Roland’s burning stare searched Milo’s face.
“Why would you do anything so stupid?”
Milo shook his head. Could he even explain the horror of what that techno-magical construct was? Would it even matter?
“It is evil, Roland,” he said, every word heavy. “It doesn’t just make them do what you want, it hollows them out. You didn’t just trick or bully those people in Gzhatsk; you scraped their souls out!”
Somewhere in the darkness rubble shifted, sending bricks slithering down over each other. Roland’s eyes darted through the darkness as he motioned some of his soldiers over to the side of the street where the disturbance had come from.
Milo held his breath as four men trudged over, rifles on their shoulders, but they picked among the ruined buildings without incident. They emerged after a minute and settled in as sentries along the street half a dozen strides from Roland and Milo.
“Souls and evil?” Roland snorted after another minute of listening to nothing but wind and combustion engines. “Did you become religious or something in the last few years?”
Milo opened his mouth to retort, but his tongue didn’t cooperate as a rush of tangled thoughts bounced around his mind. What was he talking about? By what right did he talk about souls and evil? He could have talked about stripping one’s will, but he knew with a deep certainty it was more than that.
“I’m not religious,” he murmured. “But seeing these things, doing these things, performing magic? It’s opened my mind to a world that isn’t only what I can see or touch. There are realities besides the physical; I know that now, and knowing means I can see there is such a thing as evil.”
Roland’s fingers raked through his hair with such ferocity and frequency, Milo expected blood to start trickling from his hairline.
“You aren’t making sense!” Roland snarled. “You’ll throw away a chance to end the war and right every wrong we’ve suffered because it’s evil? You, De Zauber-Schwartz, don’t have the stomach for it after everything you’ve done?”
Milo felt pressure building in the back of his mind; the familiarity of the situation was not lost on him. He’d held a bag containing the bones of an infant in his hand.
“We’ve all got to draw the line somewhere, Roland,” Milo said, meeting the accusing glare with a sad smile. “I’ll help you destroy Zlydzen, but I won’t stop until all his works burn with him.”
Roland nodded slowly, then looked up from under his brows with a fell light that made Milo’s stomach twist.
With a bestial howl, Roland sprang at Milo, his hands curled into claws that gripped the marten fur in two great clumps. With a hard yank, he drew Milo to him so they were nose to nose.
“No! You don’t get to do that, not after everything!” Roland snarled as he ground his forehead against Milo’s. “I gave you everything I had in a world that gave me nothing! You won’t take away my chance to balance the scales! You can’t do that to me!”
Milo felt Roland’s fists pressing into his throat.
“I can,” Milo gulped, his fingers digging for purchase on the silky furs. “I can, and I will.”
A roar tore from Roland’s throat, and he threw Milo down to the ground. The magus managed to keep his head from bouncing off the broken cobbles, but his elbow struck the ground hard enough to rob him of all feeling from the joint down. That happened to be on the side his ash-filled pocket was on.
Roland loomed over him, the four soldiers now flanking him with their guns leveled at Milo.
“You are so selfish!” Roland spat, a pistol appearing in his hand, not yet aimed at Milo but hanging at his side. “Everything you have is because of me! Every breath you took from that night I saved you on was only because I was there, and you have the arrogance to defy me?”
As he lay looking up at Roland and four sets of cold eyes above rifle barrels, Milo slid his nerveless fingers into his pocket. Roland glared down at him, his eyes bulging with rage as the hand holding the pistol quivered and began to rise toward him, then stopped. Milo met his furious gaze, tears rising in his eyes as he did, though that was as much from his teeth crunching through the inside of his lip as from the emotion of the moment. Milo began drawing his hand out of his pocket as slowly as possible, hoping there was enough ash between his tingling fingers.
The pistol nearly leveled with Milo, then Roland sobbed and let his arm hang at his side, the pistol loose in his fingers.
“Don’t make me do this,” he pleaded, fingers dragging across his scalp and stopping to grip a hand full of hair. “Please, for the love of everything we once had, don’t make me kill you.”
