Creation Mage 4

by Dante King

  “No,” he said. “No, the cousin I speak of is one of the clan that keeps his head down. He is an accountant.”

  I blinked.

  “He chose to be an accountant?” I asked.

  Mortimer nodded.

  “Sounds like a fucking nut to me,” I said.

  “The trials that you speak of,” Alura said while Mortimer’s brow furrowed in confusion at my statement, “I assume that is why we are down here and were not able to catch the Celestial Elevator all the way to the pinnacle of the tower?”

  Madame Xel stretched her leathery bat-like wings. “That’s correct, your highness,” she said.

  “And there’s no way for us to sneak past these trials?” I asked.

  “No,” Odette said. “As I said earlier, the trials are a form of penance that those who wish to meet Priestess Entwistle must pass through. After the Void Wars, she closed herself off up there. The only way to reach her, the only way to have a chance at collecting her soul energy, is to make our way through these trials.”

  I squared my shoulders and gazed up once more at the forbidding horn that rose above us, with its windowless tower gleaming dully in the flat light of the cloudy sky. A wind snapped and licked at the exposed skin of my hands, neck, and face.

  “All right,” I said, conjuring my black crystal staff, “I guess we should get moving. Time’s a-wasting.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Odette skirted the splattered and twisted corpse of the unfortunate dude who had plummeted so spectacularly from on high, creeping carefully along a rocky ledge. She led Mortimer, Madame Xel, Alura, and me through a roughly hewn arch of white granite.

  “Where are you taking us?” I asked Odette as we rounded a corner and found ourselves facing the velvety black mouth of a cave.

  Odette gestured at the ominous opening in the side of the mountain. “I’m leading you to the only place that I can. To Priestess Entwistle’s front door. Into the belly of the beast, you might say.”

  “Doesn’t sound too promising,” I said.

  Odette patted me on the cheek. “Don’t you worry, Mr. Mauler,” she said. “I think we know that you can handle yourself sufficiently. The five of us should be able to take care of anything that we have to face in these three trials.”

  “Is there anything else I should know about these trials before we get them underway?” I asked. “I’ve got enough confidence for all of us, but it’s an imprudent man that goes into a fight without all the information available to him.”

  “While Mallory Entwistle is a Holy Mage,” Madame Xel said, “she has procured the services of Chaos Mages to build this structure for her. So, you should expect Chaos Magic in equal measure to Holy Magic.”

  “Holy Magic and Chaos Magic,” I muttered.

  To my surprise, Mortimer lay a long-fingered hand on my shoulder. “If I may?” he said.

  “Fire away, Mort,” I said.

  “I am not sure how much experience you have had dealing with Chaos Magic, Justin,” he said.

  “Probably about as much experience as you have had with Mademoiselle Crowther’s Christmas Claret, or whatever the hell we ended up drinking last night,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

  Mortimer shuddered at the mention of the previous evening’s frivolities.

  “Well,” he said, “if that’s the case, let me give you a word of warning; Chaos Magic is… chaotic.”

  I narrowed my eyes and pursed my lips. “Yeah, you see, that’s really not that helpful, Mort.”

  “Allow me to elucidate,” Mort said in an apologetic tone. “Chaos Magic follows none of the rules that the rest of the world follows—even more so than normal magic. I imagine that, coming from Earth, you had to discard many beliefs that you had held as sacrosanct once you had spent some time in Avalonia?”

  “Yeah, for sure,” I said. “Like, I had to stop believing that magic was something imagined by storytellers. I had to give up the idea that magic wasn’t just a word that people used when they couldn’t explain something. I had to bring myself to accept that magic actually existed.”

  Mort nodded. “Indeed. Well, Chaos Magic requires that sort of flexibility of mind,” the pale bounty hunter said, running a thoughtful finger along one of his white-blond mutton chops. “Understanding or accepting the limits of Chaos Magic requires a person to rethink everything they think they know about magic. Chaos Mages are quite rare, you see. Not as rare as Creation Mages, of course, but still born very infrequently. Chaos Magic breaks down the walls of space and time—as you saw with the Celestial Elevator. Practitioners of this particular vein of magic have the ability to warp their surroundings, alter them, play tricks with them. It is what makes it so very valuable in my profession.”

