Creation Mage 4

by Dante King

  “It has barely changed,” she said.

  “You’ve been here before?” I asked, indicating that everyone should follow me to the kitchen.

  “Yes,” Mallory Entwistle said. “We had many meetings here. Discussed many things. How to save Avalonia. What we must do to save the magic that inhabits the whole universe.”

  “Is that why you want to be there if we manage to wake my dad up?” I asked. “Do you need to pick his brain about a few things concerning the whole genocide business?”

  Mallory paused in the doorway as I held the swing door of the kitchen open for her.

  “You are not an advocate of your parents’ plan?” she asked. “Even if it is theoretically proven to be efficacious in stopping the draining of pure magic from our universe?”

  I gave her a steady look. “Let’s just say that I can see why so many people are against the whole genocide thing. People are people. No matter what they do for a living, no matter how they live their lives. How many times throughout history, in myriad worlds throughout the universe, do you reckon some joker has said, ‘For the greater good I will…’ and then made an absolute Shit Mcmuffin out of things?”

  “Things must change,” Priestess Entwistle said simply as she walked into the kitchen.

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said. “It’s how that change comes about that’s the tricky bit, isn’t it?”

  None of the boys were in the kitchen, but the back door was ajar and there was a large crystal punch bowl out, filled with a dangerous-looking neon blue punch, with some goblets set out next to it.

  “Better grab one of these,” I told the women, scooping up a goblet full of punch, sucking it back and refilling my cup. “The gods only know what we’re going to find out here.”

  As Odette, Madame Xel, Alura, and Mallory dutifully filled their goblets with some of the esophagus-crisping liquor, I walked out through the back doors and onto the lawn that surrounded the freshly constructed pool area.

  I was greatly pleased to see that all the people that I cared most about were gathered about the pool. There were my fellow fraternity brothers of course; Rick Hammersmith, Damien Davis, Bradley Flamewalker, and the one and only Nigel Windmaker. Representing Team Ovaries were Enwyn Emberskull, Cecilia Chillgrave, and Janet Thunderstone. The seven of them presented quite an impressive spectacle, outlined as they were on the crest of the hill on which our frat house sat, against the turbulent, moody sky.

  Over on the far side of the pool, Rick had set out his father’s thaumaturgical forge on a clear bit of ground. The big Earth Elemental was totally engrossed in whatever it was he was doing; checking through racks of tools, using the huge bellows to get the forge fire burning with an almost white-hot flame, and generally clattering about. Sweat streamed down a torso that looked like it had been hewn from porphyry. For the first time since I had met the guy on my very first day at the Academy, I saw Rick in the place he was born to inhabit. Yes, he was a stellar warrior in his own right—but right there, lit by the glow of the forge, was where he belonged.

  All of them, bar Rick, looked up as the four women and I approached.

  “Look what the bats dragged in, darlings.” Cecilia smiled as her gaze alighted on me.

  “Did you manage it?” Damien asked, from where he was standing with Nigel. It looked like the two of them had been watching the sky from the edge of the hilltop. Maybe they’d thought we’d be coming back by air.

  “Did we manage it?” I asked, holding up the bracelet with its three spirit-filled skulls. “What kind of question is that?”

  Damien grinned.

  “And who-who-who-who is this?’ Nigel stuttered, drawing his stringbean, three-foot physique up to its full height when he caught sight of Priestess Entwistle walking confidently behind me.

  “This is Priestess Mallory Entwistle,” I said, loud enough to make it a casual introduction to the group, of sorts. “Mallory Entwistle, this is Nigel Windmaker who, despite his nervous stammering, is not an owl.”

  Nigel blushed. Mallory smiled and inclined her head.

  I then made the rest of the introductions to Mallory. She was gravely polite to everyone. Enwyn smiled at her when they exchanged greetings, but I could see that Cecilia and Janet were going to take more convincing as far as the Holy Mage was concerned.

  “Mallory is going to be staying with us for a while, fellas,” I said, addressing Bradley, Nigel, and Damien. “She’ll be bunking down in the dungeon with our other two renegades.”

  Nigel whistled between his teeth. “My g-goodness,” he said. “I wish I could be a fly on the wall when Barry and Idman catch a sight of her coming down the steps!”

  “Ew, Nigel, that’s my dad you’re talking about,” Janet said.

  “Sorry, Janet,” Nigel said, going red again, but cracking a small smile at me.

  “I’m sure they’ll be on their best behavior,” I said, knowing that Idman would be as gravely courteous as ever, while Barry would probably just transform into a walking, innuendo-spouting erection.

  “Excuse me,” Damien said, “but isn’t this hot broad, the Priestess Entwistle, the chick that you were zipping off to ice this morning?”

  “Yep,” I said, fiddling with the clasp of the bracelet holding the three captured spirits.

  “And yet, here she is…” Damien said.

  I nodded. “Yep, and there might be a little more to that story, so let’s have no quick judgements.”

  Damien shrugged. “Fair enough. What happened then?”

