He looked up at the ceiling and brought his hands together in prayer. The stick-fingers of his artificial arm wove around the living fingers of his right hand. “Our Father,” he began, “who art in Heaven, ahallowed be—”
A horrible murderous scream interrupted him. He stopped in mid-prayer and looked down at her, though it was clear to Ayaan that the noise had come from outside.
“Hell’s hinges, it’ll be lunchtime afore I get somethin’ to eat.” He waved at them with his wooden arm and his skinless ghouls filed out of the room to the barnyard. “So you’re not alone, well, I shoulda guessed so much, uh-hum.” It took Ayaan a moment to realize she was being addressed. “Evil comes in threes, don’t it just. The furry fellow, you, and who else? Who else is out there knockin’ at my gate?”
Another scream came. Another—they made Ayaan grit her teeth. One long, extended howl that seemed t come from everywhere at once. Then one of the skinless ghouls came smashing up against the windows outside. His denuded face flattened against the glass and then he slid off, leaving a thin scum of pus against the pane.
“What’s that blurrin’ out there, it moves so fast like a car used to,” Polder said, staring out the window. “And there, a green fellow, now what could that be?”
“Death,” Ayaan said, “for you, anyway.” She lay back on the table and closed her eyes.
The wizard grabbed her leg and shook it painfully. “Now you start talkin’, gal, as I will have none of silence. Who is that, and what does he want? His boys are awful fast.” He grabbed up an iron poker and laid it across the crook of his human arm. “Don’t you go astray now, you mind?” he told her. His smile told her he had meant it as a joke. Throwing open the kitchen door he strode out into the barnyard to do battle with the green phantom.
Before he’d taken three steps an accelerated ghoul leapt to his shoulders and slammed him to the ground. He cried out and tried to raise his wooden arm in self defense, throwing the handless ghoul away like a piece of trash. Another ran at him and he tore its head free of its neck with his wooden fingers. A third ghoul already stood behind him. It raised its doctored arms and jabbed his back over and over again, the sharpened bones moving so fast they shimmered in the air. Blood leaked out of the wizard in great gouts and his energy started to flicker. He shouted and turned, both arms raised in attack.
“Da,” someone said from near Ayaan’s face. She turned to look and saw the interior door ajar again. A skinny little girl, maybe thirteen years old, stood there, her face pocked with acne but her hair the color of corn floss. She looked up at Ayaan with very wide eyes. “My Da,” she said, as if that conveyed a full message on its own.
In the barnyard the handless ghouls were taking Polder’s skinless ghouls to pieces. The wizard shouted for them to press the attack but he was outclassed. He was also bleeding profusely.
“Da!” the little girl shouted, and Polder turned to wave her back. The second his attention faltered he had three more handless corpses on his legs and arms, their lipless mouths sinking long teeth into his skin. He staggered under their weight and then Ayaan couldn’t see him anymore—he had moved out of view. She could hear him screaming, though, and she imagined the little girl could too.
“They’re killing my Da!”
Ayaan nodded solemnly. “I know. But we have to think now. We have to think about what we’re going to do. Are you alone?” That elicited an obedient nod. “It’s just you and your Da?” Another. Crap, Ayaan thought. This wasn’t going to end well. “Do you know how to undo these chains? This is very important.”
The girl ran to the exterior door and looked out. Her face went white and then she stepped back into the kitchen. She took an enormous iron key out from under the kitchen table and made short work of the manacles. Ayaan sat up on the barn door table. “What’s your name?” she asked. She had a duty to this girl.
The girl looked at her dazedly for a while before answering. Visibly she pulled herself back together—someone had trained her in how to speak to company. “I am called Patience, if you please,” the girl said, and did a little curtsey. She smiled sweetly. She would have been trained to smile sweetly. Ayaan knew that training would only get her so far. The girl was going to collapse in tears very soon. She stepped down from the table and took Patience’s hand.
“Well, Patience, it’s very good to meet you. Now. Come with me.” She kicked the door closed so the girl wouldn’t have to look at her father’s body, or what was being done to it. Ayaan took a momentary glance for herself. Very little of Polder’s face remained.
