Creation Mage 5

by Dante King

  We saw a bunch of students leave a shop called Fun Guy’s Fungi. One of them, a halfling, was walking on her hands and was completely nude. None of her friends seemed to think that this was worth commenting on, but one of them waved at Enwyn as we passed and told us that we wouldn’t make a better decision that evening than buying one of the Fun Guy’s luminous tongue-dissolving toadstools.

  “Is that what she’s on?” I asked the girl, pointing at the naked halfling woman who was still walking about on her hands.

  “Yep,” the girl said, giving me that deeply analytical look that only the very high can muster, “but I think she took too much, man. Too much.”

  “Yes, well, I suppose she is half your size, isn’t she?” Enwyn said.

  The girl, who had the pointed ears of an elf, but not the fine bone structure that I usually associated with that race, raised her eyebrows. She looked over at her friend. “Oh shit, that’s buzzy, man! I thought there was something different about her!”

  “Wowzas, how long have you been in here for, cupcake?” Leah Chaosbane asked.

  “What day is it?” asked the girl.

  “It’s either Tuesday or Sunday,” Leah said dreamily, pulling out another one of her black cigarettes and lighting it by kissing the end.

  “Right…” the girl said. “Then, I guess we’ve been here for like forty-five minutes. Peace out, guys.”

  They went on their way. As they left, I couldn’t help but think that, with a Headmaster like Reginald Chaosbane, it was a wonder that the Academy didn’t do all their classes in Powder Lane. Or move the entire structure somewhere smack-bang in the middle of it.

  “We have to get a move on, ladies and gentlemen,” I said. “I keep forgetting, but I’ve got a freaking Mage Games Qualifier in about nine hours, and a few hours shuteye will probably help.”

  “Yes, and may I add that your sponsors will be keeping a very close eye on you,” Igor said, slapping the side of his head to stop his left eyeball from slowly revolving.

  “Sure they will,” I replied.

  “Don’t fret, my friends,” Leah said suddenly. “Using my powers of deduction and something that Igor no longer really has—a working memory—I have led us back to the spot where we ran into this Janet Thunderstone that you seek.”

  The street here was lined with grungier shops, dusty curtains in their windows. The neon signs twisted and writhed to form new advertisements every thirty seconds or so. These signs peddled all sorts of drugs: Brain-Smoke, Warp-Powder, Dreamcaps, Void, and the intriguingly named Mudcream.

  “You saw Janet here?” I asked.

  “Cross my heart and hope to fly,” Leah said. “We just bumped into her and Igor asked her what she was trying to get her hands on and—”

  “And she said that she was in the market for some… pixie dust, I believe,” Igor cut in. “Yes, it’s coming back to me a little now that we’re here.”

  “And you told her, Igor, that the best place to find something like that would be one of those gentlemen’s clubs where ladies take their clothes off, and do other things, for money,” Mort said. “And, ironically, doesn’t cater for any sort of male that I would ever care to label as a gentleman.”

  “That’s right,” Igor said.

  Leah twirled a pirouette and then pointed down the road to one of the nondescript, squat buildings. The structure was crouched in the shadows cast by one of the Dickensian-style street lights. It was a brown building with a couple of large windows, dusty purple drapes pulled across them. Moths had eaten away at spots in the drapes, and I could see warm, comfortable orange light spilling in through a few little holes along one edge. There was a rusted metal sign over the door that read, THE TENDER TRAP.

  “That’s where she was heading when we parted ways,” Leah said in a faraway and thoughtful voice. “That’s where she was marching off to, with that strong and determined Thunderstone glint in her eye. Just like her daddy used to when he was kicking down doors and throwing perps on floors.”

  “You reckon she could still be in there?” I asked. “It looks pretty normal to me.”

  “Oh, Justin, Justin, Justin, Justin,” Leah said. “Everything looks normal at a glance. Everyone you meet is normal until you get to know them. I think the most wise, sensible, politic, sagacious, shrewd, and commonsensical course of action for us to pursue is to roll into this Tender Trap and see what’s been snared in there. At the very least, we might find someone who saw her and can point us in the correct direction. Fingers, toes, arms, and legs crossed we might find her in there enjoying a lapdance.”

