Witchmarked (World's First Wizard Book 1) Read online

  WitchMarked

  World’s First Wizard™ Series Book 01

  Aaron D. Schneider

  Michael Anderle

  This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

  Copyright © 2020 LMBPN Publishing

  Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing

  A Michael Anderle Production

  LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  LMBPN Publishing

  PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy

  Las Vegas, NV 89109

  First US edition, September 2020

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-64971-190-8

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-64971-191-5

  Contents

  The Witchmarked Team

  Prologue: Null Victoria (July 1936)

  1. A Test

  2. A Choice

  3. A Bonus

  4. An Operation

  5. A Stair

  6. An Introduction

  7. A Threshold

  8. A Shock

  9. An Audience

  10. An Improvisation

  11. A Lesson

  12. A Development

  13. An Interruption

  14. An Adjustment

  15. A Warning

  16. A Promise

  17. A Lie

  18. A Return

  19. An Understanding

  20. A Suspicion

  21. A Complicity

  22. An Offering

  23. A Ruse

  24. A Gambit

  25. A Novelty

  Epilogue: Sine Sacrificio

  Author Notes - Aaron Schneider

  Acknowledgments

  Author Notes - Michael Anderle

  Connect with The Authors

  Other Books by Aaron Schneider

  Other LMBPN Publishing Books

  The Witchmarked Team

  Thanks to our Beta Team:

  Nicole Emens, Kelly O’Donnell, Jim Caplan, John Ashmore, Larry Omans, Rachel Beckford, Allen Collins, Billie Leigh Kelar

  Thanks to our JIT Team:

  Dave Hicks

  Deb Mader

  Rachel Beckford

  Kerry Mortimer

  Diane L. Smith

  Chrisa Changala

  Jeff Goode

  Paul Westman

  If I’ve missed anyone, please let me know!

  Editor

  SkyHunter Editing Team

  It lit me up like a torch on a pitch-black night

  Like an ember in the needles of a dried-up pine

  Lit Me Up, Brand New

  “Woe to the rash mortal who seeks to know that of which he should remain ignorant, and to undertake that which surpasseth his power!”

  Vathek, William Beckford

  Magic

  Sandra’s seen a leprechaun,

  Eddie touched a troll,

  Laurie danced with witches once,

  Charlie found some goblin’s gold.

  Donald heard a mermaid sing,

  Susy spied an elf,

  But all the magic I have known

  I've had to make myself.

  Where the Sidewalk Ends, Shel Silverstein

  This book is dedicated to my mother. You were the first one who made me believe in magic. Thank you, Momma.

  — Aaron

  To Family, Friends and

  Those Who Love

  To Read.

  May We All Enjoy Grace

  To Live The Life We Are

  Called.

  — Michael

  Prologue: Null Victoria (July 1936)

  Afghani Overrun

  Captain Cassio Magrid cursed as he read the telegraphed text. Being as he was a proper Italian officer of the glorious 9th Regiment, when he swore, it was akin to improvisational art: a blistering stream of obscenities with gravitas, metaphor, and nuance. The majesty of the profane declaration was wasted on his attendants, administrative staff, and junior officers. They were sitting at what passed for the officer’s mess in the worm-holed mountains, and many gawked with food still in their mouths. Before they could recover, he started barking orders in a thunderous voice.

  “Withdrawal protocol!” he bellowed at his junior officers as he rose from the table. “Tell the sergeants to get their tunnels wired or collapse them.”

  The junior officers responded with reasonable aplomb, but Magrid still chased them out of his presence with a pointed salvo of curses. The captain knew that he was not an exceptional tactician, and strategy was often beyond him, but by the Virgin Mother, he knew how to motivate men.

  To that end, he rounded on the bloodless corporal who had delivered the message.

  “Don’t stand there like a landed fish,” he growled, shoving the crumpled piece of paper into the boy’s front pocket. “Get back down there and send a telegram to the major. ‘We are withdrawing to Bamyan, and if he has any sense, he will pull the rest of the cohort and follow suit.’”

  The messenger stared for a second, mouth still hanging open, then spun and fled toward the communication center as another onslaught rumbled in the captain’s chest.

  “The rest of you, get this mess sorted and my camp struck,” he shouted over his shoulder as he marched in the direction the corporal had run. He forced himself to keep a measured pace, knowing it wouldn’t do to have any of his men see him act frantic. Angry was fine—after all, angry men got things done—but a frantic man was one step away from panic, and that man was no use to anyone.

  Magrid was very close to frantic, even if pride and training were keeping him together for the moment. His honor guard fell into step behind him, but their presence offered little comfort.