  “In bounty hunting?” I asked, looking ahead of me into the impenetrable darkness of the cave mouth.

  “Yes,” Mort said. “Sometimes, when the art of the kill is not calling to me and the passion for the job at hand eludes me, I am required to ambush a target. Well, sometimes, depending on the environment, I am able to manipulate it so that the mark walks right into my clutches, even if they believe they are running away from me and heading in the complete opposite direction.”

  “Dastardly,” I said.

  “Yes, it is a bit,” Mortimer said graciously.

  “So, you’re basically telling me not to trust the evidence of my own senses or the senses of those around me?” I asked. “Is that it?”

  Mort gave this due consideration. “Yes,” he said, “I believe that’s correct. Although, I might be so bold as to add that you can probably rely on my senses more than anyone else’s, when it comes to detecting what is real and what is less so.”

  Odette butted in at that point. “Those are wise words of caution, Mortimer,” she said, “and Justin would be right to ‘eed them. ‘Owever, this is the only way that leads onwards and upward. It is the only way that will enable us to reach Mallory.”

  “Could we fly?” Alura said. “Could Madame Xel get up there?”

  Or someone with broomsticks. Damn it, someone should have said we’d need them. I didn’t fancy taking another ride on the Celestial Elevator, but I would if it were necessary.

  Madame Xel stretched her leathery bat-like wings. “Oh, I could try, sweetheart, indeed I could,” she said, “but wouldn’t that just be so unsociable? I wouldn’t want to miss out on all the team bonding that I’m sure is going to take place down here.” Her expression turned serious. “Besides, our dear friend Mallory Entwistle has nasty surprises for those wishing to fly straight up the mountain without an invitation.”

  Well, there went my broomstick idea. I couldn’t say I was all that displeased.

  “And so,” Odette said, striding unconcernedly toward the mouth of the cave, “we proceed.”

  I walked into the cave right behind her. Almost instantaneously, the darkness closed over me like a shroud.

  “Is this the first trial?” I heard Alura say from behind me in a voice that sounded oddly muffled, as if she was talking through cotton wool. “Blindness?”

  Odette laughed. “No,” she said. “No, that is merely a welcome gift from Priestess Entwistle to shake the truly unready.”

  “It is an illusion of sorts,” Mortimer said in the same flat, courteous voice that he always used.

  “Just continue forward, and it will end soon,” Madame Xel said. “And remember that the dark is not scary in and of itself, it is the things that hide in the dark, that we cannot see, that scare us.”

  I had heard these words, or words similar to them, before, and I wondered if it had been Reginald Chaosbane that had spoken them to me.

  Just as Madame Xel said, after only a minute or so, the blindness suddenly lifted from our eyes. We found ourselves in the middle of a large circular chamber. It was flooded by clear cold light, which shone through ten large windows evenly spaced around the walls. A keen wind whistled in through the windows, bringing with it the smell of snow and resinous woods. I wandered over to
one of the windows and looked out.

  “Uh, guys,” I said, staring out in amazement. “Does anyone want to explain how it is that we seem to have just walked up half the mountain?”

  Out of the window, the slope of the mountain that we had been looking up only a few minutes before now stretched downward to a belt of coniferous woodland.

  “Mortimer told you. He has already explained,” Odette said, coming over to stand next to me and peer out over the frigid snow-covered vista. “It is Chaos Magic.”

  “It sure keeps you guessing, huh?” I said, my breath smoking in the air.

  “You two!” Alura said sharply. “Get over here! Quick!”

  Her tone told Odette and I everything we needed to know.

  I whirled, my staff appearing in my hand. Odette clutched at her beaded and bone necklaces and kissed them.

  “That’s your vector?” I asked, and the Death Mage nodded.

