by Dante King
“Way off,” Leah said. “What actually happened was that Palmera had been imbibing with lusty enthusiasm from the cooking sherry barrel one night—she couldn’t abide port. The silly old goose decided to throw caution to the wind and jump the boundary fence, whereupon she found the Queen was as good as her word and had enchanted the fence line with a series of Arcane Mines set about two paces back from the fence itself. This resulted in Palmera losing her head and taking on the very, very short-lived moniker, Wonky.”
“Your aunt got her head blown off by an Arcane Mine?” I said, not sure how much sympathy and incredulity I was expected to show at this insane revelation.
“Oh, and the Chaosbanes, as a family, learned an important lesson that day too,” Leah added cheerfully.
“Right,” I said slowly. “So what I can take away from that anecdote is that Aunt Palmera had the world’s shortest nickname, and also that it’s a terminally bad idea to try and take a stroll through Queen Hagatha’s garden?”
“That’s about it, yes,” Leah said.
“Then how are we getting there?” I asked. “Manafell doesn’t look like it’s that far away.”
“It’s not really, toffeetush,” Leah said, “but because we have to take the circuitous route, it would take a while to walk. So, I thought we’d save some precious time and take the pegasi.”
“Pegasi?” I asked. “As in the winged horses?”
“Smarty-pants,” Leah said.
We arrived at the barn, and Leah reached up and unfasted the large wooden bar across the doorway.
“Be a gentleman, would you?” she asked me, motioning to the bar.
I passed Leah my empty coffee cup. Then, puffing a little, I heaved the bar out of the brackets that held it and stood it up against a nearby fence. The wooden bar must have weighed about sixty pounds.
“Man,” I said, “it’s heavy enough, but is a bar the only security you have to keep people from stealing your horses?”
Leah patted me on the shoulder and then pinched my cheek. “You silly sausage,” she said dreamily. “That’s not for keeping people out. It’s for keeping Thunder and Lightning in.”
Leah pulled the doors open. The comfortable, warm smells of hay and leather, sweat and dung and horses came flooding out. Somewhere in the gloom, something let out a deep snort which reverberated through my chest.
“Hello, girls!” Leah said happily. “I’ve brought you a friend of mine to meet.”
“Meet,” I said. “Meet is what she said, not eat.”
Two pegasi mares walked forward out of the dimness of the barn. They were big beasts, about the size of a Clydesdale, but without a superfluous ounce of fat on them. Everything about the animals radiated speed, agility, and honed reflex.
They were a pearlescent silver gray color; the shade of a river at night under the light of a full moon. Feathered wings were folded, a slightly darker gray against their coats. Dark and foreboding eyes gleamed out of heads that were probably a little more pointed and streamlined than those of regular horses. They were eyes that spoke every language under this sun and all other suns and what they said was this: don’t try and fuck with us, mortal.
“Pleased to meet you,” I said to the two silent pegasi.
Some people might have thought it odd that I was engaging two four-legged beasts in conversation, but those would be people who had never looked into the eyes of a pegasus and seen the deep reservoir of intelligence in there.
These animals knew exactly what I was saying.
The pegasi didn’t reply.
“Uh, which one of you is Thunder?” I asked, not really sure what else I could say.
The animal standing on Leah’s right, who was nuzzling at the pink-haired woman’s neck, raised one dinner plate-sized hoof and stamped twice.
I nodded. “All right,” I said, turning to the other pegasus, “then you must be Lightning.”
The other animal thudded a hoof twice onto the ground too. I raised my hand toward Lightning’s nose, and the big creature moved its aquiline head toward me cautiously.
“It’s good that you’re treating them like you would any other intelligent creature,” Leah said to me. She was patting Thunder’s cheek and stroking her neck.
“I’m not really a big one on animals,” I said. “But I think I’m perceptive enough to know that these girls are not to be trifled with.”
Lightning nickered softly and bowed her head. It was a little disconcerting to hear how close that soft whinny came to a chuckle.
