The Enterprise of Death

by Jesse Bullington

  “Why didn’t you try to stop me from doing what I did to Gisela? If you had something then—”

  “I never cared about that bag of bones! I rather liked watching you interrogate her, you reminded me of myself at—”

  Then he went silent and Awa sat down, though she had just started the night’s march. Only the day before he had said he was gone the first week, which would have been when she dug up Gisela, but now he claimed to have seen that, too. That was it, then. No scream of defeat, no justifications or clarifications or backpedaling, just silence. She was too practical, as usual, she thought, and too stupid—she was so stupid she had fooled herself for a very long time, and now had just fooled herself again. Stupid.

  Of course he was off running his errands; he would no more follow her about than one would forgo a summer holiday to stay at home and stare at their mittens. She had been talking to herself with his voice for quite some time now, and even when the voice had sounded more like Omorose’s she had explained it away as another trick of his. She looked down at her trembling hands and wondered how a crazy, stupid little beast could ever hope to find a book that might be hidden anywhere in the entire world. The concubine had implied the air spirits would not have the strength to move it far but Awa had very quickly lost any sense of where she was and how far she had gone—as a child she had been sold from one master to another, journeying farther in a few years than most travel in a lifetime, nearly a thousand leagues, and then came of age on a spit of rock less than a league across.

  Graveyards seemed the logical place to search, for he would be able to command the dead to hide the book, and some of them had weatherproof mausoleums and ossuaries that would keep it safe from life’s unavoidables. Awa recognized at once the aversion the living had toward cemeteries, but she also noted their keenness to keep them tended and guarded behind walls, and so she established a routine for investigating churchyards instead of marching blindly in with a spade. She would observe them for a day or two, from hiding if possible, or by wandering near them several times a day in the more urban areas. She had taken to pulling her cowl down as far over her face as possible to avoid being recognized as a Moor or a woman, and even still there had been a few uncomfortably close calls that had resulted in her killing men, or beating them near enough. Only once had a party pursued her through the wood, hounds baying and torches shining, and while she had escaped with only a little dog blood on her hands the experience had instilled her with a strong aversion to drawing the attention of men.

  Awa suspected his voice would return, or rather, she would summon him back like a spirit to its bones, and she would resume talking to herself in his voice with some perfect explanation for the contradiction she had tricked him—tricked herself, the contradiction she had tricked herself into saying. She argued with herself, told herself she would not be fooled again, that now that she knew she was safe, and what sense had it ever made, really? The worst part of it was when she came to miss the voice when it did not return, and she tried to mimic it to relieve the monotony but now it always rang false to her ear.

  Awa was in the mountains again, which suited her, though whether she was still in Spain or had blundered into Castile, Navarre, or France would have caused some conjecture amongst the cartographers of those fair kingdoms. These mountains were far lusher with grass and pine, little emerald leaves covering the ground like an endless phalanx of shields, white flowers spearing out of the carpet on purple and green stalks.

  Soon enough the snows were coming and she stayed to the low mountains, dipping into the deep valleys and canyons to exchange the wealth she gathered in graveyards for food and wine from what outlying farmers would sell to a filthy vagabond. The men and women who worked the granite-flecked valleys of the Pyrenees were no more happy to see a Moorish wench than were the Basque shepherds of the high country she encountered the following spring, but all were willing to take a fortune for a little food, and those who followed the ragwoman into the wood to relieve her of any other burdensome wealth she might carry were found stone dead the next morning, or not at all.

  The Black Lady was soon frightening children all across the mountain range, a woman in mourning who would offer you riches in exchange for a loaf of bread, but woe to the man who tried to rob her, the woman who tried to cheat her, the child who cursed her. Awa pushed on, the mortal remains she resurrected in the cemeteries no more helpful than those she had raised in the previous churchyard, or those she had raised a year before, or three. At least the churchyards seemed to have emissaries, with one spirit usually quicker than the rest to return to its bones and speak on behalf of the cemetery.

  “Has a book been hidden in this place?” was the question she would ask, and then she would release the spirit. It would return to where the spirits of the dead go, and then promptly come back to shake its skull.

