Witchmarked (World's First Wizard Book 1)

by Aaron D. Schneider

  “BURN!” Milo howled, and to his relief, the skull replied.

  Once again, jets of verdant flame shot forth, climbing the huge creature. Pits began to gape across its massive frame as the flames gnawed down to the bone. It was horrible to see, but even more awful because it was getting closer to him. Although it was bleeding from a dozen wounds and swaddled in ravaging flames, the ogre came on, its arms raised, huge fingers curled into claws

  Realizing too late that his magic hadn’t stopped the creature, Milo barely had enough time to scramble back before flaming paws got hold of him. Talons scored the stone where Milo had stood, but the beast would not be deterred, even as it sank to one knee. One side of its eyeless face had kindled, the flesh running like wax or curling in on itself, but on it came, snarling and bellowing as its blood smoked and sizzled.

  Milo tried to reorder his thoughts, fighting to command the skull, but the reagents within were spent, nothing more than a few stray fragments rattling around within.

  The beast lunged again. Milo evaded the swipe by falling backward, but the dying brute loomed over him. The skull had fallen from his failing grip to split open with a crack on the stone floor. The ghul reared back for the final stroke.

  The Gewehr spoke in its bellicose voice, once, twice, thrice, each bringing a fresh jet of sizzling blood.

  The beast’s furious expression went slack and its arm fell as its jaw hung loose, then it toppled forward. With a crablike skitter, Milo barely managed to avoid being trapped under the burning giant as it collapsed. The beast lay still as the flames continued to feast.

  The Contest of Abjuration was over.

  “You might be a proper witch after all,” Ambrose called over the charring corpse, tucking his rifle under his arm like a safari hunter after the big kill. “But maybe we ought to leave the killing to the professionals, eh?”

  Milo snorted and jerked his thumb toward the corpse and the ashes of his two ghuls.

  “Unless we’re going by weight,” he replied with an outthrust chin. “I think I’ve got you beat two to one.”

  Ambrose put a hand on his hip and opened his mouth to argue, then gave an equine splutter.

  “Fine, fine,” he said, stepping clear of the burning corpse to stand at Milo’s side. “First round goes to you, Magus, but remember that I’m just a consort now. I’m working from a handicap.”

  “Excuses, excuses.” Milo chuckled.

  “Well,” Bashlek Marid burbled as he spread his claws expansively, “who can doubt you now, good Magus?”

  There was a rustling reply from the gathered court that sounded more like surrender than acceptance, but Milo would take it all the same. He just wanted to sit down and get his finger tended to. It was swollen to twice its size, and the throbbing was miserably distracting.

  “You really don’t expect me to believe you have had no instruction in our ways?”

  Milo squeezed his eyes together tightly, then forced them open wide, trying to keep his focus.

  “I,” he began, then paused to steady himself, hollow weariness weighing down his body. “Uh, that is, I have had no instruction apart from what your daughter Imrah gave me.”

  The chorus of evil whispers that sprang up was nearly deafening, and combined with the pounding that raced from his hand to his head, Milo wobbled. Ambrose’s strong hand slid under Milo’s arm to prop him up.

  “Steady,” the bodyguard murmured.

  Marid noticed but said nothing. He was still reclining on his throne, stroking his crimson stole thoughtfully as though it were a favorite pet. He seemed to be in no hurry.

  Milo wondered if he was supposed to say something, maybe offer further explanation or a self-deprecating remark. He knew he couldn’t explain further because his success had only been a matter of Fazihr’s and Imrah’s limited instruction and some intuitive leaps. He supposed he could just go with self-deprecation, but the pulsing ache in his hand seemed to have spread to his whole body like a fever, and his thoughts were turning soft and sluggish. He was afraid that in a few seconds, the only thing keeping him upright would be Ambrose’s grip on his arm.

