Monster Planet(20)

'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, eventually.

'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.

The green phantom was standing behind her. She had no memory of him moving across the room. Like everything else she was being shown it was a clear message. He had a pistol in his hand, a cheap Hungarian FEG that would probably blow up in his hand if he tried to shoot her with it. She did her best not to show any fear, though probably fear was what he wanted.

'We have this theory, you see, that if we kill enough mummies the ghost will come back to try to protect them. We're pretty sure it's watching us, having a fine old time at our expense. Here.' He shoved the pistol at her, barrel first. 'We also have a theory that whoever does the killing will be the target for some pretty heavy karmic retribution.' He pushed the pistol at her again, obviously intending for her to take it.

Surprised was not the word. Ayaan took it and calculated how quickly she could snap off a head shot. With the phantom dead she could easily overpower Cicatrix. As far as she knew they were alone in the bunker'she could escape into the hills and then over to the far side of the island, try to find a boat, make her way back to Port Said.

Or she could recognize that the phantom had just moved five meters across the room in the time it took her to blink. She could get the point of this whole exercise. She might very well think she was 'assassin', the 'best with a rifle' as Cicatrix had put it, but in the company of liches she was severely outclassed. Before she could even aim with the pistol he could kill her. Just switch her off, like a light.

She had to stay alive if she ever wanted to see Sarah again.

There was no question as to what the phantom wanted her to do. She rose from the chair and stood over the gold mask of the mummy exposed on the floor. She kicked the mask away from his face with one boot. Underneath hieroglyphics had been painted on his line-wrapped face. No doubt a curse on anyone who disturbed his eternal rest.

Ayaan slipped off the FEG's safety, lined up her shot, and blew his ancient Egyptian brains all over the room.





Monster Planet





Chapter Eleven


the lost i cannot bone eater has their names them their faces are lost to me i cannot faces hear their bone eater names

Sarah drew her fingertips away from the soapstone scarab in her pocket. She would worry about Ptolemy's grief later, once she had found Ayaan. She knelt before the chain link fence and worked at it for a while with a pair of bolt cutters, always keeping one hand on the fence so it wouldn't rattle. So close, she thought. There had been tragedy already but maybe, just maybe she could actually pull this off'maybe she could actually rescue Ayaan. If the damn mummy would calm down for a minute.