The Enterprise of Death (53 page)

Alone, as if she had been anything but. No words could capture the sorrow Awa felt, and why would they wish to? The two corpses approached their mistress, picking up on her unspoken desires, and she lay limp in their arms as they began carrying her back to the ruins of the Inquisitor’s manse. Better for her to have died there in that house along with Chloé than to live and suffer so.

As dawn made what headway it could in the shadowy forest, Awa tried to focus on the necromancer and her curse, on the epiphany that had struck her in Carandini’s chambers, but her mind kept masochistically returning to Chloé. Light was skulking through the trees as the two corpses stopped at the edge of the clearing beside the ruins of Kahlert’s manse. Awa clambered down from their arms, muttered an apology to their spirits as she returned their bodies to true death, then walked out of the forest toward the stream crossing the glen.

She pulled her clothes off as she walked, no longer crying, her mind as cold as the creek water she lowered herself into. In one hand she held the last salamander egg and in the other the ibex knife, and as the frigid water shocked her into taking a sharp breath she floundered back to the edge of the shallow creek. She placed the egg in a pile of grass on the bank, then hacked off her greasy, matted hair with the knife, clipping pieces of her scalp as she heaped the hair and grass ever higher over the egg.

Finally she breathed the word onto the stone egg, and as it caught fire the stink of burning hair cut into Awa’s nose. She piled more grass onto the small fire, which burned ever hotter, and then added a small fir branch that had floated down from the forest and become hung up on the bank. The wet wood caught and burned as though it had been seasoning in a shed for years. Then the fire died down, the smoke thickened, and Awa saw a small shape moving inside the miniature pyre.

It looked like a newt. Not a flaming newt, or a mysterious newt that glowed like coals in a furnace, but a simple newt. When she tried to pluck it out of the ashes it scalded her fingers, however, and she popped them in her mouth as it crawled away from the creek, its tiny legs moving ever so slowly and carefully as it wound through the grass.

Awa sighed a happy sigh as she had upon first sitting in Carandini’s marvelous padded chair, and then she lay back down in the creek, the spirits of the water doing what they could for her seared fingertips and bleeding scalp. Fuck her, and fuck her tutor, and fuck all of them, and Awa put the knife to her own throat. The blade pressed against the skin and Awa looked straight up at the cloudless sky, a river stone her pillow, the water her shroud, the banks rising sharply on either side the walls of her coffin.

There is always a choice, and Awa made hers. Fuck that, and fuck him—she had to try, no matter if she was as terrible a person as Chloé seemed to think, no matter what. The creek suddenly felt as hot as it was cold, and with a gasp she tossed her knife over the side of the bank and scrambled up after it. Surely somewhere along the line one or two of his apprentices had done themselves in or perished of external forces; for all she knew that might be exactly what he wanted. Besides, giving up was the same as letting him win, and she would fight until she lost.

It was so simple that Awa grinned as she dried herself with her discarded clothes and put on her least filthy leggings and tunic. She found a large flat boulder where the creek met the forest and, clambering onto it, took out the book. Her book. She asked her question and the pages dutifully began to turn.

The book settled on a page that began
Pity Boabdil
, and Awa took the time to read his version of her life. That he had seen so much from his prison atop the mountain brought all of her anxiety back to her tight throat, her pounding heart. How could she hope to compete with such power? It was the nature of the book that as she read the writing pulsed and changed, so that while she read for quite some time she only turned the page once, and she saw clearly how he had folded the rectangle of skin and
stitched it into place, creating two full pages—only the front and back of the first was written upon, the second blank as one of Manuel’s fresh canvases. Taking the knife, she sliced into the first page.

The book hurt; Awa felt it quivering as the iron knife dug through the page. The words were dripping off it, and by the time she had the leaf free her hands were covered in blood and the page was a wet clod of old skin. She wiped it in a small circle on the stone then put the crumpled page in the center, and put the knife to her arm. She only went in with the tip a little, and as the blood welled out she daubed a wet ring around herself on the boulder.

She tried to recall a face she had struggled to forget, a voice she had replicated perfectly until she realized what she was doing, the smell of his breath, everything. She could do this. Then the bloody page began to smoke and smolder, the red ring surrounding it crackling, and then he was there.

Rather, the thing he had become. A pit opened in what must be his head, the serpentine shadow as black and lustrous as when she had last seen it, immediately after he had tricked her into killing his physical body. The hole of a mouth twisted into a crescent, and then he began to speak through it.

“Little Awa.” The necromancer sounded happy to see her. “What have we here, eh? I don’t suppose you’ve killed all those babies, hmmmm?”

“No,” said Awa, remembering all too well the concubine’s claim that were she to kill a hundred children with the necromancer’s dagger she would be spared. The notion had never appealed to her. Strange, she thought, that despite the nonchalance toward death she had possessed in her youth she had never even considered the one obvious escape he had offered.

“No,” he said, piling on top of himself until his increasingly skull-like face floated just in front of hers. “But you found my
tome! I couldn’t believe my luck, having a book-collecting witch hunter move in so close. Mind, he never caught a witch, not one.”

“Yes he did,” said Awa, smiling crookedly at her tutor.

“Ho-ho! What a clever young woman you are!”

“Clever but stupid.”

“Did I say that? Cruel, cruel and unnecessary, you—”

“Shut up,” Awa said, still smiling. She was actually starting to enjoy herself. “What’s your name?”

