The Enterprise of Death (38 page)

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 sufficiently 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.

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.

With her eyes closed, Awa could not see if they all burst from the hard earth at once or if they had emerged one at a time and converged in the darkness, gathering like rumor, until their numbers were large enough to move. All she knew was that the crushing weight on her stomach and the fetid wind in her face were suddenly snatched away, and the only sounds she heard above her own wheezing whine and the monster’s surprised yelp were the clattering of bone on bone, of rot-greased limbs sliding around hollow sockets. She could not believe it but her ears were always the most honest of her senses, and so she opened her eyes.

Awa could not tell how many there were, the canine creature thrashing on the ground as the skeletons clawed and clubbed and kicked and beat it, and as it threw half a dozen off and gained its feet three bonemen pounced onto its back and rode it through the cemetery, their fingers wrenching out clods of meat and fur that they threw into the snowy air like wet confetti. The beast was screaming with that little girl’s scream, but to Awa’s dismay it reached the wall of the churchyard and bounded over it, disappearing into the night with its undead riders still in tow. Awa heard it scream for a long time, its voice echoing down the canyon as she looked around for the necromancer who had saved her. She was still alone, save for the thirty or forty animate corpses staring at her, but she could not get to her feet to see if her savior was on the other side of the mausoleum.