by Dante King
While this scramble was taking place, Rick knocked the two of the last three Frost Giants off their feet with his Earth spell that rippled the very ground. He jumped on the head of one of his foes while he was on the ground and, while he was doing that, Madame Scaleblade summoned those bone spikes of hers from the floor and impaled the other.
The thirteen of us mages, covered in blood and soot and the gods knew what else, stood panting and gasping in the middle of all the wreckage. Bodies were everywhere. It looked like a fucking slaughterhouse, like a charnel house.
“Th-th-that’s what I love t-to see,” said Nigel. “A good plan c-coming together.”
Alura laughed at this. “Yes,” she said. “There’s nothing quite like sneaking into the enemy stronghold undetected, is th—”
Her quip was cut off by a roar from behind us. The last desperate Frost Giant had just hauled itself to its feet. He must have been the one that had been knocked out by the flying arm. It looked very wobbly on his feet, but determined for all that.
“Oh, come now,” Chaosbane said.
“Yeah, give it up, big guy,” I said.
The Frost Giant leapt defiantly onto the table and bellowed his challenge at us again.
Then he exploded, in a crackling burst of electricity-loaded earth, as he stepped on my Arcane Mine.
Body fragments pattered down. Cecilia gave a little squeal as an eyeball landed in her glossy white-blonde hair.
“Right,” I said, “there’s going to be plenty of time for back-slapping and all that business later. Let’s get a move on and find Janet’s dad, then get the hell out of here, yeah?”
“Agreed,” Enwyn said, wiping a smear of gore off her glasses.
“Best to follow me,” Chaosbane said. “I’ve a nose for trouble, and I feel very much as if Idman is going to be smack-dab in the middle of a great steaming pile of the stuff.”
We hefted our vectors and weapons and hurried off after Chaosbane, who led the way through a series of passages that grew steadily narrower and narrower, dingier and dingier.
We came across a host of empty cells as we moved through the prison. Some, on closer inspection, held the bodies of prisoners and Frost Giants in them. It seemed that the Death Mages were using the Skeleton Key for all it was worth, freeing prisoners so as to cause as much mayhem and confusion as possible and keep the Frost giants busy on multiple fronts. The Death Mages might not have been snappy dressers, but it was clear they weren’t stupid either.
“What are we going to do if we have to face the Arcane Council down here?” I asked Chaosbane as we moved through the gloomy passages. “Fight them? Kill them?”
Chaosbane gave an ambiguous grunt, then rounded a tight corner and let out a little whistle. The rest of us filed around the corner behind him and pulled up short. There was a tense silence.
“Hello, hello, hello and multiple felicitations on the execution of your plan thus far, mates,” Chaosbane said.
Gathered in front of the Headmaster, in front of us, were a gang of dark-eyed and dour-faced Death Mages.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Death Mages regarded us with wet, dark eyes that were set into their wasted and pockmarked faces. There were maybe a dozen of them, though it was hard to tell. A shadow seemed to flow about them, obscuring faces and features unless you stared right at them. They all looked fairly uniform in their appearance; tattered robes that looked like they’d been crafted from old grain sacks, heads that were shaved to a light gray stubble, dark rings around the eyes, skin the color of ricotta, and twitchy, clever hands. In short, they were all basically identical to Horatio. And, speak of the Devil, Horatio himself was standing hunched and furious at the back, his eyes burning fever-bright in his skull-like face.
The hallway that we had come across them in was fairly roomy, what with it having to accommodate the Frost Giant guards, but it was still a hallway. There was very little cover to speak of—the corridor from which we had emerged, a corner behind the Death Mages that presumably led to another corridor, and a few cell doorways. The ceiling was fairly high, with ghostly blue light emanating from the joins where the ceiling met the walls. If shit went down here, it was going to be bloody, and that blood would probably be all up those walls and maybe across that ceiling.
“Yes, yes, you have done well,” Chaosbane continued cheerfully. “Although, might I suggest, after this little caper of yours is done, that you get out and spend a bit more time in the fresh air, mates? Get a bit of sun on your skin. Go on some bracing group walks. All that sort of thing. It’d do you all the power of good.”
