Despite the statement, Milo and Ambrose saw a shiver race through the stinking expanse. Neither could have explained how they knew, but both were certain it was rage.
“This isn’t going to end well,” Ambrose growled under his breath as he exerted himself, though at the angle he was being held, Milo couldn’t see what his bodyguard was doing.
“That’s better,” Imrah cooed with icy confidence. “Things are going to change now. I’ve been lax with you, letting you roam free. You will still be fed, but it will be by my hand and whom I choose. Your hunger has already complicated things more than it should have.”
The figure straightened from its pensive pose, shoulders squaring indignantly.
“THE PRINCE HAS LAID YOUR ENEMIES LOW,” the chorus wailed in outraged testimony. “EYES AND EARS BEAR WITNESS TO THE SLAIN!”
“You wiped out an outpost of ghuls!” Imrah cried, a brittle note in her voice. “You were meant to save my people, but now Ifreedahm is bolted shut for fear of you. That was not what I bargained for.”
Ambrose gave a straining grunt, and Milo twisted as best he could to see the big man bent nearly double, the dead soldiers nearly burying him under their gripping limbs.
“What are you doing?” Milo whispered.
Ambrose looked up from under a corpse’s arm and flashed Milo a strained smile.
“Working on something,” he panted.
Before Milo could ask anything further, the chorus sounded again, the unnatural voices rising in clear anger.
“YOU IMPUNE THE PRINCE’S HONOR? YOU WHO STAY THE PRINCE’S HAND UPON THE FIELD?”
The wall loomed over Imrah, a hundred tortured faces glaring down condemningly as the figure crossed its clean limbs.
“Kimaris!” Imrah roared, but one foot slid back reflexively. “I am your mistress! I—”
With frightening speed, the figure’s hand swept out, slapping the ghul’s face with such force that she was thrown off her feet.
“FAITHLESS KNAVE!” the chorus shrieked. “YOU ARE UNWORTHY OF THE PRINCE! JEALOUS AND PETTY INSECT!”
Ghulish ichor dribbled from Imrah’s lips as she looked up from where she’d fallen. Milo could see the terror in her face, but as their eyes met, incredible sadness stole over her features. She lowered her gaze and shook her head as she climbed to her feet.
Milo’s fingers tightened around the cane in one hand, and he began to draw his focus.
“It was always supposed to end like this, wasn’t it?” she asked, turning back to the figure looking down its nose at her. “One way or another.”
The chorus' cry was strident with triumph.
“YOUR AMBITIONS ARE SMALL! THE PRINCE’S DESTINY COULD NEVER SURRENDER TO YOUR INSIGNIFICANT DEMANDS.”
“Your destiny was to waste away in that ruin I found you in!” Imrah spat. Again the hand struck out, and she was upon the ground. Teeth and brackish blood fell from her mouth.
Milo felt the unnatural force begin to flow into his arm.
“SILENCE, WRETCH! THIS IS THE PRINCE’S HOUR! WITH THE WITCHBORN’S DEATH, IT SHALL NEVER END!”
The gelatinous wall surged forward, swallowing the figure as it made for Imrah, who released a handful of twinkling dust that kindled to blue flame midair. At the same time, Ambrose loosed a terrible roar, and corpses flew into the air like rag dolls. Milo twisted free to sweep his cane in a wide arc, pulping fingers and snapping arms.
The living tide that was Kimaris recoiled before Imrah’s fiery onslaught but it did not retreat, drawing its leading wave up higher.
Ambrose was free of dead soldiers, sword in hand, hacking and punching with the basket hilt left and right. Milo kicked free of the last corpse clinging to his legs and spun to smash the length of the cane across a soldier groping toward him. With the lingering effects of the alchemical strength coursing through him, Milo’s blow sent the corpse flopping to the ground.
Ambrose had hewn a space around them, and without the direct intervention of Imrah, the remaining corpses milled around aimlessly.
“We need to run!” Ambrose bellowed, turning this way and that, congealed blood covering his blade.
