He tried to smile but the remains of his mouth merely twitched. 'His plan required her to condition the energy of the Source. To step it down to a level his bodily tissues could accept. At my command she merely fed him an extra little jolt.'
'But why?' Ayaan demanded. 'Why did you do this? Why did you kill him?'
'Sarah knows,' he told her. Sarah bit her lip. She had a feeling she did know, and it terrified her. When Gary had told her about Mael Mag Och she'd thought of him as a laughable sort of vision. Someone stuck in the mindset of the Dark Ages. That was, of course, before he got his hands on the ultimate power of the life force itself.
'So I was saying that I never wanted this to be such a difficult transition. You should ask Gary some time, Sarah. He would tell you, I'm sure, just how much compassion I still had in my heart, back in those all-too-brief days when I still had my own body. How I wanted to make things easy on you. Instead you chose all this blood-curdling violence and pain.'
'We chose nothing,' Ayaan spat. 'What are you talking about?' She leapt down from the flatbed and took a few steps toward the scaffolding. The ghouls moved toward her just as quickly. She had watched them tear Enni Langstrom to pieces. She took a step back.
Mael Mag Och acted as if nothing had happened. 'I was a nice chap, once. I know that's changed. It's a hard lot to be a raw consciousness stripped of form and left spinning in the void. If it made me a bit cranky, well. I do apologize.'
Ayaan grabbed Sarah's arm tight enough to hurt. 'What is it, Sarah? What does he want? What is he going to do?'
She struggled to find the best words. 'His god told him to destroy the human race. Like, all of it. I think he's going to do something to the Source.'
'Very good,' he told her. 'The Source is a hole in the side of the world. Imagine a balloon with a tiny little pinprick in it. Imagine the air coming out, just a little at a time. Enough to keep the likes of you upright, that's all. Now imagine what happens if you let all the air out of the balloon at once.'
Ayaan shook her head in disbelief. 'You'd kill everything. Animals, plants, trees, people. Overload them, burn them to ashes. Everything.'
'Hmm. It is a pity about the trees. But I've been given a mission. If I'd had a bit of help from the start maybe things wouldn't have come to so drastic a pass. I asked Gary for his help and the buggering bastard ate my head. I asked the Tsarevich and instead he turned himself into the king of the blighted world. I asked you,' he said, the clouded orbs of his eyes burning as he stared at Ayaan, 'and you spat in my face.'
Sarah put her hands over her mouth. She couldn't believe this.
'Ah, yes, I asked young Sarah as well, though I was a trifle dishonest about things. She was the only one who actually tried to help me. Too bad she was such an ineffectual little child. In the name of the father of tribes himself, lass, did you honestly expect to fight an army with a couple of mummies? I'm fond of the Egyptian folk, I truly am, but they're crap against modern weaponry. You really missed the point.'
'You've been planning this all along,' Sarah said, dumbfounded. 'You wanted me to kill the Tsarevich. You wanted Ayaan to kill the Tsarevich. So you could take his place. You let him capture you and put you in that jar. You told him exactly what he wanted to hear: that he could come here and heal himself. Because this is where you needed to be. How long have you been planning this?'
'I've been planning for this since your Gary knocked me down. You have no notion, lass, of how many snares I've laid and schemes I've hatched to get us here.'