The Enterprise of Death (47 page)

Something whimpered back in the room, and Awa lifted her head. Merritt. The Englishman’s sack twitched, and Awa turned back to Chloé’s corpse. This was all her fault. As soon as she had escaped from the table she could have killed Omorose, could have ended her forever, but instead she had fumbled for something to say. How fucking stupid was she? She stayed with Chloé, mulling it all over, until one by one the candles began to sputter and die, and then the last went out and she was in the dark.

Awa awoke, not sure how long she had slept. She pawed around the dark room for what felt like hours until she found the bag the bounty hunters had taken from her, and in the blackness of the windowless dungeon she removed the portrait of Chloé, which brought on another crying fit. When she had pulled herself together she went back to digging in the bag until she found her last salamander egg. Setting it on the ground, she turned her back on it before giving the command so that she would not be blinded. The brightness gave her a pounding headache, but by the third time she had ignited the egg she saw an unlit torch in a sconce by a door, and retrieving it she soon had more light than she cared for.

The pool of blood that had leaked out of Chloé’s sack was nothing short of ridiculous, the girl seeming to have more on the floor than inside her skin. Still, even if the little death failed and her partner truly died Awa could bring her back. It was not much, but it was better than nothing. Then she began to cry again, imagining Chloé as a rotting horror, or a thing of hard bone instead of shapely flesh. Merritt groaned again from his sack, and Awa knew she had to let him out. Just not now. She could not handle his idiocy at present, and so she left him trussed and bagged and left the dungeon by way of the smaller door.

Awa stood blinking in a pleasant, sunlit bedroom, one wall lined with books, the wide crown glass windows overlooking a creek that wound through the meadow of Kahlert’s yard all the way to the edge of a forest. The blazing torch forgotten in her hand, she wandered through the house, her mouth wide, her head cocked. The contrast between the torture chamber and the rest of the simple but impressive house was as sharp as the difference between the living and the dead. Everything was intricately carved hardwood and sparkling marble or granite, with rooms to spare and a kitchen housing more sumptuous food than a prince’s larder.

Awa sat on the kitchen table and opened a bottle of wine, then
bit into a loaf of bread—she wanted the bread to taste like potash or sawdust, for the wine to taste like sour rainwater, for the world to deny her pleasure now that she had gotten Chloé killed, but her traitorous tongue relished the food and drink, and she nearly wept at the taste. She was alive, and could not pretend otherwise. Pleasure would be had, then, and she filled a sack with bread and early cheese and dried fruit but no meat. During her time in Paris, with the abundance of cheese and bread and produce to be had, and Dario’s willingness to experiment with all things related to cooking, she had finally been able to dispense with eating flesh, save that which was absolutely necessary to heal herself—if her spiritual balance were ever to be restored she had to stop feeding on the dead like the hyena, and besides, the less iron she took into her body the more powerful were her arts. After adding bottles and bottles of wine and spirits to her already bulging sack, Awa tossed the still smoldering torch onto the stack of cordwood beside the stove. Then she heaped the table and chairs and everything else that looked flammable on the smoking woodpile, and smashed a bottle of schnapps onto it for good measure.

Watching the wall of the house catch, Awa smiled and retrieved a brand from the fire. The flaming chair leg would have gone out almost at once but she politely asked the spirit of the wood escaping through the flame to humor her by burning a little longer, and so it did. She went from room to room lighting the embroidered linen curtains, but then the smoke from the kitchen began thickening in the rest of the house and she knew her time was running out. Looking in the bedroom, and the black doorway leading to the torture chamber, Awa considered turning around and leaving, letting Chloé and Merritt burn to ash, but the thought twisted in her guts and she angrily hurled her brand against the bookshelf. Chloé deserved better than that.