  “No grave in this churchyard has been disturbed to hide a book,” would come the reply, and, because Awa would not simply raise the bones but always insisted on giving the spirit back as well, sometimes a request would be given, such as, “Donna Stefanie asks that you, who can speak with both we and they, inform her husband that she knows he was having it with that Vittoria, and she forgives him, and wishes that he cease mourning and marry the girl.”

  Just as often it was, “Donna Patricia asks that you tell her husband that his dead wife knew he was cheating with that haughty blond bitch, and she was pissing in his porridge every morning until she died,” but Awa did as she was asked all the same, and would have even if she were not told where to find this hidden treasure or that buried purse in exchange for her trouble. It was the least she could do for the dead, and she had yet to have a recipient of one of their messages do worse than make the cross at her and back away gasping in horror. The legend of the Black Lady took on stranger and more diabolical permutations with each incident.

  Awa was simply relieved that through some esoteric system of their own each churchyard never made more than one request of her. She wondered how they determined whose wish was most important, or how the returned spirit remembered what it had been told in whatever place the dead go, from which she thought no memories were supposed to be taken away. She imagined she would find out herself when she died, but then remembered that unless she found the necromancer’s book her soul would be devoured, and then she would know nothing for all time.

  It was on such cheery thoughts that Awa was musing when she heard the child singing. A harvest moon shone over the sharp canyon walls as she walked the path to the cemetery she had staked out, but at this elevation snow had already been sown over field and forest, the actual harvest having come a month before. Awa stopped, the ill-fitting new shoes she had traded a priceless necklace for crunching gravel and ice, the wind that brought her the song slicing through her threadbare cloak and leggings. It was a little girl, Awa realized, singing an Ave in the moonlit cemetery, and the young necromancer left the trail lest she startle the child in the night. When the song ended and then began again, she resumed her pace, intending to circumnavigate the low wall of the cemetery and wait in the rear of the grounds until the singer returned home.

  Awa kept to the treeline, eyeing the window of the church in front of the cemetery even though she knew from her reconnaissance that the building was empty, the ancient priest sleeping with his brother’s family in a warm adobe house at the edge of town. The graveyard was perched on top of a little hill behind the church, and with the low wall ringing the grounds Awa could not see the child but her voice grew clearer and warmer as Awa reached the back of the rise. Squatting at the base of a shrouded tree, Awa rubbed her hands and hoped the child would finish soon.

  She did not, her Ave concluding but then beginning anew after only a brief pause. She might even be singing louder, her joyous little voice lacking the solemnity the words implied, and Awa stood up with a sigh. She began creeping ever so slowly up the hill, having heard the song enough times now to recognize when the girl’s voice would rise suf
ficiently to crunch another footfall of snow without the risk of being heard. Once she gained the wall she could see if the girl was alone, and if so, kill her quickly.

  Only a little, of course, and just long enough to inquire of the corpses about a certain book, and then she would bring the girl back to life. No, then she would take the dead girl back to town, jump the wall, deliver her to the house where the priest slept, then she would restore her to life, bang on the door, and be away. Then she would have a fire in the cave she had found, a hot, blazing fire, and she would stop being so unbelievably cold. She reached the wall of the cemetery, and the girl’s song abruptly ended just before Awa’s hoof crunched loudly down into the snow.

  Awa ducked even lower, one shoulder against the rough wall, and before her lips could even form a silent curse she heard the child call out, but quietly, as if she were just as afraid of being heard as she was of being missed. “Papa?”

  No father answered, and Awa exhaled. Spooked, the girl would run home and—

  “Papa, what is it?” The girl spoke in German, her voice loud and sharp despite the wall and the wind and her obvious attempt to restrain herself, a chirping, birdlike voice. “Papa, what is it? I see it. I see it.”

