“Oh, you’re doing them such a favor, little filthy. Oh, ho ho,” the lich chortled. “The Tsarevich gave these little crumbs of humanity a real life. He gave them something to believe in, and now you’re going to take it away. He fed them, clothed them—”
Sarah stared at the lich. It had already told her what she needed to know and far too much besides. “Ptolemy,” she said, “keep that thing quiet so it doesn’t give away our position.”
The mummy got her drift. It tightened its hold on the lich until the evil thing’s neck crackled and popped. Its glinting eyes stood out a little further from their encrusted sockets and some of the boils on its cheeks popped open and spilled out a little pinkish fluid. Hopefully Ptolemy had crushed its larynx.
“Alright, I’m going to try again,” Sarah told the mummy. She slipped off the safety of her pistol and ducked back under the pipe. In the shadowy street she would be nearly invisible with the hood of her sweatshirt up.
The lich had explained to her, under certain prodding, that she had arrived too late. The Tsarevich—and Ayaan as his prisoner—had left the refinery behind. He had taken all of his undead minions with him, leaving only the rotting sexless lich as a protector for the living people he had abandoned. She didn’t need to fire a shot now.
Except the living people she’d just saved didn’t seem to see it that way.
“Listen, you’ve all been duped,” she called out, and sidled toward the dubious cover of an enclosed control stand. “He’s been using you—using your bodies, using your souls! You don’t have to believe his lies any more!”
A grenade rolled out of the darkness and Sarah barely had time to get her head down and covered before it exploded, throwing vicious shrapnel all over the street. The pipes and towers rang with a million tiny impacts.
Sarah ducked back under the pipes where Ptolemy waited patiently for her. “It’s not working,” she told him. He touched his painted mouth.
She frowned in confusion, then nodded as realization dawned. She reached into the pocket of her sweatshirt and touched the soapstone.
perhaps speak they english don’t perhaps speak english
He had an excellent point.
Once she’d gotten her composure back she shoved the lich out into the street and ducked out behind him, moving it quickly into a well-lit alley. She shoved her pistol into its back and nearly retched. Where her Makarov had touched its hospital gown yellow fluid welled up and stained the cloth.
“Move,” she told it. The lich raised its hands and shuffled forward. Sarah kept close. The people living in the refinery wouldn’t dare shoot her if they might accidentally hit their overlord. She pushed it forward like an inhuman shield until she’d reached the refinery gates, only to find that someone had preceded her—they were locked tight.
Sarah nearly wet herself. She had no idea what to do next. The Russians, she had no doubt, were far less bewildered. They were probably gathering in the shadows even as she turned in slow circles, looking for them. They were probably setting up some kind of ambush. Her eyes darted back and forth as she looked for cover—she had no chance, she knew, if it came down to a protracted firefight but maybe she could—
Ptolemy came up out of the darkness and grabbed the chain link gates in his big hands. With a sound like linen tearing he strained and heaved until the fencing tore away from its uprights with a wild metallic squeal.
“Mumiyah,” someone said in the darkness. “Mumiyah!” Sarah could hear many feet scurrying away as the Russians nearly stampeded each other trying to escape.
Sarah turned to look at her undead partner as if he’d sprouted horns. What on earth had scared the refinery’s living so badly? She reached into her pocket.
we return should go before go they should return
“Yeah. I guess we should.” She held her gaze on him for a while, then turned and bent to pass under the gap he’d made in the fence.
They made their way into the dark interior of the island without further incident. Sarah slept while the mummy watched their prisoner. In the minutes she lay curled inside a blanket, watching his painted face motionless in the starlight, she wondered what exactly she was accomplishing that he couldn’t have done himself. They had failed to save his mummies—except for one. She imagined that at that point he was probably after vengeance and nothing else. Sarah had no problem using his wrath to help save Ayaan but she had to wonder—was she even helping Ptolemy? Or was she just slowing him down?
