The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [58]
The shriveled cadaver jammed her blackened digits into her mouth and began to chew, faint whines slipping between the sharp teeth and frozen meat and crackling bones as she ate her own fingers. Saffron tears flooded the long-dry riverbeds crossing Gisela’s face, and Awa laughed. Soon her guffaw turned to a dry heave and she waved at her to stop, the necromancer gagging at the sight of what she was making the corpse do. Torturing the defenseless was what he would do, not her. Not her, never her. She was different. Gisela’s spirit might have been giggling or crying, the droning noise obscure and alien.
“Now you speak what you know, and in detail,” Awa said at last. “He marked me, and he intends to steal my body. Why me?”
“The ritual required his intended to slay his flesh, but in such a fashion to free his soul instead of banishing it to where the dead go, to make it something else,” said Gisela’s corpse evenly. “An esoteric and difficult ceremony. He could not leave this place in his own body, and only vessels prepared from youth can master his arts, even with a new spirit. Few children were brought to this place, and of them you were both open to the art and easy to control.”
“I’m not,” said Awa. “I’m not!”
“You were,” said the corpse. “He needed you to murder his prepared body with a certain tool, and if you had not done that then the ritual would have destroyed him utterly. He tricked you into murdering him.”
“So what now?” Awa said after a long pause, only her bonebird returning to her shoulder dispelling the hopeless torpor that strangled her tongue. “Where is he, and when will, when will he return?”
“I do not know where he is,” said the corpse. “He will return in ten years, upon the night that is called the Autumn Solstice. It is then that the curse he put upon you will fade, and then he will return.”
“What curse?” said Awa, genuinely surprised that matters could actually worsen at this juncture.
“The curse that marks you as his intended. No dead may harm you so long as it bides, no dead in all the world. But upon the Solstice it will pass, and he will take your body.”
“And my spirit? What will happen to my spirit?”
“When the curse dissipates your spirit will be naked and vulnerable, and no wards will keep him from it. He will devour it, and any scraps he leaves will be but an extension of his will.”
“Oh.” Awa sat down on the glacier. “Oh.”
So after all she had weathered he would return in a decade, steal her body, and obliterate her soul. She often lusted after an end of consciousness, an absence of memory and pain, but he had convinced her it was not possible, that even were she to have her own skull split he would still find a way to draw back her spirit. That there was a way to achieve that precious oblivion did not bring her comfort, however, only more misery. Things we want often seem sweeter until they become attainable.
“I don’t want him to be happy,” Awa said to herself as much as to Gisela’s corpse. “I want him to be disappointed. If I kill myself, if I have my head crushed, will he be able to find a new body? Will he be able to call back my spirit?”
“I do not know,” said the corpse. “He told me only what he told me. I do know that when he wore his skin he could call back the spirits of the dead that had no bones at all.”
“Oh,” said Awa, and sat some more, her legs and bottom becoming as stiff and cold as her feet. As she ruminated on her unhappy circumstances, she had Gisela’s corpse climb down to the low meadows and retrieve an ibex from its pen, the fingerless horror snapping the animal’s neck and returning with it wrapped around her shoulders. Awa continued to brood, and eventually looked up at the spirit-shrouded