Free Kill the Dead by Tanith Lee Page B

Don’t use the strap on me. Don’t.” Dro pulled more branches across and piled them on the fire. The flames soared up, and Myal lay still on his side, watching them with the tears running sideways out of his eyes and into his hair.
“Next time,” he said, “next time, I’ll get it right. Don’t hit me, Daddy.”
“No one’s going to hit you,” Dro said.
“You will,” Myal said, “I know you. You will, Daddy, when you’ve finished that skinful of beer.”
Dro sat and looked at him. The shaking fit was gradually passing off. Myal stared at the fire, delirious, objective.
“It’s easy to follow you,” he said after a while. “You leave a kind of shadow behind you. I can’t see it with my eyes, but I know it’s there. I can find you simple as breathe.”
“In other words, you’re gifted with powers beyond the normal.”
“Lend me your knife,” Myal said slowly. “I can kill you with it. It won’t take a minute. I’ll clean it after.”
    Myal’s eyes shut. He sighed.
    “You ought to be exterminated,” he murmured. “I never had a big brother, someone to look up to. Someone I could kill.”
    “Go to sleep,” Dro said.
    “I wish I was dead.”
    “I wish you were, too.”
    Myal laughed.
    “Did I ever tell you about the Gray Duke’s daughter—?”
    He slept, relaxed, comforted, across the fire from the man he had come to kill.

CHAPTER FIVE
 
 
The Gray Duke’s daughter had made eyes at Myal. He had been flattered and afraid of her. She sidled up to him now with a wreath of lemon asphodel on her pale hair. Water ran out of her clothes and she was barefoot.
“Get up,” she said, “you have only to walk twenty paces.” Her voice was wrong. It was dark and clear and very definitely masculine.
“I don’t want to get up,” said Myal. “I don’t want to walk.”
“Yes you do,” said the voice. The Duke’s daughter had gone. Death, the King of Swords, was wrapping Myal in a blanket. The musical instrument was on Myal’s shoulder and was being wrapped in the blanket too. Death was handsome, older by ten or twelve years, or maybe more, than Myal, and he had one scratched cheek. Women scratched. Down the back if they were in bed with you, on the face if they would not, or you would not, and they were angry.
“I see she got you, then,” said Myal conversationally, “marked you. I’m glad she did.” He was not sure whom he meant. He was standing now but he had no legs. He was balanced on two columns of paper, which gradually buckled. Death grasped him. They began to walk. “You won’t get rid of me that easily,” said Myal.
“I’m afraid I will.”
They were in the open. An awful cold, or heat, smote Myal, disintegrating him. He fell forward dying, not caring that he died.
After a while, he was not dead. He was lying over the back of a small horse, watching the ground—high grasses, small stones, wild flowers—jog by between its hoofs. On the other side from his dangling face, upside down, two long black-booted legs walked, unevenly, and a black mantle swung.
“Where are we going?” asked Myal. He was having a lucid moment, he was fairly sure. He could tell the lucid moments, because they were the moments when he felt most ill. Yesterday—or had it been longer?—he had followed Parl Dro into the east. To start with, he had assumed Dro would stick to the road. Then, when Myal reached the track, he had been perplexed. It looked raw going for a lame man. On the other hand, the road ran off to the south. Stories of Ghyste Mortua tended to locate it east or north of east. By then, the itching, gnawing discomforts of Myal’s body had turned into a bright blaze. Though his head ached, he felt intelligent and eager for some kind of action. His unformed fantasies of murdering Dro, gray and sickening before, had grown courageous, inspiring. He bolted off onto the track almost without thinking. After sunset, lost in the wood, he shouted at the trees. But Dro seemed to have left an