by Dante King
“What the… Where did the big orange fuck g—”
A leg swept out from in front of me, swinging across my path like a big orange tree limb. I dropped to my knees, fell into a clean army-roll that would have had my old gym teacher weeping with joy, and felt Mega-Brad’s leg sail over the top of me.
Unfortunately, there was no time for me to pat myself on the back. The whole rolling dodge business had not only saved me from a concussion, but it had also slowed me down. I felt a big hand fall on my shoulder. There was no prize for guessing who it belonged to. I shrugged and writhed and twisted, managing to get myself free of Mega-Brad’s searing grip. I felt my sweet-ass new jacket tear from around my throat as I got myself free.
“Goddamn it, Flamewalker, you—”
My words were cut off by an uppercut that moved through the air like a comet. I got my staff up just in time, and the blow—that should have taken my head clean off my shoulders—was absorbed by the length of wood in my hand. Bizarrely, my vector rang like a gong at the impact, and molten flame burst around me like a soap bubble. I was thrown clear over the roof of a rather self-indulgent mausoleum, flailed through the air, and landed hard on the other side.
Holy shit, staff, that was some goddamn protection you just afforded me!
I would have spoken the words, but for the time being, I was a little short of breath. I lay on my back, just taking a moment to reorganize myself.
Bradley Flamewalker kicked his way through the mausoleum, as easily as if it had been made of polystyrene. Flames danced across his shoulders and arms once more. I realized that I was going to have to reduce this crazy fuck to smoking smithereens after all. Lying on the ground like I was just then, I couldn’t say that I was too averse to the idea.
Except that, naturally, Bradley’s little attempt to bat me to the outfield had driven the spell clean out of my head.
Ah, shit.
“I’ll say this,” Flamewalker said, gloating in a way that made me want to sandwich his smug face between two gravestones, “At least they’re not going to have to carry you far to bury you.”
I looked around. I had my staff in my hand, but I wasn’t sure whether it would stand up to another blow like the one before. I was getting the distinct impression that my vector was shaking its head a little dazedly. Then, my eyes alighted on the spellbook lying to the right of my head. It had fallen open on the one page that I could read.
“Most people have a touch of magic. They call it luck.”
Enwyn’s words came back to me as, above me, Mega-Brad raised his fist. Tongues of fire rippled across his knuckles.
This page didn’t have the Storm Bolt spell, but it had something else.
‘Summon Lightning Skink,’ I read, my eyes flying across the parchment. ‘Instructions: draw a circle in the air with your vector. When the portal opens say, in a commanding voice, “Come forth, Lightning Skink”.’
Worth a shot.
I cast the spell as directed, whipping my staff around in a tight circle and crying out the words that flashed and crackled on the page as I spoke them.
“Come forth, Lightning Skink!”
I was expecting something bright and lizard-like to come popping out of a portal the size of a mouse-hole, then run up Bradley’s trouser leg or something. That would have served as a distraction at least. And give me time and space enough to obliterate the angry, jumped up a-hole.
A portal of pure and infinite blackness opened in the air. It was like a hole had opened in the universe itself and beyond it, for the time that it took a fly to fart, was the indefinable rush and roar of pure, undiluted chaos.
Pure magic.
Then, in an eye-watering instant, the portal snapped closed, leaving behind a beast the likes of which I couldn’t have dreamed up on my worst hungover day.
Long, sleek, sinuous. It was the size of a Great Dane—a Great Dane that had fed often and heartily on beef and creatine. That was where the resemblance to a dog ended. It was deep black with electric blue smears across its flanks that befuddled the eye. Every angle and line of the creature was razor-sharp and aggressive. Its snout was like a wedge, the spines along its back looked quite as capable of holding an assortment of meat and vegetable chunks as any barbecue skewers that I had ever seen. Fine blue strands of electricity flowed, danced, and flickered across these spines in the same manner as a plasma ball.
