World's First Wizard Complete Series Boxed Set

by Schneider, Aaron D.

Fedor shook his head, but Izac considered the question for a moment, then sighed and shrugged.

  “I heard a name once. Roland,” he said uncertainly. “Does that mean anything?”

  11

  These Ghosts

  “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” Rihyani said as she held Milo’s hand. He knew it was a lie, though one she believed.

  She’d returned from reconnoitering the area, giving the report that indeed there were signs of Hiisi only a few miles from the encampment and the village. She’d begun to describe the nature of those signs, something Milo had asked about, but stopped when she looked into his eyes.

  Ambrose had promised to join them after seeing to Trotsky and his men. They would soon need to decide how much to share with Lokkemand.

  Now they both sat at a rough-hewn table in a hovel afforded them by the village. Milo hadn’t noticed it the night before when he’d crashed on a cot to sleep, but now he was certain the place had served the needs of animals more than humans. The floor was packed earth layered with fresh straw, but the musky smell of beasts was everywhere. It was not oppressive as much as one more indignity among what felt like a pile heaped on him.

  He not only had to face demons he thought he’d finally escaped, but now he was going to tell of his relationship with them inside a pile of stones that smelled of dung and donkey hide.

  “I might as well be honest with you,” Milo said, angry at how weak and watery his voice sounded. “Ambrose has bits and pieces of the story, I think, but I’ve never told anyone all of it. It never seemed like it would matter to anyone else.”

  Rihyani’s fingers tightened on his hand, and he realized his gaze had wandered to the crumbling seams between some stones in the far wall. In the back of his mind, he imagined Roland tunneling rodent-like through the joints until he burst into the room.

  Milo shook off the image and looked at Rihyani, who watched him with concern bending her face into a deep frown.

  “Roland was there at the beginning of what I can remember,” Milo said, swallowing hard as he tried to keep his voice steady. “I was young, five or six maybe, and alone on a street when men on horseback nearly ran me down. Roland saved me, though he was probably only a few years older. After that, we were together.”

  Rihyani nodded in gentle, wordless encouragement, but Milo felt himself swallowing a rush of bile. She pitied him, he could feel it, and that galled him to his soul, but he knew he couldn’t expect anything different. He couldn’t even hold it against her. The reasons he’d not told this tale were many.

  Milo gritted his teeth and forced himself to bear the pitying gaze that tore at his heart and needled his pride.

  “We survived in the city until one of the German reconnaissance patrols found us, starving and hours from death in the cold,” he continued, remembering the rough laughs of the men who’d pinched and prodded them while trying to squeeze some useful intelligence out of them. “I was scared of the soldiers, but Roland was there, arm around my shoulder, telling me to be brave.”

  “He was like your big brother, then?” Rihyani asked. “Why?”

  “I asked him that more than once,” Milo said, shrugging as he shook his head. “I hoped that it was because he knew me and thus my past, but he claimed he’d just met me that night. He said he saw me in trouble and didn’t want me to get hurt, and that was it.”

  Rihyani nodded and massaged the top of his hand with one thumb.

  “I’m sorry, go ahead,” she said softly.

  “It’s all right.” Milo sighed, forcing a smile. “The fact is, there’s so much I barely understand.”

  The door to the hovel creaked open and Ambrose walked inside, eyes downcast and sheepish.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” he muttered as he shuffled over to the table. “Trotsky and his boys are sorted, and I picked this up.”

  A green glass bottle appeared on the table, and a second later, Ambrose had tugged a cork out. Milo didn’t have to pick up the bottle to feel the smoky tickle of country vodka in his nostrils.

  “Managed to snatch this from Command while I was out,” Ambrose said as he patted Milo’s shoulder with one huge paw. “Thought it might lubricate the process.”

  “Are you sure that is a good idea?” Rihyani asked, but the bottle was already in Milo’s hand.

  “No,” the wizard answered before raising it to his lips and throwing back a heavy slug.

  Milo felt it burn down his throat, tasting of metal and woodsmoke. It reached his belly, where it formed a molten lake. He coughed and gave a growling laugh as he set the bottle on the table.