  There was a doorway on the other side of the circular room, opposite the direction from which we had entered. At least, I thought that was right, seeing as there was now no tunnel or doorway we could have come through. A dull moaning, shuffling sound was coming from the passage, the door of which was ajar.

  “What’s that noise?” I asked, straining my ears. “It sounds like… zombies.”

  The word was out of my mouth before I could vet it for relevance.

  Then, the door creaked open, a few figures shambled through it, and I saw that the noise had been zombies. Happily, they seemed to be the mopey, slow, lurching type of zombies that you face at the start of Call of Duty’s Nazi Zombies, and not the terrifying, screaming, sprinting variety that comes after you have progressed a little.

  I was just about to start getting generous with the Storm Bolts, when Alura spoke up.

  “What—who are these people?” she asked no one in particular.

  “They’re zombies, aren’t they?” I asked as the three that had come through the door drew closer. They had been followed by about a dozen more of the same lurching figures.

  “No, they’re not zombies—not the undead,” Mortimer said, unsheathing a particularly finely engraved knife from the inside of his cloak, which I took to be his vector. “They’re devotees, but devotees that have had their brains addled by the sheer strength of the Chaos Magic that drew them here. It seems that Mallory Entwistle has been dabbling in more Chaos Magic than I originally thought. Holy Magic and Chaos Magic, is there any more nefarious combination?”

  “Yes, those people are magically damaged,” Odette said. “They were just people once, but I fear that they are beyond our aid now.”

  “Beyond anyone’s aid,” Mort said. “I have seen this before. Devotees who are so addled and driven by the need to impress or protect the one they sought to find—the Priestess Entwistle in this case—that they become as violent and single-minded as any zombie. It is the corruption of Chaos and Holy Magic. They must die.”

  More devotees, dressed in plain white robes and sandals, were piling in through the door and heading our way. There were a few dozen in the chamber with us now, all moving with the same slow but inevitable zombie shuffle toward us.

  “The door that they’re coming through looks to be the only way out of here,” Alura noted.

  “So we’re going through them,” I said. “One way or another.”

  Mortimer flipped his knife vector from his left hand to his right and back again. “Do not think of this as killing,” he said to me. “Think of it as mercy.”

  “You’re saying that they’re already dead?” I shot back at him.

  “Oh no, their bodies live still,” the bounty hunter said, “but their brains are quite cooked.”

  “It is the first test,” Madame Xel said. She reached into one of the pockets of the leather jacket that she had slipped into before getting into the Celestial Elevator and pulled out a bottle of green liquid. It was corked and sealed with wax.

  “These poor souls, they can make use of this potion,” Madame Xel said.

  She tossed the vial high into the air, over the heads of the front ranks of shuffling devotees and into the midst of the crowd. There was the briefest instant when we were able to hear the sound of the glass breaking, and then…

  The explosion took the form of a ball of lime-green flame that expanded outward and incinerated the devotees in a ten yard radius. Those outside this immediate killzone were flung through the air, crashing into those around them and sending them toppling. Limbs, heads, and other miscellaneous body parts went flying in all directions. If it wasn’t for Xel’s special potion having increased my reaction timing, I wouldn’t have avoided a charred, bloody and airborne pecker that sailed out of the blast zone and almost smacked me in the face.

  That got my attention. A severed zipper sausage almost hitting me in the head instantly dispelled any notion I had of somehow making our way peacefully through this horde of shuffling, braindead devotees. I had my staff raised and ready by the time the first rank of those weirdos came within striking range, their hands outstretched.

  I stove in the skull of the first devotee, then conjured a Flame Barrier into the shape of a samurai sword to help cut down those that came shambling in after him. Using this arcane, flaming blade along with my staff, I quickly carved and clobbered a bit of space around myself.

  As a grossly fat gnoll fell headless at my feet, I banished the flaming sword and conjured a Magma Bomb. I tossed this out into the crowd of milling zombies and heard it go off. A few loose body parts rained down around me.

