The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [121]
Awa could not even cry but the creature cried for her—not with its ever-happy eyes, but with its bloody, foam-flecked mouth, the sound of the little girl blubbering as it mocked her: “Ba-babad, ba-ba-bad Awa. Ba-ba-bad, ba-ba-bad Awa.”
Those teeth were growing larger and larger, its breath blowing the pungent stink of blood and gravedirt and old marrow in her face. She tried to reach out, to snatch its spirit and break it, to do something, but as its eyes met hers she found herself frozen, and she wondered if she had already died. She had not, she realized as it put a leaden paw on her stomach and pressed down, her fractured ribs screaming, and to deny it what little pleasure she could she closed her eyes.
With her eyes closed, Awa could not see if they all burst from the hard earth at once or if they had emerged one at a time and converged in the darkness, gathering like rumor, until their numbers were large enough to move. All she knew was that the crushing weight on her stomach and the fetid wind in her face were suddenly snatched away, and the only sounds she heard above her own wheezing whine and the monster’s surprised yelp were the clattering of bone on bone, of rot-greased limbs sliding around hollow sockets. She could not believe it but her ears were always the most honest of her senses, and so she opened her eyes.
Awa could not tell how many there were, the canine creature thrashing on the ground as the skeletons clawed and clubbed and kicked and beat it, and as it threw half a dozen off and gained its feet three bonemen pounced onto its back and rode it through the cemetery, their fingers wrenching out clods of meat and fur that they threw into the snowy air like wet confetti. The beast was screaming with that little girl’s scream, but to Awa’s dismay it reached the wall of the churchyard and bounded over it, disappearing into the night with its undead riders still in tow. Awa heard it scream for a long time, its voice echoing down the canyon as she looked around for the necromancer who had saved her. She was still alone, save for the thirty or forty animate corpses staring at her, but she could not get to her feet to see if her savior was on the other side of the mausoleum.
Five of the walking dead quickly came to her and hoisted her up, as careful as she would have been herself to keep the splintered hoof from brushing the ground, and as they slowly turned her around she saw nothing but the empty cemetery. Instead of an unbroken white churchyard Awa saw black pits yawning all around her, several tombstones tipped over, and the gory trail the monster had left as it fled, bloody clumps of its hide littering even the far edges of the grounds. Glancing toward the previously dark town she saw it was blazing with light, but no brave souls had yet dared investigate the noisy disturbance in the cemetery. Through her shock Awa took note of the dead men holding her aloft, and realized who had saved her.
Awa had not thought herself so powerful—she had always dug up the bodies herself before trying to raise them, even if she did employ their help in refilling their own graves. Now the militia of the undead that she had conjured all stared at her, some from oozing sockets and others from dry skulls, and Awa smiled weakly at them. She had vowed not to raise the mindless ones, not to use the dead without the permission of their spirits, but this seemed like a reasonable exception. She did not know how much time she had before the villagers found their courage and came with lanterns and cudgels, and so she bade her animate palanquin lower her onto a stone cross marker to supervise the reinterment.
“Someone find my knife,” she tried to say, but only a little blood came out. The monster had nearly