The Enterprise of Death (12 page)

“Off with you.” The necromancer waved her away but she knew he watched her back as she left.

Awa knew she had to pull herself together if she wanted things to last, and, preoccupied with upbraiding herself, she stumbled over the bandit chief’s spine in the dark. That guilt rubbed at her again, but guilt is no match for hunger and Awa trotted across the glacier, her other friend forgotten as Omorose greeted her at the mouth of the hut. Awa had stopped putting Omorose down when she was absent, knowing that if she let Omorose return to her natural death the process of decomposition would resume at its usual pace, whereas in an undead state the corruption was greatly slowed. Omorose remained fair as ever to Awa, the least objective of beholders.

They sat against a rock with their feet jutting over the abyss, Awa’s pallet dragged out to cushion them as they watched the stars. The celestial fire the necromancer had mentioned was not lightning but falling stars, and although she had seen them before, never had Awa beheld so many, slicing down like knives cutting through the sun’s veil only to have the ebon cloth seal instantly behind them. Together they found a few of the constellations, and as the stars slowly turned they spied another, and then another.

“He’s onto us,” Awa finally said, having put it off as long as she could bear to keep a secret from Omorose. “He suspects, and he’ll take you away if we’re not careful. I’ll have to put you back down for a little while.”

“I know,” Omorose sighed, and Awa let out her own pent-up breath. She had worried her mistress would not understand, and the thought of disappointing her was excruciating. “But not until dawn? Please?”

“Of course! Tonight is, is beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Beautiful,” said Omorose, but she was not looking at the sky. Awa felt herself tense up and drew her feet back from the edge lest the world turn any farther and pitch her over the side. “Will you give me something before you put me away again?”

Awa nodded, unable to speak, and Omorose scooted closer to her on the pallet. It happened as slow as the twisting of the constellations above them, their hair finally tickling each other’s foreheads, and then their lips tickled each other’s, and stars fell around them as they kissed on the edge of the world.

Awa broke away, too anxious to properly speak, scrambling to her feet and wringing her hands, and she would have stumbled over the cliffside if Omorose had not caught her arm, pulling her back. Too many horrifying nights were welling up in Awa’s mind, the bones of the bear creaking, her eyes running along with her nose, but then Omorose gripped her tightly by the nape of the neck and drew her back in. Omorose tasted bittersweet, like liver and wormwood and certain nightmares, and Awa felt her mistress’s hand pushing up the bottom of her tunic. She caught Omorose’s wrist, felt soft skin and knotted muscle sliding over bone, and then they sank together onto the pallet.

Omorose doted on Awa by the light of the heavens, kissing her hoof as tenderly as she kissed other regions, and before dawn discovered them sprawled with every limb intertwined Awa had achieved things she did not even realize existed. They started awake and hurried inside lest they be discovered, and cried together before Omorose went back inside her tomb. As the wall was half filled in she knocked it back down and pinned Awa again, her well-trained hands reaching above her occupied head
to massage or restrain her lover, as befitted the situation. When it was over Omorose gently kissed Awa on the cheek and climbed inside her barrow, building up the wall from the inside. Awa wanted to help but could do nothing more than whimper, eventually dragging herself to the necromancer’s hut lest he come looking.

Awa paid for their excess with each step, resolving to be more moderate to prevent such stinging rawness in the future. That night she identified each constellation to the necromancer’s satisfaction, and only remembered that she had failed to raise the bandit chief when the necromancer mentioned it several days later. That old guilt returned, but faded soon enough as her tutor informed her that he had called up the skeleton himself and sent it off to fetch firewood and chestnuts in the low valleys. When he returned Awa apologized profusely but he waved it off, commenting on her improved mood.

“I guess I’ve just gotten used to living here.” Awa shrugged, and if that answer did not ring true to the bandit chief he did not say.

Omorose and Awa had resolved to wait until autumn to throw the necromancer off their trail. They lasted a few weeks, and before very long at all they were together again every night. Awa could not remember having been so happy.

One morning Awa felt a dull burning in the region one least wishes to feel discomfort, and to her consternation and eventual misery the sensation grew worse instead of better over the next week. It became so vicious that she could not sleep, Omorose holding her as she wept and shuddered. The next day she heeded her lover’s counsel and staggered to the necromancer’s shack.

“Feminine problems are not my province,” the necromancer sniffed after she had finally stammered out her symptoms. “I’ve told you, gnaw a little huteri, the root, not the flowers, and some yarrow can’t hurt while you’re at it. Did you know the Spaniards call yarrow ‘bad man’s plaything’? How’s
that
for—”

“It’s not that,” said Awa, her pain overriding her embarrassment. “I know myself well enough. Something’s wrong.”

“Hop onto the table and let’s have a look,” said the necromancer with a sigh, closing his book. The tome floated off to the high shelf on the wall behind the bear, and had Awa not been so distracted she would have noticed the bound air spirit sit down heavily beside the book upon delivering it. Instead she stared at the necromancer, not moving. Every time she thought he could not be worse he revealed a new method of shaming her. “Hop to, Awa. Or would you rather Gisela here examine you?”

Awa looked to the concubine and back to the necromancer.
Knowing the thing had a name did little to warm Awa to her. Anyone was better than the necromancer, though, so she nodded quickly and eased herself onto the table. She remembered the dying bandit chief laid out on the same table the first night, remembered countless unpleasant meals eaten here. She tried not to cry as the rancid concubine left her master’s side and came around the table to stand at Awa’s feet.

