Two three-man teams were watching the house for targets, one batch hunkered behind a wagon and the other huddling inside a dry, dilapidated fountain. Their sergeant was bellowing for the other teams to sound off but was only greeted by the sounds of burning buildings and fighting somewhere in the distance
“Not quite the night you planned for, was it, boys?” Milo chuckled to himself darkly as he gathered for another leap.
With a huge beat of ensorcelled black wings, Milo flew into the air, and with an inverted incantation of the flaming lash, he sent out a wave of icy black javelins to scythe down on the cowering soldiers. Preternaturally hardened ice bit through flesh and fabric with ease, and whatever flesh it touched knew the ruin of utter cold in a single labored heartbeat.
Only the sergeant, his head raised to look for his missing men, had spied Milo and managed to flatten himself behind the lip of the fountain in time. The shard shattered on the stone above him and he sprang up, service pistol sweeping skyward. He chased Milo with a flurry of hasty shots, but the pistol clicked empty before the magus touched at the back of the fountain basin, faceless stone statuary rising between the two.
Drawing on the cane’s physical enhancements, Milo spun with inhuman speed and shoved a lance of focus hastily through the end of the cane. The beak yawned, and a blade of ice three meters long and as thin as a sheet of glass flew under the statues’ outstretched arms and pierced the sergeant through the shoulder.
The man screamed as the rifle he’d scooped up tumbled from his limp fingers.
Milo met the man’s eyes, and behind the pain and hatred, he saw something move. For a single instant, something besides the dying man dangling from an icy lance stared at Milo, and Milo stared back at it.
Zlydzen has seen us, Imrah whispered, and Milo thought he heard a tremor of fear.
The presence vanished as the ice claimed him and life slipped from the man’s eyes.
Milo stood for a moment, wrestling with looking in the eyes of a dying man and seeing his enemy watching him. Part of him, still warmed by the heat of his fury, gloried in the observation, confident in his display of prowess. A quieter, deeper voice was not so certain it was a good thing.
Milo shook off the thoughts, then realized the sounds of battle had passed, and only the crackle of flames broke the silence of the night.
From somewhere among the burning trucks, Milo heard Ambrose shouting and Rihyani’s musical call.
“Milo! Milo, where are you!”
“Magus! Magus! You better have not gone and died on me!”
Despite the clinging sense of foreboding, Milo’s mouth hitched up in a smile.
“Not as lucky as that,” he shouted back.
22
The Burden
“Mercy, please!” came the desperate plea, tears and snot smearing the commissar’s face. “Please, just let me go!”
“You’re not helping your cause with that bleating, comrade,” Ambrose growled at the kneeling man. “If it weren’t for the magus here, I’d have shot you on principle.”
To punctuate, Ambrose tapped the man’s forehead sharply with one blunt finger.
Milo wasn’t certain if Ambrose was saying that to frighten the man into silence or not, but either way, the wretch recoiled and quieted some, his wailed pleas becoming sniffled mutterings.
“What do we plan to do with him?” Ambrose asked as he stepped back to stand beside Milo.
“Information would seem the most important thing right now,” Rihyani offered, but an edge crept into her voice. “Though I would like nothing better than to feed him his own heart, slowly.”
Milo looked at the fey and saw the vaguest ghost of the feral creature he’d witnessed fighting Ezekiel among the trees.
“Everyone wants this one to die,” Milo said, not much caring that the sniveling prisoner could hear him. “Is there a particular reason?”
Rihyani and Ambrose shared a look.
While Milo had been fighting for his life, Rihyani had used the Art to conceal the villagers and compel them to flee before returning. She came back and helped Ambrose finish off the rest of the soldiers, who’d unnervingly fought to the last man without any thought of retreat. All except this blubbering man in a voenkom’s, or war commissar’s, uniform. He cut quite the pitiful figure, his uniform disheveled, glasses cracked, and his cap missing, leaving his sweaty dome of a head to gleam in the rising sun.
