The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [147]
Awa crawled across the floor, little nonsense words bubbling out of her mouth as the necromancer’s ring slipped off of Omorose’s finger bone and rolled away. It was Merritt, it had to be, the sack was too large and the spreading pool leaking through it was too cold to belong to her hot-blooded Chloé, and, picking up Omorose’s skull, Awa smashed it on the ground, shards of bone spinning across the floor. She closed her eyes, bit her lip, took a deep breath, and opened her eyes again. Then she unlaced the hood with numb, clumsy fingers, and pulled open the slit to reveal the bruised, swollen, and utterly dead face of Chloé.
A Slow Night in the Black Forest
Chloé was not dead. Her eyelids fluttered, the girl’s left eye a bright red puddle, and beneath the blood-filled eye her nostril was smashed flat and black, and as she opened her mouth Awa saw that her jaw was split and crushed. Awa killed her before Chloé could feel the bones of her face sliding apart, before she could feel her battered organs fail, before she could feel cold air on exposed marrow and muscle, and though it was a little death the necromancer knew that once she revived Chloé, which she must in a day or two at the latest, her partner would not have long at all, certainly not enough time to force-feed her enough meat and bone to heal her. Then Awa wondered if she would be able to raise her at all, if, little though the death she had administered was, it had been enough, given Chloé’s condition, to kill her lover entirely, and she whimpered to herself.
Something whimpered back in the room, and Awa lifted her head. Merritt. The Englishman’s sack twitched, and Awa turned back to Chloé’s corpse. This was all her fault. As soon as she had escaped from the table she could have killed Omorose, could have ended her forever, but instead she had fumbled for something to say. How fucking stupid was she? She stayed with Chloé, mulling it all over, until one by one the candles began to sputter and die, and then the last went out and she was in the dark.
Awa awoke, not sure how long she had slept. She pawed around the dark room for what felt like hours until she found the bag the bounty hunters had taken from her, and in the blackness of the windowless dungeon she removed the portrait of Chloé, which brought on another crying fit. When she had pulled herself together she went back to digging in the bag until she found her last salamander egg. Setting it on the ground, she turned her back on it before giving the command so that she would not be blinded. The brightness gave her a pounding headache, but by the third time she had ignited the egg she saw an unlit torch in a sconce by a door, and retrieving it she soon had more light than she cared for.
The pool of blood that had leaked out of Chloé’s sack was nothing short of ridiculous, the girl seeming to have more on the floor than inside her skin. Still, even if the little death failed and her partner truly died Awa could bring her back. It was not much, but it was better than nothing. Then she began to cry again, imagining Chloé as a rotting horror, or a thing of hard bone instead of shapely flesh. Merritt groaned again from his sack, and Awa knew she had to let him out. Just not now. She could not handle his idiocy at present, and so she left him trussed and bagged and left the dungeon by way of the smaller door.
Awa stood blinking in a pleasant, sunlit bedroom, one wall lined with books, the wide crown glass windows overlooking a creek that wound through the meadow of Kahlert’s yard all the way to the edge of a forest. The blazing torch forgotten in her hand, she wandered through the house, her mouth wide, her head cocked. The contrast between the torture chamber and the rest of the simple but impressive house