“Damn it all!” Ludendorff barked, then gave several rattling coughs. The room quieted as all eyes, even Milo’s, turned to watch the crumbling titan struggle to regain his breath.
“I’ll have the room cleared if that happens again,” the general said in a wheezing growl as his watery, red-rimmed eyes swept the chamber. Several of the faces staring back at him raised chins and puffed out chests defiantly, but none was so bold as to say anything.
“You seemed to be reaching for some discovery,” Ludendorff said as he turned his gaze back to Milo. “I suggest you come to it quickly.”
Milo nodded, but he felt like there was a boulder in his stomach and that burdensome lump was also chained to his tongue, which didn’t want to verbalize what he now realized must be the truth.
He started to speak, but his voice failed him. He told himself that not saying it didn’t make it not true, but somehow in his very foundations, he knew it did make it more true.
Especially for him.
“I think the shades possessed the soldiers,” Milo said, the words coming out in a bitter and caustic rush. “The long-term magic the Soviets were under left them vulnerable. Left them open somehow, and the malicious shades leaped at the chance.”
How many of the wicked things had he bound up in those soul wells? Hundreds, at least.
“The shades became violent upon possessing the soldiers,” Milo continued, tasting bile and iron at the back of his throat. “Hundreds of men turned on their comrades, and after they were put down, the shades sprang out of the corpses to possess new men. Those shades that ran out of living targets would have destroyed anything within reach. Nothing was left because the shades wouldn’t have left anything alive or in one piece.”
The silence in the room was so complete that Milo might have thought he’d gone deaf if not for the hammer of his heart in his chest and the rasp of his breath.
Ludendorff’s face was a pensive facade again, and none dared to disturb his considerations.
“I confess that I am not well versed in all of Jorge’s reports on such matters,” the general said at last, his words slow and measured, “but I think I have the rudiments of what you have explained. You unwittingly exterminated a host of magically vulnerable soldiers using a conjured army of ghosts.”
It wasn’t a question, but Milo nodded anyway, the movement weighed down by his powerful guilt.
“Yes, General.” Milo sighed, then found he couldn’t manage to keep his head up. “Yes, sir.”
Ludendorff raised one claw to scratch his chin.
“This will take some time to discuss,” he said, his voice flat, betraying nothing. “I think it would be best if you allowed the general staff to consider the gravity of all of this. Unprecedented times, but we need to carefully consider the possible responses to this situation.”
The way the general said the last word made the wizard raise his head from where it hung miserably between his bowed shoulders. The black coat across them seemed heavier than ever.
Milo could read nothing in the dying warhorse’s expression. As he looked around the room, he wished he could say the same of the faces staring at him. Many of them were fighting to hide it, though some doing better than others, but he could smell the truth despite their posturing. They were scared.
A few years ago, that might have made him proud—cocky, even—but now Milo was wise enough to know the truth.
What men like these were afraid of, they destroyed.
2
These Stains
Ambrose was waiting for him in the entryway of the general staff offices. The big man had been forbidden to enter, though the instruction wouldn't have stopped him except for Milo’s nodded acquiescence.
The bodyguard studied Milo’s expression but didn’t bother to ask how it had gone. Without a word, they left the general staff building and stepped into the late afternoon sunshine of Berlin. The chill of fall was in the air despite the sun, and Milo told himself that was why he shivered and drew his surcoat tighter.
“We free for the rest of the day, or do they want you back later?” Ambrose asked from his position at Milo’s shoulder.
The magus shrugged as he looked up and down the street, marveling at the economic bustle of the city. As long as one didn’t look too closely at the posters on the walls, one could forget there was a war going on as one walked the streets. People went about their business and seemed untroubled by the incredible violence being done in their name and on their behalf.
The violence that Milo had accidentally become a master of.
“I need a smoke,” he grumbled, ineffectually patting the extra-dimensional pockets worked into his ensorcelled coat. He knew there was no tobacco, but he was unable to think of anything else to do.
