A tremor of revulsion went through Ayaan’s body. She had considered something so terrible it made her bones ache. She wouldn’t have done it. She told herself she never would.
“We all make mistakes,” Erasmus whispered, and she spun around to glare at him. “It can be so hard.”
Ayaan stormed past him and out to the barnyard. The green phantom stood there waiting for her, his ghouls standing as motionless as statues in a line behind him. No sign remained of the skinless horrors from the barn. The body of the dead wizard had been completely devoured. Only bloodstains remained in the barnyard.
“You did well,” the phantom told her. “I guess you get to live.”
Chapter Nineteen
“Do you feel the power here?” the green phantom asked. His withered face was creased with a beaming fascination. It looked grisly on him but Ayaan got the point. His curiosity was killing him—he really wanted to know what was inside the wizard’s silo.
Ayaan felt less a burning need to know than a profound caution. Smoky, curling tendrils of purplish dark energy licked out from the metal structure. Its metal staves looked scorched as if by a terrible fire. The six hex signs mounted around the silo’s door would burn her flesh if she tried to enter.
Patience, the adolescent daughter of the wizard, came forward. She hadn’t collapsed yet—she was tougher than Ayaan had thought she would be. Maybe she was just glad to have something to do. The girl approached the silo with a bloody knife in her hand. She had just slaughtered a goat while they waited, something that came natural to her from long practice, and now she made cutting motions around each hex sign with her gory blade. One by one they faded, their potent magic fizzling away. “The door is open now,” she said, in the hushed tones Ayaan associated with how men spoke inside a mosque. She started to move aside to let them in but then she looked up at Ayaan and Erasmus. “She was very nice to me,” she told them. Ayaan had no idea who she was talking about. “Please don’t hurt her.”
Ayaan turned and looked at the green phantom. “What’s going on here? What is this thing?”
He shrugged. “It’s a reliquary, I suppose.”
Ayaan shook her head in frustration and approached the door. If it was going to spit lightning or set her soul on fire there was nothing she could do about it. She pulled down on a lever and a bar slid away from the door. It swung open on rusty, squealing hinges.
Inside dust filled the air—no, ash. White, flaking ash that lifted on the few beams of light that filtered in through the slatted walls. Ash covered the floor, a pile of it so deep it came halfway up Ayaan’s ankles. A dry burnt log covered on one side by silver ridges like the skin of an alligator leaned against the far wall. It had a hole dug in the middle of its widest part. At first Ayaan thought someone had carved a human face into the top of the log. She knelt down by it though and saw actual skin, warped and turned to charcoal by incredible heat.
She knelt in the ash and tried to brush away some of the soot and dirt to see the face better but part of the cheek fell away at the first touch. She studied the face in horror and then looked down. What she’d thought was a log was all that remained of a woman’s body. She could see the ribcage sticking through black lumps of burnt flesh, she could trace where the arms and legs would be. Most horribly she saw what must have been done to the woman before she was burnt alive. Someone had opened up her sternum with a saw and pulled out her heart. The hole Ayaan had seen was the gaping cavity where the heart had been.
Erasmus came inside the silo, ash lighting on the ends of his glossy fur. The wound in his own chest took on new meaning to Ayaan. He lead a goat that bleated and kicked as he dragged it inside. The animal must have understood this was a place of death. Maybe it had seen the wizard set it alight, years prior.
“This is going to be a little messy,” Erasmus warned her. She didn’t move. Whatever was about to happen, she wanted to be by the burnt woman’s side. It was a grim duty but Ayaan knew no one else would be there to hold the dead woman’s hand, even metaphorically.
Erasmus tore the goat’s throat out with his claws. He held the animal tight around the neck as it thrashed and its eyes rolled, and then lifted it up so the blood that just fell out of it like water from a punctured water balloon splashed across the burnt woman’s chest. A good half gallon of blood went right into the hole where her heart had been.
When the goat stopped bleeding Erasmus set it down gently in the ash. Slowly it raised its head, its eyes a darker color than before. It rose on wobbly legs and started walking around the silo, looking for meat.
