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

time,” the marquis said archly. “I provided you with a glamour to make certain you reach her quickly as long as you don’t dawdle.”

Milo stared at the Rollsy and then looked at the fey.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Illusions convincing bodies and souls that things are or aren’t happening is one thing, but making us believe we’re flying can’t make us fly, can it?”

The marquis bent double and laid a long hand on Milo’s shoulder.

“Oh, you’d be amazed what believing something can do,” he said, his words a whisper that brushed Milo’s mind. “And no one said that men and the Folk were the only wills you could bend. Once upon a time, men knew mountains slept and rivers raged, so would it not serve me to seduce gravity?”

With that, he raised up and looked over Milo at Ambrose.

“Gear determines altitude,” he explained. “Everything else should be fairly familiar, but remember to not dawdle.”

Mind racing but not needing to be told a third time, Milo climbed aboard the Rollsy, with the marquis’ voice behind him.

“I expect we’ll be seeing you very soon, Magus. Take care, and keep an open mind.”

Milo sank into his seat and saw the fey had vanished.

“Should I be concerned about all this fey business being mostly illusions?” Ambrose asked, eying the gear shift nervously.

“Try not to think about it too hard,” Milo said and quickly added, “Especially when we're in the air.”

The mountains rolled beneath them like rocky waves breaking in shades of white and slate as they rose from a green sea. The majestic vistas passed beneath them, and had speed not been so vital, Milo would have liked to savor the beauty.

When first leaving the Lost Vale, Ambrose had refused to put the glamoured Rollsy in anything but first gear, which put them twenty or so feet off the ground. Eventually, Milo was able to cajole and taunt Ambrose to rise higher with needling jabs at the big man’s pride. In third gear, they’d risen to several hundred feet off the ground, and it was just as well because they soon spotted a burnt-out farmstead on the horizon, a smear of soot and cinders on a hillside.

Milo’s stomach slithered into a tight coil behind his ribs, and he shouted to Ambrose over the whistling wind.

“Higher,” he called, jabbing a thumb upward. “We need to get higher.”

Ambrose’s face was pale tinged with green, but he nodded and shifted into fourth gear. The previous ascensions had been gradual, but this final gear was too ambitious for such gentleness. Both men were flattened against the seats as they rocketed up, stopping only once they were what must have been thousands of feet up. It took a minute or two before either of them did anything but breathe before they unclenched.

His heart hammering, Milo hung his head out over the cab door and surveyed the land below, stretching out in a perspective he’d not experienced since the zeppelin in Afghanistan. God’s-eye-view he’d heard it called, and if that was so, Milo decided that explained a good deal about the deity. The world was beautiful but detached, and cold was all around.

Milo pushed the morose thoughts aside as he saw that the burnt farmstead was not an isolated incident. Winding like a ribbon of destruction unfurling south, Milo saw other homes and hamlets that had received similar treatment. The once-picturesque dwellings and settlements were now smoldering black blots on the landscape, throwing up choking plumes of smoke.

“Dear God,” Milo muttered, oblivious to the irony of the exclamation as he sank back.

“Looks like Joseph already found his way home.” Ambrose grunted next to him, his face purged of color. “Wonder where he’s going?”

Milo willed himself to look again at the devastation’s path.

“South,” he said stiffly. “Towards Tiflis, maybe.”

Ambrose nodded and gingerly applied his foot to the accelerator.

“Good,” he wheezed, looking for all the world like he might pass out, vomit, or both at the same time. His knuckles stood out like great white knobs on the wheel. “Means he’s not headed for Shatili. The contessa should still be safe.”

“And Lokkemand will be furious.” Milo groaned, feeling dark despair well inside him. “I was away when the enemy arrived. I’ll be lucky if he doesn’t shoot me on sight.”

The Rollsy growled a little louder as its driver applied his foot. From this altitude, the earth stretched out in imitation of the maps Ambrose had copied, making navigation a trivial concern.

“One bridge at a time,” Ambrose said slowly. “Let’s save the contessa, and then we can worry about what Lokkemand will do.”

Milo shook his head, feeling the black waves lapping at him again. His situation seemed impossible, and even though he’d known this was a possibility, he’d desperately hoped that it wouldn’t come to pass. What had started out seeming to be the only right answer had devolved into another trade-off, a measure forestalling eventual collapse.

What good was saving Rihyani if it resulted in the usurpation of an entire country and the dissolution of Nicht-KAT? Didn’t that put him in the same spot as before? No, it was worse, he realized, much worse. The selfishness implicit in the thought sickened him, but he couldn’t shake it. He couldn’t think of any other thing he could have or would have done, but that only made things worse.

He was playing a rigged game, and knowing that only deepened his disgust at his circumstances, and more intensely, his inability to escape them.

There was nothing he could do to escape the fact that he wasn’t enough, that he—

“Stop it!”

The words tore themselves from Milo’s throat with such force that Ambrose jumped, and his foot came off the accelerator.

“What the hell was that?” Ambrose shouted, but Milo was too busy to notice.

He was gripping his head and compelling his magical awareness inward.

The tide of despairing, suffocating thoughts had been in his own mental voice, but they were not his. They’d sprung from some cavity inside of him where something nested, subtle and clinging, but they