Sitting up a little she coughed noisily but unproductively. She saw she was wrapped in thick blankets that were only a little tattered along the edge'had they been taken from one of the houses nearby? She looked around and saw she was in a kind of courtyard. Dead leaves filled its corners and a dry fountain stood at its center, a big cracked concrete bowl decorated with nymphs and cupids and dolphins. Lying on a cloth next to the fountain were a sword, a noose, and a length of fur. The relics, she remembered. The relics of the Celt, whoever that might be.
Ptolemy leaped down from his perch and offered her his hand. As she struggled up to her feet she checked her pockets and found her pistol there, its magazine completely empty. She touched the soapstone scarab.
i death thought sent you sent me thought to my death,he told her. He sounded embarrassed.was but strategy it was but strategy
'Yeah,' she said, 'well. Just don't doubt me again.'
He bowed gallantly. Behind him Gary scuttered over the wall on his six bony legs. She could have talked to him if she wanted'she still had his tooth in her pocket'but she remembered what had happened before and didn't dare. Her father arrived a few moments later, forced to take the long way round. He emerged through a door in the house behind the courtyard. 'Oh, sweetheart, you look so much better,' he said, putting a withered hand on her cheek. She closed her eyes and smiled. It was so good to be back with him, to have him be alive. She refused to question that feeling.
'You saved me, you healed me,' she said, feeling like a toddler, feeling like her dad was the strongest man on earth. 'I got too close to the fungus queen. That was supposed to be fatal.'
Dekalb put an arm around her shoulder and lead her through the house. The furniture inside, the fixtures of the rooms meant nothing to her. They passed through the front door and into the street overrun with trees.
'I didn't know I had it in me,' he said. 'Your Egyptian, um, friend came and found me. He said you were dying and I was the only one who could stop it. I didn't know what he was talking about but then I saw you looking so blue and still and I couldn't help it, I just picked you up and held onto you and suddenly you started coughing. I guess I did something. It left me so tired, though. I kind of want to just go back to my tower.'
'What about her?' Sarah asked, fear suddenly blooming inside her, cold and sweaty. 'What about the one I shot, the, the lich I shot?'
Ptolemy raised one arm and pointed down the street. Sarah saw the building where she had taken refuge. One whole side of its facade had crumbled down into the street. In the exposed innards of the place she saw a tangle of rebar sticking out of half of a retaining wall. A human figure had been impaled on half a dozen spars'clearly the work of someone with superhuman strength. She glanced at Ptolemy and the mummy bowed.
The impaled woman looked nothing at all like the blight demon. She was short, almost as short as Sarah and her skin was barely mottled with fungus. Her head was missing altogether. Sarah looked down and saw it near the woman's feet, scorched and silvered. It sat on top of the remains of a campfire.
'He burned it for six hours straight,' her father told her. 'That should do it. She wasn't like Gary. I'm pretty sure.'
Sarah felt weak and sick and feverish but she had to see for herself. She climbed up into the ruined building, whimpering a little every time she put her foot down on a pile of broken bricks and it started to slide away from her. Eventually she reached the skull. She picked it up and slammed it against a block of concrete. It cracked open and inside she found only ashes.
It was about as dead as you could get. It would have to be enough.
Looking at the corpse, of what had been done to sanitize the lich, a cold feeling seeped through her hands, her wrists. Up her forearms. She had something to do. A duty. She had pretended like she was done, that her responsibilities were discharged. She had hidden in fear. Not anymore. She knew what had to be done.
'The Tsarevich isn't going to like this,' she said, scrambling back down into the street. 'I think we just declared war. What happened to her soldiers?'
The soapstone buzzed under her fingers.i scattered chased them chased they scattered
Sarah nodded. 'So they probably went back to their master. What about those relics she was after, did you figure out why he wanted them?'
no