Creation Mage 7

by King, Dante

  Idman Thunderstone spent much of his time staring out to sea, often accompanied by Janet. The old friends Madame Xel and Odette Scaleblade would periodically join them, making it their business to try and get the austere Idman to cut loose and do shots with them.

  Because the weather in the Spectral Realm was exceedingly clement and sunny most of the time, Isobel simply ordered her crew to erect makeshift tents out of spare sailcloth for us to sleep under at night. With the amount of grog that everyone was drinking and the amount of partying that was going on, though, more often than not, I fell asleep in some unlikely spot on the ship, under the stars, listening to the sound of the waves hissing against the hull.

  It did not take long to gather the news from everyone and hear the reports on what the different ships had done in the couple of days we had been apart. According to the frat boys, they had spent most of their time cruising around the islands and enjoying the sunshine.

  “We only got into one spot of trouble, didn’t we, chaps?” Bradley said as we sat around the mainmast playing a few hands of cards on the evening of the third day.

  “Hmm, do I sense a slight understatement there, Bradley?” I grinned as I slapped down a pair of burning towers to cover the pair of squealing pigs that Nigel had thrown onto the deck.

  Bradley held his thumb and forefinger about a quarter of an inch apart.

  “Ah, come on, friend,” Rick rumbled, taking a swig from his bucket-sized mug which, on closer inspection, might actually have been a bucket. “It wasn’t that bad.”

  “Getting invited to dinner by island cannibals doesn’t rate as bad in your books, big boy?” Damien said incredulously.

  Rick shrugged and gulped more mead.

  “W-w-wait just a second,” Nigel said excitedly, “let’s clarify something here, we weren’t invited to dinner, we were invited for dinner.”

  “Same thing, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “No, no, no,” Nigel said, “we were quite literally invited for dinner, like, we were the course in between the fish and the dessert.”

  I laughed. “You’re kidding me? You were actually lured into a cannibal camp and put on the menu?”

  Nigel nodded his head in the affirmative.

  “Bit clichéd, isn’t it?” I chuckled at the thought of the scene that must have played out. “How the hell didn’t you see that one coming, lads?”

  “That was the problem, I think,” said Bradley. “It was so absurdly hackneyed that I don’t think any of us believed it was actually happening, you know?”

  “It was just you guys on the island?” I asked, indicating all my fraternity brothers. “What about the rest of the crew?”

  “We told them to hang back,” Damien said. “We wanted to set a good example sort of thing.”

  “And, to be fair, friend,” Rick said slowly, lowering a pair of rutting minotaurs down on the discarded pile of cards, “stereotypes come from somewhere, don’t they?”

  “And, in our defense, they weren’t actually cannibals—not proper ones,” said Nigel.

  “No?” I said.

  “Nah, they were zombies,” Damien said.

  “Wrong, Damien,” Bradley said promptly, “they were flesh-eating ghouls.”

  Damien snapped his fingers and pointed at Bradley. “That’s right, the haggard bastards were flesh-eating ghouls. I stand corrected.”

  “My question,” Nigel said, scooping up the pile of cards with a look of disgust at losing the hand to a bunch of intellectual inferiors, “is what the devil is the difference when a bunch of the creeps are trying to marinade you and stuff lemons up your—”

  Damien cut Nigel off with a gesture as I burst into laughter. “Nigel, I think I speak for all those present when I say that seeing you with your pants around your ankles and a ghoul trying to sodomize you with an assortment of citrus fruit once was most definitely enough,” the Fire Mage said. “There’s no need for us to relive that.”

  Nigel lay the dove of ice down to restart the game. Rick followed with a fire goblin, and Bradley trumped him with the, apparently, unbeatable technicolor wizard card. This started an argument amongst Nigel, Rick, and Bradley, who were the only three among us five who knew how to play the game properly.

  Rick jabbed an accusatory finger at Bradley. “You can’t play the technicolor wizard on the godsdamned ice goblin, friend.”

  “You played the ice goblin, Rick,” Nigel said.

  “What?” Rick said.

