Chapter Twenty

Sarah leaned forward and puked up her guts. The hands in her armpits held her perfectly steady as her body wracked itself over and over again, her lungs and her stomach expelling their contents all over a cobblestone curb. She stared at the mortar between the paving stones, stared with an intensity she couldn’t have mustered normally, until sparkling lights appeared in her vision. With a great braying cough she opened up her whole body and spewed out another gallon of filth.

The mucus running down her face, the tears in her eyes were full of black flecks. Her nose pulsed and ran with a stale reek, an earthy, disgusting stink.

There was more of it, more foreign crap in the hollow parts of her but she lacked the strength to even heave. She sank back against waiting arms that lifted her up into the light. Someone wiped her face with a rough cloth and someone else poured water across her forehead and her eyes.

“Come on, pumpkin, just a little more,” her father said, and Sarah turned her head to the side under his bony fingers. “Just open your mouth, just a little more.”

She couldn’t have done it herself. Something else creeped inside of her, something cold, and pushed. A thick sludge of black and yellow nastiness drained out from between her lips. Then she slept.

Ptolemy stood guard, squatting on the top of a brick wall. When she woke light the color of wine colored his bandages and bounced off his painted face. When he turned to look at her she saw white patches in the death mask. Some of his linen was gone, too, probably devoured by fungus. He looked smaller, as if he’d lost weight. She wondered what he looked like under the bandages.

She remembered suddenly her arm—the compound fracture, the bloody mess that had been all that remained of her right arm. She lifted it now and examined it. Dark bruises wrapped around her elbow and a twinge of pain went up her shoulder when she tried to make a fist. But the skin was unbroken and she could bend her arm just fine.

That injury should have killed her. Any of her injuries should have killed her—up to and including the time she fell and skinned open her chin. When the Epidemic came, when the bodies of the dead filled up the cities and countries of the Earth, every strain of microbe and virus had gone through a population boom. The world was full of horrible infectious little things just waiting for you to get a bad scratch. But here she was. She didn’t feel great, not by a long shot, but she could tell she was on the mend.

Sitting up a little she coughed noisily but unproductively. She saw she was wrapped in thick blankets that were only a little tattered along the edge—had they been taken from one of the houses nearby? She looked around and saw she was in a kind of courtyard. Dead leaves filled its corners and a dry fountain stood at its center, a big cracked concrete bowl decorated with nymphs and cupids and dolphins. Lying on a cloth next to the fountain were a sword, a noose, and a length of fur. The relics, she remembered. The relics of the Celt, whoever that might be.

Ptolemy leaped down from his perch and offered her his hand. As she struggled up to her feet she checked her pockets and found her pistol there, its magazine completely empty. She touched the soapstone scarab.

i death thought sent you sent me thought to my death, he told her. He sounded embarrassed. was but strategy it was but strategy

“Yeah,” she said, “well. Just don’t doubt me again.”

He bowed gallantly. Behind him Gary scuttered over the wall on his six bony legs. She could have talked to him if she wanted—she still had his tooth in her pocket—but she remembered what had happened before and didn’t dare. Her father arrived a few moments later, forced to take the long way round. He emerged through a door in the house behind the courtyard. “Oh, sweetheart, you look so much better,” he said, putting a withered hand on her cheek. She closed her eyes and smiled. It was so good to be back with him, to have him be alive. She refused to question that feeling.

“You saved me, you healed me,” she said, feeling like a toddler, feeling like her dad was the strongest man on earth. “I got too close to the fungus queen. That was supposed to be fatal.”

Dekalb put an arm around her shoulder and lead her through the house. The furniture inside, the fixtures of the rooms meant nothing to her. They passed through the front door and into the street overrun with trees.

“I didn’t know I had it in me,” he said. “Your Egyptian, um, friend came and found me. He said you were dying and I was the only one who could stop it. I didn’t know what he was talking about but then I saw you looking so blue and still and I couldn’t help it, I just picked you up and held onto you and suddenly you started coughing. I guess I did something. It left me so tired, though. I kind of want to just go back to my tower.”

“What about her?” Sarah asked, fear suddenly blooming inside her, cold and sweaty. “What about the one I shot, the, the lich I shot?”

Ptolemy raised one arm and pointed down the street. Sarah saw the building where she had taken refuge. One whole side of its facade had crumbled down into the street. In the exposed innards of the place she saw a tangle of rebar sticking out of half of a retaining wall. A human figure had been impaled on half a dozen spars—clearly the work of someone with superhuman strength. She glanced at Ptolemy and the mummy bowed.

