The Enterprise of Death (37 page)

“Oh.” Chloé looked at Awa’s bulging satchel. “What are you after, then?”

“The most important thing there is. If I succeed it’ll mean I can really take care of you, forever, and not be a drunk layabout hiding in a rabbithole. I’ll, I’ll really be able to take care of you.”

“Can I come?” There was no hesitation in Chloé’s voice.

“I …” Awa had not seriously considered the girl accepting an invitation, let alone inviting herself along. “I hadn’t—”

“She was going, me was going,” said Merritt, sitting straighter in his chair and blinking at Awa. “We three was going.”

“No,” said Awa, looking at Chloé. “No fucking way.”

“Awa,” said Chloé, sliding out of her chair and going to Awa. “I know he’s been bad, but really, he’s got a sword, and is good with it, and—”

“How the fuck would you know that?” said Awa, her enthusiasm rapidly dwindling. “I’d rather eat shit, breakfast and dinner, than—”

“What saying she?” said Merritt, standing up. “We three was going.”

“He’ll get tired of it and come back here a day out,” pleaded Chloé.

“Why? Why the fuck should I put up with that?” said Awa, crossing her arms.

“Because you love me,” hissed Chloé, “and if you love me you’ll say yes, and we can leave now. Otherwise—”

“Fuck it,” decided Awa. “I’ll kill the beef if he gets mouthy. You hear me, you goddamn son of a bitch? You keep that mouth of yours shut or I’ll fucking gut you.”

“Eh?” Merritt’s eyes grew big indeed, the man ill accustomed to anyone taking such a tone with him, especially a Moor. “What?”

“Let’s get on with it, then,” said Awa, her smile nowhere near as strong as it had been in Monique’s chambers. For fuck’s sake.

Awa tried to maintain the optimism that had powered her out of the brothel, and had Chloé been her only companion she might have kept the chill of hopelessness at bay, but within a week of keeping close quarters with Merritt despair and frustration returned. It might have helped if she could have talked to Chloé about the true nature of her quest, but Awa had never told her partner anything about her past and the present seemed like an especially poor time to start, as every time she tried Merritt returned from checking the snares Awa set or otherwise mucking around in the wood. She was all too aware that as far as Chloé knew she was a simple Moor, albeit a strange one. That was what Awa had wanted her to think, but now that circumstances had changed she found herself without anyone to confide in as her unhappy, seemingly undeterrable demise loomed.

One chill evening Merritt and Chloé chatted about saints after dinner in the lean-to Awa had put together, a dusting of snow already sparkling atop it in the firelight, and, of all things, that was the conversation that drew Awa deeply into bitter memories she had tried to blot out, memories of the first time she had searched for her tutor’s book. Merritt said something about Saint
John and Awa excused herself, unable to feign indifference. When Chloé tapped her on the shoulder, asking again if she was determined to take first watch, Awa started back to the present, apologizing.

“Are you … Awa?” Chloé squatted down and extended her fingers, brushing her lover’s wet face. “What is it?”

“Nothing.” Awa took Chloé’s hand and kissed it, tasting her own tears. The snow continued to drift down on them and the necromancer was again reminded that this would be her last winter if she did not find the book. “It’s nothing, girl, just the snow melting in the fire.”

“It’s almost out. You’ll freeze. Come and lay down, we don’t need a sentry every—”

The fire flared up at Awa’s silent request and Chloé drew back in alarm, staring at the blaze. Awa tossed another windfall branch onto the flames and forced a smile. “The pitch deposits in these—you mustn’t get too close. I’ll wake you when it’s your turn.”

“Right.” Chloé shivered, then went to Awa and kissed her sweetly, her hands sliding under Awa’s hood to press her damp cheeks. Then she went back to the lean-to without another word and vanished into its shadow. Awa turned back to the fire and her reminiscences, gingerly fitting the pieces of her memory together like the scattered bones of an old skeleton.

Awa had come down from the mountain, torn between hunting Omorose and hunting the book, and for the next four years she had wandered from churchyard to ruin to ill-marked barrow, skulking through the snow and rain until every pair of leggings had lost its stripes, until each tunic was thinner than cheesecloth, until she was little more than a shadow herself, no markers remaining to signify where dusty rags stopped and ashy skin started. She starved almost constantly, and on the few occasions she found herself rich in food she ate to overindulgence, to
sickness, and everywhere she was alone save for the little bonebird she had created to keep herself company. Almost alone.

“You’ll never find it,” he had said one misty spring morning, the necromancer’s shade having taken up residence in her skull. “Never, ever, ever.”

“If you thought that you wouldn’t be here, watching me,” said Awa, though his voice had worn her purpose down from the peak it had been atop the mountain to a rough little pebble. “You wouldn’t have come back.”

“It was simple business that I had, and as I went directly it took the week and no more, and back I flew. I like to watch you being stupid,” he said. “Stupid black beast.”

At first she had thought he was imitating Omorose to needle her, but as the voice prattled on while she covered herself with deadfall branches in the dawn gloom, an even more terrible possibility occurred to her. She let the thought steep in the back of her mind like wormwood in a kettle, in the blurry region where she had hidden her intention to murder him on the night she had—for all the good it had done her. Yet when she rose that evening and he started in again she was ready for him.

“— fruitless as a winter orchard, you stupid—”

“What’s your name?” asked Awa as she shouldered her bag.

He did not say anything at first, and then said, “I won’t tell you.”

“You will if you’re really him. He said the dead have to answer the living, and have to answer them honestly.”

