Creation Mage 7

by King, Dante

  “Just this kind,” Barry said, somehow managing to point with his eyebrow at Alura, Janet, Cecilia, and Enwyn who were standing nearby.

  The cyclops made another note.

  “Speakin’ of which,” Captain Chillgrave went on suavely, “I was hoping that, after so long in foreign parts, me and my companions here might be permitted to set foot on Cupido Island, so that we might partake of some of its delights?”

  The cyclops looked up from his ledger and, for the first time, scanned the crew that were arrayed around the ship.

  “They’re liveuns,” he said crisply.

  “Aye, that they be,” Barry agreed. “Liveuns is what they are—flesh and bone and mortal blood. That ain’t a problem, is it?”

  The cyclops considered Barry through his one eye. Barry looked the guy straight back with his one eye. It was a good old-fashioned one-eye stare off.

  “Captain Chillgrave, unless you have been issued with a smuggler’s pass, you can only take three liveuns onto Cupido Island with you.”

  Barry frowned. “Wasn’t like that last time I was here,” he grumbled threateningly.

  The cyclops looked quite unruffled by Barry’s little show of anger. I guessed dealing with piratical poltergeists and psychopaths all day probably built up an immunity to menacing behavior. The guy looked about as chilled out as a cod on a slab of ice.

  “Those,” he said evenly, “are the Pirate Queen’s orders.”

  Barry, I could tell, was weighing up whether he should tell this bureaucratic harbormaster where to shove his orders, but thankfully refrained.

  “Very well,” he said. “Ain’t a drama. Just a shame that the rest of my crew will have to stay cooped up on the tub.”

  The pirate captain wheeled and pointed at me.

  “Mr. Mauler,” he said in a commanding tone, “choose another couple of liveuns to accompany yourself.”

  “Aye aye, Captain Chillgrave,” I said.

  I picked Janet and Alura. I figured that a monarch and a streetwise chick like Janet would be a beneficial combination should we be brought before this Pirate Queen, Isobel Galeflint.

  Once this had been quickly decided, Barry nodded at the cyclops harbormaster and strode over the gangplank with me, Janet, and Alura at his heels.

  We walked briskly along the teeming wharf without a single backward glance at the ship. Barry walked as if he knew precisely where he was going which, for all I knew, he did.

  It did not take me long to conclude that each of the isles had its own specialty, in the same way that certain streets or districts in a town sold certain goods or services.

  So far as I could tell, this first island was, basically, like a theme park for, well, all things erotic. There were strip joints, brothels, peep shows, bawdy houses, and jerk-off theaters catering for every taste and demand. There were multitudes of whores, flocks of them. They hung like flowers in window-boxes, leaning out of the wooden buildings that bordered the wooden walkway.

  Prostitutes of all different shapes, sexes, colors, and species draped themselves seductively around the lampposts and in the doorways, calling out to potential johns and swearing at them when they strolled on by without so much as casting an eye in their direction. I caught flashes of blue titties and orange titties, humongous titties and petite titties, and every size of knocker in between.

  All these folk were, presumably, dead, with unfinished business to attend to back on Avalonia or wherever it was that they had come from, but that didn’t seem to mean that they couldn’t stop to smell the roses and get their freak on.

  All around us, pirates cursed and spat and joked and laughed and brayed in one another’s faces. It was fucking bedlam. Not the sort of place that you’d recommend your dear old mom go with her girlfriends for a relaxing long weekend away.

  Needless to say, there was some serious drinking going on. Hammered drunk punters looked to be getting tossed out of the drinking establishments that punctuated the rows of houses of ill repute at regular intervals.

  The sound of fighting and fucking filled the air. It was so chaotic that it would have made Captain Jack Sparrow look like a schoolboy.

  As we walked past one of the many, many gin palaces, there was a staccato rat-a-tat-tat and firecracker rattle of mana-fire and a couple of flashes of bright yellow light from inside.

  To my everlasting elation, a scantily clad succubus pirate came smashing through one of the rickety front doors and landed heavily in the thoroughfare. A mana pistol skittered across the ground and plopped off the edge of the pier and into the sea. The ends of the succubus’s long fingers were smoking, and her face was covered in black smuts.

