The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [55]
This did not stop her from making sure, and when she could not pry the blade out of the slick, shrouded head she jerked him onto the floor and used the hilt to lift him up and smash him back down until his skull caved in enough for her to free the knife. She knew exactly where his heart hid and there the blade went and out he bled, and, finally, Awa let herself stop. He lay dead, swaddled in what had become his winding sheet, his skull fractured, his heart run through with cold iron, and Awa closed her eyes. She was alone.
The Counsel of Corpses
Awa was not alone. The smoke shifted, billowing waves breaking over her face, and she heard the familiar sound of his laughter. The cackling came from just behind her and, slowly opening her eyes, she turned to see what she had done.
His spirit floated free and unfettered, a smear of bright, oily blackness in the dark smoke, serpentine and long and coiling above her, faint yellow light shining from two holes in its blurry head. She could not breathe as she looked up at it, her head aching from the strain and the fumes, and it looked back at her. He looked back at her.
“I knew you were the one,” he said. “Predictable. Easily manipulated. Clever, but so very stupid. Stay safe, little Awa, stay very safe or your spirit will suffer, and those of your friends as well. Safe.”
They stared at each other, Awa unable to speak, and then he slid across the ceiling, a dozen branching, many-handed arms bursting from his sides and propelling him along, and then he slipped through the crack over the door and was gone. Awa looked down at his corpse, the bloody shroud stuck to her legs, and she began to laugh. It hurt like the time he had stabbed her, each sound that left her lips summoning another ghost of the blade jabbing into her lungs and stomach, and as she laughed she slipped from her knees onto her bottom and kicked at his corpse with her hidden hoof. Of course he wanted this, of course he planned this. Of course.
When she realized the fire in the clogged hearth had spread instead of dying she moved to salvage what she could, but as soon as she stood upright in the burning hut she fainted, the smoke too thick, the night too long. If the bandit chief had not pulled her out of the blaze she would have died, and that prospect had not held much allure in some time. He also rescued the dagger, a leather satchel, the spinning wheel, and the box of wool, but everything else fluttered away on ashen wings as the hut burned to the ground, and Awa returned to the world of the living in the skeletal arms of her only friend.
“Bury me here, and take care to dash my skull before you stack the cairn,” said the bandit chief several days later, after he had nursed her with the little lung meat remaining on the last glacier-preserved corpse in their larder.
“Get out, then,” said Awa, and before he could say another word she pushed his spirit from its body. She scowled at the dim gray shade hovering over his remains as she raised him up as a mindless boneman. The skeleton stood before her, Halim’s unnaturally moist tongue still in place. “You can’t tell me what to do, not after taking me here, after taking us here. You don’t get to rest while he plays some new game with me. No, you’re going to do what I say, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” said the skeleton.
“I bet your spirit’s not too happy about that, is he?” Awa raised her voice, looking past the boneman at his hovering spirit. “Are you!?”
“I do not know,” said the skeleton.
“I bet you don’t,” she said, and whirled away. “You’re with me for as long as I choose. Let’s fetch Omorose.”
Walking over the glacier, Awa’s pace began to flag. She knew exactly what she was doing, and it was terrible, but she could not stop herself. Of course he wanted to be dead; so did she, after all, but if she could not, then