“I am ready to go away,” said Ciddey to Dro. “I’m tired. I want to. Why can’t I just leave, without the tooth being smashed?”
“Once you’ve availed yourself of a link, the bond’s established. You’re tethered, till it’s destroyed.”
“You do it,” she said imperiously.
He smiled. He looked old and very handsome. Like a sculpture of a man, not a man. The stain of blood on his shirt had disappeared into its blackness.
“I don’t think so.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “And yet—”
“Please,” he said, an elegant, cold plea for tactful silence, which she ignored.
“You,” she said. Her eyes flamed with amazement and knowledge. “Charlatan.”
“Not quite.”
“Impostor.”
“Very well.”
“Damn you,” she said, “how dared you—”
“How dared you?”
She shut her mouth. She smiled, her lips closed.
“I feel,” she said, “serene. I don’t care about you anymore. I want to go to sleep. Or won’t it be sleep? I don’t mind. Let me go away. Please, Parl Dro.”
“Myal,” Dro said, not looking at him, “go and climb the tree and fetch the instrument.”
Myal turned his head, trying to push it through the transparent wall, somehow not able to.
“Go to hell,” Myal muttered.
“There isn’t any hell,” said Ciddey reflexively. She laughed. It was a girl’s laughter. “Perhaps I’ll find Cilny,” she said. “She could punish me. And then we could be reconciled. Oh, I’m tired of being here. Can I get the instrument and break the link?”
“I don’t know,” Dro said.
“I hated you,” she said. “How I hated you. My motive for coming back. But you.”
“Please,” he said again.
She shrugged.
“Oh,” she said. She glanced again at Myal. “Him, I suppose. I thought you’d have to follow him into Tulotef,” she said, “because you were in love with him.”
“I am,” said Dro, “in love with him. He’s my son.”
Three things happened in a neat and tasteful choreography.
The girl widened her eyes, started to question in a gesture of hands rather than words; that was the first thing. Secondly, very, very slowly, Myal wrenched himself off the wall and began struggling toward them in a kind of brainless lurch. The third thing negated all previous actions. It was a sound. The sound of tearing cloth. The frayed sling, all that held the heavy musical instrument to the rough rods of the tree, parting.
The three incorporealities left on the ghost street were transfixed. A last, abbreviated dim wail, one single note, drifted up to them. Then the crash of wood on jagged rock, a wild twanging of wires, scuff of stones, dull dreadful bouncing, slamming, sliding. The soft little rush of shale, a sharp crack. The second crash, total. Feathers of silence came drifting down.
Ciddey spun like a cobweb, the skirts of her dress fanning out, forming insectile wings.
“I wanted it,” she said. “I think I made it happen. I’m glad,” she said. She wept, not the beads of the cold fish stream, only tears. “I want to—” she said. “I want to—”
The darkness spun like a wheel, spinning her away with it. Sometimes it was possible to comfort, to smooth the path. The going through could be calm, even in some cases blissful, thankful.
But Dro stood and looked at the night, feeling only an intense and acrid shame, a rejection of everything he had ever done in the name of his so-called profession.
Automatically, not really meaning to, he put up his arm to block Myal’s blow when it came flailing for his jaw. Automatically, Dro returned the blow, light as a cat. Myal sat down on the street, cursing him.