The impaled woman looked nothing at all like the blight demon. She was short, almost as short as Sarah and her skin was barely mottled with fungus. Her head was missing altogether. Sarah looked down and saw it near the woman’s feet, scorched and silvered. It sat on top of the remains of a campfire.

“He burned it for six hours straight,” her father told her. “That should do it. She wasn’t like Gary. I’m pretty sure.”

Sarah felt weak and sick and feverish but she had to see for herself. She climbed up into the ruined building, whimpering a little every time she put her foot down on a pile of broken bricks and it started to slide away from her. Eventually she reached the skull. She picked it up and slammed it against a block of concrete. It cracked open and inside she found only ashes.

It was about as dead as you could get. It would have to be enough.

Looking at the corpse, of what had been done to sanitize the lich, a cold feeling seeped through her hands, her wrists. Up her forearms. She had something to do. A duty. She had pretended like she was done, that her responsibilities were discharged. She had hidden in fear. Not anymore. She knew what had to be done.

“The Tsarevich isn’t going to like this,” she said, scrambling back down into the street. “I think we just declared war. What happened to her soldiers?”

The soapstone buzzed under her fingers. i scattered chased them chased they scattered

Sarah nodded. “So they probably went back to their master. What about those relics she was after, did you figure out why he wanted them?”

no

Sarah frowned. He could be clear-spoken when he wanted.

He had gathered them up while she was examining the dead lich’s skull. He handed them to her and she studied them. The length of fur was matted and disgusting. The noose looked like it might fall apart at any second. She studied the sword, though, and something about it called to her. It was ancient, truly ancient, and bright green with verdigris. The blade had fused with its scabbard and showed a spot of bronze at its tip, as if someone had used it like a walking stick and repeatedly struck it against hard ground. The hilt was made of twisted cable and fashioned in the shape of a howling warrior. She grasped it with one hand, intending to wave it through the air a few times and get a feel for its balance. Before she could lift it, though—

—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 fucking lot more riding on this than you think. I—

The voice in her head made her want to drop the sword, made her want to cover her ears it was so loud. It made her teeth shake. When it stopped she felt like someone was looking right into her head, like whoever it was who belonged to the sword had noticed her intrusion, had become aware that she could hear him. At the same time she realized exactly who it was. Or who he had always said he was.

Sarah, he said. Dearie, you’re not supposed to be here. Not yet.

“Hi, Jack,” she replied. She let go of the sword. It clattered on the street. Her hand buzzed and shook—she had to grab her wrist to make it stop. It felt like she’d been polluted by bad energy, but the feeling faded once she was rid of the relic. She turned to her father. “Whose sword is this?” she demanded. “Did it belong to Jack before he became a ghost?”

Dekalb’s eyes clouded over. It was a lot of memories to process at once, evidently. “Jack? No... no, he never had a sword. And Jack’s no ghost, sweetheart.”

“What?” she asked. She was still connecting the dots in her head.

“Listen, I knew Jack pretty well. We worked together, fought together. He even killed me, after all. But now he’s just another ghoul. He was chained to a wall uptown from here the last I saw of him, with a broken neck, unable to move or walk or hunt. He was as brainless as any of them. Jack was never the type to become a ghost, anyway. He would have erased himself from the network before he let that happen.”

“Listen,” Sarah said. “I have the ability to talk to—to ghosts, and ghouls, and dead people who can’t speak for themselves, but only if I have something really important to them. Like Gary’s tooth or Ptolemy’s heart scarab. Who does this sword belong to? It was somebody the Tsarevich wanted to talk to, they called him, what was it—the Celt?” She glanced at Ptolemy, who nodded in agreement.

“There was this one guy,” her father told her. “He was a ghost, sure. Gary knew him better than I did but he was from Orkney, up in Scotland. He was a Druid.” Dekalb picked up the sword and looked at it, then showed it to Gary. The scuttling little skull-bug jumped up and down on his six pointy little feet in excitement. “Gary says yes, this was his sword. His name was Mael something, I remember now. He helped me at the end, he talked to the mummies on my behalf. Mael Mag Och. Why, sweety? What does he have to do with anything?”

“Well, he’s lied to me, for a start. He’s lied to me for years. He told me he was somebody else. He brought me here—he’s been playing me for a fool. Who knows what else he set up?” She frowned at the green sword in her father’s hand. “Right now, I am willing to believe,” she told him, “that Mael Mag Och has been playing with us all, like checkers on a board.”

The skull-bug did a little dance it was so excited.

“Yeah,” Dekalb said, “Gary says that sounds exactly like Mael.”

END OF PART TWO OF MONSTER PLANET