The Enterprise of Death Read online

  Awa looked to the concubine and back to the necromancer. Knowing the thing had a name did little to warm Awa to her. Anyone was better than the necromancer, though, so she nodded quickly and eased herself onto the table. She remembered the dying bandit chief laid out on the same table the first night, remembered countless unpleasant meals eaten here. She tried not to cry as the rancid concubine left her master’s side and came around the table to stand at Awa’s feet.

  “Spread your legs,” Gisela said, her voice gruff and masculine from the anonymous bandit’s tongue the necromancer had given her. The concubine’s clammy hand felt like an old leather glove on Awa’s knee, her thin leggings soaking up the corpse’s chill. Awa whimpered as the concubine lifted up her tunic, spreading her legs farther in a bid to bring on more pain to distract her from the scene. She told herself that as bad as it was, once it was over she would have survived the worst experience imaginable, as people often do in the midst of deep and abidingly awful situations, but that gave her little succor. Bony fingers prodded Awa; it felt like they were digging in a wound.

  “A scream from little Awa used to be a rare thing, indeed,” the necromancer said when she yelped. “But I suppose after you’ve let one out what’s the harm in howling down the moon most nights, eh?”

  “You callt it,” said the concubine, the sharp removal of her digits somehow worse than their intrusion. “Bad, too. Surprised she can walk.”

  “Like papa, like daughter, I suppose,” said the necromancer, reminding Awa that she could no longer remember her real father. “You want to make it go away?”

  Awa nodded, her eyes still bolted shut rather than showing him what they both knew surged behind them.

  “Right then, if you’re old enough to play with them you’re old enough to learn the remedy,” and his words cracked her dams, the tears hot on her face, the sob catching in her chest as he snatched her wrist and yanked her up from her reclined position. She tried to twist her hand away but he held her tight. “If you do it yourself you won’t have to come here next time, and believe you me, there will be a next time. But where’s the sport in love if it’s always safe, eh?”

  Awa went limp and allowed his hand to guide hers down between her legs.

  “Cover it with your hand,” he said, and she flattened her palm and fingers against her mound, only her dirty tunic between sore skin and rough hand. “Now find the intruder. It’s pulsing in there, cooking you up, propagating itself in the little hearth you’ve built it with grave filth for mortar. A foreign spirit, as you’d have it.”

  Awa gasped, the sensation suddenly clear and unmistakable as a kite’s cry over the silent peaks. Some spirit had invaded her and was roiling in her most sensitive instrument, feeding off her heat and moisture and swelling ever larger. He was still talking but she no longer paid him heed, her face set as she focused on the spirit.

  The necromancer had taught her early on how to use her spirit to close like a mouth around another spirit, to bite that spirit and sever its tie to its body. It was how he had killed Omorose with a brush of his hand, how they could kill anyone or anything not guarded against such an attack. All that she need do was touch her victim, and this vile stowaway was already touching her quite thoroughly. Awa did not even remember her promise to herself never to use that wicked technique, and even if she had the circumstance would surely have allowed for an exception. Her spirit tightened around the interloper and the heat began hissing out like a coal tossed into a snow bank, her pain diminishing along with the invading spirit, and before her tears had dried on her cheeks the spirit was gone, and her discomfort with it save for the mild sting from the concubine’s fingers.

  “Well?” he whispered, releasing her wrist as she let out a sigh. “My arts aren’t all so impractical, are they now?”

  “What was it?” Awa shook her head and hopped off the table, a new vigor coursing through her. “The spirit that was haunting me, how did it—”

  “Haunting you?” the necromancer hooted. “You didn’t have a haunted snatch, Awa, you picked up a case of the rot, and I can imagine where!”

  He knew, she realized, all his asides finally sinking in. Awa was halfway to the door when she caught herself, curiosity momentarily trumping her hatred for the man and his laughing concubine. “It was a spirit, I felt it, but a different kind of spirit from others I’ve met. Tiny, invisible if I weren’t looking, and without any body.”