“These old ones, the first ones, they’re all super tough. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of months. Her cells will need to rehydrate, of course, and that’s a lot of gross tissue damage to recover from, but—”
The woman’s face filled out and turned pale in the space between two heartbeats. She reared up and gasped to fill her lungs, then screamed in absolute pain and rage. Her arms came up, fully formed if still black with soot, and she clutched at her cheeks, her forehead, her eyes. She stared at Ayaan, then at Erasmus, then down at her own naked body. Then she disappeared completely.
Ayaan wanted to rub her eyes, she wanted to blink back whatever was obscuring her vision. But no, it was true. The burnt woman had revived and then vanished into thin air.
The green phantom stamped into the silo. “Erasmus!” he shouted. “Where is she?”
The furry lich could only raise his arms in protest. Ayaan wanted to smile to see the two of them so helpless. She closed her own eyes, and listened.
There. A skittering sound, then a quick rhythm of metallic thumps. There was something wrong with the sound. It was less as if she heard it than she had imagined it, or as if someone else in another place was hearing it, not her. Ayaan opened her eyes. A ladder, directly in front of her, lead up into the upper reaches of the silo.
She looked up and saw a hatch rusted shut in the dome at the top. Sighing, Ayaan wrapped her nerveless hands around a rung of the ladder and hauled herself upward. She felt as if she were slipping, as if she would fall back onto the hard packed earth of the silo floor, but she grabbed at the next rung anyway. One after the other after the other. Occasionally she stopped and hooked her arms through the ladder's rungs and tried to listen again, but she heard nothing more.
“What are you doing?” the green phantom demanded, only his cowled head poking into the silo. Ayaan ignored him and kept climbing. If he didn't trust her yet he never would, and she didn't have the energy left to explain.
At the top of the silo a thin seam of metal ran around the base of the dome, perhaps four inches wide. The hatch she’d seen from the bottom stood immediately at the top of the ladder, mounted on this thin ledge. Ayaan grabbed for the lever that worked the hatch and yanked hard at it, putting all her weight into it. With a horrible groan that sounded like the silo was about to collapse around her the hatch slid open, grinding in its tracks, and bright sunlight blasted inside the metal dome.
The blonde woman appeared there as if she’d come in with the light. She stood braced precariously on the thin seam, her pale skin naked to the sunlight, her hair glowing in an unkempt halo around her face. She had a bite mark on her shoulder, the only sign of violence on her, and a black tattoo of a radiant sun on her belly. Her bright form was doubled, though, echoed by her aura—a howling void of dark energy more vibrant and at once more tenuous than any Ayaan had seen before.
“Are you a good lich or a bad lich?” the apparition asked, and Ayaan could only crouch in the silo’s hatch with her mouth open, wondering what was going on. The woman leaned forward, across the dome, and grasped for Ayaan’s outstretched hands.
“Who are you?” Ayaan asked, finally.
“Who aren’t I?” the blonde woman replied with a sad smile. “I was called Julie, once, but I remember nothing about her. I call myself Nilla now.” She shrugged. “I’ve been called worse.”
Ayaan decided to put that line of questioning aside. “W
hat happened to you?”
Nilla looked away for a moment, as if trying to remember. “I was burned to death... but I guess it didn’t take.” She shrugged again. Ayaan thought something was wrong with her, something psychological. Though she supposed having her heart eaten by a wizard and then being burned alive gave her an excuse for a little mental baggage.
“I was headed for New York, I wanted to see Mael. We were discussing the big plan. I stopped wherever I could, wherever people would have me, living or dead. I helped them, if I could, if I felt they... deserved it.” Her eyes went very wide. “I was never a very good judge of character. Lots of people tried to kill me, I was used to that. No one tried to eat me before, though. Do you know what it’s like to see your own heart ripped out? Lucky me, being dead, I didn't need a heart. He might as well have taken my appendix.”
At the bottom of the silo Erasmus called up at them. “Miss, we don’t want to hurt you,” he insisted. “We want to honor you.”
