Gremlin Night Dale Smith (comprehension books txt) 📖

“Show me.” I was suddenly very tired. I didn’t have time to be exhausted. I need to deal with the gremlins, and then reconnect with Tully, who hopefully had a Restore potion. Then I could learn what he’d been up to.

You need rest.

“Tell me about it.” I yawned. “But there’s no time, no time at all.” I giggled. I took a deep breath. Exhaustion made me silly, and I had no time for silly.

I strode to the pillar, and placed the point of my binding knife against the concrete. I could barely see the thread. This close to the pillar, I could see the faint purple glow from the mana well inside. I swallowed.

But how to connect it? The shadow slug gave me the means. It wasn’t much, but it was all I had to work with.

I glanced down at my hip. “Hey, Shady, I’m going to have to bind you.” The shadow slug was a new manifestation, a Level 1 verging on a 2, which is the only reason I could try this stunt.

But I said I’ll help you. The shadow slug whined like a four-year old being told to go to bed.

“And you will be,” I said. “Please.”

I don’t want to be spelled.

“It will only sting a moment,” I said. Lame joke. “Please help me.”

Okay. The shadow slug’s voice quavered in my mind.

I began muttering a binding spell, “Essential Compliance.” I didn’t come up with the name, I was just stuck with casting it. I decided to go with ancient Sumerian. I’d sweated this spell out in the Academy. Not an easy spell to learn, especially in that language. I’d just about broken my brain learning it then. I had also given myself a first-class hand cramp.

I always cast Essential Compliance with my left hand, to give it extra potency. Going with my opposite hand made it more challenging, and thus gave the spell more potency. The bandage made it harder. I nearly the fumbled the spell, twice, before finally casting it.

The spell made a loud pop. The stink of sulfur and rotten eggshells filled the air. I fought not to gag. Yuck. I hated the stink of Essential Transformation. A wisp of green smoke floated around me.

I continued murmuring in Sumerian. Strands of green light appeared from my fingers. I looped the strands together until the joined glowing spell strands were the thickness of an electrical power cord, very large in comparison to the slug. Purple haze grew around me as the spell pulled the neighborhood mana in. Slow, the casting ritual was slow. I ached to give it a boost, but I stuck with the ritual. I had no idea what turbocharging this casting with blood magic would do. The temptation grew in me to try. I forced myself to continue with the ritual.

The spell coiled around the shadow slug. Its shadowy form quivered against me. Afraid. Don’t destroy me, it wailed.

“I won’t,” I said. I tugged at the spell.

Protean was a word that had been thrown at me a hundred times back at the academy. Mana was protean. Magic could be protean. Some manifestations even could be protean. People never were. Except, according to Wanda, my tight-assed teacher, my emotions. Screw her.

Most manifestations were fixed from the moment of creation. But a few weren’t. Tonight, here in Portland, there was also the Gremlin factor

But I couldn’t see enough detail in the shadow slug. I’d bitten off more than I could chew, magically speaking.

Please don’t destroy me! The shadow slug wailed.

“I won’t, I promise.” I brushed hair out of my eyes, squinted, but of course that didn’t help.

It was like focusing a microscope. An intricate trace work of glowing gold-green lines surrounded the shadow slug, which suddenly revealed far more detail inside its body. It looked like polished obsidian, with edges that just wouldn’t quit. I could lose myself in those edges. Polyhedral instead of being a lump of shadow.

I want to be me!

The web work inside the obsidian polyhedron was so intricate, layered. Like a recursive Escher painting. I peered deeper into the slug.

There. At the center, a photo negative of an ink blot-like shape throbbed. The manifestation’s heart. I just needed the shadow slug to reach. I began drawing a tight circle in the air, looping the spell thread from the tip of my binding knife around the heart of the shadow slug.

The shadow slug quivered in my mind, whimpering softly.

I began chanting in Sumerian again. The shadow slug pulled away from me, growing larger until it was a human-sized figure, a bizarre split image of a blacker-than-night shadowy form, looking in one eye-blink like a dark side bedsheet ghost and a many-sided obsidian abstract sculpture in the next.

A surge of energy swelled from the pillar. All the hairs on my arms and legs stood up. My eyes widened. The air rustled.

I pressed myself against the huge concrete pillar. The steel struts underpinning the span hummed. A river of golden light flowed from the pillar. The spell. The shadow slug reemerged from the concrete, now small again, and pressed itself back against my hip, whimpering.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

Purple mana lighting flashed around us.

The spell thread was now a golden ribbon. An image of the gremlins, dozens of them, racing through a gulch toward me now, like a tsunami. I slumped to the ground.

Come on, Liz, I told myself. Get up. I forced myself to stand, fell. The gremlins would be here in moments.

I pushed myself up. “I’d better get ready,” I said aloud.

“Or else let me have them,” a familiar voice said.

I turned around with a start. The trickster in its top-hat-and-frock-coat guise leaned against a nearby tree, smiling at me.

The trickster arched an eyebrow. “How do you plan on destroying the oncoming gremlin horde?” it asked. “The power of their chaos will cause the bridge above us to collapse.”

I stood up straight, facing it. “I’ll do what I have to.”

“Brave words from an exhausted sorcerer out