The Enterprise of Death (48 page)

A single word can contain more power than a million, and the simple
no
Awa saw before her made her cast the book to the ground and scream, her cool, practical mind doing nothing to stop her outburst. That was that.
Of course
, she thought,
of course of course of course
, if the book knew a way wouldn’t one of her predecessors have thwarted him already?

Once she had calmed a bit she retrieved the book from the grass and muttered an apology, but did not open it again until much later, after she had eaten and gotten a little drunk and grown tired of staring at the bloody sack that housed Chloé’s mortal remains. By the same time the next night Awa knew the little death would have to be removed lest Chloé actually die from the experience. Yet restoring her as she was would kill her anyway, and Awa could not very well avoid that topic any longer.

With a sigh Awa picked up the book, and asked, “Is there a means of restoring a dying person, or a corpse, to life, with its spirit intact, in such a way that the body does not decay but instead stays as it was in life?”

Yes.

Ah, the joys of one-word answers. Awa wondered if the book would burn, but pushed the thought away, and focused on the positive —there was a way. The undead she raised certainly putrefied at a slower rate with their spirit inside them, but Awa had enjoyed enough of the love of the dead to last a lifetime.

Only a dying person, though
, the book wrote after a pause, as though it were considering her query.
Once life has left the body then what you ask is impossible.

“Not much time, then,” said Awa. “How do I do it?”

You cannot. Only one of them can make another.

“Fuck!” cried Awa. “One of who, one of what!?”

Instead of scribbling an answer the pages began turning, and settled on an entry near the end. It had read “something”
of the Schwarzwald
, but the something was angrily crossed out and a new word written in, so that it read
BASTARDS of the Schwarzwald
. The old word had begun with a
W
or a
V
, but she knew she could find out the proper name by asking the book after she had read the entry. Settling in, the first thing it said was
Avoid
, followed by a catalog of attributes:
shiftless, vain, difficult, obstinate, opinionated, boorish, gluttonous.

The cramped writing was broken up by the author, as though he were putting together a taxonomical volume.

Lifespan: Indefinite, unless one is of a mind to do some mischief with an iron stake and a stout ax.

Appearance: Hideously mundane. They eschew the charms of the grave, just as an idiot child, if allowed, would refuse to advance past a prepubescent state.

Corporeality: Mutable, but disposed toward physical materialization.

“Very nice,” said Awa. “Perfect, even.”

Scanning down, she noticed
Cause
near the bottom.
Only they can create more of their kind, proving what a useless variety they are. They refuse to share their recipe for generation (or any other recipes, for that matter) and cannot be controlled by any known means. Again: avoid at all cost.

“Hmmm,” said Awa. “Hardly surprising that old asshole didn’t get along with things he couldn’t manipulate. Even if I can’t learn the trick maybe I could barter with one of them to do it for me. But how do I find one?”

The book flipped to the last page—a poorly sketched map of what Awa presumed must be the continent she had searched. A key set at the bottom confirmed this, and distracted by this new discovery, she set to orientating herself. There was a tiny island that must lie between her native land and the Spanish coast, and one of those peaks there must be where she had been indentured by her tutor, and here, this forest north of the Lombardy battlefields, must be her current position.

“Is this where I am?” Awa asked herself, and to her delight a small drop of red welled out of the page in the center of the wood. “Book, you’re fabulous! Now can you show me where to find the Bastards of the Schwarzwald?”

She eagerly watched the crimson drop sink back into the map. A moment later it reemerged an encouragingly short distance away. The drop grew larger, however, and her smile shifted downward as the bright red smear thinned and spread across the entire forested section of the map.

“That’s enough of that,” she said, closing the book and turning to the mindless corpses of Kahlert and Merritt. “Let’s go, lady-snatchers.”

Awa hoped she was leading them toward the spot on the map where the drop had initially appeared before spreading, but she had never used a map before and each time she consulted the book she seemed to be in the same place. She nevertheless drew closer and closer, her Paris-dulled eyes sharp again after half a year back in the wilds, and the wood grew thicker and thicker around her as the night grew ever deeper under those boughs that suffered the trespass of neither starshine nor moonglow. The corpses blundered after her, making such a racket as they carried Chloé that Awa could not hear the wolves gathering around them or the bats that congregated overhead.

At last they reached a clearing, and in the center of the small glade stood a small brick house with a single red door. Awa checked the map and saw she stood on the very spot she had made for, with dawn still many nightmares away. When she took her first step from the trees the animals that had followed her announced themselves, the wolves fanning out from the trees to cover the clearing while the bats swirled over the building until neither the structure nor the open sky could be seen for the flurry of wings.

“Shit,” breathed Awa, thousands of eyes staring at her in the dark.

“Good evening,” a deep voice came from behind the curtain of bats and wolves, and then the two swarms parted and a tall man stepped out of the building, a living corridor formed between where he stood at the doorway and Awa. “Please do come in. We have been expecting you.”

It took a moment before Awa could force herself to step into the lupine sea, but once she got going she found it difficult not to break into a run, hundreds of muzzles lining her path, the ceiling of hovering bats billowing down a rank breeze. Approaching the smiling man in the doorway, she saw he was pale and hairless as an ivory statue, and every bit as nude.

“I am Awa,” she said nervously, unsure if volunteering her name would be a mistake or the token of goodwill she intended it as—in any event, divulging it had never been the catastrophic disaster her tutor had implied it would be. The naked man stared at her with unabashed interest and concern, as if she were the naked stranger controlling mobs of animals. “I, I have traveled far.”

