Wizardborn (World's First Wizard Book 3) by Aaron Schneider (read me like a book txt) 📕

The man in the royal box, his mouth bowed into a frown and shoulders hunched, looked at the scene and shook his head.

“Does it have to be such a gruesome process?” he demanded with a tremor in his voice that he couldn’t quite hide.

From the dark recesses of the box came a whistling, grinding chuckle.

“Roland, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you felt bad for them,” commented a voice as agonizing as the laugh. “I thought you hated these men, boy. Instead of complaining, shouldn’t you be thanking me for the gift?”

Roland kept sweeping his eyes from one side of the hall to the next, desperate to avoid the bulging, ruptured eyes that all seemed to stare up at him. How could their blind looks seem so accusing?

“I wanted them dead, Zlydzen; that’s simple enough,” he said with a shrug, then flapped his hand. “But no man deserves this, much less what you are going to do next.”

The chuckle returned like a teapot singing with its belly full of boiling gravel.

“Oh, humans, so sentimental,” Zlydzen burbled as he ambled out of the box’s shadow. “I’m making use of what would have been wasted otherwise.”

Roland snorted and spat but didn’t say anything.

In one swollen hand, the dwarrow held an arcane device like a bronze tuning fork that had sprouted branches and leaves of metal. Upon the leaves were inscribed odd, spiraling symbols which made the eyes ache and the stomach knot if they were stared at for more than a second. Shuffling to the rail, which he could peek over, he held out the device and began to rotate it in a tight little circle.

The engraved leaves began to flutter and sent up a whistling chorus, then the branches started to turn with a dull thrum. The whistle and thrum sharpened and deepened respectively, and the air thickened with a pressure that had nothing to do with the toxic gas

The first of the rat corpses swelled and popped. Quick spasms wracked the little bodies as odd engorgements strained and burst. One or two managed to lurch upward in ungainly hops, but they all became gory blooms on the floor within moments.

Beyond the dead rodents, the clouds of poison began to recede, drawn inward by those who were better able to absorb the noxious burden. The men, their bodies deformed by toxic swellings, squirmed, shuddered, and as the noisome device reached its crescendo, rose unsteadily to their feet.

1

These Pictures

Milo felt a bead of sweat travel down the side of his scarred cheek to race along his jaw before it broke free of his chin. The dot of perspiration fell on the photograph in his hands.

He idly swept away the offending moisture with his thumb, but he supposed it didn’t matter. There were plenty of other photographs, and they all told the same damning story.

“We would appreciate an explanation,” stated the man sitting across the table from Milo. From its liver-spotted dome to its collar-pinched throat, General Erich Ludendorff’s face looked to be carved from a single tube of flesh, with the barest attention given to his wrinkled features. The wizard thought they could barely be called features, more like sags and ripples around peculiar little orifices.

Yet this simulacrum of a human form slumped in front of him had been the most powerful man in the German Empire since the death of Field Marshal von Hindenburg a few years ago, and he wanted Milo to explain something he hadn’t known about until the moment they’d shoved a folder full of photographs into his hand. Now he had dozens of grainy photographs from the valley surrounding Shatili, all of which depicted a large number of corpses displaying gruesome yet imaginative methods of elimination.

One of them showed two men who’d simultaneously rammed pistols into each other’s mouths and pulled the trigger. These unfortunate gunmen lay under a trio of corpses, one of which was a burly man who’d spitted a smaller man on each knife-equipped fist before every bit of his skull above the lower jaw had been blown off.

If Milo hadn’t been where he was, he might have believed that this was some kind of macabre farce of battlefield photography, a set of staged photos that went too far in their quest to artistically portray the horrors of war. All the men were wearing the same uniform.

“This looks to be a goodly number of Soviet soldiers all dead near Shatili, sir,” Milo said cautiously, feeling another drop of sweat slalom down his face. “As to how they all got into this state, I’m not sure I can answer.”

General Ludendorff’s frown deepened within his slab-like face, and from beneath a mass of sagging wrinkles, two eyes burrowed into Milo relentlessly. One speckled hand, claw-like despite the general’s flabby features, tapped a hooked nail upon a piece of paper in front of him. Ludendorff’s eyes never left him as he spoke, punctuating each word with a tap.

“It states here in your debrief that you placed countermeasures at Shatili to thwart the Reds,” he growled thickly, his voice all the more ferocious given his frailty. “Your report states the countermeasures were non-conventional misdirection.”

Milo nodded mutely, though there was no question in Ludendorff’s voice. For his part, he wasn’t sure how much he was supposed to say. Colonel Jorge had made it clear early on that the general staff was finicky about openly calling things magic or blatantly confessing to working with and against monsters. The one thing Milo did not want to do right now was to offend their touchy sensibilities, but he had a growing premonition that it would become unavoidable.

He couldn’t know for certain, but he was a wizard, after all.

“After you left these countermeasures in place in the pursuit of your renegade plot to capture Stalin,” the general continued, his finger still tapping, “the Soviet forces moved into the area. When they investigated the fortress complex, something occurred that caused an army of several thousand men to begin fighting among