The Enterprise of Death

by Jesse Bullington

  The necromancer’s mouth froze on the last word, his eyes staring blankly at the ceiling, and Awa pulled the sheet over his head. She heard it, his heart, beating with brooding slowness, and she began to count along with it. She knew she had to pull herself together or she would lose count and he would be cross, and she did not want him to be cross. She wondered if she would recognize him as a younger man. She had never tried and—

  The little bird clattered its bones against the window, and though she could not see it through the boards covering the portal she knew the sound at once, the mouse bones she had given it whirring against one another as it flapped just under the eaves.

  Fifty.

  Fifty-one.

  Fifty-two.

  Fifty-three.

  Awa scanned through the haze, peering at the boarded-up window, and that was when she noticed it, hiding on the ceiling. The necromancer’s spirit had somehow exited his living body and floated above it, the wormwood vapors running over but not through it, the wavering bond tying the spirit to his head curling up like smoke from a snuffed candle.

  Sixty.

  Sixty-one.

  Sixty-two.

  The bird flew back over the cliffside in her mind, but now it dived down and Awa dived after it, moving too fast, too clumsily, letting herself focus fully on the deadly thought she had kept at bay all through his explanation of the ritual. She knew she had to calm down, knew there was time aplenty if she were methodical and practical. She banged her hip on the table and fell, the smoke finally starting to choke her, and she cried out as she scrambled up, pawing the front of the bear. Somehow she could still hear his heart but had lost it just long enough to terrify herself even more.

  Was that seventy or seventy-five?

  The door in the bear would not open but she got her fingers into the seam and wrenched it, peeling back a fingernail but springing the catch. She felt about in the dark cavity and it was gone, of course he had removed it, of course he had secreted it somewhere else, of course.

  Seventy-five or eighty?

  The shelf, the high shelf where he always placed his book—she had seen the chest there when she came in, had seen it but not had time to acknowledge it, and with a sob she pushed past the bear and jumped high, her now-bleeding fingers catching the ledge and bringing the whole rickety shelf crashing down on top of her. She felt the smoke part around her, felt the spirit of the necromancer run itself over her neck in warning of what lay ahead, but there could be no turning back; instead the contact confirmed that for a dozen more heartbeats, at least, he could not return to his flesh to thwart her.

  There was too much smoke, the billowing clouds pouring out of the small blaze in the hearth blinding her further even as the firelight was gobbled up, converted into the obfuscating fumes. Then she felt the curl of an ibex horn under her palm and cried out, on her feet and blundering around to find the table, her fingers shaking so hard she could barely loose the clasp keeping the blade in its sheath. His heart was beating faster, a blatant cheat, and then she felt his leg under the cloth and followed it up to the head of the table. A high whining was coming from his spirit, the same noise Omorose’s ghost had made when Awa forced her mistress’s corpse to bury itself, and she made out the shape of his head through the smoke.

  One hundred.

  Clear as lightning and loud as thunder, she knew it, she felt it, and the spirit did, too, building itself up like a storm cloud, and then they raced for the necromancer’s skull, blade and spirit evenly paced. The cloth over his mouth sucked inward just as the tip of the dagger reached him, the wide blade cracking his left eye socket as it passed through all the way to the hilt. Awa shrieked and wrenched the knife sideways, and the ibex-horn hilt told her fingers who told her hands who told her arms who told her mind that his skull had split open like a log under an ax.

  This did not stop her from making sure, and when she could not pry the blade out of the slick, shrouded head she jerked him onto the floor and used the hilt to lift him up and smash him back down until his skull caved in enough for her to free the knife. She knew exactly where his heart hid and there the blade went and out he bled, and, finally, Awa let herself stop. He lay dead, swaddled in what had become his winding sheet, his skull fractured, his heart run through with cold iron, and Awa closed her eyes. She was alone.

  XIII

  The Counsel of Corpses

  Awa was not alone. The smoke shifted, billowing waves breaking over her face, and she heard the familiar sound of his laughter. The cackling came from just behind her and, slowly opening her eyes, she turned to see what she had done.