  “You played the ice goblin,” Nigel repeated.

  Rick nudged aside the technicolor wizard card and saw the fire-covered goblin beneath it.

  “Hm,” he said.

  Damien, chuckling while he did, made a motion as if he were pulling down a turtleneck jumper from his face. “Roll the foreskin down so you can see, dickhead.”

  “Oh, shit!” Bradley clapped and covered his mouth.

  Nigel’s brow furrowed and then a huge smile lit his features. “That is actually quite funny, Damien. Not to mention very, very humorous.”

  It took me a long while to regain my breath, I was laughing so hard.

  * * *

  A pirate Disney castle. That is how the Stronghold of the Twin Spirits struck me when Isobel Galeflint’s ship, The Hellbringer, rounded a long spit of land and we caught sight of the fortress.

  By that, I don’t mean it was like a pirate castle designed by Disney. Not some lame-ass thing that had been knocked up by their visual-effects teams for Pirates of the Caribbean and that would make a sweet toy for some six-year-old.

  No. The edifice facing us, straddling a river that flowed out to the sea, looked like what the Disney castle would have looked like if Bartholomew Roberts had studied architecture instead of piracy.

  The castle, the Stronghold, was an enormous keep of strangely glittering black rock, veined with white. It looked as if it had been constructed from volcanic glass and snow, adamantine, ice and silver. It was ringed by a curtain wall that looked about as scalable as the mountain, Annapurna. Inside, the imposing wall was cornered by round watchtowers that glimmered like black and white stalagmites.

  “Within that curtain wall, or so I have heard it said,” Reginald Chaosbane commented as we approached the mouth of the river that the Stronghold straddled, “there are large courtyards. They will be just the place for us to train and gather those who are sympathetic to our cause.”

  I managed to pull myself away from the sight of the spiky spires and Gothic-style windows and turned to face the Headmaster.

  “You mean that all of the people here, all the renegades who made it to the ranch and decided to hop on these ships with us, they’re not all the mages who’ll join us?”

  Reginald Chaosbane twirled his mustaches in a debonair and slightly dastardly way that I only hoped that I’d be able to emulate one day.

  “No, Mr. Mauler,” he said. “No, mate. No. There are others who have taken an interest in what we are doing. Some of them—most of them—are keen on saving the Universal Magic and, consequentially, the Multiverse itself. This is a course of action that I don’t see so much as noble, as essential, don’t you think?”

  I nodded briefly. “Multiverse goes kaput, and we’re all screwed, sir.”

  “Was it Voltaire who said that?” the Headmaster said softly to himself.

  “Sorry?” I said, unsure if I had heard him correctly.

  “Nothing, nothing,” Reginald said, smiling amiably at me and pulling a thin flask from an inner jacket pocket. He smacked his lips and coughed a little cloud of orange vapor out into the air.

  “For many, they care not for saving Universal Magic,” Reginald continued. “Instead, they imagine the downfall of the Arcane Council and the freeing of their puppet Queen, and this excites them. These folk cannot imagine nothingness, which is certainly what we’ll get if Universal Magic should die. You know, there are very few people who can actually imagine nothing. Most people imagine a plain color, black or white or deep blue. It’s quite the stretch to pictur
e nothing at all.”

  “Can you, sir?” I asked as Isobel steered The Hellbringer into the mouth of the river. She was at the head of the fleet of ships and led the way toward the enormous closed portcullis that blocked the seaward entrance to the Stronghold.

  “Can I what, mate?” Reginald took another swig from his flask and offered it to me.

  “Can you picture nothing?” I said.

  “I don’t know.” The Headmaster ran a hand through his dark hair. “I’m not sure if I have ever seen nothing, so picturing it would be somewhat of a tax.”

  I took a pull on the flask and tried not to give in to my knee-jerk reaction to spit the mouthful of liquor overboard. I swallowed with difficulty and felt my throat shrivel into a raisin.