  Not a single person walking past paid her any heed whatsoever, unless it was to give a drunken cheer of approval at the impromptu street theater.

  The succubus pirate moaned and got to her feet just as another pirate stumped through the wrecked door after her. The newcomer was a huge female Jotunn with a wooden leg, a wooden arm, wearing a waistcoat with the arms cut off to reveal some of the most amateur tattoos that I had ever seen.

  “That’s the fucking last time you try and fucking distract me with a drink and a joke so that you can take a peek at my fucking hand o’ cards, Thresher,” the Jotunn said, in a surprisingly feminine voice.

  The disorientated succubus made a move, as if she was thinking of reaching for her vector or a weapon, but the Jotunn was too fast for her. With a roar, she hit the still smoking succubus in the breast with a pulverizing blast of icy snow that wrapped around the succubus like a feathery scarf of ice crystals.

  Thresher, the succubus, cried out once, then her lean and almost naked body was engulfed in ice, her frozen expression a picture of shock and surprise, reminding me a lot of Wesley Snipes in Demolition Man, when Sly Stallone freezes him during the finale.

  A few spectators wearing skimpy leather outfits had filtered out from the gin palace. A trio strippers from the establishment next door, who had been enjoying a cigarette break, had gathered to watch the magical scuffle.

  “Seeing as you like to joke so much, here’s a fucking joke for you, Thresher,” the Jotunn snarled. “What do you call a pirate with no fucking arms and no fucking legs?”

  With brutal strength, the Jotunn smashed the succubus’s frozen arms from her body. Then she reached behind her back and pulled an ice-bladed axe from a sheath and hacked her legs off at the knees.

  “A fucking beginner!” she roared

  Then, she picked up the succubus’s frozen torso and tossed her off the dock and into the sea. The unfortunate succubus bobbed in the water for a moment or two, before a slimy purple tentacle rose noiselessly out of the depths and pulled her below the surface.

  “Note to self,” Alura said in my ear as we walked on by and the crowd dispersed, “do not go for a dip off the docks.”

  “How does killing one of the undead work here?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t tell you,” Alura said.

  “If one of the undead kills another here,” Barry said. “The spirit that has been killed moves on to the realm beyond this one. They do not have the chance of going back to Avalonia, through the rift that we passed through to get here, and righting whatever wrong it was that brought them here.”

  “Sounds complicated,” Janet said.

  “It’s death,” Barry said. “Like taxes, it’s not as straightforward as ye’d think it’d be.”

  We passed another collection of whores who were lingering around outside of a particularly rundown brothel.

  “Captain Chillgrave, is that you?” one of the women, who looked a little worse for wear, asked as we passed.

  “Aye, but I’ve no time for you just at present, lass,” Barry said, not even turning to look at the woman.

  “Ah, fuck you!” the woman replied amiably. “Word is that you couldn’t have stolen the candy from a newborn toward the end of your career. Come back if you fancy learning a few pirate tricks from me. I’ll give you a fine rate!”

 
“Now there, lass,” Barry called over his shoulder as we turned up a reeking alleyway, “you won’t catch me coming down here, slapping the cock out of your mouth and telling you how to do your job, will you?”

  “Barry?” I said, after we had left the whores behind and shinned up a rope ladder to gain access to a set of steps that wound a floating island.

  “Aye, lad?” Barry said.

  “You said that the departed spirits of those who have unfinished business come to the Spectral Realm instead of passing on,” I said.

  “Aye, that’s correct, sir,” Barry affirmed.

  I looked down at the rooftops of the shanty town we had just passed through. Ironically, the place looked more full of life than many places inhabited by the living.

  “Well, why in the hell would anyone want to move on from this?” I asked. “It looks like good fun.”

  “Oh, it is, sir, it is,” Barry said earnestly. “In truth, most poltergeists, ghosts, and various folks of the phantasmic persuasion don’t actually want to fix up whatever prevented from passing through to the next world. Not once they have spent more than about ten minutes in the Spectral Realm. Not when they discover the joys that abound here. And the last thing they want is to be is used as the raw ingredients for some Mage’s vector, you can quote me on that.”

