No, Milo decided with a shake of his head. This had to be something to do with the conventional war being fought above.
“Do you have anything more to say, Magus?” Lady Hrawn asked, sounding tired or perhaps very bored.
Milo realized that as he’d been weighing things in his mind, the Nether Council had sat stewing in the roiling whispers of the galleries. If the looks among the Council had been hungry before, they were ravenous now.
“My word might not mean much to you,” he began, provoking the first affirmative response from the ghuls in the gallery, “but I’ll tell you the truth as far as I know it, with my promise that it is the truth.”
The audience hall seethed, then seemed to hold its breath as Lady Hrawn nodded.
“I was sent here to learn the ways of magic from your people,” Milo said, feeling much smaller in the sudden, smothering stillness. “It cost my bosses a lot of money and the lives of many good men to get me here. The men I work for aren’t nice people, or even probably as good as the men who died so I could come here in secret, but they’re not wasteful or stupid.”
At least, Milo thought, not most of them.
“They’re at war right now with a lot of enemies, and those are just other humans,” he continued. “Why go to all the expense in blood and resources just to find another enemy to fight? They’ve already got enough of those. They aren’t going to go around looking for fresh fights, especially not with a people they know almost nothing about.”
The whispers had begun to creep back in, but either delusion or hope convinced him they weren’t as hostile as before.
“So whatever those zeppelins are for, I don’t think it’s to wage war on you and your people. When you’re fighting a war like they are, you don’t spend what you can’t spare to make new enemies. You spend it to make new friends.”
Lady Hrawn, the amphibian-faced speaker, and a few other members of the council nodded and exchanged meaningful looks. The crashing wave of whispers descended again, but in the little snippets he caught, there seemed to be as many who were leaning his way as those calling for him to be drawn and quartered.
The speaker, at a slight inclination of Lady Hrawn’s head, shifted ponderously forward and raised his deep amphibian voice.
“The council will take these points into consideration and compose a proper initiative to propose to the Bashlek,” he intoned, then swung his heavy gaze to those in front of him. “Our thanks and appreciation to Contessa Rihyani and the magus for their willingness to testify before the Nether Council—”
A piercing shriek rang from Lady Dazk’s seat, and when Milo swung toward it, he saw that it was empty. She was advancing toward Milo, gesticulating wildly as she ranted.
“You bring the enemy to our gates, and still you stand and smile at us! You talk about friendship and good lives lost while you plot our destruction! Does your swollen pride have no limits?”
“Get behind me,” Ambrose rumbled, thrusting himself in front of Milo. The rifle was still slung over his shoulder, but the bodyguard radiated a primal willingness for violence. While tall for a ghul, Dazk wasn’t eye to eye with the big man, and one of his beefy arms probably weighed more than her.
Milo knew her physical prowess was not the threat. With her denouncing screams, he felt the temperature in the room change again.
“Ah, the mighty magus cowers behind his slave when faced with the truth,” she screamed. “See the heart of those who would be your conquerors, Ifreedahm! See and know that if we strike now, strike first and strike hard, we can break their spirits and safeguard our homes.”
A few of the other council members made to speak, some in dismay, some in support, but it didn’t matter. Lady Dazk’s indignant rage was carrying the day, infectious and empowering.
“And if we are to strike,” she snarled, coming to within arm's length of Ambrose as ghuls great and small from the gallery began to slink forward, “I know just where to start.”
Milo’s eyes searched the audience chamber, and he saw only a mob of monsters creeping toward him. His hand tightened on the cane, feeling the energy thrumming within it in time with his pounding heart. He searched the crowd for a thin spot, a place where, with a torrent of flame, they might be able to break through.
It would be a futile move since he and Ambrose were still in the belly of the beast, but he wasn’t going to become someone’s meat without knocking a few teeth out first.
The magic quickened within the skull, witchfire gleaming in the empty eyes of the dead raptor.
