World's First Wizard Complete Series Boxed Set

by Schneider, Aaron D.

  A trembling moan began in the creature’s chest, but it was soon flooded and smothered by the welling blood. With a massive heave it curled up, blubberous body folding around itself. Milo heard a rattling gag inside the throat and looked down in time to see the mouth opening wide, not to consume but to expel.

  Milo threw himself clear as a torrent of ichor, caustic soup, and rattling bones spewed from Tsar’Vodyanoy’s gaping mouth. He danced back from the foul flood, barely keeping his feet as he slipped in the mud.

  “CLEVER, CRUNCHY, VERY CLEVER,” the monster moaned, still sounding amused but very weary now. “MAYBE LATER. TSAR’VODYANOY WASN’T TOO HUNGRY ANYWAY.”

  Tsar’Vodyanoy squirmed turgidly into a nearby pool and began to sink amidst another chorus of plopping bubbles. Milo thought of firing a parting shot at the creature, but if this was a real retreat, he wasn’t going to provoke it to a second round. The cane’s power had left his muscles, and he felt every single fiber shaking from the strain. If he was honest with himself, he feared he wouldn’t have the strength to point the fetish without his arm trembling.

  The animated corpses, their shades still intent on expending their flagging energies, plunged into the pool after their quarry. They thrashed and splashed in the mud, each effort weaker and slower, and it was a full minute before they collapsed to float in the black waters.

  “Where’s Ambrose?” Rihyani asked, limping toward Milo. Her leg was twisted at an odd angle, but as he watched, the phenomenal regenerative will of the fey restored her seemingly delicate bones.

  Before Milo could answer, a piercing croak tore through the air above them, and Milo saw a familiar malformed silhouette pass through the moonlight above.

  “Dead-Dead-Deadedy-Dead, meat-man is cold from toe to head,” Lempo called in a sing-song voice as he circled between the trees overhead.

  I do not like that fowl, Imrah hissed in Milo’s mind, but at the moment, he didn’t have the energy to reply.

  He ached all over, and he felt the soul-deep drain of working blood magic on the fly.

  “What’s next?” Milo groaned, looking up at the corvid. “You looking for a fight, too?”

  Lempo gave another shriek and then a hoarse laugh.

  “No more fight for you, funny little man.”

  The darkness of the midnight forest was pierced by a phalanx of spotlights, and Milo had to bite his lip to keep from screaming from the pain in his suddenly abused eyes.

  “Surrender now or die,” came a voice over a crackling speaker.

  A voice that even with the distortion, Milo couldn’t help but recognize.

  14

  These Echoes

  Milo was dragged from the muck beneath the trees by grim figures in trench coats and elephantine gas masks.

  As one, they’d advanced on Milo as silhouettes beneath the glaring lights. Their rasping breathing in time with their synchronized movements was a nightmarish spectacle.

  Was his exhausted mind playing tricks on him, or was there something unnaturally sinister about them?

  He could feel dozens of gunsights trained on him, but he dared a look around him. Rihyani was gone, as was Ambrose’s body. There was hope in that, at least.

  Looking down into the glassy-eyed masks, the magus felt something seethe uneasily in his chest. This wasn’t his weary imagination acting up. Something was wrong with these creatures.

  Milo pressed out with the Art as they reached for him with gloved hands and felt nothing—no will, no mind. They might as well have been filled with straw and stone for all he felt.

  That wasn’t good.

  Milo reached out to find the essence of a shade to animate a corpse or perhaps some simulacrum of a man, but he still sensed nothing.

  That was worse.

  As they grabbed and twisted his arms behind his back, Milo realized with a horrible lurching in his stomach what they were—living, breathing beings with no will of their own. They were hollow creatures like the ones he’d accidentally slaughtered in Georgia with his loose shades. Men and possibly women—it was hard to tell beneath the heavy garments and concealing respirators—who’d been emptied by Zlydzen’s magic and bound to a will not their own.