“This one’s pants were still around his ankles when he came stumbling through the smoke,” Rihyani explained. “The girl staggered out of the house he’d used. I could smell him all over her, despite the blood.”
Ambrose growled, and there was something wet in his eyes.
“Tried to get the girl to run toward where the rest of the villagers were,” he said hoarsely. “But at the sight of me coming toward her, she screamed and ran the other way. She ran right…right into…ri...”
Ambrose’s voice faltered, and his hands tightened into shaking fists.
“Right into the line of fire,” Rihyani said as she rested a hand gently on his broad shoulder. “There was a fireteam holding out in a stable, and they were shooting anything that moved. She was dead before she hit the ground.”
Ambrose nodded and, with a searing glare at the commissar, turned and strode a dozen paces away, where he began pacing in tight circles. His voice, a low and snarled stream of French profanity, became ambient noise to join the fading snap and pop of the smoldering village.
Milo was tired, but not so much so that he didn’t feel the flames of righteous rage spring up at this fresh atrocity. He banked them, forcing his mind to process questions that might be relevant.
“You said girl, but how old was she?”
Rihyani’s face was a mask of restrained disgust.
“Human ages are difficult for me to tell,” she began stiffly, her eyes remaining fixed in the middle distance, “but she had barely entered womanhood. She most certainly wasn’t old enough to be a mother.”
“So, you’re saying she was a child?” Milo asked, his voice a snarl as he turned toward the cowering thing not three strides from him. “A child!”
Rihyani might have said something, but a rush of disjointed memories played through Milo’s mind, pushing out everything except the sight of the commissar. Memories and feelings locked away long ago howled and rattled their chains, and before he knew what was happening, Milo had the man by the throat. His gloved fingers bit into the sweaty skin around the man’s neck, eliciting a choked gasp as Milo dragged him up so they were nearly nose to nose.
“I think a bullet in the head is too gentle,” he hissed into the man’s face. “As a magus, I can think of a dozen much more painful ways to end you.”
“P-please,” the commissar croaked. “I could be useful. Pl…ack!”
Milo’s grip continued to tighten, and the rapist began to paw at the hands around his throat. He managed to worm his fingers in enough to manage a desperate gasp.
“I’m Chief Commissar Beria!” he wheezed. “I can get you anything, please!”
Milo’s bore down on the man’s throat, and Beria’s knees buckled.
“I want to see you die!” Milo snarled, spit flying from his lips. “I want you to feel helpless, abandoned, powerless, and then I want you to die!”
Beria’s face was changing colors, his eyes losing focus behind his splintered spectacles, but in a last desperate twist, he pulled back enough to form another strangled plea.
“Please!” he cried, his voice barely above a whisper. “Stalin! I can give you Stalin!”
Milo recovered his grip, and for a single heartbeat, he didn’t care about what he’d just heard. The cries from the vaults of his mind were too insistent, too indignant, too real to ignore. He was going to kill Beria, knowing it was the right thing to do, Stalin and Nicht-KAT and the whole War be damned.
But then he smelled the acrid smoke of the burnt village and heard a lively patch of embers give a crackling pop.
Milo’s hands released the commissar, who collapsed to the earth, heaving huge sob after huge sob. He pressed his face into the sooty dirt as his hands covered his head.
Beria deserved death and worse, and if there was any justice in this life or the next, something horrible waited for him on the other side of the dirt, but there was more at stake than justice for one girl or even one village. Milo knew that the likes of Commissar Beria were a symptom, not the disease. They deserved eradication, yes, but there were always more to take their place.
“Listen to me very closely,” Milo began, grinding each word between his teeth. “The only thing keeping you alive is your absolute cooperation, do you understand?”
Beria’s bruised throat couldn’t manage a reply, but his head nodded exaggeratedly even as he stared at the ground. Milo reached behind him and picked up his cane.
“One argument, one lie, one hesitation, and I will make your end into folklore,” Milo snarled and drew a baleful light into the cane’s eye sockets. He shoved the raptor’s beak under the commissar’s chin, dragging the ash-streaked face upward. Beria’s eyes bulged as Milo held the glowing skull in front of the man’s face.
