Milo’s pulse quickened.
“You think he’s a Questor,” Milo said, leaning forward eagerly. “Posing as a human militia leader.”
“That or he is human, with help from our Guardian friends,” Jorge said, looking down at his nearly spent cigarette. “Either way, he is no good for Georgia, and, I assume, no good for the status quo in Germany. The huge, liver-spotted hands of the General Staff might clench down on Nicht-KAT as they capsize, dragging you to a sterile basement lab in Berlin and me to a firing squad.”
Milo once again recalled Lokkemand’s terrified and guilt-wracked face.
“That or we all get co-opted by the Ewiges Reich.” A low snarl tore across the room that set the hair on the back of Milo’s neck on end. The effect was even more pronounced when he realized the angry, bestial noise had emerged from Jorge’s thin chest.
“I will see Europe made a wasteland and Germany’s name wiped from the record of history,” he growled, remembered battle-lust springing up in his worn face. “All that and more to keep such secrets from such men.”
Milo stopped himself from pointing out that if the Reich had connections with the Guardians, such secrets as Nicht-KAT had might already be theirs. Jorge didn’t seem to be in a debating mood, and Milo didn’t want to find out that Jorge had deeper and darker secrets than the world’s first wizard.
“Well, then it is not a question,” Milo said, stepping away from the table and walking toward Jorge, one hand inside his coat. “You know what you have to do with me.”
“Yes?” Jorge asked, giving Milo a long glance out the corner of his eye.
Milo forced his hand to be steady as he reached out and took a cigarette from the open case. Jorge didn’t stop him
“Set De Zauber-Schwartz loose,” Milo said, lighting his cigarette with a snap of azure flame as it hung from his lip. “Stop having me waste my time with faulty baubles and let me do what I do best.”
Another crooked smile crept onto Jorge’s features.
“Which is?”
Milo sent a plume of smoke over the top of his burning thumb, setting the smoke alight with a trivial amount of focus. The smoke writhed and burned like coiling cerulean vapors from a dragon’s maw before coalescing into leering death’s head that blackened and vanished with a sweep of the magus’ hand.
“Fight fire with fire.” He laughed, a rich dark sound at odds with his scarred young face.
Jorge nodded, the light of fury replaced by brooding glee.
“Will there be anything you need from me?” he asked, depositing his cigarette in the glass.
Milo considered the point for a moment, though he knew it was all theatrics. It was the thing he’d wanted and hoped for since leaving Afghanistan.
“There’s a certain fey aristocrat we have in common,” Milo said, allowing himself a smile. “I believe she could be vital to the success of the operation.”
“I think I might be able to help with that,” the colonel said, beginning the laboriously slow climb to his feet. “Assuming she is available, I don’t doubt she would be thrilled to work alongside you again. She seemed quite intrigued by you last time we spoke. A new operation would give her another opportunity to indulge her curiosity.”
Milo was thankful the cloud of tobacco smoke helped conceal the flush that had come to his cheeks.
“It’s not a new operation,” he said, his voice rough and throaty. “Just a continuation of what began in Afghanistan, sir.”
Now standing, Jorge looked into Milo’s face with a strangely paternal glow in his gaze. Wary of such a look, Milo nearly flinched away when the colonel’s hand reached out and rested gently against his shoulder.
“Have it your way, son.” Jorge beamed as Milo tried not to squirm. “Just remember what I said.”
“Which part?” Milo laughed stiffly.
“All of it.” Jorge chuckled as he gave Milo’s shoulder a squeeze and turned to leave.
Milo sat at his desk, smiling broadly as he went through the contents of the pockets of his coat. He hadn't had a chance to sort through the various ingredients he’d collected on his last late-night escapade, and it was just as well because it seemed his stimulant-soaked brain hadn’t been picky.
