Kill the Dead by Tanith Lee (beach read book txt) 📕

white as porcelain, came out of the shadows and the trees and turnedtoward him. For a minute, he thought she meant to come straight up the incline,but then she went away from the house, the road and Myal’s slope, passing underthe shoulders of the uplands, going north.

Myal’sheart thumped. He got up and combed his hair with his long fingers, andstraightened the instrument on its frayed sling across his shoulders. With anawareness of vague dread, he walked around the curve of the hill, squintingforward until he had her pallid figure in sight again. Maintaining the distancebetween them, he followed her. He had a vile notion why he must, and his eyeswere wet already.

She hadsat in Cilny’s chair all night, and thought of Parl Dro the ghost-killer, andhow she hated him.

    Sometimes thoughts of Cilny, or occasionally of her own self, would interruptthese reveries. Sometimes she thought even of their father, his absurd botchingtogether of things to sell as strange artefacts. That was perhaps inevitable.But she did not consider any of these matters for more than a second or so.

    She began by wishing Parl Dro dead, and in her mind she constructed the way ofit, now one way, now another. She pictured him stabbed and smothered, shepictured him buried alive in earth, or hanged, or torn in shreds by animals,wolves or bears or cats. In various of these fantasies she was physicallypresent, instigating and directing them. Later he met deaths with slower andmore subtle formulae, and then she was not there. Later still, she did notthink of his death at all, only of him. He had been far younger than she hadexpected, from the stories. She imagined to herself his youth, his childhood,his birth even. She imagined his old age still to come; sickness and poverty,wealth and loneliness and joy—all his, and she was almost impartial now. Shecame, in the last descent of night, to behold him as a life, separate from her,a man, an entity. Her hate was no longer a force directed against him. Her hatehad become Parl Dro. He stood like a black tree against a backdrop of purenothingness. She could think of no other thing.

    When the birds began to tell off their notes to the lightening sky, Ciddeyrose. For a moment, she was unsure of where she meant to go, and why. Then sherecalled, with a dry ebbing at her heart, how everything was settled, that shehad no need to concern herself with plans. She had only to act.

    Outside, a bar of cloud lay low on the horizon, like another hill behind thehills. The mountain glistened, cool and sculptured, in the preludes of themorning.

     Asshe walked along the rims of the slopes, treading north, the dark started tolift, in level sweeps, like flocks of birds flying up from the land. Thesethings were so known to her. The lift and fall of day and night, the mountain,the country. She seemed only a figment of everything that was, only a memory ofsome other girl who had lived long in this place.

Froma rise, quite soon, she saw the stream shining before her.

Theyellow asphodel of the spring was gone from its banks. She glanced aboutbewilderedly, searching for some token flower, but there were only summerdaisies in the grass. Nor was the stream as clear as in the spring. It wastinged with the brown clay that lined the channel. Nor did it flow so swiftlyas when the melted snow, from the high shelves of its source, ran with it.

Ciddeytook off her shoes, as if she meant to go wading in the stream. She set themneatly, side by side, on the bank.

Thenight chill, retained by the water, made her gasp as she stepped into it. Foran instant, she felt incapable of continuing the deed. She stood shiveringbalanced against the syrupy freezing push of the current, looking wildly abouther. Almost at once, a man appeared on the rise beyond the bank, about eightyfeet away. It was the man who had sung under her window the night before, whomust have done so at the order of Parl Dro to distract her. Fate had directedhim.

Shestared at the man and he at her. Suddenly he began to wave his arms, one green,one red, and to shout. Then he began to rush toward her down the slope, and theinstrument jounced behind him.

Hemust not reach her in time.

Ciddeylet herself fall directly back into the stream. The cold liquid came over herface, entering her nostrils and eyes. She did not strike the stream bed hard,the water was too buoyant. Already it raised her and bore her forward. She wasnot yet leaden enough to sink and to lie still.

Herbraids were coming undone. She should have rebound them. She had not thoughtto.

Shehad held her breath, but now she breathed, and let the stunning cold darknessinto herself. She was so cold now that she no longer felt it at all.

Somewherefar away she heard the man scrabbling in the stream, not at the right spot, forthe current had moved her quite some distance.

     Everything slid away, almostgently now. All but one thing. She understood she must not let go of that.

     The very last sight she had,before all human seeing went out of her, was of the two black eyes of Parl Dro.They seemed to draw her from herself, right out of her bursting, suffocatingflesh. Her consciousness, narrowed to a thread, passed through them as throughthe eyes of needles. Her hatred was so fine, she felt a pang of exultation.Then she was a feather floating on a tide in darkness. And then she died.

Upstream,Myal Lemyal, plunging knee-high in the icy water, drenched himself and thrashedthe shallow race with his hands. By the time he found her, he was already halfmad.

Hedragged her out onto the bank. Her face was swollen and pop-eyed, as if she hadbeen strangled. He retched with terror, but threw her on this bloated face andtried to squeeze the water out of her.

Finallyhe gave over. He left her lying face down in a veil of pale hair. The soles ofher small bare feet, very