The Enterprise of Death (9 page)

The witch wore Bernardo’s clothes, and the naked man lay at her feet making small wet noises and holding both hands to his bloody mouth. As if she had been waiting for his audience, the witch nodded at Manuel and squatted over Bernardo, slitting his throat with a dagger. With his dagger, Manuel realized, and even though he could see the weapon his hand went to the empty sheath at his waist. She must have taken it when she bumped into him on the hill, and she must have used it on the Kristobels and now, obviously, on Bernardo.

In the better light she looked older than he had originally
thought, but not by much. She was short but surprisingly well-built, her close-cropped hair the dull, grayish brown of the bistre Manuel used for his ink, her skin darker than the dead leaves at her feet. And in the time it had taken him to kill one man on equal footing she had killed three, and all with his dagger.

“You’re a witch,” said Manuel, a bitter metallic taste in his mouth. He realized he had bitten his tongue when he had fallen during the fight, and he spit red. “Is that it?”

“Yes,” the witch said in Alemannic German to match his, and he saw her mouth was smeared with blood.

“And you used your witchcraft on them?” Manuel smiled to hear such words leave his mouth.

“No, I used your knife on them,” said the witch.

“I saw that.” Manuel nodded, pushing the rest of the way through the prickly bars of the juniper and looking down at the witch and Bernardo’s leaking body. “That’s your witchcraft, isn’t it? Being so good with a blade? The way so-called learned men attribute—”

Then Manuel stopped. Bernardo was getting up, planting his bloody hands in the thick crimson pool his neck had created, and he jerked up to his feet, the flow at his neck quickening from the exertion. He stood swaying beside the witch, who smiled faintly at Manuel. The artist was also a soldier and knew a dead man when he saw one, and Bernardo was most assuredly dead, the wound in his neck as wide as Manuel’s thumb and deep enough that as the risen corpse turned its head Manuel saw the hint of bone that must be his spine. Manuel was going to be sick, he was—

Manuel started awake in a shadowy cave long after the rain started, thunder murmuring its displeasure to be left outside. His wrist hurt and he had no idea where he was, confusion and pain adding a sinister edge to the gloom. Between the artist and the mouth of the cave was a small campfire, and Manuel lay very still, trying to straighten out what had actually happened from
what his exhausted mind had made him dream before collapsing. Yet the whole morning seemed implausible, and he was cold and damp and sore and could smell the char of cooking pork, and so he got up and went to the fire where the witch sat in front of a joint of roasting meat and a simmering stewpot.

“I wonder at you, Niklaus Manuel Deutsch of Bern,” said the witch, and when she did not offer him her waterskin he rooted through the piled bags at his feet until he found one. He dug deeper until he found another skin full of wine and an apple, and then he sat down.

“Do you?” He sounded scared to himself, and realized that he was. He did not know where his sword was, nor his dagger. Fuck.

“I do. I wonder if those men hadn’t meant to rape me if you would have set me free. I wonder. When you found me, when your master was ordering you to deliver me, you said the Spanish men would burn me, yes?”

“At best.” Manuel took a slug of wine.

“So that is alright. You were not happy about it but you would have done it, but when they decided to rape me you told me to be ready to run. That was foolish. We both would have been caught, and I still would be raped, and you would probably be killed. Are you foolish enough to think you could have fought them all when one of them almost finished you?”

“No, I didn’t …” Manuel took another pull. “I didn’t think they would be so close. I thought you might be able to get away, or that the Kristobels would come around if I put Werner down quick. Still foolish, as you say.”

“If they hadn’t tried what they did, would you have tried to let me go, or would you have given me to this Inquisition?” The witch was watching him closely, and something he could not place nagged at him.

“I don’t know,” Manuel said, reserving his lies for those who
paid him. “I’d thought about it, of course, thought of little else. I’d like to think so, but we’ll never know, will we?”

“No.” The witch sighed, and then Manuel realized what was bothering him. The first thing he had remembered upon waking was Bernardo’s corpse getting to its feet, but he had dismissed that at once as fancy. But the other shapes in the light of the meager, smoky fire were not boulders nor the walls of the low-roofed cave nor bits of fancy. They were four men, four men whom he could now smell over the cooking meat and the woodsmoke and the loamy scent of the cave. They smelled like old blood and early rot, like sweat and piss and shit, like all the notes subtle and strong that combine to create the perfume of battlefields and slaughterhouses; the unmistakable smell of death. And they were watching him with unblinking eyes, Werner, Bernardo, and the Kristobels, they were watching him from where they sat blocking the only exit to the cave.

The thunder came again, and Manuel slowly backed away from the fire, into the dark recess of the cave. He kept his eyes on the dead men she had brought back to life but soon his sore hands assured him the back of the cavern ended in cold, wet stone and earth, a dead end. She was a fucking witch, not some poor midwife or Jew or madwoman, but a real fucking witch. And he had loosed her.

Awa fell, and then the bandit chief crashed into her back, bones encircling her limp body. Both of her shoulders were dislocated as their plummet was arrested by the interlocking spines of the necromancer’s pack of skeletons that tethered the chief to the near side of the chasm. They swung into the cliff face, breaking Awa’s previously uninjured right ankle, and then they were slowly reeled back up, Awa drooling red from her internal wounds. The loose skeletal arms jammed into cracks in the rock and hauling up the line of their spines quickly rejoined the rest of their bones when Awa and the bandit chief were finally hoisted back to safety.