“Spread your legs,” Gisela said, her voice gruff and masculine from the anonymous bandit’s tongue the necromancer had given her. The concubine’s clammy hand felt like an old leather glove on Awa’s knee, her thin leggings soaking up the corpse’s chill. Awa whimpered as the concubine lifted up her tunic, spreading her legs farther in a bid to bring on more pain to distract her from the scene. She told herself that as bad as it was, once it was over she would have survived the worst experience imaginable, as people often do in the midst of deep and abidingly awful situations, but that gave her little succor. Bony fingers prodded Awa; it felt like they were digging in a wound.

“A scream from little Awa used to be a rare thing, indeed,” the necromancer said when she yelped. “But I suppose after you’ve let one out what’s the harm in howling down the moon most nights, eh?”

“You callt it,” said the concubine, the sharp removal of her digits somehow worse than their intrusion. “Bad, too. Surprised she can walk.”

“Like papa, like daughter, I suppose,” said the necromancer, reminding Awa that she could no longer remember her real father. “You want to make it go away?”

Awa nodded, her eyes still bolted shut rather than showing him what they both knew surged behind them.

“Right then, if you’re old enough to play with them you’re old enough to learn the remedy,” and his words cracked her dams, the tears hot on her face, the sob catching in her chest as he
snatched her wrist and yanked her up from her reclined position. She tried to twist her hand away but he held her tight. “If you do it yourself you won’t have to come here next time, and believe you me, there will be a next time. But where’s the sport in love if it’s always safe, eh?”

Awa went limp and allowed his hand to guide hers down between her legs.

“Cover it with your hand,” he said, and she flattened her palm and fingers against her mound, only her dirty tunic between sore skin and rough hand. “Now find the intruder. It’s pulsing in there, cooking you up, propagating itself in the little hearth you’ve built it with grave filth for mortar. A foreign spirit, as you’d have it.”

Awa gasped, the sensation suddenly clear and unmistakable as a kite’s cry over the silent peaks. Some spirit had invaded her and was roiling in her most sensitive instrument, feeding off her heat and moisture and swelling ever larger. He was still talking but she no longer paid him heed, her face set as she focused on the spirit.

The necromancer had taught her early on how to use her spirit to close like a mouth around another spirit, to bite that spirit and sever its tie to its body. It was how he had killed Omorose with a brush of his hand, how they could kill anyone or anything not guarded against such an attack. All that she need do was touch her victim, and this vile stowaway was already touching her quite thoroughly. Awa did not even remember her promise to herself never to use that wicked technique, and even if she had the circumstance would surely have allowed for an exception. Her spirit tightened around the interloper and the heat began hissing out like a coal tossed into a snow bank, her pain diminishing along with the invading spirit, and before her tears had dried on her cheeks the spirit was gone, and her discomfort with it save for the mild sting from the concubine’s fingers.

“Well?” he whispered, releasing her wrist as she let out a sigh. “My arts aren’t all so impractical, are they now?”

“What was it?” Awa shook her head and hopped off the table, a new vigor coursing through her. “The spirit that was haunting me, how did it—”

“
Haunting
you?” the necromancer hooted. “You didn’t have a haunted snatch, Awa, you picked up a case of the rot, and I can imagine where!”

He knew, she realized, all his asides finally sinking in. Awa was halfway to the door when she caught herself, curiosity momentarily trumping her hatred for the man and his laughing concubine. “It
was
a spirit, I felt it, but a different kind of spirit from others I’ve met. Tiny, invisible if I weren’t looking, and without any body.”

“Maybe not a body we could see,” said the necromancer as he settled down in his chair. “Aren’t you always going on about spirits, and how everything has one? Well there’s your proof. When a wound turns sour and starts leaking pus that’s not because the flesh has died; on the contrary, it’s because new life has settled in the injury. The maladies men ascribe to humoural imbalances are simply creatures men cannot see, beings of spirit but not of flesh. The Great Mortality a century and a half in its own tomb was not divine wrath, it was a proliferation of creatures beyond the ken of men, creatures as mindless as they are dangerous. Some say they were built by demons, some say they
are
demons, and some say stranger things still. Personally, I think those cocky bastards in the Schwarzwald have something to do with it, a nice little present for we men who so offend them with our very presence.”

“Spirits without bodies …” said Awa, wondering at another reference to men in the Schwarzwald. Usually when the necromancer got himself worked up he would allude to that place, the local lack of Germanic tongues preventing Awa from
knowing quite what he was on about but inferring from his references that it was some sort of school populated by thieves and frauds.

“Of course, there’s plenty that do more good than harm, so one has to be careful and only remove the more troublesome spirits. A fellow apprentice of mine became obsessed with removing all the parasitical creatures sharing his body—took out some useful spirits from his guts and next thing you know he stopped being able to digest food properly. Went mad and finally hanged himself when he couldn’t get rid of all the little spirits swarming inside him. We may think we hold dominion over our flesh but we’re actually crawling with uncounted poxes and other riffraff, and it’s best to let them carry on unless they start acting up like the little fellow you caught in your lointrap. Mindless spirits can be more dangerous than sentient ones, mark me—they can’t be reasoned with, for one.”

“I see.” Awa nodded, eager to get back to Omorose since he did not seem to have any more to say on the matter of her paramour. She had been out of commission for far too long and like any addict needed to fall back into the perfection she had found. “Thank you, sir.”