Ayaan looked up and saw Cicatrix smiling at her. She was waiting for Ayaan to get a good long look. Ayaan smiled back and dashed to catch up with the scarred woman. Together they entered the bunker. It went a long way back into the hillside and was lit up with naked incandescent bulbs every three meters. Arabic graffiti had faded on the walls but time had failed to erase it entirely. As they pushed deeper into the bunker Ayaan began to get a very strange feeling. There was a smell in the air, a smell like burnt cake, and she felt as if there must be a large number of people nearby but if so they were preternaturally silent.
Doors opened off the bunker's main corridor. One of them stood open. Cicatrix lead her through and into a large room, maybe ten meters on a side. The floor was carpeted in dead bodies, each hidden underneath a rough blanket. At the near end of the room a table and chairs had been set up. Standing next to the table the green-robed phantom awaited them. The lich who captured her in Egypt. Ayaan did her best not to flinch as he turned to look at the two living women. He looked almost more skeletal close up than he had from a distance but his very human eyes kept him from appearing too monstrous. 'You, of course, are Ayaan,' he said in English, his voice only slightly accented. He was a European'maybe German or Dutch. 'Allow me to introduce myself.'
She waited patiently to hear his name, wondering if she would be expected to shake his dead hand. Then a wave of exhaustion passed over and through her. She felt like she'd been hit by a truck. Another wave enveloped her and she sat down hard in one of the chairs. 'I'm sorry, I'' she began but couldn't finish. She was so. So tired, so. The life was... was draining out of...
In a moment it was over and she looked up, horrified. It felt like she was about to faint.
'I could have killed you then. Just switched you off. You don't need to know my name, because you will never address me,' the green phantom told her. She realized that she had just felt his power'his gift. Most liches had some kind of special ability, some new sense or talent to compensate for the decay of their bodies. This one could slow down her metabolism from a distance. It occurred to her that his power might also work in the other direction. That he could speed her body's natural processes up as well. He could make her faster'just as he had made the ghouls in the desert so fast she couldn't effectively fight them.
'If I want something from you, I'll take it,' the phantom told her. 'I don't trust you and I never will. He,' and Ayaan knew he meant the Tsarevich, 'believes you can be useful to us but he wants you kept on a short leash. Do you understand? You're like a dog to me. A dog that has to be controlled.'
He moved away from the table, his robe swishing around his ankles, his femur staff clicking on the hard floor. Ayaan stayed seated and waited for him to talk himself out. Men of his type always did, eventually.
'This place is where I work. I have a very simple job: I am supposed to find a ghost.' He glared at her, challenging her to deny the existence of such things. Ayaan had good reason not to so she kept quiet. 'I've been here for years and so far I've had no success whatsoever. Oh, I've raised some spirits. I've experimented with psychics'with mind readers, with mediums and table rappers and spoon benders of every type, both living and dead, and I've even found a few people who had real power. They couldn't do what I asked them to do, however. They couldn't find my ghost.'
Ayaan nodded in what she hoped was a pleasant manner. Cicatrix acted like someone who'd heard all this before, many times. She leaned against one wall and lit a cigarette. The mentholated smoke quickly filled the underground room.