“Oh.” Something inside her liquefied and drained away. It was—it had been—a kind of relief, and now it was gone. She understood that when she had heard Jack wanted to talk her subconscious had assumed it was to tell her that she’d done all that she could, that she’d been very brave but now it was over. She would have welcomed that, even if it did mean Ayaan would have died. But it wasn’t over, it couldn’t be yet. Sarah looked away from him and changed the subject. “So it’s true, all that religion stuff? There’s an afterlife?”
“You could say that. Like you could say that a book still goes on even after you’re done reading it and you’ve put it on the shelf. All the words are still there.”
“That’s… interesting,” she said.
“Fucking fascinating. Now shut up and listen to me. I don’t want to have to stay in this body any longer than I have to.”
He looked out over the waves, drew a deep breath. “The one consolation for being dead—the only possible consolation—is that you hear things. Dead people love to gossip, just like the living. It’s all they have to do. If you’re selective with who you listen to you can actually learn something useful, sometimes. I happen to have met somebody who works for our enemy. The Tsarevich, I’m told, is planning something big. He’s been working on it for years—maybe since the beginning. I get the feeling this is his unlife’s work. He’s been busy at it, collecting things he needs.”
“Things?” Sarah asked.
“People, mostly. People like Ayaan or all those mummies. There’s at least one more person he needs, somebody very special and he’ll stop at nothing to find her, or at least a reasonable facsimile. He’s been making liches at a furious rate, killing most of them because they didn’t have powers or they didn’t have the right powers. He’s been collecting old bits of machinery, too, and documents the Soviets left behind. He took five tons of documents out of a cave in Siberia last year. Whatever he found there made him think he needed to go to Egypt. It told him what to do with the mummies. It must have told him what to do next, to, because now he’s moving fast, with a purpose. He’s moving west. Toward the Source. Do you understand where this is going?”
“I think so,” she tried, though she really didn’t.
“It means that once he has this last person that he needs, he’ll be ready to act. It means the stakes are higher now. You want to save Ayaan, fine, and if Ptolemy wants revenge well so be it. But you need to know the Russian bastard has his own agenda, and I can guarantee you it isn’t good. Ayaan plays into his hand somehow so he won’t give her up easily. You’re going to need help. Find yourself a couple of atom bombs if you can, raise an army if you need to.”
“I don’t know how—”
“Then learn. I gave you your gift for a reason. Use it, now. You’ve got to find things out. You have to learn a lot between now and the end of this.”
“Learn things?”
“Yeah. And some of them are going to make you cry. I’d go do it for you but, well. Since I’m just a disembodied consciousness cut loose in the void, I figure you’re going to have to do the legwork. Understand?”
“Yeah.” This time she thought she did understand. She’d just grabbed the shitty end of the stick. Sarah poured herself a glass of water. Her mouth had gone very dry.
“Okay. So I’ll try to find out more, give you a better idea of what you’re up against as we get closer. For now I’m going to let this body go. Once I’m out you know what to do.”
Jack rocked back and forth a few times and let his torso crash forward onto the deck. Sarah looked down at the knobby back of its neck, the places where the skin of its back had been nibbled away. It turned its ruined face up toward her and its jaws clacked shut. Clearly Jack was gone. She picked up the pistol Magna had left for her and got to work.
18
Bobbing before her the Least’s face looked like a huge bag of skin dangling in folds from his tiny skull, the eyeballs floating inside, the teeth lost in the great wet flapping curtain of his mouth. He tried to smile when she opened her eyes. It looked more like an exposed muscle jerking spasmodically.
“Mine, now,” he said, his voice dribbling out of him like syrup. “My blood, my meat, my bones.” He reached out one hand, the fingers swollen and torn like hot dogs cooked too long in a microwave, and touched her breasts, pushed them around, smeared them across her chest. There was no sex in his eyes. Just hunger.
“If you eat me,” she said, “at least I won’t end up a ghoul.”
It was the closest thing she could manage to real defiance. It was also a fond wish.