The snow felt warm on Awa’s cheeks as the bandit chief carried her. He was talking to her with Halim’s voice but her rattled mind could not pick out individual words until she saw the necromancer and Omorose waiting in front of the hut, and then her fear cut through the pain coursing through her, pain as rich and widespread as the blood in her veins.

“Now
that
I saw coming,” the necromancer said with a smile at Omorose. “The runner runs, just as the fighter fights. How are you feeling, little Awa?”

Awa tried to tell Omorose to do everything she could to live, to tell her mistress how much she loved her, but only more stringy blood leaked between her teeth.

“She destroyed three,” the bandit chief said as he laid Awa down in the snow at the necromancer’s feet. “Got to the far ravine, cut off my hand, then made a jump for the other side when she couldn’t run anymore.”

“A runner and a fighter, eh?” The necromancer looked at Omorose. “I think the fight’s left her, don’t you?”

Omorose looked down at Awa and her twisted mouth began twitching at the corner as she remembered the way her former slave had held her on the worst nights when Omorose could not pretend anymore, the countless times Awa had labored to make Omorose’s shortcomings appear to be her fault instead. The younger girl looked up at her, a strange and frightening smile creasing Awa’s bloody mouth as their eyes met, and Omorose knelt to put her out of her misery. The slave must have seen the knife in her mistress’s hand then, Awa’s eyes widening, and she managed a gurgling cry.

“No!” Awa tried to warn her but then his hand touched the back of Omorose’s neck, the necromancer’s glittering eyes locked with Awa’s. Omorose fell dead in the snow, and Awa began to sob, trying to crawl to her friend despite the agony it brought.

“None of that, now,” said the necromancer, and with a murmur Omorose sat back up. “Bring Awa in and lay her by the fire, then bring me Halim. She’ll need his shoulders and ankles by the look of it, and probably more beside. You’ll be at the mortar and pestle all night; much as I hate to waste good bones she’ll be useless without them. We’ll do a soup with the powder, I think.”

The snow settled on Awa’s cheeks, on the salty brooks both clear and red that trickled down them, and then Omorose’s corpse picked her up and carried her in. When she tried to refuse the food in the coming days the necromancer merely had to threaten Omorose’s mortal remains and Awa would do as she was told. Eventually she was able to speak without crying.

“I’ll do anything you want, and not run, nor disobey,” said
Awa, unable to keep her eyes off the corpse of Omorose standing behind the necromancer as they sat at the table, the bone broth steaming between them. “But you let her go.”

“Where to?” His bemused smile sickened her.

“To wherever the dead go when sorcerers don’t enslave them,” said Awa, her voice unwavering. “You let me bury her, and you never touch her again, or let your servants touch her, or eat her, or anything else. You let her sleep, and if you do then I will be as good an apprentice as you could hope for.”

“Alright,” said the necromancer, and with a wave of his hand Omorose’s corpse collapsed in a pile on the floor. “Now eat your supper, it’s getting cold.”

Refusing the help of the bonemen, Awa found the mountainside less than accommodating to an amateur gravedigger. She eventually settled on the far side of the glacier where the rock shelf reemerged from under the ice just before the cliff fell away. On the narrow outcrop of stone she built a cairn over her mistress, and the spirits of the glacier promised to keep Omorose cool lest the summer sun ripen her into something delectable to scavengers. Awa stacked the rocks high, her fresh wounds nothing more than fresher scars and minor aches after only a few days of taking the necromancer’s cure.

That first winter alone with the necromancer was the worst, with him jumping the bones of his beloved restless dead on an almost nightly basis. Between his romps she discovered where he actually slept, and how. In the mornings when he sent her out to spar with the bandit chief he animated the bear corpse, which would rear up on its hind legs while the necromancer unlatched a catch in its fur, making its whole chest swing open on a hinge. Then he would step inside, careful not to snag himself on its ribs, and pull the furry door shut behind him. The undead bear watched Awa intently whenever she came in to bind a wound or start cooking their dinner but only growled if she
approached it. Knowing she would have to learn all his secrets to avenge her mistress, Awa became the model pupil and asked him about his sleeping habits one midwinter day when they were snowed in.

“If you mean to ask why I sleep inside a giant, monstrous beast instructed to rend apart anyone who might disturb my rest I would ask what happened to your previously acceptable wits.” The necromancer’s concubine tittered from atop the bear’s back —it was still on all fours after the previous night’s activities.

“I think there’s more to it,” said Awa. “You don’t always sleep, and when you do it’s always during the day, when I’m out.”

“Any old sod can see when the sun is up, but by keeping a nocturnal regimen I train my eyes to see better than an owl in the dark.” With his long nose and fat, round eyes he did look something like an emaciated owl, although Awa, never having seen such a bird, did not realize it.

“There’s more,” said Awa.

“More?”

“More.” Awa nodded. “You don’t want me to see you sleep, and not just because we’re all vulnerable when we sleep. You’ve your bear, after all, and I couldn’t hurt you if I tried. So why do you hide?”

“She’s calling you afraid!” said the concubine.

“Not afraid,” said the necromancer, but his left eye twitched as he spoke, and he snapped his fingers to dismiss his paramour. Her desiccated corpse went limp atop the bear and he steepled his fingers, watching Awa closely. “And no, you couldn’t hurt me if you tried. Iron, as I’ve told you, is one of the only symbols that represents what it truly is, here and on the so-called Platonic level of reality, and thus it can hurt even one such as myself. Because it is a true material and not just a symbol of something else, iron restricts our ability to alter the world, be it talking with spirits or commanding symbols or however you put it. But the usual
methods will heal an iron-caused wound, and if I feared it in general I wouldn’t give you a sword of the stuff, would I?”