  The rest of the gang had spread out around the chamber, though I noticed that they were all careful to keep their backs to the wall. The devotees might have been slow and easy to deal with on their own, but if a bunch of the bastards snuck up behind us, they might very well be able to overpower and crush us under the weight of their numbers.

  Off to my left, Alura was using her Light Beam spell to great effect. She sucked the natural light shining through the windows into her gemstone body. Concentrated beams of light blasted out of her hands and cut through the oncoming hordes of devotees like piss through snow.

  Blood spurted in all directions. It was not long before the stone flags under our feet were swimming and slick with gore. Mortimer had been right. These devotees were very much still alive and not undead—dead hearts pump no blood.

  Our hungover bounty hunter looked to be having the time of his life. He was dealing death with absolute indiscrimination. He wasn’t smiling—that wouldn’t have been Mortimer’s way—but his placid face was set in the expression of a man in his element. His knife flashed through the air, efficiently cutting through arteries and ligaments.

  As I watched, Mortimer smacked his dagger down into the crown of one miserable elven woman who was attempting to stick her fingers into his eyes. The bounty hunter released his grip on the weapon and used the same hand to fire off a corkscrewing spell of purple and black light at a pack of about eight devotees. The spell hit them with a POP and reduced them to sausage meat. Then, without missing a beat, he wrenched the knife free from the elven woman’s skull. As she crumpled, he ripped it across the eyes of a dwarf that had gotten too close and kicked him in the head.

  Madame Xel and Odette were both playing their part too. They were looking incredibly unruffled as they fired spells in all directions. Madame Xel moved Odette courteously aside at one point so that she could engulf half a dozen devotees in a jet of sticky, yellow liquid fire, which reminded me a lot of napalm.

  Odette spun to her right and thrust her bone spear through the chest of a haggard old woman who still had her witch’s hat pinned to her jumbled nest of hair. Then, the dragonkin used her Bones of the Earth spell to impale two more devotees on lances of fossilized bone that shot suddenly from the earth like a spring-loaded trap.

  Eventually, the stream of devotees slowed to a trickle. Using a bit of good old-fashioned teamwork, we herded the rest of the stumbling zombie-like followers of Priestess Entwistle into a loose circle.


  I tossed Arcane Mines around them, making sure that any cocky devotees that got ideas above their station—trying to reach out and rake us with their stiff, clawing fingers—were blown apart in bursts of Earth and Storm Magic.

  After we had herded most of the devotees together and more stopped coming, we began what was essentially shooting fish in a barrel. I sent a rain of Fireballs into the cluster of milling and frustrated devotees while Alura used her Light Beam spell to scythe them down. Mort prowled the circle, picking off any devotees that strayed from the cluster, wielding his knife to deadly effect.

  Within minutes, the last of the devotees were lying dead and bleeding on the ground. Charred corpses lay scattered everywhere. Dismembered torsos littered the ground, along with legs and arms and heads. Blood was splashed up the walls. Entrails had been spread around with a liberal hand. It looked like an abattoir.

  Most importantly though, the only doorway out of that bloody place was now free of devotees.

  “Are we good to go on?” I asked. “We’re not going to get attacked by any more of those poor schmucks, are we?”

  “I think it is safe to say that we have passed the first trial,” Madame Xel said, wiping a speck of blood off of her face.

  “Let’s continue, shall we?” Odette said.

  I nodded. “Lead on.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Odette, Madame Xel, Mortimer, Alura, and I made our way to the door. We navigated through the fallen dead and tried our best not to slip in any of the blood, which lay in puddles all over the ground.

  I was following behind Odette and Madame Xel, when I heard the succubus remark to her dragonkin friend, “Has it struck you, dearest, that Mallory might have gained some substantial power since last time our paths crossed?”

  “I was just thinking the same thing.” Odette stepped around a pair of legs that had been detached from their owner with a great deal of force. “I have a sneaking suspicion that something has increased Priestess Entwistle’s power greatly. The combination of Holy and Chaos Magic seems to be even more powerful than we realized.”