by Eric Vall
“Pray tell,” she asked, “what do you expect me to do with this?”
“Send it by courier to the king in Illaria by fastest possible means?” I suggested.
She gave me the classic stink eye, and I grabbed my note back. I didn’t need a courier, I needed a mage. I walked down, out of the palace, through the city, and down to the tracks. Korion was one of the first people I saw.
“Can you take two of the empty train cars and take this note up to the king in Serin?” I asked. “It’s extremely important. Watch out for giant flaming critters.”
Korion nodded as he took the note from me and set off.
Over his shoulder, though I promised myself I wouldn’t peek, was the most magnificent train station I’d ever seen. The Terra Mages continued to work on the details, but from my perspective, it was perfect.
My last stop was to Gwain the blacksmith.
“This is what you asked for,” he said as he gingerly handed me the orb wrapped up in paper.
“Have you tested it?” I asked.
“How would I possibly do that?” he inquired with a frown.
“Good point,” I conceded. “I’ll let you know how it works out, and you may be asked to make more.”
The blacksmith gave me a doubtful nod.
As I walked down the grand stairs to the palace, I saw Cayla, Aurora, and Bobbie at the foot. The girls had their hands on their curvy hips and expectant looks on their beautiful faces.
“You need to see this,” Cayla said.
“Not another word until you’ve seen it,” Aurora agreed.
We took Bobbie down through town to the station. My first impression was of the reflection of the station against the water. The granite that was the bedrock had an aqua green cast to it which made the station, though identical to the station in Serin, unique. I gave a push of my power and laid out the tracks and ties to finish it off.
“That’s it!” I shouted to the group. “We have completed the first transnational railroad!”
The mages celebrated with cheers, hugs, and laughter. In the middle of the group, I saw Cayla and Aurora. When they saw me, they rushed over to hug and congratulate me.
“Does it meet your expectations?” Aurora asked.
I grinned. “Exceeds them.”
“Well,” Cayla added with a wide smile across her glistening lips, “let’s go home and … celebrate.”
Bobbie knew the way back to the workshop, which was a good thing, because no one else was paying attention to the road. My right hand was down Aurora’s top, squeezing her breasts when I wasn’t pinching her nipples. My left hand was behind me and in Cayla’s pussy. I tickled her clit while my finger stroked her until she was very wet.
By the time we got to the workshop outside Eyton, we were all ready for bed, if not for sleep. That would not happen for several hours, but when it did, I slept well, my girls under my arms, their hands on my chest.
But then Aurora shook me awake in the middle of the night.
I had been dreaming of the day’s adventures, experimenting with explosives with Gwain, supervising the construction of the Grand Central Station of Cedis, and making love to my women in my workshop away from Magehill until dawn.
And yet those dreams had been rudely interrupted.
“Mason, something’s happening,” I heard the half-elf hiss though my eyes were not yet open. “You need to wake up.”
I sat up and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes so I could see the Ignis Mage clearly. She was already out of bed and dressed, but the first thing I noticed was the look of dread in her emerald green eyes.
“What’s wrong?” I asked quickly.
“I don’t know, but something’s about to happen,” Aurora said as she pulled me quickly out of bed. “You remember that strange feeling I had those three times before, just before the mine collapse, the giant fire scorpion attack, and the fire bird attack?”
“Yes, of course,” I replied while I pulled on my clothes.
“I had it again, the strongest one ever,” the Ignis Mage said, panic in her voice. “It actually woke me up it was so powerful. Something bad is about to happen.”
I didn’t know what I was about to say or do to reassure her and calm her down, but at that moment, a loud clanging bell began to peal. Aurora was right.
Something bad was going down.
Cayla shot up in bed with frantic eyes, but there wasn’t any time to waste on explanations. The half-elf was already out the door, and after Cayla and I tugged on the last of our clothes, we followed hastily on her heels.