  “There was a change of plan,” I said, allowing Mallory to help me remove the fiddly bit of bling from my wrist. “It involved a little bit of bargaining, a little bit of diplomacy and a little bit of trademark Mauler improvisation.”

  Damien made a face. “Uh oh, how much of a bloodbath did you end up leaving behind you?”

  “Just the question I was going to raise.” Janet grinned.

  “The trademark Mauler improvisation does have a tendency to get quite messy, darling,” Cecilia said, trying her hardest not to crack up.

  “Is the Trademark Mauler Improvisation—or TMP technique—the same as crossing your fingers and toes and blasting your way out of whatever room, building, and situation you find yourself in?” Nigel asked, looking like he was thoroughly enjoying this little bit of ribbing being aimed at me.

  “Ha-ha-ha,” I said, smiling around at my friends sarcastically. “Ye of little faith. There was still only one death actually, and that was of a woman who was a designated bounty.” I remembered the hordes of zealots and dozen angels we’d killed but decided to leave them out of the conversation. For effect, of course.

  “Sure, sure,” Damien said, and everyone laughed.

  “Right,” I said, turning to Odette, “how exactly do we go about using this soul energy to free my father? Will he break out of the staff and join as some sort of specter, or what?”

  Odette curled one a lock of her raven hair around a finger and then let it spring free. “It is ‘ard to say,” she said. “Freed spirits are as individual as the people they were in life. They might decide to come forth in all sorts of gusies. Depending on the situation they might decide to embody animals or other simpler creatures—this is a popular method for those spirits that are called forth to ‘elp people find treasure or guide people in epiphanies.”

  I remembered an episode of The Simpsons from when I’d been much younger—maybe only seven or so—where Homer had eaten a dangerous chilli grown by Guatemalan psychiatric patients and gone on a psychedelic trip through the desert. I wondered if these spirits, the sort championed by Native Americans, were actually the spirits of mages somehow brought forth on Earth. I made a mental note, if I ever went back to Earth, to ingratiate my ass into the nearest tipi and see if this was the case.

  “So, really,” I said, “he might just pop into my head as a voice, or appear as a ghostly apparition or…”

  “Or anything,” Odette said. “You’ll only know when it ’appens.”

  I
held the skulls, connected to the silver bracelet, out in my hand.

  “Don’t give them to me.” Odette reached out and closed my fingers over the diamond skulls. Her tanned fingers looked surprisingly small and fragile against my big fist.

  “Then who?” I asked.

  Odette nodded over to Rick, silhouetted against the glowing incandescence of the forge fire.

  “This is a task which that man was born to accomplish,” she said, certainty etching each and every syllable. “I imagine that it is for just such an undertaking that Reginald Chaosbane placed ’im in the same fraternity as you.”

  I ran my eyes over the beautiful, mysterious face of the dragonkin warrior. Her dark and dangerous eyes, so full of knowledge and power and smoldering passion, glinted and glittered in the light of Rick’s forge across the way.

  “You think that Chaosbane put me with these boys because he believed that they could help me—and not just help me in general, but in specific ways?” I asked her quietly.

  Odette said nothing, but a slight shifting of her eyebrows suggested it might be the case.

  “He is a wily son of a bitch,” I said.

  “That ‘e is,” Odette agreed. “Now get on with freeing that parent of yours, will you?”

  I laughed, bent slightly, and kissed her on the cheek.

  “Thanks for setting this up, Odette,” I said. “Thanks for working out all the logistics of the thing, you know. I appreciate it.”

  “Thank me after you ’ave got the information you seek,” Odette told me, though she looked pleased with the little peck on the cheek.

  I rubbed thoughtfully at my stubble as I walked around the pool, the three diamond skulls clutched in my hand.

  “Big boy!” I yelled as I strolled into the mouth of the smithy and was engulfed in the lung-scorching heat of the place. It was what being swallowed by a dragon must have been like.

  Rick looked up from the set of enormous tongs he was polishing.

  “Friend,” he said in his subterranean voice, “are you ready to set the soul of your ancestor free?”

  “I think you’re making it sound a little more epic than it actually is, Rick man, but I am ready, yes,” I said.

  I tossed Rick the bracelet, and he caught it in one huge hand.

  “First,” he said, “we must break the diamond skulls to release the trapped soul energy without allowing them to escape into the air.”

  “Get to it then, man, and let me know if you need a hand,” I said.

  I stood back, making sure that I was well out of the way of whatever it was that Rick was going to do.

  The big Islander had a large crucible set up in one corner of his forge fire. In it was some sort of molten metal.

  “Silver, friend, with just a splash of platinum and a thimbleful of tungsten,” he said to me, when he saw me peering at it.

  Without preamble, he tossed the bracelet into the bucket of liquid metal. Then, the big man touched the plaited leather and grass belt at his waist, which I knew was his vector, and dipped two fingers into the molten alloy. He should have screamed in pain, but instead, he muttered a few choice words and there was a deep crack from inside the crucible. The liquid metal in the crucible burped up three large bubbles and took on a brassy color.