  As we drew closer to the Stronghold, I began to see just how imposing the central keep was. It was topped with a tower that was to towers what Agent 47 is to assassins. It was the most incredible piece of craftsmanship that I had ever seen; sheer-sided, black and silver veined, like obsidian shot through with mercury, and with a series of incredible arching windows that must have given one hell of a view across the sea. It must have risen a good five-hundred feet, so that the top of it was little more than a twinkling needle.

  “On the very top of that highest tower is a private place.” Reginald Chaosbane looked up at the Stronghold with an unusually serious expression on his countenance. “There is a smaller plateau, according to what I’ve read in some of your parents’ journals, and that is where your mother and father would go to discuss the most important and secretive business.”

  I didn’t say anything. It felt a little weird to suddenly be so close to a place that had been of such importance to the parents that I barely remembered or knew.

  “Come to the front of the ship with me, Mr. Mauler,” Reginald Chaosbane, taking back the flask and stowing it into his coat. “I require your assistance in getting the front door open.”

  “The front door?” I asked.

  Reginald pointed at the gigantic and formidable portcullis that came down from the roof of the ship-sized arch and disappeared into the calmly flowing water of the river.

  “That’s the front door?” I asked. “How the hell are we supposed to get that thing open? Magic?”

  “No need for any of that type of exertion, my dear lad,” Reginald said. “Not when we have the key.”

  I looked at him and raised my eyebrows. “You have the key?”

  “No, you have the key,” Reginald said. “Or, to be more precise, you are the key.”

  This was news to me. I said as much.

  “Yes,” Reginald mused, “I can see why you might be confused. You’d imagine that if someone personified something as important as a key they would know about it, wouldn’t you? However, my dear cousin Igor and I were discussing it the other night, and we came to the conclusion that, whilst you have not always been the key, there can be no denying that your adventures and the path that you have trodden since gracing our world has turned you into a key.”

  I had been drinking and partying for about four days straight by this point, so I could have been excused for feeling a little behind the Eightball just then. To gain a little time to consider what Reginald Chaosbane had just said, I countered with, “I think Igor might have been pulling your leg he was on his latest trip, sir.”

  Reginald chuckled good-naturedly. “Oh, don’t you worry, Mr. Mauler. I am well aware that Igor is the sort of individual whose advice must come with a pinch, or more likely a bucket, of salt. Both of us know that he has the appearance of a broomstick that has been on the run from the law for about a month, and if his eyes were any further apart, he’d probably be classified as a herbivore, but that does not mean that sometimes he manages to speak sense.”

  “I still don’t get how I could inadvertently become a key to a door that I only knew existed a week ago.”

  Reginald’s dark, cunning eyes glittered. “I’m sure you do know, or could know, if you actually thought about it, mate.”

  I stopped to consider this. Ran my mind back through everything that we had all been through. After little less than a minute of intense cogitation, the lightbulb flicked on.

  “My staff,” I said.

  The Headmaster of the Mazirian Academy beamed. “Ah, there are few things more satisfying than when the camouflage is pulled away and we see what was there all along.”

  As we approached the portcullis, I asked Reginald, “Do I need to get my staff out and wave it around or some shit like that?”

  “No, your parents’ magical arts were beyond such flamboyance and showing off, Mr. Mauler.”

  It was just as he said.

  As the prow of The Hellbringer was just about to nudge up against the solid metal of the portcullis, there was a deep rumble and crashing clank as hidden chains, powered by some thaumaturgical power, began to move and the portcullis went up.

  Our ships passed through without incident, and Isobel had her crew throw lines and secure her galleon to a very well-constructed dock. The other ships behind us followed our lead and, before long, we were back on solid ground.

  Reginald Chaosbane seemed to know where to go. He led the way from the docks, not giving any of us time to indulge in a bit of good, old-fashioned gawping. We headed toward a drawbridge that led into an open gate, flanked by two intimidating guard houses. The stone huts were empty of sentries now, of course, but I imagined that they probably hadn’t been back in my parents’ day. The timber gate was aged to the hardness of solid iron and carved with intricate symbols of the stars and the planets and constellations that I wouldn’t have recognized even if they had been earthly ones.

