“I’ll second that,” Ambrose called from his place at the rear of the party.
Lady Rihyani laughed, a sound that made Milo’s heart ache.
“You don’t give yourself enough credit,” the contessa said, adjusting her muffling robes as they walked. “The fact is that things have been stacked against you since the Magpie sent you on your way. Unfortunately, much has been shaped by forces far outside your knowledge and control.”
Milo wasn’t going to argue with that, but the mention of birds struck him as an odd interjection.
“Did you say ‘magpie?’”
Lady Rihyani nodded, and few silver strands fell free. She tucked them back behind the tapered ears within her hood.
“Yes, forgive me.” She sighed, a gentle sound that Milo felt he could have bathed in. “For a long time, Colonel Jorge and I communicated using codenames and ciphers, each trying to measure the intentions and abilities of the other. I sometimes revert to old habits.”
Milo looked at her, unable and unwilling to hide the surprise on his expression.
“How do you know Colonel Jorge?”
Rihyani smiled, and her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper.
“I was the agent sent to contact him when he first began his explorations into our world. It was my job to assess him to resurrect the tradition of the Merry Fellows and reconnect our world and the world of men.”
Milo eyed the contessa warily. What had first seemed like merely a wandering aristocrat had turned out to be in cooperation with the Bashlek, and she was now telling him she’d been part of the cloak and dagger games when Jorge was in military intelligence. Milo was not adept at games of subterfuge and covert operations, but he felt the conclusion to be drawn was clear.
Contessa Rihyani was not someone to trifle with, and though she seemed friendly enough, he would be a fool to let his guard down around her.
Fighting his natural urge to throw up a rough front, Milo only nodded, and in his most sincerely inquisitive tone, asked her, “What is the tradition of the Merry Fellows?”
“It was once an informal but well-respected collaboration between certain humans and what we fey call the Folk, what you might call supernatural beings.”
“What the ghuls call ‘shayati,’” Milo offered.
“Precisely,” the contessa agreed, giving him a smile. He was embarrassed by how giddy it made him feel.
“When one of the Folk finds an exceptional human,” the fey continued, “they determine if that human can be trusted with knowledge of our existence. If they can, a bargain will be struck for their mutual benefit. Rare even in the days before such dark times as these, it is a credit to your commanding officer that he was chosen, though I’m not so certain he feels the privilege outweighs the burden at this point.”
Fazihr’s human voice called from up ahead, almost blasphemous in its volume, “We will be nearing the gate soon. After that, it will not be long to the sentry post, and then the surface.”
“That’s a lot quicker than I expected,” Milo mused with a frown. “It seems like it's only been an hour or so if that.”
“Ghul tunnels are enchanted to speed travel,” Rihyani replied with a shrug as if it were not particularly surprising. “Why else would they be carpeted in mort-scalp?”
“Mort-scalp?” Milo breathed, feeling his mouth go dryer with each cushioned step.
Ambrose muttered a string of profanity that involved multiple saints performing rude and anatomically unfeasible acts.
“Every time I think ghuls can’t get worse,” the bodyguard growled at the end of his irreverent tirade.
“My apologies,” Rihyani said, turning to look ahead once more. “I assumed your instructor had explained that.”
“That must be part of day three’s lesson.” Milo sighed, trying not to wince with every step he took across the hairy floor.
For a time, they lapsed into silence. When it seemed that the contessa was about to slide forward again to rejoin her own kind, a sudden thought struck Milo.
“Why the ghuls?” he asked and realized with a cringe the question had been loud enough to echo up and down the tunnel.
“What do you mean?” Rihyani asked, though one look at her face told Milo she knew exactly what he meant.
“What I mean is,” Milo began, carefully modulating the tone and volume of his voice, “there are obviously other Folk. I’ve read about different kinds in one of the books Imrah gave me. My question is, why send me to the ghuls first?”