Just as Awa turned to enter the dark chamber where Omorose had finally fallen, she heard a faint whine, almost a squeal, from
over her shoulder. The spirits of the wood whined as they became spirits of fire and then air, but this was something else, something she had never heard before. The sound quickened her heart, made her chest ache and her eyes water, and she was suddenly more aware than ever before of the blood coursing through her veins, the essence of her life. Her hands and feet were going numb, and she felt a weight coalescing in her body, in her face, a weight pushing her head to look behind her. Awa obeyed her blood, and then her heart stopped completely.

Her blood was pushing her eyes, wrenching them the way she might wrench an arm out of socket, and there could be no doubt of where they fell. One book, a thin volume on the top shelf, and she could not have looked away had she wanted to. Flames were scrambling up the shelf, faster and faster as the books caught, and Awa was over and up in an instant, singeing her clothes and the hairs off her arm as she jumped for it, her fingers pulling it out, and then she was back on the ground, the book in hand.

Backing away from the blazing wall, Awa looked at the book in her hand.
The Romance of the Rose
, a French text. Flipping it open, she gasped and slammed it shut, then dropped it altogether as she saw the cover had changed. Instead of a flowery gold font on a red velvet background the cover was blank, untitled, and bound in old brown hide. Even if the cover had not reverted to its true state she would have known from the glimpse she had taken of the contents—even though she had only ever seen the first page, the ever-changing first page, there could be no doubt. It was the necromancer’s book.

“Fucking witch?!” Merritt scrambled away from her after she had loosed his chains and his eyes had adjusted enough to the firelit room to see her. “Me understanding Spanish words!”

“That’s right, I’m a witch,” Awa said evenly, though behind her calm features swelled an impossibly large smile. She had found it she had found it she had found—

“Blackmoor cunt!” Merritt was clearly terrified but she needed him to help move Chloé before the entire house caught fire, and her patience with the man was limited in the best of times. “Fuck! Witch!”

“Merritt,” Awa said, switching from French to his native English to ensure he understood. “You listen to me, and you listen good—pick up Chloé and carry her out. Once we’re outside you can go your way and we can—”

“Fuck!” Merritt noticed the second door and broke for it.

“Merritt,” said Awa, advancing on him as he fumbled with the door’s lock. “If you don’t do as you’re told I’ll kill you. Right now. Pick her up.”

She was right behind him and then he got the door open, but as he swung it wide she brushed his shoulder and down he fell, his lifeless head cracking against the doorframe. Awa stood over him, and a moment later he shambled back to his feet and obediently retrieved Chloé’s body. Then another thought came to Awa, and as Merritt passed by her, exiting the burning house through the stable that adjoined the torture chamber, she went and raised Kahlert’s corpse. Giving Omorose’s bones a kick for good measure, she spied a glint of burnished bone on the floor and retrieved the ring she had given her mistress so long ago.

The ring reminded her of the string that Omorose had removed from her hoof, and she ordered Kahlert’s corpse to find it. He did, his head flopping from side to side atop its broken neck, and as the room filled with smoke she hastened outside after the walking dead. Pausing in the stable, she opened the stalls and released the panicking horses. She did not particularly care for the animals but bore them no grudge, either, and knew she had much to atone for. Balance was everything, good with evil, light with dark, life with death, greed with sacrifice.

Maybe.

At any rate, she had the fucking book.

Awa marched Merritt and Kahlert far away from the burning house before she let herself examine the tome. She held it in her hand, in her fucking hand, and did not want some bumpkin or bounty hunter coming upon her as she did some light reading beside the inferno of Ashton Kahlert’s country house. There were no neighboring buildings in sight but she still took them away from the path that wound out the front gate, instead having them slosh up the creek to cover their tracks. Soon they dipped under the canopy of evergreens but Awa made herself wait until just before sundown before stopping and opening the book.

The first page was blank and crisp, but every page thereafter was covered from top to bottom in script, the text occasionally broken by diagrams and illustrations. Flipping through it, she saw that every few pages the handwriting changed, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, but always the same brown ink. Not ink, of course, and as she thumbed through it she saw that each page contained much more than words and pictures and skin and blood—scraps of spirit clung to the book, many, many little pieces, and closing the book softly she let out a very long sigh. She would not be obliterated completely when he claimed her, then, but some small part of her at least would live on through his book. Small comfort.

