Sorcerybound (World's First Wizard Book 2), Aaron Schneider [accelerated reader books .txt] 📗

to cover his ears. Pained gaze sweeping around him, Milo saw Rihyani’s head gripped between her hands as she threw it back and screamed. Beyond her, the scene in the plaza seemed even more frenzied as some went into convulsions while others fought all the harder, eyes and ears bleeding freely.

A burst of amethyst light drew Milo’s eyes back to the erupting organ, and he saw what for all the world looked like a tiny, dying star emerge from the crackling green flames devouring the machine. It pulsed rapidly, sometimes an orb of light, other times symbols, possibly a letter or sigil, and then with a wink, it was gone.

It took Milo a moment to realize that the brutalizing cacophony was over as blood-dampened hands came away from his ears. There was ringing amidst the static of his abused auditory function, but despite this, he still heard the dwarrow’s nerve-shredding voice raised in command.

“Kill them both!” Zlydzen shrieked, stabbing a too-large finger toward Milo and Rihyani.

Almost too late, Milo turned to see the Soviet mascots bearing down on him with hammer and sickle raised.

They moved faster than Milo would have thought possible, their legs pumping like pistons across the stage, splintering wood underfoot as they came. Milo reflexively drew on the augmentative powers of his eagle-skull fetish, but even so enhanced, he had to throw himself to the edge of the stage to avoid being crushed flat and hacked in half.

Rihyani stood frozen in front of the oncoming assault, and Milo didn’t have time to cry out before the hammer wielder brought his hammer smashing into her chest—only Rihyani wasn’t there. The illusion dissipated, and the fey was suddenly behind her attackers; she raked her claws across their exposed backs. The rasping screech of a sharp edge on unyielding iron was all she got for her efforts as the hammer wielder spun. She vaulted into the air to avoid being flattened.

“They’re golems!” Rihyani shouted. “Magical automatons!”

“Got it,” Milo shouted, on his feet now, facing the sickle-wielding not-woman. He realized it sounded like he knew what he was doing, but the reality was that he had no idea. Battling magical machine-soldiers was not in his woefully limited repertoire.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Zlydzen moving toward the curtain before the sickle-wielder closed on him.

“Rihyani!” Milo shouted to the fey, nimbly dodging the hammer-wielding golem. “Stop the dwarrow!”

Milo didn’t have a chance to see what if anything she did before his golem was nearly on top of him.

Out of habit more than anything else, he launched a blast of witchfire at the approaching murder-machine, but it quickly became apparent that the fire wasn’t nearly hot enough. He only managed to set the costume ablaze, so he faced a flaming reaper who pounced on him with lethal speed.

That’s not working, Imrah informed him redundantly as he wove away from a swing.

Snarling, Milo launched another bolt of fire point-blank into the golem’s face. The machine staggered back a step but replied almost immediately with a stroke that nearly split Milo in two.

“I’m open to suggestions,” Milo snarled as he barely managed to set aside a downward hack with the haft of his cane, and even then, only with magically enhanced strength and speed.

Metal grows brittle when cold, Imrah replied, and already Milo felt her essence seethe inside the fetish.

Milo desperately parried another sweeping cut and responded with a hard blow that would have shattered the spine of a living man but only managed to ring off the golem’s arms as it staggered two steps to one side. The golem’s heavy foot came down on Stalin’s outstretched leg with a nauseous crunch, and there were a few shock-filled seconds before the man started screaming in agony. Milo ignored the warlord’s plight as he scrambled backward, realizing this was about as much extra space as he could get between him and the lethal machine already turning back toward him.

FREEZE

Milo forced his mind into the formula, but rather than releasing it in a burst of frigid intent, he looped it into a heat-sapping stream. A ray of black that chilled the air around it into a sinking fog raced out and struck the golem in its sculpted iron bosom. For a single instant, the ray only seemed to put out the last of the fire clinging to the machine, and it closed half the distance in a stride. Its next step came at a languid pace, and its arms seemed to struggle to raise the weight of the heavy sickle even as it lurched forward. A low groaning and clicking sound issued from inside the golem as tiny spurs of frost began to emerge along hairline seams across its body. A second later, these spurs bloomed into a latticework of ice that encased the now-motionless golem.

Releasing the ray, and with the rest of the world coming back into focus, Milo looked up to see the sickle arched over his head, a single narrow icicle dangling from its tip.

“That was close,” he said, stepping out from under the reaper’s shadow as he hefted the beaked cane like a miner’s pick.

One chop into the golem’s chest created a widening spiderweb of fissures amidst a chorus of cracking noises. Milo drew back his foot and threw his weight into a supernaturally fortified front kick, and the golem exploded into jagged chunks. The sickle thunked on the stage and the frozen blade snapped in half, the hilt clattering to the floor.

Milo’s moment was interrupted by the sounds of Stalin still screaming over his mashed leg and Rihyani’s struggle at the back of the stage.

“Sorry, Joe,” Milo muttered as he vaulted over the recumbent Red to help the embattled fey.

The scarlet curtains flapped and twitched as a lumpy form thrashed in their knotted embrace, while Rihyani and the hammer golem danced between the rippling waves of fabric. The golem bore dozens of jagged lines across its frame, the coveralls barely hiding anything anymore, but none of it seemed to