“Imrah!” Milo called, casually blasting a corpse back with witchfire as it lurched forward. “Imrah, come with us!”
From her place on the ground, the ghul’s attention alternated between Milo and the towering Kimaris. Her hand was inside her skin-coat, frantically groping for something as the curtain of blue flame began to shrink. The edges of the ocean crept around the waning barrier.
“Hurry!” Milo shouted as he started toward her, reaching out. Ambrose grabbed him by the shoulder and hauled him over the twitching, squirming bodies.
The air began to fill with thrumming.
“Come on, Magus!” the big man growled, outmuscling Milo with ease as the last of the alchemical strength left his limbs.
“Wait!” Milo shouted, fighting his bodyguard’s grip ineffectively. “She can still make it!”
“Damn it, Milo,” Ambrose snarled as he shook the magus. “She doesn’t want to.”
Milo shot him an accusing glare, then turned back to see that Imrah had found her feet and whatever she’d been looking for in her skin-coat. An ivory powder horn was in her hand, more of the twinkling dust tumbling from its tip to spread azure fire at her feet.
“I’m sorry, Milo!” she shouted back. “It was too late before I ever met you!”
Her eyes rose above him, and Milo followed her gaze to see a zeppelin churning toward them as it made for the sky over the draw.
“It’s over,” she called, looking at him one last time. “Goodbye.”
With that, she turned toward Kimaris, the crest of his wave nearly thirty feet high.
“Come embrace me, O prince!” Imrah screamed as she raised the horn and upended it over her head.
The air was sucked from Milo’s lungs as his teacher burst into blue flames and ran shrieking toward Kimaris’ descending bulk. He couldn’t even scream as she disappeared in a rush of slime and a cloud of putrid steam.
All he could do was give in to Ambrose’s firm grip and start running.
“Don’t know which is going to run out first,” Ambrose panted as he looked down the slope at Kimaris’ converging tide. “Our legs or this hill.”
Milo gasped for breath, spat out bile, and forced himself to straighten.
“We need to keep moving,” he wheezed and looked down the hillside they’d been climbing for the last ten minutes. The places scorched by his witchfire were covered in the murky slime of the gelatinous horror, so that everything below had a vile sort of icing.
Forcing his concentration into the proper avenue was harder the more exhausted he became, but despite everything, Milo hammered his will through the raptor skull atop his cane. The avian beak swung open, and a torrent of green fury lashed down the hill. The slime retreated before the flames, but only to the edge of its crackling reach. Milo swept left and right, trying to form a wall of fire, but every time he swung to one side, the abomination crept closer on the other side.
With nothing to kindle but bare rocks, Milo knew it was futile, buying them less and less time.
With a gasp, he stumbled back, tasting blood in the back of his throat as he forced air into his lungs.
“I can’t keep doing this,” he panted, his body burning with frustration and exhaustion.
Ambrose stepped back to watch Kimaris begin climbing again. A string of curses in several languages tumbled out as he turned away sharply, eyes scanning in every direction. Milo had just begun to straighten as the big man pointed at a jagged peak west of the hill they were climbing.
“If you make for that crest,” Ambrose said, “maybe you can send up a firebolt like a flare, and the zeppelin will swing by to throw you a line.”
Milo looked at the sheer soaring stone, and his legs trembled beneath him. A tight, bitter laugh passed his lips.
“Even if I had the strength,” he said, “there’s no way we’ll make it befor
e that thing catches us.”
Ambrose spat downhill and snarled.
“Then I guess I don’t need to hold onto these.”
From his pack, he drew out two grenades of a type Milo had never seen. They were constructed like a traditional Stielhandgranate, or stick grenade, but instead of a canister, there was a trio of ribbed spheres clustered around the top.
“What are those?” Milo asked, eying the wicked-looking devices suspiciously.
Ambrose looked up with a youngster’s mischievous grin.
“Tunnel-brushers,” he said, stroking the handles affectionately. “Drop one of these into a dugout, hard tunnel, or even a bunker if you can manage, and it fills it with burning debris that bounces around like hornets from hell.”
