He fell asleep and dreamed Cinnabar’s clay dog had got out of his pocket and was barking and frisking in the meadow, until one of its jumps broke it on a stone. Red blood flowed from the clay and Myal wept in his sleep. For comfort, his dream hands closed on wire strings and began to play them. It was the song he had made for Ciddey Soban.
Any compunction Parl Dro might have felt was inevitably tempered by the realisation that the crazy minstrel was even now probably less than a hundred feet off. Not that Dro was particularly inclined to compunction. From thirteen until he was fifteen, he had worked his way up and down various tracts of land, now as herder, now as farmhand, now as escort for or carrier of trade goods, and he had learned his own methods of survival. Myal Lemyal, from the look of things, had had a life as rough, dangerous and soul-destroying. His methods of survival were not Parl Dro’s, yet they were methods and he had survived. Dro had more respect for Myal’s abilities than Myal could guess. And less time for him than even Myal’s paranoia intimated. It was not aversion exactly, but simply that Dro’s singularity had grown to be a habit. He would break from it for a day, a night, now and then. But he was used to being companionless. Used to himself as seen only through his own implacable eyes.
At fifteen, when he was still capable of becoming reasonably gregarious, and exceedingly drunk, Parl Dro had accepted a bet, for a pound bag of silver, to sleep the night in a haunted barn. At the time he had done it for the cash, but also out of a sense of cultivated contempt. Something in him had, for two years, been vehemently denying that night when Silky had come back to him under the lightning-blasted apple tree. He did not believe in ghosts at fifteen.
He had reclined on the straw and the reeds in the barn, now and then drinking from the wineskin the men had provided, vaguely lit by a hanging lamp—the bargain had not stipulated a vigil in the dark. Just before the sun went, his hosts had shown him the place where the ghost came through out of nowhere. They had also shown Parl the cindery glove, pinned to a post in the floor. They had discovered the rudiments, and pointed to the glove, saying, “That’s why it comes.” Another told how a man had once tried to destroy the glove by throwing it in a hearth fire. But as soon as the thumb began to singe, the man had felt deathly ill. He snatched the glove from the flames before he knew what he was doing. Now they boasted about the deadalive revenant in the barn. They invited travellers to sleep there. The last man who had accepted the bet, they assured Parl, had gone stark mad. Parl had nodded, smiling. He expected tricks but nothing unworldly. He lay on the straw and thought about the bag of silver, which he had convinced himself he wanted. He ignored the sense of horror that lay over the barn. At midnight the ghost came.
It no longer much resembled anything human, though naturally by now it appeared solid and three-dimensional. The physical trauma of its death had stayed with it, which was unusual, and in this case, obscene, for it had been hacked to pieces by enemies. It came from thin air, shrieking with agony, its flesh in ribbons, its eyes put out.
Parl’s impulse was normal, and was to run away. Something would not let him. He found himself staggering to the post where the glove was pinned. And the awful, shrieking, eyeless thing came blundering after him. A moment before it collided with him, Parl cast the wineskin he discovered he was still holding straight up into the hanging lamp.