Ayaan opened her mouth to speak but Nilla was already climbing back down the ladder. She stayed visible this time. At the bottom Erasmus waited with a handmade quilt he’d probably found in the farmhouse. Nilla wrapped it around herself gratefully. When the green phantom bowed before her she returned the gesture.
“Our master awaits,” the green-robed lich said. “He is the—”
“I know all about your Tsarevich, and what he wants. Mael Mag Och and I spoke of him often. Let’s go make all his dreams come true, shall we?”
Ayaan lead the way back to the truck. While Erasmus danced around their new friend, blathering away like a puppy in heat, she smiled and laughed and genuinely seemed excited about what lay in store. Only when she saw the corpses with their hands and lips removed did she seem to frown, and then only for half a moment. Ayaan imagined she was the only one who saw.
20
Sarah leaned forward and puked up her guts. The hands in her armpits held her perfectly steady as her body wracked itself over and over again, her lungs and her stomach expelling their contents all over a cobblestone curb. She stared at the mortar between the paving stones, stared with an intensity she couldn’t have mustered normally, until sparkling lights appeared in her vision. With a great braying cough she opened up her whole body and spewed out another measure of filth.
The mucus running down her face, the tears in her eyes were full of black flecks. Her nose pulsed and ran with a stale reek, an earthy, disgusting stink.
There was more of it, more foreign crap in the hollow parts of her but she lacked the strength to even heave. She sank back against waiting arms that lifted her up into the light. Someone wiped her face with a rough cloth and someone else poured water across her forehead and her eyes.
“Come on, pumpkin, just a little more,” her father said, and Sarah turned her head to the side under his bony fingers. “Just open your mouth, just a little more.”
She couldn’t have done it herself. Something else crept inside of her, something cold, and pushed. A thick sludge of black and yellow nastiness drained out from between her lips. Then she slept.
Ptolemy stood guard, squatting on the top of a brick wall. When she woke light the color of wine colored his bandages and bounced off his painted face. When he turned to look at her she saw white patches in the death mask. Some of his linen was gone, too, probably devoured by fungus. He looked smaller, as if he’d lost weight. She wondered what he looked like under the bandages.
She remembered suddenly her arm—the compound fracture, the bloody mess that had been all that remained of her right arm. She lifted it now and examined it. Dark bruises wrapped around her elbow and a twinge of pain went up her shoulder when she tried to make a fist. But the skin was unbroken and she could bend her arm just fine.
That injury should have killed her. Any of her injuries should have killed her—up to and including the time she fell and skinned open her chin. When the Epidemic came, when the bodies of the dead filled up the cities and countries of the Earth, every strain of microbe and virus had gone through a population boom. The world was full of horrible infectious little things just waiting for you to get a bad scratch. She had lived most of her life deathly afraid of thorns and hornet stings and anything that could break her skin—any of them could have been her death. Now she’d been torn apart and put back together again. But here she was. She didn’t feel great, not by a long shot, but she could tell she wasn’t going to die.
Sitting up a little she coughed noisily but unproductively. She saw she was wrapped in thick blankets that were only a little tattered along the edge—had they been taken from one of the houses nearby? She looked around and saw she was in a kind of courtyard. Dead leaves filled its corners and a dry fountain stood at its center, a big cracked concrete bowl decorated with nymphs and cupids and dolphins. Lying on a cloth next to the fountain were a sword, a noose, and a length of fur. The relics, she remembered. The relics of the Celt, whoever that might be.
Ptolemy leaped down from his perch and offered her his hand. As she struggled up to her feet she checked her pockets and found her pistol there, its magazine completely empty. She touched the soapstone scarab.
i death thought sent you sent me thought to my death, he told her. He sounded embarrassed. was but strategy it was but strategy
“Yeah,” she said, “well. Just don’t doubt me again.” Guilt bit her hard but she kept her face calm.