  His spirit floated free and unfettered, a smear of bright, oily blackness in the dark smoke, serpentine and long and coiling above her, faint yellow light shining from two holes in its blurry head. She could not breathe as she looked up at it, her head aching from the strain and the fumes, and it looked back at her. He looked back at her.

  “I knew you were the one,” he said. “Predictable. Easily manipulated. Clever, but so very stupid. Stay safe, little Awa, stay very safe or your spirit will suffer, and those of your friends as well. Safe.”

  They stared at each other, Awa unable to speak, and then he slid across the ceiling, a dozen branching, many-handed arms bursting from his sides and propelling him along, and then he slipped through the crack over the door and was gone. Awa looked down at his corpse, the bloody shroud stuck to her legs, and she began to laugh. It hurt like the time he had stabbed her, each sound that left her lips summoning another ghost of the blade jabbing into her lungs and stomach, and as she laughed she slipped from her knees onto her bottom and kicked at his corpse with her hidden hoof. Of course he wanted this, of course he planned this. Of course.

  When she realized the fire in the clogged hearth had spread instead of dying she moved to salvage what she could, but as soon as she stood upright in the burning hut she fainted, the smoke too thick, the night too long. If the bandit chief had not pulled her out of the blaze she would have died, and that prospect had not held much allure in some time. He also rescued the dagger, a leather satchel, the spinning wheel, and the box of wool, but everything else fluttered away on ashen wings as the hut burned to the ground, and Awa returned to the world of the living in the skeletal arms of her only friend.

  “Bury me here, and take care to dash my skull before you stack the cairn,” said the bandit chief several days later, after he had nursed her with the little lung meat remaining on the last glacier-preserved corpse in their larder.

  “Get out, then,” said Awa, and before he could say another word she pushed his spirit from its body. She scowled at the dim gray shade hovering over his remains as she raised him up as a mindless boneman. The skeleton stood before her, Halim’s unnaturally moist tongue still in place. “You can’t tell me what to do, not after taking me here, after taking us here. You don’t get to rest while he plays some new game with me. No, you’re going to do what I say, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” said the skeleton.

  “I bet your spirit’s not too happy about that, is he?” Awa raised her voice, looking past the boneman at his hovering spirit. “Are you!?”

  “I do not know,” said the skeleton.

  “I bet you don’t,” she said, and whirled away. “You’re with me for as long as I choose. Let’s fetch Omorose.”

  Walking over the glacier, Awa’s pace began to flag. She knew exactly what she was doing, and it was terrible, but she could not stop herself. Of course he wanted to be dead; so did she, after all, but if she could not, then neither … then neither …

  Awa stopped, the snow cutting into her ankles and burning her buried foot a pleasant sensation, a real sensation. She would not do this, because she was alive and being alive meant making decisions, meant choosing instead of simply being. She turned back to the ruins of the hut, her boneman following her. The rest of the skeletons had leaped over the cliff while she was helping the necromancer with his last ritual and so he was the last, just as sh
e was the last apprentice. Except he would go into the ground and not return, and she would persist, alone.

  She did not make him dig his own grave but had him lie on the soot-covered granite tabletop in the wreckage of the hut, piling the rocks onto his body in the place where he had died so long ago. She felt his spirit worrying at her arms as she worked, trying to convince her to let him help, or maybe just to let him back into his bones to say goodbye, to thank her. She could not or she might not let him go, and this self-awareness gave her strength even as it sickened her.

  When the entire body was buried under the high mound of rocks save for his skull, she addressed his spirit: “I never asked your name because he taught us that names give power, and I never wanted to have power over you. I was a child and so I did not appreciate that this was impossible, that the living and the dead can never be equal, that I always had power over you. I beg that you forgive me for what I considered doing to you, for even thinking of treating you like, like a slave. You are the only friend I have, and I will miss you every day that I live, and if I one day find myself in the same resurrected position that you have suffered, every day after I die. I love you.”

