Rihyani stood frozen in front of the oncoming assault, and Milo didn’t have time to cry out before the hammer wielder brought his hammer smashing into her chest—only Rihyani wasn’t there. The illusion dissipated, and the fey was suddenly behind her attackers; she raked her claws across their exposed backs. The rasping screech of a sharp edge on unyielding iron was all she got for her efforts as the hammer wielder spun. She vaulted into the air to avoid being flattened.
“They’re golems!” Rihyani shouted. “Magical automatons!”
“Got it,” Milo shouted, on his feet now, facing the sickle-wielding not-woman. He realized it sounded like he knew what he was doing, but the reality was that he had no idea. Battling magical machine-soldiers was not in his woefully limited repertoire.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Zlydzen moving toward the curtain before the sickle-wielder closed on him.
“Rihyani!” Milo shouted to the fey, nimbly dodging the hammer-wielding golem. “Stop the dwarrow!”
Milo didn’t have a chance to see what if anything she did before his golem was nearly on top of him.
Out of habit more than anything else, he launched a blast of witchfire at the approaching murder-machine, but it quickly became apparent that the fire wasn’t nearly hot enough. He only managed to set the costume ablaze, so he faced a flaming reaper who pounced on him with lethal speed.
That’s not working, Imrah informed him redundantly as he wove away from a swing.
Snarling, Milo launched another bolt of fire point-blank into the golem’s face. The machine staggered back a step but replied almost immediately with a stroke that nearly split Milo in two.
“I’m open to suggestions,” Milo snarled as he barely managed to set aside a downward hack with the haft of his cane, and even then, only with magically enhanced strength and speed.
Metal grows brittle when cold, Imrah replied, and already Milo felt her essence seethe inside the fetish.
Milo desperately parried another sweeping cut and responded with a hard blow that would have shattered the spine of a living man but only managed to ring off the golem’s arms as it staggered two steps to one side. The golem’s heavy foot came down on Stalin’s outstretched leg with a nauseous crunch, and there were a few shock-filled seconds before the man started screaming in agony. Milo ignored the warlord’s plight as he scrambled backward, realizing this was about as much extra space as he could get between him and the lethal machine already turning back toward him.
FREEZE
Milo forced his mind into the formula, but rather than releasing it in a burst of frigid intent, he looped it into a heat-sapping stream. A ray of black that chilled the air around it into a sinking fog raced out and struck the golem in its sculpted iron bosom. For a single instant, the ray only seemed to put out the last of the fire clinging to the machine, and it closed half the distance in a stride. Its next step came at a languid pace, and its arms seemed to struggle to raise the weight of the heavy sickle even as it lurched forward. A low groaning and clicking sound issued from inside the golem as tiny spurs of frost began to emerge along hairline seams across its body. A second later, these spurs bloomed into a latticework of ice that encased the now-motionless golem.
Releasing the ray, and with the rest of the world coming back into focus, Milo looked up to see the sickle arched over his head, a single narrow icicle dangling from its tip.
“That was close,” he said, stepping out from under the reaper’s shadow as he hefted the beaked cane like a miner’s pick.
One chop into the golem’s chest created a widening spiderweb of fissures amidst a chorus of cracking noises. Milo drew back his foot and threw his weight into a supernaturally fortified front kick, and the golem exploded into jagged chunks. The sickle thunked on the stage and the frozen blade snapped in half, the hilt clattering to the floor.
Milo’s moment was interrupted by the sounds of Stalin still screaming over his mashed leg and Rihyani’s struggle at the back of the stage.
“Sorry, Joe,” Milo muttered as he vaulted over the recumbent Red to help the embattled fey.
The scarlet curtains flapped and twitched as a lumpy form thrashed in their knotted embrace, while Rihyani and the hammer golem danced between the rippling waves of fabric. The golem bore dozens of jagged lines across its frame, the coveralls barely hiding anything anymore, but none of it seemed to be slowing the brute in the slightest. Rihyani pranced away from another swing, but from her lack of counterattack, Milo could tell she was struggling with what to do next. If Milo hadn’t also given her the task of stopping the dwarrow, which must be what was thrashing in the tangled curtains, she could have brought her full power to bear against the golem. As it was, she was fighting the thing with her attention, and thus her will was divided.
