Kill the Dead by Tanith Lee

him. And then she melted like frost. And she was gone.
    The dungeon chill swilled instantly off the room and down some supernatural drain.
    Parl Dro drew a deep breath. The familiar exhaustion clambered on his back, dragged him down. Exhaustion, and something else. Something–something–
    Outside, the noise of the crowd had mounted, now the eerie barriers were gone from the air. Footsteps ran across the compound, and the door rocked to blows. There had been enough people in the street, and concentrating hard enough, to form a kind of composite pseudo seventh sense. Sufficient to guess when the exorcism was complete.
    He pulled the chair away from the door.
    Myal groaned. “Is it over? Whatever it was?”
    “I hope it is.” Dro checked, hand on the door, appalled by what he had just said. Never before had there been any doubt.

CHAPTER SIX
     
     
    The drinking party went on into the small hours.
    Most of the village had heard, many had been spectators. Spectators who had actually seen nothing, only felt, and half understood. The priests filed solemnly through the hostel, now it was safe, blessing it and sprinkling unguents. They blessed and sprinkled Myal, too. Pale and shaking, clinging to the sling of the instrument, he said to Parl Dro: “I’m sorry.”
    “You’re not only sorry, you’re a damn fool,” said Dro. He had walked out into the night and the village had borne him away to an accompaniment of shouts and clanking flasks. He was too tired to resist. No, it was not that he was so tired. He wanted to drown something, worse than nagging pain, a nagging doubt. So he sat with the village and tried to get drunk, while they tried to get uncanny anecdotes out of him. Mainly he fended them off; they fell to recounting their own ghost stories – factual or imaginary. They told him the fortress on the meadow was haunted. When he said he had slept there the previous night, they exchanged wise looks. He knew better than to attempt convincing them there had been no haunt in the fortress. No one without the seventh sense could normally tell ghost from brick.
    A few hours later, most of them were sprawled in various stages of stupor. Dro was still sober, though his nerves hummed quietly, as if they felt they should, from the alcohol in his blood.
    He went out of the inn and down the street in the star-slit darkness, to clear his head, or to make believe that it needed clearing. While he could pretend he was a little drunk, he could partake of the drunkard’s privilege and not think.
    The rain clouds were gone. The moon was leisurely sliding down the slope to the belfry.
    The woman called Cinnabar sat at the front of the potter’s shop. Queen of Fires. A dull glow lingered in the eye of the kiln, and she was in its way, catching the light on cheek and breast and hair, and on her moving hands.
    She was pinching out a little clay dog by moonlight. She glanced up and saw Parl Dro standing by the unlocked gate, watching her.
    “You look tired to death,” she said.
    “Aren’t we all.”
    “Sometimes.”
    “Can I come inside?” he said.
    She looked down, almost shyly.
    “Didn’t I say you could?”
    He stepped into the shop. It smelled of baked clay, and of some warm subtle perfume she was wearing. He had not noticed it on her before.
    “I’ll offer you my bed again,” she said to the dog. “This time, just to sleep in. It’s a rare bed. Feather mattress deeper than sixteen seas piled one on the other. It’ll do you good. You look properly done up. But I remind you of someone, don’t I?”
    He stood by her. Her fingers were very agile with the dog. It looked quite real, almost familiar, as if it might wag its tail, cock a leg or bark at any minute. He leaned down and gently kissed her temple. Her hair had a gold edging from the fire, and the marvelous scent came from her hair.
    “You’re very talented, Cinnabar,” he said, “and you have a beautiful smell.”
    Her fingers left the dog.
    “My man gave me a