He bowed gallantly. Behind him Gary scuttered over the wall on his six bony legs. She could have talked to him if she wanted—she still had his tooth in her pocket—but she remembered what had happened before and didn’t dare. Her father arrived a few moments later, forced to take the long way round. He emerged through a door in the house behind the courtyard. “Oh, sweetheart, you look so much better,” he said, putting a withered hand on her cheek. She closed her eyes and smiled. It was so good to be back with him, to have him be alive. She refused to question that feeling.
“You saved me, you healed me,” she said, feeling like a toddler, feeling like her dad was the strongest man on earth. “I got too close to the fungus queen. That was supposed to be fatal.”
Dekalb put an arm around her shoulder and lead her through the house. The furniture inside, the fixtures of the rooms meant nothing to her. They passed through the front door and into a street overrun with trees.
“I didn’t know I had it in me,” he said. “Your Egyptian, um, friend came and found me. He said you were dying and I was the only one who could stop it. I didn’t know what he was talking about but then I saw you looking so blue and still and I couldn’t help it, I just picked you up and held onto you and suddenly you started coughing. I guess I did something. It left me so tired, though. I kind of want to just go back to my tower.”
“What about her?” Sarah asked, fear suddenly blooming inside her, cold and sweaty. “What about the one I shot, the, the lich I shot?”
Ptolemy raised one arm and pointed down the street. Sarah saw the building where she had taken refuge. One whole side of its facade had crumbled down into the street. In the exposed innards of the place she saw a tangle of rebar sticking out of half of a retaining wall. A human figure had been impaled on half a dozen spars—clearly the work of someone with superhuman strength. She glanced at Ptolemy and the mummy bowed.
The impaled woman looked nothing at all like the blight demon. She was short, almost as short as Sarah and her skin was barely mottled with fungus. Her head was missing altogether. Sarah looked down and saw it near the woman’s feet, scorched and silvered. It sat on top of the remains of a campfire.
“He burned it for six hours straight,” her father told her. “That should do it. She wasn’t like Gary. At least, I’m pretty sure.”
Sarah felt weak and sick and feverish but she had to see for herself. She climbed up into the ruined building, whimpering a little every time she put her foot down on a pile of broken bricks and it started to slide away from her. Eventually she reached the skull. She picked it up and slammed it against a block of concrete. It cracked open and inside she found only ashes.
It was about as dead as you could get. It would have to be enough.
Looking at the corpse, at what had been done to sanitize the lich, a cold feeling seeped through her hands, her wrists. Up her forearms. She had something to do. A duty. She had pretended like she was done, that her responsibilities were discharged. She had hidden in fear. Not anymore. She knew what had to be done.
“The Tsarevich isn’t going to like this,” she said, scrambling back down into the street. “I think we just declared war. What happened to her soldiers?”
The soapstone buzzed under her fingers. i scattered chased them chased they scattered
Sarah nodded. “So they probably went back to their master. What about those relics she was after, did you figure out why he wanted them?”
no
Sarah frowned. He could be clear-spoken when he wanted.
He had gathered them up while she was examining the dead lich’s skull. He handed them to her and she studied them. The length of fur was matted and disgusting. The noose looked like it might fall apart at any second. She studied the sword, though, and something about it called to her. It was ancient, truly ancient, and bright green with verdigris. The blade had fused with its scabbard so thoroughly it didn’t even rattle when she shook it. A spot of bronze glinted at its tip, as if someone had used it like a walking stick and repeatedly struck it against hard ground until the patina wore off. The hilt was made of twisted cable and fashioned in the shape of a howling warrior. She grasped it with one hand, intending to wave it through the air a few times and get a feel for its balance. Before she could lift it, though—
—dare you, I’ve given you a command! You will do as I say, and you’ll do it now, lass, because there is one fucking lot more riding on this than you think. I—
The voice in her head made her want to drop the sword, made her want to cover her ears it was so loud. It made her teeth shake. When it stopped she felt like someone was looking right into her head, like whoever it was who belonged to the sword had noticed her intrusion, had become aware that she could hear him.
Sarah, he said. Dearie, you’re not supposed to be here. Not yet.
