Monster Planet(74)

'You did well,' the phantom told her. 'I guess you get to live.'





Monster Planet





Chapter Nineteen


'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, the adolescent daughter of the wizard, came forward. She hadn't collapsed yet'she was tougher than Ayaan had thought she would be. 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, 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 lighting on the ends of 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 it had seen the wizard set it 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 burnt 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 half gallon 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.

'These old ones, the first ones, they're all super tough. 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.