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 rea
ched 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?”
A single word can contain more power than a million, and the simple no Awa saw before her made her cast the book to the ground and scream, her cool, practical mind doing nothing to stop her outburst. That was that. Of course, she thought, of course of course of course, if the book knew a way wouldn’t one of her predecessors have thwarted him already?
Once she had calmed a bit she retrieved the book from the grass and muttered an apology, but did not open it again until much later, after she had eaten and gotten a little drunk and grown tired of staring at the bloody sack that housed Chloé’s mortal remains. By the same time the next night Awa knew the little death would have to be removed lest Chloé actually die from the experience. Yet restoring her as she was would kill her anyway, and Awa could not very well avoid that topic any longer.
With a sigh Awa picked up the book, and asked, “Is there a means of restoring a dying person, or a corpse, to life, with its spirit intact, in such a way that the body does not decay but instead stays as it was in life?”
Yes.
Ah, the joys of one-word answers. Awa wondered if the book would burn, but pushed the thought away, and focused on the positive —there was a way. The undead she raised certainly putrefied at a slower rate with their spirit inside them, but Awa had enjoyed enough of the love of the dead to last a lifetime.
Only a dying person, though, the book wrote after a pause, as though it were considering her query. Once life has left the body then what you ask is impossible.
“Not much time, then,” said Awa. “How do I do it?”
You cannot. Only one of them can make another.
“Fuck!” cried Awa. “One of who, one of what!?”
Instead of scribbling an answer the pages began turning, and settled on an entry near the end. It had read “something” of the Schwarzwald, but the something was angrily crossed out and a new word written in, so that it read BASTARDS of the Schwarzwald. The old word had begun with a W or a V, but she knew she could find out the proper name by asking the book after she had read the entry. Settling in, the first thing it said was Avoid, followed by a catalog of attributes: shiftless, vain, difficult, obstinate, opinionated, boorish, gluttonous.
The cramped writing was broken up by the author, as though he were putting together a taxonomical volume.
Lifespan: Indefinite, unless one is of a mind to do some mischief with an iron stake and a stout ax.
Appearance: Hideously mundane. They eschew the charms of the grave, just as an idiot child, if allowed, would refuse to advance past a prepubescent state.
Corporeality: Mutable, but disposed toward physical materialization.
“Very nice,” said Awa. “Perfect, even.”
Scanning down, she noticed Cause near the bottom. Only they can create more of their kind, proving what a useless variety they are. They refuse to share their recipe for generation (or any other recipes, for that matter) and cannot be controlled by any known means. Again: avoid at all cost.
“Hmmm,” said Awa. “Hardly surprising that old asshole didn’t get along with things he couldn’t manipulate. Even if I can’t learn the trick maybe I could barter with one of them to do it for me. But how do I find one?”
The book flipped to the last page—a poorly sketched map of what Awa presumed must be the continent she had searched. A key set at the bottom confirmed this, and distracted by this new discovery, she set to orientating herself. There was a tiny island that must lie between her native land and the Spanish coast, and one of those peaks there must be where she had been indentured by her tutor, and here, this forest north of the Lombardy battlefields, must be her current position.
“Is this where I am?” Awa asked herself, and to her delight a small drop of red welled out of the page in the center of the wood. “Book, you’re fabulous! Now can you show me where to find the Bastards of the Schwarzwald?”
She eagerly watched the crimson drop sink back into the map. A moment later it reemerged an encouragingly short distance away. The drop grew larger, however, and her smile shifted downward as the bright red smear thinned and spread across the entire forested section of the map.
“That’s enough of that,” she said, closing the book and turning to the mindless corpses of Kahlert and Merritt. “Let’s go, lady-snatchers.”
Awa hoped she was leading them toward the spot on the map where the drop had initially appeared before spreading, but she had never used a map before and each time she consulted the book she seemed to be in the same place. She nevertheless drew closer and closer, her Paris-dulled eyes sharp again after half a year back in the wilds, and the wood grew thicker and thicker around her as the night grew ever deeper under those boughs that suffered the trespass of neither starshine nor moonglow. The corpses blundered after her, making such a racket as they carried Chloé that Awa could not hear the wolves gathering around them or the bats that congregated overhead.
At last they reached a clearing, and in the center of the small glade stood a small brick house with a single red door. Awa checked the map and saw she stood on the very spot she had made for, with dawn still many nightmares away. When she took her first step from the trees the animals that had followed her announced themselves, the wolves fanning out from the trees to cover the clearing while the bats swirled over the building until neither the structure nor the open sky could be seen for the flurry of wings.
“Shit,” breathed Awa, thousands of eyes staring at her in the dark.
“Good evening,” a deep voice came from behind the curtain of bats and wolves, and then the two swarms parted and a tall man stepped out of the building, a living corridor formed between where he stood at the doorway and Awa. “Please do come in. We have been expecting you.”
It took a moment before Awa could force herself to step into the lupine sea, but once she got going she found it difficult not to break into a run, hundreds of muz
zles lining her path, the ceiling of hovering bats billowing down a rank breeze. Approaching the smiling man in the doorway, she saw he was pale and hairless as an ivory statue, and every bit as nude.
“I am Awa,” she said nervously, unsure if volunteering her name would be a mistake or the token of goodwill she intended it as—in any event, divulging it had never been the catastrophic disaster her tutor had implied it would be. The naked man stared at her with unabashed interest and concern, as if she were the naked stranger controlling mobs of animals. “I, I have traveled far.”
“Come in, come in.” The man beckoned to the doorway. “Please come in. We have all the answers in here, and the questions you’ve forgotten as well. Bring your friends, and enter freely, Lady Awa.”
Glancing behind her at the emotionless corpses and the bloody sack, Awa wondered if these were indeed her friends. They were the only friends she had with her, at any rate, and Awa wondered if Monique and Manuel were sleeping in warm beds with warm bodies beside them. Then she put them from her mind and went willingly into the darkness.
The Enterprise of Death Page 34