Added to what she’d learned from the lich she wasn’t sure if she hadn’t made a terrible mistake. If someone was going to rescue Ayaan, what made her think she was qualified? Who was she trying to kid? She was twenty years old. She’d never lead so much as a squad into combat. Now she had one coward pilot and one insane and vengeful mummy and she had to tell them what to do at every turn, when even she had very little idea what to do next.
In the morning they made their way to the rendez-vous down at an abandoned fishing village. Huddled around a decaying wharf the wrecks of boats stood mute in the water that slapped against their hulls. The helicopter stood in the town square, ready to go at a moment’s notice. They found Osman standing on the pier watching rotten sails flap in the morning wind. He was inspecting the abandoned boats, bending to tear pieces of weathered wood away from ruptured hulls. He nodded when she approached.
“Caught yourself a prize, I see,” he told her, glancing at the lich. Flies had gathered in one corner of its mouth and it twitched unhappily. With its hands bound there was nothing it could do but swallow as many of the insects as it could grab with its ravaged lips. “I’ve seen fresher catches. What are you going to do with it?”
Sarah grimaced. “I don’t know, tie it to a tree and leave it here or... something.” She shrugged. “Look, they’re gone,” she told the pilot, uninterested in his jokes. “At least two days ago. The Tsarevich got what he needed here—this piece of shit wasn’t sure what that might be, but he knew it had something to do with a ghost.”
“A ghost?” Osman winced. “Like your Jack?”
Sarah raised her hands in dismay. “No idea. Look. They’re gone, they’re headed west. Maybe to Europe, maybe farther, the lich wasn’t privy to the exact destination There’s something out there—something the Tsarevich wants, and now he can get it. They loaded up all the ghouls and liches they could fit into an old tanker or something and set sail. At least two days ago. We need to catch them, Osman.”
He rubbed his chin. “Do we?”
“Yes. Look, this lich was left behind to kind of keep an eye on the place but even it had heard about Ayaan. She’s some kind of celebrity in the ghoul world, probably for killing Gary. There’s no telling what they’ll do to her. If she’s still alive it’s probably only because they want to make her suffer as long as possible before they kill her.”
“You know what she would say right now, don’t you? ‘It’s too damn bad.’ You can do what you like, Sarah, but I don’t plan on racing halfway across the world without a little more to go on.” He threw a piece of waterlogged wood out into the harbor, skipping it a couple of times.
Sarah couldn’t believe it. “You’d give up just like that?”
“Yeah, just like that. We gave it a good try. We got here too late. Now I’m going to go back and try my luck with Fathia.” He stood his ground, arms folded. He wasn’t headed for the helicopter but he wasn’t taking her orders, either. “This is a game for grown-ups now. You had a little fun playing the hero, girl, but the world doesn’t have room for that anymore.”
“I’m not a child,” Sarah said, her teeth grinding together.
“At sixteen years old Ayaan shot her first lich. She was a child. She was a smart child.”
Sarah nodded, understanding. He wanted to help her. He just didn’t believe in her ability. He didn’t want to go back to Egypt—and he probably had a soft spot in his heart for Ayaan. But he needed to see what she was made of, first. Exactly what she’d wond
ered herself while she slept the night before and Ptolemy stood watch.
She took out her pistol and moved to stand over the sexless lich where Ptolemy had thrown it on the ground. It looked up at her with eyes that were very, very human. It didn’t fear death, she knew, it would welcome a bullet in its brains, but that only made it harder. She had killed before, she had even shot Mariam in the helicopter but that had been self defense. This was cold blood.
She thought of Ayaan. Ayaan had taught her to act, and not think.
She lined up the shot and squeezed the trigger. Skull fragments danced across the wharf. Gray brain matter oozed from the exit wound and slithered onto the rough wood of the pier.
“Ayaan shot Gary in the head. It didn’t take.” Osman handed Sarah a thick plank of wood. One end was covered in sharp white barnacle shells. She used the plank like a club and smashed the lich’s head into pulp. She lifted her arms again and again until they were sore, bringing the wood down on the diseased flesh as if she were winnowing grain.
