by Dante King
Madame Xel gave her gorgeous head a little shake. “Right, that’s enough musing for the time being,” she said. “There’s no point getting myself all hot and bothered. Not if I’m resolved on keeping this meeting strictly professional. Nothing worse than getting all erotically charged and not having an outlet to work it off on.”
“I know the feeling,” I said, giving her a smoldering glance.
“In that case, we’ll get our butts moving,” Madame Xel said. She pulled a portal stone from out of her pocket and ran her fingers across the runes on one side, checking to make sure, I suppose, that it was going to take us to the correct place.
“Where are we off to?” I asked. One of the first things that I had learned, on arriving in the magical world of Avalonia, was that you couldn’t go taxing your neurons about every little thing when it came to stepping through portal stones. No one ever had any good adventures by expending energy on worry after all. You just fucking roll with the punch, in my experience. Worry about where you’re going when you get there. In the magical world, I was yet to be gutted that I had taken a trip through a portal stone.
“We’re going to see your prospective sponsor,” Madame Xel said. She activated the portal stone and a doorway opened in the air, as neatly and easily as if someone had cut it out of the fabric of the world with a scalpel. “We’re going to see the immensely talented Zelara Solarphine.”
I found a smile tugging at the corners of my mouth, and recognized that writhing ball of excitement that I always got in the pit of my stomach just before embarking on a potential escapade.
“Let’s go,” I said, stepping through the portal and—
—out onto hard, uneven rock.
I looked around, narrowing my eyes against the cold wind that blew mercilessly into my face. So far as I could tell, I was standing on a wide plateau of black volcanic-looking rock. The surface of the rock underfoot was pitted and abrasive, like pumice, and did not look like the stuff that you wanted to fall off your skateboard on. The plateau was bordered by high, jagged peaks on two sides. In front of me the plateau stretched out for, maybe, the length of a football field before it opened out onto the sky beyond. I couldn’t see for certain, but I had an inkling that where the mesa stopped a terminal drop began.
“Bracing weather!” came Madame Xel’s voice from behind me. I turned and saw my potion tutor and agent standing in her skimpy clothes. “I’m usually a less is more kind of woman when it comes to clothes,” Madame Xel said, “but on this occasion I think it might be prudent to grab a jacket.”
She stuck one hand through the still open portal, in the same way that you might reach into a closet as you’re walking out the door, and extracted a furry pink coat.
“Perfect,” the succubus said, wrapping the garment around herself. Seeing her attired and covered like any other person struck me as wrong somehow. Madame Xel tossed up the portal stone and caught it, then slipped it into one of her coat pockets. With that funny sucking sound, like the last bit of water going down a plughole, the portal closed.
“Welcome and well met,” said a voice from out of the rocks to my right.
“Well met to you, Zelara!” Madame Xel replied.
I looked over and saw, walking out of a low building that I had taken to be a mere pile of boulders at first glance, a woman. Well, not a woman really, but a female. It took a moment or two for me to trawl through the lists of mythical creatures in my head until I had found the correct name for this captivating being.
A harpy, I realized. She’s a goddamn harpy.
The woman was slight and dressed in a robe that reminded me of the samurai somehow. A kimono style thing that wrapped about her and ended at about mid-calf. She had a head of pure white hair that stuck up in all directions and contrasted beautifully with the deep chocolate color skin of her sharply angled face. She was gazing at me unblinkingly with eyes that were as filled with purpose as a hawk’s, and the same color yellow too. She appeared to be human from the waist up, but a pair of very avian anisodactyl feet—four-toed with insanely sharp claws—were on show too. From what I could recall about harpies, the woman in front of me should have wings instead of the arms that she had folded across her chest. Once again, I found that human mythology had gotten it almost right.