  As they dragged him before a growling line of trucks bearing the spotlights, Milo saw the will they must have been bound to.

  He was standing in the open cab of an armored truck, a microphone dangling from his tattooed fingers as he watched Milo being hauled before him. Unlike the dehumanizing garb of his minions, he was dressed to impress in a pinstriped suit of gray silk over his heroic physique, every line of him clean, powerful, and cruel. Dark, smoldering eyes watched Milo, taking in every detail but revealing nothing.

  The magus, gripped between the soulless, watched a smile as cold and sharp as a blade creep across half of Roland’s face.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” Roland said in a voice even more resonant and smooth than Milo remembered. “I’m still not sure I do.”

  Milo wanted to say something witty or brash, but a strange and inexorable transformation had occurred. He wasn’t the furious, double-fisted warlock who crushed monsters and vanquished demons, not anymore. Now he was a teenager, barely more than a child, looking up at his big brother after another escapade. He felt the corners of his mouth betraying him as a matching smile started to creep across his face. The gravity of years threatened to drag him back to old habits, old feelings of deference.

  “Oh, Milo, what am I going to do with you?” Roland chuckled as he ran his fingers through his hair.

  Just as the memories made him forget who he was, they sharpened his mind to recall inconsequential ingrained details. When Roland raked his fingers through his hair, he was nervous.

  The spell was broken as Milo remembered.

  He remembered the same motion, those same ink-marked fingers combing through his hair as the rest of the crew staggered into the room and saw the whole take laid out on the bed. He remembered how those fingers had pointed at him as that voice had heaped on accusations before Milo could say a thing.

  Milo remembered it all and his rage at the memories burned away the soporific fog of nostalgia. Roland saw it happen.

  For a time, neither of them said anything as the trucks idled and rumbled and the soulless wheezed through ventilated hoses. Then Roland nodded and motioned to the back of the truck.

  “Load our guest in and tie him down,” Roland commanded flatly as he began to climb out of the cab. “I’ll square up with our friends.”

  For one instant, as Milo was herded to the back of the truck, he and Roland were level. Roland didn’t return his gaze, but the wizard stared at his former protector and friend. Roland was still taller than he, though not by as much as before, and he was certainly stronger, but the magic Milo could wield made mere muscles almost inconsequential. Even in his weakened state, Milo could speak a word and set the man ablaze, one of many to fall before his sorcery.

  I’m more than your equal now, Milo thought, nailing the words to the mast of his soul. Even in chains, I’ll be more than you. Always.

  As Milo was taken around the truck, he spied Roland stepping to the tree line and giving a sharp whistle that drew heavy wingbeats.

  Then he was at the tailgate and was half-dragged, half-carried to where shackles were bolted to the bed. The ragged streaks of dried blood told him that he was not the first to be afforded those accommodations.

  Milo let himself be stripped down to his shirt and trousers and then bound. He was going to bide his time.

  Rihyani and Ambrose were still out there, and perhaps as Roland’s prisoner, he could gain a view of the operation in Petrograd. Or perhaps they would throw him into a cell, and he would have time to recover himself enough that he could tear everything down on top of Roland’s and Zlydzen’s heads.

  For now, his head held high, he could wait because even with iron around his wrists, he knew he was freer than he’d ever been.

  * * *

  They brought Milo to
the edge of the city, past an old church, and then down cracked streets that ran between the husks of buildings. Some were only a few walls leaning drunkenly upon each other, while others were desolate hulks with broken-out windows like the eye sockets of a skull. As they wound their way around rubble and over refuse, Milo thought he spotted a building that might have been familiar from that night the wind was on fire, but then he’d look down another alley or side-street and realize they were all beginning to look the same.

  “That part of the city might not even be standing now,” Milo muttered to himself, then looked to see if the words elicited a turned head from the soulless in the bed with him. To his morose disappointment, their masked faces continued to stare through him, hands on their rifles.

