The nearest man noticed too late as the groping hand grasped his hand, in which he carried a cudgel. Fingers turned to claws, and the handkerchief was abandoned as the dying man raked arm, shoulder, and face. The guard managed to beat his attacker back with a desperate punch and several savage blows, but not before the mask had been torn off his face. The poisonous fog was thin enough at the edge of the hall that its vapors could be seen sliding up the unfortunate man’s nostrils even as he cursed his dying attacker. Dark eyes wild with panic, he looked upward and saw with absolute horror his master’s eye upon him.
“Oh, my dear Ilyah.” The tattooed chieftain sighed with heavy resignation, then gave a slow nod.
A desperate gibbering moan escaped Ilyah’s lips as he dropped his club and tried to force the mask back into place, but the others closed in around him. He screamed and tried to find a face to plead with, but behind the flat, reflective eyes and rasping respirators were monsters beyond reason or pity. With single-minded implacability, they drove him deeper into the fog as he wailed and begged. When he tried to push past them, one of them kicked him hard between the legs so his body came off the ground. Gasping and mewling, he reached out, but a cudgel swept down and broke his arm at the wrist. Then his comrades retreated to the rear of the hall, boots crunching on the bodies of dead rats, and resumed their vigil.
Ilyah’s screams were swallowed by the choking fumes within a few moments.
Soon there was only the grating breath of the masked guards and the vapors congealing into small clouds that settled across the hall floor. Jutting from the saffron murk were the tortured forms of the dead warlords and their attendants, strewn across and between the upturned seats. Behind them was a jagged hole in the floor near the orchestra pit where one of the wretches had crashed through the rat-gnawed floor and now lay broken in the darkness beneath the Bolshoi’s hall.
The man in the royal box, his mouth bowed into a frown and shoulders hunched, looked at the scene and shook his head.
“Does it have to be such a gruesome process?” he demanded with a tremor in his voice that he couldn’t quite hide.
From the dark recesses of the box came a whistling, grinding chuckle.
“Roland, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you felt bad for them,” commented a voice as agonizing as the laugh. “I thought you hated these men, boy. Instead of complaining, shouldn’t you be thanking me for the gift?”
Roland kept sweeping his eyes from one side of the hall to the next, desperate to avoid the bulging, ruptured eyes that all seemed to stare up at him. How could their blind looks seem so accusing?
“I wanted them dead, Zlydzen; that’s simple enough,” he said with a shrug, then flapped his hand. “But no man deserves this, much less what you are going to do next.”
The chuckle returned like a teapot singing with its belly full of boiling gravel.
“Oh, humans, so sentimental,” Zlydzen burbled as he ambled out of the box’s shadow. “I’m making use of what would have been wasted otherwise.”
Roland snorted and spat but didn’t say anything.
In one swollen hand, the dwarrow held an arcane device like a bronze tuning fork that had sprouted branches and leaves of metal. Upon the leaves were inscribed odd, spiraling symbols which made the eyes ache and the stomach knot if they were stared at for more than a second. Shuffling to the rail, which he could peek over, he held out the device and began to rotate it in a tight little circle.
The engraved leaves began to flutter and sent up a whistling chorus, then the branches started to turn with a dull thrum. The whistle and thrum sharpened and deepened respectively, and the air thickened with a pressure that had nothing to do with the toxic gas
The first of the rat corpses swelled and popped. Quick spasms wracked the little bodies as odd engorgements strained and burst. One or two managed to lurch upward in ungainly hops, but they all became gory blooms on the floor within moments.
Beyond the dead rodents, the clouds of poison began to recede, drawn inward by those who were better able to absorb the noxious burden. The men, their bodies deformed by toxic swellings, squirmed, shuddered, and as the noisome device reached its crescendo, rose unsteadily to their feet.
1
These Pictures
Milo felt a bead of sweat travel down the side of his scarred cheek to race along his jaw before it broke free of his chin. The dot of perspiration fell on the photograph in his hands.
He idly swept away the offending moisture with his thumb, but he supposed it didn’t matter. There were plenty of other photographs, and they all told the same damning story.
“We would appreciate an explanation,” stated the man sitting across the table from Milo. From its liver-spotted dome to its collar-pinched throat, General Erich Ludendorff’s face looked to be carved from a single tube of flesh, with the barest attention given to his wrinkled features. The wizard thought they could barely be called features, more like sags and ripples around peculiar little orifices.
Yet this simulacrum of a human form slumped in front of him had been the most powerful man in the German Empire since the death of Field Marshal von Hindenburg a few years ago, and he wanted Milo to explain something he hadn’t known about until the moment they’d shoved a folder full of photographs into his hand. Now he had dozens of grainy photographs from the valley surrounding Shatili, all of which depicted a large number of corpses displaying gruesome yet imaginative methods of elimination.
