To reach her next stop she had to pass one of the seven hold compartments of the Pinega. There were a couple of reasons to wish she could avoid that part of her route. For one thing there was the ship's original mission, and the residue of its old cargo that remained. The Pinega had been built by the Soviets to ferry nuclear waste to containment facilities near the north pole. It could hold a thousand tons of solid waste'spent fuel rods and entire disposable radiothermic generators, mostly'in two of its holds and eight hundred cubic meters of liquid toxins in the other five. It had been emptied out, of course, but on the first day of the voyage as the living and the dead were herded onboard the lich overseer of the deck had passed around a Geiger counter so they could all see just how little concern the Tsarevich had for their bodily safety. Ayaan had taken away her own lesson from that. The cultists'the faithful'had taken it in stride. If their deaths could be hastened on by service to their master, that was a reason to rejoice. They thought being dead was just the next phase of existence, and a better one at that, compared to the harsh life the living had after the world ended. Very few of them were allowed to see what happened in the surgeries at the stern, but Ayaan wondered if even the gore back there would dissuade them. These were true believers and they outnumbered the sane living people onboard considerably. For every doctor horrified at what he was asked to do there were five or six deckhands who scrubbed and scrubbed at the decks long past the limit of human endurance, who would rather scrub than eat just in case the Tsarevich walked by and wanted to see his reflection in the wood.
A few like that were painting the superstructure as she passed by. They were covered in grey paint, their faces and hands and torsos daubed with a redolent and probably toxic chemicals. Their eyes were flat and lifeless in their heads as if they were already practicing the traditional empty stare of the ghouls they hoped to become. They gave the heavy plastic buckets she hauled no more than a passing glance. Ayaan didn't look at them, didn't look at the deck ahead of her. She stared out to sea at the ever-changing, never-changing waves and tried not to think about what lay ahead.
She kept her cool even as the hatches she passed by jumped and flexed. She was pretty sure the liches just did that to spook her. The dead onboard, the vast majority of them stacked like driftwood in the ship's holds, couldn't possibly sense her through the closed hatches. She was sure of it.
Still. As she passed a staircase leading down into gloom she could hear them straining against their confinement. She could feel the deck shake with their need.
Ayaan hurried past.
The buckets in her hands got truly heavy, her arms started complaining at the weight, anyway, as she moved forward to the main entrance to the superstructure. She paused and set them down, just for a moment, even though she knew it was a mistake. The Least would spot her. He always did.
Ayaan stood about crotch-high to the Least. He was maybe three times as broad as her through the shoulders. He stank of death, of musty, rancid fat and ancient sweat. His face dangled from his skull like a wax mask that had slipped down from its wearer's true features. Of all the possible liches fit for the job the Least had been put in charge of maintaining order on the foredeck.
The Least was one of the Tsarevich's first experiments in creating a new lich, an underling with the intelligence to command troops. It hadn't quite taken. When Ayaan ducked into a shadow near the entrance to the above decks quarters he was busy stomping through the chaos of the main foredeck, a maze of winches and cranes and enormous battened hatches where the living had set up their bedrolls and their hammocks and their small tents. Dozens of wispy pillars of smoke rose from the tiny deckhouses where the living prepared their simple food. The Least made sure he got an unwholesome share of everything they made. He had five hundred kilos of bulk to maintain, after all. Ayaan watched him dip one enormous hand into a boiling rice pot and shove the grains in his mouth, the scalding water running down his chin and raising blisters in the roll of fat that ran around his neck like a goiter. She gagged at the thought of eating out of a pot he had touched but she knew she had probably done so many times.
She shouldn't have stared. He caught her glance and returned it'with a horrific smile. He knew what she had in her buckets. He would want a taste of that, too.
He came stumping toward her on telephone pole-sized legs, his splayed toenails digging into the deck. 'You know rules,' she told him, in Russian. They said the Least had been a gangster once, a Moscow Mafioso. Either it was true or his behavior was a result of brain damage post mortem'Ayaan would credit either hypothesis. 'Is not for you.'
'Don't waste, don't waste one drop,' he bellowed, spit rolling out of his mouth. He was hungry alright. 'Use all, honor all, sacred is all.' His eyes were very wide.