Their eyes met.
With a whimper, the Elki backed away.
Chapter 59
Milo aged three months.
He was a half-inch taller than he’d been upon first entering his uncle’s underground vault. He would be the same height as Emma when he got back. Finally.
He missed her. And he missed Ascher and Coral, and his friends Owen, Gunner, Oscar, and Barrel.
And Lily. Lily Breezewater.
There were nights when he couldn’t sleep. He would lie in bed thinking of the good times they’d had at the ranch during his short stay, like when they had stayed up late reading comic books and drinking Bara-cola. He wondered what his friends would think if they knew he was here, in a secret, technologically advanced underground vault with Emmanuel Banks, the mysterious magician they had known only as “Emmanuel, Savant Son of Sargos” in the comic books. He pictured their admiring faces.
More often than not, Milo fell asleep the instant he dropped into his bed. His days were repetitive and hard. His training consisted of long hours of meditation, exercise, and intellectual study. In the evenings after dinner, which Milo usually ate alone while reading the books his uncle kept assigning to him, he would practice drawing luminether from within. The spell was always the same—the one Lily had shown him on the pond.
He would recite the words of her poem (“Oh, elegant strings that tremble in time…”) and stare at his hands until the light gathered. He was getting better and better at it. He would show her when he got back.
Once, to show Milo what luminether was like, Emmanuel used a special machine to illuminate the currents all around them. They were in the Eternal Gardens, a leafy, earthy place that was kept at tropical temperatures year-round. The ceiling was a huge dome made to resemble a sky with clouds and a sun, and a moon and stars at night. Exotic birds darted from tree to tree, calling out among themselves. Lions and monkeys walked and swung about, harmless yet convincing holograms. There wasn’t a single mosquito, and the air always smelled like fresh rain.
Milo loved being in the gardens. He had never been in a jungle, but he imagined this was better. It was here that he and his uncle spent most of their meditation time. The buzzing of insects and squawking of birds made it easier to descend into the peace and quiet of his own mind. And the place reminded him of Lily for some reason. Sometimes he’d spend an hour or more just lying there on the grass, imagining Lily by his side.
The Eternal Gardens was full of luminether currents and the machine Emmanuel used to reveal them was a big, bulky device with a handle and a trigger. It had a fat metal head with a scanner in front. When he turned it on, it made a low, robotic whine much like a sound effect in a 1970s science-fiction film.
Emmanuel used the machine to illuminate harmless white mist hanging all around them.
“Put your hand in the mist,” his uncle said.
Milo did, slowly at first, feeling like a child about to touch a pot on a stove that might be burning hot. He had never been one to just dive right in, and so his uncle had to wait as Milo took his time. He slid his hand into the mist and yanked it back when he saw the luminether change course and seep into his fingers like smoke being inhaled.
“It’s going into me,” Milo said, pulling his hand away. The mist went back to normal.
“Yes. Your body’s collecting it.”
He put his hand back into the mist and once more began to draw it in through his pores.
“And it happens all the time? Even when I’m asleep?”
Emmanuel nodded, making his glasses flicker with light. Behind him, a red monkey with a purple face watched while dangling from a branch.
“Especially when you’re asleep.”
Some of Milo’s training involved direct stimulation of nerve endings to create pain. Emmanuel used magic to shock, burn, and freeze Milo’s skin in an effort to condition him into responding in certain ways. Of course, he wasn’t really shocking, burning, and freezing his own nephew, only creating those sensations. If Milo wanted to use his body as a tool for spellcasting, he would first have to learn its limits.
On one occasion, Emmanuel made him sit fully clothed in a tub of water in the Eternal Gardens. Then he hypnotized Milo into believing that the water was coming to a boil. Milo’s eyes were closed, and he was listening to the birds whooping in the trees. The sounds should have relaxed him, but his heart hammered away in his chest.
“It’s getting hotter and hotter. You can feel the bubbles rising, burning your skin with their heat. It’s like they’re screaming at you, biting you.”
Milo was sweating and his teeth were clenched tight. The water was boiling his skin, loosening great red-and-white sheets of it before ripping it off his bones. At least, that was how it felt.
“It hurts. Gods, it hurts!”
Steam rose up and burned his face. He opened his eyes and saw his uncle nodding in approval.
“You can make it stop, Milo. Send the water out of the bucket. It’s the only way.”
But Milo was paralyzed. It was part of the spell. He was a prisoner in his own body, and he was slowly being turned into soup.
“Please! Turn it off!”
“Cast it out, Milo. Empty it.”
Chaos reigned inside Milo’s head. His thoughts were blurred fragments being thrown every which way like leaves in a tornado.
“Focus, Milo, like I taught you.”
When he thought the pain would take over and wipe him out of existence, Milo heard a loud, watery burst. It felt like a dozen people had splashed him all at once. The water burned his nose and seeped into his eyes. But the pain was fading. Air cooled his skin. He opened his eyes.
There was water all around him, everywhere but inside the bucket. It dripped off leaves and ran down the hanging vines. His uncle was soaked. The man took off his sunglasses, wincing in the artificial light. He spoke in a soothing voice as he shook the lenses dry.