His eyes still roving, he spied the fey, islands of light and beauty amidst horrors. The colossus still wore his smirk, while the green one looked bored with the entire proceeding. The smaller one, the one who shone silver and shades of violet, was looking at him, her dark-golden-pupiled eyes smiling.
Seeing he returned her gaze, she inclined her head to Milo across the sea of gnashing teeth and hateful stares and gave him a wink.
Surprised to say the least, Milo’s witchfire guttered and then was blown out completely as the main entrance to the audience chamber burst open with a tremendous boom.
All froze as, resplendent upon a palanquin born by four ogre-sized ghuls, Bashlek Marid was borne into the chamber, followed by ranks of the baroquely armored Qareen. The animated corpses moved in perfect unison, bearing spears whose points dripped icy fog. Without a word, the battalion of corpses formed up behind the Bashlek in an unliving wall that stretched across the chamber and stood three deep.
Atop his lofty conveyance, the Bashlek looked across the room, thoughtfully stroking the crimson length of his stole. His wily and wicked gaze roved over the entire assembly before, with a heavy sigh, he addressed the chamber.
“My, my this does seem rather serious,” he remarked, let his gaze play across any who would meet his eye. “Was I gone so long that you deemed it fitting to assemble a celebration to welcome me back? Oh, you shouldn’t have, really.”
Everyone stared at him, silent and stunned, though both Ambrose and Milo had expressions of such intense relief on their faces that they seemed ready to faint.
Marid’s eyes wandered over to the fey, and his gnarled hands thumped together in a sound too ugly to be clap.
“You brought entertainment. How grand!” Marid cooed, smiling broadly as all but the silvery fey stiffened. “I must learn who is responsible for this grand affair and reward them handsomely for it. So tell me, who do I have to thank?”
The chamber remained miraculously silent, not a single whisper to be heard.
“Come now, humility only gets you so far.”
“Bashlek Marid,” Lady Dazk began, trying to muster the fiery vitriol she’d had moments before, “the Nether Council was called—”
“The entire Nether Council is here?” Marid asked with grotesquely exaggerated excitement. “My dear Lady Dazk, you’ve truly outdone yourself. I’ll have to arrange something very...special to repay you for such a gracious return to my city.”
Milo didn’t bother to hide his smile as he watched the firebrand she-ghul return to her seat in a miserable, skulking cringe. Turning back to see the wickedly gleaming eyes of the ghul monarch, Milo could almost find it in himself to feel bad for the wretched aristocrat.
Almost.
“Well, as merry a meeting as this is, I’m afraid I must bid it disband,” Marid declared with a lazy sweep of his claws. “Your Bashlek understands and appreciates your adulation, but I’m afraid more pressing matters require my attention.”
Before the host of ghuls could skitter into the darkness, their proverbial tails between their legs, Marid pointed a claw at the fey and then Milo.
“If both sets of my esteemed guests would attend me, I believe there are a few things we must discuss.”
14
An Adjustment
After the excitement of the audience chamber, the private gardens of Bashlek Marid might have seemed tame to the point of dull if not for the alien flora that was tended there.
/> Luminescent fungal blooms the size of small trees sprouted from clusters of stone or clung in cultured patterns across free-standing walls. Flitting among them here and there were tiny creatures that resembled airborne squids or octopi. Their moist skin was nearly translucent, and Milo spied the hair-thin filaments of their internal structure glittering in ever-shifting shades as they sprang from one growth to another, sometimes snaking in floating motes with their outstretched tendrils.
Across the floor of the chamber, Milo was treading across the same woolly base that had covered the floor of the tunnel. His eyes now enhanced, it resembled coarse gray hair.
They followed the Bashlek to one corner of the garden, past a central mushroom as tall as any tree Milo had seen, to a place where the hairy carpet did not reach. In this bald patch, stone stools were arranged haphazardly around a little pool in whose center was a pile of stones. Shimmering and shifting shades of yellow, orange, crimson, and magenta glowed in the spring that rippled up within the pile of stones to spill down into the pool.