“Inquisitor.” She addressed Kahlert’s mindless corpse, recalling from her teenage experience with the concubine on the mountain that interrogations went much quicker if one simply addressed the bones instead of the willful spirit. Not once in her dealings with the animate remains of Kahlert did she think about her oath to ask the spirit’s permission before using its body, nor did she consider the feelings of Merritt’s spirit as she had his corpse fetch firewood—ever since her initial encounter with Manuel in the cave, she had wondered if it would be possible to administer a little death to a person, raise them as a mindless
one, and afterward restore them to life, and now at last she had her answer: no. She had not intended to really murder Merritt but raising him back at the manse had evidently made his little death a permanent one; given the man’s general attitude, Awa had a hard time feeling broken up about it.

“Yes.” The inquisitor’s corpse left his position standing watch at the mouth of the small clearing, a deer trail having given way to a small patch of open ground hedged in by thick holly.

“This book.” Awa wagged it at him, unable to stop grinning. “This was in your library.”

“I did not know. I did not see it,” said the corpse.

“It, it was disguised,” said Awa, recalling that strange detail. “It looked like a book called
Roman de la Rose
, a French book bound in red velvet.”

“I remember that volume,” said the corpse. “I read part of it once, in a library. I did notice it on my shelf but could not recall where or when I had acquired it, for I disliked it as much as most French romances.”

“Then why did you keep it?”

“I thought that if it were a gift I could not remember receiving then I did not wish to offend the giver by discarding it, lest he peruse my shelves and see his gift absent. That, and I thought having a wide range of texts would make me appear intelligent.”

“You were vain, weren’t you?” Awa smiled.

“Yes.”

“How could the book know that?” Awa asked herself. “And how could it disguise itself?”

“I do not know,” said the corpse, but as it answered the book twisted in Awa’s hands. She clumsily juggled it, the book opening of its own accord. The pages were flipping to the front, and when the blank first page was reached a bright red dot appeared in the upper left corner, like a handkerchief pressed to a
pinpricked finger. Then a jagged red line arced out of the spot, and words began appearing in wet blood on the blank hide.

We had made ourselves discreet
, the bloody text read,
the spirits of the air delivered us against one side of a row where we could blend in with the wood of the shelf. Then the man mentioned the name
Roman de la Rose
when he was showing the corpse who called herself Rose his library, and mentioned his dislike for it, and so when he left Granada and had his servants pack his library we took the form of a book we knew he would not be interested in examining. Nevertheless he picked us up, sometimes, but we made our interior into an obscure dialect, and so we did not need replicate the text we claimed to be in order to maintain the ruse.

“You …” Awa’s mouth hung open as she read. Not scraps of the spirits, not tiny little pieces, but enough to respond, enough to answer. The dead cannot lie, and this book, written in blood, on skin, this book bound with spirit, must answer the same as any corpse or soul.
We
, the book wrote, the previous apprentices of the necromancer, the—

We contain the blood and skin of his tutor
, the book continued,
as well as his pupils, which enables us to change our form to better disguise ourselves
.

“Why would you?” said Awa. “It helps him, doesn’t it, if you stay hidden? Why would you help him when you’re just like me?!”

We are no longer more than a book, and books serve whatever purpose their master ascribes to them
. The text paused, and then resumed, even more quickly.
But the master of a book is she who holds it and knows its potential, and that is you until another hand lifts us, another eye reads us. We serve you now, as we served him then.

“Do you”—Awa could scarcely believe that she had reached this strange and terrible place, that even though she had succeeded in achieving the impossible and found the book, all might be for naught if—“do you know a way to break the hold he has over me? Is there, inside you, the means of stopping him from,
from”—the book was already answering but she did not read, pressing ahead—“from claiming my body? Do you know a way?”