Ayaan looked up and saw Cicatrix smiling at her. She was waiting for Ayaan to get a good long look. Ayaan smiled back and dashed to catch up with the scarred woman. Together they entered the bunker. It went a long way back into the hillside and was lit up with naked incandescent bulbs every three meters. Arabic graffiti had faded on the walls but even time had failed to erase it entirely. As they pushed deeper into the bunker Ayaan began to get a very strange feeling. There was a smell in the air, a smell like burnt cake, and she felt as if there must be a large number of people nearby but if so they were preternaturally silent.
Doors opened off the bunker’s main corridor. One of them stood open. Cicatrix lead her through and into a large room, maybe ten meters on a side. The floor was carpeted in dead bodies, each hidden underneath a rough blanket. At the near end of the room a table and chairs had been set up. Standing next to the table the green-robed phantom awaited them. The same lich who captured her in Egypt. Ayaan did her best not to flinch as he turned to look at the two living women. He looked almost more skeletal close up than he had from a distance but his very human eyes kept him from appearing too monstrous. “You, of course, are Ayaan,” he said in English, his voice only slightly accented. He was a European—maybe German or Dutch. “Allow me to introduce myself.”
She waited patiently to hear his name, wondering if she would be expected to shake his dead hand. Then a wave of exhaustion passed over and through her. She felt like she’d been hit by a truck. Another wave enveloped her and she sat down hard in one of the chairs. “I’m sorry, I—” she began but couldn’t finish. She was so. So tired, so. The life was... was draining out of...
In a moment it was over and she looked up, horrified. It felt like she was about to faint.
“I could have killed you then. Just switched you off. You don’t need to know my name, because you will never address me,” the green phantom told her. She realized that she had just felt his power—his gift. Most liches had some kind of special ability, some new sense or talent to compensate for the decay of their bodies. This one could slow down her metabolism from a distance. It occurred to her that his power might also work in the other direction. That he could speed her body’s natural processes up as well. He could make her faster—just as he had made the ghouls in the desert so fast she couldn’t effectively fight them.
“If I want something from you, I’ll take it,” the phantom told her. “I don’t trust you and I never will. He,” and Ayaan knew he meant the Tsarevich, “believes you can be useful to us but he wants you kept on a short leash. Do you understand? You’re like a dog to me. A dog that has to be controlled.”
He moved away from the table, his robe swishing around his ankles, his femur staff clicking on the hard floor. Ayaan stayed seated and waited for him to talk himself out. Men of his type always did, eventually.
“This place is where I work. I have a very simple job: I am supposed to find a ghost.” He glared at her, challenging her to deny the existence of such things. Ayaan had good reason not to so she kept quiet. “I’ve been here for years and so far I’ve had no success whatsoever. Oh, I’ve raised some spirits. I’ve experimented with psychics—with mind readers, with mediums and table rappers and spoon benders of every type, both living and dead, and I’ve even found a few people who had real power. They couldn’t do what I asked them to do, however. They couldn’t find my ghost.”
Ayaan nodded in what she hoped was a pleasant manner. Cicatrix acted like someone who’d heard all this before, many times. She leaned against one wall and lit a cigarette. The mentholated smoke quickly filled the underground room.
“Now, after years of my best ideas not working, my master came up with a plan of his own and we’re going to try it out. We know a very few things about this ghost. We know it used to be a friend of the Tsarevich, at a time when he very much needed a friend. It used to come and talk to him and it taught him many things. Then one day it stopped coming by. We don’t know why, but we do know that our liege lord was quite upset by this. We know the ghost still has many things to teach us. We also know this ghost has a fond spot in his heart for certain types of the undead. Namely, mummies.”
The phantom bent to pull the sheet away from one of the dead bodies on the floor. A bandage-wrapped dead man with a gold mask on his face lay there, his painted features staring vacantly at the ceiling. Iron staples held him to the floor, pinning his arms and legs so he couldn’t move at all except for a spastic kind of wriggling. He looked a great deal like a giant maggot.
