The Enterprise of Death (54 page)

“Mo?” Awa wondered if this were some resurgence of the old madness that had made her think her tutor’s ghost was haunting her skull and speaking with her. That had just been her talking to herself, not a bona fide hallucination, but even if she were but a phantasm brought on by an overtaxed mind Awa was overjoyed to see her. “Mo!”

“Mind the arms, love,” said Monique as Awa leaped over the creek to embrace her friend. The gunner’s voice was level despite the rivulets pouring down from her squinting blue eyes, and Awa
saw that both of the woman’s arms were bound in stained bandages, her left in a sling at her chest and her limp-wristed right held clumsily out in front of her, as though she did not know what to do with it. “Kin I jus’ say that you’re a welcome sight, shit-lookin though ya surely are?”

“Monique.” Awa touched the giantess’s shoulder. “You’re really here!”

“In the flesh, or what’s left of it.” Mo leaned closer. “Oi, wipe these eyes for me fore the others come along an’ see me actin the feeble, eh?”

“Others?” “Awa!” Manuel came trotting out of the woods. “For fuck’s sake, what are you doing out here?!”

“Manuel!” Awa laughed with delight. “Niklaus Manuel Deutsch of Bern! Who else do you have out there, Johan and Ysabel?”

“Who?” Monique shook her head. “We got the fuckin quack with us.”

“Not Paracelsus?!” Awa cried, and then he emerged wheezing after Manuel, and there on the bank of the creek Awa laughed and wept to see her friends appearing one after another when she needed them most. She gathered her gear and followed them deeper into the wood where they had camped for lunch upon finding the manse burned to the ground. After she had eaten and achieved a tidy little drunk from Paracelsus’s schnapps, they all began talking at once, all four faces struggling to contain their grins.

Before the telling of tales could begin in earnest, Awa insisted on examining Monique’s arms against the woman’s protests. Paracelsus tried to explain that the obstinate gunner had not allowed him to amputate but Awa would hear none of it, one look at the spirits infecting the wounds confirming that she was already in mortal danger. Manuel’s bitten face would require a
bit of tending as well, but Monique had no right to even be alive. Awa set out immediately with stewpot in hand to retrieve the necessary parts from the discarded bodies of Merritt and Kahlert after securing the promises of her friends not to follow her.

No sooner had she left than Paracelsus had dire need of a shit, and after quitting the campfire the physician crept after Awa, watching with interest as she cut flesh and bones from two fresh corpses that lay close to where they had found her. She knew the noisy doctor was watching her grind up the meat and bone with the aid of her knife’s pommel, and on the return trip she made sure to catch up with him and have a little word on the propriety of the occasional judicious silence.

Otherwise she was as honest as the dead with her companions as she prepared the stew that only Monique was allowed to sample, much as the smell of fresh pork excited Manuel. She made a much smaller batch for the artist soon after, which he found stringy for his taste—thankfully the sinuses and cheek meat of the dead men did their work well enough without his palate’s approval. As they ate Awa told them everything, about her servitude to the necromancer and her onanistic romance with Omorose and her curse and her years of searching graveyards and the friends she had made amongst the dead, and her enemies as well. They only occasionally interrupted her with their questions, and when she was finished they took their turns, Awa immensely relieved to hear they had dispatched the hyena.

“And when we got to Calw we heard that Ashton Kahlert’s estate had burned down, so of course we came over to have a look ourselves,” concluded Manuel. “Camped out here so as not to arouse the local ire by picnicking in the ashes, though we gathered that the barkeep at least was no friend of Kahlert.”

“An’ I’m walkin down ta see if all’s still quiet so’s we kin get out the way we come in,” said Monique, “an’ I hear ya shoutin
them fuckwords Manuel an’ me taught ya, an’ I wager they ’eard, too, so we all come a’runnin.”

“But why come all this way?” said Awa. “I understand Paracelsus wishes to study my methods, but you two have lives away from all this. Manuel’s family, and your brothel, and—”

“Well, the cleanest ’ores in Christendom didn’t stay quite so clean without your attentions,” Monique said sheepishly. “Sides, Manuel here needed your help in fulfillin a certain fantasy of ’is what relates ta those of the skeletal persuasion.”

“It’s not like that!” Manuel protested but he was smiling, too. “I’m an artist, damn it!”

“Yes, yes, of course you are,” said Paracelsus. “And of course Paracelsus will risk his life a dozen times over to study someone else’s
methods
, of course it’s all business for
him
, of course
he
has no fondness for anyone or anything but esoteric knowledge. It’s all just research for the magus, the only nourishment he requires.”

“Eat up,” said Awa, lifting another spoonful to Monique’s thick lips. “It’ll only help if you eat.”

Monique and Awa took the first watch together, catching one another up having taken some time and Paracelsus’s addition of laudanum to his schnapps making the day float by all the faster for the reunited friends. Monique waited until she was confident Paracelsus and Manuel were asleep before putting the problem to Awa directly: “So what now? If the ol’ wizardly cunt don’t know a way, an’ you don’t neither …”

“I don’t know,” said Awa. “I’ve got his book, but if it doesn’t know and my tutor doesn’t know and the Bastards of the Schwarzwald don’t know, then I certainly don’t, either.”

“What bout what he did, then? Couldn’t you do the same, nick out an’ take some other body fore he gets yours?”

“Even if I knew how, I wouldn’t. I couldn’t do that to somebody. I’m not like him.” Awa knew she was trying to assure herself as much as Monique.

“What if they was willin, like?”

“Willing? I don’t think most—” Awa saw the look on Monique’s face and shook her head vigorously, her heart twisting in a bittersweet contortion that is only possible on the rarest of occasions. “No. I … no. I can’t ask that of you, or anybody. The spirit … the spirit is destroyed, obliterated, or else trapped in his book, I think, oh hell, I really don’t know. But no.”

