Witchmarked (World's First Wizard Book 1) by Aaron Schneider (my reading book .txt) 📕

him feel. Magic was a frightening enough prospect, but such an intuitive response meant controlling it would be precarious.

Milo decided that perhaps Imrah’s introductory speech was more valuable than he’d given her credit for.

“Rule three,” she said, her tone flatter. “Don’t trust anyone. Not in this house, not in this city, not in the Underworld. There are conspiracies and vendettas and secrets whose roots grew before your kind discovered fire. You have no friends here, and assuming you do will put you at risk, and therefore me.”

Milo restrained the urge to point out the internal flaw in her logic, but smarminess aside, this seemed another fair point. If the audience with Bashlek Marid had proved anything, it was that those in Ifreedahm were not happy to see Milo and were willing to do terrible things in response.

“Do you understand?” Imrah asked, three talons still raised in front of her.

Milo nodded.

Imrah’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Prove it,” she hissed.

Milo heaved a sigh and straightened like a soldier bearing up under a tedious parade examination.

“Rule one, you’re in charge. Rule two, don’t do anything magical without your say-so. Rule three, trust no one.”

It was Imrah’s turn to nod.

“Good,” she rasped, then turned toward the tables, her arms stretched out in a sweeping gesture.

“What do you see there?” she asked, her back to him.

The tables were covered with all manner of containers: bottles, chests, jugs, jars, sacks, pouches, and boxes. All were spread across the table in what seemed to be no particular order, and from the few he could see through and distinguish their contents, it seemed a wholly macabre collection. A number of misshapen eyes floated in yellowish brine, while hanks of hair threatened to spill out of an open-topped sack. Others were less recognizable but no less unnerving. A blood-red concoction that seemed to be swirling of its own volition frothed in a jar, while one crate sported a collection of fist-sized segmented body parts Milo could not begin to identify.

“I’m praying it’s not breakfast,” he quipped, looking away a second too late as one of the hanks of hair twitched and fidgeted at the top of the sack.

“That will depend entirely on your performance today,” she warned, flashing him another toothy grin. “If you don’t want to make do with the scalps of the murdered and pickled frog’s eyes, you best pay attention.”

Ambrose, who was standing at the edge of the platform fastidiously cleaning his Gewehr, raised his head and gave a commending nod.

“Now that’s a lady who understands motivation,” the big man called.

Imrah’s eyes narrowed at Milo’s bodyguard.

“And you best not distract him,” she warned icily. “Food only comes when I say the lesson is finished.”

Ambrose nodded gravely and snapped off a jaunty salute.

“This is power,” Imrah said, turning back to the tables and her lesson. “These are the secrets of the cosmos wrapped in chaos, frozen by death, and waiting for the worthy to seize them. I can give you the tools to claim them, but only you will be able to determine if you have the will to wield them. Among our people, it is a birthright, a badge that we are the great Djinn’s children, but for you, a man born of mere flesh, it will be a path of pain and despair.”

She reached toward a small chest and flipped the latch open with one flick of her claw. Within, bones were piled on top of each other like a child’s haphazard collection of pebbles, delicate and beautiful. She snatched up a tiny ribcage fit for a young swallow or starlet.

“So tell me, Magus,” Imrah whispered as she crushed the ribcage in her palm, grinding until she held out a hand full of dust, “are you ready?”

Milo was spared having to answer the thankfully rhetorical question. The truth was that he wasn’t sure he was ready, but he saw no path other than forward.

Imrah spent most of that first day going over the principles of alchemical necromancy, or what might just be called necromancy by the uninitiated. Necromancy in its truest sense, she explained, was communication with shades of the deceased, which she explained were not the souls of the dead or anything so theological.

“Just as a footprint fills with water,” Imrah had explained after whispering over the crumbled ribcage and set the fragments to form a cloud a few centimeters over her hand, “so living things create cavities for mystical energies to pool.”

With another whispered command, the cloud spun out into a dancing ribbon of bone particles, looping and coiling in on itself like an eel.

“When the life is gone, those energies remain, trapped in what they touched but most potently in the corpse. Sometimes those energies hold echoes or ripples of what once was, some of them strong enough to use for shape and voice. They aren’t a true part of the dead. Only the foolish, the desperate, or the very greatest spend their time on such unreliable sources of information.”

“The greatest at manipulating essence, the true virtuosos, can feel the imprint of the dead more clearly and precisely, and so can force the essence to a truer shape. Such experts can question these shades and receive truths the living might have forgotten before their deaths.”

Milo’s head snapped to her from the ribbon of bone dust.

“Masters?”

Imrah nodded with a strange, hungry light in her eyes.

“So, what happens to the true part, the soul?”

Imrah shrugged as though the question was insignificant.

From there, she’d gone on to explain that most of ghul magic involved taking the energy provided by the dead, the essence, and using it to fuel magical reactions. That was where alchemy came into play.

She diverged slightly to explain the difference between ghul and human concepts of alchemy and chemistry.

“These reactions require ingredients that have little to do with their physical properties, but instead are connected to the magical energies that have infused them.”

She noted that for whatever reason, most magic seemed to be tied to life, whether directly or indirectly, with