One of them showed two men who’d simultaneously rammed pistols into each other’s mouths and pulled the trigger. These unfortunate gunmen lay under a trio of corpses, one of which was a burly man who’d spitted a smaller man on each knife-equipped fist before every bit of his skull above the lower jaw had been blown off.
If Milo hadn’t been where he was, he might have believed that this was some kind of macabre farce of battlefield photography, a set of staged photos that went too far in their quest to artistically portray the horrors of war. All the men were wearing the same uniform.
“This looks to be a goodly number of Soviet soldiers all dead near Shatili, sir,” Milo said cautiously, feeling another drop of sweat slalom down his face. “As to how they all got into this state, I’m not sure I can answer.”
General Ludendorff’s frown deepened within his slab-like face, and from beneath a mass of sagging wrinkles, two eyes burrowed into Milo relentlessly. One speckled hand, claw-like despite the general’s flabby features, tapped a hooked nail upon a piece of paper in front of him. Ludendorff’s eyes never left him as he spoke, punctuating each word with a tap.
“It states here in your debrief that you placed countermeasures at Shatili to thwart the Reds,” he growled thickly, his voice all the more ferocious given his frailty. “Your report states the countermeasures were non-conventional misdirection.”
Milo nodded mutely, though there was no question in Ludendorff’s voice. For his part, he wasn’t sure how much he was supposed to say. Colonel Jorge had made it clear early on that the general staff was finicky about openly calling things magic or blatantly confessing to working with and against monsters. The one thing Milo did not want to do right now was to offend their touchy sensibilities, but he had a growing premonition that it would become unavoidable.
He couldn’t know for certain, but he was a wizard, after all.
“After you left these countermeasures in place in the pursuit of your renegade plot to capture Stalin,” the general continued, his finger still tapping, “the Soviet forces moved into the area. When they investigated the fortress complex, something occurred that caused an army of several thousand men to begin fighting among themselves.”
Milo dared a look down at the photograph. That did seem to be the case, but he imagined stating that would not do him any favors with the general. He’d ceased to tap as he leaned forward to let his rheumy eyes burrow deeper into the wizard.
“This infighting also left us with no witnesses since every single one of the soldiers was
dead or fled. Even their vehicles and materiel were subjected to this violence, destroyed by their owners. In effect, what we have here is the utter destruction of an enemy force on a scale never before seen.”
Milo stared back as his chin rose and fell. He managed to keep his mouth from hanging open, but that was about all his dignity could afford at this point.
“The question then seems clear,” Ludendorff said, still frowning and boring his eyes into Milo’s soul. “Did your non-conventional countermeasures do this? Are those photographs evidence of the magical boobytrap you set?”
Milo stifled a wince as some along the sides of the long table muttered and hissed. He had nearly forgotten about them under Ludendorff’s scrutiny, but at the blatant mention of the supernatural, they intruded on the wizard’s attention as they officiously preened ruffled feathers. To his credit, the general didn’t pay them any heed.
Milo tried to weigh his words carefully, but every one felt jagged and top-heavy on his tongue.
“I would be lying if I didn’t acknowledge the part my, er, non-conventional means played, sir,” Milo said, wondering why he suddenly found it so hard to say the word “magic.” “But I would also be lying if I didn’t say that I have no idea how they achieved that result.”
Ursine grumbles and less subtle noises of indignation came from thick, bewhiskered mouths around the room. Milo had thought the ghulish court in Ifreedahm over a year ago sounded dangerous with all their viperish whispers, but he would take a snakebite over a bear mauling most days.
“So, these were not the countermeasures you planned?” Ludendorff probed, inclining his head ever so slightly to the pictures in Milo’s hands.
“No, sir,” Milo said with a shake of his head he hoped would seem earnest rather than frantic. “The, um, countermeasures were supposed to misdirect and disable communications to confuse Stalin’s forces and buy us more time to escape with him.”
The magus held the photographs in front of him as though touching them made him queasy, which wasn’t far from the truth.
“This was never my intention,” he said, honestly, bearing up under the general’s gaze.
Milo recognized that there were nuances to the statement he’d made, but the complexity of it didn’t bother him. He knew at the bottom of his heart that he didn’t have a problem with those men dying on principle. If it had been a case of him versus one of them, he’d have ended this or that soldier with a bullet or magical fire or a handy rock and not given it a second thought. He expected that any of them would have done the same, perhaps doubly so because most of them were under the influence of a dwarrow’s magic.
His disgust was for the scale and the necessity. First, scale because though he was no great philosopher or statistician, he imagined death on the scale of thousands having farther-reaching consequences than he was comfortable with. He supposed generals and statesmen could send men to die in droves at a word, but the wizard wasn’t one of those. Second, necessity because while war was a bloody business, such utter destruction of life was gratuitous. Enemies surrendered and materiel was captured; the bloody business wasn’t reduced to complete extermination.
