The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [148]
Awa sat on the kitchen table and opened a bottle of wine, then bit into a loaf of bread—she wanted the bread to taste like potash or sawdust, for the wine to taste like sour rainwater, for the world to deny her pleasure now that she had gotten Chloé killed, but her traitorous tongue relished the food and drink, and she nearly wept at the taste. She was alive, and could not pretend otherwise. Pleasure would be had, then, and she filled a sack with bread and early cheese and dried fruit but no meat. During her time in Paris, with the abundance of cheese and bread and produce to be had, and Dario’s willingness to experiment with all things related to cooking, she had finally been able to dispense with eating flesh, save that which was absolutely necessary to heal herself—if her spiritual balance were ever to be restored she had to stop feeding on the dead like the hyena, and besides, the less iron she took into her body the more powerful were her arts. After adding bottles and bottles of wine and spirits to her already bulging sack, Awa tossed the still smoldering torch onto the stack of cordwood beside the stove. Then she heaped the table and chairs and everything else that looked flammable on the smoking woodpile, and smashed a bottle of schnapps onto it for good measure.
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