Ayaan called his name but he rushed forward, perhaps intent on reaching their goal, perhaps after something else. She followed as fast as she could while keeping her wits about her. Her feet'nowhere near as steady as they used to be'kept getting snagged in tree roots and undergrowth and she had a terrible presentiment that she would arrive too late, that he would fall in some pit lined with sharpened stakes or trigger a precariously-balanced log to fall on him from high branches. She shouted to him again but he made no answer.
She nearly ran into him when she finally found him. He had stopped before an enormous old-growth tree, big enough that the trail wrapped around it, a massive wooden column climbing with ants, wrapped with the tendrils of epiphytes, studded everywhere with stunted, sunlight-deprived limbs still as thick as saplings of their own. Erasmus looked as if he were leaning forward into the tree's bulk, perhaps just resting for a moment. Resting on his face. She cautiously moved around him. He had his eyes and nose pressed up tight against a knot in the trunk the width of a dinner plate. He wasn't moving. Coupled with a dead man's lack of breath or pulse he looked more like some furry excrescence of the tree than a separate organism.
The green phantom came stumbling through the underbrush behind her, making enough noise to alert every enemy in the forest. 'What's wrong with him?' he demanded. 'What's been done to him? Get him out of there.'
Ayaan wasn't sure if he should be moved but she tugged at one of his paws anyway. She might as well have pulled on a strand of ivy'Erasmus' body, while still flexible, was stuck to the spot. She tugged again and again. Finally the green phantom stepped up to help her. He leaned his staff against the tree and pulled.
Erasmus came loose with a howl, a noise only an animal could make. His claws came up and he raked the green phantom across the belly, tearing open skin and flesh. With another scream he jumped away and headed deeper into the forest, moving as fast as his dead legs could carry him, following no trail that Ayaan could see but merely stumbling through the brush and smacking into tree limbs like a man possessed.
She had a feeling that was exactly what he had become. She saw a round space had been hollowed out of the tree, behind its wide knot. Inside someone had placed an hexagonal mirror, its frame made of human finger bones. Dark energy streamed from the thing'magic'and Ayaan was careful not to look into the glass. Instead she took the green phantom's staff and used it to smash it into bits of silver and jagged glass.
Then she turned around, and realized what fate had offered her.
The green phantom lay disemboweled on the path. His ancient, dried-up guts slithered onto the ground next to him, his hands trying in vain to keep them in. He wasn't even looking at her. Ayaan could kill him easily, smash in his head with his own staff or fire a bolt of her own particular kind of darkness directly into his brain. It would take a mere second of her time. The handless ghouls coming up the path would destroy her or perhaps the Tsarevich would kill her from a distance but that was immaterial.
She stepped closer to the green phantom, intending to finish him off'and then she stopped.
I see his heart. His black and dead heart!
The words moved through her head like a pebble rolling around on her tongue. Half her face lost all feeling and a thin trickle of drool fell from her numb lip.
You be caution in all things.
The words stopped her in her tracks.
'It's your big chance, now,' the green phantom said. He looked up at her with bitter fear in his eyes. 'If you want to prove yourself. If you want to live.' He had the remote control in one hand, the control that could activate the wards on her neck.
'Yes,' Ayaan said, 'I want to live.' The words fell out of her mouth. She had thought nothing of the kind.
'Then you'll go after him. You'll go after that furry cocksucker who just gutted me and you'll find out what happened. Yes or no?'
Ayaan sucked breath into her lungs, trying to clear her head, but the unnecessary air just wheezed out of her again. 'Alright,' she said, all thought of killing the green phantom gone. It just wasn't in her head anymore. She could feel where the thought had been but she couldn't remember what it might have been.
Your friend has friend in me,she thought. A curious thing to think, but it didn't bother her too much.
Monster Planet
Chapter Fifteen