It took them about thirty minutes to get back on the move. The unconscious woman wasn’t so much of an issue, especially at first. At first, it was the debate about what to do with the dead woman that slowed them down. The killer. Rather, the failed killer. Rose would have put good money on it not being her first time.
“You don’t know that,” said Emrys, the water of his voice now flat and sad.
“Of course I do. You don’t learn to brandish a sword to make cookies.”
Emrys looked at her flatly for a moment. “She could have been anyone.”
“Right, except that she’s a liar for sure. We know she’s a liar. Unless you found a kid running around that I missed.”
Emrys looked down and away. “I think we should take her with us.”
Rose tried not to sigh, but it was no good, she’d already done it. “Look, it’s the dead one or the not dead one. Seems like an easy choice to me.”
His gut wanted to argue, but the bit between the ears knew better. He was too smart not to see it. But he sat for a minute and tried to think his way around it anyway. Eventually he said, “We at least have to bury her.”
“What? Why? She tried to kill me!” Emrys looked at her flatly. “Okay, she tried to kill that other lady.” He shrugged. “Maybe, but even she doesn’t deserve an afterlife that begins with fleeing from hungry spirits with no place to hide.”
“Come on, you can’t believe that shit.” He didn’t respond for a long moment. He looked about and moved to sit in the shade. Opened a water flask, and offered it to Rose. She took it because she hadn’t noticed until then how thirsty the brief fight and subsequent panic had made her. Even a little fighting for your life was great exercise.
“I would like to explain to you why it is so important that we tend to the dead. It will not take long, which is well because we do not have long.”
Rose was about to object, but she was still thirsty, but she made a ‘go on’ gesture and took another long drink. Emrys nodded. He collected his thoughts. If he’d had a podium and a wee sheaf of papers for notes he could not have looked more like he was about to give a lecture. She wondered how often he’d done that. Was he the sort of magic student that gave lectures to other magic students? What would that be like?
“We accept that you are not only your body.” He very obviously did not look in the direction of the woman. “When you die, something is lost. That something is, for lack of a better term, your mind. Your essence.”
“Your soul, you mean?”
Emrys started. Clearly the other magic kiddies didn’t interrupt him. “I dislike that term, but yes. The second thing we accept is that there is a place in this world where the invisible things live. Minds without bodies, as it were.”
“Do we just accept that?” Emrys looked at her with an exhausted expression and then from her to the wall of stones and then back to her.
“Okay, fine, I get it”
“When people die, it is to that place they go. And if they die like this, here, in the middle of nowhere, they have no protection. In a larger city we’d have a cemetery with silver and water and iron to keep them safe on the other side, but here … We do what we can.”
Rose had actually known that city cemeteries had silver and stuff, though the little cemetery from her town had been a short stone wall and some wrought iron bars. The only silver she’d seen as a kid was coating a fancy crest at the town hall.
“So, what, we dig her a hole and she gets a hole on the other side to hang out in? Who builds it there?”
“We do. There aren’t two sides, Rose, just two different ways of existing. The spirits I summon aren’t somewhere else. I just help them express themselves physically here.” Rose wasn’t sure she liked that idea very much.
“What, so they watch me pee?”
Emrys didn’t answer. “And so this explains why it is important that we bury this woman. Perhaps she meant us harm, but I will not kill her and then also condemn her mind to torment or consumption.”
“What, there’s shit that eats minds?!”
“That is what I was taught.” Rose wasn’t too hard to convince after that, though she thought it was a little long winded.
“Okay, but we still have to search the body.” Emrys looked affronted.
“You want to despoil the corpse?”
“No, just her stuff. Look, I’m just saying her mind can’t eat the food she might have brought with her, but we can. No sense in letting it go to waste. Besides, maybe there’s some indication of why they were fighting.”
Was it that easy? It was not. Emrys pushed back for a bit, but eventually she won by reminding him that if he said no, she’d just do it anyway while he was summoning some great spirit or other.
Was she hiding anything? Was she ever! She had a whole fuck off golden crown! It had emeralds on it and little blue thingies that Rose could not have named if her life depended on it. The inside of the band also had little tiny stones in it and two of them were still glowing a little. Emrys looked at it through his summoning and then, with an understated shrug said, “I admit, it is very unlikely that was hers by rights.”
And then the ground before him started to writhe and shift like water. Rose pushed herself back by reflex. Slowly, like some sort of spider with too many legs, the ground began to resolve itself and not only took shape, but took a shape that Rose had never even thought of, let alone seen. Spiders had, what, 8 or ten legs or something? This was ALL legs. It was almost as tall as Rose’s head and as long as her bed back home. She started to prepare to blast the thing back down when it slunk off to the left, past her. Rose looked from it to Emrys …. who was smirking at her! “You shit! Was that you?!”
“I did not think you would wish to dig a hole and then move a body. This saves the time that I spent explaining the need.” But he was still smirking, that shit.
Rose narrowed her eyes. Now she was smirking. He looked confused. “What?”
“Nothing.” Rose turned herself around and moved toward the unconscious woman. He’d probably notice the hole in his shirt soon enough.
The dirt spider monstrosity, which Rose did NOT want to spend too long thinking about or looking at, picked up the body and moved her into the hole that it had made when it got up. It was gentler than she would have expected. She noticed that Emrys was no longer giving it orders. “So is that why the conjuring or whatever took so long? You were like giving it a long list of instructions?”
“Not exactly. I was negotiating. If I have time, I prefer to explain to the spirit what I want and let it make its own choices. That is a more honest communication for …. well, for a lot of reasons.” He didn’t elaborate. So Rose watched as the creature laid the body in the hole and then built a cairn of stones around her. When that was complete, it slowly and carefully picked up the unconscious woman and laid her across the armrests, with her bum landing in Rose’s lap. “Good thing I went to the bathroom already, huh?”
Emrys winced. “Sorry. I suppose I’m not used to -” He stopped himself. Rose was used to that. “I’m very sorry . Let me know when you need to go and I’ll …. do whatever I can to help, I suppose.”
“Bet you didn’t think you’d be saying THAT when you got up this morning, huh?”
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