She lead the girl deeper into the house, into a room where the breaking dawn barely lit up an over-stuffed couch and a few simple end tables. Ayaan studied the place looking for exits and ways to fortify the structure. It was no fortress but it had potential. There might be a cellar and probably other places to hide. The hex signs outside would protect the house for a while—at least until the goat blood powering them dried up and flaked off.
Patience flopped down on an ottoman and studied the seam of her little black dress. She found a loose thread and started picking at it. Any second now, Ayaan thought. Any second and the girl would lose her calm.
She had to decide what to do. The battle for the farm was over and the green phantom had won. Ayaan couldn’t let him find Patience. But even if she hid the girl, well, then what? Ayaan couldn’t stay behind to protect her. She couldn’t send anyone else to pick her up and take her to a better place. There was probably plenty of preserved food in the house but it wouldn’t last forever. Eventually Patience would have to come out of the cellar and face the big bad world. She would have no chance out there, not without her father’s magic to protect her. Ayaan hadn’t seen any firearms in the house. Certainly not the kind of weapons the girl would need to survive on her own.
Ayaan could turn the girl over to the green phantom. She could be raised as one of the Tsarevich’s zealots, get a little education, be well fed and brainwashed and turned into one more slave of the dead. She could look forward to the day when she, too, would die and have her hands and lips surgically removed.
There was one other option, of course. Wouldn’t it be better, Ayaan thought, to just put her down?
It could be done so simply, so painlessly. Ayaan could hold the girl against her breast and then just use her power, just a little, to end the girl’s life. Or even better, she could just... just...
Patience was the first living human Ayaan had been alone with since the Tsarevich remade her. The girl’s energy burned inside her hotter than the stove in the kitchen—Ayaan hadn’t really expected that, that it would be so warm or radiant. She felt quite cold, suddenly, quite chilled, and she longed to have a little of that heat inside her. No malice, no threat came attached to that desire. It was the simplest, most wholesome feeling in the world.
“Come here, Patience,” Ayaan said. “I want to hold you in my arms and make everything better.”
The girl slid off the ottoman and onto her feet. She looked down at the carpet but didn’t come any closer. Tears slicked down her cheeks.
“Come here,” Ayaan said. She took a step closer to the girl. “Come here.” She reached out one hand and touched Patience on the elbow. The little girl’s face came up, her eyes tightly shut as if she knew what came next, as if she was bracing for it.
Behind Ayaan a door opened and Erasmus stepped inside. Ayaan could feel his energy behind her, cold and unwanted. “Well, what do we have here?” he asked in a high-pitched, sing-song voice, and held out his arms. The girl ran to him and embraced him like she would a giant teddy bear, her arms tight around him, her sobs buried in his fur.
A tremor of revulsion went through Ayaan’s body. She had come so close but—no. She wouldn’t have done it. She told herself she never would.
She stood up slowly and brushed off her clothes. “We were just talking,” she announced. It sounded false the minute she’d uttered the words.
“We all make
mistakes,” Erasmus whispered, and she glared 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 once again 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.”
19
“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 came forward, her face still wet. She hadn’t collapsed yet—she was tougher than Ayaan had thought she would be. She had agreed to help them with very little encouragement. 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, not dust, 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 sticking to 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 the goat had been around to seen the wizard set the woman 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 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 quart 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. It turned to look at Patience. Ayaan blasted its brain with dark energy and it lay down again, this time for good.
“What exactly was that supposed to accomplish?” she asked.
“We’re bringing her back, of course.” Erasmus sucked at the blood on his furry hand. “These old ones, the first ones, they’re all super tough. You can blow them up, set them on fire—it doesn’t matter, they can always come back. It isn’t easy and I’m told it’s incredibly painful but with time and blood it can be done. 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. Her undead limbs protested immediately. 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 ladders 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.
At the top 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 reflecting 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 w
oman replied with a sad smile. “I was called Julie, once, but I don’t remember much about her. I call myself Nilla now.” She shrugged. “I’ve been called worse.”
Ayaan decided to put that line of questioning aside. “What 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 carrying 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, it didn’t matter. I didn’t need my heart after all. 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 once 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.”
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