  His spirit was pushing even harder then, trying to get back inside its skull, and Awa wondered if she had moved him to change his mind, to desire her companionship more than he desired rest, and so she brought a stone down on his pate as hard as she could before her weakness overpowered her compassion a second time. The skull shattered, ricocheting teeth stinging her arms, and she heard a faint hissing noise as his spirit faded into the air and the rock, but as it went a name impressed itself into her mind: Alvarez.

  “Sleep well, Alvarez,” Awa said as she covered his broken skull with rocks, and when the cairn was built she turned to her small collection of possessions and began lugging them to the abandoned shack she had shared with Omorose. She would restore Omorose to her body and see if her mistress’s ire had cooled during her banishment from her flesh, but first she would knit her a gift, a fine pair of new leggings. She had plenty of black wool, and some lighter wool she would dye with ibex blood. Nothing was stopping her from going down to the pastures now, the beasts already penned in their winter enclosures, and she would make a stew that very night, and maybe dine on a little grass in honor of the goat that had given her its hoof.

  Then Awa saw her little bonebird flitting over a patch of snow to her left and paused, the spinning wheel hoisted over one shoulder. She reached out to its spirit and called it to her but the bird lit down onto the snow and tapped its beak, as though it were searching for ethereal worms amidst that spectral field of snow. Knowing she had time aplenty, Awa delivered the wheel and wool to her hut and then relocated her bird, which was still hopping in place on the glacier. As she neared it she noticed that she was approaching the thin region of the glacier, the dangerous section shot through with thin ice and deep chasms. She moved slower, not as confident as she once was that the spirit of the glacier could be trusted to tell her when she was going too far.

  Awa’s bird had cleared the snow away from Gisela’s face with its wings and Awa grinned, knowing at once what had transpired. The concubine lay in a hole in the ice, the snow packed in tight around her. The powder above her would melt during the days and freeze during the nights to restore the unbroken surface of the glacier, and very soon she would be hidden as skillfully as a single blond hair in a field of wheat.

  The concubine’s spirit had nicked off to wherever they went, not having foreseen so early a rise, and Awa’s smile widened. He wanted to dig her up at some point, the old sneak, and he knew his pupil might interfere with that goal if she were to remain in plain sight. The potential for mischief was mind-boggling, and Awa reached out and reeled in Gisela’s spirit.

  “Get up,” Awa said once she had relocated the spirit.

  “You found me?” Shriveled eyelids blinked over the frozen yellow pools that her eyes had deteriorated to, rotten grapes set in a moldy gourd. “Told’em you couldn’t be trusted.”

  “Get up and do as I tell you or I’ll push you out and make you watch what I do to your bones,” said Awa, confident her tutor had disciplined his favorite paramour to the point that she would know better than to disobey those with the power to banish her spirit with a nod or a word.

  “Couldn’t do worse’n what he’s done,” Gisela said but crawled out of the grave all the same, frozen bones shrieking inside saggy skin as she moved.

  “You can’t lie,” said Awa, “and I’ll push you out and ask your corpse if you give me trouble.”

  “Course you will,” said Gisela. “You’re the same’s he.”

  “No.” Awa forced herself to keep her voice level. “I’m not like him. But I know how to hurt you, so behave. He hid you here to keep you safe from me, and so you’d stay fresh for when he came back to get you, yes?”

  “Yeah,” said Gisela, squatting in her grave and rubbing her knuckles.

  “When will he come back for you?” said Awa.

  “In his time,” said the concubine, her bandit’s voice husky as ever. “When he’s done with you.”

  “Done with me?” The queasy feeling this brought on told Awa she was on the right track. “Do you know what he is planning as far as I’m concerned?”

  “Yeah,” said the concubine, looking rather pleased with herself for a dirty old corpse crouched in a snowy grave.

  “What,” Awa said sharply. “What is he planning as far as I’m concerned?”

