to return.
She formed, little by little, in the shade just over the far edge of Myal’s bed. She was visible from the knees upward, and below her knees, across the mattress and Myal’s body, flowed the smoky convolutions of the water. She was mainly transparent. Even so, Dro could see she showed none of the rigours of drowning, though plainly, if unconsciously, she recollected exactly how she had died. Her face was calm and empty at first, but as she looked at him, focused on him, her face altered. Her eyes seemed to sink and to enlarge into mere sockets. She grinned, and her grin was terrible, unspeakable, showing only her lower teeth. She raised her hands, and she held a freshwater fish in them. She bore it to her mouth as if to kiss it, then sank her teeth into its squirming living back. A trickle of pallidly gleaming blood ran down her chin.
It was an illusion, the fish. She was even more a witch, dead, than she had been alive. She fashioned such forms to intimidate him. When she perceived he was not intimidated, the fish, the trickle of blood, even the swirl of the ghostly stream evaporated.
She hung there, still smiling vilely at him. Then her smile went away, and she too slid away, back and back and back, as the inescapable force of Dro’s will pushed her.
She opened her mouth in a soundless cry, and lifted her hands again. Her nails were already very long. She fought him, but he was used to such fighting, and she was not. He thrust her all the way to the wall, seeming to press her, like a phosphorescent imprint, into the whitewash. Her hair blew or fanned out like a misty colourless sunburst–moonburst–on the bricks. He held her pinned like that, and then, never taking his eyes from her, he fastened one pitiless hand over Myal’s throat, squeezing the windpipe until, gagging and choking, the musician flailed into consciousness.
Dro unfastened the stranglehold. Myal croaked a number of expletives and accusations. Dro cut him short, dragging Myal’s head around by the hair toward the wall.
“Look.”
Myal froze, petrified, rigid as a stone in Dro’s grip.
“What–what is it?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Ciddey—it’s Cidd—”
“Don’t keep naming her. She has enough of a hold on you as it is. How do you feel?”
“I feel sick.” A ludicrous note of reproach crept into Myal’s voice. “I haven’t been well.”
“You’ll be less well if she goes on feeding off you.”
“Feeding–”
“She’s using your life energy to supplement her own. Can’t you feel it?”