Milo squatted, knowing in the back of his mind that they had minutes, maybe less, before Kimaris was on top of them.
“One for each of us?” Milo asked, looking the big man levelly.
Ambrose nodded, his smile turning grim.
“Won’t take the thing down, I expect, but we might make it regret gobbling us up.”
Milo nodded and took one of the grenades.
“Well,” he said, feeling the heft of the explosive and trying to imagine pulling the pin and charging face-first into...the end.
“Do you think you’ll come back from this one?”
“Don’t think so.” Ambrose sighed. “But then again, if everything is eaten, not sure I’ll come back from that.”
The magus shrugged. “I suppose this is as good a way as any to go.”
Ambrose chuckled.
“I can think of a few better ones,” he said, a wistful look in his eye. “But it’ll have to do.”
The men stared at each other, knowing that more could be said, but also knowing nothing need be.
“Human lives seem short enough to me as is,” a sweet, siren voice called from behind the two men. “Yet it seems men are always looking for an opportunity to end things early.”
Both whirled to see Contessa Rihyani sitting daintily on a boulder. Her two companions, the verdant lady and the bronze colossus, lounged on their own jutting stones.
Milo muscled down his surprise and relief and struck an indignant pose with arms crossed.
“Took you long enough,” he grumbled.
“I told you we should have just left,” the bronze colossus said with a voice like a brass bell.
“I have a soft spot for friends.” Rihyani threw a wink at Milo before making a show of looking downhill. “Though if you two would rather take the old Roman way out, I suppose we can’t stop you.”
“Well, we could.” The green fey giggled puckishly.
“But we won’t,” the bronze giant intoned.
Ambrose stole a glance at the creeping advance of Kimaris’ reaching pseudopods.
“Is there an exit strategy?” the big man growled. “Or are we going to just keep snarking until we become slime fodder?”
Rihyani sprang off the boulder, as lithe as a cat.
“I do believe you had plans involving a zeppelin.”
“What do you think the crew is going to say?” Milo shouted at the top of his lungs as the wind raked across his face and through his hair.
In truth, he was less interested in how the crew of the zeppelin would react and more concerned about not looking down. The sight of his legs dangling hundreds of meters in their air was something he wasn’t sure he’d ever get used to.
“Ambrose?” Milo shouted when no reply came. Twisting in Rihyani’s grip, he spied his bodyguard held between the contessa’s companions, his eyes screwed shut and every muscle quivering.
“Stop squirming,” Rihyani chided, her voice barely audible as they soared toward the zeppelin. “You might not be as heavy as Simon, but we don’t make a habit of wind-riding with passengers.”
Milo might have chuckled because she was on a first-name basis with his bodyguard, but he’d accidentally looked down again, and what he saw was more than disheartening. Besides the sphincter-puckering terror of his altitude, Milo noted the glistening gray river that was snaking along the ground below them.
It seemed Kimaris, now free from whatever hold or guidance Imrah had on it, was determined to come after them.
No, not them, Milo reminded himself. Me. The witchborn. It wants me.
He took a steadying breath despite the wind whipping across his face and tried to think.
If Kimaris was determined to get him, fleeing to camp in the zeppelin would make a bad situation worse. If the disappearances of the patrolling squads were evidence, small arms fire was useless, and given the thing’s nature, Milo wasn’t certain that anything short of fire would harm it. There was a possibility that with enough explosives, most of which produced little flame, along with any and all flamethrowers in the entire division, they might be able to hold Kimaris off. That was if Milo could get everyone organized before they arrived.
Given what he would be trying to prepare them for, he doubted his chance of success.
If they headed back to Command, there was a good chance they would be handing hundreds, even thousands of soldiers over to this fiendish jelly-monster.
Milo swore under his breath and stared across the sky at the zeppelin that was banking for a broadside view of the draw as its surveillance crew frantically took pictures. Desperately, Milo wished it was a bombardier instead of a reconnaissance blimp. With a payload like one of those leviathans carried, they would at least have a chance to punch a few holes in Kimaris, and with an incendiary bomb or two, they might have handled the whole business. The truth was that Kimaris was being reckless, exposing itself above the ground like this, but given the situation, he wondered if it was a calculated risk. Why he was worth taking that risk, Milo didn’t know, but he imagined any hope of finding that answer had died with Imrah.