She recognized the voice right away. Which was funny—always when she communicated with the dead like this she heard their voices as her own, her own inner voice as if she were just thinking to herself. This voice was no different. Yet from its anger and its condescending tone she knew exactly who it must be. Or at least who it had always claimed to be.
“Hi, Jack,” she replied. Angry vibrations buzzed up through the metal and stung her hand. She let go of the sword. It clattered on the street. Her hand buzzed and shook—she had to grab her wrist to make it stop. It felt like she’d been polluted by bad energy, but the feeling faded once she was rid of the relic. She turned to her father. “Whose sword is this?” she demanded. “Did it belong to Jack before he became a ghost?”
Dekalb’s eyes clouded over. It was a lot of memories to process at once, evidently. “Jack? No... no, he never had a sword. And Jack’s no ghost, sweetheart.”
“What?” she asked. She was still connecting the dots in her head.
“Listen, I knew Jack pretty well. We worked together, fought together. He even killed me, after all. But now he’s just another ghoul. He was chained to a wall uptown from here the last I saw of him, with a broken neck, unable to move or walk or hunt. He was as brainless as any of them. Jack was never the type to become a ghost, anyway. He would have erased himself from the network before he let that happen.”
“I never questioned him... I never doubted he was exactly who he said he was. God, I am such a moron. Listen,” Sarah said. “I have the ability to talk to—to ghosts, and ghouls, and dead people who can’t speak for themselves, but only if I have something really important to them. Like Gary’s tooth or Ptolemy’s heart scarab. Who does this sword belong to? It was somebody the Tsarevich wanted to talk to, they called him, what was it—the Celt?” She glanced at Ptolemy, who nodded in agreement.
“There was this one guy,” her father told her. “He was a ghost, sure. Gary knew him better than I did but he was from the Orkney Islands, up in Scotland. He was a Druid.” Dekalb picked up the sword and looked at it, then showed it to Gary. The scuttling little skull-bug jumped up and down on his six pointy little feet in excitement. “Gary says yes, this was his sword. His name was Mael something, I remember now. He helped me at the end, he talked to the mummies on my behalf. Mael Mag Och. Why, sweety? What does he have to do with anything?”
“Well, he’s lied to me, for a start. He’s lied to me for years. He told me he was somebody else. He pretended to be Jack, in fact.”
Dekalb shook his head in confusion. “You can do what?”
She was too angry to repeat herself. “This Druid brought me here—he’s been playing me for a fool. Who knows what else he set up?” She frowned at the green sword in her father’s hand. “Right now, I am willing to believe,” she told him, “that Mael Mag Och has been playing with us all, like checkers on a board.”
The skull-bug did a little dance it was so excited.
“Yeah,” Dekalb said, “Gary says that sounds exactly like Mael.”
Part 3
1
The green phantom smiled, his withered features pulling back from his skull. “Are you comfortable? Is the refreshment to your liking?”
They had found clothes for their blonde guest, a white lace dress with voluminous sleeves and a pair of flat leather shoes that looked comfortable. Nilla leaned back on her divan and lifted her snifter in silent toast. It could have been tomato juice in the glass but Ayaan doubted it. The green phantom bowed deeply, leaning on his femur staff, and moved back to one corner of the room. On her own stool Ayaan crossed her legs and wondered how long this was going to take.
They were all—with the exception of Amanita, who was still out on assignment—gathered inside of MAD-O-RAMA, where the Tsarevich was due to make an appearance at any moment. Erasmus stood behind her in a stiff posture, not allowed to sit down because he had nearly compromised the mission. He was going to have to apologize. Ayaan had been given a huge overstuffed arm chair, a little moldy but meant as a place of honor. Semyon Iurevich perched on a three-legged chair near the back, his eyes very wide as if he expected to witness something monumental and didn’t want to blink in case he missed it. The fiftieth mummy stood holding the brain in the jar. Nilla made a point of not looking at it. Cicatrix was with her master, the two of them hidden inside his pretzel car throne which was still turned to the wall.