  “That does sound quite a pleasant way to spend a diverting few hours,” Igor mused.

  “You’re a walking cocktail shaker of drugs, Igor,” I said. “I reckon we could sit you in the corner of a dark room and you’d be able to amuse yourself pretty easily.”

  “Good point,” Igor said affably.

  “Shall we proceed?” Mort asked. He pinched his cheeks and blinked hard a couple of times for good measure. I recognized a man desperately trying to magically become sober. I had seen that look on many of my college buddies’ faces, usually when they were standing outside nightclubs and were worried that the bouncer was going to be able to detect that they had just downed half a bottle of vodka before walking out the door of our dorms.

  “Yes, Mort,” I said, “let us proceed.”

  Chapter Five

  I led the way down the street and toward the door of The Tender Trap. As we approached, I could hear music coming muffled through the door. It wasn’t the steady doof-doof-doof-doof baseline of strip joints the world over. To my ear, it sounded more like carnival polka music.

  “What the hell is this place?” I muttered.

  I noted that there was no doorman or guard of any kind. When I tried the door handle, it became apparent as to why that was—it was locked up tighter than a nun’s panties.

  Well, maybe not the nuns that live on the edge of Nevermoor, I thought to myself.

  I was considering the most subtle and least destructive way of entering a locked premises when I heard a short, sharp scream.

  It wasn’t your atypical princess wailing for a brave knight to come and save her ass. Not your usual damsel in distress bit. It was the short, frustrated scream of someone who has bypassed simply being angry and is so furious that the next logical step for them is throwing down in a big way.

  The most important thing about the scream though was that I recognized it as emanating from Janet Thunderstone’s mouth.

  “Fuck it,” I said, taking a couple of steps back.

  “Fuck what?” Mort asked politely.

  “This,” I said, and hit the door with a Blazing Bolt.

  The heavy wooden door exploded off its hinges, ripping out the door frame and three inches of wall on either side.

  There was a muffled thud and a sharp, wheezing cry that I attributed to someone being hit by the splintered remains of the door. Call me a douchebag, but I wasn’t too bothered by that.

  With adrenaline spiking through my veins and my face set in a scowl, I stepped through the wreckage of the door and was met—

  —by about twenty women dressed in nothing more than a few strips of cloth and some tactically placed tassels.

  “I love your outfits, ladies!” Leah Chaosbane said from behind me. “But is it fashion to die for? That’s what I’d be mulling over right now.”

  “My, my, I do love a striptease,” Igor said amiably.

  Obviously, an exploding door blasting into a room is going to upset the conversation. It’s going to disrupt the vibe.

  The twenty or so strippers glanced up from where they stood milling about near a dimly lit stage at the back of the room. When they caught sight of my face, as I stepped through the wrecked door and surveyed the room, they made the prudent decision and fled in every direction they could.

  “What is this place?” I asked again, ignoring the screaming, panicking strippers as they dashed this way and that. It takes a lot
to distract someone from twenty pairs of bouncing, betassled breasts. It takes something particularly unexpected to look away from twenty toned asses and twenty sets of smooth legs that have been sculpted by working a pole.

  But the inside of The Tender Trap was itself one huge distraction to me. It would have been to any Earthling that had received even a rudimentary education in cinema.

  The place was styled exclusively after one of those Star Wars cantinas, the kind which had sprung to my mind when I had heard that weird, clarinet-heavy, synthetic music.

  It was dim, and as brown in here as it was on the outside. Where the exterior of the building was made of blocks of brown stone, the interior had been rendered smooth and shaped so that it was like a curved, domed room. A large island bar sat in the middle of the one expansive open space, with a silver liquor distillery set-up behind it.

