Chapter Fifteen

Gary swept through the crowd, slashing cultists, disemboweling them, stabbing them in their throats. He was vicious and completely remorseless. He seemed to have no plan, just an insatiable need to kill. Someone hit him with a grenade and he fell down on one knee—then rose again unharmed. Twelve new barbed spines emerged from under the bottom of his skull. They shot out like pistons and skewered the heads of ghouls, right through their helmets.

“He gets stronger every time you shoot him,” Sarah said. She had told her father the secret in an attempt to break his heart. Instead he had turned it—turned Gary—into a weapon of mass destruction. Maybe she’d been wrong about him. Maybe Dekalb had more strength than she thought. “It’s all over, Ayaan. It’s all over.”

"I do not understand. Why does he fight against our ghouls? The last time I saw him he could take their minds in his hand like grains of rice." Ayaan shook her head. "Unless the Tsarevich is stronger. I think his control is the better. Yes, that must be it." Ayaan sucked on her lower lip. Sarah watched the woman who had been her mentor. If you just glanced at her she looked the same as ever—she was still Ayaan—yet if you took a closer look it was unmistakable. She was a corpse now. You could see the way her skin was tightening in her face. You could see it in how much weight she’d lost—she was half the size she used to be. Or maybe it just seemed that way. In life Ayaan had been a towering figure to Sarah. She supposed everyone’s parents were like that. In death she was just one more ghoul.

“Stay here,” Ayaan told her, and started hobbling away toward the yurt. Was she going to protect the Tsarevich? Sarah could hardly believe it. They’d done it. They had broken Ayaan, broken her mind. Such a thing shouldn’t have been possible. Yet Ayaan herself had frequently warned Sarah that humanity was a liability. Sarah remembered perfectly what Ayaan had said around the campfire one night when Sarah was sixteen years old. “None of us,” she said, “is immune to death or madness. The time may come when you have to sanitize me. You may have to shoot me because I’ve panicked so badly I threaten the squad. None of you may hesitate, when that moment comes.”

Now she seemed to have changed her tune. Was she really a believer? Did she really believe in the Tsarevich, like the two liches Sarah had already killed? Or was she just afraid of death, like her father had been, and Gary before him?

Speaking of the devil—Sarah looked up to see Gary whirling through the Tsarevich’s army like a top. He was under sustained gunfire and his skull had taken on a patchy and mottled appearance—he was being healed as fast as he was being injured but the process wasn’t perfect. Sarah just didn’t know how long it could be kept up. She knew her father was doing it. She knew he had to be somewhere nearby. Gary’s legs flexed and sharp fragments of bone jutted out of him, covered him in vicious spikes. He tore through a machine gun position and the weapon’s wooden stock shivered into pieces. The gunners were thrown away like crumpled bits of paper.

Sarah suddenly realized she’d been left alone. Ayaan and the werewolf had both abandoned her. Well, they had more serious problems. Sarah’s hands were tied so securely there wasn’t much she could do, anyway.

Or maybe there was. She turned around in place, taking in the frenetic energy of the camp, the living people running in every direction, the ghouls taking up defensive formations. She found what she wanted and headed toward it at a run. A single mummy, standing alone at the back of the valley next to a big rock formation. It—she—held a jar in her hands with something round and murky inside.

“I was sent by Ptolemaeus Canopus,” she said, skidding to a stop in the dirt. “Are you alright? We need to work together if we’re going to get out of here.”

The mummy didn’t move. The thing in the jar didn’t move either but she could feel a haze of dark energy wafting off of it. It was desperately trying to get her attention. She looked down, through the glass, and saw a human brain there. Nasty, but hardly the worst thing she’d ever seen.

Behind her she heard a prolonged scream and she turned to look. Blood jetted high over the crowd, a fountain of it. Gary had grown an extra joint at the end of his legs, a curved, scythe-like foot that looked perfect for evisceration.

She looked back down at the brain. It was trying to tell her something. She felt a strange weight in her left hand. It felt heavy, as if it was being pushed downward. She frowned. What the hell did the brain want? She could reach into the pockets of her sweatshirt, just as she had done while she watched Ptolemy’s execution. She reached in and felt something soft and hairy. She drew it out of her pocket.

Oh. Okay. They had taken the green sword away from her, as they had stripped her of all her weapons. They had left her the noose and the withered piece of matted fur Mael Mag Och once worn as an armband.

Sarah, he said, as she ran the fox fur between her fingers. I didn’t really expect you to make it this far. I suppose I didn’t expect you to fail, either. Though some things run in families, alas.