  Awa frowned, straining her neck to look at herself, and saw that her shoulder was definitely below the top of the wall. What —

  “It’s looking at me,” the girl said, her voice cracking and warbling, “looking at me it’s looking at me looking at me go away go away …”

  The girl gave a squeal, and Awa chanced looking over the wall. Nothing but the snow swirling between the gravestones, and then the squeal came again, from just behind the single large crypt in the center of the churchyard. There was no one else in the cemetery, and Awa realized the girl must have heard her outside the wall and scared herself silly. Still, Awa found herself possessed by a sudden impulse to duck back under the wall and dart to the treeline, to run through the forest and not look back, to—she shook her head, her smiling teeth shining in the dark. Childish—

  “Bad.” The girl was crying now, the dying wind bringing her tiny sobs to Awa. “Ba-ba-bad, ba-ba-bad doggie. Gooooooo a-aa-a-way. Ba-ba-bad doggie.”

  Awa’s smile faded with the chill breeze, and she jumped the wall. The ibex-handle knife reassured her palm, which reassured the rest of her, and she strode quickly toward the mausoleum and the crying child. She sent her bonebird winging from her shoulder to wait in the trees, lest it frighten the girl. Whatever fit the child was having could—Awa stopped, her breath snatched away by the gust of wind that snapped between the gravestones, her mouth dangling open, her eyes huge.

  “Ba-ba-bad, ba-ba-bad doggie.” It walked slowly around the side of the crypt, its yellow eyes shining in the moonlight, its tongue twisting around the child’s voice wafting out of its long muzzle. “Gooooooo a-a-a-a-way. Ba-ba-bad doggie.”

  It was much, much larger than a dog, its shaggy coat spotted along its flanks, scrawny legs jutting down under its thick body. No creature could have a head and neck so disproportionately large, thought Awa as it approached, it must be the angle, the perspective. Difficult as thinking had become, moving proved impossible, its eyes locked with hers, eyes that despite the distance smiled in a way its canine maw never could, the sharp teeth and dripping tongue somehow perfectly replicating the sounds of a little girl.

  “It’s looking at me,” the creature whined, “looking at me it’s looking at me looking—”

  Awa ran, the worst thing for it but there it was, Awa ran and even as her eyes watered from the wind scratching them and the nightmare reflecting in them she saw it run, too. No, it trotted, those legs swinging straight beneath it, legs capable of moving much, much faster if it wished, the monster ambling parallel with her along the uneven rows of the churchyard. No no no, Awa thought, almost turning her back on it completely to jump the wall, but then she caught herself, tightening her hand on her dagger, and she skidded to a stop in the snow, wheeling to face it. It was closer than she had thought, one row over, and it stopped as well.

  “I am more dangerous than I look,” she told the creature, and it laughed, not like a child but like the grotesque horror that it was, the cacophony leaving its slavering mouth like a thousand ravens cawing in broken unison. Dogs had to be shown you were not afraid, something her tutor had told her when lecturing on the outside world with its mobs of men and their hounds. This was no natural dog, no dog at all, but the risk of giving it a little more leverage over her was worth it if it showed the monster she was not afraid, and so she addressed it: “I am Awa, a necromancer. I have come here to raise the dead, not be barked at by dogs. Go away.”

  The creature cocked its head at her and sat back on its haunches. Awa took this to be a great improvement, until it spoke with her voice. “I am Awa. Awa. Awa.”

  “Ohhhh.” Awa could see its spirit now, in the moonlight, but it was buried deep in the creature, bunched up in its rear, and she wondered if she had erred in telling it her profession. The spirit coiled even tighter, as far from her as possible— killing the beast with a touch would be almost impossible; in most things the spirit flowed evenly throughout, and so severing it was as easy as brushing an arm, touching a tail. It was listening, though, and so she added, “I mean you no harm.”

  It again echoed her but altered the meaning by roughly inserting new words in a gruff, masculine accent, the jumble of her voice and another even worse than the simple imitation had been: “ I am also more dangerous than I look, nor am I to be barked at, bitch.”

  “Bitch?” said Awa, licking her lips. “Is that a dog joke? Funny.”

  It rose back up on all fours, a low growl giving way to her voice again, and a single word with a much deeper inflection. “ I have come here to eat the dead, not to be barked at by Awa. I mean you harm. I have come here to eat Awa.”

