Kill the Dead by Tanith Lee (audio ebook reader txt) 📗

instrument off the grass. It was an eccentricpackage, the main portion being a body and sound box of grotesquely paintedwood with chips of ivory set in, from which mass two necks extended, eachstrung with fine wires that crisscrossed each other midway. Across the top ofthese necks ran a bar to which tarnished silver pegs skewered certain of thesets of wire strings at apparently random points. Meanwhile, straight throughthe bar and into the sound box ran a wooden reed with a mouthpiece of ivory.The stops followed the reed down through the bole of the instrument in such away that, as Myal Lemyal shortly demonstrated, agile fingers could manage bothstrings and stops simultaneously. The performance, analyzed, should have beenquite impossible, additionally so when, with a precarious balance achievedagainst his shoulder, and eight fingers and two thumbs scuttling over eachother in all directions, he set his lips to the ivory mouthpiece. His hairskidded at once into his eyes, which seemed to have crossed. He looked bothmaniacal and preposterous. While from the unholy instrument came the sounds ofparadise. Of harps that were panpipes, of lutes that were also flutes, ofmandolins that were also lyres and trumpets, of celestial, never-before-dreamed-ofmelody, harmony, counterpoint and rhythm.

Whenhe finished, slipping off the string again, he laid the instrument in the grassonce more, and peered at it melancholically. The slope seemed to go on singingto itself for quite some while.

“Asyou said,” Myal ventured, “you might not care for music.”

“Iwas only curious,” said Parl Dro, “as to why such genius needs to be outpicking pockets in the wilderness.”

“Genius?”Myal smiled. The smile was angelic. He looked noble, even very beautiful, butthe illusion vanished quickly. “Well, you know how it is.”

“Didyou steal the instrument, too?”

“I?Oh no. My father did that. He killed a man to get it, and the man, I assume,put a bane on him, and on me, I shouldn’t wonder. My father used to beat sparksout of me every time he got drunk, which was pretty frequent. When he wassober, he’d teach me to play that. I hate my father. I’m not that keen onmyself.”

Helapsed into a moody reverie, staring where the dark man, who looked likehandsome Death, was still watching the village, the road, the mountain. Soon,Myal lay down in the grass again.

“What’llyou do about that girl, that Ciddey Soban?”

“Whatdo you think?”

“Goback and make her miserable some more. Push her dead sister out of this worldinto the next, so they can both be nicely lonely and wretched.”

Somethingpecked at his hand. Fearing snakes, Myal jerked three feet backward, landed,and saw the flask Dro had been offering him. He accepted the flask gingerly,uncorked it and sniffed. An appreciative grin, unlike the smile, altered thedesolation of his face.

“Whitebrandy. Haven’t tasted that since I was on the Cold Earl’s lands.”

Hetasted it, and kept on tasting it. Dro let him.

Theysaid a few more things to each other, on Myal’s side progressivelyunintelligible. Bees came and went in patches of clover. Large grape-darkclouds with edges of gold tissue clotted together behind the mountain.

“Why’dyou do it?” Myal Lemyal asked. “Why’d you send um out of thissorld wheney doanwanna go?”

“Whydoes a surgeon draw a man’s tooth when it’s decayed?”

“Issenthe same. Not attall. I’ve heard of you, and your kind.Poor liddle ghosts driven sobbinganscreaming out’f the place they wanna bemost.”

“It’snecessary. What’s dead can’t go on pretending it’s alive.”

“Anthasswhyyou wannagetter Ghyzemortwa—”

Whenthe light began to go, Myal Lemyal was already gone, blind drunk on whitebrandy and passed out in the clover. Senseless, however, one hand had fallen onthe sling of the grotesque instrument, and mingled with it in a firm andcomplex clutch.

OfParl Dro there was no longer any sign.

When hewoke and saw the stars scattered like dice overhead, Myal knew he had made yetanother mistake.

Therewas a clean fragrant wind blowing on the hills. It helped soothe his poundingheadache. But it did not help much in the other matter. He had lost the King ofSwords, handsome Death, Parl Dro the Ghost-Killer. Of course, it was inevitablethat he would ruin this chance too. Myal considered his first slip-up had beenin getting born. He had gone on wrecking his chances systematically ever since.

Theworst thing was that he was still drunk. Despite the headache and an inevitablequeasiness, he still felt inclined to roll about in the grass howling withinsane laughter. His own inanity irritated him. He put the instrument on hisshoulder and staggered down the slope, alternately giggling and cursinghimself.

Hewas detouring by the village and stumbling across the fields to rejoin the roadbeyond it, making for the faintly glowing cutout of the mountain, before itdawned on him why. Though Dro had abandoned him, Dro would not have abandonedthe leaning house and its two sisters, one quick, one dead. Sooner or later Drowould be revisiting that house. Myal had only to be in the vicinity to freshentheir acquaintance. Perhaps another tack might be in order. “I never had a bigbrother. Never had anyone to look up to, learn from.” He could hear himselfsaying it, and winced. It was difficult to be sure how to get around someonelike Dro.

Thehouse was leaning there, in its accustomed position of decline, when he re-emergedon the road. Starlit, the moon still asleep, and dominated by its trees, it didlook ghostly.

Myalshivered, scared and also romantically stirred by the idea. He had glimpsed thelive sister, Ciddey, five evenings ago, when he first exhaustedly arrived hereover the mountain. She was a true lady, like one of the Cold Earl’s women, orthe Gray Duke’s, or a damsel of any of those endless succession of courts hehad flitted in and out of, mothlike, scorching his wings. Ciddey was like amoth too. Pale, exquisite, fragile. And somehow inimical, eerie... abroad bynight with unhuman glittering eyes—

Myalbegan to know the itching panic of a babe alone in unfamiliar darkness.

Helooked at the house among its trees, and hugged himself in an infantileintuitive search for comfort. Naturally, Parl Dro would come along the road andfind him this way, quivering with fright. But there was as yet no evidence ofDro or his inexorable exorcism.

SuddenlyMyal had a wild impulse. He was accustomed to them;