  To their credit, the band that was playing the odd alien swing music hadn’t missed a beat when I blew the door in. They were still standing on their segment of stage in the corner, playing their instruments with style and not really paying attention to the strippers freaking out.

  The same could not be said for the customers. Most of the eyes in the room were on me and my companions. Only a few leisurely drinkers glanced at the orc bouncer lying in the splintered mess of timbers that had previously been a door.

  I got the impression that the clientele were the brand of hard-boiled fellows who could shuck an oyster with a glare and whose closest brush with a sense of humor probably hinged on whether or not they had recently murdered a standup comedian.

  A plethora of adjectives sprang to mind as I ran an unfriendly eye over the gathered drinkers, many of whom had had their goblets and glasses halfway to their mouths. The one that probably sprang the highest though, was greasy. They were an oily, slick, and dangerous-looking bunch. Although they were composed of a blend of races, they all had one thing in common: they were all sharks. Every last one of the bastards. They possessed that predatory, deadly light in their eyes that you might see in those of a great white, just before it bit you in half.

  Now, I took in all of this at a glance—before the dust from the destroyed door had a chance to settle. Normally, I might have taken a bit more time to survey my surroundings, especially surroundings that were so weirdly familiar. However, something up on the stage had drawn ninety-eight percent of my attention. Something that lit a flame in my chest and set my blood on its way to a rolling boil.

  Janet Thunderstone was tied to a rudimentary scaffold, her arms and legs splayed like Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. She was dressed, bizarrely, in what I could only describe as a sexy Princess Leia outfit. This was made up of a long red skirt with a slit down one side, which showed off one of Janet’s athletic, bronzed legs all the way to her hip. Her top was a bikini or bra made of some gray velvet material with gold swirls all over it. She wore a golden belt, a matching golden choker fastened and locked at her throat. From this golden choker dangled a long golden chain that pooled on the floor at her feet.

  My pulse thudded in my temple. My anger at seeing what someone had done to my friend was alloyed with the confusion I felt at having walked in on a Star Wars set.

  “Justin!” Janet yelled. A spotlight shone at her, pointing from somewhere up in the domed ceiling. With that near blinding light shining at her, I guessed she could only just make me out.

  The beautiful Storm Mage let out a vicious laugh.

  “You’re all screwed now, you lowlife scumbags!” she said to the room at large.

  “You’re all right?” I called to her.

  “I will be in about twenty-five seconds when I’m out of these ropes,” Janet said.

  I could sense my four companions spreading nonchalantly out behind me. They knew as well as I did that things were going to kick off at any moment. There was no point in presenting one big target, when lots of smaller targets would increase our chances of getting out of here in one piece.

  I took a couple of steps into the room. I stood at the top of a wide, short flight of stairs that led into the dimly lit chamber. The bar and seating area spread out in front of me. Tactically, I had the advantage, as far as the high ground went. On the other hand, the assembled drinkers had the numbers; there were about twenty or thirty mean-looking motherfuckers ranged around the bar and sitting at little cabaret tables.

  A hairy, unshaven bastard with yellow fangs protruding from a heavy jaw and clawed hands drew my attention. He slowly drained a glass of bright blue liquid and set his tumbler down with a heavy thud. He growled deep in his throat.

  “Who’s the big cheese here?” I said, in a strong voice dripping with cold menace.

  “What do you think this is, geezer?” a woman with a waspish face, and even more wasp-like wings jutting out of her back. “A fuckin’ deli? There ain’t no big cheeses here.”

  There was some moronic chuckling at this. The crowd had gotten over the impromptu entrance of me and my friends. There was a definite feeling of bad people gathering up their courage and strengthening their spines, getting ready to deal out some serious violence on us newcomers.

  “That woman there is my friend and, more pertinently to you assholes, the daughter of Idman Thunderstone,” I replied.

  That took some of the aback, I could see.

  Then, a rich, carefree laugh rolled out of a particularly dark corner. There was movement, as something large heaved itself to its feet and walked out into the light of the lamps.

