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

He took a steadying breath despite the wind whipping across his face and tried to think.

If Kimaris was determined to get him, fleeing to camp in the zeppelin would make a bad situation worse. If the disappearances of the patrolling squads were evidence, small arms fire was useless, and given the thing’s nature, Milo wasn’t certain that anything short of fire would harm it. There was a possibility that with enough explosives, most of which produced little flame, along with any and all flamethrowers in the entire division, they might be able to hold Kimaris off. That was if Milo could get everyone organized before they arrived.

Given what he would be trying to prepare them for, he doubted his chance of success.

If they headed back to Command, there was a good chance they would be handing hundreds, even thousands of soldiers over to this fiendish jelly-monster.

Milo swore under his breath and stared across the sky at the zeppelin that was banking for a broadside view of the draw as its surveillance crew frantically took pictures. Desperately, Milo wished it was a bombardier instead of a reconnaissance blimp. With a payload like one of those leviathans carried, they would at least have a chance to punch a few holes in Kimaris, and with an incendiary bomb or two, they might have handled the whole business. The truth was that Kimaris was being reckless, exposing itself above the ground like this, but given the situation, he wondered if it was a calculated risk. Why he was worth taking that risk, Milo didn’t know, but he imagined any hope of finding that answer had died with Imrah.

As he stared at the vast blimp, Milo’s frustration mounted. So huge, so expensive, so immense, and yet so useless with its vast interior filled with hydrogen bladders…

A wonderfully awful idea began to take root in Milo’s mind.

Trying not to twist too much in the contessa’s grip, he craned his neck around and spied the sharp peak Ambrose had pointed out when they were on the hilltop.

It was probably insane, but it just might work.

“If you had to,” Milo called up to Rihyani, “could you get the crew to safety in short order?”

The fey looked down at him, her silver hair snapping behind her like a banner.

“Why are you asking?” She frowned.

“Could you do it?” Milo pressed, staring up into her golden pupils.

Rihyani looked at the zeppelin, eyes narrowed, and then at Milo.

“Depends,” she answered, her caution clear despite her raised voice. “How many men would be on board?”

“A dozen at most,” Milo answered, not sure of his answer, which was based on seeing the airman crews moving in a gaggle across the command post.

“If none of them are built like your bodyguard, we could manage it in two trips,” she shouted, her face still set in a frown. “What do you have in mind?”

Milo smiled up at her winningly.

“Just some more of that old Roman stuff.”

It turned out to be three trips to clear out the zeppelin’s crew, which was just as well because it took some time for Milo and Ambrose to get the crew to turn the airship around and sail it toward the peak of Milo’s choosing.

He was doubly thankful for the fey as the pilot jabbered on because the potent creatures seemed to possess the knack for enchanting the crew into cooperating. As the moon-eyed crewman lined up in an orderly fashion to be carried away by the wind-riding fey, Milo decided he would insist on learning from the fey next.

Of course, he had to survive the next half-hour, which was far from certain.

“As long as these all stay where they are,” Milo said, pointing at the network of controls he couldn’t begin to understand, “we should slide right by that mountain top.”

“Jah.” The pilot nodded. “But you’ll need a man to stay and make sure wind currents or something else don’t knock you off course.”

Milo nodded, then pointed out the open window of the cockpit.

“How close will we pass the peak?”

The pilot’s face scrunched around his goggles, and he sucked his teeth as he checked one of the instruments in front of him.

“Within one to two hundred meters,” he said, tapping a reading Milo didn’t bother to look at.

“Make it half that,” Milo said, then repeated the command when the pilot balked.

“That’s too close,” the pilot protested.

“That’s an order,” Milo shouted back, tapping the pentagram studs on his cap.

Under the skin of the blimp, amongst swollen sacks of hydrogen bigger than houses, the whistling rush of wind was absent. The only sound was the thrum of the airship's engines, a constant low buzz.

Milo scaled a ladder that connected the crew compartments below with the blimp that kept everything afloat. He emerged onto a gantry walkway that stretched the entire width of the blimp and fit between two hydrogen bladders. A second ladder rose an uncomfortably high distance to the curved top of the blimp’s structure, where, if he squinted, Milo could see a hatch.

He tried not to think about how spindly the ladder looked as it stretched upward.

On the platform stood Ambrose, his belly pressed against the railing as he secured one of the tunnel-brusher grenades to the rippling skin of the hydrogen bladder. The other tunnel-brusher was already attached, using layers of powerfully adhesive patches commandeered from the mechanics’ stores aboard the ship.

“Crews cleared out,” Milo announced as he walked across the gantry, awed by how peaceful it was inside the rigid skin. “Almost done?”

Even the thrum of the engines was almost soothing.

“Just about,” Ambrose said softly as he stepped back to review his handiwork. Satisfied, he pulled a roll of thread out of his pack and measured two equal lengths to tie to the rings on the grenades.

“So, some poor fool stands here,” Milo said, moving to the middle of the platform between the two grenades, “and pulls the string to get the grenades going.”

“Pretty much,” Ambrose muttered as he