“Your name won’t be remembered, but they’ll tell stories how no man has ever before or ever will again suffer such a terrible end.”
Beria tried to turn away in a fit of gibbering tears, but the eagle’s beak hooked his cheek and dragged his eyes back to the magus’ face.
“Look into my eyes and tell me you understand,” Milo said in a whisper-soft voice. “I want you to show me you understand what is at stake.”
The commissar’s whole body shook as though it took all his strength to meet Milo’s eyes, but self-preservation lent him uncommon fortitude. With jerky movements and a wet gulping noise in his throat, Beria nodded vigorously.
“I understand. Yes, I understand.”
Milo searched the terrified expression for several heartbeats before drawing the cane back and straightening. He realized then that both Ambrose and Rihyani were at his shoulders once again, their faces grim and their eyes locked on Beria.
“All right, voenkom,” Milo said with deadly softness. “Tell me everything.”
Ambrose came back from tying Beria to the fountain like an untrustworthy pet, shaking his head as he hooked a thumb over his shoulder.
“I don’t know that I believe a damn word that weasel said.” He grunted as he settled on the steps of the mosque where Milo and Rihyani were sitting.
“With enough time, we could make sure he’s not lying to us,” Rihyani offered, but Milo shook his head.
“We don’t have time,” he said, frowning at the blue sky overhead. “We’ve been here long enough. If we stay much longer, there’s a good chance that we’ll be caught by another patrol.”
“Or the villagers will return, and who knows how they’ll react?” Rihyani said, her expression inscrutable.
“I’ll give you three guesses what I think they’ll do with him,” Ambrose muttered as he did a quick spot clean of his Gewehr. “And doesn’t matter what it is because it’ll be better than what he deserves.”
Milo bobbed his head, listening but unable to bring himself to say anything. Suspicions notwithstanding, Beria had been a fount of information, providing Milo with an abundance of information regarding Stalin’s operation. He knew almost nothing about the supernatural influence, thinking it was only the force of Stalin’s charisma, but even with this disappointment, the intelligence he provided was invaluable. One item in particular was rolling around his mind like a grain of sand on its way to becoming a pearl of a scheme. All this would, of course, be cold comfort to the elderly couple and the teenage girl they’d buried less than half an hour before.
Milo felt a heavy weight settle across his shoulders, and he dreaded what he knew came next.
“We can’t bring him with us, though.” Ambrose huffed as he let the rifle settle into the crook of his arm. “We can’t fly with an extra man, and we can’t drag him along by foot without risking him bolting at the first opportunity.”
Rihyani looked at the commissar sitting in the fountain, head hung miserably. Her lips worked in a humorless smile, peeling upward to reveal lethal fangs.
“Are you intending to let him live?” she snarled in a low, throaty voice. “After everything he’s done?”
“And what he will do if we let him go,” Ambrose added.
Milo sighed and pressed a thumb to the hardening ache between his eyes, realizing that his jewel of a scheme might come apart if the commissar managed to warn Stalin.
“I know all the reasons why I should put a bullet in his head,” Milo said heavily. “But I gave him my word that if he gave us information, we’d let him go. I don’t see how I can go back on that when he kept his end of the bargain.”
Ambrose snorted, and Rihyani suddenly found something interesting to look at in the sky above.
“What?” Milo demanded, eyes darting between the two of them. “You’re saying you’d kill him even after he fulfilled his part of the deal?”
Ambrose nodded while Rihyani turned a flat, chilly stare on him.
“Yes,” they said together.
Milo pinched the bridge of his nose and fought to keep his temper under control.
I agree with your companions, Imrah announced in Milo’s head. The cane rested against one leg.
“Who asked you?” he growled, kicking the fetish away angrily.
“Even the ghul agrees with us.” Ambrose chuckled.
“For all the wrong reasons, I’m sure,” Milo spat, then raked his fingers through his hair. “Fine. Tell me, how does killing him now not make us just like him?”
