You couldn’t have known, she said softly. This wasn’t your fault.
Milo laughed out loud at that.
Tell that to thousands of dead soldiers, he retorted.
If they were so worn down by Zlydzen's magical propaganda, they were beyond any hope of saving.
The words sounded definitive in his mind, but perversely, that only convinced him of their falseness. Imrah was lying to spare his feelings. Maybe her discorporation had left her soft.
I guess we’ll never know, Milo replied, then clamped down on his thoughts and cut himself off from her voice. He felt a frosty whisper at the back of his mind, but he shrugged it aside like a windborne shiver.
“Think we can go in there?” Ambrose asked, reminding Milo that he couldn’t shut himself off from contact with everything else. He wasn’t that powerful—not yet, at least.
Milo blinked and followed the big man’s pointing finger. Two streets down from where they stood, twin steeples thrust into the blue belly of the clear autumn sky.
“A church?” Milo asked with a raised eyebrow as he flicked the stubby cigarette into the gutter.
Ambrose looked taken aback at the question and an unfamiliar nervous look came into his eyes, but his head seemed to bob up and down of its own volition.
“I’d like to light a candle or two and…” The big man swallowed roughly and looked at the steeples.
“And what?” Milo asked, coolly ignoring the obvious discomfort his friend was experiencing. He wasn’t being gentle or kind; at the moment, human decency hardly seemed worth the effort.
“And, er, pray for you,” Ambrose said, refusing to pull his gaze away from the steeples. “You and me both, for the days ahead. I’ve got a feeling we’re going to need it.”
The wizard stared at his bodyguard, a vast heap of scarred muscle complete with twinkling green eyes and an impressive mustache, and snorted as if he’d heard a child tell a rather feeble joke.
“Need it, huh?” Milo said, but Ambrose remained on point like a bird dog, still staring at the church.
Milo looked at the steeples and felt pugnacious energy flowing through him. It was the same spirit that surged through him when pressures mounted at the orphanage and he’d taken to the streets with Roland and the crew. He’d look down the dark, dirty streets of Dresden the same way he was looking at the steeples as the first tinge of dusk slid into the heavens.
He was looking for a fight.
“Sure,” he said, a razor-edged smile creeping across his face. “Why not pay our respects to the second estate?”
Ambrose sensed the sharpness in Milo’s words and turned to him with a quizzical frown, but the magus was already springing across the street, heedless of traffic.
On a weekday afternoon, the Church of Saint Nicholas, De Nikolaikirche, proved to be singularly unfulfilling for Milo’s combative intentions. For one, there was hardly anyone in the building, and secondly, those who were present seemed hardly worth the time.
Apart from some vague notions about vandalizing the austere building, there seemed little to engage even his most juvenile aspirations.
Milo wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting when he’d swept through the double doors, but a quiet gothic hall full of empty chairs with a few aged parishioners shuffling around votive candles was not it. The doddering ancients didn’t even look up from their observances at his entry, though whether because of failed hearing or religious rapture, he didn’t know.
As he stood flummoxed and fuming at his thwarted aims of transgressive catharsis, Ambrose shuffled past him to deposit a few coins in a box. Milo tried to recover with a snide remark about throwing good money after bad idolaters, but Ambrose had taken a votive candle off a waiting tray and was headed away. The wizard was left at the head of the sanctuary with nothing but his thoughts and Imrah’s sullen silence.
In an act even pettier than the impetus which had driven him into the church, he rapped the cane tip sharply on the floor with his first step. No one, not even the fetish-bound ghul, rose to the bait.
Muttering curses and blasphemies he barely understood, Milo walked a few steps down the aisle between the empty chairs, deflated and defeated. He’d hoped for a chance to sneer at a priest’s unctuous manner or disrupt the preening of churchgoers, but the scenes and figures he’d concocted on his way over were absent. No, oily, fork-tongued ministers, no fat, blustery men in nice suits, no puckered, frowning women in over-elaborate frocks were present, just a few old men in workmen’s dusty coveralls and one old woman, her bowed head covered by a scarf that couldn’t quite contain a copious mass of brittle gray locks.
Milo supposed he could saunter over to where one of the workmen knelt with hands clasped and start pulling faces or whispering obscenities, but he wanted to struggle, not abuse.
He wanted to shake off the gory chains that had bound and burdened him in the general staff meeting, but he couldn’t do that by teasing and taunting a bent old man with gnarled hands clasped in prayer. He wanted to purge himself through struggle, to rage against an enemy, to remind himself he was bloodied and unbowed, even if it was in the theoretical realm.
But to blast some wiry-haired old woman made him the abuser, the monster, and he had enough of that burden sitting between his shoulders already.
The urge to kick one of the small wooden chairs down the aisle was suddenly so strong he sat down crookedly before his legs betrayed him. The chair creaked loud enough that Milo couldn’t help wincing and looking around, but no one seemed to notice. This inattention of the patrons combined with his anger at his
