A curtain flicked open in one of the doors of the place and a woman stepped out into the street. She would have been beautiful, a collection of long angular limbs, high breasts, perfectly chiseled features. Someone had hurt her badly, though. Her skin was covered everywhere with identical thin red scars that disappeared down her cleavage and into the back of her halter top. They showed on her finely-turned legs and her muscular arms, even her face, even the curve of her shaved head was covered in the tiny cuts. Her body was a map of torture—prolonged, methodical, unkind. Her eyes showed a deep, cold intelligence that refused to let Ayaan see her as a victim, though. With a bad shudder Ayaan realized what that stare meant. The injured woman wanted Ayaan to know that it had been her decision, that she had chosen to be cut to ribbons.
“Vasya,” she said, “this is her from Egypt, da? Which Semyon Iurevich said was coming.”
“Konyechno,” Vassily said, nodding eagerly. He was staring at the scarred woman as if he’d never seen a living female before. With disgust Ayaan saw real lust in his eyes. “He said to bring her.”
The scarred woman nodded. “This far, no farther. Our Lord sees her even now, is close enough.”
“Do you want me to do a little pirouette, so you can see my backside too?” Ayaan asked, surprising them all.
The scarred woman stepped closer. She smelled of expensive moisturizers and lotions. She had diamonds in her ear lobes. “They say you killed one American koschei.” The Russian word for “lich”. “They say you’re assassin, best one with a rifle.”
Damn. The one thing Ayaan had been counting on was anonymity. She hadn’t personally killed Gary but she’d been part of his death. If the Tsarevich knew about that... well, he would keep her under close observation. He wasn’t stupid.
“Take her to showplace, with others,” the scarred woman said, dismissing Vassily. The young man took Ayaan’s arm and she let him guide her away. At least she’d learned something. They didn’t want people getting past the mushroom-lined street. The fortification there spoke volumes. There had to be something behind it, behind the scarred woman. Ayaan figured that must be where the Tsarevich lived. She filed the fact away for future use.
Chapter Nine
Lined up in rows the prisoners filed into the small amphitheater at the center of the refinery and plunked themselves down on the hard ground. The prisoners were seated in the round, leaving only a narrow aisle down to an impromptu stage. There were no seats or benches, just a conical depression with a wide metal drain in its center. An enamel bath tub stood near the drain, full of what looked like clean water, clearly part of the pageant about to unfurl. Would the Tsarevich come out and baptise each of them, maybe wash their feet?
Ayaan scanned the faces of her fellow captives, looking for something—not anger, no, it was the wrong time for that. She was looking for intelligence, resolve, will. She was looking for people who could help her escape. As she studied the middle-aged women and young boys and old men and veteran soldiers with poorly-treated wounds she found little to inspire her. Most of the gathered people looked a little scared, a lot confused, with maybe a trace of hope dashed in for measure.
It was that last, the hope, that made her despair. It looked like the others had been treated to the same act she got—the kindly guide leading them on a tour of what must look like a paradise on earth. To many of these people the idea of a safe place where the dead were kept at bay and where there was a little something to eat had long ago faded from possibility. They had been hiding, hiding for years in fallout shelters or hardened public buildings, eating when and what they could, resorting to whatever it took to stay alive—Ayaan knew that many of them could tell her what human flesh tasted like. They had been cold and hungry and alone for over a decade. When the Tsarevich’s troops dug them up out of their holes it must have felt like inevitable doom descending. What little fight or spark of anger left to them had been shaken out on the long, horrible journey in the cages. Now they were brought to this safe, clean place and told lies about apple trees. Their brains no longer knew how to process bullshit.
In other words the Tsarevich had them right where he wanted them. The show he provided was a master stroke and even Ayaan had to admit its brilliance.
There were no light displays, no music. Just a man shuffling down the aisle, his body wrapped in a shapeless burlap robe. He moved slowly, deliberately, and Ayaan wondered what was wrong with him. He took his time and showed no response to the inquisitive calls of the audience. When he reached the center and stepped onto the drain every eye was focused on him though no word had yet been spoken.
