The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [15]
“Closer. How do we do this?”
Awa shrugged. “I ask them.”
“You do, don’t you?” The necromancer shook his head. “Fascinating, the shapes it takes. Make the fire hotter, Omorose.”
Omorose blinked and looked at the smoldering coals, focusing on the flames crawling up the back of the stone hearth. Her temples began to pound and sweat ran down her neck as she strained herself. She wanted the fire to grow so badly it hurt her throat and back, and she felt the pinching in her bladder and bowels as she concentrated. Finally a white jet of flame came hissing out of the center of the blaze, the plume of heat warming the room in an instant even as it died, and Omorose relaxed, her breath coming hard and her body trembling.
“Now you, Awa.” Omorose saw him smiling at her old slave and she bit her pretty lip, fury mingling with the nausea that focusing so intently always brought on. Awa paused for a moment, then stood and went outside. She returned a moment later with a log from the woodpile and tossed it on the low fire. It flared up instantly, yellow flames dancing all over the dry timber.
The necromancer brayed at this, clutching his sides as he laughed and laughed, and Omorose felt her eyes boil with embarrassment. The slave was always cheating and he always laughed, as though the ape had done something clever. She had told Awa about making her look foolish but the little black beast seemed not to care at all.
“It’s not just the wood,” Awa told Omorose, recognizing the pained expression on her friend’s face. “You didn’t hear because it was my spirit talking and not my mouth, but I asked all the logs if any were ready to join the wind, and he was, and then I asked the fire if she would burn especially hot if I gave her a log ready for her touch, and she said she would, and so it was very hot, hotter than just wood and fire.”
“Don’t listen to her,” said the necromancer, mercurial in his praise as ever. He took a hawthorn box from a shelf and opened it to show them the half-dozen round stones inside. “Bartering’s for higher powers, everything else will do as you say if you follow Omorose’s example and make them. Take these salamander eggs. They only hatch in fire, but as their mothers can’t be expected to find a hearth out in the wilds they are born with the innate knowledge of what fire truly is, and when the mother whispers the true word that all our human words for fire symbolize the eggs flare up, igniting the nest she has built, and so the fire born of their own true selves warps the symbol of the wooden nest and …”
Halim dozed in the warmth of the hut, waiting as patiently as a scorpion on a frog’s back for his opportunity. As time had stretched over them and he had come to terms with the new road his life meandered down he recognized that the necromancer had been hurt that first night even if he had healed himself, and what could be hurt could be killed. Learning the letters was hard, and the witchery impossible even had it been wanted, but he was outpacing Omorose and Awa in the martial training, and he had found where the skeletons kept the rusty swords they took down to the low passes for their raids. Soon he would be good enough to kill the necromancer in one blow and escape with Omorose, and if the necromancer did not die then Halim was confident he would at least be fast enough to spare his mistress any more pain and witchcraft.
Their first winter on the mountain the three Africans almost died a dozen times over, the necromancer begrudgingly allowing them to sleep on the floor of his hut after the third time he had to nurse Halim’s frostbitten feet back to health. The only method of restoring the blackened toes that the necromancer trimmed off and cast into the fire as the gang of skeletons held the wailing boy was to have Halim eat the corresponding digits from the supply of bandit corpses, which was dwindling. That winter waned slowly beside the glacier, and slower still when the necromancer chose the windiest, coldest, stormiest nights to amuse himself with his dead playthings.