  “Well shit,” said Awa, and it lunged forward.

  Her dagger punched through its cheek and glanced off its jawbone, the creature emitting the scream of a young girl as it wrenched itself away and dashed past her, skittering around the gravestones and disappearing in the thicket of stone markers. Her knife hand was dripping with its blood, and Awa almost laughed, the battle won before it had started, when she noticed her fingernails were digging into her slick palm. She did not have to look down to realize her knife was gone, that the monster had bit down on the blade and yanked it out of her hand and run off with it, and Awa was dashing toward the crypt even as it called out from the shadow of the wall behind her with the child’s voice, “Looking at Awa, looking at Awa!”

  It had been years since Awa was genuinely terrified, but she fell back into it easily enough. She was not breathing, which was a good start, and her vision was blurring, and she could not make herself turn and fight even though she knew it could outrun her, knew it was right behind her, knew she was doomed. Her bonebird was dipping through the air in front of her and she followed the course it charted through the cemetery, the avian construct leading her toward the high crypt. Like a hounded stag bounding over a stream, she saw a stone slab jutting out of the snow and leaped for it. Instead of propelling her up to the safety of the crypt’s roof, her right foot slid on top of the snowy gravestone and she fell forward into the side of the mausoleum.

  Unlike her childhood escape attempt from the necromancer’s hut, when she had jumped across a chasm only to have a dead tree knock the wind from her, Awa had not taken a breath in nearly a minute and so had no breath to lose, and the sensation of three ribs cracking like kindling no longer brought the debilitating pain it once had—almost, but not quite. Her callused fingers closed on the edge of the mausoleum’s roof, ignoring the agony her elbows shot into them as they too struck the crypt, and Awa hauled herself up over the top of the structure. Her palms slapped the icy stone, dragging her stomach over the sharp lip of the crypt roof, her legs curling up behind her instead of trying to find purchase on the side of the mausoleum as her bird frantically fluttered above her.

&n
bsp; Then it rose like a fish breaking the surface of a pond, the furry ridge of its back tickling her thigh, and iron-hard teeth bit into her hoof. She had no breath to scream with and so she gasped, her fingers stretching out toward the opposite end of the roof, to cling to the edge so it could not pull her off, and then she was falling. Awa tried to scream, so that the villagers in the town would hear and help, so that anyone would hear, even Omorose or her tutor, anyone, but then that precious scream was knocked out of her lungs on the frozen ground as it brought her to earth, the pain in her chest every bit as monstrous and powerful as her attacker.

  Awa lay contorted on the ground, the beast towering over her. It had her hoof in its mouth, the ensorcelled string that normally disguised it having come loose or been bitten clean through, and those shining pink gums strained as it bit down harder, its delighted yellow eyes squinting from the strain. Then her hoof cracked, blood running off its hot tongue and dribbling down her leg. It dropped her, its purple tongue running over its wide teeth, and Awa saw that in addition to her mangled hoof, the leg was twisted, broken, and blackening.

  The bloody muzzle jutted forward, Awa’s life lost, but then her little bonebird dived out of the air, pecking at the creature’s face. Awa willed it to fly away, to stay high above the monster, but it did not listen and then the beast snapped the bird between its jaws. The mouse bones crunched as it chewed, and it looked back down at Awa.

  Awa could not even cry but the creature cried for her—not with its ever-happy eyes, but with its bloody, foam-flecked mouth, the sound of the little girl blubbering as it mocked her: “Ba-babad, ba-ba-bad Awa. Ba-ba-bad, ba-ba-bad Awa.”

  Those teeth were growing larger and larger, its breath blowing the pungent stink of blood and gravedirt and old marrow in her face. She tried to reach out, to snatch its spirit and break it, to do something, but as its eyes met hers she found herself frozen, and she wondered if she had already died. She had not, she realized as it put a leaden paw on her stomach and pressed down, her fractured ribs screaming, and to deny it what little pleasure she could she closed her eyes.