He had grasped Cinnabar’s scheme with slight surprise. That she foisted the musician on him by the means of loaning Myal a horse was eccentric enough. The drug in the clay dog, which had subsequently tranced Myal and loosed his astral body, as near equivalent to a ghost as a live man could go, was a ridiculous ploy.
Cinnabar must have learned from her lover, that ghost-killer who never returned, that the ultimate way into Ghyste Mortua had to be in spirit alone. Those who were dragged in live through the manifested ghost gates of Tulotef invariably died, so the story went. That death would be inevitable to a human taken there quick, with so many deadalive feeding their unflesh hungrily on his life force—even if they did not actually lay their claws on his skin and bones. So, only by releasing astral from physical could a man get in that place and hope to survive. By becoming as near a ghost as the ghosts of the Ghyste. To this end, there were disciplines to be learned, and Dro, who also knew the story, had accordingly learned them, a smattering here, a smattering there, all knotted together by his will. That will of pure iron, which carried him mile after mile, striding on a raging ruin called, euphemistically, a leg. That same iron will, he had believed, could put to sleep Dro’s body’s life and let the spirit out. Could hold the body intact in its trance, and, if any were able to achieve it, could bring the spirit back into the body, when he was done with Tulotef.
But Myal. Flung out in spirit like a handful of dust on the air. Caught by the deadalive, no doubt of that, and by the virgin, the Maid of Vessels, with her fish-cool hate and her illusory streams—Cinnabar had consigned Myal to that, because she had been sure his proximity was in some form vitally necessary to Parl Dro. If Dro must enter Tulotef, then Myal must be there before him. It would have been good to judge Cinnabar as mad, to be irritated by her conviction and methods. But, with unease, Dro had recognized in her one of those mysterious guides the psychic road was liable to produce. And she had reminded him of the golden woman in the wood. Queen of Fires, Queen of Leaves—
The Queen of Swords, his eldritch elderly sister, was brewing more tea. The aromatic steam curled across the hovel, and vanished as if passing through the walls: the ghost of tea.
“So you’ll trance yourself without a drug, and get into Ghyste Mortua. And then you’ll destroy Ghyste Mortua,” said Sable, “like all the other ghost-killers were going to. But they never managed it, did they, eh? What’s your idea?”
“Wait and see.”
Parl Dro wondered then if she could see, past the iron, the steel, the self-denying, cynical, adamant desire to kill the dead which symbolized his existence so bleakly, see by all that to the sombre terror in his heart, lying there immovable as Myal on the bed.
Myal Lemyal did not know his body lay miles away under a sheet in a hovel. Myal’s psychic body seemed as actual to him as actuality had ever seemed, and was even plagued by the same ills of nervousness and exhaustion. But then, the town of Tulotef seemed also actual. The town, and the girl.
And the three riders who had escorted them to the gate.
In the end, these men had not beaten Myal. They had not even let him ride the horse. At the last instant, as the irrevocable gateporch leaned over them—high, wide, echoing—they had pulled him down. As he landed on the paving, the instrument catching him again an almighty thump between the shoulders, a man had leapt for the vacant saddle. Spurs dug in, the horses shrilled. In a skirl of sparks and reverberant, gate-magnified hoofbeats, the riders dashed away into the heart of the unearthly town.
Myal rose, dabbing at fresh bruises. Ciddey Soban stood nearby. She was so completely normal, and mortal, that he caught his breath again in a whirling doubt of all facts and fantasies. White, bad-tempered, her eyes blazing, she slashed the dank atmosphere in the gate with her cat’s tongue.
“Scum! Villains!” And then a host of detrimental words Myal was vaguely shocked—though not astounded—she knew.