Creation Mage 7

by King, Dante

  Skimming low across the surface of the icy rivulet, we approached the camp, banked hard, and descended to our feet. Rick, with his usual airborne panache, managed to drop straight through a selection of cages holding the skeletal remains of what might have once been drakes. Wood and bones scattered in all directions.

  “Smooth work, dude,” Damien said as Rick picked himself up and cast a belligerent look at the broomstick.

  It was the sort of little ramshackle setup that you might expect to find in the background scenery of some Western film, with a few dilapidated shacks and the mouth of a dark tunnel cut haphazardly out of the face of a steep, crumbling bank. The kind of place where toothless, bearded prospectors might be found panning, without much hope, for gold. It looked totally deserted.

  Except, I noticed, for a small campfire at the mouth of the tunnel, over which sat a battered tea kettle.

  We followed Barry up the path that led into the mouth of the tunnel. Barry’s surety was a comfort, but I still had one or two spells ready to deploy should the occasion call for it. If there was anything or anyone inside that wanted to get the drop on us, my staff would be in my hand in a second.

  Inside the tunnel, there was a rusted track laid into the floor and disappearing on its crooked way into the unguessable darkness. Beyond the entrance to the tunnel, things would have been impenetrably black were it not for Barry’s ghostly green light omitted from—for lack of a better word—his body.

  “It looks just like an abandoned gold mine in here,” Nigel said.

  “That’s because it is an abandoned gold mine, squire,” Barry said.

  “Barry, is that you?” a voice hissed forlornly from out of the gloom.

  I almost jumped but managed to keep my poise. After almost six months of madness and unexpected attacks, fights and ambushes, my body and mind had come to unconsciously expect things to loom up out of the dark.

  “Holy troll testes!” Nigel gasped. “Who the fuck is that?”

  “Aye, tis me, Buttuck,” Barry replied, with a little more force and command than he normally used in his day-to-day life—or afterlife. “Don’t act like you can’t recall the solid, charming timbre of the most feared aeronautical pirate who ever lived!”

  “‘Course I fucking recognize your voice, you old bag of wind,” replied the owner of the invisible voice. “I wouldn’t have said your ruddy name otherwise, would I?”

  Another poltergeist faded out of the darkness. He did not come out of the shadows so much as coalesce into being, as if someone were controlling his toxic green glow with a dimmer switch.

  He was a sloppily fat specter with a mane of frizzy green hair tied up in a sailor’s kerchief. He had a wispy, ghostly beard curling off his chin. His garb consisted of a suitably ragged pair of breeches and a patched dandy’s coat that was buttoned and strained over his massive paunch. When he turned, I saw that part of the top of his head was missing, showing a soup of addled spectral brains. A stuffed bird sat on one shoulder and wobbled as he floated toward us.

  “I would have been surprised if you had forgotten my voice, seeing as we only saw one another the other damned day,” Barry Chillgrave said.

  “The other day, was it?” the one known as Buttuck said thoughtfully.

  “Give or take a couple of centuries,” Barry replied casually. He pointed at the stuffed bird on Buttuck’s shoulder. The thing looked like a cross between an owl and a small turkey with constipation.

  “What?” Buttuck said in a defensive voice.

  “I forgot that you kept that damned devil bird on your shoulder,” Barry scoffed, leering as only an entity with little more than skull can leer. “Can’t believe that you held with that damned tripe all the years we were smuggling in the same circles.”

  “I was right in the end though, weren’t I?” said Buttuck, his words etched with smug defiance. “It heralded my death in the end. Screeched and everything right before I snuffed it.”

  “Course, it screeched before you popped your bloody clogs, Buttuck,” Barry said, rolling his eyes so that they performed a double loop-the-loop in his head. “Be a darned idiotic creature that didn’t cry out at a mana-round heading straight for it.”

  Buttuck pointed at his gruesomely punctured head. “The evidence speaks for itself, that’s all I’m saying, Captain Chillgrave.”

