Monster Planet(81)

She didn't turn around and look at the brain in its jar. Instead she looked at Semyon Iurevich. His eyes tracked hers perfectly.

Destroy him. Do it now.It could have been either of them saying it.

'No,' she said, out loud, and folded her hands in her lap.





Monster Planet





Chapter Two


Everyone was staring at her. She found that mildly unnerving.

'Why are you to saying 'no'?' the Tsarevich asked. His voice sounded like rotten peaches being poured out of a rusty can. Cicatrix had a look on her face of deep concern. Did she understand? Did she realize this had all been a set-up?

The voice of the disembodied brain raged and railed inside Ayaan's head, but she refused to move.How 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 f*cking lot more riding on this than you think. I'

You'll what?she asked, silently. No reply was forthcoming. The voice had disappeared with as little warning as it came. She turned and stared at the brain. It didn't move at all, of course. Its energy was unchanged. Why had it stopped in mid-sentence?

Before she could even begin to wonder she was knocked off her seat. Semyon Iurevich had come at her with a spike in his hand, growling for death. She rolled across the floor and came up in a stiff-legged crouch only to realize that he wasn't trying to kill her after all. He'd been aiming for the Tsarevich.

His plan had failed'his programmed assassin had refused to kill on cue. So he had gone with a contingency plan. He would throw away his own life to murder the Tsarevich. Unfortunately there was one problem with his thinking. Like all liches, like all undead things, his motor skills were quite poor.

The spike in his hand was little more than a sharpened metal rod. One of the crudest weapons imaginable. He probably had meant to push it through the Tsarevich's eye but his hand went wide and he caught the point in the skin of Cicatrix's neck. Bright red blood erupted from the wound and splattered Semyon Iurevich's bath robe, pooled in the Tsarevich's twisted lap. The hypnotist lich tried to pull his spike free for a second attack but the green phantom swooped into the middle of the room and held out one hand and the would-be assassin collapsed in a volitionless heap.

The lights flared up'Erasmus had switched them on. MAD-O-RAMA's dark corners were speared by floodlights that showed every speck of dust and curl of old peeling black paint.

'I must have,' Cicatrix said, her voice high and brittle with shock. 'I must have the machines with crash cart, it is being promised to to to me, I live forever!' She sounded like a mewling cat as her blood ran away across the floor. Erasmus dragged Semyon Iurevich's motionless body out of the room as Ayaan lifted Cicatrix down from the throne. She tried putting pressure on the wound but the spike had gouged out half of Cicatrix's throat. It didn't hurt that the Tsarevich had already drunk enough of her blood to leave her anemic and weak as a kitten.

'Is good life, I want more,' the scarred woman begged, but there was nothing Ayaan could do. Clearly she had been promised eternal life as a lich. Instead in a few minutes she would die and rise as a ghoul.

Ayaan looked up at the Tsarevich, who was literally foaming at the mouth with excitement. 'What do you want me to do?' she asked.

The single eye rolled in her direction but the prince of the dead said nothing.

'Damn you,' Ayaan said. Cicatrix had lost consciousness and was barely breathing. 'There's no time to make her a lich, even if I thought it should be done. I can keep her from coming back, though.'

The Tsarevich sucked on his lower lip and convulsed in his throne. Was it a nod, a shrug, or merely an involuntary spasm?

It would have to be good enough. Ayaan frowned and pulled power into her hands. She leaned forward and closed Cicatrix's eyes. In a very perverse way the living woman had been her closest friend in the camp of the liches. She kissed the shaved head and said a brief prayer for Cicatrix's salvation, begging Allah to see past the woman's decadence and her fraternization with monsters.

Then Ayaan brought up her hands and blasted Cicatrix's head until the skin and muscle and fat melted away and the skull beneath turned yellow. She kept it up until the bone scorched and steam fizzed out of Cicatrix's eye sockets.

For a long moment while she hovered over the dead woman Ayaan could think only of Dekalb. At the end of his life she had offered this same service. He had refused, and she had simply walked away. She'd always regretted that, leaving such a hero to become just another shambling, mindless wanderer. Perhaps this duty made up a little for her previous failure.