Chapter Thirteen

Everyone worked on the ship. The Pinega had been rated for ninety crewmen when she was launched and that had been for trained, veteran sailors. The hundred-odd living people on board the ship had their hands full since most of them had never left dry land before. Seasickness, the occasional midnight snack for the liches (everyone knew it was happening, nobody breathed a word) and the ship’s particular problems took their toll and on an average day only perhaps two-thirds of the women and men living on the main deck could be accurately described as able-bodied. So everyone worked.

They kept the most gruesome and repellent task for Ayaan. She got to carry the hand bucket.

“There are two hundred and six bones in human body,” a doctor told her, kneeling next to a patient who didn’t so much as flinch as he began to carve. “Twenty-seven of them are in each hand. That’s a quarter of the bones in body. There are more muscles, more, more…”

“Here,” she told him, and lifted away the inert piece of meat from the patient’s arm. The patient of course was already dead and it had no liquid blood to mop up, just a dry brownish powder that blew off the stern deck in a playful ocean breeze.

“Is more complex than any organ in body, except perhaps brain. Is evolution’s greatest miracle. But to them… to them is almost useless. They lack fine motor control. These hands might as well be lumps of… of meat.” His eyes, what she could see of them behind his scratched glasses, went very vacant for a moment. Then he leaned forward with a metal rasp and started to sharpen the exposed lengths of ulna and radius. “You’re going to do it, aren’t you?” he asked, in a whisper.

“Yes,” she said. She didn’t whisper. They had powers she lacked, senses she didn’t have. If they were going to overhear her there was nothing she could do.

“Find me when you are ready,” he told her.

She gathered the excised meat from the neat piles the other doctors had made on the open-deck surgery (no need for sterile conditions with these patients). She watched the eyes of the dead men and women who lay stretched out on the deck, looked for the hunger in them. She had to give the Tsarevich some credit—he kept his charges under tight control.

To reach her next stop she had to pass one of the seven hold compartments of the Pinega. There were a couple of reasons to wish she could avoid that part of her route. For one thing there was the ship’s original mission, and the residue of its old cargo that remained. The Pinega had been built by the Soviets to ferry nuclear waste to containment facilities near the north pole. It could hold a thousand tons of solid waste—spent fuel rods and entire disposable radiothermic generators, mostly—in two of its holds and eight hundred cubic meters of liquid toxins in the other five. It had been emptied out, of course, but on the first day of the voyage as the living and the dead were herded onboard the lich overseer of the deck had passed around a Geiger counter so they could all see just how little concern the Tsarevich had for their bodily safety. Ayaan had taken away her own lesson from that. The cultists—the faithful—had taken it in stride. If their deaths could be hastened on by service to their master, that was a reason to rejoice. They thought being dead was just the next phase of existence, and a better one at that, compared to the harsh life the living had after the world ended. Very few of them were allowed to see what happened in the surgeries at the stern, but Ayaan wondered if even the gore back there would dissuade them. These were true believers and they outnumbered the sane living people onboard considerably. For every doctor horrified at what he was asked to do there were five or six deckhands who scrubbed and scrubbed at the decks long past the limit of human endurance, who would rather scrub than eat just in case the Tsarevich walked by and wanted to see his reflection in the wood.

A few like that were painting the superstructure as she passed by. They were covered in grey paint, their faces and hands and torsos daubed with a redolent and probably toxic chemicals. Their eyes were flat and lifeless in their heads as if they were already practicing the traditional empty stare of the ghouls they hoped to become. They gave the heavy plastic buckets she hauled no more than a passing glance. Ayaan didn’t look at them, didn’t look at the deck ahead of her. She stared out to sea at the ever-changing, never-changing waves and tried not to think about what lay ahead.

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.

With a grunt Ayaan emptied her buckets into a tub full of ice. She tried not to look at the hands as they slithered out, the fingers lacing together, the dry blood running out in a fine sift. She tried not to let the powder get into her mouth or nose.

When the buckets were empty she turned to go. She knew it was futile but she moved steadily, purposely toward the door.

“There’s one more thing,” the green phantom said. She felt her body surge as he toyed with her metabolism. Would he wear her out, make her exhausted even though her shift was half over? Would he give her a goose, make her hyper until her jaw ached from grinding? His possibilities for amusement at her expense seemed endless.

“Yes, sir,” she said, wondering what demeaning errand he would have this time, and turned around.