Rihyani’s expression became fixed, a mask that betrayed nothing as she stared ahead in thought. When her golden pupils finally returned to him, he felt a quickening in his heart that was neither fear nor excitement, but something in between.
“There were many reasons, some practical to the nature of the task and some to the reality of the world.”
The answer informed him of nothing, and again Milo had to stow his inclination to become belligerent.
“I am not sure I understand,” he said apologetically before pressing in. “It might help if you could be more specific.”
Again the mask and again the penetrating look.
“One factor is how ghuls exercise their magical nature,” she said, her words chosen with surgical precision. “Ghul magic is of a kind most closely related to common human concepts of science. Ingredients, formulas—those sorts of things. We who were willing to consider the possibility of a human capable of magic felt that their methods might be the best for you to learn.”
“But that’s not the only reason,” Milo said, his certainty driving the question out of the statement.
“That wasn’t the only reason,” Rihyani agreed, and without seeming to quicken her pace, she slid back in line with her fellow fey.
They passed the gate, the massive bone creature letting them pass without comment, and made their way up a gradually sloping corridor. Then more silent trudging, until a quarter of an hour from the gate, something in the environment altered.
Milo noticed it first as a change in the fey in front of him.
The fey did not walk through the world, they strode in the way he thought kings and princes of bygone years might have. Yet not long after passing the gate, Milo saw their stride became a stalk, every ounce of their grace and poise becoming predatory. Even the bronze colossus, whose head seemed about to scrape the ceiling of the tunnel, moved with the coiling gait of a massive feline.
Milo wasn’t the only one to notice it.
“Something’s up,” Ambrose whispered at his shoulder, and a backward glance told Milo the big man was holding his Gewehr in both hands across his body.
“What is it?” Milo murmured, one hand reaching for the pistol at his hip. He felt the tremor of magic in the hand gripping the skull cane.
“Not sure,” Ambrose answered with a sniff and a twitch of his mustache. “But our fairy friends seem concerned, and there’s a smell on the air that I don’t like.”
Taking his own sampling of the air, Milo noted that there was something decidedly caustic. It was nothing so distinct as a smell, more of an irritant or a tickle in his nostrils and at the back of his throat. A few minutes later, the smell had grown to a chemical stench on the air, like someone had set cleaning products on fire.
If you could burn ammonia, Milo thought, it would smell like this.
A prickle of terror rolled up Milo’s spine and he turned back toward Ambrose, not caring that he could practically feel the blood draining from his face.
“Could this be some kind of chemical attack?” he whispered, fear sharpening his voice.
Of all the horrors of the war he’d been braced for, the threat of horrors concocted by some sadist in a lab coat had always struck him as one of the most sinister. Bullets, bombs, and shells to rip, blast, and obliterate were more honest and acceptable. A caustic fog that ate your lungs out of your chest or a noxious mist that shriveled your eyes on its way to your brain…
Milo’s chest tightened and his jaw popped
as he waited for the celestial soldier’s assessment. The thought that he’d rather end up in a ghul’s belly than choke to death in some hole occurred to him. At least he might gag the monster that ate him.
“A gas attack in tunnels like these only works if you don’t plan on taking the tunnels,” the bodyguard said after an evaluation. “Not enough ventilation to clear them out, and depending on what poison you’re putting down the chute, it could stay toxic for a good while. I’d say it’s unlikely.”
Milo let out the breath he’d been holding, telling himself the air he was about to replace it with simply stank and was not going to condemn him to an agonizing death.
Up ahead, the fey had come to a halt. Hearing sharp, hushed voices, he shuffled forward, Ambrose at his shoulder.
“Regardless, the mort-scalp is gone, and that’s going to slow everything down,” Fazihr was explaining as he darted rodentlike glances up the tunnel. “Perhaps we should return to Ifreedahm and see—”
“No,” Imrah interjected, making her retainer cringe. “The Bashlek has given us a task, and we will see it done, even if it will take a little longer.”
Fazihr wrung his hands, staring at them as though cursing the blunt digits that hid his claws.
