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

Milo held his pose—chest out, eyes closed—but it was no use. The moment was spoiled, so with a heavy sigh, he looked at the land cooking beneath the late summer sun.

The country was rough—primeval almost, with bare rocks jutting up like spines of stone segregated from the lower, flatter tiers far below where tough grasses, rugged shrubs, and stunted trees grew. A scrabbling path, little more than a track worn by goats and hinds, led from the cave mouth to a ridgeline that wound its long, meandering way down to a collection of crumbling stone walls that seemed to perch on a cliffside.

“That must be the ruins,” Imrah noted, skulking back into the shadow of the cave. “If the others followed the pace we set, we can go back and lead them here and make for the ruins just after nightfall.”

Milo nodded, turning slowly from the light of the sun to the yawning dark within the cave.

“Assuming they weren’t eaten by that thing,” Milo muttered darkly, more discouraged by the thought of returning to the dark than fearing for their companions.

“Yes, assuming,” Imrah acknowledged, her posture wilting in a manner Milo wasn’t accustomed to seeing from her. Milo again noted how much talk of the creature seemed to affect her, but before genuine pity or concern could take root, that nagging question reemerged.

More of my people? Milo thought. She’d said she had no idea what it was, but then how could the sentries not be the creature’s first victims?

None of this was helping him work up the nerve to go back down under the mountain. Quite the opposite, but it roused his mind and senses, and he felt his eyes narrow as he watched Imrah shuffle back into the dark.

There was something more going on that she wouldn’t tell him, so he had to stay ready in case that secret ended up trying to kill him. Given what he’d seen of ghul society so far, he was pretty sure it eventually would.

“Let’s get this over with,” he muttered, fishing in his pocket for the snuff box that contained his sight-salve.

After anointing his eyes with the dark paste, he joined Imrah in the dark to fetch the rest of the group.

They did not make it out of the cave until well after nightfall, though thankfully, there were no further sightings of the gelatinous monster.

They emerged from the darkness of the cave to the striking world of the shadows of a cloud-speckled moon dappling the mountainside. Without preamble, the contessa and her fey companions took the lead and guided them down the path, which turned out to be far more treacherous than Milo had imagined. In places, it narrowed or widened with the terrain, but the adjustments were not always welcome to those who walked it. Too far out on a wide path and you’d risk sliding halfway down the slope, and too close in would see your ankles snapping between hidden seams and clefts in the rock.

Even with his enhanced sight, Milo was certain that he’d have been injured, possibly even crippled, if it hadn’t been for the well-traveled fair folk giving them directions as they went. He wasn’t the only one.

Just before the goat track met the ridgeline, Imrah had skirted the inside of a boulder rather than the outside. Some treachery in the ground saw the boulder shift inward as the she-ghul passed, and as wiry and agile as she was under her human guise, she wouldn’t have been able to jump clear. Luckily for her, the bronze titan had been behind her, and with one hand, he steadied the boulder, sparing Imrah from being pinned to the wall by a few tons of rock.

Imrah had muttered a half-hearted thanks, at which the towering fey laughed, a sound that sang across the heights and down the hills. Milo might have winced at the sound revealing their position to possible enemies in the area, but it sounded like nothing a human voice could produce. It was like something an ancient god or spirit of the mountain might have emitted, and Milo very much doubted that any living man would have gone looking for its source.

The going was easier on the ridgeline, apart from the stomach-churning vertigo one experienced when looking to the right more than two paces. The expanse below might have been beautiful to see in the day time, the sun-painted cliffs plunging downward before blooming into pools of greenery in the valley below, but not moving along them at night. A low, hungry wind groaning along the edge reminded you how close to a fatal plummet you were, and it seemed that all it would take was a sudden storm to sweep you from the ridge to your doom.

When they reached the tumbled-down walls at the edge of Shahr-e Zuhak, the Red City, Milo thought he would feel incredible relief to be finished with such a perilous trek, but that was not the case. Even with his alchemically-enhanced vision, the ruin seemed to be a desolate and haunted place, especially in the feeble moonlight.

Ancient buildings clustered along the cliff face, with so many hollowed out windows and doorways that the whole edifice was like Argus’s petrified corpse. The whole forsaken citadel seemed husk-like, and even as they moved down the dusty streets, Milo couldn’t help remembering that he now knew strange, horrible things moved in the dark. The realization struck even deeper when he remembered that there were things even the monsters didn’t know about.

Fingers closed tight around his cane, and his other hand braced on the butt of his pistol, Milo walked as softly as he could, eyes swiveling this way and that.

So tightly wound were his nerves at the thought of a supernatural horror springing on them that when his ears registered the crack of a rifle shot, he felt relief despite the whine of an angry bullet passing inches from his head.

18

A Return

“Move and die,” came the warning in German.

After