Creation Mage 6 Page 4

  “What if you don’t enter one of the border burrows?” I asked.

  “Ah, well, in that case, you and your conveyance would be intercepted, and dealt with very efficiently, with a smack on the wrist.”

  “That doesn’t sound so harsh,” I said.

  “Sorry mate,” Reginald said, screwing the cap back onto his flask, “I forgot to pronounce the required capitals—my tongue’s a little numb after the flight. The Slap on the Wrist is a defensive spell measure that would have you raining down in incy wincy little pieces over quite a large section of Manafell.”

  I looked around at the transparent tunnel completely surrounding us. “So, it’s sort of like a magic vacuum in here?” I asked. “The only magic that has any effect on something inside it is that magic that is controlled by the border guards? All other magic is nullified?”

  “In a way,” the Headmaster said. “The nuts and bolts of it are this: there’s nobody who could fly this sleigh now, even if they wanted to.”

  He paused and stroked his mustache with thumb and forefinger. “Well, I could, of course,” he said, “but I might be the only one.”

  The whirlwind journey to the floor of Manafell and the border station lasted only a minute or so. Gradually, the speed of the sleigh lessened. The crystalline tunnel came to an end outside of a squat marble building. The structure sported tiny windows and that awfully efficient, inoffensive characterlessness—the byword of all government buildings the multiverse over.

  Almost immediately, once the sleigh had come to a halt and the legs of the six bulls were stationary once more, a concealed door opened in the side of the building and a team of uniformed guards came marching out.

  The guards looked like they might be at least half-Jotunn; they were so big and broad. They had quick, alert eyes and the carefully cultivated bland expressions of those who regarded all travelers as idiots until proved otherwise. They wore formidable suits of armor, forged from blued steel. Heavy truncheons hung at their belts, and large bastard swords were strapped to their backs. On their heads were helmets which looked slightly more phallic than was probably necessary.

  One of the guards stepped forward and treated us to a facial expression that was not quite a leer, but was definitely not a smile either.

  “‘Ello, ‘ello, ‘ello, what brings you lot here, then?” he asked. Not waiting for an answer, he leaned on the edge of the sleigh and said, “My name’s Sergeant Mullock. I will now conduct a short questionnaire, and then, depending on your answers, my men will make a search of your conveyance, if that’s agreeable with all those present?”

  There was the typical murmur of acquiescence made by those who flaunt and mock authority on a daily basis and are now confronted by it.

  “Splendid,” said Sergeant Mullock. “Now, if you would be so kind as to pull your conveyance to the side over there. Your bullocks can graze on the paddock immediately in front of the inspection zone.”

  Reginald Chaosbane clicked his tongue at the six bulls who, in defiance to the fact that they looked like they would much rather break from the traces and trample us all, did as they were told.

  The guards moved with the sleigh, their hands starting nonchalantly to the truncheons at their belts. Clearly, these were security professionals who were ready to leap into action with only moderate provocation.

  As Reginald parked the sleigh and the bulls got down to some serious cud chewing, the Headmaster smiled broadly around at Sergeant Mullock and his four men and pulled out his flask.

  “Drink?” he said affably, waving the open vessel invitingly under one of the guard’s unsuspecting noses. The man recoiled.

  “Sorry, sir,” said Sergeant Mullock, “not while we’re on duty.”

  Reginald shrugged and took a swallow himself.

  Off to one side, I heard one of the guards say in a barely sotto voce tone, “Bloody out of towners are like hemorrhoids: pain in the ass when they come down and a blessed relief when they head back up again.”

  Leah giggled.

  Mort said, “That sounded slightly derogatory, didn’t it, Igor?”

  “Now, look here Sergeant Mullock my old mucker,” Reginald said, talking over his kin, propping his booted feet up on the rail of the sleigh and crossing them at the ankle. “I appreciate that you and your lads have a job to do, but we really aren’t a threat. I understand fully well that the Castle of Ascendance is only a stone’s throw away. And you have to be seen to be doing a good job, but I’m in and out of here fairly often. In fact, my family’s own ranch is on land that directly adjoins that of Queen Hagatha’s estate. We’re just in the area for a festive family get together.”

