Kill the Dead by Tanith Lee Page A

comb from some foreign place. The scent’s in the wood, and when I comb my hair, my hair takes the scent, too.”
    “I’m sorry you lost him,” he said.
    “You’re not,” she said. She rose and turned and looked at him. Her eyes were bright with tears. “Or maybe you are. I’m ashamed of myself,” she said. “Making up to a stranger. Or am I a stranger to you? Am I so very like her?”
    “You’d prefer me to go.”
    “No,” she said. “The beds at the inn are full of vermin.”
    “Perhaps suitable company.”
    “Oh, you,” she said. Her tears seeped away again into their fount.
    He kissed her in a rich dark forest of hair. The unique comfort of human flesh bound both of them tightly together for some while after the kiss had finished.
    “Tomorrow, before you leave,” she said, “there’s something – I’ll tell you. Is your companion well enough to travel?”
    “What companion?”
    “The boy at the hostel. The man the ghost was visiting.”
    “He’s nothing to me.”
    “Ah,” she whispered, “don’t be too sure.”
    She kissed him this time, smoothing his hair in long, repeated, serene and sensuous caresses. Presently she took his hand, and led him up the little stair, along the passageway, and into the feather bed sixteen seas deep.
     
     
    The strains of music spearing out of the hostel door were wonderful to the extent almost of sorcery. They fell in the compound in shards, like the morning sunlight. Pigeons paraded, cooing in bemused fascination. A cat lay not far off, eyes narrowed, belly tilted to the sun, apparently a music lover and not hungry.
    As he made the music, a sense of glorious well-being invaded the musician. When he left off, high waters of debility swept back in on him. Panting and dizzy, he set the instrument aside and curled on the bed. Silence. A cat leaped past the door, and the pigeons leaped into the air. A woman with terracotta hair came over the threshold.
    Myal looked at her uneasily. Most women intrigued and scared him. Quite a few men too, for that matter. But then he relaxed. The woman had a sweet and satiated look. Her heart belonged somewhere that was not here. She was totally unobtainable: safe.
    “You’ve a great knack with music,” she said.
    “Oh, thank you.” Myal smiled modestly.
    “Parl Dro,” said the woman, “left the village an hour before sunup.”
    Myal’s face flattened with dismay. He sat up, went white, and lay down again. “That’s that then.”
    “Not necessarily. If you were fit to travel by tomorrow.”
    “I won’t be, anyway. Anyway, I can’t catch him up again. Anyway, what’s in it for you?”
    He could guess what had been in it for her. So this was the type that attracted King Death. Very nice too. But why was she interested in Myal?
    “I read the blocks. They showed the two of you. There’s a balance that needs you both.”
    “Did he tell you about –? ”
    “Ghyste Mortua? I know about it. I have reason to bear a grudge against the deadalive in that place.”
    “It’s all a story,” said Myal slyly.
    “Like the thing in here last night?”
    Myal involuntarily glanced behind him. Despite the unguents of the priests, despite the exorcism, he had not slept easily in this room. Only illness had let him sleep at all, drugging him with inertia.
    “Well, a good story. Maybe true.”
    “There was a town,” she said, low, staring at him, seeing not him, but images in her mind. Myal, lying dizzily watching her, began to see them too.
    The name of the town had been Tulotef. It stood on the side of a tall hill, above a valley where a wide river ended in a curious star-shaped lake with four subsidiary stretching channels. Forest bloomed over the uplands. Distant crags, pale as winter, towered from the trees. The ways to Tulotef were limited and occult. It was, besides, a town good to itself alone. Other towns it had greeted with swords and fusillades; retaliatory armies came to have the boiling juice of almonds and