“He thinks that’s true,” Nilla told Ayaan. “I guess we should go down.”
“Wait,” Ayaan said, and grabbed the woman’s shoulder. “I have so many more questions.”
Nilla smiled again, that sad, even heartbreaking smile. “I’ve never been good with questions. You need to have some answers first, before you can be good with questions.” She looked down at her hand and then turned it palm up. A little blob of silvery metal sat there. It looked like it could have been a piece of jewelry but the fire had melted it. “Take this,” Nilla said in a soft whisper. “It used to be in my nose.”
Ayaan nearly dropped it.
“Not like that,” Nilla chided. She touched the side of her nose and showed Ayaan where it was pierced. “It was a nose ring. Sarah will want it.”
Ayaan opened her mouth to speak but Nilla was already climbing back down the ladder. She stayed visible this time. At the bottom Erasmus waited with a handmade quilt he’d probably found in the farmhouse. Nilla wrapped it around herself gratefully. When the green phantom bowed before her she returned the gesture.
“Our master awaits,” the green-robed lich said. “He is the—”
“I know all about your Tsarevich, and what he wants. Mael Mag Och and I spoke of him often. Let’s go make all his dreams come true, shall we?”
Ayaan lead the way back to the truck. While Erasmus danced around their new friend, blathering away like a puppy in heat, she smiled and laughed and genuinely seemed excited about what lay in store. Only when she saw the corpses with their hands and lips removed did she seem to frown, and then only for half a moment. Ayaan imagined she was the only one who saw.
Chapter Twenty
Sarah leaned forward and puked up her guts. The hands in her armpits held her perfectly steady as her body wracked itself over and over again, her lungs and her stomach expelling their contents all over a cobblestone curb. She stared at the mortar between the paving stones, stared with an intensity she couldn’t have mustered normally, until sparkling lights appeared in her vision. With a great braying cough she opened up her whole body and spewed out another gallon of filth.
The mucus running down her face, the tears in her eyes were full of black flecks. Her nose pulsed and ran with a stale reek, an earthy, disgusting stink.
There was more of it, more foreign crap in the hollow parts of her but she lacked the strength to even heave. She sank back against waiting arms that lifted her up into the light. Someone wiped her face with a rough cloth and someone else poured water across her forehead and her eyes.
“Come on, pumpkin, just a little more,” her father said, and Sarah turned her head to the side under his bony fingers. “Just open your mouth, just a little more.”
She couldn’t have done it herself. Something else creeped inside of her, something cold, and pushed. A thick sludge of black and yellow nastiness drained out from between her lips. Then she slept.
Ptolemy stood guard, squatting on the top of a brick wall. When she woke light the color of wine colored his bandages and bounced off his painted face. When he turned to look at her she saw white patches in the death mask. Some of his linen was gone, too, probably devoured by fungus. He looked smaller, as if he’d lost weight. She wondered what he looked like under the bandages.
She remembered suddenly her arm—the compound fracture, the bloody mess that had been all that remained of her right arm. She lifted it now and examined it. Dark bruises wrapped around her elbow and a twinge of pain went up her shoulder when she tried to make a fist. But the skin was unbroken and she could bend her arm just fine.
That injury should have killed her. Any of her injuries should have killed her—up to and including the time she fell and skinned open her chin. When the Epidemic came, when the bodies of the dead filled up the cities and countries of the Earth, every strain of microbe and virus had gone through a population boom. The world was full of horrible infectious little things just waiting for you to get a bad scratch. But here she was. She didn’t feel great, not by a long shot, but she could tell she was on the mend.
Sitting up a little she coughed noisily but unproductively. She saw she was wrapped in thick blankets that were only a little tattered along the edge—had they been taken from one of the houses nearby? She looked around and saw she was in a kind of courtyard. Dead leaves filled its corners and a dry fountain stood at its center, a big cracked concrete bowl decorated with nymphs and cupids and dolphins. Lying on a cloth next to the fountain were a sword, a noose, and a length of fur. The relics, she remembered. The relics of the Celt, whoever that might be.