  “It’s good,” he muttered hoarsely. “Thank you.”

  Ambrose nodded and ambled over to sit on his cot and listen.

  “So, we were sent to Dresden, and Roland made sure we were kept together,” Milo said with a sniff as his fingers played with the neck of the bottle. “He lied about his age to make sure we were in the same dormitory, and soon the children and even the adults in that hellhole knew he was my guardian. Neither of us could avoid everything, but I had a much easier time than most because of him.”

  Milo raised the bottle to his nose and savored the way the smell of the vodka prickled.

  “At some point, we started sneaking out to steal things,” Milo continued after taking a small sip. “I’m not sure why, but once we learned we could, it was like discovering ourselves. We were no longer rats scampering from shadow to shadow under the boots of the orderlies and the older children. Out there in the dark, we were predators, stealthy and clever.”

  Milo raised the bottle again and felt the burning pool inside him radiating a soothing warmth across his whole body. He wanted nothing more than to keep filling those depths until they swallowed him. Only by sheer force of will did he lower the bottle to the table again, dragging his fingers down the smooth sides until glass ended and the wooden table began. With the tips of his fingers, he began to rotate the bottle idly.

  “Before long we had a crew, other orphans like us, along with a few strays living rough in Dresden. We moved from simple snatch jobs to schemes more grandiose and violent. I was eleven the first time I held a porter at knifepoint while the crew emptied his wagon. I was twelve when I killed a man we were mugging.”

  “The little one in the top hat,” Ambrose said, nodding slowly. “I remember.”

  “Me too,” Milo muttered and took another drink.

  He didn’t bother to look at Rihyani’s and Ambrose’s faces as he took a swallow he could be forgiven for. He stifled another cough when the swallow turned out to be larger than he’d expected, though not as rough as the first.

  “I cried hard that night, but Roland was there, arms around my shoulders, telling me to be brave. We learned from that night, and I only had to kill two more times before things all fell apart. One of those times was a handsy orderly from the orphanage who’d followed us out one night when I was sixteen. No great loss there.”

  Milo rolled the bottle on its bottom in a slow oscillating pattern, his hand on the neck. He waited for a few heartbeats and then gave a quiet sigh of relief. No one had asked about the other murder.

  “So there I was, about to turn seventeen and looking at the reality that we were going to be sent to the war or a factory. Roland had this plan for us to steal a shipment of arms off a train and use it to start up as gun runners along the eastern edge of the Empire. It was daring, it was inventive, and it was either a victory or a firing squad once we started, so we were all in. By then we were old hands at sneaking, stealing, intimidation, and general miscreant behavior, so despite the risks, we were confident we'd succeed. Then the worst happened.”

  “You were discovered?” Rihyani asked, leaning forward, still holding Milo’s hand. “The plan fell apart? You were betrayed?”

  “No, no, and yes, in that order,” Milo said with an ugly snicker before drawing on the bottle once more. He was surprised at the ease of his confession but also by how light the bottle was feeling.
He couldn’t have drunk that much, could he?

  Milo looked up from considering the bottle and saw Rihyani and Ambrose staring at him, faces taut with a pained combination of interest and frustration. He’d been telling them something, he knew it…

  “Ah,” he said with a lurching start, thumping the bottle down once more. “So, we pulled off the job, managing to snatch no less than a dozen machine guns with, uh, well, a lot of ammunition, along with several crates full of rifles and even some grenades, I think. We left Dresden and hadn’t made it to Poland before we made a deal with some Red sympathizers in Berlin to sell off most of what we stole. We went from being hand-to-mouth orphans to rich men in less than two weeks. That night we rented the best hotel and had so much alcohol brought into the room we could have drowned in it.”

  Milo’s gaze swung back to the bottle, which he began to raise to his lips.

  “Much better than this stuff,” he muttered, then giggled as he winked at Ambrose. “No offense.”

  Ambrose’s face was hard and fixed to the point it nearly looked waxen and mask-like. When the grim line of a mouth spoke to him, Milo started in shock.