  “What a load of twaddle,” Barry muttered, shaking his head at Buttuck. “Of all the ridiculous, unfounded…”

  “Look, I know you didn’t hold with much superstitious stuff,” Buttuck interrupted, “but—”

  I cleared my throat.

  The two poltergeists turned to look at me.

  I smiled politely. “Hi there,” I said. “I was just wondering whether you two phantasmic fuckbuddies would mind shutting the hell up so that we could get on with this rather pressing assignment we’ve been sent on?”

  Barry was a picture of apology. “Aye, sir, o’ course! My deepest apologies, skipper!” He wheeled on Buttuck and stabbed a skeletal finger at him. “You heard the mortal, Buttuck! We need a bootlegger’s portal to Nevermoor and we need it now!”

  Buttuck tapped his rotten-looking front teeth.

  “Hm,” he said, “that’ll cost you that will.”

  Next to me, Damien looked around at the dank darkness that hemmed us in.

  “No offense, bro,” he said, “but what the shit would you do with any sort of monetary payment? I’m thinking that it’s going to take more than a few coins to get Asscrackistan here up to an acceptable level of interior decor.”

  Buttuck narrowed his eyes at Damien and turned to Barry.

  “If I sort you out with a portal,” the pot-bellied poltergeist said, “I want you to take me on whatever voyage it is you’re embarking on, Cap’n.”

  Barry looked over at me. I gave him the universal signal to give the guy what he wants so long as he does what we need, which is, funnily enough, the exact same finger twirl used to indicate that someone is crazy, only not pointed at your own head.

  “What makes ye think that I’m off on a voyage, lad?” Barry asked the specter.

  “You’re up to something, that much I know,” Buttuck said. “No one has come through here for the past one-hundred and twelve years! I’m bored to death here, Captain Chillgrave.”

  Nigel started to make a noise that I knew was the start of him pointing out that Buttuck was, in fact, already deceased, but Rick clapped a couple of enormous fingers over the halfling’s mouth to stop him.

  “Why the heck don’t you just leave your post, then?” Barry said.

  Buttuck drew himself up. Admittedly, there was not a lot of difference, due to the fact that he was practically spherical anyway, but I could tell that he was affronted.

  “A sailor don’t ever leave his post, Cap’n,” he said in a dignified voice. “Not without the express permission of a senior officer. There’s no honor in it.”

  “We were fuckin’ pirates!” Barry said exasperatedly. “We were the bloody antithesis of honorable, lad!”

  “Still,” Buttuck said.

  Barry sighed, or at least made a noise like someone expelling breath.

  “Fine, if you sort out a portal for us,” Barry said, “then I give you permission to join us on our voyage, to serve under Master Mauler and myself.”

  Barry pointed at me, and I saluted at Buttuck.

  “What’s more,” Barry said, “once you’ve served me true and faithfully-like, and we’ve seen this voyage through, I give you my solemn word that ye may go on shore leave indefinitely.”

  Buttuck’s eyes shone.

  “Shore leave, sir?” he said.

  “That’s right, Buttuck,” Barry said. “Shore leave. An eternity of drinking, whoring, and dicing.”

  “Aye aye, sir!” Buttuck said and ripped off a salute of such crispness that it would have left Steve Rogers with a tear in his eye.

  Without further ado, thank the gods, Buttuck moved away and began singing what sounded like a seaman’s shanty, alt
hough in a tongue that sounded like nothing I had ever heard before.

  “You recognize that language, Barry?” I asked the poltergeist.

  “Nay, sir,” Barry said. “That’s why we had to come here. Old Buttuck might be an ass in many respects, but he might be the last undead soul on Avalonian soil who knows how to conjure a long-range bootleggers’ portal in an instant.”

  “Ready, sirs!” Buttuck said, and his voice was no longer forlorn but alight and jolly with adventure. He was standing beside what might very well have been a flapping sheet of gray silk, had I not known that it was a doorway through space and time.

  “Right,” I said, squaring my shoulders, “let’s fucking do this.”

  Chapter 4

  I shouldered my broomstick and led the way into the portal, stepping out of the underground tunnel and into…

  …the plain hazy light of Nevermoor at dusk.