“Come in, come in.” The man beckoned to the doorway. “Please come in. We have all the answers in here, and the questions you’ve forgotten as well. Bring your friends, and enter freely, Lady Awa.”

Glancing behind her at the emotionless corpses and the bloody sack, Awa wondered if these were indeed her friends. They were the only friends she had with her, at any rate, and Awa wondered if Monique and Manuel were sleeping in warm beds with warm bodies beside them. Then she put them from her mind and went willingly into the darkness.

Manuel dropped the dead lantern and ran, telling himself he was going for more light, that he had to go for more light, but as he skidded around the side of the mound and heard Paracelsus’s scream joining his own, and then Monique’s joining their merry little choir, he knew he had no fucking intention whatsoever of going back. He was outside in the light, the abandoned lanterns propped on gravestones casting a soft amber haze on the screaming artist. Then he realized he was the only one still shrieking, the other two now silent as, well, the graveyard around him, and he shut up, too. As soon as he did he heard it, the panting, the shuffling of dirt, and try as he did to stare straight ahead and run for it his traitorous neck turned and looked back over his shoulder.

At first Manuel saw nothing but the face of the barrow and the black forest behind it, but then a shadow moved along the top of the high mound and he would have screamed again, he would have prayed and wept and swore, but as soon as he saw the hyena atop the barrow it pounced. Spindly legs stabbed his back like spears, and he smelled his own death wafting out of the brown muzzle that clicked shut beside his cheek. Then Manuel was falling forward, the beast riding him to the ground, and he landed at the base of a tombstone, the weight of the monster grinding him into the earth.

“Fuck fuck fuck,” Manuel chirped, a frigid wet nose snuffling his ear. Then its tongue was lapping him, the hot, sticky muscle plastering his hair up and out of the way of his neck. Manuel lay on his face with the hyena crouching on his back, several stiff lumps in its engorged belly rubbing the base of his spine as it breathed against his cheek, and his next
fuck
was washed out on a tide of vomit, the rotten-meat stench coming from the creature’s maw positively evil. Before he could even stop gagging it rose from his back and circled around, jutting its nose against his, and then it lapped up his spew, one yellow eye winking at him.

Not like this
, thought the artist,
not here, not now
. That was probably what everyone thought when they died, he knew, but he had been spared at least a dozen deaths before this one, deaths that would have been far better than being gobbled up by a devil or monster or whatever the fuck it was. He would really have to write a play where he died properly, one without all these witches and fiends, and Manuel giggled.

The hyena stopped slurping up his vomit and giggled back, foul cords of the artist’s bile tethering its open mouth to the earth, and then tilted its head to the side and bit Manuel’s face. Not off, not yet, the jaws settling on either of the artist’s cheeks and pressing down, the rows of teeth reaching his ears. Manuel struggled then, struggled as he should have when it first pinned him instead of letting it take any pleasure from him, and he realized as the teeth pierced his skin and dug into the bone that it was still playing with him, that what he thought was pain was only a prelude, and then the hyena’s jaws tightened against his skull and Manuel screamed into its throat as it bore down like a nutcracker straining against an obstinate walnut.

The lantern was right there above them and shone down the bright red, ribbed throat gaping in front of him, a tunnel so wide and slick Manuel wondered that it did not eat him whole, and then he felt his cheekbones begin to give, his sinuses bursting,
and he heard a resounding crack. He realized his skull must have split from the pressure. It dropped him, and through the tears and drool coating his face he saw the tombstone towering above him, memento mori and all that, and wondered if he would be called up or pulled down. Then he heard the shrieks of the damned and closed his eyes, knowing himself a fallen man.

“Up, lump!” Monique kicked his leg and Manuel opened his eyes, wiping the film from his face. The wailing hyena had not fled entirely but howled from the dark side of the barrow, and Monique snatched Manuel, hauling him upright. “Get your sword out, lump, an’ take this. Pop the fucker in the face when I hold’em still for ya.”

“What!?” Manuel did not realize he was shouting as he took the proffered pistol. His ears were ringing but he was relieved to see that the second pistol she had set on the gravestone beside the lantern was smoking; a more likely culprit for the thunder in his head than a cracked skull.

“Sword an’ pistol, lump, an’ if ya ain’t sure ta hit with mine then stick it with yours.” Monique was striding forward, leaving Manuel trembling with a gun in one hand and his hilt in the other. Looking down, he saw that, as if in a nightmare, the trigger and firing mechanism had somehow fallen off the gun and what he now held was a very long and heavy L-shaped piece of bronze with no means of firing. Before he could alert the gunner she began shouting into the darkness with a voice that could deafen a cannon. “Out, bitchdog, out! I took a paw for a paw, so let’s settle this fair an’ now!”

Manuel forgot whatever he was going to say when he saw her draw a third pistol from a sheath at her waist and set it on a tombstone, and then take its mate with the same hand. She raised both arms and waved them in the air, and the artist saw that her right was mangled, the bitten hand soaking through whatever rag she had tied onto it and splashing the barrow as she
dropped her arms and set her last gun down. She flexed the fingers of her left hand, peering around the edge of the light, and shouted, “Don’t need tools ta take down a fuckin bitchdog! You scared, bitchdog, you scared out there in the dark?! Come an’ ’ave a taste without your tricks an’ skulkin in the dark, bitchdog! Come an’ take a mouthful—”