The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [54]
The necromancer’s mouth froze on the last word, his eyes staring blankly at the ceiling, and Awa pulled the sheet over his head. She heard it, his heart, beating with brooding slowness, and she began to count along with it. She knew she had to pull herself together or she would lose count and he would be cross, and she did not want him to be cross. She wondered if she would recognize him as a younger man. She had never tried and—
The little bird clattered its bones against the window, and though she could not see it through the boards covering the portal she knew the sound at once, the mouse bones she had given it whirring against one another as it flapped just under the eaves.
Fifty.
Fifty-one.
Fifty-two.
Fifty-three.
Awa scanned through the haze, peering at the boarded-up window, and that was when she noticed it, hiding on the ceiling. The necromancer’s spirit had somehow exited his living body and floated above it, the wormwood vapors running over but not through it, the wavering bond tying the spirit to his head curling up like smoke from a snuffed candle.
Sixty.
Sixty-one.
Sixty-two.
The bird flew back over the cliffside in her mind, but now it dived down and Awa dived after it, moving too fast, too clumsily, letting herself focus fully on the deadly thought she had kept at bay all through his explanation of the ritual. She knew she had to calm down, knew there was time aplenty if she were methodical and practical. She banged her hip on the table and fell, the smoke finally starting to choke her, and she cried out as she scrambled up, pawing the front of the bear. Somehow she could still hear his heart but had lost it just long enough to terrify herself even more.
Was that seventy or seventy-five?
The door in the bear would not open but she got her fingers into the seam and wrenched it, peeling back a fingernail but springing the catch. She felt about in the dark cavity and it was gone, of course he had removed it, of course he had secreted it somewhere else, of course.
Seventy-five or eighty?
The shelf, the high shelf where he always placed his book—she had seen the chest there when she came in, had seen it but not had time to acknowledge it, and with a sob she pushed past the bear and jumped high, her now-bleeding fingers catching the ledge and bringing the whole rickety shelf crashing down on top of her. She felt the smoke part around her, felt the spirit of the necromancer run itself over her neck in warning of what lay ahead, but there could be no turning back; instead the contact confirmed that for a dozen more heartbeats, at least, he could not return to his flesh to thwart her.
There was too much smoke, the billowing clouds pouring out of the small blaze in the hearth blinding her further even as the firelight was gobbled up, converted into the obfuscating fumes. Then she felt the curl of an ibex horn under her palm and cried out, on her feet and blundering around to find the table, her fingers shaking so hard she could barely loose the clasp keeping the blade in its sheath. His heart was beating faster, a blatant cheat, and then she felt his leg under the cloth and followed it up to the head of the table. A high whining was coming from his spirit, the same noise Omorose’s ghost had made when Awa forced her mistress’s corpse to bury itself, and she made out the shape of his head through the smoke.
One hundred.
Clear as lightning and loud as thunder, she knew it, she felt it, and the spirit did, too, building itself up like a storm cloud, and then they raced for the necromancer’s skull, blade and spirit evenly paced. The cloth over his mouth sucked inward just as the tip of the dagger reached him, the wide blade cracking his left eye