The Bashlek took the seat in the far corner of the garden wall, emitting a groan of relief as he settled against the mossy buds that coated the two walls.
“Please.” He sighed, gesturing to the stools. “Have a seat, and have no fear. We need only be ourselves here.”
To illustrate the point, the Bashlek leaned to one side and released a tremendous fart. The air filled with the smell of rotting flesh and something that might have been an abrasive chemical cleaner. Milo fought not to gag as his eyes watered. He glanced at the fey, who unfairly seemed immune to the stench or the grotesque display. Ambrose swore in a few different languages and stepped back a step.
“Go on and have a seat, Magus,” Ambrose grunted, eying the malodorous monarch warily. “I’m just going to enjoy the scenery, such as it is.”
The stools were low and sized for ghuls, a fact Milo was convinced was not lost on the ghul monarch as he squatted to perch uncomfortably. Looking to the side, he saw the moonlit fey who must have been Contessa Rihyani slide gracefully onto the seat. A strange impression, a ripple almost across his sense of the unseen, flitted by. Milo noticed he was staring, and she was staring back.
Milo coughed and cleared his throat, which made it more noticeable when he turned away. To his great discomfort, he found that Marid was also staring at him, his shriveled lips having slid up just enough to show his tangle of fangs.
“You’ve turned out to be a lot more work than I bargained for,” the ghul said after a lengthy foot-shuffling pause. “More helpful than you know, but even so, it seems that every time I turn around, someone is trying to kill you.”
Ambrose gave a not-so-subtle sniff that was as good as his “making friends” jibe.
Milo opened his mouth to apologize, then shut it. A lifetime of monsters, whatever their species, warned him that an apology was not in order.
“I was just thinking you should rename the audience chamber ‘the arena,’” Milo quipped, doing his best to seem at ease despite the precarious seating. “At least that way, guests have some idea of what they are getting into. You know, good sportsmanship.”
The Bashlek chuckled and conceded the point with a nod as the contessa offered a brief smile.
“You handled the situation better than most,” Rihyani said in a soft yet powerful voice. It was the kind of voice that didn’t need to be raised to get attention.
“I’m not sure we were in the same room then, Contessa,” Milo replied, battering down a sheepish grin. “I’m pretty sure I was seconds away from Lady Dazk picking out bits of me from between her teeth.”
Marid snorted a laugh at that, but the contessa just gave another cryptic smile as she tilted her head back.
“Perhaps,” she said, eying him with a gaze that was both aloof and flensing. “But you provided solid reasons, if not evidence, for your innocence. The Nether Council’s more moderate members will be shaken by the Bashlek’s display of power, and the more conservative members will have your words to swing them over to their side.”
Milo’s eyes wandered to the Bashlek, who’d closed his eyes as he nestled in the blooms like a dog enjoying a roll in the grass. Even so, he nodded slightly at Rihyani’s assessment.
“Radicals like Dazk aren’t going anywhere,” she continued. “But they’ve played their hand, twice now if I hear correctly, and failed both times. They’ll have to consider other methods to challenge the Bashlek and get rid of you. Subtler ones, and if Dazk is any evidence, it is something they are ill-equipped to do.”
Milo wondered if sending a Si’lat after him in the food delivery counted as subtle, but before he could say anything, Bashlek Marid cleared his throat as his eyelids rose to half-mast.
“Yet for all that, there is still the matter of your army snooping around my mountain,” the old ghul said, his gaze sliding to Milo. “Which is why your tutelage will have to be adjusted. Now, just a moment. This is the good part.”
“But I just started!” Milo blurted and instantly regretted it. He sounded petulant even to his ears. “I, uh, mean, my mission is to learn magic, and so I just can’t, you know, stop.”
Marid brushed the protest aside with a flick of two claws, eyes sliding closed again.