  The others followed a second after me, and I had to step aside to avoid being jostled.

  There was no snow in Nevermoor or in the surrounding countryside, but it was still cold. I was pretty unclear about Avalonia’s geography, but I figured that meant that wherever the Chaosbane Ranch was located was further south than where we were now. Possibly.

  Buttuck’s impromptu portal had spat us out in the middle of the official portal station on the edge of Nevermoor. It was manned by the dwarf, Petram, who I had bribed with unlimited access to Pulchra Vaitati—the very unreligious nunnery in the orchard land surrounding the town proper. It was a nunnery that was more brothel than convent, and old Petram was more than happy to trade his silence for a few rounds of hide the purple sausage every now and again with the nuns up there.

  I led the way, not having to tell the three men and two poltergeists following along behind me to keep quiet.

  I found old Petram snoozing in his booth, just as I thought he would be. He was attired in his old-fashioned light blue uniform that reminded me so much of an old school bellhop. His golden pince-nez was balanced precariously on the end of his crooked nose.

  I slapped my hand down on the desk and caught his pince-nez as they leapt gleefully off the end of his nose for freedom.

  “What in the name of a minotaur’s mother’s muff is…” he started to cry, before he saw my face.

  “Ah, Mr. Mauler,” the old dwarf said. “I should have known it was you. It usually is, whenever I find myself in sudden need for fresh underclothes.”

  “Sorry to wake you, Petram,” I said. “Just wanted to make sure that our little agreement still stood?”

  Petram smiled, but I could tell that there was something bothering the old codger. He looked wary, scared even, where once he had been full of good-natured bluster. Despite this, the old dwarf’s beard bristled as he set his jaw in a determined fashion.

  “Oh, the agreement stands still, sir,” he said. “No fear of that. The gals up at the nunnery have been treating me very kindly. Very hospitable to an old dwarf they are, especially one who needs extensive massaging on a cold winter evening…”

  I put up my hand to forestall any divulging of details that might make me throw up into my own mouth.

  “Good to hear,” I said.

  “Only…” Petram said.

  “Only what, friend?” Rick rumbled from over my shoulder.

  The dwarf looked up at the towering Earth Mage. He had to look a long way up. He swallowed.

  “Well, your movements and your business are your own, of course,” he said. “And I know you know that I was once a spy for the Arcane Council, but I’m not interested anymore.”

  “Spit it out, friend,” Rick said kindly.

  “It’s just, you don’t have to worry about me saying anything to the minions of the Arcane Council, but just be careful when you go down into the town is all,” Petram said. “Things have changed this last week. Keep your damned heads down. You’ll see what I mean. Things are queer in town. Unsettled. And if you were thinking of heading up to the Academy, I should rethink the notion.”

  I nodded. “All right, Petram. Thanks for the heads up.”

  We moved on down the path of white gravel and made our way cautiously out into the lane beyond.

  My plan was to go around the houses on the edge of the town and cut through the back of the Academy. Once we had gathered the schematics that Barry needed, we’d head back out through the side of the Academy, back into the town and then make our way up the hill to the frat house.

  No muss, no fuss.

  “Right, Buttuck,” I said as we lurked by a drystone wall, “I need you to take our broomsticks and transport them back to our frat house.”

  “The dwelling lies to the east of the Mazirian Academy,” Barry told the other poltergeist in the tone that I was coming to know as his ‘captain’s voice’. “It’s at the top of the highest hill that overlooks the town. Ye can’t miss it, Buttuck—ye’d better hope that ye can’t, at any rate.”

  “Aye aye, Cap’n,” Buttuck said. With a commendable lack of blather, he gathered the broomsticks together using a coil of eldritch rope that he made appear out of nowhere. He slung his bundle of broomsticks over his shoulder and bobbed off in the direction that Damien was indicating.

  The rest of us carried on around the town in the opposite direction. It was not long before it became apparent that it was as Petram had said: there was a strange and unsettled air permeating the place.

