CHAPTER ONE
“Cilny—we are in danger.”
The shadows did not answer.
The only way down from the mountain was by a steep, tortuous steel-blue road. About ten miles below the pass the road leveled grudgingly and curled itself around toward an upland valley where trees and a village were growing together. Half a mile before it reached the village, it swerved by the wall of a curious leaning house.
There were trees growing by the house, too. Their roots had gone in under the foundations, seeking the water course that was otherwise evident in the stone well just inside the ironwork gate. Gradually, the roots of the trees were levering the house over. Extravagant cracks ran up the walls, and a dark-green climbing plant had fastened on these. Over on the north side, however, the house itself had at some time put out a strong supporting growth: a three-story stone tower.
The tower was probably defensive in origin. Its three narrow windows looked northwest toward the mountain, over the smoky tops of the trees.
The sun was down. At this hour the mountain seemed to take on exactly the twilight color of the sky behind it, and might almost have been made of a slightly swarthy and imperfect glass. Modestly, other more distant heights had retreated into soft charcoal strokes sketched over the horizon.
From the uppermost window of the tower, it was possible to see the mountain road very clearly, even in the dusk. And better still after stars, as if ignited by tapers, burst into white dots of brilliance overhead, and a pale quarter moon floated up in the east.
A figure was coming down the road from the pass. It was wrapped up in a black hooded mantle, but its general shape and mode of walking showed it to be masculine. Showed, too, that it was lame. At each stride, for strides they still were, there came a measured hesitation on the left side.
When the black-mantled lame man striding down the road was some seventy paces from the house, the girl at the tower window drew back swiftly into the room. Turning to the shadows there, she repeated her whisper with a restrained desperation.
“Cilny—we’re in danger—terrible danger. Can you hear me? Are you there? Oh Cilny, answer me.”
This time there was a response. The shadows, at their very thickest in one of the tower’s deep corners, seemed to part. Pale as the quarter moon, a shape slipped from between them.
“I’m here,” said a voice less a whisper than the rustle of a leaf on one of the trees outside. “What is it?”
“Darling Cilny, my only and best sister,” said the girl who had watched at the window, “there’s a man walking along the road. He’s lame in the left leg, and dressed in black. I may be mistaken, but I think I know him.”
The pale moon shadow laughed gently, a leaf laughing.
“When did you ever meet such a man, Ciddey?”
“Not meet. Never met. Never to meet, I hope and I pray. But I’ve heard talk of such a man. Old tales.”
“What a mystery. Won’t you tell me?”
“If it’s he—his name is Parl Dro. But he has another name. A trade name. Ghost-Killer.”
The pale moon shadow, who was also a girl, long-haired and slender like the first, but—unlike the first—oddly transparent, drew back a little way, and her translucent hand drifted to her translucent mouth.
“We don’t want such a person here,” she whispered in her leaf voice.
“No. We don’t. So, hide, Cilny. Hide.”
• • •
Parl Dro had been looking at the house steadily, with two raven-black eyes, as he came down the road. Mostly because such a dwelling betokened the proximity of the village he was aiming to reach before full night set in. Not that he was unused to sleeping on bare ground. He was as accustomed to that as he was to the relentless grinding ache of the lame leg. He had known that hurt, in any case, some years, and had carefully taught himself that familiarity, even with pain, bred contempt. There had also been trouble not far behind him, which he did not want to dwell on, because probably there would be more trouble not far ahead.
It had periodically happened that, arriving in some rural, out-of-the-way place, Parl Dro, limping long-leggedly in his swathing of black, had been mistaken for Death. Card-casting and similar divination generally foretold his arrival in the shape of the ominous King of Swords. But then, his calling being what it was, that was not so inappropriate.
He had been subconsciously aware for half an hour or so of scrutiny from the house, and had not bothered with it. It was not unlikely that a stranger would be stared at out in the wilds. Then, when he had followed the curve of the road and come level with the antique ironwork gate, something prompted him to stop. It might have been that uncanny seventh sense of his that had made him what he was. Or it might have been only that more usual and more common sixth sense, the inner antenna that responded to quite human auras of trouble or mystique. He could not, at this stage, be sure. The house itself, leaning and overgrown in the gathering of night, was so suggestive of the bizarre, he was inclined to dismiss his sudden awareness as imagination only. But Dro was not one to brush aside any occurrence too lightly, even his own rare fancies.
Presently, he pushed open the iron gate and went into the paved yard.
Over a well craned a dead fig tree. The other trees, jealous of its nearness to the water source, had sucked the life out of it. Truly, a malevolent notion. The house door, deep in a stone porch, was of wood, old and very warped. He went to the door and struck it a couple of times.
As he waited, the bright stars intensified against the night, and the ghostly moon, in the way of ghosts, solidified and assumed reality.
A beetle ran up the ivy plant along the wall.
Nobody had answered the knock, though somebody was here for sure. The whole house seemed to be listening now, holding its breath. Peering over at him. Possibly the occupant of the house, alone after sunset, was quite properly chary of opening the door to unknown travelers.
Dro’s methods did not include unnecessarily terrorizing the innocent—though he was quite capable of it if the occasion warranted. He stepped back and moved away from the old door.
The yard was now hung with curtains of dark shadow. Yet starglow pierced the trees and glimmered in the well water. . . . There was something about the well. Something.
Parl Dro moved across to it. He stood and looked over the rim and beheld his own faceless silhouette blocking out the luminous darkness of the sky. A rusty chain went down into the water. He let the impulse order him, and began to wind the chain up by its handle. The chain dragged from the bucket at its other end, and the handle creaked sourly in the quiet. His seventh sense was very definitely operating now. The bucket slapped free of the well at the same instant the house door crashed open.