“Loyalty is an admirable trait,” he said, clearing of his throat. “But of no use if it gets us all killed.”
“So, you know what did this?” Contessa Rihyani asked, looking from Fazihr to Imrah and back.
“Well, no,” the ghul retainer confessed, wilting under the glare of his mistress. “But the mort-scalp is fashioned to be extremely resilient. It is the corpus that provides the essence, so it needs to be robust, especially in stretches like these that must be ready to communicate a potential invasion. It would take a concerted effort to scour or uproot so much of it.”
“Requiring substantial forces then,” Rihyani said, following his logic. “We could be heading into a large contingent of soldiers.”
“Precisely,” Fazihr agreed, turning a pleading eye to Imrah. “Think of the damage it would do to Ifreedahm, to your father, if the Bashlek’s daughter was taken hostage by meatsacks.”
Ambrose gave a dry cough, and all turned around to stare at the two humans.
Milo stared back mutely until Ambrose surreptitiously dug an elbow into his back.
“I—”
The elbow dug again.
“We don’t think it is a chemical attack.”
The stares continued.
The elbow dug again.
“So...so, I don’t think this has anything to do with the Germans’ forces,” Milo continued, feeling squeezed between the stares of the inhuman party and Ambrose’s questing elbow. “So, uh, we should press on unless we have a good reason not to.”
“Our reason,” Fazihr snarled, “is that we have no idea what lies ahead. We could be walking into a trap or something worse. The point is, we don’t know.”
“But we do know that zeppelins are flying around this mountain,” Milo said, his voice unflinching but dispassionate. “Which means there is a better than good chance that there will be major movement in this area. If you get me—ugh, us, us!—to Bamyan, we can make sure a lot more of those meatsacks don’t start marching all over this mountain.”
Fazihr bared his teeth, but a furtive look at Imrah stilled further protests.
“Fine,” the retainer spat. “Then may I advise the humans to go first? It’s a straight march to the sentry post from here.”
Milo looked at Ambrose, who nodded.
“We’ll scout ahead then.” Milo sighed. “I mean, at this point, we’re practically experts at tunnels, right?”
Creeping down the scoured stretch of tunnel was at once tedious and stressful in a manner that Milo imagined was akin to what men in the trenches felt.
Every moment seemed to threaten them with a messy end, but as the moments stretched into minutes that stretched into hours, the sharp edges of the threat grew dull. Instead of a piercing trauma that awakened the body with adrenaline and sharpened every sense, there was the grating rasp of another advance, another step, another breath toward a death that wasn’t in any hurry to arrive. After three hours of the grinding experience, Milo found himself fantasizing about what would end his life. Would it be a bullet ripping from far up the tunnel? A mine or some other booby trap to rip him apart or jelly his guts? Maybe a tunnel rat commando springing from a black alcove to plunge a knife into his chest?
The longer he dwelt on how his life would end, the longer and more fanciful his morbid daydreams became. Soon he was layering levels of plot and symbolism, like a ninepence rag’s attempt at a modern morality tale.
Thus distracted, it was no surprise that he nearly planted his foot in a splatter of viscous goo four hours into the unaugmented trek to the surface. The only thing stopping him was Ambrose’s strong hand gripping his shoulder.
“Hold on,” the bodyguard murmured, drawing Milo back a step and then hunkering down to frown at the glistening smear. “Perhaps a little of your light.”
“LIGHT,” Milo obliged, and beams of green light shone from the sockets of his cane.
The floor, as reported by the ghuls, had been stripped of the mort-scalp, leaving only bare stone whose surface was scoured clean. Milo was no spelunker, but even the dust or damp you might have expected was absent. This gelatinous splotch was the first interruption they’d seen in that sterile length of the tunnel.
“Anything about this or something like it in those books?” Ambrose asked, flicking out a penknife from a pocket. The tiny blade was humorously small in his shovel-sized mitts. “Because this doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen.”
