He must have set the instrument down and forgotten to take it up. No, absurd. What then? He had only imagined he had brought it with him from the ridge? But he had experienced its weight. It had actually slammed into him two or three times. Why then had he replied he could not play it?
The crowd seemed to exist, but had not a moment ago.
The instrument did not exist any longer, but had.
Ghosts’ concepts. The wills and beliefs and fancies of—ghosts.
Ciddey clung to him, pulling down his head toward her face. Jammed in the crowd, he kissed her, his mind wandering around and around behind his closed eyes.
“Parl Dro will follow you,” she whispered, digging her long nails into his arms. “And bring the instrument with him.”
“Maybe. Yes. I can’t tell.”
“He will.” She smiled at him like a wolf. Then, as once before, she grew appallingly defenceless. “Look after me,” she moaned.
A heavy man leaned on Myal drunkenly. Somewhere another girl in the crowd was whispering of a potion she had made to entice a man to come to her. Myal found, inadvertently almost, he had lifted the drunken man’s money bag from his mantle. Ghost money. What did it matter?
They sought an inn, the way travellers might be expected to in an unknown town. The sign was richly painted, its colours shades of pallor, brass and dragon’s blood. In the picture, a maiden held a unicorn helpless by its horn as a warrior in mail sheared off its head. Myal grimaced at it. Near the inn, the usual stream ran down the street. A cat carved of marble sat on one of the stepping stones, and Myal tried to pet it before he realised.
Men sat drinking at the inn tables. Lights burned and a fire, none of them giving glow or heat to the big room, only a hellish localised motion. An innkeeper came, and the thief paid for a room with his stolen money. Ciddey swept up the stair like a great lady. They ordered neither food nor drink. Like the lights of Tulotef, sustenance would be phantasmagorical and unnecessary. And on the stair, Myal asked himself: “The three riders gave me a drink. Or did I imagine it? Ghost-pretend. Surely I’m hungry?” But he was not, and he knew why not. He had died. The dead had killed him. It hadn’t been a faint, but death. Then they had brought him here as a jest. And if Parl Dro came after him, Myal would have to be properly scared, like any other ghost confronted by an adept and professional ghost-killer.
Of course, all returning deadalive must have a link. Myal knew what his must be. The instrument. Which was very bizarre, because Ciddey—
“Don’t suppose,” she said, as they entered the room, “that we’ll share this bed. The incident in the wood was a game. I wouldn’t come near you normally. You can have the chair. By rights you should sleep on the floor, dog.”
The bed had curtains like a black crow’s wings. The narrow window stared toward the lake. The procession still glided by, two streets below. It had gone on and on, for almost two hours. Assuming, of course, it was at all possible to reckon time here. The moon had moved, however. Perhaps it was. Myal peered in the bloodless fire, and wondered why he was not gibbering with terror and despair.
“I’m cold,” said Ciddey from the large black bed. She held out to him her small narrow hand. He was not afraid of her, either, nor did he want her any more. But he went to her, and presently got into the bed with her. They kissed and clung, in a sad, lazy, sensual nothingness. She murmured at his ear, “Cilny would be jealous. My sister would hate me, in bed with a man.” Then, miles of deep and delicious and passionless kisses later: “You mustn’t try to have me. I’m a virgin.”
Obviously she had died a virgin, she could not lose her virginity after death. But he felt only the sort of dislocated concupiscence that came in fever dreams, and was unable to, or undesirous of, acting on it. In a dreary way, the sexual limbo was very pleasant. Certainly he did not want to stop embracing her, just as he did not want to intensify the embraces.
Then, languidly, between the long, long, purposeless kisses, they began to talk.
“I think I’m dead,” he said. “I really must be.”