Kill the Dead by Tanith Lee Page A

Her hatred was so fine, she felt a pang of exultation. Then she was a feather floating on a tide in darkness. And then she died.
Upstream, Myal Lemyal, plunging knee-high in the icy water, drenched himself and thrashed the shallow race with his hands. By the time he found her, he was already half mad.
He dragged her out onto the bank. Her face was swollen and pop-eyed, as if she had been strangled. He retched with terror, but threw her on this bloated face and tried to squeeze the water out of her.
Finally he gave over. He left her lying face down in a veil of pale hair. The soles of her small bare feet, very clean and faintly pink, flushed pinker as the sunrise burned down on them.
Myal sat on the bank some yards away from her, gnawing his nails. He did not look at her beyond intermittent, furtive glances. Eventually, he swung the musical instrument around on its sling into the crook of his shoulder.
He made a song for Ciddey Soban. He did not know how beautiful it was. But the instrument had been wetted by his career through the stream, and some of the strings sagged and gradually became flat. If his father had been with him, Myal would have been beaten.
In the end, Myal stopped playing. He put his arms around the instrument, hugging it tightly, and watched the stream going by.
An hour or so later, the cold in his still dripping boots and shirt started to wriggle its way under his ribs and spine. He sneezed and rubbed his hand across his eyes and stood up. And found he was standing on one of Ciddey’s small shoes.
He walked away from the stream slowly.
He could hear cows mooing like bassoons across the curves of the land. The odour of turf and flowers became an irresistible series of irritations in the passages behind his nose and throat, and he sneezed again and cursed himself and the world, and trudged once more toward the eastern snarl of the road.

CHAPTER FOUR
 
 
Five miles east of the village, the landscape began to flow steadily downward. Deep valleys appeared and shimmering ravines. Trees like poles, each with a solitary rounded cloud of foliage smouldering at its top, led in avenues along the crests of ridges, or by the misty lanes of faraway, indeterminate rivers.
Somewhere in this country, by night, Parl Dro had slept, wrapped in his black mantle. The weather had been soft and warm, turning cold only as the dawn approached. But a few hours after sunrise, the heat came back, smilingly, as if its absence might be overlooked.
On the morning wall of a farm, a skinny child sat, dangling its legs among the vines. When it suddenly saw the black-clad man striding his long lame strides down the road, the child slunk into a thicket. It sprang out at him as he passed.
“Give me some money!”
Dro did not look at it. “Why?”
“I have the magic sight,” said the child. “I’ll tell your future. Give me a twenty-penny piece.”
Dro stopped. He looked at the child. It was a girl with sun-bleached hair. He threw her a twenty-penny piece, spinning it lazily from his height to hers. She caught the coin, and said, “I know who you are. I thought you were a legend. They said you’d be by this way sometime.”
“Who said?”
“They all did. For years and years. Now I’ll tell you. Watch out. Before and behind. You’ve got a lot of enemies.”
“Have I really?” said Dro.
“But not me,” said the child. “I think you’re lovely.”
She ran away along the wall. Rosy dust puffed from the ground as she went. The soil was more acrid here, and powdery.
At noon there was an inn that sold wine and golden cheese. Peaches ripened on the walls. A blind dog sunned itself, and whined when Parl Dro’s shadow slid over its back.
In the afternoon, the road shifted to the south. A thread of track beat on eastwards, but faded in a molasses-coloured wood as the sun began to wester. When he emerged from the wood, the land sloped down to a loop of one of the misty rivers. A ruined fortress stood dreamily in the loop, melting into