  As surreptitiously as he could, Milo looked around the room and spied Imrah standing at the edge of the gallery nearest the throne. He expected her to be glaring at him while waiting for a response, or maybe even trying to subtly prompt him, but she wasn’t even looking at him. Her eyes were turned upward, fixed on her father. Milo was still struggling with how ghuls emoted, but as he watched, her expression tightening into something hard and angry.

  What was she mad about?

  Milo found out a second later when the Bashlek stirred from his thoughts, the room still filled with whispers.

  “Very well,” Marid said, sighing though there was a gleam in his eyes Milo didn’t like. “It seems clear to me what needs to happen.”

  “It does?” Milo asked, his voice sounding loose and drunken to his ears. Dear God, he needed to lie down.

  “Of course.” Marid beamed and his gaze swung toward his daughter, who glared back in open defiance. “My daughter has shown an aptitude for instruction. It only seems right that you should begin your tutelage under her instruction.”

  A series of sharp sounds in Ghulish that Milo needed no interpretation for came from Imrah’s spot on the gallery.

  “Simply overwhelmed with excitement, I’m sure,” the Bashlek said with a forced chuckle to his court, who obliged with Ghulish laughs that sounded even viler when forced.

  “I’m h…uh, honored, your majuzty.” Milo slurred as his eyes grew heavier and he leaned harder on Ambrose’s hand. “But I don-don’t want to be any tr’uhble.”

  The big man’s fingers tightened, probably more than they needed to, but Milo was past caring. He’d never been this tired in his entire life, and the thought of falling asleep in a room of man-eating monsters didn’t seem such a bad prospect as long as they didn’t wake him up as they devoured him.

  “No trouble at all, Magus,” Marid cooed, sounding quite pleased with himself. “I’m afraid you are under a lethargy vex from that ensorcelled club. Have no fear, we’ll see you put right. You can begin your tutelage tomorrow after you’ve recovered. I’m sure my daughter is eager to begin your instr...u...c…”

  Milo plunged into a welcoming darkness, a place where nothing hurt and the monsters lurking in the dark were content to prowl silently. It wasn’t precisely peaceful because somewhere deep in his slumbering mind, he knew the monsters both outside and inside his head were still there, but for the moment, they were content to let him be.

  Right now, Milo would take that gladly.

  11

  A Lesson

  “We need to get some things straight,” Imrah said. “Think of it as the cultural part of your instruction.”

  Milo crossed his arms and nodded slowly. His sleep had been unnaturally deep from the lethargy vex, not to mention the busy day he’d had before. When he’d woken, so weary just lifting his eyelids was a work of herculean strength, Ambrose had ladled curatives down his throat. They were putrid-tasting concoctions, but unfortunately, he had been too feeble to vomit them back up. Even with those, he still felt worn out and hungover, but his new teacher had been insistent, so he’d gone to attend her upon a wide platform of crenelated stone at the rear of the citadel. Below the granite-toothed rim of the platform was a black pool like a miniature underground lake that nestled against the citadel’s wall and was surrounded by smaller manors on all sides.

  Milo had a brief impulse to throw himself into the pool to escape his throbbing head and Imrah’s grating voice, but he decided against it. He was too slow, and he was confident that if he tried it, Ambrose would drag him back to start the whole business over.

  “I did not want this honor my father has bestowed upon me,” Imrah practically snarled as she paced in front of a series of stone tables. “This is clearly a punishment, or maybe some sort of gambit of his, but you don’t have to worry about that. All you have to worry about are the rules
.”

  “If they’re so important, why don’t you tell me what they are?” Milo muttered, not particularly caring if she heard.

  “What was that?” she snapped, rounding on him.

  Milo repeated himself as clear as day, too out of sorts to worry about sparing her feelings.

  Imrah stood, shaking with rage, claws flexing as her thin lips peeled back from her fangs. Milo thought she might pounce on him like he thought he recalled her and Fazihr doing yesterday, which now seemed very far in the past. Thinking about it hurt his head, so he settled for staring mildly at her.

