The Enterprise of Death Read online

  “What I did—” she began, his clumsy attempt to make her feel better even more insulting than making her re-create the act for his voyeuristic pleasure.

  “I know what you did,” said Manuel, those tiny voices inside him howling their displeasure at his calm, at his understanding. “You showed me. The first was not what happened, you didn’t lay into a dead body like a hungry beast, you, you, the second time … you resisted, it forced itself on you and—”

  “No!” Awa said far too loudly, a chain of dogs linking themselves to the sound, and then Bern was rattling with barks. “No, I, I made her. I didn’t know it, I didn’t know she didn’t want to, I thought she did, but I was still doing it. I made her force herself on me, as you say, which is worse than—”

  “No,” said Manuel. “I don’t understand the how of your, your ways, nor do I want to, but I heard you say, right now, that you didn’t know exactly what you were doing. Is that the truth, Awa?”

  Awa nodded, suddenly unable to speak, but he somehow saw in the dark and nodded himself.

  “Then I don’t want to hear any more. I knew what I was about when I went to war, when I cut open boys younger than Lydie to buy a little paint. I could have given up the art, I could have taken up nobler work, but I took money to kill boys far more innocent than myself. I knew, yet I did it. Tell me how your crime is worse, Awa, tell me how doing evil in ignorance is worse than doing it voluntarily, than doing it for a few fucking crowns instead of out of, out of love? That’s why, isn’t it? You loved this girl, and she died, and so you made a mistake? How is—”

  Awa’s arms were around his neck, and as they held each other neither was sure whose tears were whose, and were happy for the ignorance. It was very dark in the cemetery.

  “God loves you,” said Manuel as they tamped down the earth over the graves of his models, the corpses returned to their beds and tucked in with the help of the spade Awa had found by the nave. “He loves us all, and will forgive you if you ask Him. We can go together, straightaway, and if the confessor betrays you then the evil will be his, not yours, and—”

  “Niklaus,” Awa said quietly. “Do you forgive me?”

  “Of course.”

  “That’s what matters.”

  “Oh.”

  “And going to one of your holy men seems like a terrible idea.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?” Manuel yawned. “He’ll find you, in time, or you’ll find Him. For now I’m fucking exhausted.”

  “Me too,” said Awa. “Thank you, Niklaus Manuel Deutsch of Bern.”

  “And thank you, Lady Awa,” Manuel said with a bow to match what the four dead men had given them when Awa momentarily returned their souls to their bodies to properly apologize before reburying them.

  Over the wall went the artist and the necromancer, and as the dawn began to bleed over the rooftops of Bern they said their farewells in the street beside the monastery. Awa’s improvised goodbye was not the eloquent speech she had rehearsed, nor were Manuel’s awkward verbal fumblings much more than that, but they meant every word. There they parted, Manuel returning to his wife and family and studio and station, and Awa to the companionship of a would-be whoremonger who made a far better friend than a lover, neither knowing if they would ever see one other again.

  XXIII

  The Rise of the Hammer

  It was not easy, being a bastard, but Ashton Kahlert managed to pull it off. Had his father acknowledged his birth and given him the love and affection he so craved he might have turned out conceited and proud, with unrealistic expectations about the world. Worst of all, he might not have appreciated how brilliant his father truly was—most of his peers took their fathers for granted, ignoring greatness if it sprung from their patriarch as though their own abilities were in danger of being overshadowed by the very existence of the men who gave them life. Ashton had no such pride, no such conceit, and so he saw, albeit from a distance, just how important his father was.

  His mother was, well, his mother, and the best that could be said for her was her candor in disclosing the identity of Ashton’s father. If the boy’s grandfather had not taken his fallen daughter back into his home life might have proven much harder for Ashton, but as it stood the lad grew up inside a decent enough house in Salzburg instead of on its streets. The streets were still there, of course, and rare was the day that he could avoid them and the bullyboys who beat and mocked him for having a whore of a mother, but at least he had a bed and four walls and a roof to return to, red-eyed and bloody-nosed. He was almost old enough to seek an apprenticeship when he found out the identity of his father, although his mother, being his mother, tried to make herself the martyr in the rendition she told.