Ayaan’s clothes had been changed. She wore a white sleeveless t-shirt and a pair of drawstring pants. Surgical scrubs—most of the Tsarevich’s army, both living and dead, wore the same. They were cheaper and more abundant than real uniforms. Her feet were bare. Her hands weren’t tied, which surprised her a little. She supposed the green phantom could put her back to sleep if she tried to get away.
“Where are my clothes?” she asked, figuring the Least would either answer her or eat her. Either way she would have one less thing to worry about.
It was Cicatrix who replied, however. “We had them to burn. You got little too close to Lady Amanita so they went to mildew.”
Ayaan looked up and saw a small crowd made up of living zealots and most of the liches had gathered around to watch her die. The werewolf, the lipless wonder, the green phantom were there. Amanita was nowhere to be found but the Tsarevich himself stood in a place of honor, directly behind the Least. His pale skin and hair, his dark enameled armor held her gaze, made her stare. She figured it was probably another projection. He didn’t seem the type to take the risk of being near an unbound prisoner even when she had no weapons but her bare hands.
“Mine,” the Least said, his mouth chewing on the word like a horse chewing cud.
“Yes, very soon now,” the green phantom crowed. He looked like he could barely contain his excitement. He waved his arms around and everyone moved back, clearing a wide space on the deck leaving Ayaan and the Least alone in the middle. Ayaan’s heart sank. She knew exactly what came next.
“Your highness,” the green phantom said, and bowed in the Tsarevich’s direction. “Ladies, gentlemen, creatures out of perdition, and loyal drones. I give you the event you’ve all been waiting for. Hark back with me to the days of most ancient Rome, to the thrills, the spills, the kills of the Coliseum. To the day of the gladiator, who lived—and died—by the pleasure of his Emperor. To the days when blood was spilled, when bodies were butchered, when lives were thrown away all for one brief round of applause. The greatest show on this earth! Shall we try to regain some of that glory? Shall we celebrate the ritual of death once more? Shall we begin?”
There was a roar of agreement. Ayaan remembered what Cicatrix had told her, once upon a time. “Our kicks are never so simple.” Apparently she’d been incorrect. This was the simplest kind of entertainment there was, and one of the oldest. A battle to the death. Public execution made public sport.
The Least outweighed her by a factor of five to one. He was a lot stronger and she could only kill him by destroying his brain. He only needed to snap her neck or cut her with his ragged giant fingernails until she bled out. She couldn’t outlast him either—the undead never got tired, never needed to rest. The good news was that he was an idiot, a slow idiot.
She really, really, really wished she still had her AK-47.
Wishing didn’t make things happen, though. She needed to get her head on straight. Rubbing her hands together to get her blood pumping she fell into a fighter’s crouch, her center of gravity low to the ground, her knees unlocked. She prepared herself for his first attack. It would come hard and as fast as he could make it, she knew. He didn’t have the brains to try anything fancy.
“Ooh, I think she’s in the mood, folks,” the green phantom announced, and the zealots all laughed. She was pretty sure most of them didn’t speak English but if
they had enough faith it didn’t matter. “But there’s one more thing, one thing she didn’t count on.”
The crowd parted behind him and someone stepped slowly out onto the deck with what looked like a very painful gait. Not surprising. It was a ghoul, a shirtless dead man, and he had been impaled on something huge and sharp. It had a handle on one end, a curved grip big enough for the Least to hold. It was a chainsaw—a chainsaw nearly as long as Ayaan was tall.
The Least grabbed the handle and pulled it free in a red gout of decomposing flesh and dried up blood. Ayaan swore in the Prophet’s name. What perverse pleasure they took, these liches, in distorting the human frame. The shirtless ghoul existed for one purpose only: to be a walking scabbard.
Ayaan didn’t have time for blasphemies, though. She needed to focus on the weapon. Hand weapons ought to be useless to the undead, even to liches. They couldn’t muster the motor skills to slash or lunge properly. It seemed that the Tsarevich’s armorers had considered that possibility and found for the Least a weapon that required only a minimum of finesse. A cord dangled from the end of the handle. The Least pulled on it and the chainsaw roared with the noise of a gasoline engine starting up.