He patted around, staring blindly at the street until Ambrose produced the precious carcinogen and some rolling papers.
“Thanks,” Milo muttered as his fingers began the automatic process of feeding his addiction.
Ambrose eyed him with obvious concern but didn’t comment until Milo had returned the cigarette materials.
“So, that bad then?”
Milo nicked his thumb and snapped a flame into reality with a miniscule necromantic ritual. He lit the cigarette and then snapped again to dismiss the flame. He took a long toke and then pinched the paper-rolled tobacco between his forefinger and scarred thumb.
“Let’s go for a walk,” the wizard announced, with a sour look over his shoulder at the general staff offices looming behind them. Without further preamble, Milo hung the cigarette from his lip and took off down the street, head down and hands shoved into his pockets.
“We headed anywhere in particular?” the big man asked as he stutter-stepped to catch up with Milo’s long strides.
“No,” the magus muttered flatly around the cigarette between his teeth.
“Then can you take this thing?” Ambrose grumbled, holding out the eagle-skull cane he’d kept tucked under his arm. “I think the witch is trying to whine at me, but it keeps coming across as whispers that make my ears twitch.”
Milo snatched the cane without slowing his pace. A second later, his steps were being announced by the rap of the metal-capped tip on the pavement. A second after that, a cold, jagged voice raked through the avenues of his thoughts like a biting north wind.
This fetish is a work of necromist mastery and supreme masonic artisanry and is powered by one of the most necromantically talented ghuls in the history of that storied people. It is not a walking stick!
Despite himself, Milo smiled as the cane connected again with a sharp tap.
We can’t have the silly humans knowing that, Milo thought back. Now shush before you blow your cover.
“Giving you what-for, is she?” Ambrose asked as he moved to stay shoulder to shoulder with Milo, who nodded through a rush of blue-gray smoke.
“She doesn’t appreciate her disguise,” Milo murmured as they crossed a street and merged into the broader flow of foot traffic.
For some time, there was no conversation. Milo was unable to say anything, and Ambrose seemed determined to give him as much space as he desired on the matter. They moved through the commercialized city center past the post office buildings, trolley stations, and shops. Some people gave them an uncomfortably wide berth, while others nodded respectfully or smiled at their uniforms as they passed. A trio of young men in business suits threw them jaunty salutes as they passed, but it all slid off of Milo’s mind as he valiantly fought a futile battle to shake off the memories of the photographs in the file.
You are troubled, Imrah noted. What has happened?
A bitter, snarling smile curled one side of Milo’s mouth at the question.
My booby trap for the Soviets worked too well, he thought, then very carefully allowed the cane-bound spirit to peer into his memories of the general staff meeting.
Imrah’s failure to make an icy retort at what she saw made his heart drop inside him. He expected her to ridicule him
for being a sentimental human and act as though this kind of carnage was typical. After all, hadn’t she been the one to set loose a demonic tide of all-consuming slime? Surely, she would brush this off callously, and he could push back in a ferocious bid to save his humanity.
But no flippant dismissal came, and for some time, he thought she wouldn’t say anything. As they rounded a street corner and he stood pretending to decide where to go next, he felt the cold thoughts, but they were gentler than ever before, accompanied by a wintry sigh.
You couldn’t have known, she said softly. This wasn’t your fault.
Milo laughed out loud at that.
Tell that to thousands of dead soldiers, he retorted.
If they were so worn down by Zlydzen's magical propaganda, they were beyond any hope of saving.
The words sounded definitive in his mind, but perversely, that only convinced him of their falseness. Imrah was lying to spare his feelings. Maybe her discorporation had left her soft.
I guess we’ll never know, Milo replied, then clamped down on his thoughts and cut himself off from her voice. He felt a frosty whisper at the back of his mind, but he shrugged it aside like a windborne shiver.
