Chapter 28
Otto
Pain tears Otto apart. It eats him whole, possesses him completely.
He wishes he could die, then somehow manages to remember that he is already dead.
If he could laugh at the horrific absurdity of it all, he would, but he can’t do anything but lie still as the pain consumes him.
At some point, it wanes, almost becoming manageable, and then it waxes again, dragging him under.
Otto doesn’t know how long he is a slave to the pain in his belly and leg. It feels like centuries, but then time is a funny thing. Blood-like, it can flow at different speeds.
The first thing Otto notices when the pain has receded enough to allow his other senses to seep back into his consciousness is the necromancer’s eyes. They are like two bits of coal burning in their sockets, all orange and yellow.
The necromancer bends over Otto, fingers the wound at the back of his knee with the hand that isn’t holding the skull.
Otto roars with pain, but he daren’t let go of his belly to beat away the necromancer’s hands.
Next, the necromancer ruthlessly moves Otto’s hands away to assess the damage done there.
He clicks his tongue when he sees the wounds.
“Please,” Otto begs, his pathetic scrap of a voice raking his ruined throat raw. “Please just kill me.”
“You are dead already, remember?”
Otto laughs, but only a little bit; it pains both his throat and his belly something awful.
It’s unfair, so insanely unfair, that he should be a walking rotting corpse and yet somehow still be forced to endure pain.
“You bastard. You know what I mean. I want you to release me. Elsebeth cut some important tendons at the back of my knee. I will never walk again, so what use am I to you now?”
The necromancer sighs. “I suppose you are right. I could bind you to a different body, but where am I to get one of those on such a short notice? Time is of the essence now; the longer we stand here, the farther that peasant girl and her companion will take my wife’s skull from me, and there’s no saying what they will do with it when they discover there’s no wish at the end of this journey. ”
Otto swallows. He is frightfully thirsty, which is stupid because his body’s digestive functions have long since ceased to work. “You’re holding your wife’s skull in your hand, aren’t you?” he asks weakly.
“Not at all. How silly of those girls to think they could trick me. I’d know my beloved anywhere simply from the curve of her jaw, the blue opacity of her teeth, the way the wind lifts her hair.
Besides, my wife was missing a tooth. This skull isn’t.
It belongs to another, and as such means nothing to me.
” The necromancer looks at the skull, his eyes cold as wet autumn leaves.
Then, he lets it fall. Before it can hit the ground, he kicks it hard.
It explodes into shards and dust so fine that it passes through the silk mesh and floats for a moment, pale, ghostlike, until it disperses to the point of invisibility.
“You needn’t have done that. She might have been someone else’s beloved,” Otto whispers.
The necromancer bares his teeth at Otto. It’s a grin, but only barely. “You knew this was not my wife’s skull, so tell me, Otto Donatus Kreuzler: Why do you lie for a girl to whom you owe nothing, now that she has so brutally savaged you with her knife?”
Otto swallows again. It’s like swallowing a piece of glass. “Because I don’t want you to hurt her. I don’t want you to hurt anyone. There’s been so much pain and violence already…it has to stop sometime.”
“If I don’t release you, insects, birds, and rats will come for you and eat the flesh off your bones, and once those are picked clean, the wind, the sun, and the rain will scatter and destroy them slowly.
You shall still be conscious then, yet helpless, and all because of Elsebeth and her little knife.
Just a few weeks ago, you would’ve killed her methodically and as slowly as possible for far less. ”
It’s not because of Elsebeth I am like this, but because of you, he thinks but doesn’t say, for if he wants to avoid this grim fate, he must stay on the necromancer’s good side.
“I’m not the man I was a few weeks ago. I no longer want to torture, rape, and murder.
I just…I just want to go home and be with my wife,” Otto says quietly.
Softly, he begins to sob, but the pain in his belly is so atrocious, he can’t keep it up for long.
He wipes at his eyes with his gore-streaked hands.
The necromancer smiles, but there’s no mirth to it, no sly mockery, just a kind of sadness.
“That I can understand. Do not cry; who knows what might happen when I release you? God alone knows all the secrets of the universe. You might fly to your Frieda’s side, and she might know you anywhere, as my wife would know me and I her,” he says.
Otto would like to think so, too.
The necromancer places his fingertip against Otto’s forehead as if he is about to bless him. “You have served me well. Farewell, Otto Donatus Kreuzler.”
Finally, blessedly, there is no more pain then, and no more thoughts.