Wizardborn (World's First Wizard Book 3) by Aaron Schneider (classic books for 11 year olds .txt) 📗

“On your word,” Percy muttered from where he stood a short way out of the firelight. There was a brass-chafed Very pistol in one hand, prepared to signal some enticing light resistance. They couldn’t have the soldiers advancing unopposed and expect someone somewhere not to grow suspicious.

“A little closer,” Milo muttered as he stepped next to the trough that had been built to hold the ash. The bowl of blood was in his hands, still churning, with little tendrils of steam emerging as it roiled.

The lights had grown to a wall, a wave of illumination rising out of the cityscape. There were so many.

“Now,” Milo said firmly, determined to set things in motion before he lost his nerve.

Percy raised the flare gun and launched a star into the icy wind. The boreal gusts dragged the flare hard to the east, creating a slash of phosphorescent light across the black heavens. As the star became a comet in the howling gale, the sounds of gunfire rose in sharp pops. The deeper, throatier thundercracks of the Gewehr beat out a steady rhythm, while the snapping barks of pistol fire played a wilder tune.

Before Milo’s eyes, some of the lights winked out, and he held his breath.

For a moment, the wave of lights slowed, threatening to stall as the foremost points clustered together. Milo’s heart sank as he watched the entire advance grind to a halt, trying to take stock of who was shooting at them from the dark.

Had he guessed wrong? Had he thwarted himself?

Then there was a scream like a wildcat insane with rage, and he could make out a silvery flash darting from cover toward a knot of lights. Rifles barked from the huddled points of illumination as men shouted and howled, and then Milo saw the silver streak dart back to where he stood.

The Gewehr and the pistols barked again, but Rihyani’s wild charge and retreat had been the ticket. Like a vast beast awoken by having its nose pinched, the army of soulless surged forth, some advancing so quickly they had to be bounding over the broken, rubble-strewn ground like hounds on the chase.

“They’re coming,” Percy said, face pale and eyes wide as he glanced at Milo. “Can you do it? That many of them?”

Mil stepped to one end of the trough, bowl upraised.

“We’re about to find out.”

He tilted the bowl, and dribbles of blood fell on the ash with a hiss like new-forged steel being quenched. Milo moved along the length of the trough, letting the blood slide slowly free of its container. As the bowl lightened, he let go with one hand to take up Imrah’s cane, which was clenched in the crook of his arm. He leaned on the cane like an old man as he shuffled the last steps of the trough, exhausted in body and soul.

It wasn’t a liter and a half of his blood that had drained him but his very essence, his soul. That, combined with the focus he’d had to exert over the last few hours, had left him exhausted and ready to crumple if not for the energies he’d begun to draw from the cane to fortify himself.

Quickly, Imrah urged, a note of anxiety in her voice Milo wasn’t sure he’d ever heard before.

From inside his coat, Milo drew out two vials, and with a trembling hand, tore the wax seals off before drinking them together. The taste of sweet onions combined with a cold that numbed him from the inside out brought a surge of twisted and uncomfortable feelings, but the magus shoved them aside as he felt fresh strength and energy pressing through him.

“Now comes the hard part,” Milo whispered as he held both his hands over the hissing, roiling pit and let the world of mere physical realities slide off to the side.

Milo’s arcane sense opened wide, wider than he ever would have dared, and what he saw filled him with horror. With a clarity beyond sight, he perceived the raging beacon he’d created, the likes of which made the blazing bonfire behind him seem like a child’s campfire. Yet for all the furious light his expanded mind perceived, it was only a tiny dot piercing a vast expanse of utter darkness.

And that darkness was hungry.

Seething around the point of light, he could feel the attention of a thousand upon a thousand shades gazing hungrily at the beacon he’d lit. Slithering over each other in such numbers that it was impossible to tell where they ended and the void began, they crept forward with long teeth wetted by lamprey tongues.

They let out a collective rasping snarl no ear could perceive.

Time to play follow the leader, Milo whispered to the dark.

You keep teasing them and they’ll rip us both apart, Imrah warned.

Milo turned and beheld her, no longer the disembodied voice in the cane, but her ghulish figure hunched at his side. Her clawed fingers gripped his hand, and for an instant, he felt a gentle strength in the grasp he’d never known when she was alive.

Are you ready for this? he asked, knowing it wasn’t just his soul on the line.

It is a poor penance, she replied, bowing her head. But it is better than I deserve.

You and me both, he said, and for perhaps the last time, they shared a smile.

Together, they threw their combined magical might into the beacon, fracturing it into a roiling cloud of burning sparks. The horde of shades moaned and clamored, rushing forward, but the sparks were already racing out.

Milo’s eyes opened to see that the trough had erupted in a billowing rush of smoke filled with traceries of green lightning and blue fire. The vast cloud rolled out like a poisonous bank of fog to meet the soulless army charging at them.

There were flashes of unearthly brilliance as the sparks and cinders of magically driven ash fell upon hollowed soldiers, and in an instant, shades plunged into the