“Come now,” said Dro, very nearly playfully, “you’re not bored with this lovely bracing walk we’re having?”
“It beats me why you don’t ride with that–with your–well, it beats me. You could afford a horse.”
“If I started riding, I’d cease being able to walk anywhere again,” said Dro. “The only way I can keep the damn thing from seizing up forever is to work the hell out of it most days.”
“Oh.” Awarded this personal revelation, Myal felt pleased and almost flattered. Emboldened, he said, “You seem to know the direct route to Tulotef.”
“I practically do. But leave the name alone. Why do you think it got a nickname instead?”
“That other thing,” said Myal, “the girl–”
“No,” Parl Dro said. “Leave that alone, too.”
Puzzled and insecure, Myal did as he was told.
The escarpment went on, up and up. Looking back, the descending lands they had negotiated earlier had become another country, ethereal and far away, perhaps impossible to regain.
Myal’s mother had died six months after his birth. Another mistake, getting himself born to a woman who died, probably because of him. Inadvertent matricide thereby added to his crimes. He had been brought up, or dragged up, by the bestial father. At twelve he had run away. He was still running. Still thieving too; his first proper theft had been the stringed instrument–the second time it had been stolen. Before that he had only attempted small robberies, at his strap-wielding father’s suggestion.
When the sun fell, and the light began to go, and they were still climbing the inward-curving upland they had first got on to an hour before noon, the analogy of life itself as a hopeless climb occurred to Myal. Though they had rested somewhere, under trees, for a while, his back and his legs screamed. He could not understand how Dro, the cripple, kept going with such seeming indifference, with such a peculiar lurching grace. Myal began to think Dro forced himself on merely in order to spite his companion.
If I stop dead, what then?
Myal stopped dead. Dro did not appear to note the cessation. He went on, walking up into the forerunning brushwork of the dusk.
“Hey!” Myal yelled. “Hey!”
A bird shot out of a tree. Dro stopped, but did not turn. Myal shouted up at him, “I’m not going any farther. It’s getting dark.”
Then he realized Dro had not stopped because of any of his shouts.
Absurdly, ordered to leave the subject alone, Myal had almost succeeded in wiping it from his mind. A feeling of apprehension which came with the fading of day could be interpreted simply as normal antipathy to another night on hard ground, with possibilities of foraging bears and no supper. Ciddey Soban had been pushed into a corner of Myal’s consciousness. He had not wanted to dwell on her.
But now he recollected, and with good reason.
Dro was in front of him, about fifty feet away. Perhaps forty feet ahead of Dro a girl was stepping nimbly up the slope. She did not turn, or hesitate, or threaten, or mock. She was only there, walking, pale as a new star. Ciddey. Terrible, unshakable Ciddey.
Myal swallowed his heart as a matter of course. He went after Dro, prowling, delicate, as if travelling across thin ice. If the girl-ghost turned, he was ready to freeze, change into a tree, dive down a hole—
She did not turn.
He reached Dro. Through the closing curtains of darkness Myal peered at the ghost-killer’s impassive face.
“It’s not my fault,” Myal whispered.
Dro did not whisper, though he spoke softly.
“Maybe. She shouldn’t be able to manifest without a link. There doesn’t appear to be one. But she’s there.”
“Do you want me to play the song upside down again?”
“No. I don’t think there’s much point. I’d say she only left last time out of a kind of scornful sense of etiquette.”
“What do we do?”
“Follow her. That’s her intention. We might learn something by falling in with it.”
“Where’s—where’s she going?”
“Where do you think?”