  The creature—and I was at a loss as to what race of thing it was—stumped slowly out from where it had been sitting. It was about eight feet tall, four feet wide, and fat as fuck. He, and I thought it was a he because of the fedora perched rakishly on its wide head, was covered from toes to crown in thick fur.

  “You’d be the big cheese,” I said, fixing my gaze on the man who looked like he’d been poured into his skin and overfilled by about four hundred percent. He reminded me, fittingly, like a cross between Jabba the Hutt and a wookiee.

  “I haven’t heard the expression before,” the creature said in a deep, gravelly voice like slow flowing lava, “but I like it. I like cheese.”

  “Yeah, I bet you do,” I said, “but you know it’s not usually eaten by the block, right?”

  The creature walked around the island bar, moving toward a reinforced stool that stood empty nearby. It sat itself down. Immediately, the barman, a cyclops with green skin and a slicked back hairdo, set a shot glass down and poured a measure of ruby-red liquor into it.

  “The name’s Oddus,” the creature said, raising the glass. “Born a humble Yeti. Owner of The Tender Trap.”

  “That’s really swell for you,” I said a scathing bite of restiveness entering my voice, “but I don’t give a rat’s ass what your name is.”

  “Ah, but you hold such store in names, do you not?” the Yeti said casually. “I mean, look at you. You, an Earthling no less, if I am any judge, blow my door down, walk into my establishment, and start bandying around names like Thunderstone? Not proper, no. Bad manners, yes.”

  “I just thought you might want a heads-up as to whose daughter you’ve kidnapped,” I said.

  “Mmm, so you busted in here for the good of me and my clientele, is that it… Justin, was it? How very considerate of you.”

  “That’s me,” I said, nodding at the broken bouncer on the floor. “Mr. Considerate.”

  “Yes,” Oddus said. “Yes, very considerate. Only, I know that Idman Thunderstone is—how do you say?—out of favor with the Arcane Council currently. Some might say that he’s on the run.”

  The Yeti gestured around at his customers, some of whom had got surreptitiously to their feet.

  “And, if you knew anything, Justin, you would know that throwing around Thunderstone’s name here, amongst many who have been carted into the Eldritch Prison over the years at his behest, is a foolish idea.”

  I looked over at Janet, restrained with ropes and with the golden choker on. A tiny sliver of my mind c
ouldn’t help but notice how gorgeous she looked in that outfit. I quieted that thought with no small amount of effort.

  “So, you knew who she was when she came knocking, asking for pixie dust?” I said.

  Oddus knocked back his drink and spread his hands. The bartender refilled his glass instantly.

  “Of course,” the huge Yeti rumbled, grinning menacingly.

  My patience was running short.

  “I can take it that you don’t intend to let her go?” I asked.

  “No,” Oddus replied shortly. “But I will let you and your friends go, if you decide that you want to walk out of here, rather than be carried out in buckets and emptied into the gutters.”

  I turned. Turning my back on Oddus was a gesture that was meant to convey how little a threat I viewed him as. It also allowed me to find where Mort was positioned.

  The bounty hunter Chaos Mage was standing almost directly behind me. His hood was still cast over his head, obscuring his features.

  “Mort,” I whispered so quietly that I hoped he was good at reading lips, “has this bastard got a bounty on his head?”

  Mort nodded instantly. It seemed that even after a healthy dose of pickled python pounce his encyclopedic knowledge of his hitlist burned like a supernova in his mind. He flashed me ten fingers and then two more, pointing vaguely around the room. I took this to mean that there were an even dozen of Avalonia’s most wanted dotted about the place.

  “Am I still deputized?” I hissed. “Still licensed to kill?”

  Mort nodded again.

  I turned back to Oddus. I pasted a look of resignation on my countenance.

  “Do you have any questions for me, Earthling?” the Yeti asked me.

  “Yeah, I do have one now that you mention it,” I said. “What the fuck is this set-up? I mean, you’ve copied that scene from Star Wars, right? I’m not just seeing things?”