Creation Mage 7

by King, Dante

  My plan was simply to have the Amber Dragon smash at least one of the enemy ships to kindling. That had been the plan. Level the playing field with a dragon so that our schooner was only getting its ass kicked from one side—that was easy enough, right?

  Wrong.

  As with most plans, this one was instantly given a ruthless revision by Nature, or Fate, or whatever the hell else I might have preferred to call the ironic powers behind the Multiverse’s grand scheme.

  The damned Amber Dragon, my fucking hoped-for White Knight, had only popped into existence and wheeled around in the sky for perhaps fifteen seconds before a blazing haze of purple light rose from the ship I had designated for destruction first.

  “Ah, that’s not going to be good,” I said to the sky.

  It wasn’t.

  Another dragon burst into being, with a sound that made me think that the very air was being blasted and torn apart.

  It was a big fucker, not quite as massive as the Amber Dragon, but still plenty large enough to cause our ship some real problems. It was wreathed in pale green, with skin that was more shadow than actual tissue, even here in the Spectral Realm. I could see its skeleton glowing through its ghostly scales like a radioactive art installation.

  The ancient Amber Dragon only had time enough to engulf the bow of the ship, along with a handful of enemy sailors, in glutinous molten amber before the phantom dragon flew up and into it.

  From where I stood, up in the crow’s nest, I was almost on a level with the two dragons when they collided in mid-air. The impact of the two gigantic bodies coming together was like a hammer blow, the wash of air hitting me in the chest and sending me staggering back into the rickety railing.

  As their great bulks tumbled and twisted in the air as they slashed and snapped at one another, all I could do was watch with my bottom jaw hanging open. It was only when the ghost dragon’s tail whipped downward and batted one of our unlucky rebels off the deck of our ship and into the foremast of an enemy vessel with enough force to rip his arms off, that I came back to myself.

  For the time being, as the two titanic beasts went at one another, I wasn’t sure how I was meant to help. Then I had an idea. I could at least hamper one of the enemy captains by reducing the maneuverability of their ship.

  I raised my staff and pointed it at the vessel that I had previously afflicted with the toad rain and summoned a low Meteor Shower. I pictured the rain of flaming, deadly asteroids coming in only a little higher than the top sails and, thankfully, this is what happened.

  The blazing meteors, smaller than was probably usual if I had unleashed the spell with more mana, punched down and made Swiss cheese of the ship’s sails. Weakened as they had been by my rain of mana-leeching amphibians, the sailors did not have the energy necessary to douse the fires that sprang up all over the ship. They hastily tried to do what they could do to stop the damage, but with our crew firing spells at them, they were finding it increasingly difficult to fight on two fronts.

  An ear-splitting scream made me twist around, the smile of satisfaction that had adorned my face disappearing.

  My Amber Dragon was getting the worst of the brawl, despite its size. In fact, its size was what seemed to be letting it down as the ghost dragon was smaller and nimbler.

  My Amber Dragon’s wings looked a little like the sails of the ship I had just hit with the meteors; they were tattered and scarred. They were struggling to hold the creature up.

  “Shit,” I hissed, racking my brain for something that might keep the dragon in action and prevent it from succumbing to a watery grave.

  For once, and to my frustration, my brain drew a blank. There was no way that I could see to save my dragon and keep it in the fight. I was not one of those assholes who would see something give its life just to appease my pride.

  I raised the summoning orb and drew the Amber Dragon back to safety, just as the phantasmic dragon attempted to rake its amber eyes with a set of five-foot long glowing claws.

  The ghostly dragon did not rest on its laurels for long. Flapping its pale green and black wings, it turned so that it was facing our ship. Its eyes alighted on the scurrying multitude of the rebel crew below it. Those massive orbs flashed a highly worrying shade of emerald, like a fat kid that has just spied an unattended pie sitting on a windowsill.

  The dragon dived.

  I raised my staff, pointed at the phantom dragon and sought desperately for a spell.

  Time slowed so that each second felt like ten.

  Then, the ocean erupted in a tangled mass of venomous purple tentacles.