He told her, his jovial smile narrowing to a tiny hole that voiced the syllables. She smiled wider, which made him thrash against the invisible walls of the circle, greasy black smears hanging in the air. Then he drew himself up short, facing her again.

“Doesn’t matter,” the necromancer hissed. “Think it makes a difference, knowing that? Think there’s anything in the book to save you? Think I don’t know you’ve got a few more months left on your sentence, a few more precious summer days until I can claim you? Your time is running short, little Awa, your time is running up, and I’m going back to where I was before you so rudely invoked me.”

“Why does the curse, the ward, whatever you put on me that keeps me safe from the dead, why does it last ten years?” said Awa.

“That’s as long as I can persist without a true form,” he said, the question restoring some of his good humor—he might be a monstrous necromancer with pretensions at some sort of immortality, but he was still a pedant at heart. “Any longer and I start to lose my abilities, degenerating in quality, and we can’t have that. Being freed from flesh is the most marvelous experience possible, although I expect you lack the imagination to see why. I fly like a tireless bird, across mountains and oceans, from pole to pole and back again, learning all the secrets our physical senses keep hidden. But after a decade or so I begin to slide, and if I’m
not careful I’ll wind up as some mundane poltergeist, able to interact with this world on only the faintest level. So I give myself ten years at a time, which is proven to be safe, and fairly easy to keep track of, especially as I time it to expire on memorable dates … such as Christmas, or the Autumn Solstice.
This
Autumn Solstice.”

“What would you do if I died before you could return for my body?” Awa recalled all too well the feel of a blade against her throat an hour before.

“I would take another body.” The black smile spread even wider, a chasm in the smoke. “I would lose much time, for the body would not be trained as you have been, prepared, seasoned. I would have to take a child to make sure my arts would find a home, to ensure the vessel would be capable of overcoming its innate iron as you are, and I might well make a bad choice and not be so powerful as I once was.”

Not even that bitter remedy would stop him, then.

“But in time the body would grow,
my
body would grow, and I would retrieve my book and train a new pupil, and try again. It has happened before, indeed, it has happened more often than not. Our world is perilous, after all, and living ten years without the protection of my wing is a trial not all are capable of. But I have always regained what was lost, and I have always punished those who sought to hide in death. There is no escaping me, little Awa, and we both know I cannot lie.”

“If escape is impossible …” Awa felt her stomach fall through her bottom, knowing she was down to her last hope, but also certain that this final possibility that had come to her in Carandini’s chamber was the key to everything, and as close to a sure thing as she would ever come.

“This page is almost used up,” he said, languidly swimming around his circle, “so unless you’ve got another piece of my skin, a piece of bone, something to prolong my visit, I’m afraid I’ll be
going back to the so-called New World for a little while longer. New! I’ve been there a dozen times, but even old things are interesting with new eyes. I think we’ll go there in the flesh, you and I, once I’ve returned. I’ll be seeing you soon, little Awa, I’ll be seeing you very, very soon.”

Awa did not want to use the other page of his skin lest the means of thwarting him somehow require it, and besides that she suspected that if she broke the circle to place another artifact inside the ring he might be able to escape. There were still a few tiny scraps of the skin burning in the circle, meaning he could not flee just yet, and Awa mustered the courage to ask. She had him.

“How do I defeat you?” Awa said. “Tell me how to destroy you, to banish you from this world, to stop you from stealing my body.”

The oily shadow stopped swirling around its circle, the eye holes growing larger, the mouth hole shrinking. It shuddered violently. The features were more distinct than ever, the face in the smoke almost that of her tutor. It shook harder, and Awa realized he was afraid.

No. She heard it then, the noises he was making, and they were not fearful whimpers, desperate cries. He was laughing.

“Tell me!” Awa screamed. “You have to tell me!”

“You think I know that?!” Her tutor made a sound like a clicking tongue or a clicking bone. “Think I kept reading any grimoires that seemed to be going in that direction? Think I went out of my way to ruminate about such conundrums? Think you’re the first to ask? No no no, little Awa, why would I try to learn the answer?”

“How …” Awa’s fists were clenched. Not fair. “Where might I find an answer? Where might I look to find a way?”

“I haven’t the foggiest,” beamed the eel-like apparition. “No idea whatsoever. But you’re a clever,
clever
girl, so I’m sure you’ll—”

“Get fucked!” Awa shrieked. “You fucking piece of shit, I’m going to fucking end you!”

“Language!” The necromancer’s spirit recoiled. “No soap around for leagues, by the looks of you, or I’d advise you wash your mouth, young lady! But in all seriousness, we might find another way, together, you and I—”

“You’re fucking dead! Think I’m some beast for you to beat, some dog to come lick your hand after all you’ve done?! You fucking bastard! I’m going to fucking ruin you!”

“Look, this page is burned out, so I don’t have to stay any longer than I wish and if you won’t be civil—”

“Be gone! Fucker!” Awa shoved him back the way he had come, and then she was alone on the comfortable boulder by the pleasant creek winding through the scenic glade beside the burned-out house of the dead Inquisitor. “Fuck!”

Awa did not shed a single tear, nor did she waste another breath. She had perhaps half a year, and she would use it well— that she had even considered giving up made her sick. If she died, regardless of the cause, it would inconvenience him but by no means thwart him, and thwart him she fucking would.

“What in fuck witchery’s this?” Awa looked up to see Monique standing on the opposite side of the creek. “With that cunt-smack’s house a hot mess of ash an’ coal jus’ down the crick, you think profanin at the top of your lungs is best?”