“Shut the hell up, Chaosbane!” Horatio snarled.
Arun had been right; he was a little tetchy about his looks.
The rest of the group of Death Mages shifted restlessly, as Chaosbane took a couple of swaggering steps toward them, twirling his wand in his fingers. They were obviously well aware that, as suicidal and loony as Reginald Chaosbane might act, he was a thaumaturgical force to be reckoned with.
Chaosbane stopped and looked back at us. He appeared to be mildly affronted by Horatio’s tone. “That’s not a very genial attitude,” he said, turning back to Horatio. “Not the sort of way one should act when another person gives them such solid advice.”
Horatio gritted his rotten teeth, spit hissing through them, and his eyes bulged maniacally. “You’re too fucking late, Chaosbane,” Horatio said.
“For…?” Chaosbane asked in that infuriatingly blithe fashion of his.
I edged closer behind the Headmaster. I could feel the tension building in the air. It was that same feeling that you got when you wound up a jack-in-the-box or played a game of Irish Snap. It was the feeling that, at any moment, everything was going to come apart at the seams and there was going to be a good deal of yelling and jumping around. Nerves were stretched thin.
“For? For?” Horatio sneered. “To stop us doing what we came here to do, of course! Too late, for you and the loyal mutts behind you,” and here his mad eyes flicked over to me, though the stare I gave him back made him quickly look away, “to stop us freeing all those Death Mages imprisoned here. For—”
Chaosbane yawned. He pulled out his flask and took a facetiously slow drink from it. He smacked his lips.
Horatio screamed in rage—I figured he had some sweet little monologue planned there and was pissed that Chaosbane had ruined it—and his hand moved with the speed of a bull-whip toward me. With a speed that was becoming more and more honed with every fight to the death, I conjured a Flame Barrier shield. Horatio’s spell ricocheted off it and punched into the wall next to me, blasting fist-sized chunks out of the stonework like fifty-caliber machine gun fire.
That was, essentially, the starter’s gun. The Death Mages sprang into action, taking Horatio’s crack at me to mean that they should all get involved. I had to give it to them; they had some nuts on them, these guys. I could only imagine what an intimidating sight I and my fellow mages presented, filling one end of the corridor and bristling with menace. Still, the Death Mages made the decision to fight within a couple of seconds. I supposed that was the good thing about fanaticism; it made making decisions a lot easier.
One of the Death Mages let loose a spell that ripped twin shards of razor sharp rock from the walls, punching them out and into the corridor. His intention had been clear—to skewer a couple of us like marshmallows on a stick—but luckily Bradley had other ideas. He had changed back into his Crimson Titan form. This filled up the corridor even more—and, what with Rick, it was already pretty cosy—but it meant that he could stop the rock shards from perforating anyone. One of the shards screeched across the backplate of his translucent orange fire armor, cracked, and shattered. The other shard Bradley managed to catch with his heightened magical strength and pushed it up toward the ceiling.
The Death Mage who had fired the spell laughed psychotically and raised his hands to have another go. He fell back with a squawk with one of Ragnar Ironskin’s throwing knives embedded
in his chest.
Meanwhile, Enwyn fired a Fireball in the direction of the Death Mages, Cecilia responded with a few Greater Frost Shards, and Rick smashed his fists into the ground and set a rolling ripple of earth toward our enemies.
It was complete chaos. Shields of one elemental or another deflected all sorts of spells. A mage battle was far more intense, far more tactical, than a fight between mages and magical creatures. With magical creatures, all you really had to worry about was something ripping your head off, hitting you with some sort of sting or corrosive acid or physically attacking you in some way. Monsters didn’t typically go in for tactics. They tried to eat you or kill you. They didn’t block and counter.
This was not so with the Death Mages. They were skilled magical practitioners. They weren’t rushing into anything. They had come here with a purpose in mind—apparently to use the Skeleton Key to free a whole bunch of their pals—and now that they had done this, they were keen on making good their escape.
