Creation Mage 6 Dante King (online e reader .txt) 📖

“She is,” I said.

Felicity padded silently up onto the deck and pawed cautiously at the capture orb hanging at my belt.

I recalled how she had told me that she had been captured by just such an orb, by the orc shaman we had fought and killed on the day that she had decided to come home with us.

I explained this to Enwyn. If I had expected it to shock or puzzle her in any way, then I was sorely mistaken. The secretarial-looking woman merely contemplated the purple-furred creature, as she curled herself by my feet, and said, “Is that so?”

“Do you want to come with me?” I asked the cat. “Or would you prefer to stay and guard the frathouse?” She nuzzled into me, then nodded toward the frathouse. “Alright. I guess you have a lower tolerance for Chaosbanes than I do.”

Suddenly, Igor burst out of the front door, stumbled out onto the porch, and staggered down the steps, his arms pinwheeling madly in circles like someone running down a steep hill. His progress was arrested dramatically by a snow-covered cast iron birdbath that struck him squarely in the balls.

“Morning, Igor,” Enwyn said, surprise barely registering on her face.

“Oooooh yep, right in the snowglobes,” Igor groaned, straightening himself up with difficulty.

“What’s the rush, man?” I asked. “The house on fire?”

“Jumping jackalopes, is it?” Igor said, whirling so fast that his enormous mustache flapped visibly on his top lip. “I’m sure Barry said he was going to take care of that minor conflagration in the bathroom.”

“Minor what?” I  said.

“Oh nothing, my dear fellow, nothing at all!” Igor said nonchalantly. He pulled a live beetle out of his pocket, crushed the gleaming orange insect between his palms, and then snorted the residue out of his cupped hands.

“And so it begins,” I muttered to Enwyn.

“I should hope so, I should hope so, I should damn well hope so!” rambled the shabby Rune Mystic, who also happened to be my first Mage Games sponsor and in the running for Avalonia’s All-Time Most Inebriated Human Wrecking Ball.

“I should hope so,” Igor repeated once more. “Otherwise my ears are playing up again.”

“Your ears?” Enwyn asked.

“Yes, my ears, my most beauteous and beddable strumpet,” Igor said. “Do you not hear it?”

“All I hear is a series of splatting noises as shit pours steadily from your mouth, Igor,” I said. “What are you talking about?”

Igor frowned at me, stuck one finger into his ear, and twisted it back and forth ferociously. A faint trace of powder came out with the finger as he pulled the digit free.

“No, there it is! Just as I thought,” Igor said. “That’s the great thing about snorting fresh vee-beetles. Not only do the little blighters hit your adrenal glands with the speed and intensity of a knife fight in an outhouse, but they also sharpen your hearing to an unbelievable degree. I hear the sleigh bells! The rest of the pestilential gang are almost here! Can you not hear them too?”

I was about to tell Igor that I thought he had well and truly left the reservation when I heard it.

Sleigh bells.

Enwyn and I looked skyward.

A sleigh, or at least a vaguely sleigh-shaped object, was being towed through the stormy skies by six unknown creatures. It kept disappearing and reappearing again, as it dipped in and out of the low snow-laden clouds, but there could be no doubt: it was heading right for us.

The sleigh swept in low and made a pass of the fraternity house, shooting past with such speed that it blew the snow clean out of the fruit trees standing around the front garden. Banking in a nicely controlled turn, the sleigh came back around, the six beasts pulling it slackening their speed sufficiently so that they could touch down and bring the sleigh to earth.

It would have been nice to say that the sleigh touched down with the grace and unruffled precision of a loon landing on a lake. In actual fact, it hit the lawn like a bewitched garden shed being driven by a lunatic.

Snow and mud sprayed in all directions, and more than a few of the hedges, plants, and small trees that had called the garden home were unceremoniously wiped out.

Enwyn, Igor, and I judiciously retreated to the back of the porch until the ice and soil had settled. When it had, I noticed that the sleigh was a great carved monstrosity of a thing. It looked like a cross between an ancient harpooning boat, the likes of which old Captain Ahab tried to puncture Moby Dick from, and a modern day dumpster.

The beasts that had been towing the sleigh, and that were now standing quite unconcernedly where a couple of nice pear trees had been only a moment before, were bulls.

There were bulls though, and then there were these bulls.

The animals must have stood about eight feet high at the shoulder and weighed as much as the entire offensive line of the Indianapolis Colts each. Their hooves were the size of trash can lids, their nostrils big enough to drive a minecart up. Their coats, horns, and eyes were as black as the Duke of Hell’s waistcoat. When one started to take a very loud, very long piss, its urine didn’t just melt the snow but appeared to dissolve the frozen earth underneath too.

“Friendly looking things,” I said faintly, in a voice heavy with sarcasm.

“Ah, I see that you have an agricultural eye on you, Mr. Mauler!” came a voice from atop the sleigh.

Headmaster Reginald Chaosbane was standing at the front of the sleigh, a pair of reins in his hand. He was dressed with his usual piratically roguish panache; crisp white shirt with billowing lace cuffs, snazzy silk waistcoat, tight black pants, and knee high leather riding boots. To