Ptolemy leaped down from his perch and offered her his hand. As she struggled up to her feet she checked her pockets and found her pistol there, its magazine completely empty. She touched the soapstone scarab.
i death thought sent you sent me thought to my death, he told her. He sounded embarrassed. was but strategy it was but strategy
“Yeah,” she said, “well. Just don’t doubt me again.”
He bowed gallantly. Behind him Gary scuttered over the wall on his six bony legs. She could have talked to him if she wanted—she still had his tooth in her pocket—but she remembered what had happened before and didn’t dare. Her father arrived a few moments later, forced to take the long way round. He emerged through a door in the house behind the courtyard. “Oh, sweetheart, you look so much better,” he said, putting a withered hand on her cheek. She closed her eyes and smiled. It was so good to be back with him, to have him be alive. She refused to question that feeling.
“You saved me, you healed me,” she said, feeling like a toddler, feeling like her dad was the strongest man on earth. “I got too close to the fungus queen. That was supposed to be fatal.”
Dekalb put an arm around her shoulder and lead her through the house. The furniture inside, the fixtures of the rooms meant nothing to her. They passed through the front door and into the street overrun with trees.
“I didn’t know I had it in me,” he said. “Your Egyptian, um, friend came and found me. He said you were dying and I was the only one who could stop it. I didn’t know what he was talking about but then I saw you looking so blue and still and I couldn’t help it, I just picked you up and held onto you and suddenly you started coughing. I guess I did something. It left me so tired, though. I kind of want to just go back to my tower.”
“What about her?” Sarah asked, fear suddenly blooming inside her, cold and sweaty. “What about the one I shot, the, the lich I shot?”
Ptolemy raised one arm and pointed down the street. Sarah saw the building where she had taken refuge. One whole side of its facade had crumbled down into the street. In the exposed innards of the place she saw a tangle of rebar sticking out of half of a retaining wall. A human figure had been impaled on half a dozen spars—clearly the work of someone with superhuman strength. She glanced at Ptolemy and the mummy bowed.
The impaled woman looked nothing at all like the blight demon. She was short, almost as short as Sarah and her skin was barely mottled with fung
us. Her head was missing altogether. Sarah looked down and saw it near the woman’s feet, scorched and silvered. It sat on top of the remains of a campfire.
“He burned it for six hours straight,” her father told her. “That should do it. She wasn’t like Gary. I’m pretty sure.”
Sarah felt weak and sick and feverish but she had to see for herself. She climbed up into the ruined building, whimpering a little every time she put her foot down on a pile of broken bricks and it started to slide away from her. Eventually she reached the skull. She picked it up and slammed it against a block of concrete. It cracked open and inside she found only ashes.
It was about as dead as you could get. It would have to be enough.
Looking at the corpse, of what had been done to sanitize the lich, a cold feeling seeped through her hands, her wrists. Up her forearms. She had something to do. A duty. She had pretended like she was done, that her responsibilities were discharged. She had hidden in fear. Not anymore. She knew what had to be done.
“The Tsarevich isn’t going to like this,” she said, scrambling back down into the street. “I think we just declared war. What happened to her soldiers?”
The soapstone buzzed under her fingers. i scattered chased them chased they scattered
Sarah nodded. “So they probably went back to their master. What about those relics she was after, did you figure out why he wanted them?”
no
Sarah frowned. He could be clear-spoken when he wanted.
He had gathered them up while she was examining the dead lich’s skull. He handed them to her and she studied them. The length of fur was matted and disgusting. The noose looked like it might fall apart at any second. She studied the sword, though, and something about it called to her. It was ancient, truly ancient, and bright green with verdigris. The blade had fused with its scabbard and showed a spot of bronze at its tip, as if someone had used it like a walking stick and repeatedly struck it against hard ground. The hilt was made of twisted cable and fashioned in the shape of a howling warrior. She grasped it with one hand, intending to wave it through the air a few times and get a feel for its balance. Before she could lift it, though—
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