“You’re right on that score,” Leah said. “We had a little incident last year when one of our guests came out here, bad-mouthing Thunder and Lightning, calling these sweet girls old nags and whatnot.”
“Can’t imagine they put up with that.” I ran a hand down one of Lightning’s smooth flanks.
Leah pointed over to where a stable door leant against a wall. It was cracked and broken, the thick hinges bent and twisted.
“One of them kicked the door to make a point?” I asked.
“No, Thunder was a bit crosser than that,” Leah said. “She booted that foolish Mr. Fotheringay right through the door.”
Thunder snorted. It did not sound like an apologetic or remorseful snort.
I looked up at Lightning. The pegasus was still peering at me with a vaguely distrustful eye, although she was allowing me to continue to stroke her flanks.
“I promise, I’m all yours,” I said. “I won't try anything flashy. If you’re willing to carry me, then I’ll put my faith in you. How about it?”
The pegasus looked at me with a slightly dubious eye, as though she had scant regard for my potential flying skills. I pointed this out to Leah, who laughed.
“You forget,” she said, “Thunder and Lightning are not your average horses. These fine fillies are possessed of rare intelligence. I’ve met plenty of humanoids who, if brains were dynamite, would not have enough to blow their hats off. These girls though, they’ll take us exactly where we need to go. And take us fast too. They have carted more than a couple of Chaosbanes into Manafell for one reason or another. I imagine you are a good flyer, despite the fact that you have not flown a pegasus before. You strike me as a man who can turn his hand to most things, but in this case, you can just sit back and enjoy the ride.”
I liked the sound of that. I enjoyed the thrill of riding on a broomstick, but I was on vacation and what were vacations good for if not for turning off the old brain once in a while. Leah had made today sound like it would be innocent sightseeing. However, what a Chaosbane considered innocent most other people might consider a minor felony.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll follow your lead. I’m more than willing to trust Lightning, if she is willing to trust me.”
Leah clapped her hands. “Goodo. Let’s not beat around the bush any longer then, we're burning daylight here.”
With the athleticism of a gymnast, she vaulted onto the back of her pegasus. More slowly, I followed suit. I did not want to do anything to offend Lightning, not when our friendship was so young.
I managed to find a comfortable position behind the beast’s wing joints. Once I was on Lightning’s back, I was struck once again by how solid and strong the pegasus was. I figured I could have tried to break a lead pipe over the mare’s back and she probably would have taken about as much notice as she might have a horsefly.
With a snort, Lightning followed Thunder and Leah out of the barn and into the paddock.
“Right,” I said. “Now what do we do?”
“Easy,” Leah said. “Now you just hold on to your butt and let Lightning do the legwork.”
“Don’t you mean the wing-work,” I said.
Leah snapped fingers and pulled a mad face at me. “That’s right,” she said. “I’m always getting that line wrong.”
Without warning, the iron-hard muscles of the pegasus bunched beneath me. I just had time to suck in one reinforcing breath before Lightning leapt up into the frigid sky.
H
oly shitballs, I had ridden on the back magical creatures before, and I had felt the sort of acceleration that only a broomstick could provide, but this was something else entirely. I had never experienced such insane acceleration at the hands of something that did not have an engine. Never, in all my life, had I gone from standing still to, well, I couldn’t even hazard a guess at how fast I was going.
It was like someone had strapped feathery wings to a Kawasaki Ninja H2 and screwed the throttle down all the way. I barely had time to grab onto Lightning’s neck and hunker down against the roaring wind. To my astonishment, once I had tucked myself alongside the neck of the flying creature, everything calmed down.
The pegasus was a marvel of aerodynamic natural design. I had to squint my eyes against the inevitable air that stung them, but apart from that, the ride was surprisingly comfortable. Leah and Thunder zooming along in front of me. Leah’s hair had been torn free of its normal bunches. Now, it flew behind her like a bright pink banner.