There was no preliminary warning, no stir in the house that had been audible outside. One second the pool of the night lay undisturbed, the next second broken by the opened door, the dash of thin bright light thrown out across the yard from her pallid lamp.
He got the impression altogether of great pallor from the girl who stood there, a pallor that for an instant sent the familiar dazzle up his spine. But it was not quite that pallor after all. It was the bleached dress, the flaxen hair in five slim braids, three down her back, one each side of her face and looped over her ears. That, and her white skin, white hands, the right holding the narrow flame in its tube of greenish glass, the left holding the long, bared, white-shining knife.
Dro had halted the bucket, his hand still taut on the handle. He stayed like that, and watched her. He might have expected the not unnatural interrogation and bluff: Who are you? How dare you? My man will soon be here and see to you. None of that came. The girl simply yelled at him, in a shrill voice: “Get out! Go away!”
He paused a moment, letting her words hang. Then he said, pitching his own voice to carry level and clear, “Can’t I draw a drink of water from your well, first? I did knock. I thought there was no one home.”
He had a beautiful voice, marvelous diction that often worked like a charm on people, particularly women. Not on this one.
“Get out, I said. Now!”
He paused again, then let the handle go abruptly. The chain unwound with a screech and the bucket plummeted under. He did it to startle her, and so it did. The seventh sense was alert as a nerve, bristling. He walked around the well and back toward the door, toward her. He wanted to be sure, and that meant eliminating other explanations for her unfriendliness. As he went, he slipped the hood off his head. As he walked slowly, his lameness was minimized, and he was graceful. He kept his hands loose, free of the mantle, showing he had no weapon ready or considered.
Parl Dro was a remarkable looking man. Not as young, maybe, as he had been ten years before, but with an extraordinary handsomeness that had laid a velvety somber bloom across a concert of strong features. Lips and nose, cheekbones and jaw were those of some legendary emperor on a coin. The eyes, with their fabulous impenetrable blackness, were an exact match with the long straight black fringes of hair. Characteristics, both physical and immaterial, hinted a zodiacal latitude somewhere between the earth sign of the bull and the fire sign of the serpent.
As he strolled into the light of the small lamp, the girl must see all this. See, too, the slightly cold and acid twist to the mouth that dismissed sexual immoderation and therefore threat of it, the invisible yet quite precisely ruled line that seemed to link the balance of both eyes—a mark of calculation, intelligence and control above and beyond the normal. Only a fool would judge this man robber, rapist or similar practitioner. And the girl did not seem to be a fool. Yet she was afraid, and menacing. And remained so.
As suddenly as she had thrown open the door, she slashed out with the knife in her hand.
Parl Dro stepped back, a sloping lame man’s step, but perfectly timed, and the blade carved the air an inch from his side. He was somewhat above average height, and the girl not tall. She had been aiming as close to his heart as she could.
“Now will you take yourself off!” she cried, in a panic apparently at her own intentions as much as the missed stroke. “You’re not welcome.”
“Obviously.”
He stood beyond her range, continuing to look at her.
“What do you want?” she spat at last.
“I told you. A drink of water.”
“You don’t want water.”
“How odd. I thought I did. Thank you for putting me right.”
She blinked. Her long lashes were almost gray, her eyes a hot, dry cindery color, nearly green, not quite.
“Don’t try word games with me. Just go. Or I’ll call the dogs.”
“You mean those dogs I’ve heard snarling and barking ever since I came through the gate.”
At that, she flung the knife right at him. It was a wide cast, after all; he judged as much and let it come by. It brushed his sleeve and clattered against the side of the well. He had had much worse to deal with a few days back.
“Too bad,” he said. “You should practice more.”
He turned and walked off and left her poised there, staring. At the gate he hesitated and glanced around. She had not moved. She would be shocked, but also dreaming that she had got rid of him. It was too soon for that.
“Perhaps,” he called, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Leaving her knife lying by the well, she flashed back into the house and slammed the door. In the stillness, he heard the sound of bolts.
He pulled the hood over his head.
His face was grim and meditative as he turned again onto the road and started toward the village.
• • •
The village was like a hundred others. One broad central street which branched straight off the road. The central street had a central water-course, a stream, natural or connived, that carried off the sewage, and in which strange phosphorescent fish swam by night Stepping stones crossed the water at intervals, and at other intervals alleys as narrow as needles ran between the houses. Most of the buildings facing on the main thoroughfare were shops, their open fronts nocturnally fenced in by locked gates. Houses on the thoroughfare had blind walls, keeping their windows to the rear, save for the rare slit that dropped a slender bar of yellow gold onto the ground.
The three inns, however, made up in light and noise what the village, mute and dark amid its grain fields and orchards and the vineyard scent of late summer, otherwise lacked.
The first inn Dro bypassed. It was too loud and largely too active for his requirements. The second inn was but two doors away, and plainly served also as the village brothel. There had been enough trouble with women. As he went by, a sly-eyed curly girl shouted from the open entrance the immemorial invitation, and, when he ignored her, screamed an insult connecting virility, or lack of it, to a limp. That made him smile a moment. The final inn stood on a corner formed by the central street and an adjacent alley. It too was loud and bright, but to a lesser degree. He found the writing on the sign was virtually illegible. The door was also shut, as if to say: I am not actually inviting any of you to enter.
When Dro pushed the door wide enough to be admitted, the entire roomful of occupants turned to see who was coming in. Their reaction on learning was disturbed, but vague.
Parl Dro’s fame, or- perhaps infamy, tended to precede him. It was quite probable some here would surmise his identity. It seemed likely the girl in the leaning house had done so. But if the diners and drinkers of this inn divined who had come among them, they were not eager, or had no reason, to act upon it. Even the singing, ...
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