Doing my best not to stare—which is tricky when someone is, essentially, half a bird and rocking the type of toenails that could eviscerate you with a twitch of the ankle—I held out my hand and smiled respectfully at the woman who might very well be my second sponsor. When I remembered that my other sponsor was Igor Chaosbane, a mage so full of alcohol and chemicals that he had to be careful not to accidentally swallow an ember when he was smoking his pipe in case he exploded, Zelara Solarphine looked to be a different class of sponsor. The hand that grasped mine was strong and callused.
“Justin Mauler,” I said as we introduced ourselves. “A pleasure to meet you.”
“I am Zelara Solarphine,” Zelara said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you too. Almost as much of a pleasure as it was to see you in action at the Academy.”
“You were in the crowd?” I asked.
Zelara nodded. “Correct. In the stadium. I make it a point to watch prospective War Mages. You never know if there is going to be one among them who will be the perfect candidate to showcase my broomsticks to the world.”
“You haven’t found anyone yet, then?” Madame Xel asked.
Zelara regarded me, pinning me with that cool, calculating gaze of hers that was so much like a bird of prey’s that I almost squirmed. She looked at me for a full ten seconds, then said, “No. Not yet. But this one… He shows promise. He shows spirit.”
Despite the chill breeze, Zelara rolled up the sleeves of her kimono. I saw that her forearms were tightly muscled and lean, with an impressive array of scars and burns criss-crossing her brown skin. I wondered how it was that a craftswoman like her ended up with such an impressive collection of wounds and marks. Was it from her work? Or did she moonlight as a gladiator or something?
“Look,” I said, “I’m not here to beat around the bush. Madame Xel tells me that, due to me being an Earthling, many of the potential sponsors are thinking twice about offering me deals with them. They’re worried that I might have pulled a fluke out of my… Well, they’re worried that the victories that Cecilia and I enjoyed at the Exhibition games might have been flukes.”
Zelara said nothing.
“You strike me as a pragmatic woman,” I continued. “A woman who rarely makes mistakes, and learns from them when she does. I get you. I’m not one who likes to make a habit of screwing the pooch myself.”
Madame Xel snorted with laughter behind me, and even the enigmatic broomstick maker standing before me cracked something that might have very well been a smile.
“I appreciate your directness and candor, Justin,” the harpy said in her calm and thoughtful voice. “Many people come to visit me here in my aerie and only endeavor to—”
“Blow smoke up your ass?” I asked.
This time Zelara’s grin could not be doubted. The smile under her rather beaky nose was as hard and sharp and predatory as the rest of her, but at least it told me that she had a sense of humor.
“That’s right, Justin,” she said. “Just as you say. They come here, fawning over my broomsticks, telling me how streamlined, aerodynamic and fabulous they are. And I tell them that I know they are all these things. I have designed them to fly truer and faster than any other commercially produced brooms out there. I make each one with these two hands of mine.” Zelara held up her arms, showing off the scars and shiny burns. “I spill my blood and my sweat over them on occasion. I know how good they are, because I am the one who crafts them. They are made from wood that I select from the fir trees down in the valley and—the thing that sets my brooms apart from all others—their tails are made only from harpy feathers, as opposed to the conventional twigs. Their quality is not something that I question. The question is, are you the mage that sh
ould be representing Solarphine’s Sticks on the public stage?”
I squared my shoulders and adopted a serious expression. I was used to putting on a cheerfully reckless demeanor, but I felt that a certain level of outward gravitas could do nothing but improve my chances here.
“You just tell me how I can prove it to you,” I said. “How can I be the guy worthy enough to represent your broomsticks?”
Another one of those razor-thin smiles appeared briefly on Zelara’s face. “As you said astutely and correctly, Justin, I am a pragmatic woman. I don’t like to invent tasks for the sake of doing so. Life is too full as it is for that sort of behavior. However, if you wish to prove that you are the Earthling for the job, then I will tell you how you can achieve that.”
“Tell me,” I said.
“I am more than a skilled crafter of broomsticks,” Zelara said. “I am also, first and foremost, a mother.”
I blinked at this, but asked no questions just yet. I was desperately hoping that she wasn’t going to ask me to babysit.