When I reached her, she was getting aboard Bobbie. Big Guy stood outside the workshop, and he tilted his head as if to ask what was happening. I lifted him up with a strong push of my power and brought him into Bobbie’s sidecar.
“Just in case we need back up,” I said as I climbed on Bobbie behind Aurora.
“Guys!” Cayla ran to us as she struggled to toss the strap of a rifle over her shoulder. “What’s happening?”
“No time to explain,” the half-elf shouted impatiently.
“And no idea what’s happening,” I added as I helped Cayla behind me. “That’s what we’re going to find out.”
Bobbie didn’t need to be told to drive fast, she sensed the need the moment I did. We tore down the dirt road toward Eyton, and Bobbie started onto her usual shortcuts, when I had a thought that made her change direction.
“Wait, we’re not going to the palace?!” Cayla shouted in my ear.
“The threat isn’t at the palace,” I called back. “This is the agent of the Master again, and he’s always had one aim from the day he tried to stop the mining operation to today! To stop the railroad!”
We bypassed the city entirely on this hunch and cut fifteen minutes through shortcuts directly to Lake Falder and the train station. We immediately saw the flames reflected on the still water and knew what we faced before we made it all the way there.
The station was on fire.
“How is that possible?” I heard Cayla gasp to herself. “It’s made of stone!”
Impossible or not, the closer we got, the more real it became. A blue blaze covered the station from the dome at the top down to the rails.
Aurora didn’t wait until we had come to a stop before she attempted to extinguish the flame. From my position behind her, the scent of evergreen washed from her over me like a tidal wave. I could tell she gave it her all, but the flames barely flickered in response.
As we pulled to a stop in front of the station, we could see a crowd run toward us from the open gates of Eyton. With their white robes glowing in the moonlight, I could tell our mages were among them. Bagnera and Korion were soon at Aurora’s side.
“The fire is too powerful!” Aurora shouted.
“Let’s form a circuit,” Bagnera replied as she wiped sweat from her brow.
The three Ignis Mages raised their hands, and I could feel the spark on the energy. I wasn’t about to sit around and watch either. The moment I spotted Haragh, Pindor, Churchwell, and the other Terra Mages in the crowd, I pulled them over to me.
“Let’s start a circuit too,” I shouted. “We’ll try to smother it with dirt!”
The Terra Mages nodded and in unison, we dropped to our knees, hands in the sandy soil at the shore of the lake. I felt their energy pass to me and mine to them, and together we unleashed a massive wave of power into our element. The dirt all around us rose up in a flood and washed over the station.
All of our efforts seemed to pay off at least a little. Most of the flames had diminished and a few had gone out completely. Still, between the efforts of nine mages working their damndest, I would have thought we could put out a fucking fire.
It was when I was standing there with my eyes on the scorching of the beautiful structure and the warping of the tracks that I saw it.
The runes.
The same runes I had seen everywhere, from the mines to long before on the amulet around Mage Abrus’s neck, were carved into t
he space where the clock on the tower was to be installed. I sometimes wondered whether it was truly part of a spell or just a profane act of mockery. The ultimate fuck you graffiti. It didn’t matter to me really. It was the mark of The Master and if it wasn’t personal before, it was now.
“Mason!” Cayla shouted, which broke me out of my angry revenge fantasy. “Count the number of train cars!”
There were four, including the locomotive, but there should have been five.
Cayla and I didn’t waste a word before we ran full sprint to Aurora, who still tried to extinguish the flames with the help of the other Ignis Mages. I grabbed her by the arm, which seemed to break her out of the spell.
“Come on, he’s getting away!” I bellowed before the half-elf had a moment to object. “He has one of the train cars!”
Haragh spotted us and roared, “Where are you going?!”
We had just reached where Bobbie was parked when I turned and yelled back, “We’re going to get the bastard who did this! Try to save what you can!”
The moment our asses hit the seats, Bobbie skipped onto the train tracks and accelerated fast northward. That was the thing about stealing a train on a track’s terminal station: there was only one direction one could run.