“Think we can go in there?” Ambrose asked, reminding Milo that he couldn’t shut himself off from contact with everything else. He wasn’t that powerful—not yet, at least.
Milo blinked and followed the big man’s pointing finger. Two streets down from where they stood, twin steeples thrust into the blue belly of the clear autumn sky.
“A church?” Milo asked with a raised eyebrow as he flicked the stubby cigarette into the gutter.
Ambrose looked taken aback at the question and an unfamiliar nervous look came into his eyes, but his head seemed to bob up and down of its own volition.
“I’d like to light a candle or two and…” The big man swallowed roughly and looked at the steeples.
“And what?” Milo asked, coolly ignoring the obvious discomfort his friend was experiencing. He wasn’t being gentle or kind; at the moment, human decency hardly seemed worth the effort.
“And, er, pray for you,” Ambrose said, refusing to pull his gaze away from the steeples. “You and me both, for the days ahead. I’ve got a feeling we’re going to need it.”
The wizard stared at his bodyguard, a vast heap of scarred muscle complete with twinkling green eyes and an impressive mustache, and snorted as if he’d heard a child tell a rather feeble joke.
“Need it, huh?” Milo said, but Ambrose remained on point like a bird dog, still staring at the church.
Milo looked at the steeples and felt pugnacious energy flowing through him. It was the same spirit that surged through him when pressures mounted at the orphanage and he’d taken to the streets with Roland and the crew. He’d look down the dark, dirty streets of Dresden the same way he was looking at the steeples as the first tinge of dusk slid into the heavens.
He was looking for a fight.
“Sure,” he said, a razor-edged smile creeping across his face. “Why not pay our respects to the second estate?”
Ambrose sensed the sharpness in Milo’s words and turned to him with a quizzical frown, but the magus was already springing across the street, heedless of traffic.
* * *
On a weekday afternoon, the Church of Saint Nicholas, De Nikolaikirche, proved to be singularly unfulfilling for Milo’s combative intentions. For one, there was hardly anyone in the building, and secondly, those who were present seemed hardly worth the time.
Apart from some vague notions about vandalizing the austere building, there seemed little to engage even his most juvenile aspirations.
Milo wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting when he’d swept through the double doors, but a quiet gothic hall full of empty chairs with a few aged parishioners shuffling around votive candles was not it. The doddering ancients didn’t even look up from their observances at his entry, though whether because of failed hearing or religious rapture, he didn’t know.
As he stood flummoxed and fuming at his thwarted aims of transgressive catharsis, Ambrose shuffled past him to deposit a few coins in a box. Milo tried to recover with a snide remark about throwing good money after bad idolaters, but Ambrose had taken a votive candle off a waiting tray and was headed away. The wizard was left at the head of the sanctuary with nothing but his thoughts and Imrah’s sullen silence.
In an act even pettier than the impetus which had driven him into the church, he rapped the cane tip sharply on the floor with his first step. No one, not even the fetish-bound ghul, rose to the bait.
Muttering curses and blasphemies he barely understood, Milo walked a few steps down the aisle between the empty chairs, deflated and defeated. He’d hoped for a chance to sneer at a priest’s unctuous manner or disrupt the preening of churchgoers, but the scenes and figures he’d concocted on his way over were absent. No, oily, fork-tongued ministers, no fat, blustery men in nice suits, no puckered, frowning women in over-elaborate frocks were present, just a few old men in workmen’s dusty coveralls and one old woman, her bowed head covered by a scarf that couldn’t quite contain a copious mass of brittle gray locks.
Milo supposed he could saunter over to where one of the workmen knelt with hands clasped and start pulling faces or whispering obscenities, but he wanted to struggle, not abuse.
He wanted to shake off the gory chains that had bound and burdened him in the general staff meeting, but he couldn’t do that by teasing and taunting a bent old man with gnarled hands clasped in prayer. He wanted to purge himself through struggle, to rage against an enemy, to remind himself he was bloodied and unbowed, even if it was in the theoretical realm.
