'And she will take those wires and connect them to it?' Ayaan asked. She'd never been very good with electronics.
'There's really nothing to attach them to without her. She's going to enter the Source, physically. It's the only way. She needs to act as a conduit for the life force. A transformer, I guess'she can take the power of the Source and feed it to the Tsarevich out here as healing energy.'
Nilla vanished without fanfare as she crossed the line. She turned invisible. The female cultists in her train looked frightened for a moment but she must have spoken aloud to them because they kept walking.
'He's coming,' someone said in Russian. 'He is ready,' someone else shouted. Some of the cultists dropped to their knees as the flap of the yurt was drawn back. The ghouls kept working'they didn't even look up.
A young girl, maybe twelve years old, stepped out of the yurt. Her head had been shaved and she had a fresh cut on her cheek. She wore a silk dress stained with blood in a couple of places. Ayaan barely recognized her at first but slowly her brain worked it out. It was Patience, the girl she had taken away from the farm in Pennsylvania. By the look of things she was the new Cicatrix.
A hand appeared out of the darkness of the yurt. A length of twisted forearm. The Tsarevich hauled himself forward, pushing his misshapen skull out into the light. He couldn't walk. His legs were two different lengths'his left was nearly a foot longer than his right'but clearly he intended to emerge under his own power. Inch by inch his deformed flesh hauled itself out of the yurt.
The green phantom waited at the side of the flatbed with a shiny metal shopping cart. The Tsarevich lurched forward and slid down into it, his off-center hips jamming down into the metal basket. His shorter arm reached forward and his fingers wove through the bars while his longer arm draped over the side of the cart and nearly dragged his knuckles in the dirt. The green phantom pushed him forward with visible effort, toward the scaffolding.
'What's that?' someone said, and Ayaan assumed they'd never seen the Tsarevich before. She almost laughed. She had been holding her breath'except that she had no breath to hold. Her chest had locked into rigor with anticipation. 'No, seriously,' the voice called again, and she turned to see who had broken the tension. 'What is that?'
She looked'everyone looked'and saw someone walking towards them from the far side of the valley. A clearly dead person whose face was a bare skull. There were scraps of skin adhering to the bone, and a pair of prominent eyes in the sockets, and a wispy lock of hair or two. The figure was perhaps six feet tall and extremely thin'except for the skull its entire body was wrapped up in a heavy olive drab blanket.
It glided forward, rolling a bit, because it didn't have any feet to walk with. Sharp-looking ends of bone stuck out of the bottom of the blanket. Instead of walking forward it sidled forward in the manner of a crab.
'Dad,' Sarah breathed. But Ayaan knew the figure wasn't Dekalb'it couldn't be. For some reason she felt like she recognized it, though it was unlike anything she'd ever seen before.
'Get a sniper over here,' Ayaan shouted but it was too late. A female cultist in a paper smock approached the strange figure. She had a pistol in either hand and she raised them to shoulder height. She demanded that the creature stop at once. 'Come on, we need a fire team!' Ayaan yelled. She half-turned to relay her instructions to Erasmus but that would mean taking her eyes off this new enemy.