“Good luck,” the green phantom said, sneering at her. Then it began.
19
The chainsaw came for her with a scream and raised sparks from the deck plates, gouging a bright silver wound in the fresh paint. Ayaan stepped aside, tried to circle around the Least. She ducked as the chainsaw bounced off the deck and back into the air, then lunged forward and slammed both fists against the Least’s knee.
Nothing. She might have punched Jell-o for the same effect. The Least’s enormous body was covered in a thick layer of fat that absorbed all the energy she put into her swing.
While she was absorbing that information the lich wound up for another pass. The audience went wild as he whirled the chainsaw over his head and brought it down in a swinging arc that missed Ayaan’s chest by centimeters. She staggered back, away from the howling metal—she could feel heat coming off the blade. Too close, much too close for comfort. She jumped back, tried to get away. The chainsaw bit down again, light glaring off its chain. She pivoted on one foot, tried to slip under the attack—and pain exploded all down her arm.
Ayaan dropped to the deck, grabbing her arm high up near the shoulder, horrified. Had he gotten a vein, an artery? If he’d cut too deep, if he’d cut open a major blood vessel she would bleed to death in minutes. She had to know, had to assess the wound but she didn’t have a moment’s respite. The whining blade kept flashing down, left, right, center and all she could do was roll around on the deck.
The Least came at her again, looming over her, moving in for the kill. Ayaan struggled up into a crouch and ducked between his legs. Shrieking in confusion he swung the chainsaw around, tracking her, failing to watch his swing. As the blade flew around it cut right into the throat of one of the onlookers—a living cultist, a thirtyish man with a hairless chin and thick rimless glasses. Blood flashed across the deck, stained everything as he went down in convulsions and horrible liquid grunting noises. Screams went up from the audience, screams of terror from one side, screams of bloodlust from the other.
Ayaan didn’t waste the diversion. Head down she bulled into the crowd, shoving some zealots aside, jumping at others as they shied away from her. Finally she had a chance to check her arm and her stomach went weightless for a moment as she brushed blood away from her wound. It wasn’t fatal—a lot more than just a scratch but the bleeding had mostly stopped on its own.
The Least shouted “Mine!” and plowed right into the crowd after her, his chainsaw held high to avoid any more accidents. She kept her head down and snaked through the bodies, shaking off the hands that grabbed at her, punching, slapping, clawing anyone who tried to get too close. She was looking for something, anything she could use as a weapon. There—on the deck—a smoldering cookfire. A pot of beans simmered in the coals. Her hands screamed in agony as she grabbed the hot metal pot but she ignored the pain. The Least came at her through the crowd, lunging forward, and she let him have it right in the face. Beans splattered his wobbling chins, boiling water splashed up his nose, his mouth, his eyes. His hands went reflexively to his face, to try to scrape the pain away. The chainsaw drifted, forgotten, the tip of the blade bouncing up and down. It dropped to the deck with an endless clattering.
In a second—in less than a second—the lich would recover himself. He didn’t feel pain the way a living person did, would hardly notice the burns on his face and chest. Ayaan didn’t have any opportunity to think. All she could do was act.
Using both hands she picked up the chainsaw—she could lift it, if she got her center of gravity under it, if she heaved with her back and her knees and all the muscles in her arms—and sliced the Least right in half. The chainsaw slid through his flesh like so much hamburger. It bucked when it hit his spine but she pushed, shoved, grunted her way through until his torso fell away from his abdomen and both big nasty chunks of meat hit the deck.
The Least howled in pain for real, then, but only once. He couldn’t seem to catch his breath for another scream. The noise of the chainsaw chugging and gasping and singing as it cut through empty air was the only sound.
Nothing happened for a long, long time. Long enough for Ayaan to hear her own heart beating wildly. Long enough to shift the weight of the chainsaw onto her hip.
She had won, she supposed. She had beaten the Least. He wasn’t going to get up, not from that wound, so it was over. She had saved herself.
A voice—her own voice—her mind’s voice—was screaming in the background:
Who’s next?