  To my surprise, Sergeant Mullock seemed to blanche at the Headmaster’s words.

  “Adjoin the Castle of Ascendance grounds… You don’t mean… You’re not another bunch of—”

  “Chaosbane. Reginald Chaosbane, at your service, Sergeant,” Reginald said loudly, reaching up to doff a hat that wasn’t there.

  “Cripes, I thought I recognized that geezer,” the shortest guard said to one of the other ones.

  “Bugger me, but we’ve already had about a score of them cuckoos come through here already,” his fellow replied, a touch of dismay coloring his words. “A convoy of about a dozen came through, and it took four hours to check all the paraphernalia they were trying to bring in!”

  “Headmaster of the illustrious Mazirian Academy,” Reginald finished grandly, bowing low.

  A guard sporting a red beard was walking around our ride and doing the sleigh equivalent of kicking tires. He snorted derisively when he heard Reginald’s words.

  I shot him an unfriendly look.

  “What’re you looking at, fella?” the walking armored mountain shot at me.

  I held up my hands. “Just wondering why you’d find the name of the Mazirian Academy so funny. Surely, you support us in the Mage Games? There can’t be any other Academies that come close.”

  The guard gave me a queer, frozen look. Then, to my astonishment, he burst out laughing.

  “Here, Loinsan, did you hear what this bloke just said?” the red-bearded guy said.

  Loinsan, the shortest guard, looked up. “What’s that, Randulf?” he asked.

  “This chap here just asked me whether we supported the Mazirian Academy in the Mage Games!” Randulf wiped a tear of mirth from the corner of his eye.

  Loinsan began making a noise that most closely resembled a goat that had just swallowed a lit cigarette. I realized, after a second, that he was laughing.

  “Blimey, that’s a good one!” he gasped. “Can you imagine, the Mazirian!”

  I looked from one man to the other.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  “There’s something that you probably don’t know about our Academy, Justin,” Enwyn said, leaning across Mallory.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “The Mazirian Academy’s reputation outside of Nevermoor and the surrounds is not exactly stellar,” Enwyn said. “The Headmaster’s genius is well-known and held in high regard, but so too are his… eccentricities.”

  The two guards, Randulf and Loinsan, were still laughing heartily together.

  Loinsan, between pained gasps, said, “The Maz-Maz-Mazirian! Over the likes of Belgarath!”

  “Or Taranaki!” Randulf choked.

  “Or Proelium’s!”

  “Or even fuckin’ Battlebone!”

  “That’s enough, Privates Randulf and Loinsan!” Sergeant Mullock snapped, a trace of color reentering his cheeks. “A bit of professionalism might see the pair of you spending more time conducting searches and less time cleaning the crappers with your toothbrushes!”

  “Sorry, Sergeant,” the two privates said in unison.

  “Randulf, you get the scanner and do a vector check. Make sure that none of these travelers have anything on them that has been reported stolen.”

  “Yes, Sergeant!” the guard with the red beard said, snapping off a crisp salute.
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  “Loinsan, you carry on with an exterior visual check of the conveyance.”

  “Yes, Sergeant!” Loinsan said, going back to his half-assed scanning of the sleigh.

  Moving with slow, careful, frown-faced deliberateness, Randulf walked around the sleigh and asked each of the passengers to present their vectors in turn. He scanned the vector of each member of our party with an unpretentious little item that looked like a metal fly-swatter. Where the mesh of the swatting part of the apparatus would have been though, there was a grid of golden light beams. They were gossamer-like things and yet gave the impression of being harder than diamonds somehow.

  When it was my turn, I held up my two vectors for inspection—the black crystal staff of my father and the white crystal that was my mother’s vector in disguise.

  Randulf shot me a strange look, and for a moment I thought that he was about to raise the alarm. Thankfully, the man seemed only to want to get us the hell out of his border station as quickly as possible. Seemed that he’d had his fair share of Chaosbanes for one day.

  With a grunt, he moved on to Mort, who was sitting directly behind me.

