by Dante King
“That was a neat trick,” I addressed the woman lounging imperiously on the throne, which looked carved out of pearl. “What do you do for an encore?”
The Priestess Entwistle might have been a few things—psychotic, selfish, cruel, and in possession of an ego that could sink a cruise ship—but there could be no denying that she dressed to kill. I could see why she and Madame Xel had got along; the two women looked to shop at the same sex shop.
The Priestess’ outfit (just) covered all the key parts of her anatomy, which were, of course, the parts that every male wants to see.
Her skin was as flawless as new porcelain, her hair ran like a curling river of molten gold shot with bronze down her back. She had eyes that poets would have said you could have got lost in—and I agreed. You’d get lost in those baby blues if you weren’t careful, and I doubted you could find your way of them again. A strange haze clung to her like fog; a pearlescent mist, which I thought was a glamor of some kind. It added to her mystique, to her magnetism.
She was surrounded by a dozen or so similarly angelic-looking assholes. They were impressive but nothing compared to Entwistle.
“My, my,” she said, addressing Mort in a voice that was as pleasant, intricate, and captivating to the ears as a Stevie Ray Vaughan guitar solo, “ if it isn’t the soberest Chaosbane of them all! I hear that you took up bounty hunting after we parted ways, Mortimer.”
Mort said nothing, but continued to gaze placidly at a spot some two inches above Priestess Entwistle’s head.
“Is that why you’ve come?” Entwistle continued. “To claim my… bounty?”
Mort continued to keep his trap shut.
The bright blue eyes of the woman on the throne flicked toward me. She almost caught me checking out the swell of her fantastic rack.
“And you brought a little apprentice,” she said. “How nice.”
“Go fuck yourself,” I suggested pleasantly.
The crowd around Priestess Entwistle muttered angrily, but she held up her hand to stop them.
“So brave. So fearless,” she said. “You are a very talented mage with all these various elements at your disposal. That much is evident to anyone with half a brain.” She leaned forward and crossed her legs, resting her chin on her fist. “It’s been a long time since any here have seen someone who can wield Infernal, Lightning, Fire, Ice, and Earth Magics. What is your name?”
“Justin Mauler,” I said. “Thanks for the compliment, but we came here for something, and I intend to leave with it.”
The court began talking under their breath yet again, but Mallory Entwistle sat and ran her eyes over me. I saw her eyes linger on the crystal staff that I still had in my hand. It was poking out from behind my back.
From what I knew, the staff was unrecognizable to most everyone, which is why I could run around with it and not worry about anyone connecting the dots about it having once belonged to Zenidor.
Except as Mallory’s gaze came to rest on my father’s old weapon, I felt a shudder of what could only be translated as apprehension run through the black crystal staff.
Mallory Entwistle’s eyes widened.
Did the spirit inside the staff somehow communicate with her? Did she recognize it? Did she know whose spirit lay within it?
I had to answer “yes” to all those questions because of what followed.
All of a sudden, Priestess Entwistle’s entire demeanor changed. She sprang to her bare feet, clapped her hands, and all of our bonds simply melted away.
I got slowly to my feet, as did the rest of the gang. Odette was rubbing her wrists where the shackles had been and looking quizzically at Priestess Entwistle. It was obvious to me that she was completely blown away by the reality bending magic that we had just been swept up in.
Priestess Entwistle turned to Madame Xel.
“Xel,” she said in a voice that flowed and wrapped around us like a river of warm maple syrup, “you look sensational as always. How have you been?”
Before Madame Xel could answer, Mallory Entwistle’s gaze had swept regally across to Odette Scaleblade. She put her hand to her mouth, as if she had only just realized that her pal of years was among her prisoners.
“Odette,” she said, “my old friend, how are you?”
“Thriving, Mallory,” Odettte said carefully, “although not thriving as well as you, clearly.”
