The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [150]
“Yes.” The inquisitor’s corpse left his position standing watch at the mouth of the small clearing, a deer trail having given way to a small patch of open ground hedged in by thick holly.
“This book.” Awa wagged it at him, unable to stop grinning. “This was in your library.”
“I did not know. I did not see it,” said the corpse.
“It, it was disguised,” said Awa, recalling that strange detail. “It looked like a book called Roman de la Rose, a French book bound in red velvet.”
“I remember that volume,” said the corpse. “I read part of it once, in a library. I did notice it on my shelf but could not recall where or when I had acquired it, for I disliked it as much as most French romances.”
“Then why did you keep it?”
“I thought that if it were a gift I could not remember receiving then I did not wish to offend the giver by discarding it, lest he peruse my shelves and see his gift absent. That, and I thought having a wide range of texts would make me appear intelligent.”
“You were vain, weren’t you?” Awa smiled.
“Yes.”
“How could the book know that?” Awa asked herself. “And how could it disguise itself?”
“I do not know,” said the corpse, but as it answered the book twisted in Awa’s hands. She clumsily juggled it, the book opening of its own accord. The pages were flipping to the front, and when the blank first page was reached a bright red dot appeared in the upper left corner, like a handkerchief pressed to a pinpricked finger. Then a jagged red line arced out of the spot, and words began appearing in wet blood on the blank hide.
We had made ourselves discreet, the bloody text read, the spirits of the air delivered us against one side of a row where we could blend in with the wood of the shelf. Then the man mentioned the name Roman de la Rose when he was showing the corpse who called herself Rose his library, and mentioned his dislike for it, and so when he left Granada and had his servants pack his library we took the form of a book we knew he would not be interested in examining. Nevertheless he picked us up, sometimes, but we made our interior into an obscure dialect, and so we did not need replicate the text we claimed to be in order to maintain the ruse.
“You …” Awa’s mouth hung open as she read. Not scraps of the spirits, not tiny little pieces, but enough to respond, enough to answer. The dead cannot lie, and this book, written in blood, on skin, this book bound with spirit, must answer the same as any corpse or soul. We, the book wrote, the previous apprentices of the necromancer, the—
We contain the blood and skin of his tutor, the book continued, as well as his pupils, which enables us to change our form to better disguise ourselves.
“Why would you?” said Awa. “It helps him, doesn’t it, if you stay hidden? Why would you help him when you’re just like me?!”
We are no longer more than a book, and books serve whatever purpose their master ascribes to them. The text paused, and then resumed, even more quickly. But the master of a book is she who holds it and knows its potential, and that is you until another hand lifts us, another eye reads us. We serve you now, as we served him then.
“Do you”—Awa could scarcely believe that she had reached this strange and terrible place, that even though she had succeeded in achieving the impossible and found the book, all might be for naught if—“do you know a way to break the hold he has over me? Is there, inside you, the means of stopping him from, from”—the book was already answering but she did not read, pressing ahead—“from claiming my body? Do you know a way?”
A single word can contain more power than a million, and the simple no Awa saw before her made her cast the book to the ground and scream, her cool, practical mind doing nothing to stop her outburst.