  With the godforsaken Afghanis routed, he had minutes, maybe less, before those pasty devils of the German Army were pouring over and through the tunnels honeycombing the mountainside. Amir Amanullah’s forces, the rabble their allies called an army, had been the bulwark between his forces and the far more numerous enemy. Without that bulwark, the northern brutes could sweep him and his men away in a single assault.

  Magrid didn’t think of himself as a coward, but he did not relish the idea of such an inglorious defeat. The second he’d read those two words, he’d known he was not going to throw his career or his men away in a futile defensive action. These cursed mountains had already taken their toll on his forces, with absolutely nothing to show for it. If he’d wanted to spend his time in a meat grinder, he would have stayed on the trench-striped wastes of Crna Bend or Monastir.

  A percussive thump resounded from the tunnels.

  The air was choked with dust and sulfurous smoke.

  Another bark of profanity, less skillful than those before, spewed out of Magrid’s mouth, along with foul-tasting grit. The dust settled across the passage, turning the crimson uniforms of the Italian soldiers to a musty shade of rust. Blinking like owls at dawn, the men in his guard turned to their captain.

  He spun on his heel and headed for the freight tunnels.

  The explosions could only mean one thing: the enemy was already advancing through the tunnels. One of the rigged tunnels, probably the one Alpha principi was respon
sible for, had blown, sealing it shut, but that was one of six main tunnels that fed into their position. Magrid’s mind raced, trying to come to grips with the reality that the German soldiers had covered half a mountain in such short order.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he snarled, shaking his head savagely as he accelerated to a jog. He was thankful to hear the boots of his honor guard behind him.

  He had to get to the freight tunnels, where the rails could carry him out of the blasted mountain to Jubal. From the fortified town, he could assess what had become of his command.

  Another boom shook the dust from the overhead lights strung throughout the tunnel, and the captain fought to keep from flinching. His pace quickened as he tried to remember which passage was the quickest way to the freight lines. He choked back a scream of frustration as he passed a sign for the secondary armory chamber up ahead, realizing he’d taken a left instead of a right. He would have cursed the mute soldiers huffing behind him, but he was heaving air in and out in great blowing rushes.

  Swiping sweat from his eyes, he took the next left and nearly sprinted down the winding tunnel. His heart was hammering in his chest, and not just with the effort. Screams had begun to echo through the tunnels, punctuated by the reverberating cracks of rifle and pistol fire.

  He needed to reach that rail.

  Like an answer to prayer, the tunnel unfolded into a cavern filled with crates stacked upon sagging pallets. Clusters of lights dangled from poles jutting ceilingward between the maze of wooden boxes, their glare casting sharp shadows across the floor but failing to reach the vault above.

  A firm hand took Magrid by the shoulder as he made to forge his way between the crates.

  “Please, Captain,” said the steady voice of Sergeant Major Pavoni, the head of the honor guard. “Let us secure the area.”

  Magrid’s face twisted with the competing fears of an ambush and the enemy that was smashing his forces to bits behind them. A wild, almost joyful scream sounded from the tunnel they had just emerged from, then there was a crunching thump of a detonation, followed by a billowing cloud of dust.

  “No time!” Magrid snapped, pulling himself free of Pavoni’s grip with a jerk.

  The captain led his honor guard through the stacks, crying out as he spotted the rail carts between an alley in the hastily stacked assortment of supplies. Not waiting to see who followed, he squeezed down the alley, forced to turn sideways to scrape past.

  “Nearly there,” he wheezed, failing to convince himself that he was encouraging his guards.

  He slid free of the claustrophobic passage of stacked wood and gave a whoop of victory that fell apart in his mouth as he looked down the line of squatting carts.

  The locomotive had been reduced to a mangled collection of gears and metal shards, and its jagged surface glistened with something dark and viscous. Before Magrid’s numb stare, the pile of gears shifted and collapsed in upon itself with an acidic hiss. The air stank of burnt ammonia.

  “Treachery!” Pavoni snarled as the rest of the guard unslung their rifles and raised them to their shoulders. “Sabotage.”

  Magrid continued to gape, unwilling to believe that for the first time in his not-undistinguished military career, he was about to face a battle he could not avoid and could not win. This wasn’t what he’d bargained for when he’d taken the assignment to Afghanistan.

  “Enemy sighted!” one of the guards barked, and the honor guard turned as one.

  The first row to rush in from the opposite side of the cavern was scythed down by a disciplined salvo of rifle fire. Men so dusty their uniforms were almost unrecognizable crumpled to the floor as heavy rounds punched through flesh and bone, many dead before the fatal shot’s shell casing struck the stone.