Ambrose and Rihyani glanced at each other and back at Milo with an almost pitying look. Milo had no memory of his parents, but sometimes the wardens at the orphanage had shared similar looks when they thought their charges were being particularly stupid or naïve. Milo despised the look, and it took more self-control than he would have cared to admit not to throw something at them to dispel their condescension.
“Last I checked, I never raped a little girl,” Ambrose said flatly. “Or forced civilians into service at gunpoint.”
Milo ground his teeth together.
“I gave my word!” he roared as he sprang to his feet and began pacing. “That has to mean something. To me, if nothing else.”
“Some creatures have chosen to be unworthy of such things,” Rihyani said, her words tender and patient as she watched him, but it was no use. Milo felt the gravity of certainty grip him and he knew nothing could set him free.
Nothing except doing as he’d promised, as sick as it made him feel.
“Then I suppose I shouldn’t have given my word,” Milo snapped. “But since I did, I need to honor the terms. It is as simple as that. Maybe it’ll ruin everything, but I’m doing it.”
Ambrose opened his mouth to argue, then stopped, cocking his head to one side. Milo recognized the signs of Ambrose’s inhumanly keen hearing at work.
“What is it?” he asked, eyes sweeping to the edge of town, but he saw nothing.
Ambrose shouldered his rifle and drew his bayonet blade.
“Time to go,” he said quickly before heading toward the fountain where the commissar squatted.
“What are you doing?” Milo called after him, shuffling an uncertain step after him.
“You said you wanted him to go free,” Ambrose answered over his shoulder. “Fine, let me go do it, so your precious word can be kept, and we can get out of here.”
Milo felt a tremble of concern as he watched the blade glinting in Ambrose’s hand, but something in the big man’s voice told him to trust. After all, Simon Ambrose didn’t lie.
Despite that, Milo stood fixed in place as he watched Ambrose trudge over and roughly cut Beria’s bonds. The commissar rose and stood staring at Ambrose as the two exchanged words, then Ambrose turned and ambled back to Milo and Rihyani.
“Ready to go?” Ambrose asked.
&
nbsp; Rihyani nodded as she rose, while Milo bent down and scooped up his cane.
Not a word, Milo warned Imrah before turning to Ambrose, frowning.
“What did you say to him?”
“Told him not to follow us, or I’d gut-shoot him and break both his legs.” Ambrose shrugged. “Recommended that he stand there counting as high as he could before moving to make sure I didn’t get the wrong idea if I heard him behind us.”
Milo looked past Ambrose at Beria, who stood shivering in the dry fountain, staring at them with terror-stretched eyes.
“That’s it?” Milo asked doubtfully.
Ambrose heaved a sigh and shook his head.
“Fine,” he sputtered. “I also reminded him I was an excellent shot, and I’d love for him to give me an excuse.”
Milo stared at Ambrose for a long moment and then nodded.
“Fine, let’s get moving.”
They gathered their things in short order, deciding to go by foot at least initially unless a patrol in the area spotted them and they came under fire. Carrying Ambrose, they couldn’t fly high enough and would be moving too slowly to effectively avoid such an assault, so they trusted the rough terrain of Georgia to give them the concealment they needed.
They left Beria counting as they jogged past the outskirts of the village and the burned-out trucks.
Milo threw one last look over his shoulder and nearly stumbled as he saw movement at the opposite side of the town. His alarm dissipated when he recognized that the dark shapes all bore sooty faces and weary expressions. The villagers were coming back to what remained of their homes, sweeping around the village perimeter with wary eyes.
As he loped onward, Milo wondered if they’d scrape together what they could before leaving or stay and try to rebuild, but the thought flew from his mind when he heard an ear-piercing wail come from the center of the town where a dry fountain had sat in front of a venerable mosque.
“What was that?” Milo said reflexively as he looked at Ambrose, but something in the pit of his stomach told him.
Sorcerybound (World's First Wizard Book 2) Page 28