For one glorious moment, Bradley and I looked in stunned silence at this awesome creature that I’d just conjured out of the ether. The Lightning Skink bared fangs like shards of glass and looked at me with questioning eyes of pure white, bisected by a blue slit of pupil.
Bradley and I slowly faced one another. I smiled.
“Sic him,” I said.
The Lightning Skink launched itself at the frozen form of Bradley Flamewalker with the speed of a bullet. It crashed into his chest, and my adversary’s armor soaked up the impact like the magical, resinous body armor that it was; the plates shifting and squeezing under the strain of the blow. Sparks and embers flew as the two elemental magics came together. The Lightning Skink sank glassy claws into Mega-Brad’s magical corsetry, and the two of them bowled over backward.
For a good while, all I could do was sit back on my elbows and watch the show—and what a show it was! Lightning and fire coming together in the magical sense made fireworks on New Year’s Eve look like nothing more than kids’ firecrackers.
Miniature bolts of lightning pinged and ricocheted off Bradley’s armor or scales or whatever it was that the giant douche had fashioned to protect himself. They grounded themselves in the headstones and in the ground, sending up splinters of stone and mud and wood, in much the same way as a hail of machine gun fire might have. I screwed up my face against the danger of flying fragments, but I couldn’t have looked away even if I had wanted to.
I must be casting higher than a Level 1, I thought. Just like my Storm Bolt.
Flamewalker and the Skink crashed and tumbled through the graveyard. Headstones exploded, mausoleums fell, and a few old bones pinwheeled through the air as the carnage unfolded.
“Beats a quiet night at home with a pizza and the latest episode of The Walking Dead,” I said to myself, watching in awe as the two combatants broke apart. Bradley swung his fist at the Skink, but the monster whisked aside and raked him across the thigh with its claws. More embers lit the night as the armor absorbed the blow.
Bradley managed to get his hands on the Lightning Skink and tossed it through the air. It smashed through a statue of a rather pissed off looking cherub.
Suddenly, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I grabbed whoever it was by the wrist and turned with a snarl.
“So-sorry,” Nigel said, his eyes wide.
I let him go.
“That’s the most badass thing I’ve ever seen!” Damien said. “It’s like a Pokémon on steroids! How the hell do you know how to cast something like that without going to a single class?”
I shrugged. “Natural talent?”
Damien grinned, his eyes fixed on the battle in front of him.
“Come to watch the show?” I asked.
“N-not quite,” Nigel stuttered, he was twisting his hands anxiously. He winced as an explosion reverberated around the graveyard and the Lightning Skink gave a grating cry that sounded like the static on a TV turned up to eardrum-wrecking volume.
“They’re destroying the wards,” he said.
“The what?”
“The wards!”
“Nigel, bro, repeating the word doesn’t mean that I’m going to understand it any better. Wards? Like protection type wards?” I said.
Nigel nodded vigorously.
“The wards that Nigel speaks of,” rumbled Rick, “were set in place to keep the undead from breaking out of their tombs.”
“The undead,” I repeated.
Rick nodded. “The gravestones are all wards, and our two friends here are destroying them, weakening their collective spell. See?”
I look
ed where the big man was pointing one of his sausage-sized fingers.
The earth over one of the destroyed graves was trembling. Even as I watched, a skeletal hand thrust upward, clawing at the air.
“I guess I get a taste of the Walking Dead after all,” I said. “Let’s just hope that we live through this so that we can get pizza after.”
Nigel gave me a confused look as I got to my feet.
Around us, the earth rippled and heaved as skeletons started to pull themselves jerkily from what should have been their eternal resting places.
“This,” I said, grinning about at the others, “is turning out to be one hell of a day.”
Chapter Seven
One of the skellies pulled itself out of the ground, dirt falling from its ruined body. There were a few shreds of skin and gray muscle clinging to its bones, but it was mostly all skeleton. Clearly, it had been under the ground for a long time. Slowly, it straightened itself all the way upright and lurched about, as if it was wondering what the hell it was doing out of its grave. It reminded me of how discombobulated you feel when you’ve had a big night on the tiles and wake up, fully clothed, in your own bed with absolutely no idea of how you got there and someone knocking on your door or calling your phone. It lumbered in a circle and its eyeless sockets fell on the four of us.