  More piled in after the doomed frontrunners, toppling and lurching over their dead comrades. The second volley, more rushed and leveled at the erratically moving targets, only felled half of the men, the wayward shots biting into crates or sparking off the walls.

  The honor guards were chambering a third round of fire when Pavoni’s voice echoed through the cavern like a mortar blast.

  “Cease fire!” he howled, his voice almost pained.

  Over a half-dozen Italian soldiers lay dead or dying, while more terrified faces pressed into alleys between the boxes. Like a bewildered herd, the men at the front were driven forward. They stepped on the fallen, whose cries were soon drowned out by the sobs and fearful curses of an entire platoon, some thirty men.

  “What’s going on?” Pavoni snarled, glaring at the advancing faces of the men, not daring to spare a look at Magrid.

  “Something’s in the tunnels!” a man shrieked as more men began to jostle forward. “We have to get out!”

  Something? Not someone? The oddity of the statement drew Magrid’s mind, kicking and screaming, from his hasty escape plan to the men in the chamber.

  “How far have the Germans advanced?” the captain demanded, forcing himself to use his battlefield voice. These sorry cowards were his best chance of getting out of here, and he was determined to get them sorted quickly.

  “The tudro aren’t in the tunnels, sir,” said one of the forward men, passing a trembling hand over his terror-pale face. “It was something else.”

  Again, “something.” The vague menace of the word infuriated Magrid.

  “Say something sensible,” he snarled as he drew his pistol. “Or never speak again.”

  Even staring down the barrel of the sidearm, the men advanced another few steps.

  “I-I don’t know what it is,” the forward soldier stammered before taking a fear-swollen gulp as he genuflected. “But it came up through the tunnels. It was huge, dark, and fast, and blessed Maria, it stank.”

  Stank? Magrid held the pistol steady but dared a glance at the noxious pile of scrap metal that had been a locomotive.

  “Cowards!” Magrid spat, sweeping the pistol at the lot of them. “You ran for your lives from some phantom instead of fighting like men! Cowards!”

  Then the question Captain Cassio Magrid had been fearing all his life was asked by a sharp voice in the midst of the throng.

  “What were you doing, sir?”

  Magrid was spared having to answer that damning question when a scream rose from the rear of the formation.

  Men turned and saw their death coming. Some made ready to fight, others fell to the floor and wept, and some just stood there in shock. Captain Magrid was one of the latter, despite what he had been told about how his end would come. It was huge, it was dark, it was fast, and when the dark, gnawing tide swept over him and bore him down to a messy end, his last thought was a rather repetitive realization: it did stink.

  1

  A Test

  Milo knew serving in a penal regiment would be dangerous, but he thought he’d at least make it to the frontlines before looking death in the eye.

  “Take him behind the latrines,” Jules hissed as his angry, muddy eyes bored into Milo’s pale stare. “I want him sucking his last breath face-down in filth.”

  Milo would have spat in Jules’ face if they hadn’t already wound the gag so tightly that his jaw ached. Instead, he settled for straining forward and kicking out as Jules’ cronies began to drag him away. Tall as he was, Milo’s kicks still fell woefully short of their intended targets.

  It was early morning, and the rest of the 7th Penal Regiment of the Polish Colonial Forces, the duly named “Mud-Snakes,” were busy prepping for redeployment. As such, no one noticed Milo and his rough-handed escorts as they dragged him across the camp. With one man for each arm and one to keep the gag bound tight at the base of his skull, they skirted the various companies that were hard at work.

  Supplies were heaped on flat-backed automobiles, draped in canvas, and then lashed down tight, so they resembled nothing so much as ancient, lumpy beasts of burden. Quartermasters shuffled about, counting and cursing as they sought to dredge order from the chaos, while officers gave sharp, nonsensical orders to men who�
�d learned better than to pay them much attention. The last ten weeks had not beaten any of the criminal nature out of the motley collection of men in the regiment, but it had taught them that the disgraced officers placed over them were disgraced for a reason.

  As the regimental proverb said, “Princes may turn into frogs, but generals don’t turn into mud-snakes.”

  More than once, Milo took his life into his hands, straining at his captors to try to get the attention of the men he passed by mouth or motion, but it only earned him sharp blows to the ribs. No one saw him because no one wanted to see him. The sort of business done in the shadows of a penal regiment was something no sane soul wanted to contemplate for long. Even when they reached Milo’s company, everyone seemed to be looking everywhere but at him.

  Which was why, not ten paces from the latrines, Milo nearly choked out a laugh through his gag as someone shouted his name through the bustling camp.