“Ssh. Don’t. Kiss me. You’re not dead.”
“But that’s—mmm—yes, that’s how I know. But I want to ask you—”
“No. Don’t ask me. Kiss.”
“Yes. Oh Ciddey.... I want to ask you about the musical instrument. About the link.”
“Myal....”
“It’s my link to life. And Parl Dro’s got it And he’s coming here because—well, because I just suppose he’s a ghost-killer and he’s obsessed with Tulotef, so he’ll have to come here. But why you?”
“Why? Darling—”
“Darling. Why is the instrument your link, too?”
“So clever. Myal Lemyal’s so clever. And so lovely.”
“Ciddey—I wish you’d tell me.”
“I will. You’re only riffraff, but I love you. There, I’ve told.”
“Dro burnt your shoe. And there was nothing else I had that could have been yours. I don’t see how the instrument my father murdered a man to get can have anything to do with you. But it does. I was your energy source to get back, and your hatred of Dro was your motive. But the instrument was the link.”
“So clever. How did you know? Ah—”
“Oh—I played a song to you on it in my sleep, and you arrived. When I played it backwards you went away. And when I went with you into the wood, I took it with me, or I thought I did. And when we were here, you wanted it played. When you realised it was an illusion, you were afraid—”
“Stop it. I don’t want to discuss it. Kiss me.”
“Yes... Ciddey? Let’s stop pretending we’re alive. It can’t hurt if we tell the truth to each other.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too. Only I’ll wish I hadn’t said it now. Because I don’t. At least—”
“Myal—”
For a long while then there was just the mandragora kisses. The pulse of the unwarm fire in the grate casting neither shadow nor light, the gems of torches and lamps on the window similarly unconductive. The drowned noise of bells.
They might melt into the bed. They might freeze and become a gray statue, forever kissed together. He did not mind. Then she said, her voice small and thin as her little hands locked on his back: “When Dro comes, we must be strong and fight him. If you promise you’ll help me fight him, I’ll tell you. If you’ll help me kill him. Will you? For my sister’s sake.”
It did not seem a huge thing to kill Parl Dro. It seemed a depressing thing, a vile thing, but quite possible.
“If I say yes, I may not mean it.”
“When I—when I... after the stream... you would have killed him then.”
“I was sick.”
“Promise.”
They writhed slowly, and he promised her, from some dark dungeon-deep ecstasy, and he did not mean it. And then she told him, like a trusting child, about the instrument, puzzling him a great deal, so he questioned her awhile, between the long rollers of their deadalive and timeless and unimperative love.
There were really two very atrocious aspects on which his recognition foundered. And in the end, when he was convinced, he felt ridiculous. Even as a ghost. A couple of the idiotic and perverse mainstays of his life were gone. But since he was dead, maybe that was only right
By then, something peculiar was beginning to happen in the room.
It originated at the window, and was a sort of steady drawing, a bleeding away of substance. Myal became, for the first time since realising his condition, nervous.
“What is it?” he demanded. Then he understood without getting an answer from the girl. They both reacted quite intuitively, falling apart like two tired pages in a book. And they lay, the lovers, in the tomb of the bed, watching the manifestation of dawn at the window.
It was not like any dawn he had witnessed when alive. It had neither colour nor light. It simply sucked the world away, consumed it, in an invisible conflagration.
“What happens,” Myal said eventually, “to us?”
“What do you mean?”
“In the daylight”