  “Maybe not a body we could see,” said the necromancer as he settled down in his chair. “Aren’t you always going on about spirits, and how everything has one? Well there’s your proof. When a wound turns sour and starts leaking pus that’s not because the flesh has died; on the contrary, it’s because new life has settled in the injury. The maladies men ascribe to humoural imbalances are simply creatures men cannot see, beings of spirit but not of flesh. The Great Mortality a century and a half in its own tomb was not divine wrath, it was a proliferation of creatures beyond the ken of men, creatures as mindless as they are dangerous. Some say they were built by demons, some say they are demons, and some say stranger things still. Personally, I think those cocky bastards in the Schwarzwald have something to do with it, a nice little present for we men who so offend them with our very presence.”

  “Spirits without bodies …” said Awa, wondering at another reference to men in the Schwarzwald. Usually when the necromancer got himself worked up he would allude to that place, the local lack of Germanic tongues preventing Awa from knowing quite what he was on about but inferring from his references that it was some sort of school populated by thieves and frauds.

  “Of course, there’s plenty that do more good than harm, so one has to be careful and only remove the more troublesome spirits. A fellow apprentice of mine became obsessed with removing all the parasitical creatures sharing his body—took out some useful spirits from his guts and next thing you know he stopped being able to digest food properly. Went mad and finally hanged himself when he couldn’t get rid of all the little spirits swarming inside him. We may think we hold dominion over our flesh but we’re actually crawling with uncounted poxes and other riffraff, and it’s best to let them carry on unless they start acting up like the little fellow you caught in your lointrap. Mindless spirits can be more dangerous than sentient ones, mark me—they can’t be reasoned with, for one.”

  “I see.” Awa nodded, eager to get back to Omorose since he did not seem to have any more to say on the matter of her paramour. She had been out of commission for far too long and like any addict needed to fall back into the perfection she had found. “Thank you, sir.”

  “You need to know these things,” the necromancer said sagaciously, taking the mug of tea his concubine had prepared. Gisela began to speak but he raised his eyebrows and she pitched onto the floor, her taut skin slapping the stone. “Now, since you’ve found me up and about let’s move on to the next stage of your training. I’ve been trying to teach you how to raise the souls of the dead for ages now but you always seem to be too busy for your old tutor.”

  “I already know how,” said Awa, unable to hide her smirk. “How many times must I tell you that when you treat spirits with respect they make things much easier? I don’t need to order them about to get results.”

  “Oh really?” The necromancer put down his tea. “Young Awa has surpassed her tutor, has she, just like she surpassed her fencing instructor? So tell me, why didn’t you return his soul to his bones, hmmm? Too busy? Not in the mood?”

  “I—” Awa blushed, unhappy to be reminded of her selfishness in forgetting her friend.

  “Or is it just possible you’re not half as clever as you think? Is it just possible you can’t back up that shit you’re so keen on talking once your old tutor’s taken away the ouch-ouch, eh?”

  “Alright,” said Awa, striding around the table. The old bastard had a surprise coming, just like the first time she had animated a skeleton. She remembered the panicked expression on his face when the skeleton had gone for his th
roat and she smiled, her hoof clicking on the floor. She reached out to the spirit of the concubine that hovered over her splayed corpse, called her back to her bones as she had with Omorose. The corpse sat up and clambered to her feet, but weirdly enough the bulk of her spirit hung around Gisela’s exterior like a cloak knit of shadow and mist.

  “Any chump can bring back the flesh,” said the necromancer. “I thought you said you could return her soul to her bones.”

  “I …” Awa’s heart began to trot. “Didn’t I, Gisela?”

  “No,” the concubine said. Somehow her voice sounded even deader than usual.

  “You’re making her do this, to mock me,” said Awa, raising her voice. “I told her she could go back to her body so that means she must not want to, she must be resisting because you told her to. You’re trying to make a point about the difference between asking and ordering the spirits, aren’t you?”

  “Did I ask you any such thing?” The necromancer looked at Gisela.

