The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [116]
“You’ll never find it,” he had said one misty spring morning, the necromancer’s shade having taken up residence in her skull. “Never, ever, ever.”
“If you thought that you wouldn’t be here, watching me,” said Awa, though his voice had worn her purpose down from the peak it had been atop the mountain to a rough little pebble. “You wouldn’t have come back.”
“It was simple business that I had, and as I went directly it took the week and no more, and back I flew. I like to watch you being stupid,” he said. “Stupid black beast.”
At first she had thought he was imitating Omorose to needle her, but as the voice prattled on while she covered herself with deadfall branches in the dawn gloom, an even more terrible possibility occurred to her. She let the thought steep in the back of her mind like wormwood in a kettle, in the blurry region where she had hidden her intention to murder him on the night she had—for all the good it had done her. Yet when she rose that evening and he started in again she was ready for him.
“— fruitless as a winter orchard, you stupid—”
“What’s your name?” asked Awa as she shouldered her bag.
He did not say anything at first, and then said, “I won’t tell you.”
“You will if you’re really him. He said the dead have to answer the living, and have to answer them honestly.”
“The dead cannot lie. I never said they had to answer.”
“Shit,” said Awa, unable to remember if that was true or not, and knowing how foolish it had been to try and catch him with such a trick. As soon as a thought occurred to her she knew she had thought it, of course, and if she knew she had thought something then he knew she had thought it and—the only thing to do was blunder ahead and hope for the best. “Why will you not answer me?”
“Because knowing would give you power over me,” said the necromancer’s shade, but he spoke slowly, carefully. She had put him on guard and—
“Why are you answering me at all if you don’t have to?”
“Because I like to see you squirm. Truth burns hotter than ignorance, little Awa.”
“Why didn’t you try to stop me from doing what I did to Gisela? If you had something then—”
“I never cared about that bag of bones! I rather liked watching you interrogate her, you reminded me of myself at—”
Then he went silent and Awa sat down, though she had just started the night’s march. Only the day before he had said he was gone the first week, which would have been when she dug up Gisela, but now he claimed to have seen that, too. That was it, then. No scream of defeat, no justifications or clarifications or backpedaling, just silence. She was too practical, as usual, she thought, and too stupid—she was so stupid she had fooled herself for a very long time, and now had just fooled herself again. Stupid.
Of course he was off running his errands; he would no more follow her about than one would forgo a summer holiday to stay at home and stare at their mittens. She had been talking to herself with his voice for quite some time now, and even when the voice had sounded more like Omorose’s she had explained it away as another trick of his. She looked down at her trembling hands and wondered how a crazy, stupid little beast could ever hope to find a book that might be hidden anywhere in the entire world. The concubine had implied the air spirits would not have the strength to move it far but Awa had very quickly lost any sense of where she was and how far she had gone—as a child she had been sold from one master to another, journeying farther in a few years than most travel in a lifetime, nearly a thousand leagues, and then came of age on a spit of rock less than a league across.
Graveyards seemed the logical place to search, for he would be able to command the dead to hide the book, and some of them had weatherproof mausoleums and ossuaries that would keep it safe from life’s unavoidables. Awa recognized at once the aversion the living had toward cemeteries, but she also noted their keenness