Ciddey snarled. Her long teeth flashed silver. She had stopped being a girl. She had become what she truly was. The hair could not rise on Myal’s astral scalp and neck, but nevertheless he felt it shifting. A movement smoothed over the crowd, also. A brief exploratory movement—testing itself —forward, toward Dro. And Myal could see in it a host of flickering hands, a thousand nails, like long flat blades—the nails that went on growing in a grave, those things of the body which, like the deadalive themselves, refused to acknowledge death. And, as if to complement Myal’s observation, “How?” whispered Ciddey. “Why, just tear him in pieces.”
Myal turned wildly. Parl Dro only stood there, not reacting in any fashion. Myal turned as wildly back again. Like the first chord of a hideous song, Ciddey ordered the crowd to follow her, by willpower and sheer hate. He had lain with that, comforting it and caressing it.
She slid from the horse and started to walk across to them, toward Dro. The crowd surged after, one gluey, mindless, malevolent step at a time.
As Myal moved, it was like plunging into a sea of ice. Breasting their hatred and his own terror, he struck out frantically for a shore he never reckoned to gain.
He stepped between Ciddey and Dro, therefore between the whole ghost crowd and Dro. As he did so, Myal slung the musical instrument off his shoulder and clutched it in his hands, digging his own nails into the wood of the two necks. Ciddey checked instantly, and the rest of them behind her.
He shook the instrument at her—his hands were shaking anyway—and she recoiled.
“Remember what you told me,” Myal said. His voice shook too. He wondered if his legs would give way.
Ciddey smiled. The smile showed only her lower teeth, and suddenly her eyes seemed to melt into black sockets.
“I remember, betrayer,” she hissed. “I told you about my milk tooth and how my father thrust it into the wood to replace a piece of ivory that had fallen out. I remember.”
“The tooth’s your psychic link,” said Myal. He stammered a little. He was now so cold he could barely feel what he held. The instrument might slip through his grasp, evade it as the pebble had. He must not let it. “If I destroy the tooth, you can’t stay here. Can you?”
“No,” she said softly, still smiling.
“I’ll do it,” he said.
“Oh,” she said, “great ghost-killer.” Then she laughed, except there was no sound. Out of her open mouth flew instead a silver blade, which landed on the paved street by Myal’s boots and flopped there. It was his turn to recoil. Ciddey held out her left hand, and stream water dripped from it, trickled, gushed. The water poured around the landed fish, which was whirled up in it. Ciddey held the water there like a silver shawl, and the fish spiralled in the water. “You’ll destroy the tooth, will you?” she said. “First you have to dig it out of the wood with your knife. Or do you have a knife? Perhaps you can borrow Parl Dro’s. The knife he used to pick the locks of my house on the night he killed Cilny. But then,” said Ciddey, twirling the water and the fish in bizarre loops and coils, “but then, I forgot. Even before that, you have to find out which of the pieces of ivory is my baby tooth. They’re all so smooth now, and so yellowed. They all look the same. Don’t they, minstrel?”
Myal stared at her, then at the instrument. Of course it was true. All those tiny chips of bone—he had never even counted how many—
Ciddey flung her shawl of water over him. He jerked aside at the vivid sting of its wetness, while the tail of the fish, completely palpable, horrible, thrashed his cheek. Then the crowd of dead things was pushing by, a single pulsing entity. He was smothered, trodden down, kicked, panicking and yelling, and then abruptly, thrusting through, surfacing, denying their force could affect him.