We passed over many fields and little rivers, estates as grand as any others that we had seen thus far. Always, the pegasi kept one wing dipped to the right so that they were continuously moving in a south easterly direction, toward the sprawling glittering mass of Manafell.
Leah had been right. The capital city was not that far from the Chaosbane ranch. Not as the crow flew anyway. Queen Hagatha’s estate, though, was obviously enormous, and it required us to circumnavigate it for about ten minutes before we began to descend toward the metropolis, toward the greatest city in the Kingdom of Avalonia.
We landed, with very little fuss, outside the city walls. Thunder and Lightning walked us along a wide dirt road filled with people coming to and from the city. Piles of slush lined either side of the side of the road, and the earth under the hooves of the pegasi was blackened and cracked.
When I pointed this out to Leah, she shrugged. “After heavy snowfall, the city guard brings forth a dragon, or a team of drakes, to melt the road to the capital for some miles.”
“A dragon used as a snowplow?” I said, amazed. “That’s nuts.”
“Is it?” Leah asked dreamily. “I thought it made rather good sense. Keeps the main trade route open, the taxes and merchant fees jingle-jangling into the Queen’s coffers, and the road free from highwaymen. There’s no deterrent quite like the threat of being barbecued by a monstrous lizard to keep a man walking the straight and narrow.”
“You may have a point there,” I said.
“Oh, I have points everywhere,” Leah said. A wicked-looking stiletto appeared in her hand for a moment, and then vanished just as fast.
“I thought you said that this was going to be more of a relaxed vacation sightseeing?” I said. “I didn’t realize that I should have been coming along armed.”
“Hope for the worst, prepare for the best,” Leah said.
“Don’t you mean, prepare for the worst, hope for the best?” I asked.
Leah considered this a moment. “No,” she said after a little while, “I think I prefer my way better.”
Chapter 9
As we approached the mammoth gates into the city of Manafell, my thoughts went quiet within my head. The sheer weight and size of the place squashed all the buzzing internal chattering into silence so that it was only me and my eyes and the great weight of stone in front and above me.
It was a bizarre sensation to be standing outside of a proper fortified city. Of course, I had seen such impressive and intimidating sites on the silver screen, and so there was this odd feeling of familiarity to it, almost as if I had been here before.
But all the tens of millions of dollars of cinema production in movies like Kingdom of Heaven or The Lord of the Rings or Troy could not emulate the feeling of weight and impregnability that those walls and their towers, which marked the outer limit of Manafell proper, impressed upon me.
The walls must have been as thick as four pickup trucks parked end-to-end. They were slightly overhanging so that scaling them was impossible. They were topped with crenellations, where stone-faced guardsmen patrolled. Steel glittered menacingly from brightly polished swords, shields, and chainmail. Every single one of the guards was dressed in an ensemble of bright green cloak, meticulously shined armor, and lethal looking morning-stars. The morning-stars were not pretty weapons, but they conveyed a sense of seriousness to the men holding them. They could be quite easily used to cave in the heads of anyone who fancied climbing a scaling ladder.
It was, undoubtedly, an impressive display of military might. However, I couldn’t help but notice that the soldiers’ helmets were almost identical to those worn by the men manning the border burrow. There was just no getting around the fact that they were very penis-like. It was a bit of a faux pas on the part of the chief armorer or whoever decided on the designs of the helmets.
The open gates were so big that they could have been repurposed as a keel for a war galley. The iron bolts studding the massive planks were as big as my fist. It was, all in all, a very serious gate and matched the four stern-faced guards standing on either side of them. Most of the people hurrying through the gates kept their eyes down and the faces averted from the guards, as if catching their eyes was a sure way to get yourself noticed and into a spot of hot water.
We left the pegasi tethered in a stable that some enterprising gentleman dwarf had set up just outside the gates. Leah flicked the dwarf a couple of coins and told him that it would be in his best interests not to do or say anything that would offend the great steeds.