  “What in the name of all that is fucked up…?” I gasped.

  The writhing limbs must have each been almost as wide around as the main mast of our schooner. They shot up out of the once placid, now churning, waters on either side of the enemy vessel that sat on our schooner’s port side and wrapped themselves around the dragon with terrifying speed and accuracy.

  One second, the phantasmic dragon had been hurtling toward our schooner, the next it was arrested in mid-air. The tentacles, after halting the dragon in mid-dive, tensed and then twisted in a jerking motion. There was a truly horrific sound as a spine as long as a bus, made up of vertebrae each as big as an air-conditioning unit, was twisted and broken. The magical dragon spasmed, but before it could fade into the ether from whence it had come, the tentacles hauled downward and smashed it through the enemy ship.

  The dragon disappeared beneath the surface of the frothing sea. The ship folded in half like a toy made of popsicle sticks.

  Sailors were flung screaming through the air. Many were snatched out of the sky before they could land and pulled down under the waves to meet whatever awful fate awaited them at the many hands of the kraken.

  In less time than it took for me to lower my staff, one of the enemy ships had vanished. All that was left was a bunch of floating wooden detritus on the surface of the churning sea.

  Slowly, my head turned.

  I almost, almost, felt sorry for the clueless raiders still firing cannons and muskets from the deck of the remaining enemy ship. The poor suckers had absolutely no idea what was about to—

  The kraken surfaced on the far side of the enemy ship and, from my high vantage point, I saw one of the most hideous creatures I had ever seen.

  The Abomination still probably had it beat in terms of grotesqueness, but when it came down to a sheer, ghastly, death incarnate, predatory alien vibe, the kraken was hard to beat.

  It was, essentially, a giant cephalopod, with the creepy soulless but eerily intelligent eyes that cuttlefish and octopuses have. Its mouth was grinding beak filled with spines. It stank like… like… like a fucking plastic bag filled with rotten fish and the crap that a grizzly bear takes after its been hibernating for six months that’s been left in the trunk of a hot car for a week. It was a smell that defied description, a smell that actually made me gag and almost lose my breakfast onto the poor bastards below. As it emerged, to just above the surface of the water, it let loose a chittering rumble that I knew would haunt my nightmares.

  With a casual strength that eclipsed the might of any organic, flesh and blood creature, the kraken simply flipped the thousand-ton ship into its disgusting maw and ground it to bloody splinters.

  And then…

  It was gone.

  Nothing remained of the two raiding ships but a little flotsam and a few severed limbs floating on the surface of the sea, which was calm once more. Silence assaulted my ears, louder somehow than the cannons had been.

  I looked down at the stunned rebels below me. A few of the braver—or more dazed ones—had wandered over to the railings and were peering down into the water.

  I let out a great whooshing breath and spat the smell of the kraken out into the air.

  “Just when you thought it was safe to get back in the water,” I whispered to myself.

  As I made my way down from the crow’s nest, careful not to fall off the rigging and into the sea, I saw an
other ship sail around the headland.

  If the blood red sails weren’t enough of a clue as to who the glamorous galleon belonged to, the woman with the flying red hair standing on the bowsprit, steadying herself with one hand, was a dead giveaway.

  Admiral Isobel Galeflint, the Pirate Queen, had arrived on the scene.

  Chapter 16

  The Pirate Queen’s ship slid gracefully into the bay like a leviathan, like a behemoth of the deep, like a giant cruising shark. Behind her a couple of other ships, dwarfed by the gargantuan galleon, followed as an entourage. Along the side of the hull of her red-sailed galleon the words, THE HELLBRINGER.

  Dangling from one hand and looking as easily balanced on the bowsprit as she might have been standing on a sidewalk, the Pirate Queen swung around and then trotted along the thin, jutting spar and back onto the main deck of her mammoth ship.

  By the time that I was standing back on the poop deck of our schooner, The Hellbringer had come alongside us and lines had been cast across to pull us to her.