  “He’s plannin on takin your pretty body and makin it his. Can’t live forever, not even he, but he can get somethin new, somethin fresher. Spirit’ll last for all days, tis the blood and bone what sours.”

  “What?” She cannot lie, Awa told herself, she must be telling the truth. “What do you—”

  “Did you have a vision of bein out your skin?” the shriveled concubine asked, and Awa’s heart froze at the memory. She had felt the cold air on her exposed musculature as she lay dripping on the floor, the necromancer hunched over the large bloody membrane he held stretched flat on the table like new vellum, his quill racing over what she had known must be the inside of her skin. She had awoken with a scream, her whole body racked with fever, but until that moment she had been able to force herself to believe it had been nothing more than an especially vivid nightmare, that even for her tutor there were limits to what reality would allow. The concubine clapped her hands together gleefully. “You remember, don’t you, lil Awa?!”

  “Yes,” said Awa, her taxed mind as numb as her ice-crusted ankles. “He wants my body. His spirit wants my body, and he did something to me, when I was asleep.”

  “Marked you! Marked you for his touch!” said Gisela. “And once he’s in you wager on those hands of yours touchin me a bit! Wager on that tongue of yours—”

  “I don’t think so,” said Awa, pushing the concubine’s spirit out of her body, the shade moaning as it was unmoored. The dead do not lie, however, and so that wager—“Get up.”

  The corpse sat back up from where it had fallen, the loose soul of Gisela expectantly settling around her body’s neck like a stole. Awa smiled at that, knowing the bones remembered as well as the spirit, and chided herself for allowing the hideous concubine to enjoy even a drop of pleasure, an iota of sensation. You stay and you watch, she thought, and smiled at the cadaver.

  “Your fun’s over, Gisela,” said Awa, pleased to see the spirit writhe over her bones. “But first you watch your body tell me what I want to know, and then you get to watch what I do to it. I warned you, and you gave me that shitty attitude you always do, having a laugh at my expense, except he isn’t here to protect you, is he? He isn’t here to watch your back, and if he means to steal my body I don’t really care too much for staying in his good graces. So bite off all your fingers and swallow them, and feel it, you nasty thing.”

  The shriveled cadaver jammed her blackened digits into her mouth and began to chew, faint whines slipping between the sharp teeth and frozen meat and crac
kling bones as she ate her own fingers. Saffron tears flooded the long-dry riverbeds crossing Gisela’s face, and Awa laughed. Soon her guffaw turned to a dry heave and she waved at her to stop, the necromancer gagging at the sight of what she was making the corpse do. Torturing the defenseless was what he would do, not her. Not her, never her. She was different. Gisela’s spirit might have been giggling or crying, the droning noise obscure and alien.

  “Now you speak what you know, and in detail,” Awa said at last. “He marked me, and he intends to steal my body. Why me?”

  “The ritual required his intended to slay his flesh, but in such a fashion to free his soul instead of banishing it to where the dead go, to make it something else,” said Gisela’s corpse evenly. “An esoteric and difficult ceremony. He could not leave this place in his own body, and only vessels prepared from youth can master his arts, even with a new spirit. Few children were brought to this place, and of them you were both open to the art and easy to control.”

  “I’m not,” said Awa. “I’m not!”

  “You were,” said the corpse. “He needed you to murder his prepared body with a certain tool, and if you had not done that then the ritual would have destroyed him utterly. He tricked you into murdering him.”

  “So what now?” Awa said after a long pause, only her bonebird returning to her shoulder dispelling the hopeless torpor that strangled her tongue. “Where is he, and when will, when will he return?”

  “I do not know where he is,” said the corpse. “He will return in ten years, upon the night that is called the Autumn Solstice. It is then that the curse he put upon you will fade, and then he will return.”

  “What curse?” said Awa, genuinely surprised that matters could actually worsen at this juncture.

  “The curse that marks you as his intended. No dead may harm you so long as it bides, no dead in all the world. But upon the Solstice it will pass, and he will take your body.”