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

“Tellme about Ghyste Mortua.”

Shelooked at him, and sucked her tea.

“Youknow all you need to.”

“Youlive on the doorstep,” he said. “You’d know more.”

“Thewoods are full of noises by night,” she said. “Riders, horses, yellings. Theydon’t bother with me. I’m too old, too near the edge, the gate out. Too ugly.They don’t bother.”

“Yourvillage,” said Dro. “Is the Ghyste what drove your people away?”

“That,and other things. But if you’re asking have the deadalive got stronger in theseparts, yes, they have. Stronger, and stronger still. I haven’t got the seventhsense, but when I was a girl,” she said, “I’d see shapes in the wood like milk,pale, showing the trees through them. Now, the dead look like men. I’ll tellyou, when I spotted you in the dawn, I wondered.”

“They’restrong enough to manifest after sunrise?”

“They’restrong.”

“Butonly at certain seasons,” said Dro.

“Ofcourse. What’d you expect? The psychic time that corresponds with the time ofthe landslide. Not a calendar day or month or year. But moon times, star times,seasons of conjunction and the zodiac. One is right now. That’s why you’rehere, eh? And him—somehow he knew the right time, too. So he’s cleverer thanyou think.”

“Orthan he thinks.”

“Solvedyour mystery yet?” she inquired. “I mean the woman who made the clay dog, andput the drug into it, and why.”

“Maybe.”

“What’llyou do?”

“Whatwill I do?”

“It’seasier,” said Sable. “Her way, it’s easier. Especially for you, Parl Dro.”

“So youknow my name,” he said flatly.

“Iguessed your name,” she said. “People always said, one day you’d come.”

The oldpain gnawed sullenly on the bones of his leg. Pain like fear.

And thememory began to come he had been trying to keep at bay. He had shoved thememory out of sight in some attic of the mind. He had thrust other memories inits way, between himself and it. Memories of childhood, of youth. Even ofSilky. Rather be wounded than made a fool, perhaps.

Butnow, he slipped back toward it. The herb tea, the pain, Myal’s half death, themessage Cinnabar had sent, all these things pushed Dro back along the highwayin his brain. Not far. He found himself glancing over five years, then overmore than twenty. At himself, fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five. The years ofgrowing and learning, by trial and error, by thought and reading and dialogue,his inescapable trade. He glimpsed two or three old men, professional exponentsof exorcism, those who had taught him. He had never really needed theirlessons. Somehow he had known. Always known, and always had the strength,psychic, metaphysical, to put the knowledge to its terrible, essential work.Silky, when he was thirteen, had found the truth of his calling in him, justas, if she had not died, she would have found for him other truths, better,sweeter, less precious. And if she had lived, how would he have lived? Afarmhand to this day, perhaps. Or a minor landowner if he was lucky. Sons anddaughters, a wife, a gradual, gentle, back-breaking, marvellously simple life.If she had lived, and not come to him in the rain with her cold hands and herelemental wickedness. But he could not linger with Silky. The memory he wasavoiding was nearer than that. Very, very near. Not a boy of thirteen, a mandressed in black. And yet, of course, Silky was in this memory, too. Had almostbeen the cause of it.

Hecould see the mountain with absolute clarity. It was ahead of him in thememory, poking up in the dusk to the northeast, like a chimney, smoking asingle cloud and a scatter of spark-bright early stars. Over the mountain laythe lands that drew away into the legend, the mirage that pulled at him,Tulotef, Ghyste Mortua. He knew the season for it was coming, as every fewyears it did, the time of manifestation. Philosophers and charlatans had allinstructed him, and he had believed in it with a dry matter-of-fact mysticism.

Strange,though, how dim and amorphous that initial belief in the Ghyste seemed to himnow, as he recollected it. More a casual interest than a driving goal, not thededication it had become.

Probablywhat happened, the trouble before he crossed the mountain, had influenced him.He was contrary enough that to have obstacles apparently put in his way madehim more determined to press on.

Theslopes of the south side of the mountain were lightly wooded, the trees foldingback to those farther mountains south and west, that had grown so vague in thedusk, as if they were only paintings, which ran.

Aclearing dipped through the wood. A bit of the sun had fallen into it duringthe sunset and now burned on a nest of wood. A firelit wagon hulked nearby,with a scrawny, moth-eaten dog tied to the wheel, but no horse in sight. Drohad come on the scene abruptly, and paused. The dog, scenting or hearing himbelatedly, set up a racket, trying to offset its aberration by sheer volume. Drowas faintly amused by this, also alert to see some man come around the wagon orbetween the trees, brandishing axe or knife or staff. Instead, a womanappeared, and empty handed.

Shestood and looked at Parl Dro across the forty-foot space between them, and gavehim one of the great shocks of his existence. For she was Silky, Silky to thelife—or would it be the death? And worse than seeing a mere child again, thiswas Silky as she might have grown to be, a woman of early middle years, alittle coarsened, a little fined, but the scintillant hair still like moltenhoney in the firelight, spilled over her back, her breasts.

Beforehe knew it, he had begun to walk toward her, not even really wanting to, butimpelled.

The dogdropped its histrionics to a guttural growling, and the woman who was Silkyretreated to the wheel, and put her hand out ready to loosen the rope that keptthe dog tied.

WhenDro came on, she shouted at him.

“Whoare you? How dare you sneak up on me? Don’t you know my man’ll soon be here andsee to you?”

Obviouslya bluff. The dray horse was gone, and the man with it. That meant a longishjourney at best.

“I don’tmean you any harm,” Dro called.

Hebreathed more easily since she had shouted, for her voice