  “No,” said the concubine.

  “So why is your spirit still absent?” The necromancer smiled at Awa as he asked.

  “She did not do what must be done,” said Gisela. “My soul needs her help to return.”

  “She’s lying!” Awa said, refusing to acknowledge that the concubine had lost her rough masculine accent and was speaking with a flat cadence, like the mindless bonemen the necromancer had given tongues to report on what they saw in the chestnut forests on their forays down the mountain. “You’re making her lie to upset me!”

  “The dead can’t lie,” the necromancer said patiently. “How many times have I—”

  “You lied about that!”

  “No, I didn’t. Even those cheats in the Schwarzwald can’t let even a little one slip out, it’s impossible for them. Believe me, Awa, you just can’t do it because I haven’t taught you yet. Not everything is as easy as making a log burn on a fire, you know.”

  Awa felt sick but knew he was wrong, at least about some of it. Maybe if a spirit wanted to return badly enough it could even without whatever means he employed. Still, she heard herself say, “Show me, then.”

  “Right ho,” he said. “Put her back down.”

  “Alright,” said Awa, and she released the little bit of spirit holding Gisela up. The concubine fell back on the floor.

  “Only the first time’s tricky, and after that the soul will listen to you and hop up or down at a word or a poke. Here’s what you do—roll her over, and kneel by her head.”

  Awa did.

  “It’s not so difficult but hardly the sort of thing your average gravedigger might think of. She’ll be easier than most because her spirit’s already right there, yes? Now, if you focus you’ll notice it stems from her head. Normally there would be no real spirit to see, only a sort of tether leading from that little piece of spirit that stays in the skull into nothing, and that’s what you have to pull on, normally, you reel them back in from wherever they’ve gone. So you focus on that, on drawing them back to their body.”

  “Yes?” Awa said impatiently, looking down at the chipped teeth jutting out between the gaps in Gisela’s shredded lips.

  “Focus on drawing the spirit back, and breathe into their mouth, willing your life into their chest. And that’s it, though caution is never more justified—you can put them down just as easily as the rest but they’re no longer mindless, so they’re not bound to follow your ord—”

  “Get offa me!” The concubine shoved Awa away, the young necromancer falling down hard as Gisela scrambled up. “Why couldn’t you make’er practice on that bandit?”

  “You were handy.” The old man shrugged. “Where are you going?”

  “Home,” Awa said numbly, getting up and pushing open the door.

  “As the devil told the sinner,” the necromancer called after her, “you are home.”

  X

  Cruel Youth

  Omorose was not waiting at the door when Awa came home. She sat in the back of the hut, staring straight ahead, and Awa bit her lip. She wanted Omorose to tell her it was different, to tell her it was a lie, but the corpse only sat there until Awa told it to get up.

  “You’re not Omorose,” Awa said, her voice cracking.

  “I am her body,” said the corpse.

  “You’re not supposed to lie. He said you couldn’t lie.”

  “I never lied,” said the corpse.

  “You did!” Awa shouted, her stomach heaving. “You did! You told me those things, you told me, you told me you loved … oh no no no, not that, no, not that.”

  “Yes,” said the corpse, its eyes still staring ahead. “I’ve been talking to myself using her, her body, I’ve put the words I want to hear in her mouth, and I made her touch—”

  Awa was sick, hunched over and crying and unable to think. When she finished she staggered away down the cliff face and sat on the edge wondering how much she had imagined, how much she had dreamed. She had known her tutor was mad, obviously mad, but was madness contagious?

  It took the better part of the day for Awa to pull herself together, but when she did she knew what she had to do. She marched straight back to the hut, more frightened than she ever had been before but resolute. She owed her, and after Awa had put Omorose’s corpse back down she squatted by her face, that stricken, long-dead face, and looked. There it was, the little shard of spirit she had been using to raise Omorose lurking in her mistress’s mouth, and if that were the anchor then the line ought to be …

  Awa saw it then, growing off of the spirit fragment and vanishing, and she reached down along it with her mind, searching for Omorose. Then she exhaled into Omorose’s gaping mouth, and as she did the coldness hit her like a wave of frigid water, the rest of her breath sucked out of her lungs by the corpse. Omorose’s eyes fluttered and her lips rasped together, and then she opened her eyes and she opened her mouth and she sat up, not some simulacrum or hollow vessel but Omorose herself.

