The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [20]
“There’s nowhere to run,” she heard Halim say, and her left foot twisted underneath her as a loose piece of stone slid out from under it and clattered down the side of the crevasse. A year before, the skeleton who appeared beside her would have been indistinguishable from its fellows, but Awa had taught herself to look closely at the bones, and the faint fissures where his broken arms and legs had been fused back together identified him at once. The bandit chief held a sword loosely in his arm, and behind him she saw a pack of skeletons fast approaching.
“Awa,” the bandit chief said. “Listen to me—”
Awa did not, limping toward the prominence she had long before chosen as her leaping-off point, resolutely refusing to consider how a sprained ankle might impact her jump. He quickly circled in front of her, his sword raised. Her hand tightened on the hilt of her own weapon and she grimaced to put weight on her left leg.
“Don’t,” the bandit said. “I have every advantage and—”
Instead of her usual cautiousness, Awa came at him hard as Halim would have, and he fell back as their swords met and she tried to drive him over the edge. He spun around her on the plateau side, their backs bumping, and she lost her balance. His hand snatched her tunic and pulled her back from the precipice, and then their swords connected again as she used the momentum he had granted her to attack.
Without being able to speak he had lacked the ability to instruct the children as well as he might have, and his bones had tallied many more years than she of swinging iron and steel, but still she drove him back, her teeth gritted, her sword a russet blur. He tried talking to her but the ringing of metal on metal sang louder than he could speak. At last she overextended a jab and he kicked her in the stomach, bringing her to her knees as she gagged on the pain in her gut. Instead of running her through or pinning her down he dropped to a squat and hissed at her.
“Awa, listen to me”—he glanced over his shoulder—“you can’t get away, not now. I’ve tried finding ways to help but there are still too many of the mindless ones under his sway. The dead travel fast, girl. Now quickly, before she comes, Omorose means to kill you. She killed Halim and—”
“You killed Halim,” Awa said, still on her knees with her head bowed but slowly curling her toes under her feet to spring up. “You brought us here, didn’t you? And if Omorose is, is confused, who can blame her? Who can blame any of us?”
“I”—the skeleton turned its skull away from her—“I didn’t—”
Awa’s sword blasted his wrist into powder that joined the snow now falling around them, and as both his sword and the hand that gripped it fell she pivoted on her good ankle and hobbled along the chasm. The other skeletons had reached them now and came pouring down the mountainside toward her, a flash flood of clattering bones. She was panting and her left leg stabbed her from toes to groin with every footfall but she pushed herself faster, shards of muddy ice coming loose from the precipice beside her. Then three skeletons dropped down in front of her, and she limped even faster toward them, her eyes focused on the spit of rock jutting out between her and the skeletons. A small tree grew from a crack near the top of the cliff on the opposite side of the chasm.
“Death won’t save you from him!” the bandit chief cried from just behind her, but then she turned, the toes of her good foot pressing down on the edge of the rock. Awa leaped over the gulf, the far side rearing up through the thickening snow, and she hit the trunk of the tree chest-first. The cracking of her ribs was louder than the cracking of the wood under her impact, her legs slamming into the sharp stone