The ash and soot from the fire of a loving home had many useful properties, but the splinters he’d shaved from nearly half a dozen thresholds were embarrassingly impotent. He also found a sack of petrified pig droppings in the extra-dimensional pocket, which as far as he knew had no use except for being refined into sulfur, which he had plenty of.
There seemed to be even more, including a purse whose contents felt uncomfortably soft in his hands. Given the aura and smell emanating from the container, he wasn’t sure he’d ever open that one.
Despite this befuddling chore of discovery, he was still smiling when Ambrose finally ambled into the room.
“I assume you heard all that?” Milo muttered without looking up.
Ambrose grunted an affirmative before shuffling over to the couch against the far wall. He settled onto the seat with a low groan matched by the protest of the furniture beneath him.
“Why lurk outside in the hall for so long?” Milo asked, glancing up with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. “Didn’t fall asleep again, did you?”
Ambrose scowled but decided not to rise to the bait.
“Glad to see you're in a good mood,” he said, leaning back and clasping his broad hands across his wide stomach. “But, to answer your question, I was waiting for you to remember you forgot something and run after Jorge to tell him. It lasted so long because, as you know, the colonel is uninterested in hurrying.”
Milo stopped his sorting and looked at Ambrose, his smile hardening along the edges.
“What did I forget?” he asked, feeling a twitch in his guts that told him he knew exactly what the big man was talking about.
“Well, besides recommending me for some sort of medal for putting up with you,” the big man began his heavy lids sliding to half-mast over his green eyes, “there’s the whole issue of your extracurricular research he might want to know about. I mean, I’m glad your little crusade is coming to you, less huffing about for me, you see, but it seems ill-advised to keep from Jorge the reason you’re so obsessed with the Guardians.”
Milo pushed back from the desk, his good mood in danger of becoming permanently soured.
“If you did hear all that, then you know Jorge doesn’t need to know,” Milo said with a shrug. “He’s a soldier, after all, and aren’t soldiers supposed to care only about the mission?”
Ambrose, eyelids so low they might as well have been closed, heaved a great sigh.
“I suppose, but if you have what could be vital intel or a time bomb in your lap, it seems unwise to keep it there without a superior having knowledge of it. I mean, I understand not telling Lokkemand since the man’s an ass, but if you can’t trust Jorge, we’ve got bigger problems.”
Milo fought the urge to let his gaze slide over to a stone in the study wall where an engraved wooden box sat. Ambrose knew where the box was, but it bothered Milo to even acknowledge its presence except in the process of accessing it. Eyes fixed and voice steady, he regarded Ambrose with forced calm.
“We don’t know that we have anything of value,” he said evenly as he climbed to his feet and gathered the partially sorted supplies on his desk. “Until we do, there is no need to bother Jorge or anyone else with what we might or might not have.”
Ambrose’s gaze remained hooded as Milo deposited the supplies on the table and went back to scrutinizing what was esoterically useful and what was just a curiosity.
“You’re the magus.” Ambrose shrugged. “I’m just the shuffling assistant.”
“Oh, don’t pout,” Milo said with a groan. “Come on, let me finish sorting this rubbish, and we’ll go get something to eat. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”
Ambrose’s belly gave a low rumble, and the big man had a look of betrayal stamped on his face.
Milo laughed as his pile of discards continued to grow.
“Just because we both know what’s best for you.” Milo chortled as he twisted around to nod at his bodyguard’s stomach. “Now quiet, or I’ll mess something up and have to start over.”
Ambrose lapsed into silence, gaze downcast for a heartbeat before his eyes swung over to the hiding place in the wall. His hands slid down the slope of his belly to rest in knotted lumps on the tops of his legs.
“You’re going to try to talk to her again, aren’t you?” he said, his voice low, almost angry.
Milo straightened a little, back stiff, neck tight, too rigid to turn around and face the big man.
“It,” Milo said through a clenched jaw. “She’s not there anymore, just an impression, an echo.”
Ambrose rose from his seat and moved to the doorway.
“When?” he asked while in transit to the portal.