“Alright,” Osman said when she was merely spreading the gore around. “Alright, enough. Good. Now.” He jerked the club out of her hands. “Where do you want to go?”
13
Everyone worked on the ship. The Pinega had been rated for ninety crewmen when she was launched and that had been for trained, veteran sailors. The hundred-odd living people on board the ship had their hands full since most of them had never left dry land before. Seasickness, the occasional midnight snack for the liches (everyone knew it was happening, nobody breathed a word) and the ship’s particular problems took their toll and on an average day perhaps two-thirds of the women and men living on the main deck could be accurately described as able-bodied. Every warm body was needed just to keep the boat moving, and everyone knew their place.
They kept the most gruesome and repellent task for Ayaan. She got to carry the hand bucket.
“There are two hundred and six bones in the human body,” a doctor told her, kneeling next to a patient who didn’t so much as flinch as he began to carve. “Twenty-seven of them are in each hand. That’s a quarter of the bones in the body. There are more muscles, more, more…”
“Here,” she told him, and lifted away the dead piece of meat from the patient’s arm. The patient of course was already dead and it had no liquid blood to mop up, just a dry brownish powder that blew off the stern deck in a playful ocean breeze.
“The hand is more complex than any organ in the body, except perhaps the brain. It is evolution’s greatest miracle. And to them… to them it’s almost useless. They lack the fine motor control. These hands might as well be lumps of… of meat.” His eyes, what she could see of them behind his scratched glasses, went very vacant for a moment. Then he leaned forward with a metal rasp and started to sharpen the exposed lengths of ulna and radius. “You’re going to do it, aren’t you?” he asked, in a whisper.
“I’m going to try,” she said. She didn’t whisper. They had powers she lacked, senses she didn’t have. If they were going to overhear her there was nothing she could do about it.
“Find me when you’re ready,” he told her.
She gathered the excised meat from the neat piles the other doctors had made on the open-deck surgery (no need for sterile conditions with these patients). She watched the eyes of the dead men and women who lay stretched out on the deck, looked for the hunger in them. She had to give the Tsarevich some credit—he kept his charges under tight control.
To reach her next stop she had to pass one of the seven hold compartments of the Pinega. There were a couple of reasons to wish she could avoid that part of her route. For one thing there was the ship’s original mission, and the residue of its old cargo that remained. The Pinega had been built by the Soviets to ferry nuclear waste to containment facilities near the north pole. It could hold a thousand tons of solid waste—spent fueld rods, mostly—in two of its holds and eight hundred cubic meters of liquid toxins in the other five. It had been emptied out, of course, but on the first day of the voyage as the living and the dead were herded onboard the lich overseer of the deck had passed around a Geiger counter so they could all see just how little concern the Tsarevich had for their bodily safety. Ayaan had taken away her own lesson from that. The cultists—the faithful—had taken it in stride. If their deaths could be hastened on by service to their master, they didn’t have a problem with that. They thought being dead was just the next phase of existence, and a better one at that. Very few of them were allowed to see what happened in the surgeries at the stern, but Ayaan wondered if even the gore back there would dissuade them. These were true believers and they outnumbered the sane living people onboard considerably. For every doctor horrified at what he was asked to do there were five or six deckhands who scrubbed and scrubbed at the decks long past the limit of human endurance, who would rather scrub than eat just in case the Tsarevich walked by and wanted to see his reflection in the deck plates.
A few like that were painting the superstructure as she passed by. They were covered in grey paint, their faces and hands and torsos daubed with a redolence of toxic chemicals. Their eyes were flat and lifeless in their heads as if they were already practicing the traditional empty stare of the ghouls they hoped to become. They gave the heavy plastic buckets she hauled no more than a passing glance. Ayaan didn’t look at them, didn’t look at the deck ahead of her. She stared out to sea at the ever-changing, never-changing waves and tried not to think about what lay ahead.
