Myal started to say something, but the sentence stayed in his mouth, because Parl Dro, handsome Death, the King of Swords, had vanished between one breath and another.
For ten minutes, Myal charged about the hill. He shouted to Dro, or against Dro. Then he stumbled and slid, and when he came to rest hard against a spike of rock that seemed to have been set there purposely to impale him, he felt something snap under his shoulder. He looked, and found he was lying on the shambles of the broken instrument.
“You learn to play this, you ugly cretinous little rat,” Myal’s father had affectionately said to him—but not his father, after all, had he not always suspected? “I killed a man because of that. I killed him good and dead.”
Myal supposed it was because of the instrument. Because of his father—his unfather—being away to buy the instrument, Dro had slept with Myal’s mother.
“I killed him good and dead.”
Myal held the broken sound box in his arms, and wept in the dead black country of the night.
CHAPTER ONE
As the sun westered, it dyed the great branched candelabra of the trees. Trunks and boughs were steeped in patches of yellow-amber. The leaves were shining saffron, a prophecy of the autumn, no longer so far away, for the westering of the day allegorised the westering of the whole year. The end of summer was an arid scent, like the dust along the road.
Myal walked at a rhythmic pace. At each step, the bag on his shoulder jounced. There was a stringed instrument in the bag, nothing odd about it, a battered vintage guitar he had diced for in a ramshackle village, and, to his surprise, won. He had been thinking about the best way to portion and cut the body when he could find a twin for it and how to cut the twin too. Then there was a suitable reed to come by, and all the carpentry which these things would require, to fix them in place. He did not make the plans quite lightly, either, for remembrance of their forerunner still gnawed at his heart. It always would. He had buried the bits of wood and wire on the hill of Tulotef. The first grave made there for centuries. Certainly, the first grave to be mourned.
But grief did not have to jeopardise other emotions. The awareness of being inside real flesh made him secure, just as practicing the trance state of astral release exhilarated him. There had also been some luck in the past month. Gambler’s luck and minstrel’s luck. Even luck with a girl in a lowland cottage, a girl who wanted only a day and night, and not all his days and nights thereafter. Maybe the old woman in the hovel had blessed him. He had given her a present of three of the silver pegs from the dead instrument, since she had cared for him so well during his... absence. She had also sewn his shirt together where she had cut it previously, searching for the drug that tranced him. Actually, her name was not Sable. That was just the scrawl on the door which related to a former tenant. Parl Dro had not been right about everything. This notion had cheered Myal, as, with a droll cunning, he set out on his quest. He had been cheered as well by the memory of how he had achieved success before, against greater odds, when he was delirious with a fever and the onslaughts of two greedy deadalive.