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

night, and the moon was shining. From the shapeof the moon, and certain horrible, barely recalled revivals, he deduced he hadbeen lying there two or three days.

Thehurt in the leg had subsided to a blaze, as if the muscles and tendons weremerely on fire. It was the damaged nerves of the previous wounding, ill-equippedto endure another wound, which had so incapacitated him.

Hisreturn to consciousness was marked by a frantic feverish compulsion to get tothe woman. He had incoherently realised by then, naturally, that her pleas thathe go away had been entirely for his sake. She had known what “her man” wascapable of, and foolishly had put Dro first. If she had instead appealed to himfor help, they might both have fared so much better.

Scramblingdown from the mountain was difficult. The agony it cost him went almostignored, save when he fell and lay in the slate dust, the stars darkening withthe blood behind his eyes. In the end, the descent grew more facile. He becameused to staggering on the blazing stick of leg.

Night,and somehow another day were gone, before he reached the clearing in the wood.The wagon was gone, too. In the dark he could not find the wheel ruts traced overthe turf and summer-hard soil. He could not even find the remains of the fire.

Hebegan to search, idiotically, about the wood, wandering in circles mostly. Dayand night blended. He came on a deserted farm at the wood’s edge. A few rootsand other vegetable stuff were coming up wild in the garden patch, and therewas a well. It was enough to keep him alive, and gradually to bring him back tologic and fatalism.

He losttrack of time again in the farm ruin. Not for many years had he been soindecisive, so plainly lost over the horizons of his own self. The days seemedvery hot, the nights interminable. The old house looked out southward from thewood, into the slender valleys that lay between the claws of the southernmountains. Seen mainly by night, they did not seem real either. Indeed, nothingdid.

In theend, the idea of the Ghyste came back to him, supplanting other ideas orregrets. To travel across the northern mountain again became imperative—to goafter the legend.

Thememory of the woman who was like Silky became frankly an embarrassment.Whatever had been done to the crippled leg, it had healed into its usual awfulacceptable state. The same could occur with memory.

As hecame over the mountain pass, down the steel-blue road in the dusk, toward thatleaning macabre house with its stone tower—the house of Ciddey Soban, the houseof the ghost—he had a wonderful sharpened sense of returning to reality, and topurpose. The golden woman slipped away from him like a dream.

Hecould have done nothing for her. Trouble had caged her. He could not have sether free. He had not loved her, certainly. He had never loved, woman or man,place or beast or object. Not even Silky. Silky had only been a part ofhimself.

CHAPTER TEN

Sablewas plaiting her thin iron hair again, as she came into focus for him acrossthe hovel, but the sun no longer shone on the rag bed where Myal Lemyal layimmobile on his back, head still averted toward the right shoulder, the grimysheet pulled to his Adam’s apple, unruffled by any movement.

“You’vebeen away a long while,” said Sable. “Thinking, or else you sleep with youreyes wide open. I could count the times you blinked on the fingers of one hand.Practicing?”

Drowatched her pointlessly busy, agile and magical paws.

“Youmean I’d prefer to use my own will, rather than Cinnabar’s drug, to get there?That was always the plan.”

“Thendon’t you wonder why she sent this boy in ahead of you?”

“Shethought she saw something in the cards she cast. She told me. She insisted Myalmust go with me. She persuaded him after me. He had some supernatural baggagewith him I could have done without.”

Hehad grasped Cinnabar’s scheme with slight surprise. That she foisted themusician on him by the means of loaning Myal a horse was eccentric enough. Thedrug in the clay dog, which had subsequently tranced Myal and loosed his astralbody, as near equivalent to a ghost as a live man could go, was a ridiculousploy.

Cinnabarmust have learned from her lover, that ghost-killer who never returned, that theultimate way into Ghyste Mortua had to be in spirit alone. Those who weredragged in live through the manifested ghost gates of Tulotef invariably died,so the story went. That death would be inevitable to a human taken there quick,with so many deadalive feeding their unflesh hungrily on his life force—even ifthey did not actually lay their claws on his skin and bones. So, only byreleasing astral from physical could a man get in that place and hope tosurvive. By becoming as near a ghost as the ghosts of the Ghyste. To this end,there were disciplines to be learned, and Dro, who also knew the story, hadaccordingly learned them, a smattering here, a smattering there, all knottedtogether by his will. That will of pure iron, which carried him mile aftermile, striding on a raging ruin called, euphemistically, a leg. That same ironwill, he had believed, could put to sleep Dro’s body’s life and let the spiritout. Could hold the body intact in its trance, and, if any were able to achieveit, could bring the spirit back into the body, when he was done with Tulotef.

ButMyal. Flung out in spirit like a handful of dust on the air. Caught by thedeadalive, no doubt of that, and by the virgin, the Maid of Vessels, with herfish-cool hate and her illusory streams—Cinnabar had consigned Myal to that,because she had been sure his proximity was in some form vitally necessary toParl Dro. If Dro must enter Tulotef, then Myal must be there before him. Itwould have been good to judge Cinnabar as mad, to be irritated by herconviction and methods. But, with unease, Dro had recognized in her one ofthose mysterious guides the psychic road was liable to produce. And she hadreminded him of the golden woman in the wood. Queen of Fires, Queen of Leaves—

TheQueen of