  She drew in a long, snorting breath and let it out slowly, whistling through her teeth. Slowly she held up her alchemically repaired hand and raised a single sharp digit.

  “Rule one,” she began, her voice strained but level. “When we are on this platform, I am your lord and master. As far as you are concerned, I am god within this stony rim. What I say must be obeyed without fail, or you might kill us both.”

  Milo had heard instructive introductions like that before. In truth, the one by Training Sergeant Dubiki had been far more compelling and intimidating. Hardly taking a breath, he’d bellowed out a well-rehearsed speech about making soldiers out of scum, complete with enough profanity and vivid imagery that even those who didn’t speak Polish got the picture.

  Milo didn’t mention that, but something on his face must have irked Imrah because when her second digit rose, her hand trembled.

  “Rule two,” she intoned in a chilly voice a step above a whisper. “You are neither to perform nor research this magic without my express permission. As I’ve said, this is extremely sensitive and dangerous work, and careless action or even careless thought could result in disaster.”

  On this point, Milo did take notice.

  He remembered the skull lamp responding to his thought to dim without a command and how uneasy that had made him feel. Magic was a frightening enough prospect, but such an intuitive response meant controlling it would be precarious.

  Milo decided that perhaps Imrah’s introductory speech was more valuable than he’d given her credit for.

  “Rule three,” she said, her tone flatter. “Don’t trust anyone. Not in this house, not in this city, not in the Underworld. There are conspiracies and vendettas and secrets whose roots grew before your kind discovered fire. You have no friends here, and assuming you do will put you at risk, and therefore me.”

  Milo restrained the urge to point out the internal flaw in her logic, but smarminess aside, this seemed another fair point. If the audience with Bashlek Marid had proved anything, it was that those in Ifreedahm were not happy to see Milo and were willing to do terrible things in response.

  “Do you understand?” Imrah asked, three talons still raised in front of her.

  Milo nodded.

  Imrah’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Prove it,” she hissed.

  Milo heaved a sigh and straightened like a soldier bearing up under a tedious parade examination.

  “Rule one, you’re in charge. Rule two, don’t do anything magical without your say-so. Rule three, trust no one.”

  It was Imrah’s turn to nod.

  “Good,” she rasped, then turned toward the tables, her arms stretched out in a sweeping gesture.

  “What do you see there?” she asked, her back to him.

  The tables were covered with all manner of containers: bottles, chests, jugs, jars, sacks, pouches, and boxes. All were spread across the table in what seemed to be no particular order, and from the few he could see through and distinguish their contents, it seemed a wholly macabre collection. A number of misshapen eyes floated in yellowish brine, while hanks of hair threatened to spill out of an open-topped sack. Others were less recognizable but no less unnerving. A blood-red concoction that seemed to be swirling of its own volition frothed in a jar, while one crate sported a collection of fist-sized segmented body parts Milo could not begin to identify.

  “I’m praying it’s not breakfast,” he quipped, looking away a second too late as one of the hanks of hair twitched and fidgeted at the top of the sack.

  “That will depend entirely on your performance today,” she warned, flashing him another toothy grin. “If you don’t want to make do with the scalps of the murdered and pickled frog’s eyes, you best pay attention.”

  Ambrose, who was standing at the edge of the platform fastidiously cleaning his Gewehr, raised his head and gave a commending nod.

  “Now that’s a lady who understands motivation,” the big man called.

  Imrah’s eyes narrowed at Milo’s bodyguard.

  “And you best not distract him,” she warned icily. “Food only comes when I say the lesson is finished.”

  Ambrose nodded gravely and snapped off a jaunty salute.

  “This is power,” Imrah said, turning back to the tables and her lesson. “These are the secrets of the cosmos wrapped in chaos, frozen by death, and waiting for the worthy to seize them. I can give you the tools to claim them, but only you will be able to determine if you have the will to wield them. Among our people, it is a birthright, a badge that we are the great Djinn’s children, but for you, a man born of mere flesh, it will be a path of pain and despair.”

