The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [56]
Awa stopped, the snow cutting into her ankles and burning her buried foot a pleasant sensation, a real sensation. She would not do this, because she was alive and being alive meant making decisions, meant choosing instead of simply being. She turned back to the ruins of the hut, her boneman following her. The rest of the skeletons had leaped over the cliff while she was helping the necromancer with his last ritual and so he was the last, just as she was the last apprentice. Except he would go into the ground and not return, and she would persist, alone.
She did not make him dig his own grave but had him lie on the soot-covered granite tabletop in the wreckage of the hut, piling the rocks onto his body in the place where he had died so long ago. She felt his spirit worrying at her arms as she worked, trying to convince her to let him help, or maybe just to let him back into his bones to say goodbye, to thank her. She could not or she might not let him go, and this self-awareness gave her strength even as it sickened her.
When the entire body was buried under the high mound of rocks save for his skull, she addressed his spirit: “I never asked your name because he taught us that names give power, and I never wanted to have power over you. I was a child and so I did not appreciate that this was impossible, that the living and the dead can never be equal, that I always had power over you. I beg that you forgive me for what I considered doing to you, for even thinking of treating you like, like a slave. You are the only friend I have, and I will miss you every day that I live, and if I one day find myself in the same resurrected position that you have suffered, every day after I die. I love you.”
His spirit was pushing even harder then, trying to get back inside its skull, and Awa wondered if she had moved him to change his mind, to desire her companionship more than he desired rest, and so she brought a stone down on his pate as hard as she could before her weakness overpowered her compassion a second time. The skull shattered, ricocheting teeth stinging her arms, and she heard a faint hissing noise as his spirit faded into the air and the rock, but as it went a name impressed itself into her mind: Alvarez.
“Sleep well, Alvarez,” Awa said as she covered his broken skull with rocks, and when the cairn was built she turned to her small collection of possessions and began lugging them to the abandoned shack she had shared with Omorose. She would restore Omorose to her body and see if her mistress’s ire had cooled during her banishment from her flesh, but first she would knit her a gift, a fine pair of new leggings. She had plenty of black wool, and some lighter wool she would dye with ibex blood. Nothing was stopping her from going down to the pastures now, the beasts already penned in their winter enclosures, and she would make a stew that very night, and maybe dine on a little grass in honor of the goat that had given her its hoof.
Then Awa saw her little bonebird flitting over a patch of snow to her left and paused, the spinning wheel hoisted over one shoulder. She reached out to its spirit and called it to her but the bird lit down onto the snow and tapped its beak, as though it were searching for ethereal worms amidst that spectral field of snow. Knowing she had time aplenty, Awa delivered the wheel and wool to her hut and then relocated her bird, which was still hopping in place on the glacier. As she neared it she noticed that she was approaching the thin region of the glacier, the dangerous section shot through with thin ice and deep chasms. She moved slower, not as confident as she once was that the spirit of the glacier could be trusted to tell her when she was going too far.
Awa’s bird had cleared the snow away from Gisela’s face with its wings and Awa grinned, knowing at once what had transpired. The concubine lay in a hole in the ice, the snow packed in tight around her. The powder above her would melt during the days and freeze during the nights to restore the unbroken surface of the