The Enterprise of Death

by Jesse Bullington

  “Pity Boabdil.”

  IV

  The Three Apprentices of the

  Necromancer

  He was, of course, a necromancer, although it was some time before his pupils learned that word, and of course he meant them ill. They were trapped atop the mountain, and even had they outrun their undead handlers there was still the matter of the chasms that boxed in that high and desolate spit of rock and ice, and the sheer cliff that fell away on one side of the prominence. The atoll of stone where they were imprisoned cast its shadow over another, lower island of rock and hard earth, and there the necromancer’s semi-wild goats, sheep, and ibex pastured in the summer when color returned to the lichens and grasses of the mountain.

  They were his apprentices whether they liked it or not, and of course they did not. The chestnuts they had found so delicious the first few days soon became disgusting as they ate little else, be they roasted plain, ground into flour, or cooked with the little meat he granted them. During the days he had them beat at one another and the skeletons with sticks under the tutelage of the reanimated bandit chief, who had escaped the cave and for a time held his own against the deathless that fateful night before losing first his nose and then his life, and so was deemed a suitable fencing instructor.

  They erected a crude lean-to against a boulder as far as was possible from the necromancer’s hut without sleeping on the actual cliffside like swallows. The old man oversaw their construction and laughed at them for choosing the shrieking wind that raged along the precipice over his quieter company, and often he did not even allow them to stay in their meager shelter. On the nights he forced them into his hut he taught them to read in the only book he had, and in that book he only ever let them see the first page, yet he could make the letters bend and warp and dance into new shapes and languages and thus one page was enough.

  “The power is in the symbol,” he told them one night after they had eaten of the bandit flesh kept cool year-round in the snow of the glacier behind the hut. Before they had discovered the actual source of their meat Omorose had told Halim that prohibitions against pork meant nothing to the damned, and even after they realized that he had made them cannibals they soon found that hunger goads worse than any god and so they continued to eat the stringy lumps in their stew. “What are we but symbols? Our flesh is merely an imperfect shadow cast by our spirit, what your imams call the soul. Our bodies are powerful because of the soul they symbolize, and with that power we can alter them, and we can alter other symbols.”

  Halim had given up trying to unravel what the witch meant with his words and simply followed Omorose’s and Awa’s leads as to when to nod or shake his head. The old man never singled him out with questions the way he did the young women, and Halim attributed this to the prayers he still sent east as often as he dared.

  Awa found the sorcerer’s ruminations cumbersome and often wrong, the spirits clearer than ever there atop the world. Trafficking with the powers was something else entirely from the spirit-infused charms coveted by her people, however, and as she learned how to address the fire spirits that hid in rocks as well as the spirits of the stone themselves she slowly plotted their escape.

  Omorose struggled with the concepts but appreciated the results—her tutelage on the mountain was more formal than anything she had learned as a child, and far more useful than hours of squeezing as if she were holding in her water to one day please a prick. The necromancer’s exercises made her capable of altering little things to suit her purpose, made her able to bend what she thought was real to the breaking point and then ease it back down once the world had given her what she wanted. Little things only, but she was beginning to appreciate that little things stacked up, and things that ought to be mundane became something more if she focused enough. The tongues of the bandits he had made them eat while concentrating on what the muscle-paddles symbolized had taught them Spanish in as much time as it took to chew and swallow the tough meat, and she was confident that were she to eat the tongue of Halim or Awa she would learn their savage native languages in the same short order.

  “Omorose,” said the necromancer, switching back and forth from Arabic to Spanish to get them used to the subtleties of their fresh linguistic knowledge. “What sort of symbols am I talking about?”

  “Everything is a symbol,” Omorose said quickly, her eyes darting to Awa for support. Her former slave gave the slightest of nods, and Omorose continued. “This world is nothing but symbols, which is why I thought we were in Hell when we came here. I thought we had gone from one world to another but only … only the symbols had changed. The world seemed changed because things I knew”—seeing his sour expression Omorose amended herself—“because things I thought I knew, like death being the end, had changed.”