In my head, I tried to calculate how far ahead he could be. It had been about an hour since Aurora woke me up and the bells started to ring their alarm. If that had been the moment the Master’s agent set the station on fire and took off in the train car, if he had been going maximum speed, he’d be halfway to Pautua by now. We would never be able to catch up even if we chased him all the way to the other terminus in Magehill, and who knew what damage he could do to the other stations along the way?
The moment I had that thought, Bobbie popped off the track, and Aurora turned to give me a questioning look.
“The train can’t take a shortcut to Paulua, but we can,” I grinned.
The shortcut, the straightest path to the queen of the cattle towns as it were, was a harrowing ride up and down over the hilliest terrain, and required us to jump fences, splash through creeks, swerve around trees, and drive blind through eight foot tall blades of prairie grass. All at night time. I trusted Bobbie’s instincts, but my heart felt like it would burst out of my chest for most of the ride.
We were back in cattle country, dodging cows and steer in their grazing fields, when I saw the stolen train car on the tracks to the north-east. It was going at its maximum speed, and I felt a new stab of anger that the thief had been the one to experience that sensation before me. He wasn’t driving ass backwards either. Bastard.
“Look!” shouted Aurora.
Before I had a chance to see what she saw, Bobbie was struck in the front by something covered in flames. The sapphire windscreen held strong, but Bobbie wobbled, and we were showered by sparks from the impact.
I looked up as Bobbie began swerving left and right as if to avoid something, but as I looked behind me, I saw no sign of the fiery object we had been struck by. Turning back, I noticed Aurora look up, and I followed her stare up into the starlit sky.
It hung in the sky, awash in flames of yellow, orange, and red, and it watched us pass below with a long serpentine face and open mouth that dripped with fire. Its wings beat slowly as if it treaded air like people tread water.
It was, for lack of a better word, a flame dragon.
Aurora pointed her hand up at it and set forth a jet of blue flame. The creature opened it maw to drink the flames in and came in closer. Aurora immediately ceased her flame attack.
“No, keep doing that,” I said to the half-elf, and then jerked my head back to the princess. “How close are we to the twenty foot waterfall you got us to avoid outside Pautua?”
“One mile that way!” Cayla shouted, and I mentally transmitted that information to Bobbie.
Bobbie altered her direction but continued to weave back and forth to avoid being targeted. Aurora sent up another blast of blue flame at the beast, and as before, it devoured the attack and began to fly closer. I had hoped it was a trick of perspective that it appeared to get bigger only because it got closer, but I had to admit to myself it was true.
The dragon that fed on Aurora’s flame was larger than before.
Her flame didn’t just attract it, it nourished it. That meant if things didn’t go to plan, we would have a very big dragon to deal with.
“Turn right at the next hill!” Cayla yelled in my ear.
“Come on, you got to reel it in, like he’s the biggest fish in the sea,” I shouted to Aurora.
The half-elf doubled down on her blue flame, and I could feel the heat of it as it flew from her fingers. I dared to look up, and I saw the dragon was mere feet above us now. It was close enough that I could have reached up and touched it if I wanted to be roasted.
It was at that moment when the dragon was almost upon us that we drove under the waterfall. The beast’s shriek echoed over the valley, and we could see nothing but steam.
When I could see again, we were on a hillside, nearly vertical, and there was no dragon to be seen in any direction. I breathed a sigh of relief as we came up over the side of the hill and into the middle of Pautua.
The empty village was even emptier than usual at this late hour as Bobbie steered down to the tracks. I heard rather than saw the train car’s approach from the south and sped up to intercept.
I reached into my satchel and slipped something into Cayla’s hand. She held it up, and her eyes opened wide when she guessed what it was.