“Presumably, these guys aren’t fans of humans as a whole?” I asked.
“Um, no,” Nigel said. “I think they’re definitely more the sort of undead that are pleased to eat you rather than meet you.”
“Ooh, Nigel, that was such a bad line that it was good,” I said. “How did we end up with a graveyard full of these things at the end of our driveway, by the way?”
All over the graveyard, as Bradley continued duking it out with that sweet-ass Lightning Skink I’d conjured, more skellies were shaking off clods of mud and rotten pieces of coffin and getting to their fleshless feet.
“Well, obviously, the local village buried their dead here,” Nigel explained, his voice rising a fraction as the skellie nearest to us began walking jerkily in our direction.
“It’s a graveyard,” I said. “You’re speaking sense so far, Nige.”
“Right. Yeah. Well, apparently a few years back, some Death mage studying at the Academy—and with a really warped sense of humor—thought that it’d be a bit of a crack-up to raise the dead one night and loose them on the town.”
The skellie wasn’t the quickest mover, but it ambled along with the same sort of unstoppable determination with which a glacier moved—that is to say, it was slow but looked as if only an extreme act of violence was going to divert it from its chosen course.
Nigel continued, “So, this Death Mage got in heaps of trouble for that—I think he might even have been expelled from the Academy, which is pretty hard to accomplish. Chaosbane and a few of the other teachers had to subdue the undead and then turn the gravestones of those skeletons that had been woken into wards.”
The skellie was within an easy rock throw now.
“Look,” Damien drawled, cutting through Nigel’s narrative, “this is really interesting and all, but I think I speak for all of us when I say; this ain’t the time for a history lesson! How the hell do we take these things down? Can we?”
Nigel frowned as he racked his obviously capacious brain. “They’re still just bones, held together by magic alone,” he said. “Scatter the bones and you should break the spell. Reanimating skeletons is the least difficult sort of necromancy—from what I’ve read. There are no muscles or tendons or any of that sort of stuff to worry about enchanting. Easy to raise. Easy to kill.”
I looked at the skellie as it closed the gap between us, and I decided to put Nigel’s theory to the test. I stepped forward and, with a deft swing, whipped the staff around and took the skellie’s head clean off its shoulders. There was a cracking rip, as skull parted company with vertebrae and a dull flash of blue light from the staff, and the skellie crumpled to the floor in a shower of tumbled bones.
“All right, boys,” I said, turning and grinning at my fraternity bros, “let’s get to it!”
Despite their apparent fragility, it was clear, as I turned back to the graveyard, that we were going to have our work cut out with these bony bastards. The ground was now a writhing, squirming mass of undead as they extricated themselves from their underground homes. Bradley and the Lightning Skink sure had been doing a number on the wards, that much was obvious.
Speaking of Bradley, I saw him stumbling backward and forward through the wreckage, waving his hands in an attempt to get the Lightning Skink off his back. Globules of molten fire and orange gelatinous shield flew off him as my magical pet tore into the plates across his shoulders with its crystalline claws.
I would have laughed, but at that moment my eyes flicked across and I saw a wave of stumbling, shuffling, jerking undead heading our way. I felt a savage grin spread across my face. I always tried to look on the bright side of any situation, and one thing had just become apparent to me; these guys were going to be the ideal candidates for honing my rudimentary magic skills. I twirled the staff and beckoned to the leader of the skeletal troop.
“Sticks and stones will break your bones, buddy,” I growled.
It seemed that my fraternity brothers had the same idea—as far as making this a practice session of sorts—as I did. Rick’s shovel-like hand pulled me irresistibly out of the way as the big Islander stepped forward. He raised his hands solemnly above his head—in no rush, despite the fact that he was about to be inundated by a wave of crusty, long-dead strangers—and then brought them down in a motion that, somehow, conjured images of falling mountains and slipping hillsides. His fingers looked to me as if they dipped into the very soil itself, though I couldn’t think how he might do that.
