Sorcerybound (World's First Wizard Book 2) by Aaron Schneider (best color ereader .TXT) 📗

his heart coming down from a threadier pace in fits and starts. Drawing his focus from inward to outward, he pressed the witchlight to reach out and caress the sigils carved into the floor and filled with a mixture of ash and silver. They glimmered with a sinister opalescence in the green light, winding in concentric rings of eye-searingly intricate patterns. Satisfied that everything was still in place, Milo fitted the cane into a sconce set in the wall, where it continued to glow.

“Not sure you’re supposed to,” Ambrose grumbled around a mouthful of bread as he stepped around Milo and carefully deposited his burdens on the floor. “But if you do, let me know.”

The big man handed over the wooden box retrieved from the hidden alcove in the study, clearly glad to get some distance from the vessel.

Milo’s fingers traced the engravings worked into the box, right-angled versions of the sigils that coiled on the floor in front of him. He could feel the traceries of silver he’d dribbled into each side, a modified version of a warding recipe in Spectral Ruminations. The abridged texts he’d been studying since his tutelage among the ghuls had proven to be the only beginning of knowledge rather than the boundary. With not much to do during the claustrophobic winter in Shatili, he’d quickly raced through the codices he had and was soon pushing the limits of the theories and the directives presented. More and more, he had learned magic was an art, even among the seemingly regimented practice of alchemical necromancy. Rules could be bent with ingenuity and fortitude.

The top of the box was sealed by a locked latch worked in heavy pewter. The padlock’s keyhole had been filled with molten brass, so the congealed lump denied any attempts to unlock the container.

Milo took the box and set it in the exact center of the concentric rings.

“I still say that you should tell Jorge about this,” Ambrose muttered, holding out a bowl full of iron filings. “I mean, what if something she’s told us could be useful?”

“It,” Milo corrected, scooping out a generous handful of the ferrous dust. “It, not she.”

Ambrose rolled his eyes.

“Well, it sure looks a lot like her,” the bodyguard shot back before trading the bowl for the pouch of hearth ash. “And that doesn’t change my point.”

“We don’t know that anything we’ve heard is even true, much less useful,” Milo retorted before he took a pinch of ash and sprinkled it across the filings. “The last thing we need to do is waste the colonel’s time.”

The iron fractals began to hiss, smoke, and then glow with a forge’s heat. Milo let the simmering particles fall from his hand toward the floor, watching as they tumbled around and into one another. By the time they reached the stones, they’d coalesced into a key whose toothy tip still glowed with heat.

Testing first with a light touch before pinching the blackened ring between his thick fingers, Ambrose drew the key up and carefully handed it to Milo, wary of the glowing end.

“I think it has less to do with the colonel’s time and more to do with his permission,” Ambrose grumbled as he stepped clear.

Milo shook his head but didn’t take the time to argue.

Instead, he stepped to the box and pressed the glowing head into the brass-choked lock. There was an instant of resistance, then a bubbling hiss as brass wept from the keyhole and the key began to slide in. Even with the molten metal dribbling across its face to pool on the floor, the ensorcelled box remained unmarred. Sweat sprang to Milo’s brow as his spirit strove to unfasten wards under intense pressure without destroying them. The key and lock were ritual instruments, physical manifestations of magical realities, a pantomime for an operation that was metaphysical yet necessary for its success.

The day Milo understood exactly why one needed the other was the day he’d understand things at a much deeper level than he could imagine. For now, though, he had to focus his will and try not to scorch his fingers to the bone at the same time.

Milo felt as much as heard the soft click through the spitting brass as the key drove home. Steeling his mind and body for the next step, he turned the key as he released a single steadying breath.

The pewter lock fell into the pool of brass, the heavy latch flew open, and a nightmare emerged.

Lightless beyond even Milo’s magical senses, it was a living shadow given a perverse physicality as it twisted and wrenched itself from the container. Amorphous flesh writhed around warping disjointed bones, refusing to take any shape except that of something straining and raging with overlong limbs and groping digits. The only thing which remained fixed was some semblance of a head, which flopped this way and that while two glowing eyes remained fixed hatefully on Milo as he watched it struggling.

The temperature plummeted, and soon Milo could see his breath forming in front of him in little puffs. A scream like the shearing of a soul pierced the stillness of the dungeon. The air seemed to vibrate with the pent-up malice of the cry as though trembling to bear such hatred.

“BE STILL,” Milo commanded in an eldritchly-empowered voice.

Impossibly the horror emerging from the box ceased its straining, and its keening faltered into silence. It swayed slightly, an oscillating torso with an odd number of limbs jutting from a box that could not have held half its mass. The lolling head watched Milo with open hunger, a low cunning glinting in its eyes.

“You come to us again, Milo,” the shade burbled in a voice as foul as a septic wound. “Do you think we have anything more to teach you?”

Milo met the taunting glare with a cold, unrelenting stare that bored into the undead specter until it shivered. The magus felt a smile tug at the corners of his mouth; he was either getting better, or the familiar