The green phantom was standing behind her. She had no memory of him moving across the room. Like everything else she was being shown it was a clear message. He had a pistol in his hand, a cheap Hungarian FEG that would probably blow up in his hand if he tried to shoot her with it. She did her best not to show any fear, though probably fear was what he wanted.
“We have this theory, you see, that if we kill enough mummies the ghost will come back to try to protect them. We’re pretty sure it’s watching us, having a fine old time at our expense. Here.” He shoved the pistol at her, barrel first. “We also have a theory that whoever does the killing will be the target for some pretty heavy karmic retribution.” He pushed the pistol at her again, obviously intending for her to take it.
Surprised was not the word. Ayaan took it and calculated how quickly she could snap off a head shot. With the phantom dead she could easily overpower Cicatrix. As far as she knew they were alone in the bunker—she could escape into the hills and then over to the far side of the island, try to find a boat, make her way back to Port Said.
Or she could recognize that the phantom had just moved five meters across the room in the time it took her to blink. She could get the point of this whole exercise. She might very well think she was “assassin”, the “best with a rifle” as Cicatrix had put it, but in the company of liches she was severely outclassed. Before she could even aim with the pistol he could kill her. Just switch her off, like a light.
She had to stay alive if she ever wanted to see Sarah again.
There was no question as to what the phantom wanted her to do. She rose from the chair and stood over the gold mask of the mummy exposed on the floor. She kicked the mask away from his face with one boot. Underneath hieroglyphics had been painted on his line-wrapped face. No doubt a curse on anyone who disturbed his eternal rest.
Ayaan slipped off the FEG’s safety, lined up her shot, and blew his ancient Egyptian brains all over the room.
11
the lost i cannot bone eater has their names them their faces are lost to me i cannot faces hear their bone eater names
Sarah drew her fingertips away from the soapstone scarab in her pocket. She would worry about Ptolemy’s grief later, once she had found Ayaan. She knelt before the chain link fence and worked at it for a while with a pair of bolt cutters, always keeping one hand on the fence so it wouldn’t rattle. So close, she thought. There had been tragedy already but maybe, just maybe she could actually pull this off—maybe she could actually rescue Ayaan. If the damn mummy would calm down for a minute.
It had taken them six days to track the Tsarevich back to Larnaca on the island of Cyprus. He had been easy enough to follow—Ptolemy could sense his lost kin, even from hundreds of kilometers away. The bunker and its scene of carnage had drawn them inexorably. That had been the easy part. Osman had dropped them at a safe distance away and then flown off in the Mi-8. When Sarah had asked him to come with her he had just laughed. “There’s a reason I learned how to fly this thing,” he explained to her. “When you’re the wheelman, you always get to be in on the getaway.” He agreed to pick them up when they were done and that was the extent of his involvement.
Alone—except for Ptolemy, who didn’t have anything to say—Sarah located the bunker and found her way inside. The lights still worked but the smell of death nearly drove her away.
She still didn’t know what to make of the slaughter up in the hills. Forty-nine mummies dea
d, assassinated methodically with a bullet in each cranium. The wounds were all in the same place, perfectly centered on the foreheads. There should have been a fiftieth mummy: there was a place for it in the concrete bunker, there were even scraps of linen stapled to the floor where it must have been imprisoned. It just wasn’t there. What might have happened to it was anybody’s guess.
Ptolemy had taken the massacre badly, of course. there wombs will never dead be more of dead us, no births never to dead more wombs, he had wailed, and she had felt his loss. He had a point, too. There were only so many mummies in the world and only a small percentage of them had returned from the dead—the vast majority of mummies had their brains spooned out of their heads as part of the mummification ritual. There would never be any more of them, either. The exact recipe for creating one of their kind was lost to the ages. They might well be immortal but when one of them died their total population shrank for good.
