The lamp burst with a crack of glass, and fiery oil and wine splashed over the straw. In seconds, the barn was on fire, full of light and smoke and roaring. The live dead thing had by then seized Parl, screaming and pressing him into the terrible still-bleeding gaping of its wounds. Parl would have burned along with the linking glove, if somehow the extraordinary power of will that was in him—latent, yet stronger than any power he had known he had, stronger than muscle or brain or the drives of hunger, sex, ambition or fear—if somehow that power had not sprung from him and thrust the deadalive whining and snarling aside.
The glove flared a few instants later, and the dreadful noises stopped. The blinded rigid face of the ghost-thing suddenly relaxed, as if its searing hurt had gone away. It faded quietly in the smoke, and Parl Dro broke out of the barn and ran like a dog-fox for the wood.
He looked back when he was on higher ground, and saw the men out in a black silhouette-dance around the fire, trying to quench it. He never got their silver, only the name of an arsonist, and the assured knowledge once more that the dead did not always die.
The smaller fire between the stones was sinking. Dro leaned to put on more branches, and paused. Along the side of the ravine, the musician was playing his music.
Dro sat, the branches loose in his hand, listening. Fine as silk threads drawn through the dark, the notes sewed over and about each other. The melody was oblique, tragic, stabbing somewhere inside the heart with a sweet piercing pain, removed yet immediate. Like that of any excellent minstrel, Myal Lemyal’s music could find out emotions that did not belong in the humours or mind of the listener, and plant them there and let them grow while the song sang itself. But Myal was much better than excellent. Myal, playing the bizarre instrument his father had killed to get, was one of the lost golden gods returned from the morning of the earth.
Then a cold sighing came over the ravine, and stars scattered along Parl Dro’s spine.
Very slowly, he turned his head, looking beyond the firelight and the freckling leaves of the poplars.
Under the oak on the hill the far side of the gully, glowing a little, like a fungus, shadow-eyed, smiling, still as a stone, sat Ciddey Soban.
Dro got to his feet. She was looking exactly at him, and now, mostly unmoving, she merely followed him with a serpentine turning of her head. She was scarcely transparent any more. Only one limb of the tree showed faintly through the drift of her skirt. Her skin, her hair, were quite opaque. Unlike her sister, this one was strong.
He walked, not fast, along the ravine side, toward Myal’s music.
Presently he came to a boulder and saw Myal Lemyal lying against it, sound asleep, and playing the instrument in his sleep.
Dro kicked him in the side. Myal grunted softly, his hands falling over each other and back to the strings, playing on. Dro leaned and slapped him hard across the jaw. The music sheered off, and Myal threw himself into a sitting position, plainly terrified.
“I haven’t done anything,” he cried, barely awake, the automatic protest of a hundred wrongful, and rightful, apprehensions and beatings.
“Look across the ravine. Then tell me you haven’t done anything.”
Myal started to look, and then would not “What is it?”
“You asked me that on the previous occasion. The answer is the same as then.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Myal, refusing to look.
Dro leaned down to him again, quiet and very dangerous.
“Whether you believe it or not, she’s used you. You summoned her with the song. I take it it’s a song you composed for her. Now, tell me what else you stole from her corpse.”
“Nothing!”
“You insist I search you?”
Myal slithered away backwards along the ground.
“Leave me alone. I tell you, I didn’t bring anything, just her shoe–and you burned that.”
“You didn’t remember the shoe at first. Think.”
“I am thinking. There isn’t anything.”
“There has to be something. She’s there. She needs a link to be there.”
“Well, I haven’t got anything.”
“Back away any farther,” said Dro, “and you’ll fall down the ravine.”
Myal halted himself. He was about a foot from the brink. He hauled himself farther in and, warily watching Dro, stood up.
“I still know I haven’t got anything else of hers.”
“Then you picked something up without knowing it.”
Myal looked as though he might glance across the ravine, but he switched his back to it again.