“The dead cannot
lie
. I never said they had to answer.”

“Shit,” said Awa, unable to remember if that was true or not, and knowing how foolish it had been to try and catch him with such a trick. As soon as a thought occurred to her she knew she had thought it, of course, and if she knew she had thought something then he knew she had thought it and—the only thing to do was blunder ahead and hope for the best. “Why will you not answer me?”

“Because knowing would give you power over me,” said the necromancer’s shade, but he spoke slowly, carefully. She had put him on guard and—

“Why are you answering me at all if you don’t have to?”

“Because I like to see you squirm. Truth burns hotter than ignorance, little Awa.”

“Why didn’t you try to stop me from doing what I did to Gisela? If you had something then—”

“I never cared about that bag of bones! I rather liked watching you interrogate her, you reminded me of myself at—”

Then he went silent and Awa sat down, though she had just started the night’s march. Only the day before he had said he was gone the first week, which would have been when she dug up Gisela, but now he claimed to have seen that, too. That was it, then. No scream of defeat, no justifications or clarifications or backpedaling, just silence. She was too practical, as usual, she thought, and too stupid—she was so stupid she had fooled herself for a very long time, and now had just fooled herself again. Stupid.

Of course he was off running his errands; he would no more follow her about than one would forgo a summer holiday to stay at home and stare at their mittens. She had been talking to herself with his voice for quite some time now, and even when the voice had sounded more like Omorose’s she had explained it away as another trick of his. She looked down at her trembling hands and wondered how a crazy, stupid little beast could ever hope to find a book that might be hidden anywhere in the entire world. The concubine had implied the air spirits would not have the strength to move it far but Awa had very quickly lost any sense of where she was and how far she had gone—as a child she had been sold from one master to another, journeying farther in a few years than most travel in a lifetime, nearly a thousand leagues, and then came of age on a spit of rock less than a league across.

Graveyards seemed the logical place to search, for he would be able to command the dead to hide the book, and some of them had weatherproof mausoleums and ossuaries that would keep it safe from life’s unavoidables. Awa recognized at once the aversion the living had toward cemeteries, but she also noted their keenness to keep them tended and guarded behind walls, and so she established a routine for investigating churchyards instead of marching blindly in with a spade. She would observe them for a day or two, from hiding if possible, or by wandering near them several times a day in the more urban areas. She had taken to pulling her cowl down as far over her face as possible to avoid being recognized as a Moor or a woman, and even still there had been a few uncomfortably close calls that had resulted in her killing men, or beating them near enough. Only once had a party pursued her through the wood, hounds baying and torches shining, and while she had escaped with only a little dog blood on her hands the experience had instilled her with a strong aversion to drawing the attention of men.

Awa suspected his voice would return, or rather, she would summon him back like a spirit to its bones, and she would resume talking to herself in his voice with some perfect explanation for the contradiction she had tricked him—tricked herself, the contradiction she had tricked herself into saying. She argued with herself, told herself she would not be fooled again, that now that she knew she was safe, and what sense had it ever made, really? The worst part of it was when she came to miss the voice when it did not return, and she tried to mimic it to relieve the monotony but now it always rang false to her ear.

Awa was in the mountains again, which suited her, though whether she was still in Spain or had blundered into Castile, Navarre, or France would have caused some conjecture amongst the cartographers of those fair kingdoms. These mountains were far lusher with grass and pine, little emerald leaves covering the
ground like an endless phalanx of shields, white flowers spearing out of the carpet on purple and green stalks.

Soon enough the snows were coming and she stayed to the low mountains, dipping into the deep valleys and canyons to exchange the wealth she gathered in graveyards for food and wine from what outlying farmers would sell to a filthy vagabond. The men and women who worked the granite-flecked valleys of the Pyrenees were no more happy to see a Moorish wench than were the Basque shepherds of the high country she encountered the following spring, but all were willing to take a fortune for a little food, and those who followed the ragwoman into the wood to relieve her of any other burdensome wealth she might carry were found stone dead the next morning, or not at all.

The Black Lady was soon frightening children all across the mountain range, a woman in mourning who would offer you riches in exchange for a loaf of bread, but woe to the man who tried to rob her, the woman who tried to cheat her, the child who cursed her. Awa pushed on, the mortal remains she resurrected in the cemeteries no more helpful than those she had raised in the previous churchyard, or those she had raised a year before, or three. At least the churchyards seemed to have emissaries, with one spirit usually quicker than the rest to return to its bones and speak on behalf of the cemetery.

“Has a book been hidden in this place?” was the question she would ask, and then she would release the spirit. It would return to where the spirits of the dead go, and then promptly come back to shake its skull.

“No grave in this churchyard has been disturbed to hide a book,” would come the reply, and, because Awa would not simply raise the bones but always insisted on giving the spirit back as well, sometimes a request would be given, such as, “Donna Stefanie asks that you, who can speak with both we and they, inform her husband that she knows he was having it with that Vittoria,
and she forgives him, and wishes that he cease mourning and marry the girl.”

Just as often it was, “Donna Patricia asks that you tell her husband that his dead wife knew he was cheating with that haughty blond bitch, and she was pissing in his porridge every morning until she died,” but Awa did as she was asked all the same, and would have even if she were not told where to find this hidden treasure or that buried purse in exchange for her trouble. It was the least she could do for the dead, and she had yet to have a recipient of one of their messages do worse than make the cross at her and back away gasping in horror. The legend of the Black Lady took on stranger and more diabolical permutations with each incident.