The Enterprise of Death (19 page)

“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 crackling 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.”

“And my spirit? What will happen to my spirit?”

“When the curse dissipates your spirit will be naked and vulnerable, and no wards will keep him from it. He will devour it, and any scraps he leaves will be but an extension of his will.”

“Oh.” Awa sat down on the glacier. “Oh.”

So after all she had weathered he would return in a decade, steal her body, and obliterate her soul. She often lusted after an end of consciousness, an absence of memory and pain, but he had convinced her it was not possible, that even were she to have her own skull split he would still find a way to draw back her
spirit. That there was a way to achieve that precious oblivion did not bring her comfort, however, only more misery. Things we want often seem sweeter until they become attainable.

“I don’t want him to be happy,” Awa said to herself as much as to Gisela’s corpse. “I want him to be disappointed. If I kill myself, if I have my head crushed, will he be able to find a new body? Will he be able to call back my spirit?”

“I do not know,” said the corpse. “He told me only what he told me. I do know that when he wore his skin he could call back the spirits of the dead that had no bones at all.”

“Oh,” said Awa, and sat some more, her legs and bottom becoming as stiff and cold as her feet. As she ruminated on her unhappy circumstances, she had Gisela’s corpse climb down to the low meadows and retrieve an ibex from its pen, the fingerless horror snapping the animal’s neck and returning with it wrapped around her shoulders. Awa continued to brood, and eventually looked up at the spirit-shrouded corpse. “Is there a way to stop him?”

“He told me there was,” said the corpse. “He instructed me to tell you, if you found me and asked that question. He said that if you take one hundred children, and you kill those one hundred children using the knife he gave you, then your curse will be lifted and he will never trouble you again.”

Awa nodded glumly. “He knew I would find you.”

“He told me you were clever but stupid,” said the concubine.

“Is there any other way to break the curse? Any at all?”

“If there is, I do not know it.”

“Oh.” But Awa did not think long before a different, welcome thought occurred to her, one that shone its light through her darkened spirit and brought blooms of hope to her neglected inner plot. “His book wasn’t on the mantel, it wasn’t there! His book might have a way to take it off!”

“It might,” agreed Gisela’s corpse.

“Did he take it with him? Do you know if he took it with him? I didn’t see it, I didn’t see him take it!”

“He could not take anything with him. He is a creature of aether now, and cannot take such things as are made of more than spirit.”

“He’s hidden it, then, like he hid you!”

“Yes.”

“Where?!” Awa leaned closer and took Gisela’s slippery, fingerless hands in her own cold-cramped palms. “Where has he hidden it?”

“I do not know—”

“Shit!”

“— where it is hidden, but I do know he sent it away with his familiar spirits, demons made of the high mountain winds.”

“Oh,” said Awa, then seized on a discrepancy. “But you said beings of spirit could not take physical items with them!”

“No,” corrected the corpse, “I said that he is a creature of aether now, and so he is and so he cannot move his book, nor otherwise manifest himself beyond the absence of life he has become—he might smother a small bird by settling upon it, but little else is possible until he again dons flesh. His familiars are made of wind, real wind, and as such they can blow the breeze about your hair or swirl the snow around my grave or even, if several muster their strength, take a book from one place and put it somewhere else. I do not know if he intended me to see or not, but these eyes saw his familiars take the book and fly away with it. But I do not know where they have taken it.”

“How will I find it then?!” Awa cried. “It’s gone forever!”

“It has your blood inside it,” said the corpse, arresting the fit Awa was on the verge of suffering. She had not intended it as a question but was not very well going to tell the corpse that. “He took a page of flesh from his back, and prepared it, and when he inscribed the inside of your skin he also added a new page to his
book, and wrote upon it using your blood. This is how his art is crafted: your blood on his skin to add a new page to his book, his blood on your skin to bestow his curse. Yet your blood is just that, and if you draw near enough your stolen blood will cry out to you, if you listen. This will help you find the book.”

“Oh!” This news cheered Awa far more than it had any right to. “And if I find the book I can remove the curse!”

“I do not know.”

“But it might!”

“Yes,” said the concubine. “It might.”

“Thank you!” Awa threw her arms around the ice-coated corpse, making Gisela’s spirit squeal faintly. “Thank you thank you!”

Let there be hope, then. It scared her almost more than there being no hope at all, to have such an impossibly small chance, such a mean and tiny scrap of hope, but hope she did. She would find the book, and she would break the curse, and even if he killed her, even if he found another way, even if all were for naught, she would have this delicious warmth, this knowledge that she could choose. She had no options before, she knew that now, that she had been as weak and open to suggestion as the mindless bonemen, but at this moment she had the choice of whether she would wait hopelessly for his return or whether she would work to thwart him. To those spoiled on countless options and fattened on limitless choices such a selection might appear to be no choice at all, but there on the mountaintop Awa wept at the luxury.

“Thank you,” said Awa, wiping her face on her tunic. “Oh, thank you so much.”

The spirit of Gisela buzzed around her vacant, lolling head, the animated body waiting for another question. None came.

“Gisela.” Awa addressed the spirit as much as the body, and it quieted its droning. “Lie back down in your grave.”

The corpse obeyed her, and as soon as it lay flat in its grave of
ice Awa shoved Gisela’s spirit back into her desiccated head. Her putrid eyelids fluttered, and the last thing the restored spirit saw was a dagger plummeting into her eye. The sensation of the skull splintering inward as the blade sunk in delighted Awa, but then she doubled over and gagged, wondering what had happened to her and how she might stop herself from ever again acting so wicked, from ever again taking pleasure in such evil sport.

The concubine had it coming
, Awa thought as she wound her way across the glacier back to her hut, the evening sky ablaze around her, and she almost convinced herself she was the only victim atop the mountain. Then she reached her hovel and saw the left wall of her hut, Omorose’s tomb, and burst into tears. That night she soaked the lighter wool in ibex blood but did not eat the creature’s flesh, instead smoking it for later consumption and eating the pile of brown grass she had collected until she threw up again. When the last of the chestnut wood had burned away and the half-smoked meat lay piled outside her door she slept with her back to Omorose’s crypt and hoped for their future together.

The next day the dyed wool dried and she knit by starlight, adopting the necromancer’s nocturnal schedule in preparation of her journey to the world below. Safer to travel at night, he had told her many times, and here at least she believed him. Days later she had several sets of black and rust-red striped leggings, and a coarse black cloak, and a new goatskin tunic, and then it was time to see if Omorose would behave herself.