Inside the fence she kept low. It was well past midnight and anybody human inside the refinery complex should be asleep. The undead stayed up late, though, and she couldn’t afford to be seen. Ptolemy slipped under the wire behind her with an inhuman grace, his painted face a mask of composure. He could at least still function to the extent of following her around—hopefully he could fight, too. If not she was probably screwed.
“Stay low—we’re going to slip in between those two big pipes there,” Ayaan told him. He could hear her just fine, even when she wasn’t touching the soapstone heart scarab. Together they crab-walked through the darkness and ducked under a pipe as thick as a tree trunk. Electric light burned in the narrow alley beyond the pipe, something Sarah hadn’t seen in years. It flooded the way with brilliant illumination. There was nowhere to hide in that light, no shadow to exploit.
Sarah breathed out through her mouth and closed her eyes. She looked for the dark energy of the undead. If no one was looking maybe they could just slip by. She found nothing, extended her perception and tried again. There—a few dozen meters away—she caught the golden radiance of a living human, the closest animate creature. Fast asleep, too, judging by the vibrations of its aura. Okay.
She signaled Ptolemy and then dashed across the lighted alley into the shadows beyond. More living people—all of them asleep—lay above her, tucked into sleeping bags on a catwalk. There seemed to be no real resistance to her invasion inside the refinery. Did they think one chain-link fence was enough? She supposed if you had an army of the undead to back you up then perimeter security didn’t have to be your main focus.
“Come on,” she said, and touched the soapstone to make sure Ptolemy was still with her.
they rot will did perish and they rot for what perish they did, he said. Well, it was the right spirit, anyway.
A large wooden structure, clearly built by the Tsarevich and not part of the original refinery, stood at the end of a road before her. Mold spotted the wood but there didn’t appear to be any guards stationed inside. She could vaguely sense some dark energy ahead of her but she decided to risk it. Ducking inside the shack she pushed a curtain away from a door and stepped into a large enclosed space.
Clear plastic sheeting hung down in the middle of the room, dividing it in half. Electronic equipment filled most of the far half—radar screens, several television sets, medical equipment. High-wattage light bulbs hung from the ceiling and blasted any shadows out of the corners. On the near side of the curtain stood some old, mildew-damaged furniture and an antique silver microphone on a tall stand.
Sarah stepped up to the microphone. She had only skimpy memories of how such things worked. She had only been eight years old when the Epidemic hit, after all, and electricity had been a commodity rarer than jewels in her life. She must have seen a movie at some point, however, or even a television show in which someone tested a microphone like that by tapping it. Almost reflexively she reached up with one finger and touched the microphone’s windscreen.
A dull roaring sound echoed around the wooden shack, a high-pitched ringing following close on its heels. Sarah ducked as if undead birds were cawing for her flesh. She looked up and saw speakers mounted in the room’s four ceiling corners.
“You shouldn’t be here yet. You haven’t been cleaned properly.”
Sarah’s heart lurched. A dead thing—a lich, one of the Tsarevich’s creations—had emerged from behind the piles of electronics in the far half of the room. Its greenish face loomed up against the plastic, the curtain draping across its dead features. Sarah had never seen a human body so badly decayed. Boils and sores had replaced most of its skin, while its hair hung in sparse clumps leaving plenty of rotten scalp exposed. Its eyes looked like they’d been boiled too long, its teeth were brown and broken. She couldn’t even tell what sex it had been in life. It wore a crisp green hospital gown and latex gloves and it looked at her as if it were studying a germ under a microscope.
“Filthy little child. Not one of ours, no, you’re not one of ours at all. You’re looking for something, looking, no, looking for some one. You won’t find her, not here.” Its voice was barely human, rough around the edges, husky, wheezing.
Sarah shook her head. “You don’t know what I—”
“Filthy, you’ve been hiding in dusty unclean places, you’ve been hiding for years in the desert and you shower what, once a week? If you’re lucky. There’s filth on you. I can see it under your nails, I can see it in your hair.” The lich leered at her. “Sarah, you need a bath. Thirty-two million microbes on every square inch of you, chewing away happily, twenty-four seven on your dead skin cells. Imagine what they’d make of an aged slice of beef like me.”
