The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [60]
The spirit of Gisela buzzed around her vacant, lolling head, the animated body waiting for another question. None came.
“Gisela.” Awa addressed the spirit as much as the body, and it quieted its droning. “Lie back down in your grave.”
The corpse obeyed her, and as soon as it lay flat in its grave of ice Awa shoved Gisela’s spirit back into her desiccated head. Her putrid eyelids fluttered, and the last thing the restored spirit saw was a dagger plummeting into her eye. The sensation of the skull splintering inward as the blade sunk in delighted Awa, but then she doubled over and gagged, wondering what had happened to her and how she might stop herself from ever again acting so wicked, from ever again taking pleasure in such evil sport.
The concubine had it coming, Awa thought as she wound her way across the glacier back to her hut, the evening sky ablaze around her, and she almost convinced herself she was the only victim atop the mountain. Then she reached her hovel and saw the left wall of her hut, Omorose’s tomb, and burst into tears. That night she soaked the lighter wool in ibex blood but did not eat the creature’s flesh, instead smoking it for later consumption and eating the pile of brown grass she had collected until she threw up again. When the last of the chestnut wood had burned away and the half-smoked meat lay piled outside her door she slept with her back to Omorose’s crypt and hoped for their future together.
The next day the dyed wool dried and she knit by starlight, adopting the necromancer’s nocturnal schedule in preparation of her journey to the world below. Safer to travel at night, he had told her many times, and here at least she believed him. Days later she had several sets of black and rust-red striped leggings, and a coarse black cloak, and a new goatskin tunic, and then it was time to see if Omorose would behave herself.
She would not, although at first she did seem calmer. Then the reason for her lack of aggression became apparent: “Girl, I’m trying very hard to pick up a rock to brain you, but my body won’t listen. What have you done to me?”
Awa had awoken early and brought her mistress outside just before sunset, and as the sun sank between the peaks like the lidless, bloody eye of a dying beast, Awa shook her head, disappointed but, she found, hardly surprised. “He’s cursed me, Omorose, so that the dead cannot harm me.”
“Isn’t that a tragedy,” said Omorose, and she knelt and picked up a rock. Awa watched her closely, and saw the exposed musculature tighten around the stone, Omorose’s entire arm going rigid. She turned and tossed the stone over the cliff. “Poor little ape, protected yet again by her beloved daddy.”
“Don’t,” said Awa, her tongue feeling as fat and stupid as Omorose insisted the rest of her was. “Please, Omorose, don’t. I know what I did to you and—”
“You’re sorry?” Omorose said sarcastically. “Apology accepted, beast, just as soon as you fling yourself off that cliff.”
“I won’t,” Awa said quietly, relieved she had not been asked to do so the first time she had returned Omorose’s soul to its body. She would have, then. Probably.
“Oh well,” said Omorose. “Then why don’t you get on with raping me or whatever you’re going to do?”
“I’m not.” Awa felt the tightness wrap around her throat, as though her mistress were choking her. “I’ll never touch you again. I, I found a way to make it so you’ll be alright, so you can be normal. So we can be even.”
The words sounded so foolish that Awa could not blame Omorose for the incredulous look on her raw, frostburned face. Taking out the ring the necromancer had given her, she offered it to Omorose. The undead horror blinked at it and said, “Am I supposed to be touched that my violator made me a present?”
“I didn’t.” Awa swallowed, resisting the urge to throw it over the cliff and send Omorose hurtling after it. “It’s, it was his. It will make you … normal.”
“Normal?” Omorose plucked the ring from Awa’s palm and slid it on. “You mean not so much rotten meat when