“But there’s more,” said Dro.
“Yes. There’s this big joke. I suppose it is fairly funny. Soban had a trick. He used to get bits of things, and weld them or carpenter them together. The instrument...” Myal clutched suddenly and convulsively at the two wooden necks resting against him. “...the instrument was like that, too, you see. He got two stringed bodies—guitars, mandolins, something, and carved them up and then joined them together. And the reed he threw in as an afterthought, to make it more—more bizarre. The joke was, nobody was meant to be able to play the damn thing. Nobody should be able to play it. And my father used to smash me from one end of the wagon to the other, when he was drunk, learning me how he’d teach me when he was sober.”
“And you can, of course, play it exquisitely.”
“It makes me sick. It really does. And the other thing.”
“Which is?”
“My bloody father. How he used to sit over it, polishing the wood and twanging the wires, and say he’d killed the man who’d owned the instrument He never killed Ciddey’s father for it. He never even stole it. He paid for it.”
“Which disappoints you.”
“No. It’s just—I based my life on my screaming fear of his violence, on his capacity for murder, maybe. And he didn’t. Which is odd, because he looked like he meant it when he said it.”
Dro got up. Myal glanced at him. Dro said slowly, “Do you remember what he actually said?”
“The exact words? Yes, I do. He said them often enough.”
“Say them.”
Myal twisted uncomfortably, reacting to an insidious tremor of tension on the air. A tension which had been there all along, of course, which was now growing, swamping both of them.
Finally, Myal looked down and touched the strings. Perhaps unconsciously, astral or not, he switched himself over into his past, over into the skin of that hated, terrible man, whose minstrel’s hands had clamped on the instrument, whose small pig’s eyes had congealed in a cold red blankness. Savouring, tasting what had been, what he had done.
“He used to say,” said Myal, “‘You learn to play this, you ugly cretinous little rat. I killed a man because of this. I killed him good and dead.’”
“Yes,” Dro said.
His own eyes were wide open, but they looked shut. Like the eyes of a man who has just died.
Myal’s father’s image slid off from Myal. He surfaced from it, sighing, as if coming up from deep water.
“What is it?” he said to Dro.
“It’s a dry lake,” said Parl Dro. “And we’re going down there.”
“What?”
Parl Dro began to walk away, picking down over the slope, the wrecked leg swinging itself with a stiff, agonised elegance.
Bemused, Myal scrambled, forgetting that no incorporeality need ever scramble, after him.
The shelves of the lake were hard-baked, already partly petrified, composing a terraced effect of powdery stone, like the earthworks of some extraordinary, inverted castle. Here and there, the antique slimes and marshes the lake had tried to transform itself into as it emptied, had grown weird trees and thickets which, in turn, had perished and calcified. It did not seem to be only the going of the water, however, which had made the place so inimical to what tried to live there. Probably the upheaval in the hill which had slain living Tulotef, was also responsible for the draining of the lake. There had been laval activity deep down to complement the earth-shake above. As a result, some fluid poison or other, some literal scum of the earth, had processed itself into the waters of the lake. So that, as it died, it also killed.