After a pregnant pause the man lifted shaking hands to his head and twitched back the cowl that had obscured his features. The audience screamed or gasped or recoiled in horror—it was a ghoul standing before them. The flesh of his face had been eaten away, either literally or just eroded by time. His eyeballs were huge and staring, his nose nothing more than a dark cavity in the middle of his head. His cracked yellow teeth curved into something approaching a smile. And then he began to cough. Long, painful paroxysms as air flooded into his motionless lungs. When it came back out of him it sounded like words.
This dead man could talk.
“My... name is... Kolya...” he creaked. His eyes rolled around the audience, trying to make eye contact. They were very blue. “Kolenka,” he stuttered out, “Kolenka Timofeovich Lavachenko. I was... mechanic for... agriculture implementation... in Ukraine farms... I repair and oil combines and, and tractors... now I serve him... in life eternal. Is real.”
A puppet. Ayaan knew that the dead man wasn’t speaking of his own volition, that the Tsarevich had to be somewhere nearby, controlling this corpse, pushing air down its throat, plucking its vocal cords like the strings of a guitar. Gary had done something similar years prior. He’d made a crowd of dead people speak with one voice, one outpouring of hatred. She frowned, thinking this was in very poor taste, and looked around the audience again.
They were enrapt. Leaning forward, propping their faces in their hands, their eyes were wide. Some of their mouths had fallen open.
“Soul is... still in body, after our death. Is remains. As you can... see.”
A woman wearing a headcloth and a peasant dress broke down in tears, the scant moisture running down the canyons of her wrinkled face. A boy near her covered his mouth with one hand and looked around. When his eyes met Ayaan’s she read there what was going on.
Hope. The bastard Tsarevich had given them all just a little bit of hope. Enough that they could let themselves believe. He was offering them a solution to the central problem of the age, and they, by the looks of them, were seriously considering buying in.
“I live... forever... I feel no pain. You see this, is real. You serve... him too and reward... is yours. For everlasting. You will see.” The dead man raised his bony arms to beckon to them, to beg them to come into the fold. To live forever with no pain.
“Blasphemy!”
Ayaan spun around and saw one of the prisoners had risen to his feet. A big Turkish man with a mole on his chin and a mustache so thick and bristly it looked like he’d glued horse hair to his face. He had a tiny book in his hand, a leather-bound book with gilt edges that had to be a Koran. “Blasphemy!” he shrieked again. He was speaking broken Russian, just like the animated corpse. “God made man in his image, this is to mock the Creator!”
A pair of living men carrying rifles came running down the aisle and grabbed at the Turk, hitting him savagely in the face. They couldn’t stop him from shouting even as they dragged him down toward the stage, toward the bath tub standing near the drain.
“‘Allah is the Guardian, and He gives life to the dead, and He has power over all things!’ Allah! Not this imposter wizard!”
He ducked under the arm of one of the guards, still shouting chapter and verse, and shoved the dead man across the stage. The ghoul didn’t even look confused, he just stood there with his arms out and open wide.
“Here, listen, all of you, to the word of the Prophet: ... Most certainly I will bid them so that they shall alter Allah's creation; and whoever takes the Shaitan for a guardian rather than Allah he indeed shall suffer a manifest loss!”
The guards seized the Turk again, each of them getting an arm and dragging them behind his back. The Koran fell to the drain, its pages askew. Without any preamble the guards frog-marched the Turk over to the bath tub and shoved his face down into the clear water.
Ayaan hugged herself. If she protested or rebelled now she knew she would simply join him down there where foaming water was already slopping into the drain. The Turk kicked wildly and fought his captors but he couldn’t breathe water like a fish. His spasmodic movements grew disorganized, then weak, then stopped altogether. Ayaan saw the efficiency in this method of execution. The Turk’s body was preserved largely intact with no bullet holes or broken bones. The guards released him once he stopped writhing and slowly, painfully, he got to his feet. His eyes were bloodshot and water streamed from his mustache, slicked it down across his mouth.