  And that was when it suddenly hit me.

  Idman fucking Thunderstone, former High Warden and owner of the Eldritch Prison and one Avalonia’s most wanted fugitives, was sitting in the back of the fucking sleigh!

  Of course, Barry was in there too, but as a poltergeist, he could change his appearance at the drop of a hat. I wasn’t too worried for him.

  Mallory Entwistle was a fugitive from Queen Hagatha’s justice too. I had heard her and Mort though, cooking up a story that he had captured her and was bringing her in. I had only heard them muttering to each other out of the corner of my ear and hadn’t really been paying too much attention to their conversation, as I had been speculating too deeply on how the damned sleigh was staying in the air at that point. That made sense though, as far as it went, thanks to Mort being one of the most infamous bounty hunters in Avalonia.

  Slowly, not wanting to draw the attention of any of the guards, I scanned the five armed border custodians.

  Sergeant Mullock was still having his ear chewed off by a loquacious Reginald Chaosbane. The Headmaster was lamenting the fact that so few citizens of Manafell took the Mazirian Academy’s War Mages seriously in the big kingdom-wide tournaments. The Sergeant looked like a man who was torn between wanting to shut the Headmaster up with his truncheon and knowing that, if he did, it would mean bringing a shitload of paperwork down on his head.

  Randulf was, of course, still checking vectors. Loinsan had pulled a small fox-like creature with a mirror on its back out from somewhere. The animal was on a lead and was snuffling about under the sleigh, while Loinson, using the mirror strapped to the fox’s back, checked that there was nothing under the sleigh that shouldn't have been. The other two armored guards were lounging around, but keeping a general eye on us.

  I turned to the back of the sleigh. Leah had scrambled back there as we had come to land, saying something about wanting to spread out. I was expecting to see Idman and Barry sticking out like a couple of sore, and wanted, thumbs.

  They were nowhere in sight. There was only Leah lying sprawled in the back with the luggage, her long legs crossed and one foot jiggling to some song that she was humming tunelessly. She was smoking one of her black cigarettes. The way that the guardsman stationed at the rear of the sleigh was grinning dazedly, I imagined that the female Chaosbane was smiling guilefully through the clove-scented smoke at him, causing his attention and eye for detail to become as skittish and restless as a long-tailed lizard in a room full of rocking chairs.

  Barry, being a denizen of the spectral realm or whatever, could have been hiding anywhere. There were, however, only so many places that you could hide a six-and-a-half-foot-tall man like Idman Thunderstone.

  My eyes ran over the pile of luggage that Leah was reclining on. Was that a meticulously shined boot toe that I could see? I swallowed and readied myself to deal with the shit that was moving closer and closer to the fan.

  “Vectors all checked, Sergeant!” Randulf yelled, coming over to stand next to the leader of the small company.

  “And?” the Sergeant asked, gratefully peeling himself away from Reginald’s incessant chatter.

  Randulf gave me a shrewd look over his superior’s shoulder, as if to ascertain whether or not he was going to regret not mentioning my two vectors.

  “Negative, sir,” he said.

  “Good,” Sergeant Mullock said. “What about you, Loinsan? Anything to report?”

  “No, sir,” Private Loinsan said. “The carny fox has detected nothing.”

  “As it should,” Mallory said, in her smoothly authoritative voice. “This is a certified Klaus Family Cruiser, is that not right, Reginald?”

  “That’s enough out of you, miscreant,” one of the guards said, his words coming out edgeways through tight lips.

  Mallory raised an imperious eyebrow at him and tucked a strand of bright blonde hair behind her ear.

  “Look down at me all you want,” the guard sneered, “but I’ve seen you on the wanted posters. You're just another infractor. I recognize him too.” He jerked his blocky head at Mort.

  Mort cottoned on quicker than I would have suspected a man who spent most of his time assassinating criminals could. “My bounty here is correct though,” he said. “Isn’t she, Reggie?”

  “Hm? What? Oh yes, cousin,” Reginald Chaosbane said, his clever dark eyes swiveling from the pile of luggage in the back of the sleigh to Mallory Entwistle. “That’s right. Klaus Cruiser. Lovely little sleigh. Everything above board.”

