The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [176]
Not safe, Awa caught herself as she wiped the muddy earth beneath her as smooth as she could, nothing about this was safe. The report of another volley shook the cart to punctuate this thought, and she swung her slingbag around, jamming the loose page back into her satchel beside the leather tube Manuel had given her and removing the book. Manuel and Monique were behind her in the cramped hollow, their voices low, but she knew time was running out and addressed the tome.
“Show me the last page he took from his last body,” said Awa. “I already used one but there were two.”
A thick scab ran from the top of the book to the bottom where she had removed the first page taken from Walther’s skin, and this second leaf did not come any easier, even when she ordered the book. When the binding finally gave up the page a trickle of blood began running down the spine, as if the folio were a deeply embedded hangnail. She had it, and placing the page in the mud, she dug deeper in the book’s binding until the flow quickened and she was able to surround the loose page with a ring of black blood.
Then Awa cut her forearm with the ibex knife. In her haste she went deeper than she intended, and leaning forward she quickly splashed a red ring around herself. She would have continued despite her sudden lightheadedness but Monique had torn her own tunic and grabbed Awa’s bleeding arm. In the shadow of the cart three pairs of eyes focused on Monique’s ten fingers tying the rag around the wound, particularly the disproportionately thin thumb and forefingers on her right hand.
“Wish we ’ad Doctor Lump or some of your famous stew,” said Monique.
“That’s good.” Awa dragged her arm away, the phantasmal shapes lurking just behind Monique almost capturing the necromancer’s attention before she turned back to her work. “Now go away, both of you.”
“Fuck that!” Manuel was shaking his head vigorously. “And fuck you both if you think I’ll go out there! No!”
“Niklaus Manuel Deutsch of Bern, if you don’t leave you’ll distract me, maybe get us all killed,” said Awa. “Maybe worse.”
“Fine! Fine! Fuck fuck fuck—”
“Niklaus!” Awa shouted in his face. “What happened to you? You were brave, gallant, fearless, you saved me and—”
“Fearless, she says.” Manuel looked between Awa and Monique. “Never fearless, Awa, and brave? More like stupid. Reckless. I—”
“You saved me,” Awa said quietly. “I’m asking you, Niklaus, to try and save me a second time. To save us all. I won’t be able to do it if you’re here, I’m too scared he … If I, if I don’t have complete concentration I’ll fail and he’ll kill me, Niklaus. Not even that, not death, but worse, he’ll—”
“Damn you. You told us.” Manuel sighed, the old Manuel, the Manuel who, in that instant, regretted not his decision to leave his comfortable home and loving family, nor his choice to march into the mouth of Hell with his countrymen and these two friends, but only his forgetting of pine planks and charcoal. We always have a choice, and Manuel made his. “Well, Mo, ready to say good morning to the Imperials?”
“ ’Eard they give’em prime matchlocks of different make than we’s used ta down ’ere,” said Monique. “Let’s get a closer look, then.”
“Let no one disturb me,” Awa told them. “But stay close, if, if this even works, we’ll still be, well, right here, with all those—”
A volley cut her off, and before it quieted Monique had given her a kiss on the cheek and dragged Manuel out after her, the artist flashing Awa a crazed smile as the descending cloud of black smoke covered them. No goodbyes, no speeches or tears, just the tide of gunsmoke swallowing them up and leaving Awa in her cart-cave at the edge of the earthwork.
The rays of sunlight punching through the smoke cloud would have formed the shapes of skulls to the artist if the vapors had not blinded his eyes, and the mud squeezing up between his fingers