There was a moaning and groaning sound, which emanated from one of the open cells up the corridor from us. Then, two undead figures shambled through the cell door. One was a human prisoner, the other was a Frost Giant Guard, and they had both obviously just been reanimated by one of the Death Mages. The two of them shambled toward our group, heedless of the hexes and spells that flickered and sparked around them.
Janet fired a Storm Bolt at the Frost Mage but, due to the narrow confines of the battle zone, had to pull her aim at the last moment when Nigel inadvertently ducked into her line of fire. Her Storm Bolt hissed to the right, singeing some of the Frost Giant’s fur as it missed it by an inch, and exploded over the heads of a couple of the Death Mages. These Death Mages cried out as sizzling sparks of spent Storm Magic rained down upon them.
Capitalizing on this momentary distraction, Cecilia and Madame Scaleblade launched themselves off Rick Hammersmith’s shoulders in a beautiful display of synchronized death-dealing. Each woman, at the peak of their jumps, let loose a spear—Cecilia’s was of ice, Madame Scaleblade’s of bone. Each spear found their mark and nailed a Death Mage each to the wall behind them.
While all this was going on, Chaosbane had wandered over to stand and lean in the doorway an empty cell. Spellfire cracked the stone around him, curses setting off sparks and deflected hexes sizzling holes in the walls and ceiling. Out of the corner of my eye, as I traded magical blows with Horatio himself, I noticed that Chaosbane was filling his pipe and tamping the tobacco—or whatever herb he smoked—into the bowl.
I lobbed a Magma Bomb toward Horatio, but one of the other Death Mages used a spell to steer it into a wall where it exploded harmlessly.
The two zombies came on, arms outstretched as they lurched forward with the sort of single-minded stoicism that was unique to zombies and stoners heading out on a Burger King mission.
Alura managed to find room in the jostling, packed throng of mages at my side and let loose with a blast of pure, crystalline light. This beam of light hit the zombies and sent them staggering back a pace or two. Ironskin capitalized on these two enemies being thrown off balance and hewed the legs out from under the human zombie with the sword that he had drawn from a scabbard on his back. With another graceful sweep, he snicked the zombie’s head off. Before he could turn his attention to the Frost Giant zombie though, the dead Jotunn had caught him in the chest with one beefy forearm and sent him crashing against the wall of the corridor. The breath rushed out of Ironskin, and he fell stunned to the floor.
Acting on instinct, I let loose with the Frost Shard spell. Five large icicles magically appeared and flew like the knitting needles of Hades straight into the thighs of the Frost Giant and anchored it to the floor. The undead Jotunn did not look surprised—zombies had roughly the same emotional range as a brick—but it did grunt and look down at its skewered legs. That was handy, since it didn’t see the Fireball that I sent ripping toward its face. The Fireball smacked into its head and ignited it. The undead monster’s fur went up like a cotton ball. The zombie didn’t react in any way to this, only continued to try and free its legs so that it could continue its relentless quest to kill us. After a while though, the magical flame must have roasted the Jotunn’s brain within its skull because it suddenly dropped like a sack of potatoes to the deck and moved no more.
I allowed myself to breathe a short sigh of relief, but that—like the zombies—was to be short-lived.
“Oh shit!” Damien yelled. “Those crazy bastards have let loose a—is that a gas or something?”
It certainly looked like a gas. There was one female Death Mage who was in the no man’s land between the two warring sides—thrown there by an exploding bottle of potion that Madame Xel had used to vaporize one of our foes. As the lilac-colored gas enveloped the woman, she began to scream in agony. As I blocked another spell from Horatio, the screaming woman’s flesh began to slough away from her bones. It peeled away from her legs in gory strips so that she collapsed to her knees. Skin and muscle dropped out of the sleeves of her robe like so much bloody bacon. She gave one last gurgling screech, then her face slid off her skull and splattered to the deck. She keeled over and lay still.
“Fuck m-m-m-me, what th-the hell is that?” Nigel squeaked, using language that I had rarely heard him use before.