To punctuate the point, the golem pulled its next stroke, and when Rihyani made to dodge the feinted swing, it reached out and grabbed her by her cloak. She snarled and lashed out with her claws, but they only spread more superficial gashes across metal limbs.
Unperturbed by the scratches, the golem slammed her down on the stage with bone-snapping force. For an instant, as Rihyani sprawled at the machine’s feet, the curtains ceased their mad dance, and Zlydzen’s nightmarish caricature of a face emerged from the folds, black eyes burning with hate at the fey.
“Kill her now!”
FREEZE
The frigid black ray snapped from Milo’s outstretched hand and struck the golem even as it reared back for the executing stroke.
“Rihyani! Get out of there!” Milo shouted before pressing more of his mind and Imrah’s essence into the enervating ribbon of unlight.
“Stop him!” Zlydzen hissed.
Milo only realized Rihyani had been thrown bodily by the golem as she came hurtling toward him, but he had time to break off the formula before she was caught in the crossfire. This did not, however, give him time to avoid being bowled over as he and the fey went down in a tangle of limbs.
Zlydzen cackled and Milo saw the golem stomping toward them, shedding flakes of frost with each step. He tried to draw on his mind for another burst of cold, but he was too dazed. Rihyani stirred on top of him groggily, and he felt her will clumsily pushing outward and only managing to swaddle the dwarrow in another layer of the curtain.
Get up.
As the murder-machine loomed over him, Milo fought to think, to will something to happen, but all he could do was watch the hammer rise overhead.
Get up, Milo!
The hammer descended, and a tremendous impact rocked the stage. The whole world seemed to tilt perilously; the golem’s strike had cratered the stage a few spare centimeters from Milo’s head. He heard the full-throated roar of a large engine hard at work, and another shudder shook the stage, forcing everything to tilt even further.
MILO! Get up!
The golem yanked the hammer out of the stage, and in the process, toppled backward. Milo realized that he and Rihyani would be joining it as they began to slide. The world came into sharper focus and he saw that one entire section of the stage had collapsed, and he and Rihyani were sliding as gravity relentlessly pulled them down the newly created slope.
His grip tightening on the cane, Milo drew on the strength and energy within. Snarling with the effort, he began to scrabble upward, one arm wrapped around the still-dazed Rihyani. Slivers of wood bit into his hand and scraped his knees, but with a growl and a heave, he dragged himself and Rihyani onto a level portion of the platform.
Looking down at the fey, her eyes half-lidded, Milo feared that her injuries were more severe than he’d first thought, but then a drowsy smile, free of her ferocious fangs, spread across her face.
“Thank you,” she murmured softly. “You saved me again.”
“I think that makes us even, right?” Milo quipped, not sure why now of all times, all he could do was look at her lips.
“Not even.” She laughed, but then her eyes flashed, and her hand shot out and gripped him by the back of the
neck. “Look out!”
With more force than seemed possible for her graceful limbs, she pulled hard to one side, and together they rolled hard to the left. The golem landed heavily and nearly on the hem of their clothes from its herculean leap out of the wrecked half of the stage. Milo and Rihyani didn’t have time to disentangle themselves but kept rolling as the automaton came after them, hammer raised.
Milo was nearing the point of nauseous disorientation when the beautiful sound of a Gewehr cracking off shots rang through the air. The rolling stopped, Rihyani on top this time, and both looked up to see the golem lurching drunkenly as shot after shot slammed into its iron body. Three of the shots left heavy dents in the iron chest and face, but two of them bit deep, punching holes in the shoulder joint of the hammer-wielding arm.
The golem turned its malformed face toward Ambrose, who was advancing from the edge of the stage, already ramming another magazine home.
“Get Stalin!” the big man shouted, and Milo realized his prisoner’s icy prison had come apart with the stage’s destruction.
