The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [32]
“I’m jealous of you,” Awa told him as her sword whipped toward his skull.
“Oh?” The echo of metal tolled across the high places as he parried her.
“Foraging down the mountain.” Awa ducked, his sword grazing her sweaty scalp. “With the bonemen.”
“Well, it—” Before he could finish she was on him again, and it was not until she had cracked his shoulder blade and then mixed up the powdered-bone-and-water mortar to fix it that he went on. “Well, it is a change of—”
“What’s this, what’s this?” The necromancer had crept up behind her, his concubine on one arm. “Lollygagging, by the look of it. I trust you to manage yourself and yet here you sit, gossiping away.”
“I hurt his arm.” Awa tried to relax her tight jaw but the rest of her body was not as adept a liar as her tongue. “We were only talking about parrying while I repaired it, not—”
“Hurt him, did you? I suppose that means you’ve learned all you can from the old boy, eh?” The concubine whispered in his ear and the necromancer smiled. Awa knew what was coming next, she knew him well enough to see that, and the best thing would be to deny him the satisfaction of a response. She knew that, but it was so unfair, it was so petty and cruel, it was so—
The shoulder blade she was daubing stayed gripped between her fingers but the rest of the bandit chief fell apart on the stone, his skull bouncing in the dirt to settle in front of the necromancer. Awa ground her teeth and felt her fury slowly begin to cool. She had expected that, but then her tutor put his bare foot on top of the skull and began lifting his other leg, clearly intent on balancing atop the skull while his rotten little girlfriend egged him on.
“Stop it!” Awa shouted. “Please!”
“Oh.” The necromancer hopped off the skull, then hooked his foot under the jaw and adroitly kicked it up into the air, catching it in one hand. Halim’s tongue remained on the ground, coated in dust. “What’s the matter, he can’t feel anything now.”
“You could break him.” Awa felt her fingernails, gnawed to the quick though they were, digging into her palms. “You pull those tricks and his skull lands on a rock, and then what? He’s gone forever.”
“And what a tragedy that would be.” The necromancer rolled his eyes.
“I want to play with him,” said the concubine, the little cords of brown musculature remaining on her face pulling up into a smile. “Don’t you? We could teach her how to get some friction off the bones.”
“Tut-tut,” said the necromancer, leaning down to pick up the dirty tongue. “We’ll need this, then, though I imagine Awa won’t —”
Awa did not. She was already halfway across the glacier, all her recent scabs peeling back as her feet kicked up the ice. She did not cry, and had not in some time, though on occasions like this she dearly wanted to. That night she heard them carrying on for hours, personal sounds made public on the wind, but even after they quieted she could not sleep, tossing in the warm summer night on her pallet of dried boughs and old hide. Few things make one more desperate than insomnia, and when she could bear it no longer Awa began removing the stones from the far wall of her hut.
The draft of cool air that wafted out was reward enough, and she lay down, her back to the small cavern she had opened. She had raised and put down dozens and dozens of the bonemen at her tutor’s instruction but never had she done so unbidden. The thought had lived with her since the day her mistress had died, of course, but Awa feared becoming like the necromancer even more than she feared the man himself. She had almost done it, she had almost done what she had promised herself she would never do, but then they started up again at the necromancer’s hut, the she-cat yowls of the concubine digging into Awa’s once-soft eyes and finally drawing forth the tears.
“Hold me, girl,” said Awa, and Omorose crawled out of her grave, wrapping her frigid limbs around her former slave.
Awa