  Even though we were doing our best to avoid any rambling locals, I soon got the impression that we might have been able to walk straight through the center of Nevermoor without encountering any of the local inhabitants. Everything was quiet. Somber. There was none of the usual bustle and noise that I would have expected for the town around sundown.

  With the disconcerting lack of life in the town, it didn’t take long to make our way through the dense shrubs, boggy ground, and collection of random statues and discarded, broken magical implements that lay on the border of the western side of the Academy.

  We arrived inside the hedgerow that marked the border of a stretch of the Academy’s manicured lawns.

  “What can you see, Nigel?” I asked.

  The halfling stuck his small head through the branches of the bushes and peered surreptitiously through the foliage.

  “Great dripping dryad danglers,” the Wind Mage cursed under his breath, “there are Arcane Council sentries about.”

  “How can you tell?” Damien asked.

  “I can tell. My parents were highborn, remember?” Nigel said. “I know arrogant bureaucratic thugs when I see them. My parents used to have enough of them over for dinner for me to spot them from a mile away.” He let out a low whistle. “And I’ll be barbarian’s beef cannon, they’ve got roving Arcane Knights patrolling too!”

  At any other time, I might have asked Nigel where the fuck he was getting these expressions from, but now was not the time. I put that question on the backburner.

  “I guess that means the Arcane Council has openly taken control of the Academy,” I said. “They’re obviously making no secret of the fact that they’re gunning for Reginald Chaosbane.”

  “And us, most likely,” growled Rick.

  Nigel nodded and punched his fist into his open palm. “What about our War Mage studies! We were looking so freakin’ good!”

  “Don’t get your panties in too much of a twist, Samwise,” I said, patting Nigel on the shoulder. “Let’s just concentrate on getting in and out without detection, yeah?”

  “Why do you always call me these weird names at times like this?” Nigel asked me.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Meriadoc,” I said, frowning.

  “Plan?” Damien asked.

  “We follow Barry by the least obtrusive path possible to the library,” I said. “We take any Arcane assholes we have to, but quietly.”

  Everyone nodded. There were no quips. No superfluous words. This was not the time for it.

  I crossed my fingers and summoned my staff.

 
“Whoa,” Damien said in a hushed voice.

  Whoa was right. What I should have held was my father’s black crystal staff, which had blended with the original wooden staff that I had picked from Barry’s Magical Emporium.

  What had appeared in my hand though, was a staff that was neither black nor white—or maybe it was black and white.

  “Looks like the staffs of the Twin Spirits have fused into one,” I said, turning the scintillating rod in my hands.

  It was that strange unnamable color; not black not silver, not gray or white, but a marriage of all. It was color that bewildered the eye and captured it at the same time. Hypnotic. Beautiful. Its shape was efficient, elegant, and dangerous—three attributes that I couldn’t help but think rather personified my parents, not to mention Vanyir, the dragon spirit who had been inside of my original vector.

  Rick’s eyes were sparkling like a couple of green gemstones in his blocky face as he ran them with a connoisseur's eyes over the staff.

  “Cool,” he said simply.

  “Very,” Damien added.

  I smiled proudly. “Alright. Let’s go!”

  Barry led the way across the lawn and up to the pool area. There was a distinct lack of people here, especially for this time in the afternoon. Sure, it was the ass-end of Yuletide season, but there should have at least been someone enjoying a drink or having a dip, but there was not a single solitary student in sight.

  We paused behind an enormous stone planter, and Barry glanced around.

  “Coast is clear,” he stated.

  Incorrectly, as it turned out.

  As we moved swiftly toward the door that led into the Academy proper, the said door opened and an Arcane Knight stepped out into the evening air. I recognized him as Arcane Knight because he was dressed in the same sort of shiny, overelaborate armor as the men and women I had seen guarding Queen Hagatha.

  He was an ugly motherfucker, this particular guy—the sort of ugly that would have made a freight train hop the rails and take a dirt road. I didn’t imagine a guard who straddled the line between a hideous human and a beautiful chimpanzee would be often put on the Queen’s guarding detail, so I could guess why he’d been assigned this job.