  “When did the betrayal happen?” he asked.

  “Yes, that,” Milo said, pointing with a finger even as he swung the bottle about. “So that night, I’m drunk, much drunker than I am now, and he, Roland, that is, he has me come back to his room. On the bed is all the money from the sale, which was odd because he’d handed it out before we started celebrating. That was why we were celebrating after all, right?”

  Milo tried to laugh, but it caught in his throat. To dislodge the trapped laugh, he drained the last of the bottle, but there was hardly anything left, and it only frustrated him. Memories, long kept under lock and key, were bubbling up, and he’d been fool enough to not only let them see daylight but now the warden was drunk at his post.

  The bottle came down with an angry thunk as his words started to flow out hot and slurred.

  “He’d stolen all the money, he had, swiping it while we drank and bragged about how we were going to spend our money. He calls me in and says, ‘Milo,’ and I says, ‘Roland, why’s all the money here?’ and he smiles and tells me, ‘we’re running away, Milo, running away like we always wanted.’ ‘What about Rush-sh-shia and the gun selling’ I says, and he says, ‘no trust me, trust me, Milo, we’s, uh we’re better than that, we’re going west not east.’ I shakes my head and says ‘why?’ and he says ‘we can be together’ and I just looks, just stares at ‘im, an’ you know what he does?”

  Milo swung an exaggerated stare across the room in an inebriated attempt at a dramatic pause.

  “He puts his arms around my sh-shoulders and tells me to be brave, like always.”

  Ambrose and Rihyani frowned, vague disappointment in their expression, which spread a twisted, hard smile across Milo’s face.

  “Then he kisses me,” Milo said as he slouched back into his chair. “Not like always.”

  Rihyani shook her head slowly, and Ambrose muttered a curse under his breath. Milo nodded, a heavy, aggressive slamming of his head up and down.

  “That’s right, and I yell, and he’s telling me to be quiet, but I’m drunk and confused, and he’s grabbing me and I’m scared, and then the others come in and see him grabbing me and all the money on the bed.”

  Milo shivered as ice crept up from the bottom of the molten lake in his belly as he remembered all those red-rimmed eyes shifting from confusion to anger. Suddenly the vodka was like a cold, jellied weight in his stomach, the liberating buzz gone with a splash of frigid water on the inside.

  “I was too drunk, too scared, and too stupid to explain and then Roland tells them I stole the money and came to him with the plan to run away. I can see they believe him, so I try to pull away, and he holds tight since he’s always been bigger and stronger, and desperately I grab a bottle and hit Roland. He lets go, and I start rushing out of the room. The others are drunk as I am, maybe more, so I somehow rush through them and start running.”

  Milo raised a hand to his mouth and began to curl in on himself, the sudden weight of the hastily drunk vodka dragging him to the edge of his seat. He’d let go of Rihyani’s hand and was now wrapping his arm around his stomach.

  “Dear God,” he gasped and swore as the smell of the room mixed with the vodka vapors in his nostrils. “Uh, so I was suddenly on the run, not even eighteen, no papers, no money, and with my best friend—hell, my big brother—having turned my only other friends against me. It was only a matter of time before I was cau—oh, God, before I—”

  Milo lurched to his feet and stumbled to the rickety door of the hovel, knocking his chair over as he did. He clapped one hand over his mouth as his gorge rose to the back of his throat, yanked the door open, and managed a couple of strides before pitching forward on hands and knees. His body bowed, and his stomach emptied its contents in spattering heaves.

  He managed a groan and sometimes a curse between each body-arching expulsion until he had nothing left, either in words or further fluids to evacuate. Mouth dripping, he hung there, crouched over his vomit, wanting to recoil from the rank smell but lacking the strength. Every muscle ached, and his bones felt as though they were grinding against each other as his body temperature plummeted. He shivered and then managed to sink back onto his haunches, arms limp at his sides.

  It was in that broken and vulnerable state that he looked up and saw Trotsky, Fedor, and Izac standing against the palisade wall.