Duh, it’s fucking magic, man, I reminded myself. It was all too easy for me, as an exclusive member of the planet Earth population until just recently, to fall back into a pesky scientific way of thinking. Science wasn’t the sole force at work in this world. Magic didn’t play by the same rules. It didn’t even play the same sport.
From where the giant’s hands touched the ground, waves rippled out. The earth undulated and lashed out, rolling toward the oncoming skellies in the same manner that a rug does when you shake it out with a snap.
The front rows of oncoming skellies were flipped away by the surge of moving terra firma. They flew through the air, spinning and somersaulting away, back into the graveyard. Some of them fetched up against the mausoleums and headstones that had managed to survive the battle of Bradley and the Lightning Skink, smashing into them and fragmenting on impact.
“Shit, man!” I whooped, clapping Rick on the back. “How the hell did you do that? You’re not holding a staff or anything!”
“I need no vector,” Rick rumbled, his heavy dreadlocks swinging across his face as he turned to beam at me. “My body is the vector, you see, friend? I am a Stone Elemental. I am one with the earth.” As if to illustrate his point, Rick thrust one of his thick fingers into the ground. A line of raised earth fired out—much like a mole or rabbit track does in cartoons—knocking a few more skellies aside as it shot toward a toppled headstone. The grave-marker was flicked up, like it weighed nothing at all, and cannoned into a couple of advancing undead. They shattered like they were made of cheap pottery.
“The perks of being a natural mage, friend,” Rick said to me.
I whirled my own vector around my head and punched the tip of the staff through the rib cage of one skellie who’d gotten a little too close for comfort. I wrenched the staff and the skellie came apart, its skull bouncing across the ground.
For a good while, I lost myself in the whirling confusion of the battle. My staff darted this way and that, batting skulls from necks, snapping femurs, and turning pelvises to powder. The orb set into the end of the tip of my vector flashed and glowed with each successful strike.
After about five minutes of smashing my way through the persistent thr
ong of pissed off undead, I wrenched away from a clutching skeletal hand, smashed in the skull of the old grabby-hands, and looked up to see how the others were doing.
A gout of flame illuminated the scene suddenly, and I saw that Damien was busy reducing the skellies advancing on him to ash. Four rings—two on each hand—set with red stones glinted on his fingers as he performed intricate hand gestures in the air. Flame blossomed and expanded from his cupped palms, scorching the skellies around him, blackening bone. Every now and again, Damien would whirl to face the next wave of attackers, perform another hand gesture, and be rewarded with a couple of sad sparks and a puff of smoke. I grinned. Obviously, I was not the only one new to this magic gig.
A sudden gale whipped up around me, and I had to shield my face with my hands against a rain of grit and soil and small bones. I squinted up and saw Nigel hovering over to my left. He was weaving and wobbling in the air, and I wondered whether that was due to inexperience or too much booze. Maybe a bit of both.
“Sorry!” Nigel called, his face contorted in concentration as he summoned up another swirling vortex of air that ripped a bunch of skellies from his path and tossed them away in a shower of patellas, vertebrae, and metacarpals. “I’m still getting the hang of the whole hovering and spell-casting business!”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a gang of skellies advancing on Rick’s rear, who was busy dealing with a couple of fairly sprightly-looking undead—must have only been interred for half a century by the look of them. I couldn’t warn him over the noise of the skirmish, and I couldn’t get to him in time—not through the milling mass of undead.
Summoning the page of my spellbook into my mind, I recalled the hand gesture that would conjure the Storm Bolt. The staff thrummed with anticipation in my hand. I felt that same lurch in my stomach that I had felt in my uncle’s bookstore, as some power was drawn from inside me, and I released the spell.
The Storm Bolt blasted through the pack of milling skellies. It vaporized those closest to me, shattered others like china on the outskirts of the spell and then blew the skellies that were sneaking up on Rick into fragments.