If she let even a drop of blood escape her buckets Ayaan would be beaten for her failure. There was no point arguing to the Least's sense of reason. Her only chance was to outrun him. 'Stay back, Tsarevich gave me my orders,' she shouted. She grabbed up her buckets in fingers that were red with the effort of carrying the weight, fingers that didn't want to close. 'Stay back,' she shouted, and dashed inside the superstructure. A two-story run up a steep metal staircase awaited her. She would make it, she would run faster than the Least. She always had before.
'To giving me,' the Least howled as if someone had stuck him with a straight pin. 'You be to giving me!'
At the top of the stairs, her body heaving with the effort, Ayaan ducked into a companionway and kicked the hatch shut behind her. She had made it.
The rest was easy. She passed through the flying bridge where the navigators stood watch, keeping the ship on course. Most of them turned up their noses at her as she passed, not wanting to associate with anyone so uncouth as to pull hand bucket duty. One junior navigator, though, a girl from a fishing village in Turkiye who had come into the Tsarevich's service at the same time as Ayaan, did give her a glance. As she passed the girl shoved a scrap of paper in her back pocket. Ayaan made no acknowledgement.
Down another corridor and up to the door. Ayaan rolled her shoulders and tried not to think about the pain in her arms. Almost done. She hit an automatic hatch release with her hip and stepped into the Officer's Mess, a low room lined with clean windows, the walls and floor draped with Persian rugs. On couches before her the liches lay in wait. One of them'she didn't know his name but he was covered everywhere in thick fur like an ape'came up and politely offered to take the buckets from her but she politely declined. Another squatted down on the floor and showed her a wide, lipless smile. The Green Phantom scowled at her, while Cicatrix smiled disinterestedly and reburied herself in an issue of French Vogue so old the lamination had worn off the cover. The living woman had a bright new scar on her cheek. It was healing well.
With a grunt Ayaan emptied her buckets into a tub full of ice. She tried not to look at the hands as they slithered out, the fingers lacing together, the dry blood running out in a fine sift. She tried not to let the powder get into her mouth or nose.
When the buckets were empty she turned to go. She knew it was futile but she moved steadily, purposely toward the door.
'There's one more thing,' the green phantom said. She felt her body surge as he toyed with her metabolism. Would he wear her out, make her exhausted even though her shift was half over? Would he give her a goose, make her hyper until her jaw ached from grinding? His possibilities for amusement at her expense seemed endless.
'Yes, sir,' she said, wondering what demeaning errand he would have this time, and turned around.
Monster Planet
Chapter Fourteen
A human brain. In a jar.
Cyrillic characters ran around the top and bottom of the glass container, etched in a looping cursive hand. Inside the jar the brain floated in yellowish liquid, dangling from a web of silver chains. It was a human brain, most definitely, and most certainly it was dead. Ayaan lacked the sensory sensitivity of a lich but even she could tell that something had taken up residence in the disembodied organ. It didn't pulse or glow but then again, it sort of did.
A mummy carried the jar. Not just any mummy. The fiftieth mummy, the former high priestess of Sobk who had crocodiles painted like a print on her ragged linen. The last mummy, the one Ayaan had been about to slaughter when the ghost had appeared.
'Enough, enough, enough,' the ghost had chanted then, rushing into the room, possessing the crumbling flesh of a Cypriot ghoul in order to steal its voice. True intelligence had shown in its borrowed eyes and Ayaan remembered the story Dekalb, Sarah's father, had told her, of a creature that could inscribe its personality over the blank slates of the undead. A creature that had helped him in the final mad rush of corpses in Central Park. A creature that had a special affinity for mummies.