“Tonight,” Milo confessed, still fixed in place like an insect on a corkboard. “If I have the strength for the attempt.”
Ambrose took up his position at the open doorway, a flat, unapproachable expression settling over his features.
“Don’t worry about dinner for me, then,” he muttered darkly. “I seem to have lost my appetite.”
4
The Confession
Despite his claim, Ambrose was still munching on a small loaf of dark bread when the witching hour crept up on the slumbering Shatili.
“I thought I was the one who was in a coma,” Milo muttered as they made their way into the nether regions of the fortress complex. “You’d never guess it from dinner.”
That wasn’t necessarily true, but Milo savored the color that rose to the big man’s cheeks.
Ambrose muttered something rude-sounding through the bread stuffed into his mouth. His hands were full of supplies and implements Milo had stacked in his arms. Snuffling and grunting, he followed Milo downstairs lined with mossy walls and the smell of old damp. Neither man bothered with a lamp, a candle, or any sort of light. Milo’s eyes had been treated with nightsight elixir, and Ambrose’s half-angel nature had proven darkness to be no impediment.
It wasn’t until they reached the lowest level, bypassing several doors and passages during their descent, that the first light interrupted the utter darkness they’d been walking in.
The raptor-skulled cane shed viridian light over a wide corridor where iron staples had been driven into the wall to hang manacles from the damp, moss-furred walls. Both staples and manacles were corroded beyond use, but they hung in rusted stillness as a testament to the dark and hopeless times witnessed by the space. Despair dripped from the walls as surely as moisture from the Argun wetted the moss.
The resonance in the room was a strident clamor against Milo’s magical senses. Even braced for it, he paused for a moment as he adjusted to the sensation washing over him. The light radiating from above the cane’s beak flickered for a second, then flared to painful brilliance before settling to an even glow again.
“Not sure I’ll ever get used to that,” Milo murmured, his heart coming down from a threadier pace in fits and starts. Drawing his focus from inward to outward, he pressed the witchlight to reach out and caress the sigils carved into the floor and filled with a mixture of ash and silver. They glimmered with a sinister opalescence in the green light, winding in concentric rings of eye-searingly intricate patterns. Satisfied that everything was still in place, Milo fitted the cane into a sconce set in the wall, where it continued to glow.
“Not sure you’re supposed to,” Ambrose grumbled around a mouthful of bread as he stepped around Milo and carefully deposited his burdens on the floor. “But if you do, let me know.”
The big man handed over the wooden box retrieved from the hidden alcove in the study, clearly glad to get some distance from the vessel.
Milo’s fingers traced the engravings worked into the box, right-angled versions of the sigils that coiled on the floor in front of him. He could feel the traceries of silver he’d dribbled into each side, a modified version of a warding recipe in Spectral Ruminations. The abridged texts he’d been studying since his tutelage among the ghuls had proven to be the only beginning of knowledge rather than the boundary. With not much to do during the claustrophobic winter in Shatili, he’d quickly raced through the codices he had and was soon pushing the limits of the theories and the directives presented. More and more, he had learned magic was an art, even among the seemingly regimented practice of alchemical necromancy. Rules could be bent with ingenuity and fortitude.
The top of the box was sealed by a locked latch worked in heavy pewter. The padlock’s keyhole had been filled with molten brass, so the congealed lump denied any attempts to unlock the container.
Milo took the box and set it in the exact center of the concentric rings.
“I still say that you should tell Jorge about this,” Ambrose muttered, holding out a bowl full of iron filings. “I mean, what if something she’s told us could be useful?”
“It,” Milo corrected, scooping out a generous handful of the ferrous dust. “It, not she.”
Ambrose rolled his eyes.
“Well, it sure looks a lot like her,” the bodyguard shot back before trading the bowl for the pouch of hearth ash. “And that doesn’t change my point.”
