by Dante King
“Epic,” I breathed to myself. Another weapon in the arsenal. I recalled how I had seen Cecilia use this very spell on multiple occasions, often with deadly effect. Giant icicles coming at an opponent during the Mage Games… That’d make them sit up and take notice I was sure, especially if I combined it with some of my Fire and Storm Magic.
I snapped my spellbook shut. It was another boost to a morning that, in spite of the fairly miserable weather, was turning out to be a humdinger. I started humming to myself as I finished off my coffee, feeling as if I was riding a gravy train with biscuit wheels.
The door to the kitchen creaked open.
“Nigel!” I greeted the halfling. “How the hell are you this morning? Excuse me for saying so, buddy, but you look like something that’s been scraped off the bottom of someone’s shoe. Pull up a chair.”
“Would you mind terribly just turning the volume down a bit, Justin?” Nigel said as he shuffled into the room. “Your voice is going through my head like a tortured banshee.”
“Sorry, Nigel,” I said in a stage whisper. “Are you feeling a little bit hungover this morning? We’ve fought the undead on a couple of occasions now, but I don’t think any of them looked half so crappy as you do right now.”
Nigel pulled himself laboriously onto a stool next to me and groaned. He pointed to my crotch.
“Just because you have one,” he said, “doesn’t mean that you have to be one.”
I laughed at that. “Sound advice.” I necked the last of my coffee and prepared to leave.
“So,” Nigel croaked as he groped pathetically at the coffee pot, “did you do it?”
“Do what?” I asked.
“Cecilia,” Nigel replied as I pushed the coffee pot within his grasp. “Did you do Cecilia?”
“Nigel, Nigel, Nigel, you know a gentleman never tells.”
“Yes,” said Nigel, “that’s rather my point.”
He had me there. “Yep,” I said shortly, “I sealed the deal and, I have to say, that it was probably the best lay of my life.”
Nigel grunted in a thoroughly un-Nigelish fashion. Normally, the halfling was a sucker for the details of any sexual liaison. It was a mark of how hard he was feeling the previous evening’s fiesta that he just said, “You prick. And here I am, feeling like I’m dying.”
“You’d be one to know, eh?” I said, alluding to his death at the hands of Rick and his subsequent regeneration.
Nigel shuddered. “Let’s not talk about that right now.”
“Fair enough. Anyway, I’ve got to go.” I patted Nigel gently on the back and took my leave. I passed Bradley in the kitchen doorway. The High Elf looked tired, but not quite as woefully haggard as Nigel.
I didn’t stop to chat and neither did he, but I heard him enter the kitchen and say, “Nigel, you’re looking a bit under the weather, man.”
“Oh, I’m so glad that you and your hair are here, Bradley,” the halfling replied acidly. “Just the sort of company that a dying man wants to share during his final moments.”
“I don’t appreciate the sarcasm about the hair,” Bradley said, though I could hear the suppressed laughter in his voice.
“You don’t like my sarcasm?” snapped Nigel. “Well, I don’t like your stupid.”
I grinned, left my two fraternity brothers to bicker amongst themselves, and headed up to the Academy.
I was ambling along quite happily through the drizzle, with my hood drawn up and my boots splashing through the shallow puddles, when I was hailed from the rear. I turned. I was walking up a sidestreet that ran parallel to Nevermoor’s main highstreet to avoid the crowds of shoppers and pedestrians as they hurried about their business, but there were still quite a few people about.
“Justin!” I heard someone yell again.
I craned my head around a cart full of swamp yams being driven slowly along by an elf wrapped in a voluminous cloak and saw the familiar faces of Janet Thunderstone and Alura the Gemstone Princess.
“Ladies!” I said, genuinely pleased to see them. “How’s it all going?”
Alura’s bright gold eyes gleamed with their white pupils. The sun sparkled off her unmistakable glittering, faceted, diamond-like skin wrapped in an ethereal mist. The Gemstone Princess gave me a wide smile, a hug, and a crisp kiss.
“Excellent, Justin, excellent,” she said, in her crisply polite aristocratic voice. “Going very well, thank you. And yourself?”
