Monster Planet(114)

Exposed to the air his emaciated body was as white as bleached bone. He looked like something carved out of soap. He had big ears that had always been hidden before by his cowl, at least in Ayaan's experience. He had a few long strands of hair plastered to his otherwise bald head.

He turned, his body swooning backwards, to look at Ayaan. She couldn't read his eyes. Then the ghouls fell on him and tore him to pieces. Sarah fired wildly into the seething mass of bodies but there were just too many of them.

When it was over the ghouls fell back out of Sarah's range and stood in an orderly formation like soldiers in a parade. It didn't make any sense. There was no one around to control them, no lich who could command them. Yet there was no reason for them to line up like that, either, just as there had been no possible explanation why they should attack Enni.

A voice sounded from atop the scaffolding. 'The stench up here,' it intoned, its timbre watery and barely recognizable as human speech, 'is bloody awful.'

A single ghoul stood there above the twin spikes. It was one of the most horrifying creatures Sarah had ever seen. Its skin hung off of its chest in long, tattered strips that fell across its groin like a gruesome kilt. Its face was a smudge of once-human features that had been battered and burnt out of all recognition. Its legs, thick and muscular, were covered in sores and lesions. It had no arms whatsoever, just ragged ends of flayed bone that hung down like tiny, broken wings.





Monster Planet





Chapter Eighteen


'Hello, lasses,' the armless ghoul choked out. It laughed at them, a sputtering, horrible noise. 'Honestly, I am glad to see you both still with us.'

All that remained of the Tsarevich were a few lumps of indistinct meat skewered on the steel spikes, fuming and smoking as they smoldered away to black carbon.

'I want you to know that I never wanted anyone to suffer.' He staggered closer to the edge of the scaffolding. Another step and he would fall onto the spikes. Sarah was pretty sure that was exactly what he intended to do.

'Mael Mag Och, I presume,' she said.

The ghoul flexed the ragged nubbins of bone he possessed in place of arms. 'In the flesh.'

'What's going on here?' Ayaan shook Sarah's shoulder but Sarah didn't know how to answer. 'What happened to the Tsarevich? The machinery was supposed to heal him! It was supposed to make him whole again. What went wrong?'

Mael Mag Och shrugged. It made the skin of his chest split and peel. 'The machinery worked just fine, lass. I just never meant it to do any such thing.'

'You? You killed him?' Ayaan was nearly shrieking. Sarah wished she would calm down. 'How is that possible?'

'It helps to have friends on the inside.'

'Nilla,' Sarah said, getting it.

He tried to smile but the remains of his mouth merely twitched. 'His plan required her to condition the energy of the Source. To step it down to a level his bodily tissues could accept. At my command she merely fed him an extra little jolt.'

'But why?' Ayaan demanded. 'Why did you do this? Why did you kill him?'

'Sarah knows,' he told her. Sarah bit her lip. She had a feeling she did know, and it terrified her. When Gary had told her about Mael Mag Och she'd thought of him as a laughable sort of vision. Someone stuck in the mindset of the Dark Ages. That was, of course, before he got his hands on the ultimate power of the life force itself.

'So I was saying that I never wanted this to be such a difficult transition. You should ask Gary some time, Sarah. He would tell you, I'm sure, just how much compassion I still had in my heart, back in those all-too-brief days when I still had my own body. How I wanted to make things easy on you. Instead you chose all this blood-curdling violence and pain.'

'We chose nothing,' Ayaan spat. 'What are you talking about?' She leapt down from the flatbed and took a few steps toward the scaffolding. The ghouls moved toward her just as quickly. She had watched them tear Enni Langstrom to pieces. She took a step back.

Mael Mag Och acted as if nothing had happened. 'I was a nice chap, once. I know that's changed. It's a hard lot to be a raw consciousness stripped of form and left spinning in the void. If it made me a bit cranky, well. I do apologize.'

Ayaan grabbed Sarah's arm tight enough to hurt. 'What is it, Sarah? What does he want? What is he going to do?'

She struggled to find the best words. 'His god told him to destroy the human race. Like, all of it. I think he's going to do something to the Source.'