“The man who is coming here. His name is Parl Dro. Have you ever been told what—a ghost-killer is?”
An extraordinary thing happened. She had spoken softly, yet her words seemed to intensify as they left her mouth. They blossomed, spread, enveloped the street, hitting the walls of the houses, the stunned sky, like frightened birds thrown from an opened cage. And all at once, the unhaltable procession had halted. It appeared to petrify. The riders sitting bolt upright, the horses’ heads reared forward. The choir of boys’ voices died away just as the bells fell quiet, as if a wind had dropped.
Ciddey trembled, or she felt she did. And then, behind her, that man with the tapestry face coming unstitched spoke aloud.
“Bring her here to me.”
Ciddey’s rider turned his horse smartly and shouldered back through the stylised tableau. No one looked at them. If an eye blinked, a tassel fluttered, a bead gleamed, she might only have imagined it. There was no noise in all the town.
The duke of Tulotef sat and gazed at her.
“Who are you?”
“A Soban. Ciddey Soban.”
“I’ve never heard the name.”
She was suddenly icy cold, and lonely, lonely. Among strangers, without friends. There was no one to turn to after all.
“I wanted to warn you. A traveller is coming who is—”
“Yes,” said the duke. He was like a rag doll. His face was all undone now, and he seemed ready to unravel from head to toe, and be rolled up into some other dimension.
She wanted to go home. She wanted not to be afraid, or in search of vengeance. No longer a heroine. She wanted obscurity, loss of identity, peace. She wanted an answer to some question she did not understand how to ask. But Myal—Myal and Parl Dro—
“You must destroy him. You’ve got the power. There are enough of you,” she said bitterly, not really sure what she was bitter about, or talking about. “It’s you or him. He’s very accomplished at his trade. I’ve watched him at work. I know.”
This man, this duke, had ruled in Tulotef on the night the hill fell on him.
When she drowned, he had already been returning to this place for centuries. She lowered her eyes. She tasted water, then ashes. She said again, “Destroy him.”
When the sun had gone and the dead town began to come back it did not look quite as it had. The stone streets were less absolute. The tops of the towers were cloudy and the scalloping of the roofs below seemed bathed in a soft lake fog. For, of course, the lake had returned also, filling up its basin and its channels, as though the world bled water. Yet even the lake was subtly altered, as if it had frozen over in the late summer dusk, become a sheet of luminous, motionless ice. Myal observed these things and their difference to him almost impatiently. He felt an odd relaxation, because everything had become a farce. He, alive yet a spirit, standing in a ghost town with a real wooden instrument on his shoulder, the other shoulder resting on the corner of a phantom house that felt quite real also. In such a situation, either madness or sublime indifference would result His temperament had automatically chosen the latter. So he leaned there, and watched the endless procession swim by down in the streets below, and even entertained the notion of improvising a melodic counterpoint to the bells and the songs, but somehow he never got as far as bringing the instrument forward where his fingers could reach the strings.
On an opposite wall there was some scribbled graffiti. Myal’s limited education made him dismiss the fact he could not read it. Then he realised he could not read it because it was written mirror fashion, back to front.