“Just corking, my Lady,” I said, sketching a courtly bow and giving her a teasing grin.
Alura smiled wider and punched me on the arm. As a Gemstone Elemental, she packed quite a punch even when she was messing around.
“I yield!” I said, and Alura laughed.
“I hear things got a little bit out of hand at your place last night?” Janet asked me, giving me a hug and a kiss on the lips in turn. Janet was the daughter of the High Warden of the Eldritch Prison, Idman Thunderstone—one of the most feared men in Avalonia. As one might expect from the daughter of such an intimidating and no-nonsense man, Janet had plenty of attitude and ran her own show. Interestingly, she had been the first mage that I ever met, though I hadn’t realized it at the time. The two of us had hooked up and slept together after an Iron Maiden concert back in my world. Janet was a petite and athletic brunette with a body that could make a Catholic bishop question his lifestyle choice.
“Our frat? Out of hand?” I said. “That doesn’t sound like us. You heard more than I did, Miss Thunderstone.”
The two young women looped their arms through mine, and we started walking casually up the hill toward the Academy.
“Oh, come on, Justin,” Janet said. “There’s a rumor going around that Rick was hammering on the door of one of the bakeries in Nevermoor at midnight, demanding that they let him in so that they could bake him into one of his favorite vole and wondernut pies.”
I raised my eyebrows at this. “Is that right?” I asked, desperately hoping that this rumor turned out to be true.
“That was the gossip around the breakfast table in the Elemental sorority this morning,” Alura said.
“I hate to disappoint, but I can neither confirm nor deny these incredible rumors,” I said. “I was out and about.”
Both Alura, the Gemstone Elemental, and Janet, the Storm Mage, looked at me.
“With Cecilia?” they asked at the same time.
“A gentleman never—” I started to say, but the women shouted me down as one.
“Oh, you so did go out with her,” Janet crowed. “When are you going to take me out on a hot date, hm?”
“Or me?” Alura asked, her pretty face sparkling momentarily as the sun made a game at piercing the gloomy firmament.
“Hey, hey, wait one second,” I laughed. “These are modern times we’re living in, aren’t they? What’s to stop you two lovely things sweeping me off my feet, huh?”
The girls laughed as we walked up the winding main drive that led to the front doors of the academy.
“Come on,” Janet said, “we better get our asses to class before we’re so late that we have to flag it altogether.”
We arrived at our Vector Care class a good ten minutes later than we should have. Thankfully, when we snuck in through the door, the rest of the class were chatting amongst themselves and there was no teacher in sight. I sat behind a desk at the back of the class, and Alura and Janet took seats on either side of me.
“Where do you suppose the lecturer is?” Alura asked, looking about the room.
I shrugged.
The answer to her question appeared a moment later in the swaggering form of Reginald Chaosbane. The Headmaster, who looked like the lovechild of Jack Sparrow and Loki, traipsed into the room with the confident step of a man who knows that, no matter what he does or says, he can’t be fired.
“Ah!” the Headmaster said by way of greeting as he sashayed down the aisle that separated the two sides of the room. “Yes, here you are! Here all of you are. Excellent. Now, I’m not sure t
hat inane banter is a subject that we teach at the Academy but, if it is, allow me to assure you all that you have mastered it. Now, if you’d kindly stop the racket, we can get down to business.”
The class’s hubbub died almost immediately. Reginald Chaosbane rarely spoke above a sort of inebriated prattle, but he nevertheless had the suave charm and charisma that could silence a room and hold the attention of anyone in it.
“Will you be teaching us today, sir?” someone at the front of the class called out.
Chaosbane looked startled at the very notion. “Good gods, no, I hope not,” he said earnestly. “What’s the good of being the Headmaster if you actually have to take classes.” He gave a little shudder which set most of the class to tittering, though I didn’t think Chaosbane was putting it on.
“Anyway,” Chaosbane said, patting his pockets as if he was hoping that there might be a bottle of something somewhere on his person, “as much as I would love to, uh, stay and teach you, uh, knowledge, I'm afraid that today is one of those days where I actually have to get things done. However, I wished to be here briefly, so that I could introduce you to a new member of staff.”