  Before we completely secured, Meng, who I was beginning to see was probably Isobel Galeflint’s right hand woman, had swung across on a rope and landed with the grace of a cat on our deck. Without paying attention to the few exhausted rebels that half-brandished swords at her, she strode up the deck toward Barry, Janet, Alura, Enwyn, Cecilia, and me.

  “Nice of you guys to join us,” I said.

  Meng apparently wasn’t in the bantering mood. She slouched up to me, hooked her thumbs into her belt, and tipped her head to one side.

  “Admiral Galeflint wants to see ya,” she said.

  “Is she going to tell us off for making a mess of her ocean?” I quipped. “Because if she is, I’d like to point out that it was her pet that caused all the damage.”

  “Quite some pet, ain’t it?” Meng said casually, fixing me with her beady eyes. “Now, hurry the fuck along, there’s a good lad. You don’t want to keep the Admiral waiting.”

  I made to follow Meng. Janet, Alura, Enwyn, Cecilia, and Barry fell in behind me. Meng, looking over her shoulder as she led the way back down the stairs of the poop, held up a hand.

  “Nah, mateys,” she said. “Admiral Galeflint just wants to see Mauler. None of you others. You lot stay here, aye. Especially not you liveuns.” She gestured at Enwyn and Cecilia. “Never seen your faces before, so I don’t trust you. Barely trust the other liveuns.”

  I exchanged glances with my women. None of them looked particularly comfortable with me scaling the rope ladder that hung from the towering side of the galleon next to us.

  “It’ll be fine,” Barry said soothingly to them. “Galeflint won’t harm Justin here, not after how we have held up our end of the bargain. I hope not anyway,” he added.

  I gave the poltergeist pirate a sarcastic thumbs-up.

  “Thanks for the confidence-boosting pep talk, Barry,” I said and followed Meng toward the rope ladders.

  A short while later and I was standing on the far bigger, far grander deck of The Hellbringer. Isobel Galeflint was standing up on top of the taffrail, heedless of the dizzy drop to the ocean below. She was surveying the floating wreckage that bobbed in the gentle heave and swell, at the tatters of sail cloth and splinters of woods that was all that was left of two ships.

  After a few moments, she turned to me and sighed.

  “I do so love to see a job done right,” she said. “Nothing like when a half-cocked plan delivers the goods, eh?”

  “Half-cocked?” I asked.

  “Aye, half-cocked,” the Pirate Queen repeated. “In all honesty, I wasn’t expecting any of you and your mates to survive that little encounter, Mr. Mauler. Especially after you summoned a damn dragon. Don’t you know that there aren’t any dragons in the Spectral Realm? They get their own damned place after they pass. Summon a live one, and the Spectral Realm conjures up a dead one to take it down. It’s the balance of things.”

  “Right,” I said. “I was wondering where that dragon came from.”

  Isobel let out a sigh. “Seeing the damage and retribution that has been visited upon the raiders that have been such a pain in my ass these past few months, and knowing that you played your part, well… I won’t deny, it gives me a warm little glow just here.”

  She rested a hand on her bare navel and stroked a finger across the flat planes of her stomach. I tried not to stare but failed completely.

  “I’m surprised and impressed,” Isobel went on, her gray eyes boring intently into mine. “The sight of all this destruction has kindled my sense of adventure once more. It has been too long since she I’ve been out on the high seas myself. I forgot how invigorating all the blood and carnage and death can be.”

  I think she might be getting off on this a little, I thought.

  The woman still had her hand resting on her bare stomach, and it looked like her fingers were itching to go a little lower.

  In an attempt to steer the Pirate Queen’s mind back to business, I said, “So, now that we’ve gotten rid of these pesky raiders, how do you feel about—”

  Isobel cut me off with a sharp gesture and then motioned me to follow her. Swallowing a rising impatience, and contenting myself to enjoy the view of her sexy, swaying, leather-clad ass walking ahead of me, I followed her.

  We ended up below the poop deck, in the part of the stern that I guessed was reserved for Isobel and those minions who held the highest positions onboard the ship. It was nicely furnished in here, with lots of windows. It looked a little bit like a suite in a fancy Renaissance-era apartment.