“How did you—”
The lich tilted its head to one side. “Know your name? How did I know your name? There’s always a consolation prize. I’m not one of his special ones, no, I can’t bring flowers to the desert, I can’t kill you from here with my mind, no, but I have my uses.” It scratched at its upper lip with one latex-covered finger, popping some blisters there. “You’ll need a good disinfecting, Sarah. All those razor bumps on your head, that pimple on your chin—infections, all of them, did you know that? Nasty little colonies of germs. Take your clothes off. They’ll need to be incinerated. You just need to be parboiled a bit, get the nastiness off you.”
Sarah knew a threat when she heard one. She pulled her Makarov MP out of her pocket and slipped the safety off. “I don’t think so, asshole. I think—”
“You think you can kill me from there and you’re right, you can. One shot to the head.” The lich pushed against the plastic curtain, moved a step closer to her. Despite herself Sarah took a step back. “Why don’t you? Why don’t you kill me right now? I won’t stop you, I won’t even try. It’s this skin.” The lich ran the knuckles of one hand across its leprous cheek. “I’m not one of the special ones. I wasn’t brought back quite right. They tell you all about life eternal, you know, they tell you your body is good forever but they can’t stop it. They can’t stop the rot, you can’t stop the rot no matter what you do. There’s not enough bleach in the world. Now. Clothes off. Or shoot me in the head. I don’t care either way.”
Ptolemy swooped out from behind Sarah—he moved faster, nearly as fast as one of the accelerated ghouls that got Ayaan—and grabbed up the plastic sheet in both hands. He tore it off the rings holding it to the ceiling and thrust it away. The mummy grabbed the lich and wrestled it around into a headlock, its face peering up at Sarah, its rotten eyes wobbling in their sockets. It smiled broadly.
“That’s the way, big boy. Come on. Squeeze me harder. You think I want to live forever in a rotten old shell like this?”
“Wait,” Sarah told Ptolemy. “You’d just be doing it a favor.” She stepped closer and put the safety back on her pistol. “We need information. We need to know where Ayaan is being kept. You can read my mind, you know who I’m talking about.”
“Oh, I know indeed, but you don’t think I’d give up that kind of dirt for nothing, do y
ou? Let me have a little taste, first. Let me chew on one of your fingers.”
Sarah grimaced and looked at the mummy. His painted face didn’t offer any inspiration. She had an idea of her own, but it wasn’t exactly the kind of cautious, well-thought-out plan that Ayaan would have come up with.
What the hell. “Hold him down, hold his head down,” she told the mummy, and Ptolemy obliged. Scowling she stuck a finger in her mouth, licked it a couple of times. She held it up to the light, caught a glint off the glob of saliva there, and jabbed it into the lich’s rotting ear. Its waxy skin split under the pressure and she felt thick, viscous fluid swell up around her fingernail, but she knew the lich was more afraid of her than she was of it. “How many germs in a gram of human spit?” she asked, but the lich was already screaming.
12
Sarah tied the dead thing’s hands with a length of electrical cord. Ptolemy kept the lich in a sleeper hold as she lead the two of them carefully out of the shack and through the streets and passages of the refinery. “Hello,” she shouted, and around her the refinery woke up with sparkling gold energy. There were no other liches in the area, her prisoner had assured her of that much. There were no undead soldiers—just living humans, left behind when the Tsarevich decamped.
Not every victory had to come at the end of a hard struggle, she decided.
“It’s alright, come out! You’ve been liberated,” she shouted as bleary faces looked down at her from the catwalks. The Russians looked confused and bewildered, mostly.
A rifle shot rang out and Sarah rolled under a massive pipe. Ptolemy pulled their captive into the partial cover. Sarah was the only one breathing, the only heart beating in that little space but she made up for the other two. “I guess they didn’t want to be liberated,” she said.
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