Priestess Entwistle waved a self-deprecating hand and took Odette by the arm. “Oh, please,” she said, “don’t be silly. Just a few illusions. I feel so embarrassed that you and Xel should have had to go through those three trivial trials to get up here. If I had only known, I would have had you escorted straight through to the feasting hall.”
“Feasting ‘all?” Odette asked, puzzled.
“Well, we have to have a feast to celebrate two of my oldest friends returning back into my fold, must we not?” the Priestess said, leading Odette along, out of the throne room and into a grand passageway. Me and the other three tagged along behind, momentarily forgotten by the Priestess but not, I noticed, by the eight armed guards that shadowed us.
As we made our way through the opulent corridors, I wondered just how the hell I would complete my mission. There was also the little problem of needing to be back at the Academy for the Mage Game Qualifiers.
The entire building seemingly answered to Entwistle’s every whim and thought. I didn’t doubt that, if she wanted, she could have the walls of this stronghold compress like an accordian and crush us into paste.
“Mort,” I muttered to the Chaos Mage at my side, “I’m thinking we’re in quite a sticky spot here.”
“Agreed,” Mort hissed out of the corner of his mouth.
“So sticky that, unless we’re very careful, we might get our legs ripped off trying to escape.”
“Yes,” Mort affirmed. “If we’re to have any hope of leaving here, you must ensure that you don’t allow yourself to become bewitched and placed under Entwistle’s thrall.”
We were only twenty yards from the doors of the banqueting hall. Suddenly, Madame Xel leaned between Mortimer and I, and touched us both quickly on the inside of the wrists. I looked down and saw that she had smeared the pair of us with a single streak of oily unguent.
“What was that?” I asked quietly.
“It’s a lotion that seeps into the skin,” Madame Xel said in a hurried whisper. “It will stop you succumbing to Mallory’s charms and turning into something like a devotee.”
“Has everyone else managed to get some?” I asked.
Madame Xel made a face. “I managed to tag Odette in the throne room, but Alura, being young and honest, had succumbed quicker than I thought she would. I was too late.”
I looked about, trying to find the Gemstone Princess, and saw that she was trailing along right behind Priestess Entwistle, a terrifyingly beatific expression of worship on her crystalline face.
“Shit,” I said. “What do we do about that?”
“Let me worry about that,” Madame Xel said.
“How is she doing that?” I asked as we passed into the banqueting hall and were deafened by the ringing of silver trumpets.
“Holy Magic is meant to be used to enlighten someone’s mind to the beauty of doing good, being virtuous and all that other fairly dreary stuff,” Madame Xel said. “It helps guide people in the ‘right’ direction, if used correctly. Entwistle though, has morphed and bastardised this magic so that, instead of showing people the moral light, it makes people enraptured with her. Likely an effect of the residual Chaos Magic of her tower combining with her own magic.”
“And with that sort of power,” I said, “you can kind of do anything you please, right?”
Madame Xel nodded.
I had a gander at our surroundings then. The hall was just as sumptuous and OTT as I might have guessed it would be. Topless female angels stood around the walls with trays of goblets. There were live white doves fluttering about the place. An enchanted snow fell from the ceiling, disappe
aring before it reached the heads of the feasters.
There was food of every description in evidence; roasted fowls, spitted hogs and lambs, fish and prawns and oysters. Mountains of fruit, sugared almonds, and delicate pastries.
It was a gastronome’s dream made real. The miasma of delicious spells competing with one another filled my mouth with saliva in seconds. Small fountains were set into each long bench table. Whatever liquid was inside them, it’d definitely quench my thirst and take the edge off my nerves a little. Besides, what kind of college student refused free grog?
I looked around the hall at the heaped platters, steaming tureens, brimming bowls, and artistically arranged desserts.
“Well,” I said, “if I’m going to become enamored with some tainted Holy Mage Priestess turned Queen, at least I’ll be doing it with a full stomach.”
I reached toward the nearest whole roast pheasant, surrounded by roasted potatoes and some deep magenta tubers that Mortimer told me were sweet babaco, and began to load my plate.