  “You …” Omorose focused on Awa, who stared aghast at her lady. “You black bitch!”

  The first few blows Awa accepted passively, letting Omorose tackle her and pummel her face. She deserved that, surely, but through her teary, swelling eyes she saw Omorose hoist a rock and she drew the line.

  “Stop!” Awa managed, but Omorose did not listen and so Awa pushed the woman’s spirit back out of her body, her corpse slumping forward on top of Awa and the rock clattering down beside them. Awa lay there as the sun set outside her door, Omorose’s weight heavy upon her, and marveled at her own folly. Several times she caught herself talking to Omorose or herself, and finally she heaved the sticky body off of her and sat up, twilight settling over the mountain.

  “Bitch!” Omorose came at her again, and again Awa dropped her back down, wincing to see her beloved’s jaw crack open on a rock as her empty corpse hit the side of the hut. The third time Omorose used an obscure Egyptian curse word but the stone she snatched up informed Awa of her unchanged purpose and so back down she went.

  A different thought occurred to Awa, the harshness of Omorose’s reaction justifying sterner measures. She tried and found that raising just the body as she had before still came easily, the amorphous blur of Omorose’s spirit shrouding the corpse but unable to possess it of its own volition. Awa thought to kiss her one last time but the body no longer appealed to her, the long years since Omorose’s death no longer so slight a concern, the hard work of the glacier no longer quite so successful.

  “Get back in your grave, and cover yourself with stones,” said Awa, the corpse silently obeying her but Omorose’s shade letting off a high whining sound. Once Omorose’s corpse had blanketed itself with rocks and lay facing the gap in the wall, Awa addressed her old mistress: “Omorose, I’m going to let you back into your body now but I can’t let you attack me. So don’t move or I’ll just push you out again, alright?”

  Awa focused and Omorose jumped into her old skin. “ Let me back into my body? You dirty, sneaking animal ! It’s mine!”
r />   “You’re dead.” Awa swallowed.

  “Damn right! And you think that gives you the right to rape me? To make me lick you, you horrible fat ape?”

  “No, I didn’t know, no, I love—”

  “Why don’t you lick me, girl, why don’t you lick my rotten slit if you’re so keen on me?”

  “Alright,” said Awa, her composure falling away like the bones of a skeleton with a cracked skull. She dropped forward on her knees and began pulling the stones away from the barrow to get at Omorose. “Alright, I’m sorry, I’ve been selfish, I didn’t think, and when I offered before you told me not to and—”

  “I didn’t tell you anything!” Omorose screeched, the stones covering her rattling like Awa’s teeth as she shifted in her grave. “And stay the hell away from me, you nasty beast! Don’t you dare touch me again, don’t you dare!”

  “I thought it was you,” Awa pleaded. “I did, I thought it was you, I thought I’d brought you back and—”

  “I loved you? I wanted to fuck you?” Omorose’s blackened lips pulled back to reveal mealy green gums. “I’d sooner have our tutor touch me than have a mud-black little monkey clinging—”

  “What’s wrong with you?!” Awa screamed at her. “Why are you always so mean?! You weren’t even in your body so why do you care? Why do you care if I’m happy for one night in a thousand?!”

  “My body,” said Omorose, her shift to calm, rational discourse even more frustrating to Awa than her shouting accusations. “Mine. I might not have been in it but I certainly knew what you’d been up to as soon as I got back. My flesh remembers, that little bit I left behind remembers, I remember. My body, not yours. Ape.”

  “You weren’t.” Awa gulped, timing her words to fit between the sobs. “I didn’t know, and you weren’t using—”