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.

Ayaan wanted to rub her eyes, she wanted to blink back whatever was obscuring her vision. But no, it was true. The burnt woman had revived and then vanished into thin air.

The green phantom stamped into the silo. “Erasmus!” he shouted. “Where is she?”

The furry lich could only raise his arms in protest. Ayaan wanted to smile to see the two of them so helpless. She closed her own eyes, and listened.

There. A skittering sound, then a quick rhythm of metallic thumps. There was something wrong with the sound. It was less as if she heard it than she had imagined it, or as if someone else in another place was hearing it, not her. Ayaan opened her eyes. A ladder, directly in front of her, lead up into the upper reaches of the silo.

She looked up and saw a hatch rusted shut in the dome at the top. Sighing, Ayaan wrapped her nerveless hands around a rung of the ladder and hauled herself upward. She felt as if she were slipping, as if she would fall back onto the hard packed earth of the silo floor, but she grabbed at the next rung anyway. One after the other after the other. Occasionally she stopped and hooked her arms through the ladder's rungs and tried to listen again, but she heard nothing more.

“What are you doing?” the green phantom demanded, only his cowled head poking into the silo. Ayaan ignored him and kept climbing. If he didn't trust her yet he never would, and she didn't have the energy left to explain.

At the top of the silo a thin seam of metal ran around the base of the dome, perhaps four inches wide. The hatch she’d seen from the bottom stood immediately at the top of the ladder, mounted on this thin ledge. Ayaan grabbed for the lever that worked the hatch and yanked hard at it, putting all her weight into it. With a horrible groan that sounded like the silo was about to collapse around her the hatch slid open, grinding in its tracks, and bright sunlight blasted inside the metal dome.

The blonde woman appeared there as if she’d come in with the light. She stood braced precariously on the thin seam, her pale skin naked to the sunlight, her hair glowing in an unkempt halo around her face. She had a bite mark on her shoulder, the only sign of violence on her, and a black tattoo of a radiant sun on her belly. Her bright form was doubled, though, echoed by her aura—a howling void of dark energy more vibrant and at once more tenuous than any Ayaan had seen before.

“Are you a good lich or a bad lich?” the apparition asked, and Ayaan could only crouch in the silo’s hatch with her mouth open, wondering what was going on. The woman leaned forward, across the dome, and grasped for Ayaan’s outstretched hands.

“Who are you?” Ayaan asked, finally.

“Who aren’t I?” the blonde woman replied with a sad smile. “I was called Julie, once, but I remember nothing about her. I call myself Nilla now.” She shrugged. “I’ve been called worse.”

Ayaan decided to put that line of questioning aside. “What happened to you?”

Nilla looked away for a moment, as if trying to remember. “I was burned to death... but I guess it didn’t take.” She shrugged again. Ayaan thought something was wrong with her, something psychological. Though she supposed having her heart eaten by a wizard and then being burned alive gave her an excuse for a little mental baggage.

“I was headed for New York, I wanted to see Mael. We were discussing the big plan. I stopped wherever I could, wherever people would have me, living or dead. I helped them, if I could, if I felt they... deserved it.” Her eyes went very wide. “I was never a very good judge of character. Lots of people tried to kill me, I was used to that. No one tried to eat me before, though. Do you know what it’s like to see your own heart ripped out? Lucky me, being dead, I didn't need a heart. He might as well have taken my appendix.”

At the bottom of the silo Erasmus called up at them. “Miss, we don’t want to hurt you,” he insisted. “We want to honor you.”

“He thinks that’s true,” Nilla told Ayaan. “I guess we should go down.”

“Wait,” Ayaan said, and grabbed the woman’s shoulder. “I have so many more questions.”

Nilla smiled again, that sad, even heartbreaking smile. “I’ve never been good with questions. You need to have some answers first, before you can be good with questions.” She looked down at her hand and then turned it palm up. A little blob of silvery metal sat there. It looked like it could have been a piece of jewelry but the fire had melted it. “Take this,” Nilla said in a soft whisper. “It used to be in my nose.”

Ayaan nearly dropped it.

“Not like that,” Nilla chided. She touched the side of her nose and showed Ayaan where it was pierced. “It was a nose ring. Sarah will want it.”

Ayaan opened her mouth to speak but Nilla was already climbing back down the ladder. She stayed visible this time. At the bottom Erasmus waited with a handmade quilt he’d probably found in the farmhouse. Nilla wrapped it around herself gratefully. When the green phantom bowed before her she returned the gesture.

“Our master awaits,” the green-robed lich said. “He is the—”

“I know all about your Tsarevich, and what he wants. Mael Mag Och and I spoke of him often. Let’s go make all his dreams come true, shall we?”

Ayaan lead the way back to the truck. While Erasmus danced around their new friend, blathering away like a puppy in heat, she smiled and laughed and genuinely seemed excited about what lay in store. Only when she saw the corpses with their hands and lips removed did she seem to frown, and then only for half a moment. Ayaan imagined she was the only one who saw.