Chapter Ten

“Was no accident, of course. We target you. You’re quite celebrity famous in some circles.” The scarred woman palmed the wheel and threw the Hummer H-2 into second gear to get up a rugged hill. “We were in neighborhood anyway.” The Tsarevich had all the gasoline he could ever want. No one else was using it.

In the passenger seat Ayaan grabbed a handhold mounted above the glove compartment and tried not to bounce around too violently as the big vehicle rumbled up a goat track. She still wasn’t sure what was going on. She had been sleeping in a hammock in a part of the refinery reserved for new recruits when the scarred woman had woken her by calling her name. Dawn hadn’t broken when they left the compound to head up into the dusty hills. “Do you have a name, or is that part of the big mystery?” Ayaan asked.

“They call me Cicatrix. I am very close with Tsarevich. I could be good friend to you, do you understand? Us two ladies, we could be friends. Or maybe you want to kill me, hmm? Maybe I will always be enemy to you, well, that is okay also. That can also be made to use. Now is time to make up your mind.”

Ayaan grasped a little of what was happening, then. She was being given the option of serving the Tsarevich alive or serving him undead. This unscheduled joyride up into the mountains was some kind of test. Either she would prove herself to the lich of liches or she would go face down in a bath tub. If she chose the later option she would stand up a minute later and proclaim that she served the Tsarevich in eternal life. She remembered her decision when she’d been locked in a cage in darkness and fear. She remembered that she wanted to stay alive as long as possible so that maybe she could eventually meet all of her commitments, avenge all of her ghosts. “I want to be your friend, obviously. Who do I have to fuck?”

Cicatrix—if that was her real name—laughed happily. “Around here,” she said, looking over at her new friend with a crooked smile, “our kicks are never so simple.”

She wheeled the car around to a stop with a plume of dust that rose up around the windows and obscured the view. From the back seat Cicatrix grabbed a sheer, see-through violet coat lined with fox fur and struggled into it. The fur danced around her bald head like a replacement mane when she jumped down from the Hummer’s footboard. Clearly the coat wasn’t meant to keep her warm. Even up in the hills with a meager breeze feathering over her skin Ayaan was warm enough to start sweating the moment she stepped down from the car.

Cicatrix lead her between two lines of semi-permanent tents toward a concrete bunker half sunk into the grassy hill-side. Whoever had lived in the tents was long gone—the wind had torn holes in their fabric and some of their stakes were coming up. Ayaan looked in through the flap of one tent and was mystified by what she saw: a card table surrounded by folding chairs, the table’s top covered by dozens of Ouija boards. A deck of cards lay scattered on the floor, some water-stained and others bleached to blankness by the sun. They weren’t playing cards, though, but endless repetitions of the same five symbols, a cross, a circle, a star, a square and three wavy lines.

Ayaan looked up and saw Cicatrix smiling at her. She was waiting for Ayaan to get a good long look. Ayaan smiled back and dashed to catch up with the scarred woman. Together they entered the bunker. It went a long way back into the hillside and was lit up with naked incandescent bulbs every three meters. Arabic graffiti had faded on the walls but time had failed to erase it entirely. As they pushed deeper into the bunker Ayaan began to get a very strange feeling. There was a smell in the air, a smell like burnt cake, and she felt as if there must be a large number of people nearby but if so they were preternaturally silent.

Doors opened off the bunker’s main corridor. One of them stood open. Cicatrix lead her through and into a large room, maybe ten meters on a side. The floor was carpeted in dead bodies, each hidden underneath a rough blanket. At the near end of the room a table and chairs had been set up. Standing next to the table the green-robed phantom awaited them. The lich who captured her in Egypt. Ayaan did her best not to flinch as he turned to look at the two living women. He looked almost more skeletal close up than he had from a distance but his very human eyes kept him from appearing too monstrous. “You, of course, are Ayaan,” he said in English, his voice only slightly accented. He was a European—maybe German or Dutch. “Allow me to introduce myself.”

She waited patiently to hear his name, wondering if she would be expected to shake his dead hand. Then a wave of exhaustion passed over and through her. She felt like she’d been hit by a truck. Another wave enveloped her and she sat down hard in one of the chairs. “I’m sorry, I—” she began but couldn’t finish. She was so. So tired, so. The life was... was draining out of...

In a moment it was over and she looked up, horrified. It felt like she was about to faint.

“I could have killed you then. Just switched you off. You don’t need to know my name, because you will never address me,” the green phantom told her. She realized that she had just felt his power—his gift. Most liches had some kind of special ability, some new sense or talent to compensate for the decay of their bodies. This one could slow down her metabolism from a distance. It occurred to her that his power might also work in the other direction. That he could speed her body’s natural processes up as well. He could make her faster—just as he had made the ghouls in the desert so fast she couldn’t effectively fight them.

“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.