“Maybe we could share?” said Monique. “Like, if you wasn’t keen on, on pushin my soul about, maybe we could both set up shop. Room enough for two in ’ere. Rest of my family’s right dwarfs, maybe that’s the reason I come up so big?”

“I—I’ve never heard anything so generous.” Awa took her friend’s hand. “But like I said, even if I wanted to I don’t know how. I can talk to spirits, and make bargains with them, but I’m not so wise about controlling my own spirit, or who knows what else goes into what he does.”

“Whatta the, uh, the dead say on it, then?” said Monique.

“Which dead?”

“I ain’t the expert,” protested Monique. “Jus’ askin, right? You told of helpin out all them dead people fore meetin up with Manuel an’ me, thought you might’ve asked one of them dead or spirits or what bout how ta deal with dead wizards tryin to do stuff an’ all. What?”

“No.” Awa had sat up straighter, a sudden thought setting her teeth on edge. “I just … maybe … Monique, is there a war happening?”

“A war?”

“Yes, like the ones you were fighting when Manuel and I met?”

“Hell, there’s always a war goin down Lombardy-ways,” said Monique. “Emperor Charles ain’t just a fuckin Spaniard cunt but the king of the fuckin Spaniards from afore he got the ’oly Roman crown, so ya know he’ll be mixin it up with the
cheese-eaters an’ the eye-ties even more than the old Emp. What’s war gotta do with it?”

“I … I …” Awa was getting excited, her thoughts swirling around something but unable to stick to it. She was on the edge of salvation, she felt it. “We need to go there, Mo, we need to go to war.”

“Might’s well ask Manuel if he’d like ta paint a pretty ’ore.” Monique grinned. “Them sally eggs ya gave me’s changed the whole fuckin game, Awa. Traded a smith some mink for time in ’is shop, an’ made me some commissions. An’ I’m talkin
dread
fuckin cannons, no locks ta jam, no cords ta die in the rain, no trays ta spill—I jus’ keep’em in the bottom of the barrels, add a charge and round, an’ pop goes the fuckin hyena, Barbara bless us. Go on down the front an’ get some honest blood on’em sounds fun, ’specially if my arms get as good as you say. But mark me, this is my last go—I’d rather crawl back on bended tit ta Dario than keep workin the von Wine shaft.”

“One go is all I have,” Awa said nervously, wondering if the plan she was forming had any chance of success. “I’m out of time.”

In the predawn gloom the corpse of Niklaus Manuel Deutsch, artist, soldier, and pretentious know-it-all, was somberly carried through the camp by the Dutch gunner Mo and a Milanese man who had not campaigned under von Stein in years. Those who had not seen their old ally in over half a decade were warned away by his dour face and cold eyes that nodded down at the body he helped carry whenever one of his former friends tried to ask him just where the hell he had gotten to after cutting out with Manuel and disappearing all those years ago. At von Stein’s tent the guards did not give them much trouble, for von Stein overheard before Monique’s voice could become too loud and hurried out to see if it was true. He had no idea Manuel had come down to find sport at the little park just north of Milan, indeed, if he had he would have gotten the boy a cushier location than the front, and he gnashed his teeth to see his useful pawn as cold and dead as the trout he had left half eaten on his plate to investigate the ruckus.

“What’s this, what’s this?” said von Stein. “I thought you died of the pox ages ago, my maid, and yet it’s poor little Manny I see at his reward? Baffling!”

“He wanted ya ta be left lone with ’is corpse,” said Monique sadly. “Said it often, he did, fore he went—said you’d ’ave a pray o’er him in private, that you’d understand.”

“Did he?” Von Stein blinked down at the body. “Well I don’t, not at all. Morbid, morbid as hell, such a thing.”

The pallbearers held their breath, then von Stein sighed and held open the flap of his tent. They carried Manuel in and set him down on the ground, and von Stein stood over the body shaking his head. Then he looked again at the man who had helped Monique carry in Manuel’s body and the captain blinked, now more interested in the soldier than the corpse.

“Ber … Bernardo?” asked von Stein.

The man nodded.

“I sent you with Manuel all those years ago, didn’t I?”

The man nodded again.

“I recall you, I do.” Von Stein waggled his finger at the mercenary, pleased with himself for remembering the man’s name. “Manuel absolutely hated you. I thought you died.”

“I did,” said the man, and slapped von Stein’s extended hand. The captain took a step back, then toppled over, his eyes rolling back in his head as he died with all the glory of a glutton choking on a chicken bone. Awa quickly knelt and restored Manuel from the little death she had given him outside the camp while Monique pointed her guns at the tent flaps lest the guards enter upon hearing von Stein’s body fall. They did not, and Manuel, having had some experience in bouncing back from a little death, helped Awa drag von Stein under the captain’s massive table. Manuel glanced nervously at Monique and when he looked back at Awa he saw she no longer appeared to be Bernardo but now looked exactly like von Stein. It was bizarre and terrible to see the man hunched over his own corpse, and then she looked up at her old friend, grinning with teeth the color of the trimmed beard that wreathed them.

“Do I look the part?” asked Awa.

“Need to start writing plays,” muttered Manuel. “Or poems. Something with tragedy.”

“No tit in plays, an’ poems’re for ponces,” said Monique, creeping to the mouth of the tent to peek out. “Can’t fuckin believe that worked.”

“You’re dealing with a witch of the first water.” Von Stein’s doppelganger puffed out her chest. “I think it’s time to, how did you put it, inspect the lines?”

“The lines.” Manuel gulped. “Yes, I, that’s where the worst will be. But what about his, his body?”

“Oh, that’s an even better idea! I’ll just raise his corpse, make myself look like Bernardo again, and we can all—”