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

“And who is that fool going to be?”

“Well,” the big man began as he stepped back from the affixed grenade and gave Milo a level look, “I’d be a pretty poor bodyguard if I expected you to be the one to set off the suicide trap.”

Milo shook his head.

“You don’t have to do that, Ambrose.”

The bodyguard scowled.

“After all this, you’re going to make it hard on me?” he rumbled, crossing his big arms over his chest. “Milo, someone’s got to set this fireball off, and pretty as I am, I’m not the poor bastard who was born with magic up his trousers, so spare me all that rot. It has to be me.”

Ambrose turned his back to his ward, pretending to check the lengths of the strings as he muttered, “There’s always the chance I somehow come back, and if I don’t...well, I suppose it was a long time coming.”

Milo sighed and reached into his black coat.

“Simon?”

“What?” the bodyguard asked fiercely, turning on his heel with eyes blazing.

“You don’t have to do this,” Milo said, shaking a vial filled with black sand. “Because I’ve got someone else dying to do the job.”

Ambrose’s eyes widened, and he made several attempts to form a coherent sentence before finally throwing his hands in the air and wagging his head.

“Witches,” he growled in disgust as a smile crept below his mustache.

“Come and get us,” Milo growled under his breath as he gripped the rail running across the top of the zeppelin.

Despite the reality of losing his grip and subsequently his footing and then sliding off the airship to certain doom, Milo only had eyes for the fang of rock in their path. By his amateur evaluation, they were minutes from passing the summit, and right on schedule, a tongue of murky filth as wide as a football field and three times the length lapped its way up the mountainside.

“Keep coming,” Milo muttered. “Almost there.”

Despite his fixed gaze, not all of him was present for the unnerving spectacle.

In the back of his mind, he kept the shades animating the Si’lat under tight control, especially the squirrely little thing in charge of the grenades. Besides the one who kept getting curious about grenade rings, Milo had set the other two animate clouds of black sand to watch the controls as the pilot had instructed. Milo wasn’t sure if both were required, but it looked like a two-person job to make sure all the instruments and knobs and levers and other such remained just as they were. That and shades were relatively simple things, and Milo’s confidence in directing them was suspect.

Still, their presence below meant Ambrose stood next to him, glaring at Kimaris’ ascent.

“Where does something like that come from?”

“Hell?” Milo offered. He was half-joking, but the look on Ambrose’s face conveyed that such things were no laughing matter.

The guard shook his head and adjusted the straps on his parachute with his free hand.

“Are you sure these things will work from this height?” the big man asked as he eyed the pack suspiciously.

“No,” Milo admitted as he ran his thumb along one of his own straps. “But I figure they couldn’t hurt.”

Ambrose’s gaze wandered to the valley floor passing beneath them.

“I think I’d rather blow myself up,” he muttered, the words nearly stolen by the whistling wind.

“You and the Si’lat can still switch places,” Milo said, jerking a thumb at the hatch. “You better hurry, though.”

Ambrose’s mustache twitched against the wind as he scowled at Milo.

“You know, you think you are a whole lot funnier than you actually are.”

Milo raised a hand to his ear and gave an exaggerated shrug.

“What was that? Couldn’t hear you over the sound of trying to save your life.”

Ambrose rolled his eyes, and both fell silent as Kimaris reached the peak, wrapping around the horn of rock and straining up into the open air. They were seconds from passing over the monstrosity-laden zenith, and for an instant, Milo feared they weren’t going to be close enough. His mind scrambled as he wondered what they would do as the zeppelin barreled by. Looking past the peak he’d been fixated on, Milo learned exactly what would happen when he saw a white-crowned mountain rising barely a few miles from its smaller brother. At this altitude and speed, they would amble past the crucial point and the smash into the taller mountain five minutes later.

Milo nearly said something to Ambrose, but he spied something strange happening just below them.

Kimaris’ cloudy bulk began to darken as it gathered itself. The magus remembered the sight of its cresting wave looming higher and higher over Imrah, and then they were over the peak, the gelatinous monstrosity hidden from view.

Then a rope as thick as a truck strained upward. The slime was compacted to give it strength and rigidity, but Milo could still see the tortured forms writhing within the compressed layers. In horrified awe, he watched it strain up over them, then sprout the acid-eaten faces of the grotesque chorus like a rash of pustules.

“THE PRINCE IS NIGH!” they shrieked thinly as the tendril swayed and then descended upon the zeppelin.

Gripping the rail, Milo and Ambrose skittered across the hull of the airship as the tendril slapped down, buckling the forward portion of the blimp several feet inward. The entire airship shuddered and both men lost their footing, boots skidding and scrambling as they held on with both hands. With wide, terrified eyes, they looked up and saw the tendril constricting, wrapping around the airship as it drew more of its bulk up from the peak.

The zeppelin listed hard from the sudden burden, but the protesting engines kept the craft plugging forward. As it moved clear of the peak, Kimaris came with it, a shrinking flag dangling from the airship as it began to spread over the surface.

“Move!” Milo shouted as the metal beneath their feet groaned and rumbled.

Hand over hand, they made for