“There is a local community of stone golems that live just down the valley,” Zelara carried on. “Recently, they have taken to staging wrestling tournaments periodically through the day and night. The noise is… Well, a people of stone are bound to make more noise than a tribe of banshees, are they not? This has, unsurprisingly, been disturbing my fledglings. It keeps them up. Turns their tempers black. That, in turn, robs me of my sleep and has an adverse effect on my workrate, you see.”
“I see,” I said. “All too clearly. You want me to take care of these stone golems for you?”
“In a way, yes,” Zelara said. “But the best way to do that will be, not to kill them, but best them at their own sport. They are a simple folk. If you strike a wager with them that makes them cease their nocturnal disturbances, then I will know that you have the clarity of mind as well as the braun to represent my broomsticks.”
I looked at Madame Xel who was standing watching the discussion mutely. She raised a single eyebrow and gave a little shrug, as if to say, “This is the deal. Take it or leave it.”
That’s all very well for her to say, I thought. She’s not the one who has to fight a bunch of stone golems.
I looked back at Zelara, making sure that none of the doubt I felt at the potential for completing this task showed on my face. I smiled—one of those dashing, cheerfully reckless ones.
“Consider it done,” I said, and turned and set off toward the mouth of the valley.
Chapter Ten
The sounds of drums started up as I trudged down the valley, leaving Zelara Solarphine’s aerie behind me. I had no clue as to what I was walking into, no idea of what I could expect to find. I hadn’t even been given any directions on how to find these stone golems by Zelara. No doubt though, this was all part of the test. Zelara probably wanted to make sure that the person she was going to sponsor had at least a handful of brains floating about between their ears. Life in the magical world was probably fairly akin to ripping around the skies on a broomstick: there were moments where you had to think fast, problem-solve on the spot and go with your gut instinct to avoid falling from that height, or at the kind of speed, that would leave you as a mere stain on the landscape. Lucky for me, I was packing more than my fair share of the gray matter. I assumed that if I followed the sound of the echoing drums I’d be bound to wind up at the right place. I highly doubted that a stone golem fight club was going to be a world-leader when it came to clandestine sporting events.
The thrumming, pulsing rhythm of the drums reverberated and bounced around the sheer sides of the valley as I descended into it. As I drew closer to the source of the throbbing racket, I became aware that little chips of loose rock were dancing all around me. Every now and again a large slab or boulder would sheer away from the valley wall and tumble with a noise like thunder down the shale-covered slopes. I also noticed that the fingers that were clutching my black crystal staff, which I had summoned into being as soon as I was out of sight of the aerie, were tapping involuntarily on the shaft of my vector. I was keeping time with the pulsing cadence of the simple drumbeat, bopping my head to the simple but catchy beat. I had to hand it to these stone golems; they might have been pissing off the neighbors with their noise, but it could have been worse. They could have been blasting Bieber for one thing, or Crazy Frog.
After about a quarter of an hour of walking, with my head moving in strategic arcs as I moved stealthily along, I rounded a hill of rubble and ripped up trees and found the entrance to the stone golems encampment. It looked to be, as far as I could see from my vantage point behind the mound of shattered stone and broken logs, a smaller valley—an off-shoot of the main gorge that I had been following down from Zelara’s aerie—that stretched a fair distance into the mountainside. At the far end, shrouded in shadow and extremely atmospheric gloom, was the mouth of a cave. A couple of torches—little more than two small trees that had been dunked in pitch and set ablaze—burned on either side of the entrance.
I felt the prickle of anticipation creeping up my spine. The feeling that an adventure was afoot. The feeling that I was about to face an unknown challenge. That I was about to be required to think on my feet or be dropped on my ass.
This was a scenario that I had come to expect and gotten used to, ever since the day Enwyn Emberskull had shown up in my uncle’s secondhand bookstore and transported me into this magical realm.