Blood had begun to stream from Milo’s mouth so that as he spoke, it spattered the ash-filled hand he raised to his lips.
“You won’t have to,” Milo muttered thickly and opened his hand.
RISE
His focused mind thrumming to the tune of his blood flecking the ash, Milo felt as much as saw the bloody darts rise into the air. The red projectiles trailed streamers of ash as they hurtled toward the four soulless. Chasing each of those streamers were ripples of gloaming light, hungry shades that keened as they closed on their quarry. The gory shards struck the four soulless simultaneously with the slap of fluid striking a hard surface as the contrails of ash crumbled. The wailing lights, scenting the bait, dove in without hesitation.
All that happened so quickly that Milo’s eyes barely had time to register everything, and by the time they did, he was distracted by the eruption of essence his mind felt emanating from the soulless soldiers. Their bodies rocked and quivered, the rifles tumbling from their grasp as every joint twisted in a different direction.
Roland looked at the soldiers spasming on either side of him, then swung his gaze to Milo and raised his pistol.
OBEY
The four soulless pounced, seizing on the arm holding the weapon while the others grabbed whatever part of Roland was handy. The pistol barked twice, one shot whining off the cobbles beside Milo the other rocketing straight overhead. Roland roared and cursed, but as strong as he was, four full-grown men couldn’t be thrown off so easily.
“Petrograd is seething with unsettled shades,” Milo growled as he sat up. “That’s the thing when you hollow people out. There’s nothing to keep them from being filled with something else.”
The pistol fell from Roland’s grip, but only so that he could strain at Milo with hands intent on strangling him.
“Traitor!” he howled between a slew of blistering, venomous curses as he struggled. “Ungrateful whoreson! Liar! Traitor!”
Milo would have thought the words would slide off him, but they stung deeply as he tried to clamber to his feet. He thought to say something, to rebut or maybe even explain, but several things happened in quick succession.
The other soulless opened fire and a trio of shots sailed past Milo’s bent back, while others hammered into the flesh of the shade-possessed soulless. Milo felt a shade’s wail of frustration as its host succumbed to its injuries, but before he could redirect it to the soldiers firing on them, Roland lunged forward and grabbed him by the throat with his free hand. Milo gasped and pried at the fingers crushing his windpipe as the three remaining servitors pulled on Roland’s arms.
Then a wild, whooping cry tore through the night from the opposite end of the street.
Through his hazy, black-spotted vision, Milo saw a nightmare from the past barreling toward them. A gaunt figure riding a skeletal charger was bearing down on them, a crackling wheel of fire spinning around his head.
18
These Insanities
Milo didn’t have the breath to curse, but if he had, it would have been a good one. Something poetic, with metaphor and symbolism, but as things stood, he only managed a gargle. Roland seemed determined to keep strangling Milo singlehandedly, despite three soldiers contesting the point.
Instead, he saved his breath for a final heave at Roland’s throttling grip, and the investment paid off as the hand came free
and air poured through his bruised throat.
Roland surged forward with a scream, but Milo slipped past the clawing hand and drove an elbow across his jaw. He felt the jaw crack under the blow, the reverberations traveling up his arm, and Roland collapsed to the ground under the shade-dominated assailants.
Milo looked up in time to see the rider charging at him, screaming like a burning demon, as the wheel of fire spun over his head. This close, he could see that the steed was none other than the Qareen mount he’d made in Georgia, but that was not what made the bottom drop out of Milo’s stomach. Astride the necromistry-powered horse was none other than Ezekiel Bouche, looking filthier and more ragged than Milo had ever seen him, yet smiling as wide as ever.
“YEEHAW!” he shrieked and then threw back his head to laugh with wicked mania.
Milo gaped. He was as vulnerable as he’d been that night when the city burned, but this time, the rider rode right past him without a sideways glance. Ezekiel hammered his heels into the unfeeling flanks of the unliving horse and made a beeline for a collection of soulless huddling against their truck. Round after round from their rifles sent up puffs and thin splatters of dark blood from the wild cowboy’s chest, but he rode on, laughing all the while.