  He made another abortive attempt to see if his will could ferret out something from them, but again there was nothing. They were meat, bone, and various tissues, continuing to exist only because no one had told them they were dead. Even the Soviets in Georgia hadn’t been this expunged from humanity. The reality of what Zlydzen could do chilled him, not only for its effect but also the complete mystery of its means.

  He’d interrogated Rihyani and Imrah on the way back from Georgia about dwarrow magic, but they were hardly more knowledgeable than he. Dwarrow magic tended to be tied to the creation of physical objects, similar in some ways to ghul necromistry, but that was the end of their understanding. Dwarrow made items or devices that worked wonders and horrors, and it seemed none knew how they worked except them.

  Milo wondered if Roland, who was working with Zlydzen, could shed light on the conundrum. The thought of asking him seemed ridiculous, then Milo’s wrists clinked as the truck rolled over some detritus, and he remembered his interrogation of Ezekiel Bouche. Perhaps, when he finally absconded from this place, Roland would come with them. They’d captured one warlord out from under his army, hadn’t they? Why not another?

  He thought of Roland bound before him as Milo conjured the images of shades to claw and scourge his flesh. The magus nursed the venomous flame of that thought until the vehicle’s lurching stop drew his attention.

  He looked up and saw a rusted wall nearly five meters tall looming before the truck, with coils of razor wire like fraying curls across its top. Set in the center of the wall was a gate of iron latticework, overlaid and intertwined as though someone had taken sections of wrought iron fence and welded them together. As the gate swung open and they passed through, Milo saw that was indeed what the gate was made of.

  The ramshackle gate closed behind them, then the truck was rolling down a wide road of crushed rock. On either side, tin-roofed pavilions and open-sided garages were alive with bustling bodies and scattered sparks as gas-masked men and women in coveralls worked on various metal projects.

  Milo’s nightsight elixir was beginning to fade, but the gray of the coming dawn gave him some help, though it didn’t do him much good. He couldn’t for the life of him figure out what they were building. It wasn’t weapons or parts for any vehicle he’d ever seen. More than anything, what he saw mostly was rods of metal being fastened together in vaguely plantlike or maybe even floral patterns. Milo shifted to try to get a better look, and the shackles gave a sharp rattle as he played out the short chain. The soulless all swung toward him, rifles coming to their shoulders.

  Milo decided that the construction efforts would have to be one of the things he’d ask Roland about.

  His eyes swung back to the fort, and in front of the truck, Milo saw a smooth-sided column reaching skyward. Following the stony trunk upward, he saw a plinth at the top where a one-winged angel stood with an arm upraised as though calling the earthbound mortals below to behold some miracle. The other side of the statue had been reduced to blocky broken angles with a few trailing spurs of twisted metal. Despite the mangling, something about the statue was familiar. As Milo stared up, they passed beneath its shadow, and a chill raced through him.

  He felt the icy wind, that breath of the cruel winters of Northern Russia that came on so quickly. As he stared at the angelic sentinel, his mind was hurled back in time.

  He was holding Momma’s hand and huddling close to her against the chill.

  Someone was talking to Momma, a man with a voice as cold and biting as the wind.

  “And we still cling to such superstitions. Bah! Angels and crosses, and God! A real Russian doesn’t believe in such foolishness as God!”

  He didn’t like the man. The man could sound nice when others were around, but with Momma, it was always like this. He also didn’t like the man’s frowning mustache and scheming dark eyes.

  He pressed his face into his mother’s coat.

  “It is not that we don’t believe in Him, Soso,” Momma said softly. “It is that we hate Him—hate Him because He first hated us.”

  “And yet we are surrounded by all this?” the man demanded, pointing up at the angel.

  His mother laughed, and it was like bells chiming through the wind, taunting and yet beautiful.

  “Didn’t Dostoevsky say it best? Love is not the same thing as loving. You can be in love with a woman and still hate her.”

  The man shrugged and turned to walk away, toward the palace.

  The chill retreated, and Milo realized where they were: the Winter Palace.

