'Now, after years of my best ideas not working, my master came up with a plan of his own and we're going to try it out. We know a very few things about this ghost. We know it used to be a friend of the Tsarevich, at a time when he very much needed a friend. It used to come and talk to him and it taught him many things. Then one day it stopped coming by. We don't know why, but we do know that our liege lord was quite upset by this. We know the ghost still has many things to teach us. We also know this ghost has a fond spot in his heart for certain types of the undead. Namely, mummies.'
The phantom bent to pull the sheet away from one of the dead bodies on the floor. A bandage-wrapped dead man with a gold mask on his face lay there, his painted features staring vacantly at the ceiling. Iron staples held him to the floor, pinning his arms and legs so he couldn't move at all except for a spastic kind of wriggling. He looked a great deal like a giant maggot.
The green phantom was standing behind her. She had no memory of him moving across the room. Like everything else she was being shown it was a clear message. He had a pistol in his hand, a cheap Hungarian FEG that would probably blow up in his hand if he tried to shoot her with it. She did her best not to show any fear, though probably fear was what he wanted.
'We have this theory, you see, that if we kill enough mummies the ghost will come back to try to protect them. We're pretty sure it's watching us, having a fine old time at our expense. Here.' He shoved the pistol at her, barrel first. 'We also have a theory that whoever does the killing will be the target for some pretty heavy karmic retribution.' He pushed the pistol at her again, obviously intending for her to take it.
Surprised was not the word. Ayaan took it and calculated how quickly she could snap off a head shot. With the phantom dead she could easily overpower Cicatrix. As far as she knew they were alone in the bunker'she could escape into the hills and then over to the far side of the island, try to find a boat, make her way back to Port Said.
Or she could recognize that the phantom had just moved five meters across the room in the time it took her to blink. She could get the point of this whole exercise. She might very well think she was 'assassin', the 'best with a rifle' as Cicatrix had put it, but in the company of liches she was severely outclassed. Before she could even aim with the pistol he could kill her. Just switch her off, like a light.
She had to stay alive if she ever wanted to see Sarah again.
There was no question as to what the phantom wanted her to do. She rose from the chair and stood over the gold mask of the mummy exposed on the floor. She kicked the mask away from his face with one boot. Underneath hieroglyphics had been painted on his line-wrapped face. No doubt a curse on anyone who disturbed his eternal rest.
Ayaan slipped off the FEG's safety, lined up her shot, and blew his ancient Egyptian brains all over the room.
Monster Planet
Chapter Eleven
the lost i cannot bone eater has their names them their faces are lost to me i cannot faces hear their bone eater names
Sarah drew her fingertips away from the soapstone scarab in her pocket. She would worry about Ptolemy's grief later, once she had found Ayaan. She knelt before the chain link fence and worked at it for a while with a pair of bolt cutters, always keeping one hand on the fence so it wouldn't rattle. So close, she thought. There had been tragedy already but maybe, just maybe she could actually pull this off'maybe she could actually rescue Ayaan. If the damn mummy would calm down for a minute.
It took six days to track the Tsarevich back to Larnaca on the island of Cyprus. He had been easy enough to track'Ptolemy could sense his lost kin, even from hundreds of kilometers away. The bunker and its scene of carnage had drawn them inexorably. That had been the easy part. Osman had dropped them at a safe distance away and then flown off in the Mi-8. When Sarah had asked him to come with her he had just laughed. 'There's a reason I learned how to fly this thing,' he explained to her. 'When you're the wheelman, you always get to be in on the getaway.' He agreed to pick them up when they were done and that was the extent of his involvement.