A stone's throw from the truck, Ezekiel launched his wheel of flame, and Milo realized for the first time that the flame was an incendiary device spinning frantically on a length of rope.
The wheel became a crackling star that struck the truck and exploded in a shower of broken glass and burning fuel.
“Burn, haha! Warm right up, darlin’!”
As if in answer, the fire expanded with an oxygen-slurping whoosh, sending waves of flame in every direction. The truck bore the incendiary attack stoutly, the men around it less so. They might have been soulless, but their flesh still felt pain, and the lizard-brain response to the gnawing flames was as hard-wired as breathing. Screams rose in concert with the crackle of flames. A few managed to fire a handful of shots, but even with Ezekiel cackling half a dozen yards from them, their shots sailed into the night before they surrendered to the flames.
Those less fortunate were put out of their misery a second later, crumpling to smolder on the ground as the throaty call of the Gewehr sounded from the ruins.
“Let’s not linger here, if you please,” came a crisp voice in American English at Milo’s shoulders before someone began to draw him out of the street. “Mr. Bouche and your man seem to have things well in hand, but it would be a shame to lose the world’s first wizard to a stray bullet.”
Blinking but not resisting, Milo looked over and saw he was being led away by Percy Astor in a navy suit and a fedora.
“You!” Milo exclaimed as he followed. “What? How?”
“A moment,” Percy said as he half-led, half-dragged Milo behind a freestanding section of brick wall. “Yes, now, where were we? Oh, yes, what and how? Are particulars important at the moment, or can I summarize?”
A shot whined off a brick a few inches from Percy’s shoulders, spraying jagged fragments as the American lurched back. Milo spied a few soldiers moving through the ruins, whether flanking or making a fighting retreat, he wasn’t quite sure. No sooner had he spotted them than he was flattening himself against the bricks as more bullets hissed and zipped through the air.
Milo heard the clop of hooves on cobbles and then another scream, and he poked his head out to see Ezekiel riding down the soldiers. The pale light in the eye sockets of the unliving horse danced and flared as it ran men down. In the muzzle flares and the flicker of the Qareen’s eyes, Milo watched men die screaming in defiance as a hurtling body began what a hard hoof finished.
“He certainly has his uses.” Percy chuckled as he stepped away from the wall and brushed vainly at the brick dust staining his outfit. “Crude tools can still be effective, as I’m sure you understand. Sometimes all you need is a hammer, am I right?”
The grin the American gave Milo seemed to suggest they were sharing an inside joke, but Milo squashed the moment with a tremendous frown and responded with a question of his own.
“What the hell are you two doing here?” he asked hoarsely, raising a hand to his throat.
Percy drew back, looking affronted, but he gave a little bow as he swept his hat from his head. The man’s pate was noticeably balder than the last time they’d met.
“Oh, you are quite welcome for the rescue. It’s nothing,” he cooed, then gave a tart smile. “No trouble at all. Don’t worry about thanking us.”
Milo massaged his throat, wincing at the swelling and when he found places where Roland’s nails had cut his neck.
“You’re not answering the question,” he said, his voice rasping like a file over stone.
Percy raised an eyebrow before replacing his fedora.
“And you’re being very rude,” he replied archly. “Now, are we going to stand here making asinine observations about the obvious, or do you plan to reunite with your compatriots? Makes no difference to me.”
Milo spat at the man’s feet, then looked up the ruined street and saw no further sign of the soulless soldiers. His gaze swung back to where the confrontation with Roland had taken place and he loosed a stream of invectives.
The three shade-powered humans lay in a broken heap, but Roland was nowhere to be seen.
At that moment, Ezekiel trotted up from the other end of the street, still mounted on the unliving steed. This close, Milo could see that Ezekiel wasn’t just ragged but rotten. The flesh of his face and chest were pocked with gangrenous holes, while his hands were nearly black with dried blood around tattered skin through which the dirty ivory of tarnished bone showed. The wind shifted, and despite the cold, Milo could smell putrid meat.