I had a feeling that I was going to need every ounce of strength I possessed.
Chapter Twenty
“So,” I said to Priestess Mallory Entwistle as she guided me to a seat next to her, “how did you come to acquire such an . . . awesome pad?” I thought about referring to it as an evil lair, but I didn’t want to press my luck.
“Chaos Mages,” the Priestess sent simply.
In my peripheral vision, Mortimer, who was sitting on my left, stiffened in his chair—in quite a different way to how I was stiffening in my chair.
“Yes, I paid for the help of some Chaos Practitioners,” Entwistle said. “And they did a fine job, I think. They are not cheap these people, and have been working on and off on my little residence for over twenty years.”
Next to me, Mortimer turned his head slightly. His voice, even speaking right into my ear, was so quiet that it was almost inaudible over the sound of the feasting people.
“If they have been working continuously, then that would explain the Priestess’ behavior,” he said. “Her growing tendency to lean toward the erratic. The human sacrifices.”
“Well,” I said, listening to Mort but talking to Mallory Entwistle, “they seem to have done a good job of making it difficult to traverse, that’s for sure.”
“The Chaos Magic that impregnates every inch of this structure would have slowly altered and skewed her mind,” Mortimer said, speaking almost to himself as things mentally slotted into place. “She might return to the woman we all knew if we can get her out of this place. She might not be entirely to blame for the things that she has done…”
That sounded an awful lot like pleading insanity to me, but not killing someone that Madame Xel and Odette once regarded as a friend surely trumped the alternative.
I turned briefly to Mort and said quickly, “Let me see how this chat with her goes. You have a look over your bounty lists and see if we can’t work something out if we need to.”
For whatever reason, I was given the seat of honor next to Entwistle in the middle of the top table. It was the spot usually reserved for kings and dignitaries, lords and ladies, and Albus Dumbledore. It was, as she repeatedly told me, a seat of privilege, a sign of curried favor.
Personally, I had no idea how I’d gained any favor with her during the brief interaction we had shared back in the throne room, curried, stewed, or otherwise. My mind returned to the strange recognition that had crossed her face when she’d seen my black crystal staff.
I was deeply suspicious of the Holy Mage, of course. This sudden change to amiability on her part reminded me of Smeagol when he was trying to do a number on the hobbits; she put on a good show, but it was all bullshit. It was evident that Mallory wanted something from us—from me—but she was as full of twists and turns as a pretzel factory, and I couldn’t tell what it was yet.
Judging by the way that she was assiduously massaging my sex pistol under the table with her foot though, it wouldn’t be long before I found out.
I was constantly amazed, albeit in a very relaxed way, at how quickly I could roll with new and developing situations. A lot had happened in the short time that my four companions and I had been delivered, through Priestess Entwistle’s sorcery, from the plateau on which we had faced the angels to her throne room. We had been bound and then freed, Odette and Madame Xel had been ignored and then welcomed as old friends, Alura had been semi-bewitched by the looks of it, and I had gone from a bit of a nonentity in the eyes of our hostess to being, essentially, given a good old rub’n’tug under the table.
Honestly, it was a marvel that I managed to keep my head for five minutes at a time living in the Avalonian Kingdom. Being part of the magical world had certainly changed my perspective on the human—and elf, troll, faery, nymph, dwarf etc.—condition.
“You know, I was acquainted with your father,” Mallory Entwistle said, running an eye-catching finger along one of the thin, white satin straps that barely covered the nipple of her right breast. “He was an admirable mage. Powerful. Possessed of a fine and altruistic vision.”
“My father?” I asked, feigning surprise.
“Don’t be daft,” she said, and this time her foot squeezed my nuts a little too hard. I grunted.
“Yeah, I got the impression that you might know him when we were in the throne room,” I said, trying my hardest to keep my head in the game and out of my pants, where Mallory’s bare foot was doing its wicked work.
I saw Priestess Entwistle glance down to the side of my chair, but I had taken the precaution of concealing my vector, dematerializing it.
