The sound was curious too, for noise was everywhere, yet no figures were directly apparent. Then, suddenly, gazing at a blank yard, you saw a man definite as your own hand seen by daylight. A cobbler mending a shoe, a smith hammering. Or two children playing with a cat.
Ciddey was prowling ahead of him, and he, dutiful page or bodyguard, or dog, or whatever he was supposed to be, remained about a respectful yard behind her. A large building blocked the head of the street, but with an arch through and a flight of steps. The first lamp burned in the arch, and Myal regarded it warily. It was a ghost lamp, for certain, a pale greenish-lemon moth light fluttering quietly in its smoky glass, clear and evident as a flower or a jewel in the gloom. And yet casting no brightness and no colour from itself on anything. Not on the wall, not on the stair. Not even on Ciddey as she passed under. Nor on Myal. And when he held his hand against it, no blood showed in his fingers, and he felt no warmth.
“Come on,” she snapped, ten steps above him. “Don’t play with that. If you must play, play the instrument.”
“No,” he said stubbornly.
He followed her up the steps and she flounced haughtily ahead of him again. They emerged on a platform and beheld all the town spilled down the hill, about three quarters of a mile of it. There were towers, as the story said, slim and tall, with crenellated baskets of stone at their tops. Alleys wound and roofs overlapped each other in slaty scales. Everything was lightless yet dotted by yellowish swarms of lamps, and everything was also apparent in enormous detail, as if illumined by a cool black sun of vast radiance. Beyond Tulotef, the drama of the landscape. The star-channelled lake was opened by the moon, or by the supernatural effulgence of the town, a plate of silver chains, flickering, winking, as if under the flare of a midsummer noon—and yet colourless. The same occult rays hit the blades of distant mountains which rose from the forest beyond. White as winter they were, as described. And the forest was a black snow which had carpeted the rest of the earth.
The country was silent as—yes, as the grave. But the grave itself banged and sang and laboured, cascades of noise flowering up from the streets below. And now that he looked, Myal could see a colossal procession winding through the broad lower thoroughfares. Flatly red-winged torches, the stagnant flash of brazen vessels giving off a gray-gold shine, as if in a picture, light without light. There were priests in the concourse, women in gowns of silver tissue, perhaps the lord of the town himself. Bells rattled the night off their clappers and out of their pear-shaped sound boxes.
“I’m cold,” said Ciddey Soban.
“Are you?”
“Yes. Won’t you play? The duke or the earl of Tulotef might hear you. You could be a court musician.”
“I’ve been that. It didn’t suit me. I—had to leave.”
“You weren’t good enough.”
“I was too good,” said Myal mournfully. “The only thing I can do well, and I do it too well, and everyone hates me.”
“Please play for me, Myal.”
“No.”
“I command you. I am a Soban. You’re just riffraff, a vagabond. Do it. Play!”
“I can’t.”
“Why not.”
“I don’t know.”
Suddenly someone jostled Myal. He and the girl were thrust together. There was a big crowd on the platform. They had been there all the time, unnoticed, or else they had just evolved. They were now completely real and three-dimensional, they even smelled human—leather, sweat, scent, wine. Their object was to view the great procession choking its way through the streets.
“Mind yourself,” someone said to Myal.
Someone else trod on his foot and hurt him.
Ciddey lay shivering on his chest.
With a slow dim panic, he realised that bodies pressed in his back where the instrument should have been. He felt stupidly across himself for the frayed embroidered sling, and it was not there.