As he stared at the vast blimp, Milo’s frustration mounted. So huge, so expensive, so immense, and yet so useless with its vast interior filled with hydrogen bladders…
A wonderfully awful idea began to take root in Milo’s mind.
Trying not to twist too much in the contessa’s grip, he craned his neck around and spied the sharp peak Ambrose had pointed out when they were on the hilltop.
It was probably insane, but it just might work.
“If you had to,” Milo called up to Rihyani, “could you get the crew to safety in short order?”
The fey looked down at him, her silver hair snapping behind her like a banner.
“Why are you asking?” She frowned.
“Could you do it?” Milo pressed, staring up into her golden pupils.
Rihyani looked at the zeppelin, eyes narrowed, and then at Milo.
“Depends,” she answered, her caution clear despite her raised voice. “How many men would be on board?”
“A dozen at most,” Milo answered, not sure of his answer, which was based on seeing the airman crews moving in a gaggle across the command post.
“If none of them are built like your bodyguard, we could manage it in two trips,” she shouted, her face still set in a frown. “What do you have in mind?”
Milo smiled up at her winningly.
“Just some more of that old Roman stuff.”
It turned out to be three trips to clear out the zeppelin’s crew, which was just as well because it took some time for Milo and Ambrose to get the crew to turn the airship around and sail it toward the peak of Milo’s choosing.
He was doubly thankful for the fey as the pilot jabbered on because the potent creatures seemed to possess the knack for enchanting the crew into cooperating. As the moon-eyed crewman lined up in an orderly fashion to be carried away by the wind-riding fey, Milo decided he would insist on learning from the fey next.
Of course, he had to survive the next half-hour, which was far from certain.
“As long as these all stay where they are,” Milo said, pointing at the network of controls he couldn’t begin to understand, “we should slide right by that mou
ntain top.”
“Jah.” The pilot nodded. “But you’ll need a man to stay and make sure wind currents or something else don’t knock you off course.”
Milo nodded, then pointed out the open window of the cockpit.
“How close will we pass the peak?”
The pilot’s face scrunched around his goggles, and he sucked his teeth as he checked one of the instruments in front of him.
“Within one to two hundred meters,” he said, tapping a reading Milo didn’t bother to look at.
“Make it half that,” Milo said, then repeated the command when the pilot balked.
“That’s too close,” the pilot protested.
“That’s an order,” Milo shouted back, tapping the pentagram studs on his cap.
Under the skin of the blimp, amongst swollen sacks of hydrogen bigger than houses, the whistling rush of wind was absent. The only sound was the thrum of the airship's engines, a constant low buzz.
Milo scaled a ladder that connected the crew compartments below with the blimp that kept everything afloat. He emerged onto a gantry walkway that stretched the entire width of the blimp and fit between two hydrogen bladders. A second ladder rose an uncomfortably high distance to the curved top of the blimp’s structure, where, if he squinted, Milo could see a hatch.
He tried not to think about how spindly the ladder looked as it stretched upward.
On the platform stood Ambrose, his belly pressed against the railing as he secured one of the tunnel-brusher grenades to the rippling skin of the hydrogen bladder. The other tunnel-brusher was already attached, using layers of powerfully adhesive patches commandeered from the mechanics’ stores aboard the ship.
“Crews cleared out,” Milo announced as he walked across the gantry, awed by how peaceful it was inside the rigid skin. “Almost done?”
Even the thrum of the engines was almost soothing.
“Just about,” Ambrose said softly as he stepped back to review his handiwork. Satisfied, he pulled a roll of thread out of his pack and measured two equal lengths to tie to the rings on the grenades.
“So, some poor fool stands here,” Milo said, moving to the middle of the platform between the two grenades, “and pulls the string to get the grenades going.”
Witchmarked (World's First Wizard Book 1) Page 30