  “How? Why?” he demanded.

  “You changed them,” said Omorose. “Because nothing in this world is true, and everything is a symbol. You can take what is true, what the symbol stands for, and you can change the symbol. You took the bones of men who had come here before us and changed what they stood for, life instead of death. You took the truth behind the symbols of the men, their souls, and you put them back into their bones and changed their symbols and, and—”

  “Bah! Awa, tell me plainly, girl, what do I mean by symbols?”

  “You mean different things at different times with the same word. But now you’re talking of spirits.” Awa licked her lips, uncomfortable under his gaze even after all the long months on the mountain.

  “And what is it we do when we change symbols, as your little friend calls it?” Omorose bristled to hear her flawless recitation of the words he had driven into her skull used in such a chiding manner. He was never satisfied with anything they did unless it made the others look bad, her especially. She looked to Awa, who stared past the necromancer and out the dark window.

  “You can’t change spirits,” Awa decided, looking back at her tutor. “You use words to make spirits and symbols sound the same but they’re not. When you say you’re changing symbols you mean you are controlling spirits and making them do what you want, which is not what they want. The spirits of the dead want to leave their old bones but you draw them back and bind them and make them do what is not natural. So when you say you’re changing symbols you are making the spirits do unnatural things for you.”

  “Closer. How do we do this?”

  Awa shrugged. “I ask them.”

  “You do, don’t you?” The necromancer shook his head. “Fascinating, the shapes it takes. Make the fire hotter, Omorose.”

  Omorose blinked and looked at the smoldering coals, focusing on the flames crawling up the back of the stone hearth. Her temples began to pound and sweat ran down her neck as she strained herself. She wanted the fire to grow so badly it hurt her throat and back, and she felt the pinching in her bladder and bowels as she concentrated. Finally a white jet of flame came hissing out of the center of the blaze, the plume of heat warming the room in an instant even as it died, and Omorose relaxed, her breath coming hard and her body trembling.

  “Now you, Awa.” Omorose saw him smiling at her old slave and she bit her pretty lip, fury mingling with the nausea that focusing so intently always brought on. Awa paused for a moment, then stood and went outside. She returned a moment later with a log from the woodpile and tossed it on the low fire. It flared up instantly, yellow flames dancing all over the dry timber.

  The necromancer brayed at this, clutching his sides as he laughed and laughed, and Omorose felt her eyes boil with embarrassment. The slave was always cheating and he always laughed, as though the ape had done something clever. She had told Awa about making her look foolish but the little black beast seemed not to care at all.

  “It’s not just the wood,” Awa told Omorose, recognizing the pained expression on her friend’s face. “You didn’t hear because it was my spirit talking and not my mouth, but I asked all the logs if any were ready to join the wind, and he was, and then I asked the fire if she would
burn especially hot if I gave her a log ready for her touch, and she said she would, and so it was very hot, hotter than just wood and fire.”

  “Don’t listen to her,” said the necromancer, mercurial in his praise as ever. He took a hawthorn box from a shelf and opened it to show them the half-dozen round stones inside. “Bartering’s for higher powers, everything else will do as you say if you follow Omorose’s example and make them. Take these salamander eggs. They only hatch in fire, but as their mothers can’t be expected to find a hearth out in the wilds they are born with the innate knowledge of what fire truly is, and when the mother whispers the true word that all our human words for fire symbolize the eggs flare up, igniting the nest she has built, and so the fire born of their own true selves warps the symbol of the wooden nest and …”

  Halim dozed in the warmth of the hut, waiting as patiently as a scorpion on a frog’s back for his opportunity. As time had stretched over them and he had come to terms with the new road his life meandered down he recognized that the necromancer had been hurt that first night even if he had healed himself, and what could be hurt could be killed. Learning the letters was hard, and the witchery impossible even had it been wanted, but he was outpacing Omorose and Awa in the martial training, and he had found where the skeletons kept the rusty swords they took down to the low passes for their raids. Soon he would be good enough to kill the necromancer in one blow and escape with Omorose, and if the necromancer did not die then Halim was confident he would at least be fast enough to spare his mistress any more pain and witchcraft.