It was a steel orb with a cap and ring on top, the size of a baseball with segments like a pineapple for easier grip, and matching notches on the inside to make it fragment on detonation. Inside was six and a half ounces of ammonium nitrate Gwain and I had on loan from the royal botanists. Pulling the ring on top would release a thin metal striker on tiny springs so it would tap a percussion cap filled with just a pinch of gunpowder, enough to light a spark. This spark ignited the fuse, just a sliver of tin coated with gunpowder, which by our calculations would take about four seconds to burn from one end to the other, and set off the compartment with the ammonium nitrate. It wasn’t particularly complicated, but it was tiny detail work and the sort of thing which if done wrong could be pretty disastrous. I had thought it best to work with a colleague.
Not that it had ever been tested. Where the hell was I supposed to test a grenade in King Davit’s castle? So this would be our test, right in the middle of an important battle. It could be a dud or it could be overkill that blows us all up, like the magnesium ball I shoved into the fire bird’s gullet nearly did. Not that I told Cayla that.
“When we’re almost next to the car, pull out the pin, throw it under the rails,” I explained and gave her a grin, “then count to four, and we’ll see what happens.”
Cayla looked at it like I just gave her an engagement ring. Poor girl was as weird as I was. She squeezed my waist in a hug as we drew near to the train car.
We were two seconds away from passing the train car when I shouted, “Now!”
The princess pulled the pin and the trigger flew off the top of the grenade. She tossed it to the tracks, and we sped on. Based on my calculations, we needed to get a hundred yards away in four seconds, which was a little over fifty-five miles per hour, very close to Bobbie’s maximum speed. Needless to say, Bobbie picked up on this and accelerated rapidly.
One … two … three … four …
“Damn!” I groaned. “It’s a dud--”
Then a massive explosion sounded, and Bobbie did a one hundred and eighty degree spin so we could see what had happened. My poor train car, which had taken me hours to create, rolled end over end off the tracks to come to rest in the grass in the shadow of the town of Pautua.
We steered Bobbie over to the smoking husk of the car, and the three of us stepped off the bike and approached.
A flash of flickering light in the window of the car told us to get ready, and we were prepared when the creature leapt out fr
om the car door. When it did, it was burning tentacles first, half fire and half plasma in their boneless mushiness, as they flailed about trying to blindly catch someone, anyone. The rest of the torpedo shaped body seemed to be dragged out by these appendages, and it included a single yellow burning eye which gave us a stare of resigned malevolence.
“Dude!” I shouted, “You’ve given us a giant fire scorpion, a fire bird, a flaming dragon, and now we’re at a fire squid? You’re making me cry. Aurora, would you put this thing out of its misery?”
“Gladly,” the half-elf replied and, with a wave of her hand, extinguished it.
There was another flash of light through the windows, and while I was prepared for another creature to come out of the back door, a fiery humanoid flew up through the steel wall like it was a hot knife through butter. It sent out a blast of hot air in its wake, strong enough to knock me on my ass.
“You cannot even begin to fathom the power that is behind me,” the creature bellowed as it rose up into the night sky. “Soon you will all bow to his majesty or be destroyed.”
“I think you know our choice,” I said as I sent a dirty curl of soil and pebbles toward him, and I smelled Aurora’s pinewood scent and knew she had her powers set to extinguish this being.
The fiery humanoid zig-zagged through the air to avoid my projectiles, but finally it crashed down to the ground. The flames dissipated, and all that was left was a middle-aged man with black curly hair and angry eyes.
“Daibusu,” Aurora murmured as she blinked in surprise. Then her eyes shot over to me. “Mason, this is Daibusu, the ultimate Ignis Mage, who I always thought should have been head of the Order of Elementa after Abrus died. Guess it was a good thing he wasn’t. It seems he and Abrus had the same Master.”
“It would have been too easy to become head of the Order.” Daibusu smiled, but there was blood on his lips. “But Wyresus was a useful fool. With him in charge, trust in magery would continue to drop, and would-be mages would find another home. Our home.”
“Sorry to put a damper on your plans,” I said sarcastically.