Time broke down into its component parts. Ayaan’s body moved through space. Her mind reeled at a very different speed. The crowd didn’t move at all.
The green phantom stood no more than three meters away, leaning on his staff. His eyes were on the Least. Ayaan couldn’t determine which half he was looking at.
If she could take him down. If she could kill the green phantom. Her brain looked at it as a chess problem. If you could capture a bishop by sacrificing a pawn, then losing the pawn didn’t hurt at all. They would shoot her, they would keelhaul her, they would crush her but if she could cut down the green phantom it would mean the end of speeding ghouls. It was his power alone that drove those madly whizzing horrors. More than that: the green phantom was the Tsarevich’s right hand man. His most important general. If. If. If.
She lunged forward. A hand with fingers like bloated sausages closed around her ankle, pulled her foot back down to the deck. In the midst of rising horror she looked down. The Least had her in a death grip.
“Mine,” he mewled, like a dying kitten.
Rage pulsed through her body, she could feel the heat of it pumping through her capillaries. She raised the chainsaw in one savage motion and brought it down right between the Least’s eyes. His head liquefied as the metal teeth ground through bone and brain tissue like a flaming knife through rotten cheese.
They hit her then, the zealots, cultists large and small falling on her like a rain of bodies. Someone kicked and smashed at her wrist until she let go of the chainsaw. It became hard to breathe and her vision dimmed. Time stopped altogether.
20
They found trace of the Tsarevich’s ship a week out of Gibraltar, in the middle of the Atlantic. Osman had turned to Sarah and asked what she wanted to do—storm the bigger ship in the middle of the ocean or wait to see where it made landfall? She chose land.
Crossing the Atlantic nearly killed them a dozen times. The waves grew taller than the tug and when storms shot across their bows the water rose, and rose, and threatened to capsize the little boat. Osman got them through, with skill and the creativity born of self-preservation, but it was a close thing.
They followed the Tsarevich long after they ran out of food. Ptolemy took the lion’s share of the steering after that. Sarah and Osman spent a lot
of time asleep. Eventually they saw seagulls again. Landfall turned out to be half a world away from where she started. A new continent, a new hemisphere, a place where they measured distances in miles, not kilometers.
For most of a day they hung back, keeping the Tsarevich in radar range but out of sight just over the horizon. He was looking for something. His ship hugged the coast line but cast back and forth as if her pilot were trying to remember where to put in to land. They passed north past a jungle, a riotous, overgrown beach where grass grew three meters tall. They passed dead villages and towns and resorts like empty tin cans strewn along the sand. Still they headed vaguely north, past a sandy spit that ran for miles, studded with the ruins of houses, crowned with an enormous, dark lighthouse. Finally the larger ship came to a halt and Osman touched his controls, locked his wheel, cut the tug’s throttle. The Tsarevich’s ship had put in at Asbury Park, in New Jersey.
“You know we’re only about sixty kilometers from—” Osman began.
She grabbed the chart away from him. “Yeah. I know.” Sixty kilometers made about forty-five miles from New York City. She could read a map.
New York was where her father had died. He’d been born there, too. He had fled it as a teenager, come back to it as a man and saved a lot of people and then he died. Sarah knew something about dealing with other peoples’ ghosts. She knew to stay away from them, if she could.
The tug boat stood at anchor in the water a kilometer out on the ocean swells, far enough not to be noticed if they kept quiet, close enough to watch the Tsarevich’s ship through Ayaan’s old field glasses. They waited for darkness to fall. A nearly perfectly straight boardwalk confronted them, a linear extrusion of American decay. The buildings on the shore, an endless line of restaurants and gift shops and unrecognizable brick piles stood weathered and old in the twilight, the color of sandstone mesas in some desert eroded by memories, by secrets she didn’t share. The windows were all broken out, blank, dark. Some of the buildings had come down—lightning, rain, wind, who knew what had toppled them. Maybe the roots of the trees had choked the wide streets, maybe over a decade the root systems of so many trees could break down the foundation stones of pleasure palaces and arcades. Soot and smoke damage darkened the countenances of most of the structures that remained standing.
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