  The whale host walked along a wide path that wended its way through a series of ornately carved gates and passageways which led under the walls, toward the center of the Stronghold. There were many statues of mages of different races in various poses. There was an ifrit mage in mid leap, an angelic mage with spread wings, a female dwarf with crossed arms, and a stern-faced cyclops dressed in a robe with an enormous scythe over his shoulder.

  “Who are all these people?” I asked Reginald Chaosbane, not really expecting him to know, but guessing that he might have an idea.

  “The fallen,” the Headmaster replied.

  “Sounds about right,” grunted Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock, who was stumping along behind me. “Statues, bloody statues. Funny that they always go up when someone snuffs it.”

  “Bloody Nora, you’re in a fine mood, aren’t you, Gorlbadock?” Aunt Ruth said dryly. “Nothing like a sea voyage to relax and refresh, they say.”

  The matriarch of the Chaosbane clan batted her long lashes at me. “Don’t let him rob you of the appreciation of the culture of this place, Justin.”

  “Bah!” old Gorlbadock said. “Culture! You know what else has culture? Yogurt. Culture forsooth!”

  The path snaked through the sculptural maze of long dead War Mages and ended at another gate. This gate was made of gleaming silver, so bright that it acted like a mirror and reflected the light of the sun into our faces. As Reginald Chaosbane and myself approached, this shining gateway opened as it sensed the staff that I carried, within which the souls of my parents resided.

  We passed through and found ourselves in the middle bailey. In short time, the large open area was filled with people, many of whom I didn’t recognize from the gathering back at the Ranch.

  “Who are all these people?” I asked Leah.

  The ditzy pink-haired Chaosbane shrugged. “I can’t even attempt to tell you, honey-doodle.”

  As I looked out over the expanse of the middle bailey, the scale of what I was seeing impressed itself upon me.

  “These are a bunch of other armies who’ve shown up here, Headmaster,” I said.

  Reginald Chaosbane cocked an eye at me. “That does seem to be the case, doesn’t it?”

  “I agree with Justin,” Nigel said. “This looks t-t-to me to be what is basically known as a weapon count.”

>   “Spot on, Mr. Windmaker, spot on!” Reginald Chaosbane said. “Bravo.”

  “You mean these are armies?” I asked.

  “Parts of armies, certainly,” Reginald said.

  “Yes, parts of armies,” Mort said, appearing at my shoulder in his silent manner. Mort was one of those bounty hunters who knocked his targets off without them ever being aware that he was even in the same room as them. “Only parts. There isn’t any leader out there who is rash enough to send in their whole army, I wouldn’t think.”

  “Quite so, cousin,” said Reginald. “There was no possible way I could have done it without you, Mr. Mauler. The vast majority wouldn’t have recalled the Twin Spirits unless they were to hold your staff, but they knew something wasn’t right. And that it had to be righted. So they came here.”

  “The Twin Spirits weren’t really just two people, two powerful mages, Justin,” Madame Xel said, putting her arm around me and engulfing me in her intoxicating perfume. “It was a movement too. And while most folk won’t remember the names of Zenidor and Istrea, they remember that they started something. Salvation of Universal Magic.”

  “It’s true,” said Enwyn. “There is a call in their souls, and they have responded.”

  I looked out at the glittering shapes in the courtyard now. They were men and women of all different kinds—mages dressed in every kind of battle uniform I could have cared to imagine—moving in fluid formation. Working their way through what looked like designated drill moves.

  They were training already. Sparring and practicing unarmed combat.

  If I had doubted or not appreciated just how serious things were, then I doubted no longer.

  “Do you think that any of these people coming here are suspicious?” I asked Reginald Chaosbane quietly as the rest of the renegades piled into the middle bailey behind us.

  “Suspicious? No,” Reginald Chaosbane replied. “A nun doing squats in a cucumber field is suspicious. I think all we need to worry about, to be aware of, are the different motivating factions that are driving each of our allies. That all of us seek to overthrow the Arcane Council is beyond question, mate, but why those among us want to do that varies.”