  We proceeded onward, making our way through a couple of other islands that were just as crazy and specialized as the sex-focused one.

  There was a small isle on which everyone looked like all they did was eat buffet food. There were restaurants and bars and eateries of every description, and Barry informed me that you could eat here and never get full. The main street was a banquet table stuffed with folk all chowing down from ever-refilling plates.

  “It’s for those that went hungry through life,” Barry explained as we skirted the main thoroughfare and crossed a bridge onto the next island. “Part of the brilliance of this realm is that it gives folks what they could never get back in the mortal realm.”

  A shadow passed over us as we made our way across a long set of steppingstones that were actually the most laid-back turtles of all time. I looked up as a gentle, unearthly keening song floated down like a soft rain.

  “Barry,” Janet said in a voice of forced calm, “are they flying whales?”

  “Aye, miss, that they be,” Barry said, leading us on and not even looking up at the miraculous sight of the two pale pink whales gliding over us. They were as huge as two Boeing 747s and with eyes like a couple of amber exercise balls.

  We moved our way through the smoky labyrinthine streets of an island that must have been presided over by Bob Marley, if the smell of the place and the way that everyone was grinning inanely at one another and munching on greasy food was anything to go by. After climbing up a winding spiral stair of floating steps, we found ourselves at a fifteen-foot-high solid golden gate.

  To my surprise, and the evident surprise of Barry too, the gate swung smoothly open as we crested the top of the spiral stairs. Beyond it, gleaming like the gaudiest palace that I had ever seen, was none other than a full-scale replica of Castle Grayskull, built entirely out of golden bricks.

  Somehow, the massive gaping maw that acted as the front door just wasn’t as scary as I remembered it as a kid. It must have been the gold, I reckoned. The whole place had a slightly cheesy, tasteless vibe to it. Like it had been commissioned by Mike Tyson or something.

  “You must be kidding me,” I said softly, exchanging a look with Janet, who was the only other person there who had been to Earth.

  For her part, Janet mouthed, “What the fuck?” back at me.

  There was little time to goggle at Castle Goldskull, though, because my gaze was soon arrested by the figure standing in the middle of the path that led to the garish edifice.

  She was standing, leaning on a spear tipped with a pulsating blade of purplish-blue crystal, as if she owned the joint.

  Hell, I reminded myself, I supposed that she did. She owned the whole of fucking Cupido Island, if this was the woman I thought it must be, if this was Isobel Galeflint, Pirate Queen of the Spectral Realm.

  It couldn’t have been anyone else. She was so ravishingly beautiful, so poised, so contemptuous in her glance. Backed by half a dozen nautical bodyguards, she had bright crimson, wavy hair and was dressed in a leather outfit that was part black and gold brocaded admiral’s jacket, part bikini, part lingerie, and part bondage outfit.

  She looked like the leader of a punk band. She looked like a wanted renegade.

  She looked, indisputably, like the boss.

  Unlike the whole rigmarole that me and Leah had had to go through to enter the Castle of Ascendance back in Manafell, it seemed that the Pirate Queen was a more simplistic and confrontational gal than Queen Hagatha.

  “Well, well, well, if it isn’t the very late and very great Captain Barry fucking Chillgrave!” Isobel Galeflint said in greeting. “What the fuck are you doing here, eh, you most esteemed and lauded sky-pirate that you are? I thought you were too good for us lowly scum of the Spectral Realm, Chillgrave? I heard that you had got yourself a cute little Paraphernalia shop of some sort back in Avalonia? I heard that you had taken up the role of ye olde fucking poltergeist with the magical wares and vectors, flogging all that shit that you stole over the years to Academics and the like.”

  “You heard a lot, Galeflint,” Barry said.

  The Pirate Queen tossed her bright crimson hair out of her gray eyes, so that she could run them over Barry, Alura, Janet, and me. There was a blue-stone pendant around her neck that flicked out from her ample cleavage before disappearing back into it again. I found myself privately wishing that I could join it down there.

