The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [26]
“If they hadn’t tried what they did, would you have tried to let me go, or would you have given me to this Inquisition?” The witch was watching him closely, and something he could not place nagged at him.
“I don’t know,” Manuel said, reserving his lies for those who paid him. “I’d thought about it, of course, thought of little else. I’d like to think so, but we’ll never know, will we?”
“No.” The witch sighed, and then Manuel realized what was bothering him. The first thing he had remembered upon waking was Bernardo’s corpse getting to its feet, but he had dismissed that at once as fancy. But the other shapes in the light of the meager, smoky fire were not boulders nor the walls of the low-roofed cave nor bits of fancy. They were four men, four men whom he could now smell over the cooking meat and the woodsmoke and the loamy scent of the cave. They smelled like old blood and early rot, like sweat and piss and shit, like all the notes subtle and strong that combine to create the perfume of battlefields and slaughterhouses; the unmistakable smell of death. And they were watching him with unblinking eyes, Werner, Bernardo, and the Kristobels, they were watching him from where they sat blocking the only exit to the cave.
The thunder came again, and Manuel slowly backed away from the fire, into the dark recess of the cave. He kept his eyes on the dead men she had brought back to life but soon his sore hands assured him the back of the cavern ended in cold, wet stone and earth, a dead end. She was a fucking witch, not some poor midwife or Jew or madwoman, but a real fucking witch. And he had loosed her.
The Last Apprentice
Awa fell, and then the bandit chief crashed into her back, bones encircling her limp body. Both of her shoulders were dislocated as their plummet was arrested by the interlocking spines of the necromancer’s pack of skeletons that tethered the chief to the near side of the chasm. They swung into the cliff face, breaking Awa’s previously uninjured right ankle, and then they were slowly reeled back up, Awa drooling red from her internal wounds. The loose skeletal arms jammed into cracks in the rock and hauling up the line of their spines quickly rejoined the rest of their bones when Awa and the bandit chief were finally hoisted back to safety.
The snow felt warm on Awa’s cheeks as the bandit chief carried her. He was talking to her with Halim’s voice but her rattled mind could not pick out individual words until she saw the necromancer and Omorose waiting in front of the hut, and then her fear cut through the pain coursing through her, pain as rich and widespread as the blood in her veins.
“Now that I saw coming,” the necromancer said with a smile at Omorose. “The runner runs, just as the fighter fights. How are you feeling, little Awa?”
Awa tried to tell Omorose to do everything she could to live, to tell her mistress how much she loved her, but only more stringy blood leaked between her teeth.
“She destroyed three,” the bandit chief said as he laid Awa down in the snow at the necromancer’s feet. “Got to the far ravine, cut off my hand, then made a jump for the other side when she couldn’t run anymore.”
“A runner and a fighter, eh?” The necromancer looked at Omorose. “I think the fight’s left her, don’t you?”
Omorose looked down at Awa and her twisted mouth began twitching at the corner as she remembered the way her former slave had held her on the worst nights when Omorose could not pretend anymore, the countless times Awa had labored to make Omorose’s shortcomings appear to be her fault instead. The younger girl looked up at her, a strange and frightening smile creasing Awa’s bloody mouth as their eyes met, and Omorose knelt to put her out of her misery. The slave must have seen the knife in her mistress’s hand then, Awa’s eyes widening, and she managed a gurgling cry.
“No!” Awa tried to warn her but then his hand touched the back of Omorose’s neck, the necromancer’s glittering eyes locked with Awa’s. Omorose fell dead in the snow, and Awa began to sob, trying