“You emptied the bucket,” he said. “How did it feel?”
Milo could move again. He looked at his hands and saw that they were not red and scalded as he had thought. Astoundingly, his entire body and his clothes were perfectly dry.
“It felt pretty good,” he said. “Except the part where I was being boiled alive.”
Emmanuel put his glasses back on. He got up and joined his hands together behind his back. Still dripping wet, he watched Milo as he spoke.
“At some point you’ll learn how to control these automatic responses so you can reproduce them at will. The training sessions will be painful. I hope you’re OK with that.”
Milo’s voice’s wavered. “Pain is a signal, nothing more. Right?”
“I would never hurt you. You know that.”
“I know.”
At night, Milo slept alone in his tiny bedroom, which was no more than a bed, a closet, and a desk. There was no window, only a vent that let in a steady current of air. Sometimes he heard sounds coming from the vent that made him dream of huge machines chugging away inside the earth.
Every morning a bell would sound to wake him up, and a little metal door would slide open in the wall, revealing a tray of breakfast fit for a monk: a bowl of oatmeal with a glass of milk and a few wedges of fruit, as well as a multivitamin. He was to have no entertainment or pleasure during his training apart from reading and lounging in the gardens during his short breaks.
“Comfort is a mind-killer.” His uncle’s words. “It makes you lazy, self-satisfied. When it comes to spellcasting, you must always be striving.”
Another three months went by. Milo mastered the basics of what his uncle was trying to teach him (and he grew another half inch). He learned how to channel large amounts of luminether from his body into small crystals that were blue-white in color, like icicles with layers of frost over them. He could hold one in his hand and stare at it for several seconds until it brightened into something resembling pure light solidified. It was one way of practicing the most fundamental aspect of spellcasting.
“Be careful,” Emmanuel said once, after Milo had managed to fill one of the crystals to its maximum capacity. “Throw that and it’ll blow up like a grenade. Go ahead. Try it on that wall over there.”
Milo threw one as hard as he could against the wall at the other end of the room. It shattered in a burst of violent white light.
“It can knock a person unconscious,” Emmanuel said. “But it’s more useful against machines. It creates an electromagnetic pulse that disarms them.”
“What are they called?”
“Good question. I never gave them a formal name. Always just called them stunners.”
“Works for me.”
He also learned how to expel harmless bursts of energy that would shoot out of his hands and roll across the floor for several seconds before disappearing. Emmanuel called them “bursts” and explained that despite being harmless in battle they could be used to amplify an already existing spell or increase the power of a spell cast by an ally.
His uncle demonstrated.
“I’m going to cast a freeze spell on that statue over there.” He pointed at a marble statue of a woman swaddled in robes holding a water pitcher. They were in one of the training rooms. “Now, I’m a magician, not a sorcerer, which means elemental spells aren’t my specialty. But that’s OK because I have you.”
Milo couldn’t help but smile. He liked the fact that his uncle might need his help. He also liked elemental spells because they were his specialty—though he hadn’t learned any fun ones just yet.
“Ready?”
His uncle pulled a blue crystal out of his pocket, charged it, and took aim at the statue. A crackling sound came from across the room. The statue began to take on a glassy texture as ice formed over its surface. It was not a very impressive spell, and it was too slow to be used as a weapon. That was where Milo came in.
“Fire one of your bursts.”
Milo made a claw with his right hand, imagining the weight and heft of a bowling ball, then channeled energy into his palm and ran forward. He cast the ball of light that had formed over his hand directly at the statue.
It made a soft sizzling sound as it rolled across the floor. When it hit the statue, Milo heard a sound like tin foil being crushed into a ball.
The effect was instantaneous.
Heavy spikes shot out of the statue, giving the woman a monstrous appearance. By the time the spell puttered out, the woman was covered in a variety of sharp icicles that ranged from the size of a finger to the length of a sword.
“Now what?”
Emmanuel smiled at him. He held out a hand, palm up. A flame fizzled to life, turning his glasses into flat orange circles.
“Now we’re going to melt it.”
The night of the ice statue, Milo awoke in his room in the dark and was unable to fall back asleep.
He’d been dreaming about his family, and in the dreams he and his mother, father, and sister were in the family minivan, driving toward the edge of a cliff, and he could see in the mirrors that his mother and father were smiling, despite the fact that they were headed toward certain death.
He got out of bed and turned on the overhead light. His books sat in a pile on his desk, next to a stack of notebooks in which he’d been taking notes on the subjects that interested him most. If there was one thing his uncle gave him in large amounts, it was paper, pens, and books.
Milo swiped his arm across the desk. His books and notebooks made loud papery bursts against the floor.
“Fire!” he shouted, lifting his right arm and pointing it at the pile.
Nothing happened. He felt stupid. He wanted that feeling of something violent and dangerous shooting out of him—like the fireball that had failed to save his father’s life.
“Ignite!” he shouted, and this time he stabbed his arm toward the pile like he wanted to give it a good smack.
Again, nothing. He could feel the fire inside of him. He was sweating and his face was hot. If only he could just let it out…
He closed his eyes and made fists with his hands. Clenching his teeth, he let out a groan of frustration.