“We have a new teacher?” a bespectacled gorgon asked from the front row. “What happened to Madame Incana?”
Madame Incarna was a beautiful dryad who had previously taught the Vector Care class. She had been a captivating lecturer and a treat for the eyes, so I was equally interested in what Chaosbane’s answer would be.
“She is undergoing certain research projects,” Chaosbane replied. “Something or other about the plight of moss-bound arachnodillos. Riveting stuff, but the show must go on!”
Chaosbane reached behind him, picked up a piece of chalk from the desk, and walked over to the large blackboard at the back of the room. He then drew a child’s approximation of a door on it, and rapped his knuckles on it.
Rat-ta-ta-tat. Rat-tat.
“This,” he said, “is your new Care of Vectors teacher, Madame Odette Scaleblade, Death Mage extraordinaire.”
The creaking of the blackboard door opening mingled with the gasps of surprise that flitted around the room like whispers at the sound of the words ‘Death Mage’.
“A Death Mage!” Janet hissed leaning across to me. “They’re very rare. Almost as rare a Creation Mages.”
I recalled the Death Mage that had broken into my fraternity house a few weeks prior. He had been a crazy, half-starved looking bastard, like Voldemort’s anemic cousin, and had been wearing a drab brown robe and not much else. I settled back in my chair, expecting more of the same. Death Mage didn’t exactly conjure the jolly, pointy hat wearing magic user image that so many people thought of when magic was mentioned.
Having said that, the woman who stepped through Chaosbane’s magically conjured door could not have been less like the gaunt thieving prick that had made off with the Skeleton Key.
Madame Odette Scaleblade was a slightly older, captivatingly beautiful woman with heavy-lidded eyes and a pale gold shimmer to her flawless skin. A couple of short horns poked up through her mass of black curls and, when she stepped fully through the door, it was clear for all to see that she also sported a reptilian dragon’s tail.
In response to the very audible group gasp that went up from the class when they saw her dragon tail, Madame Scaleblade laughed throatily. It was the sort of warm, husky laugh that, had it been an item of clothing, would have warmed your neck on a cold winter’s eve. When she spoke, her accent sounded French to my Earthling ears, although I doubted whether Chaosbane had found her in Paris.
“Yes,” she said, and she dragged the ‘s’ out in a lisping, hiss that was somehow full of sensual promise. “Yes, I am not only a Death Mage, but a dragonkin too. That’s what I am. Now, now that we ‘ave addressed the elephant in the room, may I also assure you that I am more than capable of filling your brains with the sort of knowledge that you will find most helpful in keeping your vectors in as good a shape as possible.”
One of my classmates attempted to say something at that point, but Madame Scaleblade cut across them.
“One last thing,” she purred. “I would much rather be addressed as Odette than Madame Scaleblade. Being addressed so formally makes me feel one step closer to the grave, no?”
Chaosbane, who had been twiddling his thumbs and openly admiring Madame Scaleblade, seemed suddenly to collect his thoughts. He clapped his hands, ran his thumb across his neat little mustaches, and said, “Excellent. Cracking. Wonderful! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must be ankling off. I have an important meeting with certain Arcane Council members concerning some sort of indiscretion at my end. An indiscretion, I don’t doubt, that they will find to be most certainly a misunderstanding.”
With that, Chaosbane hurried from the room.
“Now,” Odette Scaleblade said, snapping everyone’s attention back to her, “I will tell you something so that you ‘ear it straight from the dragon’s mouth, as it were. I was stripped of my tenure from my last post at a less liberally-minded Academy. My crime? Informing students on certain vector-related things that, apparently, it was not good for them know.”
Odette paused, and her tail moved lazily behind her. She regarded the class through her half-closed, heavily make-upped lids. She reminded me of a sultry gypsy woman somehow, all dark and mysterious. This was emphasized by the fact that she wore long patterned skirts, a blouse with cut off sleeves, and her neck was festooned with beaded and jeweled necklaces.