  “Heinrich Kramer,” she had told him as they cleaned up after dinner one winter night, keeping her voice low so her father could not hear them from his chair by the hearth in the only other room. She had promised him she would not tell the boy what had happened but the fantasy father her son had invented for himself was so wrongheaded, so misplaced, that she had to set him straight, even though it would hurt him. “ The Heinrich Kramer, Inquisitor of our fair little saltheap, and of all Tyrol besides.”

  Seeing her son’s jaw drop, she went on before he could get carried away with his fancies. “He’s a cruel man, Ash, a very cruel man. Do you think I’m a witch?”

  “What?” Ashton smiled. “Of course not. If you were you’d not be so miserable all the time.”

  “Thank you for that,” she said. “He didn’t think I was, either, but that didn’t stop him from making a veiled accusation or two. He’d come into the bakery I was working at, when I’d gone to Tyrol, and he took a fancy to me, and that was that. So in he comes and tells me he’ll put me on trial for putting the blood of babes in my bread if I don’t do as he says. I’m not kidding, Ash.”

  Yet Ashton could not stop smiling. His father was a great man, just like he had always insisted to the bullies who worked him over. His father was a great man and, better still, a living man. His mother was going on now, doing her little sniffling act she always did when he was “being difficult,” but Ashton had heard enough to know what really happened. His mother, well-meaning and kind and thoughtful though she might have been, was a slut, and Ashton had seen her bring home enough men when his grandfather was away to know she must have seduced Inquisitor Kramer, then been put out when he denied any responsibility for the child. She was his mother and he loved her, but he could hardly blame his father for not wanting some low slattern for a wife.

  “Father?” The Inquisitor looked the boy up and down, Ashton feeling his hard eyes running over the yawning seam where his shoes needed cobbling, the patches on his trousers that were only a little off-color, the sweat stains on his linen shirt, the slightly too big hat he had taken from his grandfather. “Impossible. Do you know what it is that you do, boy? You accuse me before God of being an adulterer. Me.”

  “I didn’t … I don’t …” The years Ashton had spent preparing for this moment had dragged by so slowly that he had thought the day would never come at all, yet now that it had arrived it was flying by far too quickly, and the angry expression on the man’s face told him just how naïve he had been. Of course his mother had made it up to make herself sound more important, to say that for one night at least she was found desirable by a great man. This was all her fault, and as the Inquisitor reached for the small brass bell on his desk Ashton felt the tears come, and rather than be cast out with this great man thinking he had invented the story himself for his own gain he fell to his knees and quickly blurted out an apology. “This wasn’t— it wasn’t my idea. My mother told me you were, you were with her when she worked at a bakery. In Tyrol. She was lying to me, I see that now, she’s a lying slut and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry I came, I meant no, I meant no malfeasance, I—”

  “Malfeasance.” Kramer smiled, his hand hovering over his bell. “A fine word, a topical word, but not the word you meant, I don’t think. Are you sure you’re not tr
ying to blackmail me, to get a little something from your malfeasant papa?”

  “No!” Ashton said, trying to calm his breathing, to stop his tears, to remember the words he had rehearsed. His father was supposed to have acknowledged him, to offer him a place and opportunities, and he was supposed to nobly turn them down, to say, as he was saying now, despite how inappropriate the words had become, “I just, I just wanted you to know I’m going to be better than any other son my mother would have bore, because you are a great man. I am going to be a great man, because you are—”

  One of Kramer’s black-gloved hands had slipped in front of his square jaw, and a long finger shot up before the man’s smiling lips. Ashton trailed off as the Inquisitor slowly got to his feet and walked around the table, the coils of his hair bobbing around his ear as he peered closer at the boy. His smile grew wider, and he tousled Ashton’s hair. The boy nearly wet himself.

  “Innsbruck,” Kramer said in a low murmur. “The little witch of Innsbruck. You’re fifteen, lad?”