“We don’t know that anything we’ve heard is even true, much less useful,” Milo retorted before he took a pinch of ash and sprinkled it across the filings. “The last thing we need to do is waste the colonel’s time.”
The iron fractals began to hiss, smoke, and then glow with a forge’s heat. Milo let the simmering particles fall from his hand toward the floor, watching as they tumbled around and into one another. By the time they reached the stones, they’d coalesced into a key whose toothy tip still glowed with heat.
Testing first with a light touch before pinching the blackened ring between his thick fingers, Ambrose drew the key up and carefully handed it to Milo, wary of the glowing end.
“I think it has less to do with the colonel’s time and more to do with his permission,” Ambrose grumbled as he stepped clear.
Milo shook his head but didn’t take the time to argue.
Instead, he stepped to the box and pressed the glowing head into the brass-choked lock. There was an instant of resistance, then a bubbling hiss as brass wept from the keyhole and the key began to slide in. Even with the molten metal dribbling across its face to pool on the floor, the ensorcelled box remained unmarred. Sweat sprang to Milo’s brow as his spirit strove to unfasten wards under intense pressure without destroying them. The key and lock were ritual instruments, physical manifestations of magical realities, a pantomime for an operation that was metaphysical yet necessary for its success.
The day Milo understood exactly why one needed the other was the day he’d understand things at a much deeper level than he could imagine. For now, though, he had to focus his will and try not to scorch his fingers to the bone at the same time.
Milo felt as much as heard the soft click through the spitting brass as the key drove home. Steeling his mind and body for the next step, he turned the key as he released a single steadying breath.
The pewter lock fell into the pool of brass, the heavy latch flew open, and a nightmare emerged.
Lightless beyond even Milo’s magical senses, it was a living shadow given a perverse physicality as it twisted and wrenched itself from the container. Amorphous flesh writhed around warping disjointed bones, refusing to take any shape except that of something straining and raging with overlong limbs and groping digits. The only thing which remained fixed was some semblance of a head, which flopped this way and that while two glowing eyes remained fixed hatefully on Milo as he watched it struggling.
The temperature plummeted, and soon Milo could see his breath forming in front of him in little puffs. A scream like the shearing of a soul pierced the stillness of the dungeon. The air seemed to vibra
te with the pent-up malice of the cry as though trembling to bear such hatred.
“BE STILL,” Milo commanded in an eldritchly-empowered voice.
Impossibly the horror emerging from the box ceased its straining, and its keening faltered into silence. It swayed slightly, an oscillating torso with an odd number of limbs jutting from a box that could not have held half its mass. The lolling head watched Milo with open hunger, a low cunning glinting in its eyes.
“You come to us again, Milo,” the shade burbled in a voice as foul as a septic wound. “Do you think we have anything more to teach you?”
Milo met the taunting glare with a cold, unrelenting stare that bored into the undead specter until it shivered. The magus felt a smile tug at the corners of his mouth; he was either getting better, or the familiar wraith was finally beginning to understand the nature of things.
Milo warned himself not to get cocky even as he raised his chin to glare imperiously at the shade.
“You are the shade of Imrah Marid of Ifreedahm, daughter of Bashlek Ifreedahm,” Milo declared, his eye contact not flinching for a second. “I command you to remember what you once were. REMEMBER.”
The shade clearly did not appreciate the instruction, flailing at itself with its too numerous limbs with a sob, pinching and clawing in a fit of masochistic defiance before surrendering. Like water taking the form of a vessel, it poured its umbral flesh into the shape of Milo’s former teacher.
Only this time, instead of donning Imrah’s ghulish form, it emerged from its roiling coils as she had appeared when wearing her human guise.
A small, shapely woman with dark hair and flashing black eyes had replaced the grotesque creature, but her midsection was painfully pinched in the box, flesh compressed beyond mortal endurance. An ephemeral gown of black gossamer lay lightly over her body, the spectral cloth rippling in an ethereal wind.
Sorcerybound (World's First Wizard Book 2) Page 5