“‘Appily,” she said into the captivated silence, “this is not the case ‘ere at the Mazirian Academy. So, I shall start by telling you this; while the art of sealing a soul to an item to create a vector ‘as been lost, I believe it can be recovered. What is more, I ‘ope that one day someone among the students I teach will learn this lost art form. That is why I teach. That is my dream and my goal.”
I was captivated by this woman, and I was not the only one. Alura was sitting right forward in her chair, a look of rapt concentration on her pretty, sparkling face.
“Let us start by examining one of your vectors, hm?” Odette Scaleblade said. She pointed a ring-encrusted finger at me. “Mr. Mauler,” she said, “the Headmaster has mentioned you in our talks together. Perhaps you would be so good as to come up to the front with your vector, and you and I might take a look at it, yes?”
I got up and walked to the front of the class. As I went, I conjured my black crystal staff with a thought—a skill that had become second-nature to me. I handed it to Madame Scaleblade and stood quietly while she ran her fingers over it.
After only a few seconds, Madame Scaleblade muttered something in a tongue I did not recognize and looked up at me. Up this close to her, I could see that her eyes, under the thick and artfully applied eyeliner, were a curious shade of light brown that was almost red.
“This staff,” she said to the class, “has… twin spirits.”
This might have been news to everyone else, but I had suspected such a thing. The old gnarled staff that I had picked up from Barry’s Magical Paraphernalia store had been absorbed into the black crystal staff that had once belonged to my father. It was technically two vectors in one, so it having two souls made sense.
While the rest of the class muttered amongst themselves, Odette Scaleblade leaned in close to me. “Twin spirits, but not the Twin Spirits, hm?”
Before I could answer, she had straightened and addressed the class once more.
“This means that this particular staff has been infused with two souls,” she said. “A rare thing. And, it seems, these two souls were intimately linked. One human, and one something else entirely... Kindred spirits, some might say.”
I recalled Madame Incana, the previous Vector Care teacher, had said that two vectors linking would require that they be like kindred spirits.
Madame Scaleblade went on to explain that, depending on what soul or spirit inhabited a certain vector, individual vectors would react differently to differing amounts of magic being directed t
hrough them.
“This is why looking after your vector is so vitally important,” Madame Scaleblade elucidated. “You may not realize or feel it now, but if you do not take care of your vector and maintain it as you would any other vital piece of equipment, then it will come back to bite you in the behind.”
“Are you talking about mana-burn, Madame—I mean, Odette?” Janet asked from the back of the room. “
“I am glad you asked, Miss…?”
“Thunderstone,” Janet replied.
One of Madame Scaleblade’s heavily pencilled eyebrows rose just a fraction at the name. “Indeed, I am speaking of Mana-burn,” she said. “Mana-burn will infect your vector if you do not give it adequate care.” She twirled one of her sable ringlets of hair around her forefinger and continued. “Mana-burn is a result of casting too many powerful spells in quick succession. Mana-burn will result in your vector weakening or misfiring—something that is not very helpful in the middle of a battle, no? Now, who can tell me ‘ow to prevent this problem?”
“Mana-priming,” Alura asked. “As an Elemental, it’s a simple process for me since my body is itself a vector, but for non-Elementals, it requires filling your vector with mana but not actually casting a spell.”
“Correct!” Odette replied. “But, alas, prime too much, and you’ll have problems, too. Vectors, like people, are finicky things. That is the first lesson that you will learn in this class, I think. Now, I’m afraid I have administerial work to do, so keep yourselves busy by turning to your spellbooks. I will transfer the required reading now.” She pulled out her wand, which was shaped like a stiletto dagger with a blade that looked like a dragon’s tooth. Then, she tapped her wand on a pile of dusty tomes balancing on a shelf. “That should do it. Read up, soak in knowledge, learn all you can, for Death is always at the door!”
The rest of the class was spent with our noses pressed into the required reading Odette had transferred to our spellbooks. When Madame Scaleblade eventually told us that class was over, I was surprised to find that two hours had elapsed with considerable speed.