Milo found his lips meeting Rihyani’s as she bent toward him. The contact was so quick that had it not set his every nerve alight with a spark of desire, he might have thought he imagined it.
“We’ll talk about that later,” the fey said as she sprang off him, her predatory mien in place. “Right now, I’ve got a dwarrow to catch.”
Milo fumbled to his feet, his lips tingling oddly even as he searched for where Stalin had gone. Thankfully, it wasn’t far.
Dragging his wounded leg behind him, the Bolshevik warlord had managed to hop and crawl toward the back of the stage. As Milo watched the pathetic display, Stalin’s hands groped across the knotted curtains for support.
“And where do you think you’re going, Joe?” Milo hissed as he advanced on his quarry.
Stalin twisted at the taunting call and lost his balance, the thick curtains slipping through his sweaty, trembling hands. He tried to twist as he fell to spare his injured leg but only managed to have it be underneath him when he landed. An animalistic bleat of pain slipped past his lips, so unlike his calm, sure voice only moments earlier.
“Oh, how the mighty have fallen,” Milo quipped as he came to stand over him.
“No,” Stalin snarled as he fought to roll over and climb to his feet. “It can’t end like this.”
Milo stomped, knocking him back down onto the stage.
“End?” Milo said teasingly as he glared down into watering dark eyes. ‘You’re far too useful alive for this to be over so soon.”
A struggle between indignation and relief writhed in the wounded warlord’s eyes, then they narrowed as they roved across Milo’s face.
“No,” he gasped again, face straining toward Milo’s with eyes beginning to bulge. “Are you a ghost?”
Wary of a deception, Milo straightened, reached inside his coat, and fished out a fetish, a simple-seeming coil of leather he’d prepared in Shatili just for this moment.
BIND
The leather sprang to life, and in seconds, it had wound its way around Stalin, forcing his legs and arms together with sharp tugs of its coils. Though he winced at the constricting movements, hissing as it pulled at his injured leg, Stalin never ceased staring at Milo, his eyes growing wider and wider.
“So, this is it, then,” he murmured, sliding into his native Georgian as he sank back against the stage heavily. “Laid low by the sins of my past.”
A cold, bitter smile slowly crept out from under his mustache.
“I should have known she was lying. Oh, clever little Petrovich.”
Behind him, Milo heard a rending metallic crash, but that sound could never have struck him as hard as the name which passed Stalin’s lips.
“What did you say?” Milo snarled as he reached down and grabbed Stalin by the leather web that ensnared him.
“Did you think I wouldn’t recognize you?” Stalin asked, his face still lit by his wintry smile. “That I wouldn’t see her in your face, your mouth, your eyes?”
Milo’s fingers twisted into the cords until his fingers ached, but the power of speech seemed to escape him.
“Magus!” Ambrose shouted. “Where’s Rihyani? We need to go!”
Turning around from Stalin’s leering grin, Milo saw the big man standing over the crumpled golem, the machine’s hammer in one hand. If his heart hadn’t been doing its best to pummel its way out of his chest, Milo might have laughed at the sight.
“She went after Zlydzen,” he said, finding his voice at last and nodded toward the empty steps of the Parliament building where he’d last seen her. The gates into the courtyard were shattered and hanging off their hinges, and within, he heard the sounds of a violent struggle.
“Go get her,” Ambrose said as he tossed the hammer to one side. “I’ll get him in the Rollsy, and then we need to go. Things are getting wild out there.”
Stealing a glance past the stage, Milo saw what he meant.
The square had become an abattoir.
Milo and Rihyani’s specters were gone, and most of the Russian soldiers seemed to be among the piles of the dead, but that had not stopped the conscripts from tearing into each other with reckless abandon. Brother fought brother and neighbor fought neighbor as the dwarrow’s broken manipulations turned men into mad beasts. In the flurry of blows and screams and blood, it was almost impossible to tell who had been driven mad by the street organ’s broken enchantment and who was fighting for their lives to fend off the frenzied humans next to them.