She kept her cool even as the hatches she passed by jumped and flexed. She was pretty sure the liches just did that to spook her. The dead onboard, the vast majority of them stacked like driftwood in the ship’s below decks, had to be secured. She could imagine the Tsarevich letting them go, leaving them to their hunger and their instincts. It would be a way for him to conserve psychic energy. Even if he did that, though, he would need to make sure that the hatches could not be opened or forced from below.
Still. As she passed a staircase leading down into gloom she could hear them straining against their confinement. She could feel the deck shake with their need.
Ayaan hurried past.
The buckets in her hands got truly heavy, her arms complained at the weight, anyway, as she moved forward to the main entrance to the superstructure. She paused and set them down, just for a moment, even though she knew it was a mistake. The Least would spot her. He always did.
Ayaan stood about crotch-high to the Least. He was maybe three times as broad as her through the shoulders. He stank of death, of musty, rancid fat and ancient sweat. His face dangled from his skull like a wax mask that slipped down from its wearer’s true features. He had been put in charge of maintaining order on the foredeck.
The Least was one of the Tsarevich’s first experiments in creating a new lich, an underling with the intelligence to command troops. It hadn’t quite taken. When Ayaan ducked into a shadow near the entrance to the above decks quarters he was busy stomping through the chaos of the main foredeck, a maze of winches and cranes and enormous battened hatches where the living had set up their bedrolls and their hammocks and their small tents. Dozens of wispy pillars of smoke rose from the tiny deckhouses where the living prepared their simple food. The Least made sure he got an unwholesome share of everything they made. He had five hundred kilos of bulk to maintain, after all. Ayaan watched him dip one enormous hand into a boiling rice pot and shove the grains in his mouth, the scalding water running down his chin and raising blisters in the roll of fat that ran around his neck like a goiter. She gagged at the thought of eating out of a pot he had touched but she knew she had done so many times.
She shouldn’t have stared. He caught her glance and returned it—with a horrific smile. He knew what she had in her buckets. He would want a taste.
He came stumping toward her on telephone pole-sized legs, his splayed toenails digging into the deck. “To be giving me one bucket, yes,” he said, in Russian. They said the Least had been a gangster
once, a Moscow Mafioso. Just before the Epidemic had hit he’d been shot in the gut and left to die in a meat locker in a dance club kitchen. When the Tsarevich had found him he’d been dead and frozen, and when he thawed out part of his brain had died despite the boy lich’s best efforts.
“This isn’t for you,” she said. He should have known that, and maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t care.
“Don’t waste, don’t waste one drop,” he bellowed, spit rolling out of his mouth. He was hungry alright. “Use it all, honor all, sacred is all.” His eyes were very wide.
If she let even a drop of blood escape her buckets Ayaan would be beaten for her failure. There was no point arguing to the Least’s sense of reason. Her only chance was to outrun him. “Stay back, the Tsarevich gave me my orders,” she shouted. She grabbed up her buckets in fingers that were red with the effort of carrying the weight, fingers that didn’t want to close. “Stay back,” she shouted, and dashed inside the superstructure. A two-story run up a steep metal staircase awaited her. She would make it, she would run faster than the Least. She always had before.
“To giving me,” the Least howled as if someone had stuck him with a straight pin. “You be to giving me!”
At the top of the stairs, her body heaving with the effort, Ayaan ducked into a companionway and kicked the hatch shut behind her. She had made it.
The rest was easy. She passed through the flying bridge where the navigators stood watch, keeping the ship on course. Most of them turned up their noses at her as she passed, not wanting to associate with anyone so uncouth as to pull hand bucket duty. One junior navigator, though, did give her a glance. A girl from a fishing village in Turkiye who had come into the Tsarevich’s service at the same time as Ayaan. As she passed the girl shoved a scrap of paper into her back pocket. Ayaan made no acknowledgement.
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