He struck bodies, cloaks, mail and hair out of his way. He had somehow a bright and detailed image of himself, as if a mirror were hung up in the air—a lunatic, teeth snarling, irises encircled by white, and he was sprinting. He wondered what he was doing, and before he had the answer he had already reached the end of the street where the overlaid roofs tumbled down across each other’s backs. Or seemed to. Where, in fact, the bare hillside dropped off into the night. His arms were out, throwing something violently away. It seemed to be himself he was throwing, but then a weight was gone, and he was left behind it. A sharp cry of loss broke from him. But then the cry was covered by what seemed to him the most awful noise he had ever heard.
Flung into space, falling fast toward impact and death, the musical instrument screamed.
It was a shrill tearing scream, slender, fearsomely melodious, composed of many notes sounded all together and without pause. Its very soul seemed crying. It had been cobbled together, a drunkard’s jest. It had come to life slowly as the boy Myal began stupidly, improbably, to play it. It had grown a spirit as a child grew length of bone and breadth of skin. It had grown life. It had belonged to Myal, and now he had killed it, and as it tore down the nothing of the atmosphere toward destruction, it shrieked to him. He knew it was only the air rushing up through the stops of the reed. He knew that. It made no difference.
He stood upright, but moaning ceaselessly, as if he had been hurt. He had. He did not even think to look back, to watch Ciddey Soban crouching in terror, tensed for the crash and the splintering which would shatter the linking tooth along with everything else. Myal had forgotten her, forgotten Tulotef, and Parl Dro. He merely wanted the scream to end, wanted the instrument’s agony of fear to end in the quickness of the death blow.
Then the scream cut off, and Myal, spreading out his hands as if to fly, nearly pitched off the hillside in the instrument’s wake.
It was Ciddey’s mocking voice which brought him out of wherever it was his emotions had taken him, her voice crisp as the sound of a coin ringing on the street.
“You could never do anything right, Myal Lemyal, could you? Not even that.”
Then he realised, too stunned to be glad or afraid, that he had not heard the impact after all of wood on stone. So he peered into the abyss, and saw, no longer than his thumbnail, the instrument suspended, caught by its frayed sling. From the bracket of the inn sign, streets below. For a moment his reason was outraged, for the inn, its sign, the bracket, were as insubstantial as the rest of Tulotef. Then he recalled the stunted little tree which had appeared where the inn had been in the morning. It was the tree which had arrested the instrument’s fall. He could almost make it out, now he knew.
And behind him Ciddey, her link to living death unbroken, was saying to Parl Dro, just as Myal once had: “Lend me your knife. I can kill you with it.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Parl Dro stood and looked at the ghost girl, at her sad and evil and lovely face. He was aware the ultimate moments had arrived, inevitable as if they had been making love together, not hate. He had already braced himself. Despite the procrastination he had offered Myal, Dro had known this event was unavoidable when he sat in Sable’s hovel. Maybe he had known all along, as maybe he had known it all. He had used Ciddey inexcusably, not from a fastidious loyalty to his trade, but to cement his own damaged psyche. And so what came now was just enough, though not exactly the justice she craved.
Quietly, he took out the knife she had asked him for and handed it to her, the hilt toward her hand.
She accepted it doubtfully, however. Even the deadalive could know surprise, as they could know any state that suited their basic pretence of life.
“Thank you,” she said. But then: “It will be nice to stab you with your own blade.”
“Good.”
“Where should I strike,” she said, “to hurt you the most, and leave you alive the longest? You see, I want Tulotef to have you, too.”