The Enterprise of Death (5 page)

“Please, sit and eat,” the man said, his Arabic crisp despite his pale skin. “Now.”

Even Halim acquiesced, none of them eager to see what might happen should they disobey. They all balked at the stools, but the rib seats scooped their bottoms comfortably and were not as sharp as they appeared. Halim and Omorose stared doubtfully at the gray chunks floating in the stew that he ladled out, but Awa’s mouth flooded as the familiar goat spirits rushed into her nose and rubbed their musky backs on her tongue, and she forgot her fear.

Seeing Awa slurp up the food, Omorose set her dignity aside to sate her hunger, but Halim only drank water from the jug out of his smaller bowl. His knotted, burning stomach advised against attempting anything solid, and only with great effort was he able to keep himself from checking the window to see if the skeleton still watched him. He wondered if it all were punishment for not following his master’s order to throttle Omorose rather than risk her defilement, and he cursed his own cowardice.

“Now then,” the man said, reclining in the chair across the table from them. “Welcome, welcome. My apologies for any discomfort experienced but I assure you the mercies of those men who had you bound would have proven no gentler. As a matter of fact, I don’t think it would be any exaggeration at all to say that you children owe me your lives.”

Omorose did not say anything. Awa did not say anything. Halim swallowed, and picked up his bowl of stew.

“I am, as you see, a simple hermit.” The man leaned forward and leered at them, exposing a set of uneven yellow teeth. “A lonely goatherd, I lack enough stock to feed every beggar who crosses my border, and so you will have to earn your keep by doing as I say. I live a sparse life, as you see, and have little room under my roof. I therefore suggest you work together to build a shelter before the next storm. Winter comes quickly up here, and you don’t want to be caught without something substantial when the snow falls.”

Unaware if her companions’ silence meant lack of manners or a surfeit of terror, Omorose shakily stood and managed a quavering “Thank you.”

“It’s nothing, nothing.” The man waved his hand dismissively. “I always need more hands, more backs.”

“No.” Omorose closed her eyes, swallowed, then opened them again. “Thank you, but no. We … we have to go. Now. We have—”

“Pressing business?” The man widened his grin. “Loving parents? No no, I don’t think so. You’re mine now, just like my other little helpers. You will help me, won’t you? You’ll do what I ask, without my having to order?”

“I—” Omorose could not stop shaking, even when Awa’s fingers found her hand. “I—”

“Run!” Halim hurled his stew in the man’s face and leaped on top of the table, his heart pounding harder than his feet as he took one, two, three steps across the granite and fell upon the hermit. Awa and Omorose were both knocked to the ground by their stools as the skeletons shook themselves back into their old shapes and followed Halim over the table.

The eunuch landed atop the old man and brought them both to the floor. Halim punched in the hermit’s long nose, blood splashing hot against his cheeks, but to the eunuch’s horror the ancient man howled with laughter instead of pain, putting his hands to his hollow cheeks and hooting as the boy’s fist fell again. Halim’s second punch made a wet slapping noise and he felt the man’s jaw shift in his face, but then bone fingers were tightening around both of the youth’s wrists and his neck and his legs and Halim was yanked off of the old man by the three skeletons, who held him aloft as the hermit shakily got to his feet, his face a giggling red smear.

Awa threw open the door and was confronted by another walking corpse, this one carrying a bundle over its shoulder. She darted past it into the night but stumbled as she heard Omorose scream behind her. The girl had frozen in the doorway, and before Awa decided whether to run or go back another boneman came around the side of the hut and seized her by the shoulders.

“Hold them still and make them watch,” the hermit commanded, and as Awa was dragged back inside she saw that Omorose had her arms pinned behind her back by the new arrival, a shriveled husk of a corpse that had deposited its bundle
on the table. The bundle moved, and as her skeletal captor hoisted her up Awa saw it was the bandit chief who had originally captured them, jagged splinters of bone jutting out of his broken arms and legs. Only Halim tried to avert his gaze, but the skeletons holding him got their fingers under his eyelids and made sure he saw through his tears, the sensation of gritty bone pressing against exposed eyeballs arresting his struggles. The eunuch knew he would never escape if they blinded him.

“Have a look, children,” the hermit said, blood bubbling in the center of his swollen, mashed face as he drew a dagger from under his cloak. “Look close, now!”

The blade cut into the bandit chief’s face and he began to scream. Omorose and Halim joined him, but Awa managed to keep her jaw set even when the man’s nose came off, the hermit popping the glistening lump into his mouth and chewing it with a serene expression on his desiccated face. The screams grew louder as the old man swallowed and wiped his bloody face on the front of his cloak. Looking back up at them, the hermit’s caved-in nose was again straight and jutting out of his face like an accusatory finger.

Then the old man began screaming along with the broken bandit and Halim and Omorose, dancing around the hut and shrieking in their faces, rubbing imaginary tears from his cheeks and skipping about like the happiest of spoiled children. When he noticed Awa was not screaming along with the rest he paused for only a moment, giving her a saucy wink as he snatched up a clump of dried stalks studded with silver-trimmed green leaves from a basket by the hearth and ignited them on the fire. Puffing his cheeks and blowing out the flaming wormwood, the hermit inhaled the thick smoke billowing off of the plants and howled even louder, prancing back toward them and shaking the smoking clump in their terror-taut faces.

