The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [19]
Save Omorose. The sword she had drawn came around to the right of Halim, the rusty point nicking the necromancer’s shoulder as it passed him and found its target. The eunuch’s knees buckled and his arm jerked, his sword twisting in his suddenly clumsy fingers, and he smacked the necromancer’s chest with the flat of the blade instead of running him through. The force of Omorose’s blow flipped Halim backwards, the cold sky above and then the upside-down image of the bandit chief running toward him and then the earth he was crashing down onto, fat red raindrops spattering the dust and snow, and then he landed, having come fully around to see one of the necromancer’s corpses swaying in front of the laughing old man, a small, headless thing with more meat on it than most of the undead.
“Oh.” Halim’s lips made the shape as he realized she had decapitated him, and then the world grew dimmer and dimmer as he saw Omorose approach him, the last thing he felt her fingers hoisting him up by the hair.
“Very nice, very,” the necromancer managed, and Omorose suddenly felt dreadfully weak and began to cry, her dripping tears washing some of the grime from Halim’s severed head as she carried it to her master. He had never before praised her so openly, and as if she were purring instead of sobbing he stroked her again with his words. “Excellent work, truly. You’re as unpredictable as the weather.”
Snow began drifting down and more thunder came from beneath them, where the true storm lurked over the lower peaks. The necromancer dusted himself off and looked from Omorose to the skeletal bandit chief. With a sigh he patted Omorose’s shoulder and said, “Cut Halim’s tongue out and give it to yon sword master. He’ll catch her for us, but perhaps words will work better than other weapons on little Awa. Bring her to us, bandit.”
Omorose’s wild, dangerous smile found its twin on the necromancer’s face as she clumsily used the sword to free Halim’s tongue. Tossing it to the bandit, she saw it fly between his jaws and then vanish as if Halim and his tongue had never existed and she were simply a young woman having a most peculiar nightmare in her harem. Then she saw the tongue had somehow adhered itself to the interior of the skull’s hollow mouth and now licked the horror’s teeth, and Omorose knew she would never wake up.
Awa came to the end of the unbroken prominence and looked across the wide chasm—she had spent countless hours jumping around the mountaintop in preparation, but standing on the edge she realized, as she always did when she surveyed even the narrowest part of the crevasse, just how impossible a leap it would be to the far side. If she did make it, though, she could run all the way down the steep mountain instead of trying to descend the cliffs. Or so she hoped.
Then Awa turned away from her treacherous escape route to face her pursuers, a stone in one hand and a femur in the other. There were still only two, and she hurled the fist-sized rock with a skill she had steadily honed over the previous year. She turned to meet the charge of the second skeleton without looking to see if her missile connected with the first. It did, the spirit in the stone honoring the deal it had silently brokered with Awa and flying true. The targeted skeleton’s skull exploded and its body tumbled in a heap at her feet, but its fellow launched itself off a boulder with its sword coming down to split Awa’s shoulder.
Awa had watched them meticulously, and occasionally the necromancer even allowed her to inspect an unanimated example so that she might learn how each piece fit together and worked in harmony, and so she knew exactly how the bones could and could not move, and she sidestepped the leaping skeleton at the last moment. Its twisting shoulder blade cut her underarm as she brought the loose bone in her right hand down into the gap where its extended sword arm met its body. There was a grating sound as it landed and tried to raise its weapon, and she pulled down on her bone like a lever. Its arm popped neatly off as she planted her foot on its