  “Information is more valuable than gold, Chillgrave,” she said. She jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the golden remake of Castle Grayskull. “Though, it’s definitely not as aesthetically pleasing. So, you couldn’t hack life as a shopkeeper, then?”

  “Nah, not in the end,” Barry said. “Going the honest route didn’t really work out for me,” Barry replied.

  “That right? Well, it’s about time you came crawling back,” said Isobel Galeflint. “You’ve still got ships to build for me, remember? You’re indebted to me for… oh, I don’t know? What would it be now? A thousand more years?”

  “Give or take a decade,” Barry said, looking rather unconcerned.

  “Right,” Galeflint said, her tone one of honey and venom. “Well, if these three crewmembers are the only help you brought, then you’d best get cracking.”

  Her eyes lingered on my face for a moment, and I found Justin junior stirring. There could be no doubt; there was something undeniably fuckable about the Pirate Queen.

  “I won’t be doin’ that, Your Majesty,” Barry said, with a slightly sarcastic inflection. “We’ve got bigger problems, bigger makara to fry, than a simple debt being repaid. There’s war on the horizon. Universal Magic is dying. You’ve seen it. You’ve felt it. We’ve all seen it and felt it. And the Spectral Realm is entirely made o’ magic.”

  “And what,” Isobel replied in a voice that was as smooth and dangerous as a velvet-covered razorblade, “the fucking hell do you think I’m going to do about that, hm?”

  Barry studied his fingernails with an indifference that I thought ought to be applauded.

  “Well, old girl,” he said. “If ye don’t fancy giving up the ghost just yet, and relinquishing all that you’ve strived so hard for, then I’m afraid you’ve only one choice.”

  “And that is?” Isobel Galeflint asked, leaning forward with murder shining in the depths of her cool, gray eyes.

  “You’re going to have to help us,” Barry said.

  Chapter 12

  For a very long, very fraught moment, Isobel Galeflint stared at Barry. The poltergeist had just requested her help, but it seemed like she would be reticent to give it. In fact, the look she was currently giving Barry made me wonder if she intended only to help us off the nearest cliff into the bay belo
w. She stared at us appraisingly—a woman torn between curiosity and the desire to return to her solid gold house so that she could do whatever pirates did when it came to recreation.

  “Are you going to kill us?” I asked, feigning nonchalance. “Only we’re on a bit of a tight schedule. You know how it is. Time and tide wait for no man and all that,” I added in at the end, trying to inject the right nautical theme into things.

  Isobel cocked her head at me. I could almost see the wheels turning behind her pretty gray eyes. She might have looked savagely beautiful, as if she had come out the victor in a no holds barred battle to the death in one of Reno’s seedier strip joints, but I could tell that she was far from stupid. I was willing to bet that every instinct of hers was tied to self-preservation and to the expansion of her power. She was obviously a woman who, despite her fearsome reputation, was unlikely to let her bloodlust get the better of her.

  “Hmm, kill you, kill you…” she mused in that quite pleasant voice of hers, which sat on the fence between refinement and violence. “That might be nice, don’t get me wrong. Me and the boys here were just about to wander down below to see if there wasn’t some sort of trouble that we could start.”

  “And finish,” hissed one of her minions, a dude who had the head of a moray eel, if I had learned anything from Animal Planet.

  The other pirate bodyguards laughed sycophantically—a half dozen good little suckholes employed for their strength and obedience more than their sense of humor.

  “Yes, of course, Caxton, and finish,” Isobel Galeflint said. “We always finish things, don’t we, lads? However, I won’t jerk your chain and say that there isn’t some novelty in the idea of helping folks for once.” She tapped the butt of her magically tipped spear on the ground thoughtfully.

  “Helpin’, boss?” said a woman with the smooth, almost otter-like, hide of a selkie. “Since when do we help anyone?”

  “Anyone that ain’t ourselves, o’ course,” chipped in Caxton, the eel-man. He crossed arms that were about as big around the bicep as my thigh.