After delivering these epithets, she stood simmering, like any spoiled noble girl who had not got the masculine treatment she supposed was her right.
It all seemed so real. The hollow gate, wide open and unguarded, yet like a score of similar town gates Myal had gone in and out of. The angry female. The soft cool vapours of night. The gauzy sounds of people and action going on in the vicinity: hoofs, feet, metalware, voices, wheels and occasional bells; a dog barked somewhere, lusty and demanding. There was even a vague smell like baking bread—
The only wrong note was the half-mooned darkness. All this clamour of an industrious town in the forenoon, carried on at midnight.
“As for you—”
Myal turned automatically. Ciddey Soban glared at him.
“Damn it,” said Myal defensively, “what was I supposed to do? You’re all ghosts.”
“Be quiet.”
He quailed at the venom in her eyes, and said, fawningly, “Well, they were—”
“You offered me your protection,” she snarled.
“Did I?”
“And you let them molest me, threaten me with a sword.”
“And you wanted to lead me into town by a ribbon.”
“That’s all you’re good for. Someone’s lapdog.”
“They’d have beaten me up, while you—”
“I’d have laughed.”
“I think,” said Myal, turning from the gateway, “I’ll just—”
“No you won’t. As a protector, you’re ridiculous, but you’re all I have. You’ll stay with me. You, and that silly stringed instrument.”
She walked in the gate. She was imperious. It would be simple to retreat, dodge away into the forest that stretched from the slope, pressed like a huge crowd against the causeway, rank on rank of bladed darkness which was trees. Simple to retreat. Or was it simple? Something which was more than the willpower of the ghost girl was enticing him toward that gate.
A sudden uncanny notion struck Myal, unformed yet menacing. He had remembered the way the riders had threatened him by the pool, stating the penalties for those who consorted with the deadalive. Of course, they had been threatening him. But the odd thing was, they had spoken many of the words as they stared at Ciddey. As if they were grinningly, nastily unsure which of the two, the girl or the musician, was the ghost.
And then again, why had they abruptly abandoned Myal to his own—or Ciddey’s—devices at the gateway? As if he did not really matter to them. The undead needed the living to feed from, was that not Parl Dro’s enduring philosophy? So why—
“Myal Lemyal, will you do as I say?”
Ciddey was glaring again, from the town side of the gate.
“Why should I?” Myal asked, obeying her.
Once he was in the town, a sense of total helplessness overcame him, not physical, but mental; not even truly unpleasant. Ciddey and Tulotef had got the better of him. Small surprise. He gave in.
Ghyste Mortua was not as he had been picturing in the part-assembled song. Not dusk. Not dim and shrivelled. No fireflies. And yet, so strange.
The stone street inclined upward, narrow and closed in by houses with blind walls. It was pitch dark there, but somehow everything was visible, in a thousand shades of black, even the bricks or the stones. While over the tops of roofs the gust of light dazzled into the sky, dousing the stars, which he had taken to be the light of the lamps of Tulotef—or was it rather the light of Tulotef itself? A glow like phosphorous on a bone. Myal braced himself to shudder, and the shudder did not come.