There were more mutters and rumbles, but Milo snuck a peek in time to see Ludendorff quiet them with a wave of one vulture-like hand. He felt the gaze settling on him, but it seemed more intrigued than hostile, and that steadied Milo. He looked at the photos again, and something caught the corner of his eye and dragged his attention back to one photograph.
A smile, wide to the point of splitting, stretched across the face of a corpse. The dead man had spitted two men who had gutted him as they died. Something about the scene seemed familiar, and not just the two impaled men.
It was the smile, he decided as he stared.
“The shades were powerful but unfocused,” he continued as he flicked through the other photographs, unsure of what he was looking for. “Without magical will to channel them, they would have exhausted themselves quickly since unfocused actions waste huge amounts of their essence. They needed a receptacle.”
There!
He found the same smile on another face, just as wide and somehow disturbingly similar even though it was clear this was another body with another cause of death. Scanning the body, he saw that its hands were drenched in gore so that it was hard to see them clearly in the black and white photograph, while it was easy to see that the legs were gone below the knee. As he studied the maniacal grin straining the features, he thought it was almost like the man’s face had been forced to adopt features that were not his own.
Something twisted in his stomach, and he wondered at his choice to leave his cane outside with Ambrose. He could have mentally conferenced what was becoming a theory with Imrah, though right now, he feared she would confirm his growing dread.
“The shades would have been looking for a receptacle for their essence, something they could latch on to,” he carried on, then words failed him and his mouth went dry as he flipped through more photographs. “But without a magical focus or will to anchor them, they would have been butting up against the natural barrier that all living souls create.”
Milo stared at another photo.
In this one, a dead soldier lay flat on the ground, his head turned to the left. His arms were extended out to either side, and his fingers were buried in the backs of the men on either side of him. Dark splashes of blood ran up to the shoulder of his uniform. Half of his face was pressed into the dirt and there was a fist-sized hole through his back, but Milo could still see the gaping grin.
Again the features seemed pressed out of their natural shape to create a maniacal mask.
“Shades are echoes,” Milo said, his voice and thoughts in danger of being lost amongst the growing clamor of German oaths and denouncements. “They might act like thinking spirits, but they are pieces of what they once were. They have a set of patterns, and they can’t do anything except repeat them.”
Milo remembered what Rihyani had told him about the kind of mental degradation those manipulated by Zlydzen would undergo over time. Could that damage have been spiritual as well? She had talked about them being hollowed-out shells, but what if it was more than their thoughts that had been scraped clean?
“Damn it all!” Ludendorff barked, then gave several rattling coughs. The room quieted as all eyes, even Milo’s, turned to watch the crumbling titan struggle to regain his breath.
“I’ll have the room cleared if that happens again,” the general said in a wheezing growl as his watery, red-rimmed eyes swept the chamber. Several of the faces staring back at him raised chins and puffed out chests defiantly, but none was so bold as to say anything.
“You seemed to be reaching for some discovery,” Ludendorff said as he turned his gaze back to Milo. “I suggest you come to it quickly.”
Milo nodded, but he felt like there was a boulder in his stomach and that burdensome lump was also chained to his tongue, which didn’t want to verbalize what he now realized must be the truth.
He started to speak, but his voice failed him. He told himself that not saying it didn’t make it not true, but somehow in his very foundations, he knew it did make it more true.
Especially for him.
“I think the shades possessed the soldiers,” Milo said, the words coming out in a bitter and caustic rush. “The long-term magic the Soviets were under left them vulnerable. Left them open somehow, and the malicious shades leaped at the chance.”
How many of the wicked things had he bound up in those soul wells? Hundreds, at least.
“The shades became violent upon possessing the soldiers,” Milo continued, tasting bile and iron at the back of his throat. “Hundreds of men turned on their comrades, and after they were put down, the shades sprang out of the corpses to possess new men. Those shades that ran out of living targets would have destroyed anything within reach. Nothing was left because the shades wouldn’t have left anything alive or in one piece.”
The silence in the room was so complete that Milo might have thought he’d gone deaf if not for the hammer of his heart in his chest and the rasp of his breath.
Ludendorff’s face was a pensive facade again, and none dared to disturb his considerations.
“I confess that I am not well versed in all of Jorge’s reports on such matters,” the general said at last, his words slow and measured, “but I think I have the rudiments of what you have explained. You unwittingly exterminated a host of magically vulnerable soldiers using a conjured army