Well, fuck it, this is what life is all about, isn’t it? You’ve got to push the envelope, I thought. I stretched my neck to either side, working out the tension that sometimes accompanied imminent violence or battle. If you didn’t push the envelope personally, you’d never know where your boundaries lay after all.
I stepped around the pile of rubble and cracked and splintered trees and started making my way slowly and carefully along the periphery of the narrow gorge that led to the cave mouth. I didn’t adopt that classic hurried hunched scurry, which was a cross between a ninja with lumbago and Smeagol. That sort of movement, I reckoned, would get you noticed in no short order. Nothing screamed guilty or up to no good like a hunched man in a hurry. Instead, I moved with a sure and measured tread, being careful only to keep the wall of the gorge on my left so that, if things went tits up, I could at least get my back to the wall.
As I approached the mouth of the cave, the drum beat rose to such an intensity that I could feel it in my chest, resounding from rib to rib and giving my internal organs a high intensity massage. This rhythmic din was added to and heightened by the occasional dull roar from a stony throat, and the mass cheer of a gathering of entities that were thoroughly enjoying themselves.
I slipped casually into the cave mouth, still not having sighted a single stone golem. There hadn’t been anyone standing guard by the opening to the cave, which told me that stone golems were either pretty clueless when it came to matters of security or else they didn’t think anyone would be fucking dumb enough to gatecrash one of their little wrestling tournaments.
Shows how much they know, I thought to myself drily. Never underestimate a human being’s ability to get themselves into shit.
I padded down the only passageway. It was lit with more poorly-made and hastily constructed torches, some of which had burned out. The place was rife with shadows and rang and rumbled to the sounds of the stone golems’ backyard wrestling. Finally, I rounded a corner and emerged into a large cavern. The walls were stained black in places where torches had burned and there was a thick fog of smoke hanging around the high, rough ceiling. In the middle of the cavern—which had the look of an incredibly roughly built hall, what with the towering limestone columns that appeared to hold up the roof—there was a large open space. It was roughly ringed around by stalagmites. Within this more or less circular space, two stone golems were going Chris Brown at one another in a serious way. Making sure that I was well concealed in the shadows, I climbed up the base of one of the stalagmites that was closest to me so that I could get a slight van
tage point and I took a few moments to analyze the situation.
There was a large crowd of about forty or fifty stone golems gathered about the circle. It looked like there might have been more, but that was only because your average stone golem takes up quite a bit more room than your average human punter. A stone golem really fills up space. They have a definite weight that you can feel as well as see. They were humanoid in shape, but looked as if they had been shaped and moulded from Play-Doh by kids. Or chimpanzees. Drunk ones. Their features were crude, their arms longer than their stumpy legs, which ended in three large toes. Not one of them had a single strand of hair. Their eyes gleamed black and shiny in their flat gray faces, like nuggets of wet coal, as they cheered on the two golems that were beating the crap out of one another in the middle of the circle. Some of the gathered crowd were holding pottery vessels, swigging from them and then passing them on, which told me that they were probably filled with the golem equivalent of homebrew.
“I don’t know what that is, but I don’t think it’s pumpkin juice,” I muttered to myself as the vision of a meme that I had seen recently popped into my head at the sight of the golems on a drinking spree.
The stone golems were whooping and hollering in their deep gravelly voices, their voices getting louder and louder until they competed with the drums that shook the cavern. Such was the noise that I felt like I was in one enormous drum myself, and I had to make a conscious effort to stop grinding my teeth to the beat of the catchy rhythm.
The fighting itself was not exactly what you would call a dazzling display of unarmed combat technique and patience. It reminded me of, if anything, a Tekken battle that you might have with someone who had never played the game before. Or your dad. Basically, if what I had been watching had been a video game, there would have been some serious button-mashing going on. Both golem combatants were hammering away at one another with about as little skill as I had ever seen. One would strike the other, and then the other would retaliate with a punch that was so obviously telegraphed that it was a wonder the two of them weren’t working from a script. Clearly, they were tough bastards, but they also looked to be about as dumb as—well… a box of rocks.