“Yes,” she said, in that lovely, harmonious voice of hers. “Yes. The staff. Of course. It’s changed in the twenty years or so since last I saw it, but that magical signature that it gives off… One can hardly fail to recognize that, if one is able to see such things.”
“So, you were a big fan of my old man, were you?” I prompted. I took a bite from the pheasant leg that I had been working on. The food was unbelievable, as was the drink. Speaking of which…
I glanced over at one of the gorgeous topless angelic waitresses, my eye fixed on one of the flutes of bubbling lilac drinks that she had on her tray. The woman, catching my eye, smiled and waved her hand over the tray of drinks. Then she made an action that, at any other time, I would have taken for her blowing me a kiss. The glass of lilac liquid vanished like fog , then the vessel reappeared on the table at my elbow.
I gave the angel an appreciative smile. “You’d better keep them coming, miss,” I said over the noise of the music emanating from a quartet of cherubic musicians in one corner.
I took a sip of the drink, made an involuntarily appreciative noise in my throat, and drained the glass.
“Wine made from the petals of the shy lotus,” Entwistle explained. “It is much prized by connoisseurs, ruinously expensive, and is said to boost the drinker’s libido to unknown heights…”
As soon as I set the empty vessel down, it dissolved into mist and was replaced by a full one. I glanced over at the angelic waitress, and she flashed a wink at me.
“My father,” I said again, trying to keep the conversation turning, “you said you knew him?”
“Yes and, like I said, he was a praiseworthy man; a visionary and a leader that many followed gladly.”
“But not all,” I said.
“No, not all,” Priestess Entwistle said.
The Holy Mage’s foot continued to massage my dong. With the booze and the excellent grub, I was struggling to keep my mental equilibrium. I was naturally amicable, even when someone had been actively trying to kill me, or was currently trying to subtly manipulate me. I couldn’t help but at least try and give them the benefit of the doubt.
I had the creeping feeling that, in the immortal words of Dale Doback, old Priestess Entwistle had had a taste of the old bull and now she wanted the young calf.
I wonder if she actually did have a taste of the old bull? I thought. I wonder if the old ma
n strayed while he was with my mom. In a world like Avalonia I wouldn’t be at all surprised. And if he were a Creation Mage, then it was probably an occupational necessity.
“Zenidor,” Mallory continued, as if she could read my thoughts as they bloomed in my head, “was a man that attracted many people, many female mages.”
“Chip off the old block am I?” I quipped, stripping the last bit of meat from the pheasant leg and tossing it onto my golden plate. I had accidentally leaned on my shiny gold plate with my elbow earlier and left a dent in it. That was why you shouldn’t make platters and bowls out of soft metals. It was something that they had failed to mention in many of the fantasy books that I had ever read.
Priestess Entwistle leaned toward me, pushing her knockers strategically together so that her cleavage yawned like the Mariana Trench. I took a slurp of my shy lotus wine so that my eyeballs weren’t tempted to migrate southward and stay there for the winter.
“You are,” she said, her tone as gentle and lulling as the wind through the branches of a willow tree, “as intoxicating as he was—as charming and confident—though I get the impression that you have the same hardness and strength of character and resolve as your mother did.”
“Do I get the impression that you harbored a little bit of a crush on the old man?” I grabbed a slice of custard tart from a platter near by and slid it deftly onto my plate, which seemed to be cleaning itself between courses.
“Zenidor could have had any woman he wanted,” she said. “He was the envy of the men that followed him and had no shortage of female mages fawning at his heels. Yet he also had your mother, and she was not only beautiful, but talented, dangerous and driven too. She was, how do I put it? His handler. Any woman who wished to enter their bed had to meet Istrea’s approval.”
“A match made in heaven, was it?” I asked.
Priestess Entwistle gave me a sad little smile. It was, I thought, in all the glitz and glamor and razzle-dazzle of that banquet hall, the only genuine thing I had seen since sitting down.