At least, that was how it should have been to Milo’s reckoning.
“So, you are suggesting that this outcome,” Ludendorff asked as he sank back with a wheeze, “was an accident? A magical mishap?”
The grousing about the mention of magic nearly drowned out Milo’s answer of “yes,” but when it registered, the room subsequently filled with throaty snarls and wet growls. He wondered if Goldilocks had heard similar sounds when she woke up from her pilfered nap.
Ludendorff sat quietly for a moment, shriveled talons resting on the table, eyes sunk into the folds of his face. Had the lights in the room been dimmer, he might have looked like a wizened idol carved from stone. The expression on his sagging face didn’t change as he began to speak, but despite that, every voice in the room quieted when the calm, phlegmy voice emerged.
“I would like you to think very hard before you answer this next question,” the general warned, still holding his pose. “Speaking as the only expert we possess on such things, could there be any possible explanation for why these countermeasures malfunctioned so grotesquely?”
Lie, Milo thought instantly, and unbidden, a very convincing, very intricate collection of rubbish sprang to mind. It would be easy because as Ludendorff had already noted, Milo knew more about magic, or its practical applications at least, than any other person in the Empire or the world for that matter. He could mention anything he’d learned in Ifreedahm or the Marquis’s court and fabricate a befuddling and engaging lie right there on the spot. After all, not that long ago, lying had been second nature to him in his ill-fated attempt to be a professional criminal.
But damn it all, he wasn’t that person anymore, at least not entirely, and he wasn’t about to sit there with a folder full of death in his hands and twist things to try to save his skin. He wanted to—oh dear God, he desperately wanted to—but some swelling, festering sense of decency wouldn’t let him.
So instead of lying, he opened the folder full of carnage again and perused the horrors as his mouth gave voice to his mind’s musings.
“I’d rigged a series of unstable soul wells to collapse when disrupted,” he explained as he flipped between the photographs, searching for inspiration among the black and white splashes of blood and entrails. “The shades inside the soul wells were old spiteful things from around the fortress, the sort of resonances folklore might call poltergeists or other disrupting spirits. Once set loose, I expected they’d frighten some of the soldiers and wreak havoc with their wireless communications, and maybe cause engines to stall and machines to misbehave.”
There were more mutters and rumbles, but Milo snuck a peek in time to see Ludendorff quiet them with a wave of one vulture-like hand. He felt the gaze settling on him, but it seemed more intrigued than hostile, and that steadied Milo. He looked at the photos again, and something caught the corner of his eye and dragged his attention back to one photograph.
A smile, wide to the point of splitting, stretched across the face of a corpse. The dead man had spitted two men who had gutted him as they died. Something about the scene seemed familiar, and not just the two impaled men.
It was the smile, he decided as he stared.
“The shades were powerful but unfocused,” he continued as he flicked through the other photographs, unsure of what he was looking for. “Without magical will to channel them, they would have exhausted themselves quickly since unfocused actions waste huge amounts of their essence. They needed a receptacle.”
There!
He found the same smile on another face, just as wide and somehow disturbingly similar even though it was clear this was another body with another cause of death. Scanning the body, he saw that its hands were drenched in gore so that it was hard to see them clearly in the black and white photograph, while it was easy to see that the legs were gone below the knee. As he studied the maniacal grin straining the features, he thought it was almost like the man’s face had been forced to adopt features that were not his own.
Something twisted in his stomach, and he wondered at his choice to leave his cane outside with Ambrose. He could have mentally conferenced what was becoming a theory with Imrah, though right now, he feared she would confirm his growing dread.
“The shades would have been looking for a receptacle for their essence, something they could latch on to,” he carried on, then words failed him and his mouth went dry as he flipped through more photographs. “But without a magical focus or will to anchor them, they would have been butting up against the natural barrier that all living souls create.”
Milo stared at another photo.
In this one, a dead soldier lay flat on the ground, his head turned to the left. His arms were extended out to either side, and his fingers were buried in the backs of the men on either side of him. Dark splashes of blood ran up to the shoulder of his uniform.
Half of his face was pressed into the dirt and there was a fist-sized hole through his back, but Milo could still see the gaping grin.
Again the features seemed pressed out of their natural shape to create a maniacal mask.
“Shades are echoes,” Milo said, his voice and thoughts in danger of being lost amongst the growing clamor of German oaths and denouncements. “They might act like thinking spirits, but they are pieces of what they once were. They have a set of patterns, and they can’t do anything except repeat them.”
Milo remembered what Rihyani had told him about the kind of mental degradation those manipulated by Zlydzen would undergo over time. Could that damage have been spiritual as well? She had talked about them being hollowed-out shells, but what if it was more than their thoughts that had been scraped clean?
“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.”
Wizardborn (World's First Wizard Book 3) Page 2