“No one said you’d stop,” he muttered distractedly, nestling a little deeper into the fungal fronds so that nearly half his face was concealed. A shiver ran through his wiry form, and there was a subtle spicy scent in the air. A light dusting of pink and white particles fell from the fungus-encrusted wall to land stark against the Bashlek’s inky skin suit.
There was an awkward silence, and Milo, confused to the point of embarrassment, looked at the contessa, who was looking away discreetly. The silence continued, and Milo looked at the other fey, who just looked bored. He finally glanced at Ambrose, who shrugged helplessly.
Another shiver ran through the Bashlek’s form and he straightened, opening bright, almost burning eyes. Milo fought the urge to recoil; he knew the eyes of an addict when he saw them.
Subconsciously, he glanced at the fungal patterns on the wall.
“Ohhh…ahhh, yesss, that’s better,” the ghul purred in a way that made Milo feel dirty as it brushed his ear. “I swear, it gets better every time.”
“Nazahr, please,” Contessa Rihyani murmured, the words as soft and unhurried as ever, but Milo felt the subtle tonal shift. Was she embarrassed by the Bashlek?
For his part, the Bashlek stared at both of them, mortal and fey, for a few seconds, blinking slowly. Then he looked at Rihyani, who still had her face turned away.
“Oh, fine. I suppose you are right,” the ghul monarch groused, drumming his finger on his knee rapidly. “Business needs to be handled.”
He suddenly looked around, seeming confused, and then with a stricken look, he turned to the contessa.
“What were we talking about?”
Milo would have laughed if this ghul hadn’t saved him from a mob of his enraged fellows less than an hour earlier and remained his best hope of holding those monsters at bay. The latter fact made this scene downright terrifying.
“The adjustments to the magus’ education,” Rihyani replied in a long-suffering voice. “You were laying out your plans for how he could assist you and still maintain his studies.”
Marid nodded, claws drumming on his knees even faster.
“Yes, yes,” he hissed, running a tongue over his teeth and then grimacing. “I remember now. Yes, I had it all figured out before I sent you in to deliver the news about the airships. Yes, yes, yesss.”
The Bashlek began to rock, his fevered gaze turning to the luminous fountain. The wrinkled folds of his eyelids rose farther then Milo would have thought possible, his face becoming a google-eyed mask fixed on the transition of colors.
“Care to share, your M—” Milo never got to finish his sentence.
“Contessa Rihyani will take you and an entourage of my daughter’s,” Marid declared in a distant voice to match his increasingly rem
ote gaze. “Your education will continue on the road to your people’s camp, then they will establish a base of operations to continue the tutelage as you confer with your superiors. The situation requires your presence to secure our interests, and by extension, your mission. As per my arrangement with your superior, his intervention needs to be at specific times to be effective.”
Milo absorbed the eruption of instruction with a scowl.
It very much seemed there was a good deal to Jorge’s interaction with the monster that the colonel had not told Milo. Milo had almost assumed that was the case, but having the brunt of his ignorance bear down on him like this was a distinctly unpleasant experience.
“I suppose,” he began, trying to keep his head above the surface of this pool in which he was scared to find the bottom. “It couldn’t hurt to reestablish contact with Nicht-KAT. That is, as long as Contessa Rihyani is okay with it. I mean, after all, she just got here. If she has other business to attend to, I wouldn’t want to make the lady feel rushed.”
Milo looked at Rihyani and saw her smiling. An ugly snort and an uglier chuckle rose from Bashlek Marid.
“The lady’s business was coming here to escort you,” the ghul said. “Do you really think those clumsy flying machines could wander through my domains without me knowing?”
Milo met Marid’s hot stare, refusing to be cowed by the mad intensity he saw there.
“It seems you know a good deal more about everyone’s business than I do, Your Majesty,” Milo replied flatly. “When you’re done playing your games, let me know.”
World's First Wizard Complete Series Boxed Set Page 16