But to blast some wiry-haired old woman made him the abuser, the monster, and he had enough of that burden sitting between his shoulders already.
The urge to kick one of the small wooden chairs down the aisle was suddenly so strong he sat down crookedly before his legs betrayed him. The chair creaked loud enough that Milo couldn’t help wincing and looking around, but no one seemed to notice. This inattention of the patrons combined with his anger at his childishness gnawed at him with long, sharp teeth. The magus hung his head, anger, guilt, and fear writhing inside him like wrestling serpents.
With burning eyes, he swung a sidelong look at the crucified Christ.
“I hate you,” Milo spat under his breath, feeling the venom slide freely back into himself even as the words slid between his lips. “I hate you so much.”
“What was that, young man?” asked a soft, cracked voice behind him.
Milo jumped and nearly toppled out of his chair as he twisted around to see that the old woman had somehow crept up on him. Despite her shuffling gait, every step was silent. The magus in Milo instantly suspected magic, yet as she came closer, he saw that it was consummate skill and no doubt a lifetime of practice that enchanted the worn creature who stared at him with expectant, watery eyes.
“Uh,” Milo began pathetically as he realized he hadn’t answered her, “I’m sorry. I was just…”
Staring at the frail being in front of him robbed Milo of the last vestiges of his self-indulgent rage. He was hollow and black inside, but he couldn’t bring himself to fight with such a vulnerable creature.
“Just praying,” he lied, smiling weakly up at her as he folded his hands over the eagle-topped cane, which now felt paganly garish as he sat there.
“Hmmm,” the old woman said, clearly unconvinced. Milo held her gaze like all good liars, daring her to challenge him with the sincerity of his expression. The elder did not; to his horror, she did something much worse. With joints so stiff he could almost hear them give creaks of protest, the old woman settled into a seat near him.
Milo balked, suddenly experiencing social anxiety unlike anything he’d known since childhood. The woman seemed to sense it and took pity on him. She sat there in silence, letting the shock of her proximity settle and still, while the light of the setting sun shifted across the sanctuary. A shaft of d
usk’s ruby light fell across her, and for a moment, Milo felt as though he saw her not as an age-bent creature but as a woman in her winter years but still very much alive. The scarlet light played across her features, and whether from a trick of illumination or imagination, he thought he could see more of her than the patina of age.
There were stripes of darker hair amidst her dry locks, iron and silver, and in her wrinkled face, her eyes, while dimmed with years, were sharp chips of emerald. He saw a strong Roman nose, a clean jawline, shoulders accustomed to heavy burdens, a wide, nurturing bosom, and hands hard with work but still femininely tapered. Age and all its cruel cares and infirmities couldn’t hide these things, not fully. Milo saw a fierce but faithful woman looking at him with knowing eyes.
For a moment they considered each other, disciple and blasphemer, the magus Milo felt a mad thought caper through his mind:
Perhaps I’d have been safer with her if I’d stayed angry.
Almost as though she could hear his thoughts, a slow smile broke across the old woman’s face. Green eyes flashing with hidden humor, she shifted stiffly to look at the crucifix over the altar.
“Sometimes I am angry at him too,” she said quietly, one arthritic, ravaged hand rising shakily to a simple locket hanging from her throat.
Milo narrowed his eyes at that, a hard, shadowy place within calling for him to spring up and wait for Ambrose outside. Tension rippled through his legs as almost without thought, his body began to obey. He looked around for his bodyguard and spied a broad uniformed back standing in front of a wax-dribbled stand, a single lit candle shining.
He thought about willing Ambrose to look up so he could gesture that he was going outside, but the big man’s head was bowed, and he felt the intrusion would have been sacrilege. Milo realized he’d have to get up and walk over there, but that would mean blatantly walking past the old woman, and somehow that would be even more awful than the conversation she seemed determined to have with him.
World's First Wizard Complete Series Boxed Set Page 67