Without preamble the Tsarevich’s image appeared in the center of the room, facing them. He bowed deeply in Nilla’s direction and spoke in fractured English—the only language Nilla had. “My lady. What honor you give me. I have sought you for years now, to only glory you. How kind of you is to come. May I introduce myself, I am Adrik Pavlovich Padchenko, who some too kindly call Tsarevich.”
“Enchanted to meet you,” Nilla replied. She looked sincere enough. “I’m nobody.”
The boy lich smiled broadly as if she’d said the most amusing thing he’d ever heard. Then he turned and faced his generals. “With this nobody and her gracious presence, we are made ready. Most of you know what means this. We have worked so long, so hard. Tomorrow we begin!” With the exception of Ayaan, the mummy and the brain, the entire room cheered.
“There is perhaps one, though, who knows not why we celebrate today.” The image came to take Ayaan’s chin in both of his small, pale hands. She gave him her best smile though she wanted to knock him away from her. “Why, she does not know real me at all.” That elicited a few chuckles.
“My story is starting in tragedy,” he told her, walking toward the throne that hid his true body. “Is starting with being hit by car, at tender age of nine years old. Many thought I would die. I did, yet not in the right away.” More laughs.
The story he told her then was either heart-wrenching or blood-curdling, Ayaan couldn’t decide which. The boy who would become the lich had been a child of moderate accomplishment—good grades, a promising future of higher education and the chance to really make something of himself. Then came the accident. Most of his tiny bones had been broken, many of his organs ruptured or crushed. He was brought immediately to a hospital where it was discovered he could not breathe on his own and his heart was barely moving. After dozens of surgeries over the course of two weeks he was eventually stabilized—alive, but unable to regain consciousness.
In a country where advanced medical services were rarer than gold his family had been wealthy enough or at least desperate enough to hire specialists to try every possible remedy. Mostly they ran endless tests and rated him on various scales—the DRS, the Rancho los Amigos Index, the Glasgow Coma Scale. They tried to get him to blink his eyes, to wiggle his toes. They stuck him with pins, made him smell unple
asant odors; a nurse moved his hand around on a computer keyboard and helped his fingers twitch and spell out nonsense words.
Eventually the doctors presented their findings. The boy was not in a coma, they assured his parents. Coma victims could not react to unpleasant stimuli. He was not in that darkest of closed-off places, the persistent vegetative state, because his brain was undamaged, at least physically. He was not in a stupor, nor had he suffered cataplexy, or narcolepsy, or any of a hundred other things.
He was, the doctors whispered, “locked in.” For whatever reason his brain continued to function and his body lived but they weren’t on speaking terms any more.
“To myself,” the Tsarevich explained, “is not so bad. I had dreams, nice dreams. An angel stood in my corner and showed me pictures of world. This was in actual a television set, ha ha. Every day beautiful nymphs they came and washed my body, was quite stimulating. Were nurses, of course. Prettier inside my head than out. I lived in fairytale land, where I am Prince Ivan, yes? You know the story of Prince Ivan? He is taken away by the grey wolf, to fabulous and magic land, and has great adventure. He even fights Koschei the Deathless, and he wins! No one ever told tale of Prince Ivan grows up to turn to Koschei. Never before.”
The causes of Locked In Syndrome had always eluded the medical profession. Nor was there any real treatment, the doctors told his parents, only therapies with little hope of any real amelioration of his condition. There was very little hope of his just coming out of it on his own, though here the doctors split. Some suggested it could happen, that children were resilient, that there was always room for a miracle. Most of the doctors suggested quietly removing the boy’s feeding tube and ending what promised to be a short and extremely unpleasant life.
American consultants and Orthodox priests were contacted and their advice sought. Decisions were made. The machines that kept his body going were paid for. His room was kept sterile and safe and free of intruders. Everything was kept on battery power because the local electrical grid was unreliable. All of his supplies—liquid food, replacement parts for the oxygen supply, pain medication—were ordered in bulk and fed into automatic delivery systems. When the Epidemic came the nurses deserted the hospital but the boy’s life hardly changed.
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