He felt unbearably tired and shut his eyes. He hardly listened as she made her confession to his boots.
She told him in any case those things he had gradually come to understand when sorting his reactions to the leaning house, the room in the stone tower, the dark well, her devouring vindictiveness. Ciddey had not simply mourned her sister Cilny’s death, she had caused it. They had had one of those frequent squabbles the village reported. It was hardly different from a hundred others, but its upshot was that Ciddey had pushed Cilny into the well. The younger sister had fallen across the rusty chain, clung to the bucket, but Ciddey had unwound the chain. It had been a long brevity of malice. When the struggles in the water had ended, Ciddey had woken as if from a nightmare. She had been overcome by horror. With a maniacal strength she had hauled up bucket and chain once more, the lightweight dead weight draped across it. Ciddey had flung her sister onto the paved yard. She had tried to cudgel the water from her lungs. Weeping more needless water on Cilny’s drowned face, Ciddey had sat and rocked her in her arms, confronting the ultimate loneliness of the deranged house of Soban. But in the night, Ciddey had carried and dragged her sister’s corpse to the stream below the mountain. Ciddey had woven her sister a wreath of yellow asphodel, but Ciddey still hoped the current would bear her sister away, out of sight and mind. Cilny, though, being absolutely dead, sank heavily to the stream’s floor. Even the fierce spring wash of melted snow did not move her. When the men found her and brought her back to Ciddey, Ciddey shaped her misery and her guilt into another thing. She bore Cilny’s ashes into the tower and worked witchcraft with them. She brought Cilny back to her, and cherished her dead as she had seldom done alive. Parl Dro the exorcist had sundered that expiation, and all the murk in Ciddey’s soul transferred itself to him. But she had found out now, Dro was not to be punished in her stead. Only Ciddey remained vulnerable, to be her own scapegoat. She lay on the street of Ghyste Mortua, and waited for nemesis.
But Parl Dro, who was not the sombre angel of divine wrath, did nothing, said nothing.
At last, Ciddey lifted her head. She experienced then a strange wave of emptiness, or was it more a sense of lightness, of the weight of Cilny slipping from her neck?
“I shall be punished,” she said with curious dignity. “Will you do it? What will happen?”
“You’ve been punished,” Dro said. He looked at her wearily. “You’ve punished yourself.”
“I must suffer in hell,” she said stubbornly. But a clear hard tension was melting from her face, her body.
“There isn’t any hell.”
“Where shall I go, then?’
“Somewhere,” he said. “Somewhere not here.”
“Perhaps nowhere,” she said. She stood up. Suddenly, everything she had fought for, or against, no longer mattered to her. She did not see, but the tips of her pale fingers, her long pale hair, became in that moment transparent again, as at her first manifestation.
“Somewhere,” Dro repeated.
“Well,” she said, “you’d know.” She stared about her. An expression of uninterested incredulity crossed her face. “They’ve gone,” she said. “The ghosts of the Ghyste.”
“They’re weak,” Dro said. “They couldn’t stand too much specific truth of this nature. Left to itself, any ghost will eventually die. It may take centuries, it still happens.”
She stared at the luminous lightless revenant of the town. She even glanced at Myal.
“Why don’t you,” she said, “go down and take the instrument and get out the tooth and tread on it. I’ll tell you which bit of ivory it is.”
But Myal only flinched aside. He walked away and leaned his forehead against one of the ghostly houses. He did not intimate what he thought or meant to do, but he remained, perhaps unconsciously, in earshot.