Kill the Dead by Tanith Lee

imprint of his warped and blackened soul on them, which, as the fever worsened, slowly emerged.
When Myal saw the red spirit of the fire rising in a thin streamer from the fortress over the marsh, he picked up a sharp stone from the wayside. But something had gone wrong. Something always went wrong.
“Ciddey,” he said to the ground.
“That’s your reason, is it?” said the King of Swords.
Myal looked at the king’s boots.
“She was very young to die,” Myal said sentimentally. Tears ran out of his eyes. As each tear formed it blinded him, and then his sight returned as the drops dropped straight from the sockets onto the turf. One hit the upturned face of a flower. He could imagine it thinking: Ah! Now I have to contend with salt rain.
“If you’d just left them alone,” Myal said. “She put her shoes on the bank. She fell back in the water. I tried to get to her, but when I got her out she was dead.”
He abandoned himself once more to the fever. He lay, wrapped in misery, waiting for his consciousness mercifully to go out again. Then King Death was shaking him. Or seemed to be. The horse had stopped.
“What did you say?”
“What did I say? Don’t know. You sure I said anything? Maybe just a delirious babble. You shouldn’t take me too seriously–”
“Ciddey Soban. Are you telling me she’s dead?”
“Oh,” Myal yawned. Fresh tears dropped from his eyes. “She drowned herself. It was your fault, you damned bastard.”
But something about Dro’s voice, though quite flat, quite expressionless, brought Myal to the realisation that of course the Ghost-Killer could not have known till now about Ciddey. It would have been stupid, after all, to slaughter a man for a crime he was unaware of having committed.
“With her sister gone, she had nothing left to live for,” Myal explained.
Dro stood, looking away into the spaces of the morning. By twisting his head, Myal could see him, but it was too much of an effort to retain this position. Eventually Dro said,
“I’m glad for your sake your music isn’t as trite as your dialogue.”
The horse began to move again.
Myal sang the song he had made for Ciddey Soban, quietly, to the ground, until he fainted.
 
 
The hostelry was one of seven, but the only such place in the river village run by priests. The religious building stood off to one side, a whitewashed tower and wooden belfry piled on top of it. The hostel itself stood within a compound, a single lone story of old brick. The priests came through a wicket gate into the compound to draw water at the well. Olive trees clawed in over the wall. There was a smell of the oil press, and of horses. Dro had hired the horse and the blanket from the priests. They were the only hospitalers in the district who would take in a sick man and care for him. Dro had been down at first light and found this out. And even the priests wanted paying. As he came through the dawn village and saw them, busy in their gardens and orchards, fishing in a pool, scurrying about with washing and baking, horses and dogs and cages of fowl, he wondered when, if ever, they made time to pray.
When he got back to the fortress, leading the horse for Myal, Myal was obviously too sick to travel over the meadow and the causeway and along the village street.
It was a sort of fever Dro had seen before, coming and going in tides. He waited for the next low tide, then hauled Myal into the meadow and shovelled him on the horse. It was almost noon by then.
Dro’s plan had been straightforward. To offload the musician on the priests with enough cash to see ailment and convalescence out. That cancelled all guilts, real or invented; Dro could return to his interrupted journey. That was the original plan. Myal’s news altered things. If it were true. A delirious man might conjure innumerable dreams, believing each and all of them. But that was an insufficient blind. The sense in Parl Dro which judged such things had already credited the death of Ciddey