He was not apprehensive now, not even desperate anymore. Merely determined, like any heir to a fortune, to claim his birthright. Dro had only one thing of worth to offer Myal, and that was the acid elixir of his own company; his erudition, his harsh judgment, the razors of his tongue and his mind. Myal had grown up in a beast pit, and the earth had gone on looking that way. He was tired of it. He needed a new vantage. He understood Dro could give Myal his own self, or show him where his self was to be found. He did not intend Dro, who had sown him accidentally, and abandoned him in death, to get away with it. Myal had acquired the trick from women he had had trouble with, maybe. But it was still a valid trick, and he had the knack of it: blackmail.
For the rest, he knew Dro would no longer vampirise him. Dro was independent to a fault, and had learned to fuel himself, like some volcanic fire, once ignited. Myal’s other role, as Parl Dro’s reason for life—or reminder to live—Myal accepted gladly, and with amused pride and a desire to please. It was fine, even funny, that till Myal died, Dro would not. Improvising on the humour, Myal had now one mad recurring vision, which tended to make him giddy with laughter. It concerned himself at fifty-five or so, and Parl Dro, his father, still looking the age of the hour of his death, some fifteen years younger than his son. Or perhaps Dro would age now, logically, a master of all life’s disguises.
“It’s easy to follow you,” Myal had said to Parl, beside the fire in the ruined fortress, as the night shook with fever. “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.”
It was admittedly a little harder to trace a man permanently in astral form, once he had decided to remain mostly invisible. Yet here and there, the beacon sent out its ray, the habit of corporeality proving too much for even Parl Dro’s fortitude. And meantime, the link itself was the best guideline in the world. And what would Myal say when he caught him up? It was still difficult to be sure how to get around someone like Dro. Though, of course, now he believed he could do it. Somehow.
The sun burned in the black flames of poplars.
The high sky was only a clear luminous parasol. No cloud. Not even a bird. Not yet even a star.
But the unseen shading was vivid. It had led him over a hunchbacked hill, off the road, down a meandering track and farther into the trees. The light began to go suddenly, like water running through the fingers.
“You’re a magician,” Myal could say to Parl. “You can kid anyone you’re only a man, but you can walk through walls. You’re invulnerable to death by blade or rope or poison or any other normal agency. You could get in a king’s vault and steal anything you felt like. And you want to throw all that away? As a professional thief, I resent that.”
And he could say to him, “I never had a father. I had a thing with a leather strap in its hands.”
And he could say to him, “You knew I’d come after you, like before. Stop making grand gestures and face facts. All right, you’re guilty about the others you sent off. But you’re determined to survive however you possibly can.”
The fulvous leaves softened into dark greens and umbers, and the branching stems were cool as ash. The glade was empty, or appeared to be.
Myal stopped, and looked at it, swallowing his heart as usual, glancing casually at a particular vacant area between two trunks.
“Well,” said Myal, his voice light and carrying, with an exquisite diction.
In the area between the trees, the unseen shadow emerged, dim and formless.
“I said,” said Myal, “well.”
And then he fired sheer will across the glade, the psychic’s instrument of intent and survival. It hit the place between the trees, bound and held, and hauled. And Parl Dro evolved, filled in by velvet blacks, till the paler sculpture of the face was firmly marked between ebony mantle and raven’s hair.
Parl Dro looked at Myal with slight anger and mild interest. His disapproval was almost comic in that instant, his foreboding beauty almost touching; his despair, if he did despair, was hidden.
And Myal laughed at him, and Myal looked himself beautiful and ruthless as a gold angel fallen straight from the setting sun. Just like the prince he had always really known he was.
“Well,” drawled Myal for the third time, knowing now what to say. “Fancy meeting you.”