Monster Planet(26)

She kept her cool even as the hatches she passed by jumped and flexed. She was pretty sure the liches just did that to spook her. The dead onboard, the vast majority of them stacked like driftwood in the ship's holds, couldn't possibly sense her through the closed hatches. She was sure of it.

Still. As she passed a staircase leading down into gloom she could hear them straining against their confinement. She could feel the deck shake with their need.

Ayaan hurried past.

The buckets in her hands got truly heavy, her arms started complaining at the weight, anyway, as she moved forward to the main entrance to the superstructure. She paused and set them down, just for a moment, even though she knew it was a mistake. The Least would spot her. He always did.

Ayaan stood about crotch-high to the Least. He was maybe three times as broad as her through the shoulders. He stank of death, of musty, rancid fat and ancient sweat. His face dangled from his skull like a wax mask that had slipped down from its wearer's true features. Of all the possible liches fit for the job the Least had been put in charge of maintaining order on the foredeck.

The Least was one of the Tsarevich's first experiments in creating a new lich, an underling with the intelligence to command troops. It hadn't quite taken. When Ayaan ducked into a shadow near the entrance to the above decks quarters he was busy stomping through the chaos of the main foredeck, a maze of winches and cranes and enormous battened hatches where the living had set up their bedrolls and their hammocks and their small tents. Dozens of wispy pillars of smoke rose from the tiny deckhouses where the living prepared their simple food. The Least made sure he got an unwholesome share of everything they made. He had five hundred kilos of bulk to maintain, after all. Ayaan watched him dip one enormous hand into a boiling rice pot and shove the grains in his mouth, the scalding water running down his chin and raising blisters in the roll of fat that ran around his neck like a goiter. She gagged at the thought of eating out of a pot he had touched but she knew she had probably done so many times.

She shouldn't have stared. He caught her glance and returned it'with a horrific smile. He knew what she had in her buckets. He would want a taste of that, too.

He came stumping toward her on telephone pole-sized legs, his splayed toenails digging into the deck. 'You know rules,' she told him, in Russian. They said the Least had been a gangster once, a Moscow Mafioso. Either it was true or his behavior was a result of brain damage post mortem'Ayaan would credit either hypothesis. 'Is not for you.'

'Don't waste, don't waste one drop,' he bellowed, spit rolling out of his mouth. He was hungry alright. 'Use all, honor all, sacred is all.' His eyes were very wide.

If she let even a drop of blood escape her buckets Ayaan would be beaten for her failure. There was no point arguing to the Least's sense of reason. Her only chance was to outrun him. 'Stay back, Tsarevich gave me my orders,' she shouted. She grabbed up her buckets in fingers that were red with the effort of carrying the weight, fingers that didn't want to close. 'Stay back,' she shouted, and dashed inside the superstructure. A two-story run up a steep metal staircase awaited her. She would make it, she would run faster than the Least. She always had before.

'To giving me,' the Least howled as if someone had stuck him with a straight pin. 'You be to giving me!'

At the top of the stairs, her body heaving with the effort, Ayaan ducked into a companionway and kicked the hatch shut behind her. She had made it.

The rest was easy. She passed through the flying bridge where the navigators stood watch, keeping the ship on course. Most of them turned up their noses at her as she passed, not wanting to associate with anyone so uncouth as to pull hand bucket duty. One junior navigator, though, a girl from a fishing village in Turkiye who had come into the Tsarevich's service at the same time as Ayaan, did give her a glance. As she passed the girl shoved a scrap of paper in her back pocket. Ayaan made no acknowledgement.

Down another corridor and up to the door. Ayaan rolled her shoulders and tried not to think about the pain in her arms. Almost done. She hit an automatic hatch release with her hip and stepped into the Officer's Mess, a low room lined with clean windows, the walls and floor draped with Persian rugs. On couches before her the liches lay in wait. One of them'she didn't know his name but he was covered everywhere in thick fur like an ape'came up and politely offered to take the buckets from her but she politely declined. Another squatted down on the floor and showed her a wide, lipless smile. The Green Phantom scowled at her, while Cicatrix smiled disinterestedly and reburied herself in an issue of French Vogue so old the lamination had worn off the cover. The living woman had a bright new scar on her cheek. It was healing well.