  Sergeant Mullock rubbed thoughtfully at his chin. He probably did that a lot. Enough to make it shinier than the rest of his face. Evidently, he was just as eager as his men to see the back of us, but his slightly more robust sense of duty stood in the way.

  “Okay,” the sergeant said slowly and without much hope. “There are a couple of ways we can go about the next part. The first way—the easy way—is that you can, honestly and openly, declare any contraband that you might be carrying.”

  Leah made a little excited noise. “And what’s the hard way, Sergeant?”

  Sergeant Mullock’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down in his thick neck like a cork in a tempest tossed sea.

  “The, um, the hard way is that my men and I go through your belongings by hand,” he said.

  Reginald Chaosbane gestured expansively. “Oh, that would be jolly, mate.”

  “It takes a lot longer, Headmaster Chaosbane,” Sergeant Mullock said.

  “That’s no trouble, no trouble at all, my dear fellow,” Reginald said. “It’ll give me time to expound on my theory of how Chaos Magic affects cepheid variables of stars. It all hinges around the faculae that I have observed on our sun and the geosynchronous orbit that the Chaos Magic is hypothesized to—”

  “Headmaster,” Enwyn interrupted, “we really are on quite a tight schedule…”

  “Yes, cousin,” Leah said, “we are. Anyway, I wouldn’t fancy having my ears bored off and I’m sure this scrumptious sergeant and his palatable privates feel the same. Let’s just cough up anything we have on us that we think might be a bit on the naughty side and be on our way. I’ll start.”

  A bright crimson G-string, skimpy enough to have been used by the beefy Sergeant Mullock as tooth floss, was flicked with unerring aim and caught on the elaborate pauldron that protected his muscular shoulder.

  The sergeant looked down at the dangling lingerie, hanging only a few inches from his nose, and I saw his nostrils dilate. He swallowed and turned beet red.

  “I… Uh, that’s not quite the… Whilst this is, um, naughty it’s not… We’re more after supernatural pharmaceuticals, weapons that are being carried with malice aforethought, that sort of thing, miss,” he managed to say, in a tight little voice.

  “Oh,” Leah said in that dreamy, ditzy tone that slipped past your guard and grabbed your libido right by the johns
on. “Oh, I see. Well, you can keep that anyway, Sergeant. I’m not much of a one for underwear anyway.”

  I might have imagined it, but I was almost certain that I heard five minute clangs as five boners made contact with five armored codpieces. The four other guards shuffled closer to the sleigh in a way that looked to me to be quite subconscious—a definite case of member over mind.

  Sergeant Mullock removed the underwear from his shoulder. “Right. Well. If you’d care to declare anything on your persons or in your luggage that you think we might take umbrage with, I’m sure that we can have you on your way in two shakes of a roc’s tail.”

  “You heard the man,” Reginald said, his voice dripping with disappointment that what promised to be a lengthy and extremely soporific chat with the sergeant had been mothballed. “For those lucky enough to have pockets, empty them!”

  “Excuse me, sir,” Mort said sheepishly, beckoning to one of the guards who had been busy working on a drool patch while he ogled Leah’s legs, “I would like to hand these over to you, although I do so with an assurance that they are absolutely safe in my hands, being what you might call a professional.”

  There was a loud rattling, clanking sound as Mort handed over the contents of what looked to be Dexter’s cutlery draw: a roll of blackened throwing knives, a push dagger, a bigger khukuri knife that looked like it would probably be kept in a sheath that ran up Mort’s spine, a couple of nondescript daggers, and a skinning knife.

  The guard, arms full of weapons, said, “I’ll just have to run a few checks on these, sir. Make sure they’re not imbued with any overly sinister magic or illicit poisons.”

  Mort smiled indulgently at the man and motioned at Mallory in front of him. His pale eyes glinted and his white-blond mutton chops quivered. “Curses and poison? That wouldn’t be fair on the bounties now, would it?”

  The man cleared his throat.