The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [168]
Rather, the thing he had become. A pit opened in what must be his head, the serpentine shadow as black and lustrous as when she had last seen it, immediately after he had tricked her into killing his physical body. The hole of a mouth twisted into a crescent, and then he began to speak through it.
“Little Awa.” The necromancer sounded happy to see her. “What have we here, eh? I don’t suppose you’ve killed all those babies, hmmmm?”
“No,” said Awa, remembering all too well the concubine’s claim that were she to kill a hundred children with the necromancer’s dagger she would be spared. The notion had never appealed to her. Strange, she thought, that despite the nonchalance toward death she had possessed in her youth she had never even considered the one obvious escape he had offered.
“No,” he said, piling on top of himself until his increasingly skull-like face floated just in front of hers. “But you found my tome! I couldn’t believe my luck, having a book-collecting witch hunter move in so close. Mind, he never caught a witch, not one.”
“Yes he did,” said Awa, smiling crookedly at her tutor.
“Ho-ho! What a clever young woman you are!”
“Clever but stupid.”
“Did I say that? Cruel, cruel and unnecessary, you—”
“Shut up,” Awa said, still smiling. She was actually starting to enjoy herself. “What’s your name?”
He told her, his jovial smile narrowing to a tiny hole that voiced the syllables. She smiled wider, which made him thrash against the invisible walls of the circle, greasy black smears hanging in the air. Then he drew himself up short, facing her again.
“Doesn’t matter,” the necromancer hissed. “Think it makes a difference, knowing that? Think there’s anything in the book to save you? Think I don’t know you’ve got a few more months left on your sentence, a few more precious summer days until I can claim you? Your time is running short, little Awa, your time is running up, and I’m going back to where I was before you so rudely invoked me.”
“Why does the curse, the ward, whatever you put on me that keeps me safe from the dead, why does it last ten years?” said Awa.
“That’s as long as I can persist without a true form,” he said, the question restoring some of his good humor—he might be a monstrous necromancer with pretensions at some sort of immortality, but he was still a pedant at heart. “Any longer and I start to lose my abilities, degenerating in quality, and we can’t have that. Being freed from flesh is the most marvelous experience possible, although I expect you lack the imagination to see why. I fly like a tireless bird, across mountains and oceans, from pole to pole and back again, learning all the secrets our physical senses keep hidden. But after a decade or so I begin to slide, and if I’m not careful I’ll wind up as some mundane poltergeist, able to interact with this world on only the faintest level. So I give myself ten years at a time, which is proven to be safe, and fairly easy to keep track of, especially as I time it to expire on memorable dates … such as Christmas, or the Autumn Solstice. This Autumn Solstice.”
“What would you do if I died before you could return for my body?” Awa recalled all too well the feel of a blade against her throat an hour before.
“I would take another body.” The black smile spread even wider, a chasm in the smoke. “I would lose much time, for the body would not be trained as you have been, prepared, seasoned. I would have to take a child to make sure my arts would find a home, to ensure the vessel would be capable of overcoming its innate iron as you are, and I might well make a bad choice and not be so powerful as I once was.”
Not even that bitter remedy would stop him, then.
“But in time the body would grow, my body would grow, and I would retrieve my book and train a new