Milo sank to his haunches, keeping the light fixed on the goo as Ambrose hooked his blade in the largest lump of the translucent sludge. The burnt ammonia smell was enough to sting the eyes, and Milo found himself blinking rapidly and rocking back.
“Some new gel fuel?” Milo suggested as he shook his head to clear the noxious fumes clinging to it. “Something for flamethrowers, maybe? That could be what cleared out the mort-scalp.”
Ambrose made a face as he raised the wobbling hunk, watching with dread fascination as it liquified and dripped on the floor.
“Maybe,” he murmured, then made a face as though he could taste the vile blob. “But that means they used fire to scour the mort-scalp, but that seems unlikely on two scores. First, it would have filled the tunnels with smoke and eaten up the air inside. Any commander ordering his men down to scour tunnels like that would soon have the troops staggering out, smoke-blind and gagging, assuming the poor fools came out at all.”
Milo nodded in understanding but was unwilling to let the theory go.
“And the other score?”
“The other bit is that it's a big and risky expenditure of men and material,” Ambrose explained, fumbling with his free hand for a match. “To scour so much tunnel with fire would mean teams of men taking shifts to make sure the weapons and men didn’t overheat, along with men bringing them water and fuel regularly. The only reason to do that is if you know the ghuls use it to work their magic, but that means not only knowing about the ghuls but their magic too, something no one is supposed to know about.”
“Supposed to.” Milo grunted as though offended by the two words appearing next to each other.
“Fair point,” Ambrose conceded, holding up his liberated match. “Which is why we light this little blob and see what happens. If it burns quick, you might be right. If not, we’re back to being clueless. Science, pure and simple.”
Milo didn’t know if the big man’s grasp on the scientific method was up to scratch, but he had nothing better to suggest. He nodded in agreement, though he rose to shuffle backward as he did.
“Fair enough,” he said, wondering just how big a mistake it would be to light up their position by setting off the fuel, if that was what it was. He comforted himself that given the sight-salve he’d applied first thing this morning, the pitch-dark of the tunnel
had no secrets from him, even without beams stabbing out from the skull. It was nothing but a stretch of tunnel curving gently up and to the left as far as he could see. Nowhere for an enemy to hide unless they could pass through the stone walls, which, when he thought about his new reality, was not as comforting as he might have hoped.
“Fire in the hole,” Ambrose muttered as he struck the match, sending up a flare-orange flame.
The match advanced toward the blob, and for a second, Milo thought the jellied mass’s quivering was shivering away from the flame. The blob gave a small keening squeal as it jumped. It didn’t fall or wobble free, but leapt, gathering itself together in the bat of an eye and catapulting free of the penknife, arching as it strained for the floor.
Ambrose was so surprised he dropped the match. It landed on the initial smear, which lit with a whoosh of sulfurous flame. The same piercing cry, almost a shriek, rose from the burning splotch, even as fingers of flame slime kindled the fleeing blob.
Milo and Ambrose watched in horrified amazement as the filaments of fire caught up with the retreating lump, then both men covered their ears as an even more terrible sound stabbed through the air. Screaming and burning, the blob continued its lurching, squirming retreat as it fled, and even as they tried to plug their ears, Milo and Ambrose made to follow.
“Doesn’t seem like fuel to me,” Ambrose shouted as they trotted after it. “Leastwise, I hope not.”
Milo was too busy jogging, trying to cover his ears with one arm while the other kept the witchlight trained on the fleeing cohort before he realized how silly he was being. The tortured goo was providing more than enough light.
“What do you think it is?” Milo called. They moved to keep it in sight as it followed the tunnel up and around.
“Very uncomfortable at the moment, I’d say,” Ambrose called, laughing.
Milo shook his head and jogged on.
A minute longer, the blob started coming apart, even as it kept trying to escape, bigger and bigger pieces peeling off to curl and twist into puffs of ash. Its keening was now just a high, pitiable whine.
Witchmarked (World's First Wizard Book 1) Page 18