At the far end of the street, he saw a fresh crowd entering the square, a rabble of scared and angry-looking citizens coming to see what new madness was gripping their city. Milo knew it was only a matter of time before the madness in the square turned its attention on them, or they waded in in some desperate attempt to restore order.
Either way, things were only about to get worse, and they needed to escape before they were inescapably caught up in the storm.
Spitting a curse, Milo spun and dragged Stalin up toward his snarling face.
“We’re not done,” the magus hissed, his pale eyes boring into the man’s dark, defiant gaze. “Not even close to done.”
Milo threw him back down and stalked toward the Parliament building.
* * *
Milo moved into the courtyard and was greeted by an odd sight.
Rihyani stood amongst the remains of a fountain, water gurgling up and around her feet from rent pipes as she faced Zlydzen. The dwarrow stood several strides away on dry paving stones. Neither fey nor dwarrow moved, each staring at the other.
Milo felt magical energies trembling in the air, Rihyani’s will swirling about and probing at a hardened presence he could sense in the direction of the squat grotesque. The magical presence of the dwarrow was stolid and intractable but showed no signs of being willing or even able to lash out. The magic present was armor, not a weapon.
“It’s over, Zlydzen,” Milo called as he moved to Rihyani’s side, kicking up little splashes. “Your golems are scrap metal, and your puppet is ready for transport. Give up now, and we can bring you in with some dignity.”
The dwarrow’s glittering black eyes turned toward Milo, and he felt his confidence wither inside of him.
“I think not, little magus,” Zlydzen muttered. “You have Ioseb, who I will remind you I already offered, but as I expressed, I have work that is too vital to spend any more time dallying with you.”
Milo gave a snort and began to prowl forward, not noticing that Rihyani’s expression tightened as he moved past her.
Milo, he heard as her will brushed his. Be careful.
Milo almost lost his stride at the contact but was determined not to let it show.
“Seemed like you spent plenty of time dallying with that curtain.” Milo chuckled as he came to stand a few paces from the dwarrow. “Which was amusing, but it’s not your dancing that I’m particularly interested in.”
A smile that could have curdled mil
k from a mile off drew Zlydzen’s lips apart.
“What exactly are you interested in, little magus?” the dwarrow asked in a ragged whisper. “How far have you plunged into the dark? Far enough to start asking the right questions?”
Milo put on his best sharkish grin in reply and drew witchfire into the cane’s sockets.
“Come with us, and you’ll find out,” Milo said with a voice that was sinister and silky. “Come quietly, and I might even ask my questions politely.”
Milo, he’s raised wards around himself, Rihyani warned. No magic can touch him now.
Milo’s stomach twisted, and he wondered if that meant the ungainly little creature couldn’t work any magic either.
“Tempting though your offer is,” Zlydzen said, still smiling, “I’m afraid I’ll have to pass. As I said, work and all that.”
Milo took a menacing step forward, pointing with his cane.
“Just because you’ve warded yourself, it doesn’t mean I can’t beat you to a pulp and pour you into the trunk,” he growled before drawing the pistol from his belt holster. “Or I could put a round or two in some nonvital parts and drag you back to the car and hope you don’t bleed out. Your choice?”
Zlydzen’s smile widened until his mouth seemed ready to split his huge head in half.
“Brave words.” The dwarrow laughed from somewhere deep inside its chest. “For such a little fellow.”
Zlydzen sprang forward, and Milo opened fire.
The first rushed shot sailed over the dwarrow’s head, Milo’s aim not adjusted for such a low-slung target. His second would not have the same problem as the dwarrow erupted upward and outward in a chorus of sickening pops and cartilaginous clicks. Milo’s second shot struck meat, but not that of the squat, lumpy thing that had stood before him seconds ago
Zlydzen, like some monstrous jack in the box, had unfolded and was now a gaunt, looming monster four meters tall, coming for Milo with outstretched hands perfectly proportioned for his enormous stature.
World's First Wizard Complete Series Boxed Set Page 63
