Milo dared a look down at the photograph. That did seem to be the case, but he imagined stating that would not do him any favors with the general. He’d ceased to tap as he leaned forward to let his rheumy eyes burrow deeper into the wizard.
“This infighting also left us with no witnesses since every single one of the soldiers was dead or fled. Even their vehicles and materiel were subjected to this violence, destroyed by their owners. In effect, what we have here is the utter destruction of an enemy force on a scale never before seen.”
Milo stared back as his chin rose and fell. He managed to keep his mouth from hanging open, but that was about all his dignity could afford at this point.
“The question then seems clear,” Ludendorff said, still frowning and boring his eyes into Milo’s soul. “Did your non-conventional countermeasures do this? Are those photographs evidence of the magical boobytrap you set?”
Milo stifled a wince as some along the sides of the long table muttered and hissed. He had nearly forgotten about them under Ludendorff’s scrutiny, but at the blatant mention of the supernatural, they intruded on the wizard’s attention as they officiously preened ruffled feathers. To his credit, the general didn’t pay them any heed.
Milo tried to weigh his words carefully, but every one felt jagged and top-heavy on his tongue.
“I would be lying if I didn’t acknowledge the part my, er, non-conventional means played, sir,” Milo said, wondering why he suddenly found it so hard to say the word “magic.” “But I would also be lying if I didn’t say that I have no idea how they achieved that result.”
Ursine grumbles and less subtle noises of indignation came from thick, bewhiskered mouths around the room. Milo had thought the ghulish court in Ifreedahm over a year ago sounded dangerous with all their viperish whispers, but he would take a snakebite over a bear mauling most days.
“So, these were not the countermeasures you planned?” Ludendorff probed, inclining his head ever so slightly to the pictures in Milo’s hands.
“No, sir,” Milo said with a shake of his head he hoped would seem earnest rather than frantic. “The, um, countermeasures were supposed to misdirect and disable communications to confuse Stalin’s forces and buy us more time to escape with him.”
The magus held the photographs in front of him as though touching them made him queasy, which wasn’t far from the truth.
“This was never my intention,” he said, honestly, bearing up under the general’s gaze.
Milo recognized that there were nuances to the statement he’d made, but the complexity of it didn’t bother him. He knew at the bottom of his heart that he didn’t have a problem with those men dying on principle. If it had been a case of him versus one of them, he’d have ended this or that soldier with a bullet or magical fire or a handy rock and not given it a second thought. He expected that any of them would have done the same, perhaps doubly so because most of them were under the influence of a dwarrow’s magic.
His disgust was for the scale and the necessity. First, scale because though he was no great philosopher or statistician, he imagined death on the scale of thousands having farther-reaching consequences than he was comfortable with. He supposed generals and statesmen could send men to die in droves at a word, but the wizard wasn’t one of those. Second, necessity because while war was a bloody business, such utter destruction of life was gratuitous. Enemies surrendered and materiel was captured; the bloody business wasn’t reduced to complete extermination.
At least, that was how it should have been to Milo’s reckoning.
“So, you are suggesting that this outcome,” Ludendorff asked as he sank back with a wheeze, “was an accident? A magical mishap?”
The grousing about the mention of magic nearly drowned out Milo’s answer of “yes,” but when it registered, the room subsequently filled with throaty snarls and wet growls. He wondered if Goldilocks had heard similar sounds when she woke up from her pilfered nap.
Ludendorff sat quietly for a moment, shriveled talons resting on the table, eyes sunk into the folds of his face. Had the lights in the room been dimmer, he might have looked like a wizened idol carved from stone. The expression on his sagging face didn’t change as he began to speak, but despite that, every voice in the room quieted when the calm, phlegmy voice emerged.
“I would like you to think very hard before you answer this next question,” the general warned, still holding his pose. “Speaking as the only expert we possess on such things, could there be any possible explanation for why these countermeasures malfunctioned so grotesquely?”
Lie, Milo thought instantly, and unbidden, a very convincing, very intricate collection of rubbish sprang to mind. It would be easy because as Ludendorff had already noted, Milo knew more about magic, or its practical applications at least, than any other person in the Empire or the world for that matter. He could mention anything he’d learned in Ifreedahm or the Marquis’s court and fabricate a befuddling and engaging lie right there on the spot. After all, not that long ago, lying had been second nature to him in his ill-fated attempt to be a professional criminal.
But damn it all, he wasn’t that person anymore, at least not entirely, and he wasn’t about to sit there with a folder full of death in his hands and twist things to try to save his skin. He wanted to—oh dear God, he desperately wanted to—but some swelling, festering sense of decency wouldn’t let him.
So instead of lying, he opened the folder full of carnage again and perused the horrors as his mouth gave voice to his mind’s musings.
“I’d rigged a series of unstable soul wells to collapse when disrupted,” he explained as he flipped between the photographs, searching for inspiration among the black and white splashes of blood and entrails. “The