“Dear God.” He coughed. “What happened?”
“I’ve been set free!” Ezekiel crowed, then threw back his head to loose a wild, undulating howl.
Milo frowned, trying to reconcile the nightmare before him with the broken man he’d left chained in the Marquis’s dovecote. Uneasiness stole over him as he stared at the cowboy’s eyes, still bulging from their sockets, yet without the malicious gleam. Milo had given Ezekiel the means to escape his curse and embrace death, which was the freedom Milo might have expected. Staring at the maniacal display, he wasn’t sure what new sort of freedom the scalp hunter had found.
As he stood staring at Ezekiel, Milo eased his will outward to probe the edges of the man.
“We should be going,” Percy pressed, stepping to Milo’s shoulder. “I believe there is stolen property to return to y—”
A rending scream cut Mr. Astor off, and it was half a heartbeat before Milo realized he was the source of the sound.
It was like nothing he’d ever felt.
Typical souls pressed back with their wills at varying strengths against the Art, defining themselves by their resistance. Practitioners of the Art like fey or Milo were dynamic, resisting but also moving, pushing back. The soulless were chilling in that they were absent, sometimes giving the bare sense of a depression or indent where a will might have been, and sometimes not even that.
This was different. It wasn’t resistance and it wasn’t absence; it was anguish.
Where a will should have been was a gaping cleft, threatening to swallow anything that came too close while bleeding pain and oozing oppression. It was an infected wound, yawning in the psychic space where Ezekiel Bouche should have been.
Milo’s eyes began to slide back into focus, but in that space between, he saw an alien light shining and twisting like a halo around Ezekiel’s head, forming strange shapes.
The symbols were writing, and as before, Milo could read them if he wished. If he dared.
With a blink, the physical world resolved before his eyes, only the barest after-image remaining. Through that fading panoply of dread, Milo saw the thing that had been Ezekiel smiling down at him.
“I see you too, little man,” it purred with a thick, liquid voice the cowboy could have never produ
ced.
Milo blinked again, then looked at Percy Astor, who appeared to be extremely uncomfortable. The pieces, half-realized and hardly understood, began to click together in Milo’s mind, and in some primal instinct, his hands shot out. Percy was thrown back by the sudden assault, but instead of anger, there was only deeper discomfort in his face.
Shame, Milo realized. He was ashamed.
“What did you do?” Milo cried, his throat tightening as his voice shrank to a horrified whisper. “What did you do?”
The inhabited shell of Ezekiel heaved a great crowing laugh, and God help him, Milo was too scared to even look at the thing. His hands tightened into fists, and he felt a sudden, desperate need to beat Percy Astor to quivering pulp. From the look Percy still wore, he might have let Milo do it without protest.
“Milo!” called a strong voice that cut through red fog settling over his mind. “Milo, look at me!”
Milo turned, his body rigid and his movements ungainly, and saw Ambrose coming through the ruins.
“Ambrose,” Milo wheezed, his chest tight and his mouth dry. “Do you realize what’s happened? What he’s done?”
Ambrose nodded and raised his eyes to look at Ezekiel.
“Better than most.” He sighed, and where Milo had expected to see righteous wrath, he saw only a weary sadness. The gravity of the melancholy look was almost unbearable as it turned to Percy.
“I don’t envy you, young man,” he rumbled, shaking his head slowly before he turned back to Milo. “But right now, we’ve got other things to worry about.”
Milo nodded and forced himself to focus. The tumult of the last few moments threatened to overwhelm him, but he needed to shake it off. He had much to tell his companions and even more to ask of them.
But they weren’t all together.
“Where is Rihyani?” he asked, looking around, though he realized if she wanted to be seen, she would have appeared.
“Right here,” came a silken voice from above. Milo saw the fey descend from the dark sky, silver skin aglow.
World's First Wizard Complete Series Boxed Set Page 85