  Their first winter on the mountain the three Africans almost died a dozen times over, the necromancer begrudgingly allowing them to sleep on the floor of his hut after the third time he had to nurse Halim’s frostbitten feet back to health. The only method of restoring the blackened toes that the necromancer trimmed off and cast into the fire as the gang of skeletons held the wailing boy was to have Halim eat the corresponding digits from the supply of bandit corpses, which was dwindling. That winter waned slowly beside the glacier, and slower still when the necromancer chose the windiest, coldest, stormiest nights to amuse himself with his dead playthings.

  He would make the preserved bear corpse in the back of the room drop from its fearsome rearing posture onto all fours, and as his disciples tried to sleep he would cavort amorously atop its back with the rankest of his undead, the emaciated one that had brought in the bandit chief that first night a personal favorite. Omorose’s observation that this gnarled thing was female was slow in coming, and Halim would have used these frequent occasions of the necromancer’s distraction to attempt his murder had he been able to bring himself to look at the loathsome conjugal bed. For Awa, the only thing more disturbing than the moans of the undead concubine were the nights when she lay motionless and silent, a simple corpse mounted by the sweaty necromancer.

  Menarche finally arrived in all its cramping glory for Awa that spring, slow in coming as good news, and she received a sharp rebuke from Omorose when she asked for some of the little linen they had left amongst them to bind herself. Understandably reluctant to request precious cloth from her tutor, Awa finally broke down when a scrap of rough wool proved every bit as unbearable as she had known it would be the first time she ran her hands over it. Rather than putting her through his usual undue unpleasantness, though, he simply sniffed the air as she entered the hut and went to the rag basket, fishing out several scraps and tossing them to her.

  “That’s a different symbol, of course,” he said as she picked up the cloth and winced, knowing it had gone too easily. “Useful in all sorts of ways. Were I you I’d postpone bearing a child for some time, better to parlay down the years. Babes fetch a high price to the right bidder, and none more than a firstborn.”

  Awa fled the hut shame-blind as the necromancer cackled along with his concubine, whom he had granted a tongue for the purpose of conversation, as well as less polite uses—Awa had once made the mistake of looking up when the necromancer gave an especially zesty grunt to find the husk of a man posed on all fours like the more robust bear upon which he rutted, the dead woman’s face buried in a place Awa thought unfit for romance. Hiding in the lean-to, Awa wadded the cloth uncomfortably in place under the leggings that the necromancer had taught them to knit from the wool he put through his rickety spindle.

  As soon as she finished the bandit chief found her and led her to the dusty plateau for her daily training. Instead of sticks she saw that Omorose and Halim already held rust-reddened swords, and she silently took one for herself when their skeletal instructor offered it. The necromancer had repaired the bandit chief’s broken bones and cleaned his flesh to help fill their larders, and like all the rest his retreat from the sparring circle was accompanied by a cacophony of grinding and clicking.

  The transition from chestnut staves that bruised skin and occasionally cracked bones to sharp metal that could kill in an instant altered the style of their training not a bit. Halim came on fierce as ever, Omorose beguiling in her feints and jabs, and Awa defensive to a fault. The bandit chief danced about them to add the element of constant distraction, and to parry with the speed of the dead any blows that slipped past their defenses. Even with his aid they often ended their training early to carry someone to the necromancer’s hut after a stab went too deep or a gash would not stop bleeding. By the time winter again loomed on the mountain Omorose and Halim each had stripes to match the old scars of Awa. Unlike her companions, Awa never screamed when the jagged metal tore through her flesh and dragged across her frame, leaving crimson wakes flecked with shavings of bone and rust.