“Not a problem, madam, not a problem at all,” the dwarf croaked in a froggy voice. “You can trust me to look after these fine fellows.”
Thunder snorted so hard that I was sure I saw one of the boards in the wall flap outward.
“Ladies, I mean! I do beg your pardon!” the dwarf said hurriedly, trying to soothe the pegasus.
“Are you not worried about leaving the pegasi with that guy?” I asked Leah as we walked away. “Pegasi can’t be all that common, can they? What if he tries to sell them on to someone else?”
Leah snorted. “Gods, I’d love that little chap to try. Thunder and Lightning would have him sailing over Manafell like a comet with a single kick.”
“Why couldn’t we just ride them in?” I asked.
Leah gave me a look. “Queen Hagatha likes a nice clean city,” she said. “And the thing about pegasi, horses, mules, and all the rest is that they have so little regard for humanoids. They’re quite happy to relieve themselves anywhere.”
“Lucky for some, eh?” I said drily.
“That’s what I’ve always thought,” Leah said, with no trace of irony in her voice.
We joined the river of travelers and traders, shadowy figures, and fantastically attired adventurers, and headed through the gates. Unlike the rest of the bustling pack of folk surrounding us, Leah made no attempt at hiding her face. She waved to the guards like an excitable child, not caring a whit for their flinty eyes and set jaws.
“Morning!” she said to an armored elven woman standing nearest to us. “Any idea whether the Queen’s in today?”
The elf looked dourly at Leah, in her holey blue woolen sweater and with her bright pink hair. “Have you got an invitation to tea or something?” the elf asked, her tone about as rude as it was possible to be without resorting to cussing.
“Tea? Gods, I hope not,” Leah said pleasantly. “Surely, she’d have something stronger than tea?”
The guardswoman did not get a chance to answer, because we were buffeted along by the horde of people shoving and pushing to get into the city. We flowed through the gate, under a portcullis, and found ourselves in a huge crescent-shaped piazza. I felt a hand on my wrist, and Leah dragged me out of the flow of incoming traffic and up onto an ornately carved fountain shaped out of glass and marble to resemble a spreading larch tree.
I took a breath, relishing the reprieve the female Chaosbane had granted me by pulling me out of the swirling foot traffic.
“What do
you think?” Leah asked me. “Is it like the big cities on Earth?”
“No,” I said, looking around with wide eyes, “it’s way better than any city on Earth.”
And I wasn’t exaggerating just to please the woman.
The crescent piazza was filled with representatives of every kind of race or species imaginable, and plenty more that I had never imagined could exist. What was more, the magic casually on display made the everyday magic of the Mazirian Academy look like sleight of hand. True, at the Academy, it was generally assumed that anyone studying there didn’t yet quite have full control over their abilities, but it was really something to see how people in Avalonia used magic in their daily lives.
Not far from the fountain, a couple of mages dressed in bright yellow robes and sporting hats carved from some kind of hardwood, were using their vectors to lever up cracked paving slabs and replace them with new ones.
Up one side street, a Ghoulish woman, as fat as a tick and ugly enough to be hired out to haunt a house, leaned out of a window with an armful of washing. As I watched, the woman threw the washing carelessly into the air, made a slashing gesture with her hand, and fixed it in place. I blinked and squinted. It was like she had just lobbed the washing out and perfectly landed it on a line that did not exist.
Off to one side of the fountain, a collection of very tall figures, dressed from head to foot in fur-trimmed robes, pointed this way and that. Anyone who had ever seen tourists trying to figure out how the hell they were meant to get back to their hotel could tell what was going on with them. As they argued amongst each other, I caught brief glimpses of their faces and hands. They had strange metallic skin that reflected the light seeping through the breaking clouds above us.
“Who are those guys?” I asked Leah loudly, pointing at the group of metal men.
“No idea, sugar-butt,” Leah said amicably. One of the men had seen us looking, and he pulled the finger back at me. With him staring right at me, what I had taken to be metallic skin looked more like straight metal than actual skin.