  She reached toward a small chest and flipped the latch open with one flick of her claw. Within, bones were piled on top of each other like a child’s haphazard collection of pebbles, delicate and beautiful. She snatched up a tiny ribcage fit for a young swallow or starlet.

  “So tell me, Magus,” Imrah whispered as she crushed the ribcage in her palm, grinding until she held out a hand full of dust, “are you ready?”

  Milo was spared having to answer the thankfully rhetorical question. The truth was that he wasn’t sure he was ready, but he saw no path other than forward.

  Imrah spent most of that first day going over the principles of alchemical necromancy, or what might just be called necromancy by the uninitiated. Necromancy in its truest sense, she explained, was communication with shades of the deceased, which she explained were not the souls of the dead or anything so theological.

  “Just as a footprint fills with water,” Imrah had explained after whispering over the crumbled ribcage and set the fragments to form a cloud a few centimeters over her hand, “so living things create cavities for mystical energies to pool.”

  With another whispered command, the cloud spun out into a dancing ribbon of bone particles, looping and coiling in on itself like an eel.

  “When the life is gone, those energies remain, trapped in what they touched but most potently in the corpse. Sometimes those energies hold echoes or ripples of what once was, some of them strong enough to use for shape and voice. They aren’t a true part of the dead. Only the foolish, the desperate, or the very greatest spend their time on such unreliable sources of information.”

  “The greatest at manipulating essence, the true virtuosos, can feel the imprint of the dead more clearly and precisely, and so can force the essence to a truer shape. Such experts can question these shades and receive truths the living might have forgotten before their deaths.”

  Milo’s head snapped to her from the ribbon of bone dust.

  “Masters?”

  Imrah nodded with a strange, hungry light in her eyes.

  “So, what happens to the true part, the soul?”

  Imrah shrugged as though the question was insignificant.

  From there, she’d gone on to explain that most of ghul magic involved taking the energy provided by the dead, the essence, and using it to fuel magical reactions. That was where alchemy came into play.

  She diverged slightly to explain the difference between ghul and human concepts of alchemy and chemistry.

  “These reactions require ingredients that have little to do with their physical properties, but instead are connected to the magical energies that have infused them.”

  She noted that for whatever reason, most magic seemed to be tied to life, whether directly or indirectly, with a few exceptions.
As such, a piece of quartz dug from the earth had limited applications. That same quartz made into a pendant for a youth’s lover was infinitely more potent and valuable.

  “Even more so if that pendant was bathed in her tears when he abandoned her for another.” The she-ghul grinned, seeming to take pleasure in the thought. “Why, if the quartz was splashed with the blood of the gift-giver after she discovered his infidelity, you could name your price in the markets of Ifreedahm.”

  She went on to explain that deciphering the nature of the ingredients he worked with was going to be the first step. She illustrated by taking two small bones from a crate and wrapping them in strands of hair, one strand from a pouch, the other from a small chest. Holding them up in front Milo, they looked almost indistinguishable, bare bone wrapped in wiry hair.

  She placed one in his hands and asked him to tell her what he felt.

  “The bone is light and the hair is wiry—” he began, but she cut him off with a sharp shake of her head.

  “No, no,” she interjected, her tone as sharp as her teeth. “Those are physical properties, crude information pumped to your brain by imprecise organs. Tell me what you sense beyond that.”

  Milo swallowed, confused. He expected nothing but more crude data as he closed his hand around the hair-wrapped bone. Pushing aside the information of his eyes and gripping hand, he tried to see if there was something, anything else. For a second there was nothing, only the distraction of the physical, but just for an instant, he felt a tremble, almost a flash of something...unpleasantly warm and rough against his soul. Was it anger?

  Feeling more than foolish, he confessed what he’d experienced and waited for a reprimand. Instead he was treated to a Ghulish smile.

  “Good,” Imrah replied and swapped the bones out. “And this?”