  “When should we try again?” Awa asked Omorose one frigid autumn night as the three huddled in their lean-to after the necromancer evaluated the light snowfall and told them they would not be allowed to sleep inside for another fortnight.

  “I didn’t know we’d already tried,” said Omorose. “Or is escape what you call it when we get one foot down the cliff only to have the bonemen pull us back by our hair?”

  “I’m sorry for that,” said Awa, cheeks darkening. “But I’ve thought of something better. If I distract the bonemen by trying to go over the glacier and down the far cliff they’ll follow, and if they leave a few behind you’ve gotten good enough to stop them.”

  During a recent sword session Halim had smashed in the skull of one of the skeletons, and to his immense pleasure it did not rise again. Awa had further determined the nature of the creatures’ mortality—if their existence could be described in such terms—by focusing on decapitating her undead sparring partners. When she had finally succeeded that very morning it had simply picked its bony head off of the dirt and reattached it, proving that the destruction of the skull itself was required to fell the monsters.

  “So we get to try and fight our way out?” said Omorose. “That’s an even better plan.”

  “I’ll fight,” said Halim, perking up.

  “You two go ahead,” said Omorose, bundling her blankets around her, “but I’m through being punished by him. We don’t seem to be in any more danger now than we were the first night.”

  “But don’t you worry about what he’s planning?” asked Awa. “No good can come of staying here.”

  “He’s going to eat us,” said Halim, a far longer chain of words than he was normally wont to link.

  “Fattening us doesn’t make sense,” said Awa. “We’ve already eaten more than we’ll ever put on, no matter how much we grow.”

  “He seems to like his bed companions seasoned,” Omorose said. “He probably wants a little more age on you and I before adding us to his collection.”

  Omorose smiled at the horrified expression on Awa’s face. Being young, pretty, and vivacious had formerly been assets instead of detriments in currying a keeper’s favor, and though Omorose was in no way disappointed to be excluded from that particular arena of the necromancer’s attentions, she found herself struggling with alternative methods of pleasing him. If you were not the favorite you wer
e a glorified servant to the favorite, and she would sooner hop onto the bear and try her hand at changing his perceptions of living partners than be forced to dote on her own slaves. Or so she told herself when she was cross.

  “Perhaps he’s simply bored, and this is how he amuses himself,” said Awa, making her mistress flinch. Omorose had recognized the familiar markings of ennui on the necromancer’s gnarled face from the outset—the way his snotty eyes lit up when he provoked a reaction from his wards, the way he chortled to see them cry. That her rival now suspected the same could complicate Omorose’s task of proving herself the most interesting pupil. The methods of allaying the necromancer’s boredom might differ from the customary variety, at least for they the living, but she had done little but combat her own boredom in the harem, and knew many a diversion and trick yet to be employed.

  “Bored?” Omorose sniffed at Awa. “Oh yes, I’m sure that’s why he teaches us his sorceries and everything else, and why he sends us out every day to spar with the bonemen. Bored. Really, girl, what a stupid thing to say.”

  “Oh,” said Awa, wondering how she had scared her friend. Omorose only became nasty when she was frightened or upset, otherwise having thawed toward Awa on the chill mountainside. Her former mistress might still eschew using her name instead of “girl,” but the tone of that word had warmed to Awa’s ear, and she felt a rare heat on the coldest nights when Omorose would murmur, “Hold me, girl,” and their prickly skin would touch and—

  “Just stupid,” said Omorose. “Don’t you think, boy?”

  Halim grunted his assent, amazed as ever at how they pretended everything was alright, how they played the little games Omorose knew instead of casting themselves over the cliffside the first chance they got. Still, he would not abandon his duty even in the hell he now inhabited, although, truth be told, the times he had slunk off to the cliff while the young women slept he had felt a fear even worse than what the necromancer inspired in him to see the moonlight glinting on the rocks far below, and even without the bonemen watching him from the darkness he would have balked. This was a test, he told himself, a test to be overcome through strength of will as well as arm.