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

me. The link that’s keeping her on earth. If I tell you, Iwant your word you won’t harm her.”

“Harm?”

“Won’tthrow her out of this world. Not until she’s ready.”

“Youcan guess what my word is worth.”

“I’lltrust you.”

“No,you don’t trust me. Something’s puzzling you, and you want to tell me so itwill puzzle you less. That’s all. And you’re prepared to betray Ciddey Soban tome for that.”

“Shewants to kill you.”

“Sheshouldn’t be strong enough yet to try.”

“She’svery strong. She’s used your energy too, to draw on through me. A ghost-killer’slife force must be particularly restorative for a ghost. And she was a witch,too.”

“Youunderestimate your own psychic force. She didn’t need me. And you don’t get myword.”

Myalgnawed a blade of grass he had found he was after all able to pluck. “I’ll tellyou anyway. I still have the advantage. You’ll see why.”

“Becausepresumably,” said Dro, “Ciddey’s link is located on that instrument I justhanded back to you.”

Myalfrowned, thunder stolen.

“You’reso intelligent. Know where?”

“I’dthought about the inset ivory,” said Dro, “but so far as I know, she never lostany bones.”

“Nota bone,” said Myal. “A tooth. A milk tooth. She fell as a baby, and it gotknocked out. She was just a year old.”

Myaltook another deep breath that was pointless. The absurdity of the story upsethim, how two of the guidelines of his life had rested on lies.

“OldSoban kept Ciddey’s tooth. Superstition. Then he had a chance to sellsomething. He was always trying to sell things, heirlooms, furniture, fordrink. He was a drunkard, like my sot of a father. That’s probably how theymet. In some inn. Didn’t care about being landowner mixing with travellingrubbish, then, drinking each other under the stinking table. Then Soban got mybloody stink of a father interested in buying a unique musical instrument. Itcame from some foreign country. No one could play it. That was true enough. Mydrunken boss-eyed father went to Soban’s house, took one look at theinstrument, and thought he, being a genius, could master it, and make afortune. He’d get ideas like that sometimes. So he felt the instrument over,businesslike, and plunked away on the wires, and blew down the reed. And thenhe said he’d buy it, but there was a bit of ivory missing out of the inlay.What’d Soban take off the asking price?”

“Towhich,” said Dro, staring at the lake, “Soban replied he could replace theivory. And he took the thing upstairs and got the milk tooth and rammed it intothe wood where the hole was.”

“That’sit. Ciddey knows, because her father made a great history out of it. She saidit shamed her. Till I came back on the same road my father did, and it turnedout so useful for her.”

“Butthere’s more,” said Dro.

“Yes.There’s this big joke. I suppose it is fairly funny. Soban had a trick.He used to get bits of things, and weld them or carpenter them together. Theinstrument...” Myal clutched suddenly and convulsively at the two wooden necksresting against him. “...the instrument was like that, too, you see. He got twostringed bodies—guitars, mandolins, something, and carved them up and thenjoined them together. And the reed he threw in as an afterthought, to make itmore—more bizarre. The joke was, nobody was meant to be able to play the damnthing. Nobody shouldbe able to play it. And my father used to smash me from one end of the wagon tothe other, when he was drunk, learning me how he’d teach me when he was sober.”

“Andyou can, of course, play it exquisitely.”

“Itmakes me sick. It really does. And the other thing.”

“Whichis?”

“Mybloody father. How he used to sit over it, polishing the wood and twanging thewires, and say he’d killed the man who’d owned the instrument He never killedCiddey’s father for it. He never even stole it. He paidfor it.”

“Whichdisappoints you.”

“No.It’s just—I based my life on my screaming fear of his violence, on his capacityfor murder, maybe. And he didn’t. Which is odd, because he looked like he meantit when he said it.”

Drogot up. Myal glanced at him. Dro said slowly, “Do you remember what he actuallysaid?”

“Theexact words? Yes, I do. He said them often enough.”

“Saythem.”

Myaltwisted uncomfortably, reacting to an insidious tremor of tension on the air. Atension which had been there all along, of course, which was now growing,swamping both of them.

Finally,Myal looked down and touched the strings. Perhaps unconsciously, astral or not,he switched himself over into his past, over into the skin of that hated,terrible man, whose minstrel’s hands had clamped on the instrument, whose smallpig’s eyes had congealed in a cold red blankness. Savouring, tasting what hadbeen, what he had done.

“Heused to say,” said Myal, “‘You learn to play this, you ugly cretinous littlerat. I killed a man because of this. I killed him good and dead.’”

“Yes,”Dro said.

Hisown eyes were wide open, but they looked shut. Like the eyes of a man who hasjust died.

Myal’sfather’s image slid off from Myal. He surfaced from it, sighing, as if comingup from deep water.

“Whatis it?” he said to Dro.

“It’sa dry lake,” said Parl Dro. “And we’re going down there.”

“What?”

ParlDro began to walk away, picking down over the slope, the wrecked leg swingingitself with a stiff, agonised elegance.

Bemused,Myal scrambled, forgetting that no incorporeality need ever scramble, afterhim.

Theshelves of the lake were hard-baked, already partly petrified, composing aterraced effect of powdery stone, like the earthworks of some extraordinary,inverted castle. Here and there, the antique slimes and marshes the lake hadtried to transform itself into as it emptied, had grown weird trees andthickets which, in turn, had perished and calcified. It did not seem to be onlythe going of the water, however, which had made the place so inimical to whattried to live there. Probably the upheaval in the hill which had slain livingTulotef, was also responsible for the draining of the lake. There had beenlaval activity deep down to complement the earth-shake above. As a result, somefluid poison or other, some literal scum of the earth, had processed itselfinto the waters of the lake. So that, as it died, it also killed.

Therewas nothing beautiful anywhere, nothing to resemble the beauty of a ruin. Eventhe beauty