“Your village,” said Dro. “Is the Ghyste what drove your people away?”
“That, and other things. But if you’re asking have the deadalive got stronger in these parts, yes, they have. Stronger, and stronger still. I haven’t got the seventh sense, but when I was a girl,” she said, “I’d see shapes in the wood like milk, pale, showing the trees through them. Now, the dead look like men. I’ll tell you, when I spotted you in the dawn, I wondered.”
“They’re strong enough to manifest after sunrise?”
“They’re strong.”
“But only at certain seasons,” said Dro.
“Of course. What’d you expect? The psychic time that corresponds with the time of the landslide. Not a calendar day or month or year. But moon times, star times, seasons of conjunction and the zodiac. One is right now. That’s why you’re here, eh? And him—somehow he knew the right time, too. So he’s cleverer than you think.”
“Or than he thinks.”
“Solved your mystery yet?” she inquired. “I mean the woman who made the clay dog, and put the drug into it, and why.”
“Maybe.”
“What’ll you do?”
“What will I do?”
“It’s easier,” said Sable. “Her way, it’s easier. Especially for you, Parl Dro.”
“So you know my name,” he said flatly.
“I guessed your name,” she said. “People always said, one day you’d come.”
The old pain gnawed sullenly on the bones of his leg. Pain like fear.
And the memory began to come he had been trying to keep at bay. He had shoved the memory out of sight in some attic of the mind. He had thrust other memories in its way, between himself and it. Memories of childhood, of youth. Even of Silky. Rather be wounded than made a fool, perhaps.
But now, he slipped back toward it. The herb tea, the pain, Myal’s half death, the message Cinnabar had sent, all these things pushed Dro back along the highway in his brain. Not far. He found himself glancing over five years, then over more than twenty. At himself, fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five. The years of growing and learning, by trial and error, by thought and reading and dialogue, his inescapable trade. He glimpsed two or three old men, professional exponents of exorcism, those who had taught him. He had never really needed their lessons. Somehow he had known. Always known, and always had the strength, psychic, metaphysical, to put the knowledge to its terrible, essential work. Silky, when he was thirteen, had found the truth of his calling in him, just as, if she had not died, she would have found for him other truths, better, sweeter, less precious. And if she had lived, how would he have lived? A farmhand to this day, perhaps. Or a minor landowner if he was lucky. Sons and daughters, a wife, a gradual, gentle, back-breaking, marvellously simple life. If she had lived, and not come to him in the rain with her cold hands and her elemental wickedness. But he could not linger with Silky. The memory he was avoiding was nearer than that. Very, very near. Not a boy of thirteen, a man dressed in black. And yet, of course, Silky was in this memory, too. Had almost been the cause of it.
He could see the mountain with absolute clarity. It was ahead of him in the memory, poking up in the dusk to the northeast, like a chimney, smoking a single cloud and a scatter of spark-bright early stars. Over the mountain lay the lands that drew away into the legend, the mirage that pulled at him, Tulotef, Ghyste Mortua. He knew the season for it was coming, as every few years it did, the time of manifestation. Philosophers and charlatans had all instructed him, and he had believed in it with a dry matter-of-fact mysticism.
Strange, though, how dim and amorphous that initial belief in the Ghyste seemed to him now, as he recollected it. More a casual interest than a driving goal, not the dedication it had become.