  “Someone arrived at Cupido Island, just after you had set off with Chillgrave,” Isobel said, her face giving nothing away. “Meng and Caxton heard her asking after a man who fitted your description just as we were about to cast off and come after you. They brought her to see me—with no little difficulty, I might add. She hexed four of my men into the waters of the port and made them shark bait with as little trouble as if they had been a bunch of schoolgirls.”

  “Who was it?” I asked. “And what did they want?”

  “She said that she was looking for you,” Isobel said. “I told her that, as it happened, I was just off to meet you. So she tagged along.”

  Isobel pushed open a door, revealing an elegant parlor beyond. Comfy couches, oil paintings, and dark wood decorated the small space. Sitting in a wingback armchair of pink suede and gazing out at the sea was none other than Mallory Entwistle.

  “Mallory!” I said, striding over to her. “What the hell are you doing here? I got a missive from Chaosbane saying that you disappeared off somewhere.”

  Mallory rose to her feet and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Well met, Justin,” she said, laying a small smile on me. Then she turned to contemplate Isobel who stood behind my right shoulder.

  I waved a hand at her when I saw her hesitation at saying anything in front of the Pirate Queen.

  “Don’t worry about Isobel here,” I said. “She’s a fucking maddog, but a trustworthy one for all her reputation. She and I, I think, have an understanding now. Don’t we, Isobel?”

  I thought it was more the casual way that I spoke, rather than the words that I said, that made Mallory and Isobel relax.

  “Aye, we’ve an understanding,” said Isobel.

  “See,” I said. “Now, Mallory, tell me where the hell you’ve been. Spare no detail. I feel that Isobel here is not too far off joining our little rebel cause.”

  Isobel snorted, but she did not disagree with me, which I thought was very promising.

  “Well, I suppose that my tale will make a fairly short account,” Mallory said. “Even though I have spent the past twenty-four hours on tenterhooks and only one slip up from a long bout of torture followed by a short execution, the retelling of what I have been doing might not sound like much.”

  “I guess we’ll be the judge o’ that,” said Isobel.

  Mallory gave her a level look. “Now that I think about it, it is probably best that you hear this too, Admiral Gale
flint.”

  “You’ve been off on a solo mission?” I prompted.

  “Yes,” Mallory said.

  “Doing what?” I asked.

  “Yes, doing fucking what?” Isobel growled.

  “I crossed back through the rift, back to Avalonia,” Mallory told us.

  “What? Why?” I asked. “Wasn’t that a bit risky? The Arcane Council must be swarming the Chaosbane Ranch and searching every haunt that the Chaosbanes, and we, have ever used.”

  “They are,” Mallory confirmed. “I can tell you that in no uncertain terms, for I was spying on the Castle of Ascension.”

  Isobel let out a low and impressed whistle. “Ballsy.”

  Mallory made no comment on the bravery she had shown, but said, “I couldn’t get really close, not with the amount of mages on the lookout for spies and saboteurs, but I got close enough to see that there was definitely a lot of movement. More movement than I would have thought the mustering of search parties would account for. It looked more like a weapon-take to me—a gathering of troops. Although all the companies of soldiers seemed to be mustering or being moved inside the castle, which I thought was peculiar.”

  In truth, there was little I could make of this information, not having any idea what the modus operandi for going rebel hunting was.

  Isobel Galeflint, though, was up on her feet and striding agitatedly around the room. She looked excited, but there was something else too, some tension that I recognized but could not put my finger on.

  “So, it’s true,” she said in a low voice. “Everything you’ve said about the growing dissent between you rebels and the Arcane Council…”

  “Well, yeah, I wasn’t exactly making a big deal of it for the fun of it,” I said, managing to keep the exasperation in my voice to a bare minimum.

  Isobel looked up with fever-bright eyes. Her mouth was half open, and she ran her tongue over her bottom lip, moistening it. She looked highly strung right then.

  She walked over to a door and grasped the ornate brass handle. “This is cause for a celebration, or a drink at least.”