  “Who let you out?” Milo wheezed as he sank onto his backside, clutching his knees as he continued to shiver.

  As he watched, he saw all three men were shaking but not from cold since each wore the clothes that the guard had managed to find. They seemed agitated, talking to each other and maybe to others, trying to speak emphatically and gesture even though their hands were behind their backs. Milo stared, trying to understand their strange behavior.

  Then he heard a voice—Lokkemand’s voice.

  “FIRE!” he bellowed, loud enough that it could still be heard as a chorus of rifles answered the call.

  Trotsky, Fedor, and Izac twisted, jerked, and crumpled.

  “What’s going on?” Milo heard Ambrose roar as he emerged from the hovel.

  Milo’s vision had cleared enough that he could see Lokkemand at the head of a column of soldiers, all with their rifles out. They were turning toward the hovel now, faces set, eyes hard.

  “That didn’t take long,” Milo grumbled as he sat beside his effluvium, watching the soldiers level their guns his way.

  * * *

  “Get him out of here,” Ambrose bellowed as he drew a trench knife from his belt. Without a backward glance, he began stalking toward the oncoming soldiers.

  Rihyani had her hand on Milo’s shoulder, but she shouted after the big man as she tried to pull him to his feet.

  “Ambrose, don’t!” she cried, as Milo forced himself to clumsily stand up.

  Some of the soldiers were already leveling their rifles at Ambrose, who kept walking forward, knife in hand. Milo knew that even with his preternatural strength and speed, it could only end one way, and that was not with a surprise victory on Ambrose’s behalf. There were too many, they were coordinated, and all he had was a knife.

  “Ambrose!” he shouted, which sounded more like a donkey braying than anything else. Despite this, Milo called out two more times as he lurched forward. Ambrose stopped a few strides away, blade still in hand.

  “Get out of here, Milo!” he growled without turning around. The soldiers were a dozen strides away and had formed a line. Their rifles were at their shoulders, Lokkemand looming behind them.

  Milo staggered next to Ambrose and rested his hand on the big man’s shoulder.

  “If they wanted us dead, they would have blown us up,” Milo rasped before hawking a mouthful of sour phlegm at the hovel. “I’m not sure what game Lokkemand is playing, but it seems to involve keeping us alive.”

  “He’s gone over to
the Reich,” Ambrose hissed. “That’s what this is.”

  Lokkemand cleared his throat, and the soldier in front of him slid aside to allow him to stand facing Ambrose squarely, hand held behind his back.

  “Nothing so dramatic,” the captain said, straightening to stare down his nose at Milo and Ambrose. “I’d rather eat a bullet than join those zealots, but the realities of the situation in this godforsaken country require me to make certain compromises. One of them was the assurance that the operation in Petrograd remained secret. You can see how things have been complicated.”

  Milo spat again, this time toward Lokkemand.

  “How does doing their dirty work not count as joining their side?” he snarled, wishing the world would stop lurching in and out of focus.

  To Milo’s surprise, the captain laughed as he continued to glare down the field at Milo.

  “You are very brave and sometimes even clever, Volkohne, but you never seemed to grasp that we are a branch of military intelligence.”

  Milo chose to blame his inebriation for his failure to put the pieces together and kept glaring at Lokkemand.

  “I’ve brokered an arrangement with the warlord in Petrograd, and soon I’ll have enough to bury the Reich,” Lokkemand replied archly. “It’s not as dashing as midnight raids and quests to discover magic secrets, but it gets the job done.”

  “Except it caused the murder of three men and has you pointing guns at allies,” Ambrose growled, ready to explode across the intervening space. “Maybe you should try our way.”

  “I do what I can with what I have.” Lokkemand sniffed. “And these guns will only be used if you choose to misbehave. If I was as depraved as you thought, I’d have put you down while you slept.”

  Lokkemand gave a sharp wave of his hand and the rifles trained on them were lowered, though still kept in ready hands.

  “I can’t have you blowing this operation, but I meant what I said yesterday,” Lokkemand told them. “I want to work together. I don’t want us to be at odds.”