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

your lungs out of your chest or a noxious mist that shriveled your eyes on its way to your brain…

Milo’s chest tightened and his jaw popped as he waited for the celestial soldier’s assessment. The thought that he’d rather end up in a ghul’s belly than choke to death in some hole occurred to him. At least he might gag the monster that ate him.

“A gas attack in tunnels like these only works if you don’t plan on taking the tunnels,” the bodyguard said after an evaluation. “Not enough ventilation to clear them out, and depending on what poison you’re putting down the chute, it could stay toxic for a good while. I’d say it’s unlikely.”

Milo let out the breath he’d been holding, telling himself the air he was about to replace it with simply stank and was not going to condemn him to an agonizing death.

Up ahead, the fey had come to a halt. Hearing sharp, hushed voices, he shuffled forward, Ambrose at his shoulder.

“Regardless, the mort-scalp is gone, and that’s going to slow everything down,” Fazihr was explaining as he darted rodentlike glances up the tunnel. “Perhaps we should return to Ifreedahm and see—”

“No,” Imrah interjected, making her retainer cringe. “The Bashlek has given us a task, and we will see it done, even if it will take a little longer.”

Fazihr wrung his hands, staring at them as though cursing the blunt digits that hid his claws.

“Loyalty is an admirable trait,” he said, clearing of his throat. “But of no use if it gets us all killed.”

“So, you know what did this?” Contessa Rihyani asked, looking from Fazihr to Imrah and back.

“Well, no,” the ghul retainer confessed, wilting under the glare of his mistress. “But the mort-scalp is fashioned to be extremely resilient. It is the corpus that provides the essence, so it needs to be robust, especially in stretches like these that must be ready to communicate a potential invasion. It would take a concerted effort to scour or uproot so much of it.”

“Requiring substantial forces then,” Rihyani said, following his logic. “We could be heading into a large contingent of soldiers.”

“Precisely,” Fazihr agreed, turning a pleading eye to Imrah. “Think of the damage it would do to Ifreedahm, to your father, if the Bashlek’s daughter was taken hostage by meatsacks.”

Ambrose gave a dry cough, and all turned around to stare at the two humans.

Milo stared back mutely until Ambrose surreptitiously dug an elbow into his back.

“I—”

The elbow dug again.

“We don’t think it is a chemical attack.”

The stares continued.

The elbow dug again.

“So...so, I don’t think this has anything to do with the Germans’ forces,” Milo continued, feeling squeezed between the stares of the inhuman party and Ambrose’s questing elbow. “So, uh, we should press on unless we have a good reason not to.”

“Our reason,” Fazihr snarled, “is that we have no idea what lies ahead. We could be walking into a trap or something worse. The point is, we don’t know.”

“But we do know that zeppelins are flying around this mountain,” Milo said, his voice unflinching but dispassionate. “Which means there is a better than good chance that there will be major movement in this area. If you get me—ugh, us, us!—to Bamyan, we can make sure a lot more of those meatsacks don’t start marching all over this mountain.”

Fazihr bared his teeth, but a furtive look at Imrah stilled further protests.

“Fine,” the retainer spat. “Then may I advise the humans to go first? It’s a straight march to the sentry post from here.”

Milo looked at Ambrose, who nodded.

“We’ll scout ahead then.” Milo sighed. “I mean, at this point, we’re practically experts at tunnels, right?”

Creeping down the scoured stretch of tunnel was at once tedious and stressful in a manner that Milo imagined was akin to what men in the trenches felt.

Every moment seemed to threaten them with a messy end, but as the moments stretched into minutes that stretched into hours, the sharp edges of the threat grew dull. Instead of a piercing trauma that awakened the body with adrenaline and sharpened every sense, there was the grating rasp of another advance, another step, another breath toward a death that wasn’t in any hurry to arrive. After three hours of the grinding experience, Milo found himself fantasizing about what would end his life. Would it be a bullet ripping from far up the tunnel? A mine or some other booby trap to rip him apart or jelly his guts? Maybe a tunnel rat commando springing from a black alcove to plunge a knife into his chest?

The longer he dwelt on how his life would end, the longer and more fanciful his morbid daydreams became. Soon he was layering levels of plot and symbolism, like a ninepence rag’s attempt at a modern morality tale.

Thus distracted, it was no surprise that he nearly planted his foot in a splatter of viscous goo four hours into the unaugmented trek to the surface. The only thing stopping him was Ambrose’s strong hand gripping his shoulder.

“Hold on,” the bodyguard murmured, drawing Milo back a step and then hunkering down to frown at the glistening smear. “Perhaps a little of your light.”

“LIGHT,” Milo obliged, and beams of green light shone from the sockets of his cane.

The floor, as reported by the ghuls, had been stripped of the mort-scalp, leaving only bare stone whose surface was scoured clean. Milo was no spelunker, but even the dust or damp you might have expected was absent. This gelatinous splotch was the first interruption they’d seen in that sterile length of the tunnel.

“Anything about this or something like it in those books?” Ambrose asked, flicking out a penknife from a pocket. The tiny blade was humorously small in his shovel-sized mitts. “Because this doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen.”

Milo sank to his haunches, keeping the light fixed on the goo as Ambrose hooked his blade in the largest lump of the translucent sludge. The burnt ammonia smell was enough to sting the eyes,