Omorose began to squirm and kick as her tormentor returned
but it was too late, and as the licorice-sweet fumes filled her nose she calmed and then quieted, her legs dangling and her eyes crossing. Halim had nearly screamed himself unconscious before the smoke even reached him and so went almost at once, but Awa held her breath even when her eyes burned and her lungs boiled, and then she finally coughed and hacked and faded on the cloying smoke, the last thing she remembered the old man putting his hand on the dying bandit chief’s shoulder and whispering,

“Pity Boabdil.”

He was, of course, a necromancer, although it was some time before his pupils learned that word, and of course he meant them ill. They were trapped atop the mountain, and even had they outrun their undead handlers there was still the matter of the chasms that boxed in that high and desolate spit of rock and ice, and the sheer cliff that fell away on one side of the prominence. The atoll of stone where they were imprisoned cast its shadow over another, lower island of rock and hard earth, and there the necromancer’s semi-wild goats, sheep, and ibex pastured in the summer when color returned to the lichens and grasses of the mountain.

They were his apprentices whether they liked it or not, and of course they did not. The chestnuts they had found so delicious the first few days soon became disgusting as they ate little else, be they roasted plain, ground into flour, or cooked with the little meat he granted them. During the days he had them beat at one another and the skeletons with sticks under the tutelage of the reanimated bandit chief, who had escaped the cave and for a time held his own against the deathless that fateful night before losing first his nose and then his life, and so was deemed a suitable fencing instructor.

They erected a crude lean-to against a boulder as far as was possible from the necromancer’s hut without sleeping on the actual cliffside like swallows. The old man oversaw their construction and laughed at them for choosing the shrieking wind that raged along the precipice over his quieter company, and often he did not even allow them to stay in their meager shelter. On the nights he forced them into his hut he taught them to read in the only book he had, and in that book he only ever let them see the first page, yet he could make the letters bend and warp and dance into new shapes and languages and thus one page was enough.

“The power is in the symbol,” he told them one night after they had eaten of the bandit flesh kept cool year-round in the snow of the glacier behind the hut. Before they had discovered the actual source of their meat Omorose had told Halim that prohibitions against pork meant nothing to the damned, and even after they realized that he had made them cannibals they soon found that hunger goads worse than any god and so they continued to eat the stringy lumps in their stew. “What are we but symbols? Our flesh is merely an imperfect shadow cast by our spirit, what your imams call the soul. Our bodies are powerful because of the soul they symbolize, and with that power we can alter them, and we can alter other symbols.”

Halim had given up trying to unravel what the witch meant with his words and simply followed Omorose’s and Awa’s leads as to when to nod or shake his head. The old man never singled him out with questions the way he did the young women, and Halim attributed this to the prayers he still sent east as often as he dared.

Awa found the sorcerer’s ruminations cumbersome and often wrong, the spirits clearer than ever there atop the world. Trafficking with the powers was something else entirely from the spirit-infused charms coveted by her people, however, and as she
learned how to address the fire spirits that hid in rocks as well as the spirits of the stone themselves she slowly plotted their escape.

Omorose struggled with the concepts but appreciated the results—her tutelage on the mountain was more formal than anything she had learned as a child, and far more useful than hours of squeezing as if she were holding in her water to one day please a prick. The necromancer’s exercises made her capable of altering little things to suit her purpose, made her able to bend what she thought was real to the breaking point and then ease it back down once the world had given her what she wanted. Little things only, but she was beginning to appreciate that little things stacked up, and things that ought to be mundane became something more if she focused enough. The tongues of the bandits he had made them eat while concentrating on what the muscle-paddles symbolized had taught them Spanish in as much time as it took to chew and swallow the tough meat, and she was confident that were she to eat the tongue of Halim or Awa she would learn their savage native languages in the same short order.

“Omorose,” said the necromancer, switching back and forth from Arabic to Spanish to get them used to the subtleties of their fresh linguistic knowledge. “What sort of symbols am I talking about?”

“Everything is a symbol,” Omorose said quickly, her eyes darting to Awa for support. Her former slave gave the slightest of nods, and Omorose continued. “This world is nothing but symbols, which is why I thought we were in Hell when we came here. I thought we had gone from one world to another but only … only the symbols had changed. The world seemed changed because things I knew”—seeing his sour expression Omorose amended herself—“because things I thought I knew, like death being the end, had changed.”

“How? Why?” he demanded.

“You changed them,” said Omorose. “Because nothing in this
world is true, and everything is a symbol. You can take what is true, what the symbol stands for, and you can change the symbol. You took the bones of men who had come here before us and changed what they stood for, life instead of death. You took the truth behind the symbols of the men, their souls, and you put them back into their bones and changed their symbols and, and—”

“Bah! Awa, tell me plainly, girl, what do I mean by symbols?”

“You mean different things at different times with the same word. But now you’re talking of spirits.” Awa licked her lips, uncomfortable under his gaze even after all the long months on the mountain.

“And what is it we do when we change symbols, as your little friend calls it?” Omorose bristled to hear her flawless recitation of the words he had driven into her skull used in such a chiding manner. He was never satisfied with anything they did unless it made the others look bad, her especially. She looked to Awa, who stared past the necromancer and out the dark window.

“You can’t change spirits,” Awa decided, looking back at her tutor. “You use words to make spirits and symbols sound the same but they’re not. When you say you’re changing symbols you mean you are controlling spirits and making them do what you want, which is not what they want. The spirits of the dead want to leave their old bones but you draw them back and bind them and make them do what is not natural. So when you say you’re changing symbols you are making the spirits do unnatural things for you.”