“Why can’t you just burn!”
Something hissed in front of him. When he opened his eyes he saw a gray band of smoke rise and curl in the air, a tiny flame dancing at its base. He took a step back. Soon the sputtering flame became a pillar of fire that threatened to decimate his book collection. It hissed and crackled. Smoke filled the room and his nose burned from it. He covered the lower half of his face and made for the door.
It was locked. He fumbled with the knob. Nothing. Someone had locked it from the outside. But why?
The smoke was so thick now that it hid the ceiling. There was no bathroom in his room, and with the locked door barring him from the bathroom down the hall, no way he could get water to douse the fire. He hoped an alarm would go off, or that someone was close enough to smell the smoke.
He got down on his stomach. The fire was a rippling, blurry thing getting fatter and fatter by the second. He realized what he had to do.
“Extinguish it. That’s it. I can do that.”
He reached out across the floor toward the flames.
“Die,” he said, coughing. “Extinguish!”
Again, nothing. The fire seemed to be growing. All those notes he had copied by hand were lost.
“Die, die! Extinguish! Get out of here!”
He curled his arm against the floor and buried his face in it. The smoke was too much, and as he coughed into his arm the thought entered his mind that he was going to die in this tiny room without ever seeing his sister again.
Then, as the world went dark around him, he heard his mother’s voice in his head.
Earth to Milo. Your brain’s in outer space again…
Armed with a new idea, he squinted at the fire, reached out one arm, and imagined a cooling wind sliding across his face, a trigger he had been practicing for a while, though he had never tried to cast this spell before now. He had never been scared enough to do it.
He whispered a single word.
“Void.”
A black dot appeared in the smoke. It hung suspended above the flames, darker than black, the color of pure nothingness. Milo watched, smoke stinging his eyes and burning his lungs, as the dot grew larger and larger and became a ball that rapidly inhaled the smoke. A void spell was dangerous; his uncle had warned him never to cast it unless he was sure he could control it.
He wasn’t sure he could, but what other option did he have?
“Oh no.”
The void grew until it was the size of a bowling ball. With a howling roar, it sucked up the burning books and notebooks and all the smoke. Then Milo felt his body being pulled toward it. He grabbed on to the leg of his bed, glad that it had been bolted to the floor.
He screamed.
“Help!”
His fingers began to slip, one by one. The void was a rift in the fabric of reality, and beyond it was pure nothingness. If Milo were to enter this void, he would be killed instantly, his body dissolved into millions of billions of particles.
This had been a bad idea. He was such an idiot. What had possessed him to start all this in the first place?
He was on his last few fingers when the void closed with a sharp hiss.
His body slammed onto the floor. Milo ignored the pain shooting up his side and raked air into his lungs. He looked around and saw that the void had sucked in everything not bolted to the floor. All his notebooks and books were gone.
Emmanuel’s voice boomed through speakers Milo had never noticed before.
“Milo, what in the fiery hell are you doing? You could have been killed!”
“But I wasn’t.”
“Do you realize what you’ve done?”
“I just cast a Tier II spell followed by a Tier III spell.”
He could hear his uncle sighing in frustration. The man appeared to be at a loss for words. Hopefully he was impressed.
“I want out of this room,” M
ilo said. He wiped sweat off his brow. “I need to reproduce this.”
“You still have a few months to go, Milo. Get some sleep. And don’t try that again without my supervision.”
“I won’t be able to sleep tonight, and you know that as well as I do.” Milo looked up at the ceiling as if he could see his uncle speaking to him from beyond. He narrowed his eyes and said, in a calm voice: “Show me the fireball spell. Tonight.”
The room was silent for several seconds except for the fuzzy hum of the speakers. Then the hum died away, and the door opened with a click.
Chapter 60
Rain drizzled over the darkened castle grounds.
Kovax ordered his soldiers to clear the courtyard. He ran to his wife and son, slipping on wet stone along the way, using his staff to balance himself. When he reached them, he tossed aside the staff and rolled his son onto his side so the boy wouldn’t choke on his own vomit. Then he rolled his wife over, cupping her face with one hand. She and the boy were soaking wet from the slimy fluid that had preserved them all these years. Kovax patted his wife on the back as she coughed.
The courtyard was empty now of all except a few of Kovax’s men.
“Will you look at that?” one of the men said, gazing down at Samara and Kofi with the stunned expression of a man at a circus freak show.
Kovax felt the urge suddenly to rip out his throat.
“The two of you”—he pointed at two men—“stay. The rest of you, leave!”
Boots and shoes clapped as the soldiers cleared everyone out.
Kovax looked down at his wife’s face. She coughed, her forehead and cheeks slick with rainwater. Next to her, Kofi made retching sounds as he vomited. There was no food in the boy’s stomach, and only a stringy discharge came out. Samara saw her son and reached out to him.
“Wait,” Kovax said. He cupped her face, his hands hard and white like albino crabs. What would she think upon seeing his f—
Samara looked at him and screamed.
“Gods, no!” she cried out, filling the courtyard with the sound of her ragged voice. “Get away from me! Get away!”
Savant (The Luminether Series) Page 34