“Nigel!” I cried, knowing that we only had seconds to stop the roiling gas as it came on. “Nigel, blast it back up the corridor! I’ll cover you! Everyone else get into cover!”
I reached deep within myself, as my twelve companions ran into available cell doorways or back around the corner, and let loose with my latest bit of learned sorcery: the Tundra Tempest.
Storm clouds instantly gathered up near the ceiling, in the middle of the corridor. The air grew thick and heavy, charged with the energy you can smell and feel before a storm hits. Thin, hand-long icicles started pelting down toward the assembled Death Mages, driving them back, while lightning bolts zapped down, singeing robes and eliciting cries of pain from the emo-looking assholes. A thin fog also spontaneously appeared, seeping out of the ground and turning the Death mages at the far end of the corridor into ghostly silhouettes.
It was, as spells went, a fucking humdinger of a distraction for multiple enemies. The lighting bolts and stinging icicles did not seem to be dealing any lethal damage, but they did enough to keep the enemy moving and preoccupied. However, I was glad that I had erred on the side of caution and told my friends to get into cover. More than a few lightning bolts snapped around my own ears and a hail of icicles peppered the ground where a bunch of my fellow students had been fighting from, shattering like exploding glass.
Nigel Windmaker, making use of the confusion that my sweet-ass Tundra Tempest had wrought among our foes, summoned a gale that turned the skin-melting vapor back on the enemy. Whichever Death Mage had cast the spell obviously knew what he and his comrades were in for, were they to come in contact with the spell, because within the next few seconds, the flesh-eating mist had dissipated.
“That’s it! We’re done here!” I heard Horatio call through the fog that the Tundra Tempest had brought with it.
“I have the key!” another yelled. “It must not be taken.”
“Then go, Bron!” Horatio cried in reply. “I’ll hold them back so that the rest of you can activate the portal stone and flee.”
Horatio cast a spell at me, or in my general direction at least. It was obvious that I was only a vague shape to him, as he was to me in the foggy atmosphere of the corridor. The spell moved through the air like ink does through water, leaving dark green smoke trails in the mist behind it. I used a burst of Flame Flight to avoid the malignant Death Magic, and it melted the ground where I had been standing only a moment before. Flame Flight used mana up at a considerable rate, so I cut the spell just before I hit the ceiling some twenty feet above the ground. As I began to fall, I visualized a steep ramp and conjured it using my Flame Barrier spell. I hit it hard and slid down the smooth spell-slide at pace, picking u
p more and more speed as I hurtled along it.
Horatio was standing, hunched, on the far side of the mist. By the way that he was bobbing from side to side, I could tell that he was trying to figure out what to make of my form as I hurtled toward him.
I’m not letting those sons of bitches steal my key, I thought as I swept down the magical slide.
I emerged out of the mist and shot off the end of the conjured ramp like a human torpedo.
Horatio’s eyes widened as he realized what he was seeing, but by then it was too late. I hit the skinny bastard full in the chest with a double-footed flying dropkick that must have broken at least a handful of ribs. He was flung backward like a ragdoll, while I managed to land on my feet and keep my forward momentum. As Horatio hit the stone floor and skidded across it on his back, I strode on and hit him with a Blazing Bolt to the chest. The spell, from such close range, left a crispy crater in his torso the size of a grapefruit.
“That’s for your cousin, you prick,” I said as I stepped over the twitching body of the Death Mage and began to run. From behind me, I heard Alura call out.
“Justin? Justin, wait for us! Where are you going?”
There simply wasn’t time for waiting about though. I was sure that I was right behind the fleeing Death Mages. One of them—Bron—had my damn Skeleton Key. We were going to need that if we were to fulfill our mission and rescue Idman Thunderstone from his own prison.
I sprinted along the only corridor there was, hurtled round a couple of corners, and found myself face to face with the Bron character.
We recognized one another in the same instant. Bron’s mouth widened as he took in my blonde hair, athletic build, and the fact that I was clearly gunning for him. As for me, my jaw clenched and my eyes narrowed as I saw that this Bron asshole was the same bastard who had stolen the Skeleton Key from my frat house in the first place.