Witchmarked (World's First Wizard Book 1), Aaron Schneider [most important books to read .txt] 📗

his strength failing him as his lungs burned, and the only thing he could think of was how much he wished that wretched name wasn’t the last thing he’d spoken. An unshakable mark of the Bellus Orphanarium, he hated that his last breath had been spent uttering it. Volkohne: folk-less in bastardized German. Dear God, how he hated that name.

Somewhere far away, Milo heard the bark of pistol fire, one shot after another.

Are we under attack?

Milo knew he was dying, his lungs throbbing as they prepared to suck in a desperate mouthful of mud. Something inside his chest kicked, a spasm of surrender, and then he was being hauled upward. Muck came out in a gagging spray, and he fought to breathe between wracking coughs that expelled more mud.

“Get up,” a deep voice told him, and had he not been occupied with cleaning his airways, Milo might have complied.

As it was, a huge hand gripped the front of his uniform and dragged him to his unsteady feet. Something soft and dry was pressed into his hands, and by reflex, Milo cleared the filth from his watering eyes.

Two men were dying at his feet, whimpering about the darkening bloodstains swallowing the breasts of their uniforms. A few strides away, face down, lay a third man, the back of his coat sporting two ragged holes. Still retching up mud, Milo turned and saw the huge Blackcoat officer looking down at him with a flat expression.

“Th-thank you, sir,” he choked out, fighting to straighten up. He thought he should salute, but feared doing so might have him getting sick all over the man.

“Come,” the giant growled in a thick accent as he turned on his heel. “We are already late.”

Though he’d only been in the building once in his life, Milo recognized the converted compound as soon as they approached.

This was the building where he’d sworn he’d lost his mind.

The 7th had been encamped in a gutted public park a few city blocks to the south of the town square, in which the Central Command of the Coalition Army was sprawled into every available building. This particular building was just across the street from the town hall, where the top brass of Central Command spent their time pretending to be very busy.

Moving down said street, Milo had spotted smartly dressed officers moving about with the swift, sure movements of men who had somewhere to be. Most were in the drab colonial colors, though peppered here and there was the striking black of Federated personnel. A few called to each other as they toted their satchels and bags full of official documents and all the bureaucratic trappings of men ready to send other men to die in their thousands. Men like Milo, men with no choice, and even worse, no hope.

He stared, mouth open, as two young colonial officers threw salutes as they passed, calling to the huge Blackcoat leading him.

“Victory through brotherhood,” they belted out, which was the “new” rallying cry of the Coalition.

The Blackcoat ignored them, but Milo, feeling momentarily insulated in the presence of his intimidating escort, gave them pitying looks.

Who were they fooling?

Milo didn’t know which was a bigger joke, brotherhood or victory.

The colonials from the likes of Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, and many other lands once under the wing of the Russian Empire had flocked to the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians out of desperation, nothing else. Outside the hearing of their new masters, Milo had listened to their true opinions, and even his seasoned ears had been burning by the things they’d whispered about the Blackcoats.

And victory?

That was a dream that had died sixteen years ago in 1918 when Petrograd burned, and the war promised to grind on. Only madmen and politicians still talked about victory.

The Blackcoat barely paused as the soldiers stationed there hurried to pull the double doors open. Realizing his bitter musings had put him out of sync with his erstwhile savior, Milo rushed to catch up.

The building might have been a large boardinghouse or perhaps a hotel before the war, but now it was just one of the many buildings hosting one branch or another of the Central European Coalition Army here in Zabrze, Poland. The lobby had been converted to a typing pool, where men and women in crisp gray uniforms punched keys in front of a wide staircase that led to a second level full of interview rooms. Milo couldn’t keep himself from counting over to the one he’d been sent to three weeks ago: Room 7, just before the corner.

A longboard was lashed between the rails lining the second-floor gallery, bearing a sign in German that read, Offices for the Non-Conventional Application of Tactics (Nicht Konventionelle Anwendung der Taktik). Milo suppressed a shudder, just as he had on that first day. No one knew what Nicht-KAT really did, and in such fertile soil, rumors, huge and thorny, flourished.

“Captain Lokkemand,” called a young woman who rose out of the typing pool with a handful of documents. She might have been the prettiest creature Milo had seen in some time, which wasn’t saying much, but the severe bangs cut into her dark hair made her look serious to the point of caricature. The stern set to her jaw didn’t help things as she rushed toward the towering Blackcoat.

“Not now,” he rumbled, and he swept past her like an urchin on the street hawking yesterday’s news rags.

She caught Milo watching her for a reaction as he followed the captain toward the stairs, and her eyes narrowed at him for an instant. Something sharp and acidic curled at the back of her throat, but then her eyes darted over her shoulder, and her mouth snapped shut. Without further complaint or even a glance at Milo, she turned smartly and made for her desk.

Milo couldn’t shake the feeling that her glance at the second level was directed at Room 7, and the realization set his teeth on edge.

How could she know? Who else knew?

Not for the