The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [59]
“He told me there was,” said the corpse. “He instructed me to tell you, if you found me and asked that question. He said that if you take one hundred children, and you kill those one hundred children using the knife he gave you, then your curse will be lifted and he will never trouble you again.”
Awa nodded glumly. “He knew I would find you.”
“He told me you were clever but stupid,” said the concubine.
“Is there any other way to break the curse? Any at all?”
“If there is, I do not know it.”
“Oh.” But Awa did not think long before a different, welcome thought occurred to her, one that shone its light through her darkened spirit and brought blooms of hope to her neglected inner plot. “His book wasn’t on the mantel, it wasn’t there! His book might have a way to take it off!”
“It might,” agreed Gisela’s corpse.
“Did he take it with him? Do you know if he took it with him? I didn’t see it, I didn’t see him take it!”
“He could not take anything with him. He is a creature of aether now, and cannot take such things as are made of more than spirit.”
“He’s hidden it, then, like he hid you!”
“Yes.”
“Where?!” Awa leaned closer and took Gisela’s slippery, fingerless hands in her own cold-cramped palms. “Where has he hidden it?”
“I do not know—”
“Shit!”
“— where it is hidden, but I do know he sent it away with his familiar spirits, demons made of the high mountain winds.”
“Oh,” said Awa, then seized on a discrepancy. “But you said beings of spirit could not take physical items with them!”
“No,” corrected the corpse, “I said that he is a creature of aether now, and so he is and so he cannot move his book, nor otherwise manifest himself beyond the absence of life he has become—he might smother a small bird by settling upon it, but little else is possible until he again dons flesh. His familiars are made of wind, real wind, and as such they can blow the breeze about your hair or swirl the snow around my grave or even, if several muster their strength, take a book from one place and put it somewhere else. I do not know if he intended me to see or not, but these eyes saw his familiars take the book and fly away with it. But I do not know where they have taken it.”
“How will I find it then?!” Awa cried. “It’s gone forever!”
“It has your blood inside it,” said the corpse, arresting the fit Awa was on the verge of suffering. She had not intended it as a question but was not very well going to tell the corpse that. “He took a page of flesh from his back, and prepared it, and when he inscribed the inside of your skin he also added a new page to his book, and wrote upon it using your blood. This is how his art is crafted: your blood on his skin to add a new page to his book, his blood on your skin to bestow his curse. Yet your blood is just that, and if you draw near enough your stolen blood will cry out to you, if you listen. This will help you find the book.”
“Oh!” This news cheered Awa far more than it had any right to. “And if I find the book I can remove the curse!”
“I do not know.”
“But it might!”
“Yes,” said the concubine. “It might.”
“Thank you!” Awa threw her arms around the ice-coated corpse, making Gisela’s spirit squeal faintly. “Thank you thank you!”
Let there be hope, then. It scared her almost more than there being no hope at all, to have such an impossibly small chance, such a mean and tiny scrap of hope, but hope she did. She would find the book, and she would break the curse, and even if he killed her, even if he found another way, even if all were for naught, she would have this delicious warmth, this knowledge that she could choose. She had no options before, she knew that now, that she had been as weak and open to suggestion as the mindless bonemen, but at this moment she had the choice of whether she would wait hopelessly for his return or whether she would work to thwart him. To those spoiled on countless options and fattened on limitless choices such a selection might appear to be no choice at all, but there on the mountaintop Awa wept at the luxury.
“Thank you,