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By Root 707 0

spirit, to bite that spirit and sever its tie to its body. It was how he had killed Omorose with a brush of his hand, how they could kill anyone or anything not guarded against such an attack. All that she need do was touch her victim, and this vile stowaway was already touching her quite thoroughly. Awa did not even remember her promise to herself never to use that wicked technique, and even if she had the circumstance would surely have allowed for an exception. Her spirit tightened around the interloper and the heat began hissing out like a coal tossed into a snow bank, her pain diminishing along with the invading spirit, and before her tears had dried on her cheeks the spirit was gone, and her discomfort with it save for the mild sting from the concubine’s fingers.

“Well?” he whispered, releasing her wrist as she let out a sigh. “My arts aren’t all so impractical, are they now?”

“What was it?” Awa shook her head and hopped off the table, a new vigor coursing through her. “The spirit that was haunting me, how did it—”

“Haunting you?” the necromancer hooted. “You didn’t have a haunted snatch, Awa, you picked up a case of the rot, and I can imagine where!”

He knew, she realized, all his asides finally sinking in. Awa was halfway to the door when she caught herself, curiosity momentarily trumping her hatred for the man and his laughing concubine. “It was a spirit, I felt it, but a different kind of spirit from others I’ve met. Tiny, invisible if I weren’t looking, and without any body.”

“Maybe not a body we could see,” said the necromancer as he settled down in his chair. “Aren’t you always going on about spirits, and how everything has one? Well there’s your proof. When a wound turns sour and starts leaking pus that’s not because the flesh has died; on the contrary, it’s because new life has settled in the injury. The maladies men ascribe to humoural imbalances are simply creatures men cannot see, beings of spirit but not of flesh. The Great Mortality a century and a half in its own tomb was not divine wrath, it was a proliferation of creatures beyond the ken of men, creatures as mindless as they are dangerous. Some say they were built by demons, some say they are demons, and some say stranger things still. Personally, I think those cocky bastards in the Schwarzwald have something to do with it, a nice little present for we men who so offend them with our very presence.”

“Spirits without bodies …” said Awa, wondering at another reference to men in the Schwarzwald. Usually when the necromancer got himself worked up he would allude to that place, the local lack of Germanic tongues preventing Awa from knowing quite what he was on about but inferring from his references that it was some sort of school populated by thieves and frauds.

“Of course, there’s plenty that do more good than harm, so one has to be careful and only remove the more troublesome spirits. A fellow apprentice of mine became obsessed with removing all the parasitical creatures sharing his body—took out some useful spirits from his guts and next thing you know he stopped being able to digest food properly. Went mad and finally hanged himself when he couldn’t get rid of all the little spirits swarming inside him. We may think we hold dominion over our flesh but we’re actually crawling with uncounted poxes and other riffraff, and it’s best to let them carry on unless they start acting up like the little fellow you caught in your lointrap. Mindless spirits can be more dangerous than sentient ones, mark me—they can’t be reasoned with, for one.”

“I see.” Awa nodded, eager to get back to Omorose since he did not seem to have any more to say on the matter of her paramour. She had been out of commission for far too long and like any addict needed to fall back into the perfection she had found. “Thank you, sir.”

“You need to know these things,” the necromancer said sagaciously, taking the mug of tea his concubine had prepared. Gisela began to speak but he raised his eyebrows and she pitched onto the floor, her taut skin slapping the stone. “Now, since you’ve