  “Didn’t that fucking hurt, man?” I asked as Rick dipped his metal-covered fingers in a bucket of water by his side. The water hissed and steamed. When Rick pulled his fingers out, the metal covering them had solidified. With a flex of his mighty fingers, the metal cracked off and fell to the floor.

  “Earth Mage,” he said simply. “Don’t you try that at home, friend.”

  “Not likely,” I said.

  Rick picked up the crucible and poured it into an intricate little mold that he had sitting ready.

  “The metal traps the soul energy for a little while,” he said. “The silver and platinum will give you an hour to converse with your ancestor, friend.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “The knowledge came to me when I entered the smithy. It belonged to my father, so his knowledge passed on to me.”

  “Alright then. So, what does the tungsten do?” I asked, wiping sweat from my face with my sleeve.

  “Tungsten is the hardest pure metal found in this world,” Rick replied. “It will enable you to unlock the staff, I believe.”

  The cast was for a tiny key, I realized. Rick poured the molten alloy into the mold with far more dexterity than a man of his size should have. I had noticed though, within the smithy, the big man moved with a grace and surety that he rarely showed usually.

  Once he had poured the last drop of metal into the cast, Rick murmured another incantation over the mold, and it solidified in an instant. Then, he popped out the key, picked it up with his freshly-polished tongs, and dunked it into the bucket of water.

  The water bubbled and hissed, spitting and steaming. Then Rick pulled it out and handed it to me.

  “Quick, take it, friend!” he said. “It will work best while it is still hot with the life of the fire!”

  I held out my hand, unaccustomed to the big man being so forceful in his speech.

  The key scalded and burned me instantly, blistering my palm. I gritted my teeth and groaned, but did not dare drop the little magic item.

  “Where do I fucking put it?” I hissed in pain.

  “The foot, friend, the foot of the staff!” Rick said.

  I conjured my black crystal staff, flipped it over in my hand, and saw that a little flake of crystal had popped out from the ass-end of it.

  A fucking keyhole!

  I slotted the little silver key into the hole. Immediately, the key was sucked into the base of the staff and disappeared.

  Holding my injured hand to my chest, I staggered out of the smithy just as the heavens opened and rain began to fall in fat drops. Forked lightning split the sky into segments, and thunder boomed across the landscape.

  I looked down at my hand and saw that the shape of the key had been burned into my palm.

  “Justin?” I heard someone yell from behind me as I dropped to my knees.

  The staff was throbbing in my hand. Pulsing. Vibrating. Shuddering.

  Thunder burst across the rolling cloud layer above me, reverberating off the houses in the village below. Within moments, I was soaked through, but I barely felt the cold or the water. I was being sucked down and stretched simultaneously. Lighting blazed red across my closed eyelids.

  Then, blackness.

  I opened my eyes and found myself in a room. It was a room of all gray. Gray walls, gray floor, gray ceiling, ambiguous gray furniture. There was one window set into one wall. Through it, I could see a storm rolling across a landscape. Lightning forked across the sky.

  There was a dragon in the gray room.

  It was about the size of a cart. It was a deep, glistening brown color, flecked with bronze scales. Its eyes shone with the light of a volcano’s heart.

  “Who the fuck are you?” I asked. I was a little taken aback by the sudden teleportation.

  The dragon tasted the air with a long, black tongue.

  “I am a resident,” it growled. “I share this space with another proud spirit. I was the resident spirit of the vector that you first selected from the poltergeist, Barry—a gnarled wooden staff, topped with a crystal ball. Then that vector was incorporated into the black crystal staff you now wield.”

  I nodded. “And the other resident of this space would be…?” I asked.

  “That would be me!”

  I whirled.

  A man was sitting perched on the arm of an armchair. He looked about as cocksure and comfortable as any man that I had ever laid eyes on. The shape of his jaw and the color of his hair was as familiar to me as my own—they were my own. He even had the same broad shoulders and athletic waist as I did. He was dressed all in black—an ensemble that was between a rogue’s garb and a garment someone might wear if one intended to ride a dragon at an extreme pace.

>   The man’s rugged face, stubbled just as my own was currently, split into a wide, white grin. His eyes shone with warmth that could only be attributed to an intense pride at what he was seeing.

  “Good day, son,” he said as he stood and walked over to me. “The name is Zenidor. I, as you probably know, am your father.”

  My mouth was dry. I had planned on being devastatingly aloof and cool for this meeting, but I was going to fail one-hundred and ten percent on that score. Besides, Zenidor—my fucking dad—was about as cool a cat as there ever was.

  “I imagine our time is short,” my old man said, standing up. There might not have been an inch difference in our heights.

  “We’ve got an hour,” I said, my mouth suddenly dry as the Gobi.

  “Has Barry Chillgrave been much use yet?” Zenidor suddenly asked me.

  “As a pool cue made of rope,” I joked.

  My dad laughed. It was a good sound. He placed a strong hand on my shoulder. Thin sword blade scars criss-crossed the back of it.

  “Now, son,” he said, “what is it that you want to know?”

  End of Book 4

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