“Hello,” Sarah said. “You must be Mael Mag Och. I’ve heard all about you but I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced.”

The voice that roared its reply into Sarah’s head held a trace of regret. Or maybe she was just imagining it. If I had come to you in my own shape you would have run away from me. I pretended to be Jack because I knew it was a name to conjure with, lass. Does it really matter so much? I still gave you your gift.

“Why?” she asked. “Why did you do that? Why did you do any of this? Did I really need another parent who was just going to disappear on me at the worst possible moment?”

It was Nilla’s notion, to be honest. The blonde lass you saw vanish out yonder.

“I’ve never heard of her.”

Ah, Mael Mag Och said, and yet she’s heard all about you. The daughter of the lost hero, turned out in a foreign land to be raised by warriors, made strong and fierce. Her heart went out to you, lass, and where Nilla’s involved, my heart goes there too.

“I refuse to believe you did anything out of the goodness of your own heart. You planned this—all of this. I half believe you got Ayaan captured just so I would come chasing after her and end up right here.”

All too true, he admitted. Yet incomplete. The entire world does not revolve around you, Sarah. I had plans for the others as well. Ayaan was supposed to assassinate the Tsarevich for me. She was the perfect candidate, I thought. Once he was dead I could take over his empire, seeing that I was the only one capable of controlling his undead army. That didn’t work out. You were supposed to crash this particular party. It is supposed to be me who mounts that scaffolding, not his Majesty the undying deformity. Didn’t I tell you to bring an army? Instead you bring a handful of mummies and one twisted freak.

“My freak seems to be doing alright for himself,” Sarah said, turning around to watch Gary plow through a line of ghouls. His bony frame had grown considerably while she spoke with the brain until he resembled nothing so more as a giant white spider with a tiny human skull perched atop its carapace.

The werewolf came at him, claws on hands and feet flashing through the air. Gary stabbed downwards with a bony tail like a scorpion’s sting that penetrated deep into the earth. Erasmus rolled to the side and came back up to slash at one of Gary’s tree-trunk legs. Gary knelt forward under the pressure and Erasmus tried to scamper up onto his back, his clawed feet digging into Gary’s flesh to find purchase.

A toothy mouth opened in Gary’s side. Lips studded with bony spikes grabbed at Erasmus’ left arm and the teeth sheared it clean off. Erasmus howled in agony as his furry body pinwheeled down to the carpet of bones while the giant mouth chewed the werewolf’s limb into pulp. A dozen thin spines lanced down from Gary’s body to impale the werewolf in as many places. Erasmus didn’t get back up.

“See? Look at that,” Sarah crowed, excited.

Ah, the druid said, our Gary. He’s a scrapper, I’ll allow you that much. Yett the only thing he believes in is the integrity of his own skin. He’d never take on this fight if he was in any danger. And unless I miss my guess, your Ayaan is about ready to strike.

“What are you talking about?” Sarah demanded. The mummy holding the brain inclined her head and Sarah pivoted around to look where she indicated. She just had time to see Ayaan crest a pile of boulders high up on the ridge wall to the south. Sarah looked closer and saw her father on the other side of the pile. He was sitting calmly, his eyes closed, his arms outstretched, the palms of his skeletal hands pointed at Gary.

“No,” Sarah said, the syllable meaningless in her mouth. “No, that’s not right.”

It’s a hard world, lass, Mael Mag Och told her. It has been for twelve years.

Ayaan grabbed Dekalb’s head in both of her hands. He jerked and flexed and tried to escape from her but he was caught like a fish on a line. Ayaan pressed harder and the skin on Dekalb’s head darkened and split like the skin of a rotten fruit. Sarah’s father kicked out with his legs but he couldn’t seem to hit Ayaan.

Sarah watched in mute horror as her father’s face peeled off in long dry strips of skin. The skull underneath glowed with dark energy. The skull flexed and shook and a network of fine cracks appeared over its surface. Shafts of dark energy leaked through the fissures. Darkness burst from empty eyesockets and Dekalb’s skull cracked open in a hundred pieces.

Ayaan let the headless body fall forward. She was done. Down on the battlefield Gary must have felt it right away. He must have realized instantly that he was no longer immune to the attacks of the Tsarevich’s army. He made a quick slash at all the ghouls and cultists nearby and then ran for the hills.

“Daddy,” Sarah said. The last thing she’d said to him was that he was a bad parent. He had begged her not to get herself into this mess.

“Daddy,” she said again. The brain in the jar had enough tact to keep silent.