There was silence in the amphitheater as he looked down, studied his hands. As his body shuddered and water fell from him. He didn’t move for a very long time.
He stepped forward, clearly dead, and looked out across the crowd, making eye contact. He opened his mouth and vomited out a great quantity of water into the drain. Then, choking on the words just a little, he began to speak.
“I am called Emre Destan. I... was a baker... in Turkiye, in Tarsus. Now I... I serve the Tsarevich. I serve him in eternal life.”
Ayaan looked at the spectators again but to her surprise she saw there was no change. They still wanted to believe—they still did believe. The bath tub, the sudden execution, hadn’t changed their minds at all. Why would it? That was the way their world worked. But here there was more, a suggestion, a promise that they could live, that they could survive in their own bodies. That they could meet this new world in their old flesh and still be spared.
The first ghoul, the Ukrainian, smiled warmly for the audience. “Is real... you see,” he said again, and again.
Chapter Ten
“Was no accident, of course. We target you. You’re quite celebrity famous in some circles.” The scarred woman palmed the wheel and threw the Hummer H-2 into second gear to get up a rugged hill. “We were in neighborhood anyway.” The Tsarevich had all the gasoline he could ever want. No one else was using it.
In the passenger seat Ayaan grabbed a handhold mounted above the glove compartment and tried not to bounce around too violently as the big vehicle rumbled up a goat track. She still wasn’t sure what was going on. She had been sleeping in a hammock in a part of the refinery reserved for new recruits when the scarred woman had woken her by calling her name. Dawn hadn’t broken when they left the compound to head up into the dusty hills. “Do you have a name, or is that part of the big mystery?” Ayaan asked.
“They call me Cicatrix. I am very close with Tsarevich. I could be good friend to you, do you understand? Us two ladies, we could be friends. Or maybe you want to kill me, hmm? Maybe I will always be enemy to you, well, that is okay also. That can also be made to use. Now is time to make up your mind.”
Ayaan grasped a little of what was happening, then. She was being given the option of serving the Tsarevich alive or serving him undead. This unscheduled joyride up into the mountains was some kind of test. Either she would prove herself to the lich of liches or she would go face down in a bath tub. If she chose the later option she would stand up a minute later and proclaim that she served the Tsarevich in eternal life. She remembered her decision when she’d been locked in a cage in darkness and fear. She remembered that she wanted to stay alive as long as possible so that maybe she could eventually meet all of her commitments, avenge all of her ghosts. “I want to be your friend, obviously. Who do I have to fuck?”
Cicatrix—if that was her real name—laughed happily. “Around here,” she said, looking over at her new friend with a crooked smile, “our kicks are never so simple.”
She wheeled the car around to a stop with a plume of dust that rose up around the windows and obscured the view. From the back seat Cicatrix grabbed a sheer, see-through violet coat lined with fox fur and struggled into it. The fur danced around her bald head like a replacement mane when she jumped down from the Hummer’s footboard. Clearly the coat wasn’t meant to keep her warm. Even up in the hills with a meager breeze feathering over her skin Ayaan was warm enough to start sweating the moment she stepped down from the car.
Cicatrix lead her between two lines of semi-permanent tents toward a concrete bunker half sunk into the grassy hill-side. Whoever had lived in the tents was long gone—the wind had torn holes in their fabric and some of their stakes were coming up. Ayaan looked in through the flap of one tent and was mystified by what she saw: a card table surrounded by folding chairs, the table’s top covered by dozens of Ouija boards. A deck of cards lay scattered on the floor, some water-stained and others bleached to blankness by the sun. They weren’t playing cards, though, but endless repetitions of the same five symbols, a cross, a circle, a star, a square and three wavy lines.
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 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 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, eventu
ally.
“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.
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