  A moment later, the palace hove into view over the truck as it began to slow, and he understood that he was correct, at least in part. They were at what was left of the Winter Palace. Stalin’s forces had not been kind to the resplendent enclave, and in the time since then, there had been only cursory attempts to restore portions of the sprawling structure to use. The entire west wing was a bare-beamed ruin, stretching out like the blackened skeleton of a fallen giant amidst the rubble of its fossilized flesh. The central hall was in better condition. Its many broken windows had at least received the attention of boards and nails to hold them there. The east wing seemed more or less intact, but gaping windows, doors, and huge holes marred the structure like tunnels bored by beetles and worms through a corpse. In the washed-out pre-dawn light, everything seemed the sad gray or flat black of death and rot.

  Roland’s operation was headquartered in the corpse of Russia’s old aristocracy. Somehow the irony of that reality was bitterly funny to Milo, and as the soulless moved to unload him, he was laughing quietly to himself.

  They kept his hands shackled, but they separated the cuffs from the truck bed, then they hauled him down onto the ground. He was still wearing a smile as he was dragged to the central hall, where he could see Roland standing in front of the huge black doors. They swung open and more men emerged, though these wore the khaki uniforms of the Reds and had no gas masks. On their belts were pistols and what looked like wooden truncheons studded with metal knobs.

  “Take him to my suite and see that he is given clean clothes and hot water to wash with,” Roland instructed without looking at Milo. “I will deal with him after I meet with the dwarf.”

  Without a backward glance, Roland swept inside, leaving Milo to the care of men he knew were as soulless as the creatures in the masks. Without a word, they grasped him with rough hands and dragged him inside, the great doors booming shut behind him.

  * * *

  Milo at first told himself he was not going avail himself of any part of Roland’s hospitality, but no sooner had a basin of hot water appeared than he shed his clothes and began to wash.

  The fight in the marsh with Tsar’Vodyanoy had chilled him to the bone, and he had mud and filth crusted in the most unlikely of places. Despite himself, a groan of pleasure from deep in his belly escaped his lips as he slipped into the basin. It was not large enough to do anything more than squat in it, but he savored the nearly scalding water sliding over his weary and begrimed flesh. Scooping up handfuls, he ladled the water over his shoulders, neck, and head, deep sighs humming through his chest.

  For one moment he forgot about the danger, about the magically hollowed creatures standing guard over him with pistols and blud
geons, and about the fact that he was squatting naked in what amounted to Roland’s bedroom.

  For one moment he was enjoying a bath, savoring the feeling of shedding the filth and fatigue of violence.

  The blissful amnesia lasted only a few seconds since the hot water could not stave off the chill of reality.

  With one more shuddering sigh, Milo eyed his guards.

  The soulless men in the Soviet khakis didn’t seem to be paying him any heed, but Milo knew that could change with one wrong move from him or one word from those holding their chain. One on one, Milo thought he might have a chance even without magic, given the training Ambrose had afforded him, but there were four men standing guard over him, and he was willing to bet there were many more within easy shouting distance.

  With all his magic available to him, he might have been able to fight his way out, but they’d taken the cane, the satchel, and even his greatcoat. The means to work necromistry were momentarily lost to him, and Milo didn’t know if the Art could find any purchase in the soulless. The specters had worked on Stalin’s men, but these soldiers seemed even more empty than the ones in Georgia. He didn’t want to make a move and discover he was wrong; that could be fatal, and testing the Art would be difficult, given the one-sided way they seemed to respond to stimuli. He might not know the Art was not working until he did something to provoke them to violence, and by then, it would be too late.

  No, his best option was to wait, though that didn’t mean staying in the cooling water basin the whole time. Having Roland come in to see him naked and shivering was a humiliation he’d rather not endure, especially after he’d felt so empowered while staring at his erstwhile protector turned warlord earlier.

  As quickly and effectively as he could, he clawed and rubbed the remaining filth off and emerged from the basin. They’d laid towels, cold but plush and clean, upon a velvet divan. Milo scuttled over and began to dry himself, looking around the room as he did so.