Chapter Fifteen

Sarah’s ankle caught on something metal and she went down, hard, the skin of her elbows coming off on the pavement, leaves and bits of vine bursting up around her like green smoke. “I’m alright,” she told Ptolemy, and started to get up.

The thing she’d tripped on was metal, black metal spotted with rust. She could kind of make out its shape, hidden under tons of vegetation, small trees and blowsy bushes that shook in the wind. She had tripped over a wing. The entire metallic object, which had to be fifteen feet across, was an airplane, a small airplane turned upside down with its nose buried in the ground.

She would have looked at it some more if she hadn’t heard an air horn just then. The sound vented up out of the tree-clogged streets on every side. She couldn’t tell which direction it came from. “What do they want?” she asked, as if she didn’t know the answer.

Maybe she didn’t. When she reached into her pocket for the reassuring angularity of her pistol, her fingers touched the soapstone scarab instead.

they Celt came for relics the relics of the Celt, Ptolemy told her.

Sarah got to her feet—her ankle felt sore but not broken—and they headed uptown again. Away from the last place they’d seen the mold maiden. If she tripped again Ptolemy was going to have to carry her. She didn’t doubt that he could but it would hurt her image as the leader of this farce.

“You were supposed to watch the Tsarevich,” she told him, panting a little. There was a kind of natural trail up Broadway, a strip of bare pavement where the trees hadn’t taken over quite yet. The hot asphalt felt strangely good under her feet. “Those were my orders.”

and were so I sentries did but there and were I sentries, he told her. i spotted was i spotted

It actually helped a little to know he wasn’t perfect. “So you came looking for me, to report?”

yes and found instead i found yes her The mummy raced ahead and grabbed something out of a tree. Sarah stopped and leaned forward, catching her breath. more there is more, he said, but she needed to process this one piece at a time.

“Just a second. So the Tsarevich didn’t even send her here to take over Governors Island. He sent her for these relics? What kind of relics?”

Ptolemy held an undead squirrel in his hands. Its tail would never be bushy again and it was missing one leg. When it saw Sarah it grabbed at her with its tiny paws, gnashed its teeth at her. Lovely. The mummy turned away from her and crushed the animal to oblivion. Had he not grabbed it when he did it probably would have jumped down onto Sarah’s neck. It would have torn open her throat. It was desperate for her energy. For life.

“Thanks,” she said, and then repeated herself. “What kind of relics?”

a sword armlet a rope a sword an armlet

Sarah sighed. He could be so literal. She lifted her legs, trying to keep them from stiffening up, and looked behind them. Scattered movement a couple blocks away got her moving again. “A sword. A rope. And an armlet,” she huffed. “What does he hope to do with them?”

make magic, Ptolemy answered, as if she had asked what a soldier did with a firearm. he ghost will make ghost he will magic.

Ghost magic. Yeah. She knew how useful that could be. Maybe they should have kept the squirrel around. Maybe Jack could have used it to give them some pointers.

She could use some. She was running uptown, away from the mushroom queen, but also away from her boat. The survivors on Governors Island had assured her that Manhattan was almost free of ghouls, that they had all headed west. She wasn’t about to trust that, though, since she was already further up Broadway than any of Marisol’s people had been in twelve years.

There were some ghouls in Manhattan that she knew about. Weird, surgically maimed things in helmets that were hunting her like a deer. And they were lead by a female lich who could kill just by being near her.

the i spoke more something more i spoke of, he said from behind her, not even panting for breath. Well, of course, he didn’t need any, and anyway she didn’t know what effect breathing would have on telepathy.

it is ayaan about ayaan is it

That made her stop short. She just stared at him until he began speaking again.

lich she is dead a lich dead The words made Sarah’s head spin. Dead. Lich. Ayaan. Lich. Dead.

She couldn’t make them stop. “Shut up,” she said, to herself. He didn’t respond. She couldn’t make the words stop.

Ayaan was dead. Her rescue mission had failed.

When she had time she would think about that. In the meantime Sarah kept running. Ptolemy kept up with her easily. He could have run circles around her, frankly. Still, she was faster than the ghouls and that was what mattered.

Then she heard an air horn from the streets to her right and she knew that mere speed wasn’t going to save her. She had been about to head in that direction, hoping to circle back to the harbor and find some way back to Governors Island. She tried to sense where the dead men were but the buildings blocked her arcane vision. She spun around in a slow circle, looking at the streets that seemed to head in every direction, searching the windows of the dead and hollow buildings as if they could tell her. “Which way?” she asked Ptolemy, but he didn’t even shrug.

Uptown again. Into the belly of the beast, and farther from safety than ever. She raced uptown and listened for horns behind her, for any sign of pursuit. When her lungs cramped and her body doubled over, unable to run another yard, she stopped. Ptolemy stared at her with his painted eyes. They never showed anything but a cool, intellectual repose. She wanted to smash in the plaster over his real face, his real skull. Wait, she thought, as breath raced in and out of her. There was something...

A dark stain had appeared across Ptolemy’s facial portrait. A smoky trail of mildew curled across his cheek like a worm eating its way through his flesh. She grabbed his hands and saw spots on the linen that wrapped his finger, big colorless spots with paler rings around the edges, smaller spots like a spattering of some dark fluid.

Sarah dropped his hands and rubbed at her own fingers. A fine dusting of dark spores had come off on her skin. Her fingers started to itch and she scratched at them mercilessly. She backed away from the mummy as if he could somehow infect her, somehow make her—

SLAM!

Sarah’s body spasmed with fear. She looked behind her and saw a little store with a plate glass window. What had made that noise? She couldn’t see anything moving, she could only see a kind of greasy stain on the window and—

BAM!

A whip-thin ghoul in a stained white dress hit the glass face-first, hard enough to make the whole storefront shake. Her hands like bunches of twigs came up and slapped feebly at the glass, her body pressed against it. She must have been trapped inside that store for years—she had hit the glass with her face so many times her features were completely gone, smeared together into one homogeneous dark bruise. A few strands of blonde hair still stuck to her battered skull. As Sarah watched she drew her head back and launched it once more at the glass.

WHAM!

Sarah couldn’t move, could barely breathe. She was too horrified.

The air horns came again, from two directions this time. Realizing she’d been paralyzed by a relatively harmless unorganized ghoul, Sarah started to hyperventilate. A handless ghoul appeared a few blocks away, half obscured behind some trees. It hadn’t seen her yet. She knew, however, that it wouldn’t try to recruit her. It would simply kill her without warning, without thought.

“Go,” she said. She grabbed Ptolemy’s arm. “Go! Go take that thing out!”

She tried shoving him into the street but she might as well have tried to shove a bank vault. He turned his mildewed face to her for a moment, then shook off her arm. She couldn’t meet his painted stare.

She touched the soapstone but he didn’t have anything to say, for once.

He turned and started walking toward the ghoul, even as new air horns blared into life, seemingly from every direction. Sarah didn’t waste any time. She ran across the street and started tugging at doors, tried prying up window panes with her fingernails. Finally she found a basement-level entrance down a flight of stairs. The iron security gate had rusted half-open, wide enough for her to squeeze through. She opened the door behind it and ran inside, into a smell of old things slowly falling apart. She closed the door behind it and turned the creaking deadbolt.

Silence. She could hear the air horns outside, more and closer than ever, but there was a barrier between her and them. She felt the still, settled air of the basement room and she dropped to a crouch on the floor, her face buried in her hands.

Ayaan was dead. Her mission was over.

If she stayed perfectly still nothing bad could happen.