The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [14]
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