  “I think, sir,” said Ashton, not quite sure.

  “Your mother seduced me,” said Kramer, ever smiling at his son. “She baked some of her hair and blood into a cake, and gave it to me. By the time her witchcraft had worn off I had already put you in her belly.”

  Ashton tried to speak, to tell his father the lies his mother had told, but only a happy little sob came out.

  “I let her live, and escape trial, because I knew I had put some good into her,” said Kramer, leaning back against his desk and pointing at Ashton. “You. I made her recant her ways, of course, and swear that when you were of age she would tell you who your father was, so you could come to me and receive my blessing. I see that here she was as good as her word.”

  “She lied!” Ashton managed. “She said you wouldn’t want, she said you wouldn’t want, she …”

  Heinrich Kramer went to his son then, and the boy felt the soft baized wool of his father’s robe soak up his tears, gloved hands removing his oversized hat and stroking his hair as he cried and cried. Of course the Inquisitor could not publicly acknowledge the boy as his own, and of course Ashton understood. Even still, Heinrich Kramer was a gentleman and a loving father, and helped in every possible way with the boy’s desire to follow in his heavy bootsteps. Within a few years Kramer was denounced by first a local bishop and then the Inquisition as a whole for his radical methods and publications, but through his eager son the good work continued.

  Ashton worked his way up through the local Dominican order with the invisible glove of his father unlocking the few doors that the boy could not pry open with his natural intelligence and zeal. Low means and low birth were no longer the barriers Ashton had supposed they would be, and his father’s close association with the archbishop of Salzburg meant that the boy was eventually appointed Inquisitor himself, albeit of a more remote region. He met with his father often, and together they would go over the finer points of Kramer’s witch-hunting manual that the Inquisition had claimed was out of line with doctrine.

  Despite the Church’s betrayal of him, their most faithful son, Kramer knew that only through the flames of the Inquisition could the Empire and all her little princedoms, bishoprics, and prince-bishoprics be cleansed of the taint that had taken root, and if his son were to be his instrument, then so be it. Indeed, Ashton’s illegitimacy proved most beneficial for the two of them, the myriad enemies they made within both the Church and the universities unable to connect father and bastard son in any sort of discrediting manner. Kramer died a very happy and old man, and his son, Ashton Kahlert, proudly set to ensuring that his own father’s legacy would be as immortal as that of God the Father. That he had never mustered the will to properly question his mother before her eventual murder at the hands of one of the men she brought home Ashton considered his chief personal failure, but he tried not to dwell on it.

  Kahlert’s effectiveness at ferreting out witches was not lost on the archbishop of Salzburg and his associates, but after the enemies of the Inquisition had successfully removed Kramer from power all true believers knew a more cautious route was in order. Kahlert’s official role as Inquisitor was thus obfuscated from as many records as was feasible, and his jurisdiction was expanded to wherever he set his feet.

  As the most powerful living necromancer prepared to escape the prison of his body atop the Sierra Nevadas, Inquisitor Kahlert journeyed to Granada to assist the Spanish Dominicans with the ongoing expulsion of Jews and Moors from the lands united by the deceased Isabella and the demented Ferdinand—the kabbalists were up to their old tricks, adding blood to the matzos, and stranger sorceries still were credited to the Moslems. Reluctant to abandon the purging of his homeland though he was, Kahlert had learned from his father that the cleansing could not be limited to one area, lest honest men forever be taxed with the guarding of their borders from marauding witches.

  Granada was a fair city, and so purged of Jew and Moslem that Kahlert could scarce believe a Moor had ruled it only twenty years before and allowed every sort of degeneracy to flourish. The Spaniards—some of them, anyway—understood the effectiveness of his father’s interrogation methods far better than the Imperial Inquisitors had, and Kahlert established himself in a quiet little house up in the Andalusian foothills overlooking the city. When he was not assisting in the more problematic interviews with the accused, he rediscovered his youthful love of the romance, and in only a few years had assembled a fine collection of melodramas and adventures by the greatest German, English, and Italian authors; the French he found entirely too French, and the Spanish were, well, everyone knew what Spaniards were, and it went double for their romances.

  One evening, after a day sweating in a dungeon with a pair of pliers and a pair of Jewesses, Kahlert took a constitutional among the chestnut trees above his house, and there he met the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. There were no other houses for some distance, and the servants he kept were all men, and yet here was a woman sitting on a boulder, dark enough of complexion to arouse suspicion, but comely despite it. She wore an exotic, flowing garment of multicolored silk and, even as he knew she must be brought in for questioning, Kahlert found himself looking for an excuse to delay such an engagement.

  “Good evening,” Kahlert said in Spanish with a bow. “You are lost?”

  The woman looked up, and he saw from the tears still shining on her cheeks that she had been crying, though her kohldarkened eyes were not the slightest bit puffy or red. She seemed to hesitate for a moment, and then replied in a husky voice. “I am indeed lost, good sir. Indeed, I doubt any in all this world are more lost than I.”

  “Perhaps I may be of service, then,” said Kahlert, the encounter seeming more and more like one of his romances. “My house is not far from here, and from the patio we may overlook all of Granada. I have found a delicate pigeon sofrito after a leisurely stroll helps orient oneself marvelously.”

  “That is a most generous offer,” said the woman. “If it would not be an imposition I would be pleased to join you.”

  She was not jabbering at him in a foreign tongue; on the contrary, she spoke with obvious care and intelligence. Having seen a few Spanish ladies with only slightly lighter skin, Kahlert let himself hope she might actually be a lost Christian of unfortunate pallor and nothing worse. Then he realized she was clearly waiting for him to help her from her seat, and he quickly extended his hand. Through his glove her fingers felt even thinner than they looked, the delicate bones hard in his palm.

  “What is your name, my lady, and from where did you hail prior to being lost?” Kahlert asked her as she released his hand and stood beside him.

  She began to tremble anew, the pools of her greenish-brown eyes filling, and as if speaking the words caused her physical pain, she groaned, and he barely made out her words: “Um … a … Rose. Call me Rose. I’m from … there.” She pointed south, her face contorting with emotion.

  Kahlert realized how insensitive he was. His work had not allowe
d for much polite contact with decent women, and he cursed himself for a low-mannered clod. “Forgive me. Of course you are exhausted and in need of rest and nourishment, not an interrogation. Please accept my apologies, Lady Rose. My name is Ashton Kahlert, and I confess that I am a terrible host.”

  She nodded, too well-bred to sniffle despite the obvious appropriateness of the occasion for it. Kahlert’s mother would have sniffled. If, during his lengthy tenure as a witch-hunting Inquisitor, he had encountered even one actual witch Kahlert might have paid more attention as he led her back to his house. He might have noticed little things, like the way the hem of her dress never became dusty, or how, despite wearing little brown sandals, she left bare footprints upon the dirt track. But he had never captured anyone more sinister than a mundane midwife and so these telltale signs were lost to him.

  The servants were surprised to see their master returning with anyone along the trail that wound into the hills behind the stucco-framed house, let alone a beautiful, immaculately dressed woman. Not having any women in the house meant he had not needed female servants, but the woman insisted she was perfectly capable of bathing herself once the bath was heated. Kahlert retired to change for dinner, not something he was accustomed to doing.

  Omorose settled into the bathwater with a sigh, and while her illusory appearance remained unblemished, scraps of the young corpse began floating loose in the water. She frowned at that. She would need to acquire bandages to wrap her flesh in, lest an ear fall off mid-conversation with her host—at the very least, the strange particulars of necromancy meant she would keep her tongue and her bones, which would be sufficient so long as she kept the ring on her finger at all times. She had stopped daring to hope she would ever enjoy another bath around the time she had died, and while the sensation of warm water running over exposed tendons and bone was less fulfilling than it was on her few remaining patches of skin, a bath was a bath was a bath, and she was happy to have it.