Creation Mage 6 Read online

  “So, she is one of yours?” he asked.

  Mort nodded.

  “And you are the Mortimer Chaosbane.

  Mort nodded again.

  The guard tried at a smile. “Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you, sir,” he said.

  Mort blinked. Then said, quite truthfully, in his eerily polite voice, “It’s not often I meet people who say that.”

  The guard cleared his throat again and hurried away, casting a quick glance back at the pale bounty hunting Chaosbane and his ridiculous facial hair.

  I had nothing that I’d consider contraband on me, nor did Mallory, Enwyn, or, surprisingly, Leah.

  The female Chaosbane did ask the guards whether they fancied strip-searching her, but it seemed that none of them quite had the courage to do that.

  I watched as Reginald handed over a large, ornate pipe that I recognized instantly as the apparatus that I’d puffed on the night of the Choosing Ceremony.

  “We’ll look after that, Headmaster Chaosbane,” Sergeant Mullock said, taking the pipe carefully from Reginald. “It’ll be safe here for when you or one of your staff members can come to collect it.”

  The sergeant sniffed at the bowl of the pipe and his eyes went wide. “Holy smokes!”

  “Yes, it’s my own special blend,” Reginald said, smiling wistfully as Sergeant Mullock handed the pipe to one of the guards to take away.

  “And I thought I’d had my last surprise today after after going through one of your aunt’s handbags…” Sergeant Mullock said, his eyes watering.

  “That must’ve been my cherished Aunt Ruth,” Reginald said.

  “Might have been, sir,” the sergeant muttered, blowing his nose. “I can’t recall the woman’s name.”

  “Probably Aunt Ruth,” Reginald said. “She’s very much the sort of woman whom you would remember meeting for the first time—as much as you’d try and forget it. What did this aunt look like?”

  “I wouldn’t like to say, Headmaster,” the sergeant replied.

  “Probably sweet Aunt Ruth. Let’s just say, mate, that if you had a dog with a face like my aunt you’d shave it’s backside and teach it to walk backward.”

  I could tell by the look on Sergeant Mullock’s face that he was close to reaching his Chaosbane limit. The look was compounded when Leah performed a perfect backward roll, hopped off the sleigh, and went to stand next to Reginald.

  “Are you talking about Aunt Ruth, cousin?” she asked, regarding the sergeant through her big, beautiful eyes and smiling coyly at him.

  “Indeed I am,” Reginald said.

  “I like Aunt Ruth,” said Leah, stretching her arms over her head so that her midriff showed.

  “So do I,” said Reginald.

  Leah leaned in toward the sergeant of the border guard. “We have a private little joke in the family, when we introduce her to people,” she said. “This is Aunt Ruth, we say, the ‘less’ is silent.”

  While Sergeant Mullock had his brain reduced to cream cheese by Reginald and Leah, Igor was keeping two of the other guards busy on the other side of the sleigh.

  “How about this?” he asked one, pulling a joint wrapped in giant leaves and as long as his forearm from his trouser leg.

  “Contraband,” the guard said.

  “Pity,” Igor said sadly and handed it over. “How about this?”

  The guard took the small vial of viscous cobalt blue liquid and held it up to the light. “What is it, sir?”

  “Grape spider venom,” Igor said.

  The guard almost dropped the vial. “What in the hell do you do with this?” he demanded.

  Igor patted him companionably on the shoulder, as if he was letting him in on a great secret. “I dip the ends of my mustache in it and breathe the fumes,” he said. “Gives you some serious get up and go, I can tell you.”

  “This is one of the most toxic venoms we know of!” the guard said.

  “Like I said, the fumes do make the old noggin tingle a little. Can I keep it?”

  “Hells no!” the guard almost screamed.

  “Too bad,” the scruffy Rune Mystic lamented. “And what about this?”

  At the end of twenty minutes, the Sergeant had well and truly reached his limit.

  “Right, that does it!” he said. “You!” he said, the veins in his neck popping as he pointed at Igor.

  “Hello, my man!” Igor said cheerfully, licking a bit of spilled powder off his thumb and making a face as if he’d just been hit in the groin by a golf club.

  “Empty your pockets of everything and we’ll call it even!” Sergeant Mullock said.

  Unable to speak at that moment, Igor simply gave the man a thumbs-up and began removing sachets of powder, pills of every size and color, small bottles, large bottles, and pieces of dripping string from his pockets, the lining of his duster, and from behind his ears.

  “And you, Headmaster,” the sergeant said.

  “Yes, Sergeant?” Reginald Chaosbane said, saluting flamboyantly for no reason whatsoever.

  “Just… Just get… Just you take this sleigh… Get out of here and fly straight to your ranch.”

  “Oh, he knows the ranch, Reggie,” Leah said, beaming at the sergeant and patting him on his armored chest.

  “Of course, I know the bleeding Chaosbane Ranch,” Sergeant Mullock said through gritted teeth. “Parts of it have exploded four different times this year alone. There was a localized rain of ham sandwiches over it last month after someone threw a tantrum and cast a complex hex just because they’d been served an all vegetarian dinner!”

  “Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock,” Reginald and Leah said together.

  “I… just… please, just go. Get to your ranch and stay there, d’you hear?” Sergeant Mullock said weakly.

  “Loud and clear, Sergeant! Loud and clear!” Reginald said, springing up over the rail and taking the reins in hand.

  Leah bent forward and kissed the defeated border guard sergeant on the cheek and said, “And, can I just say, pumpkin, that I love what you’ve done with your hair.”

  The sergeant touched at the sweaty lock in the center of his forehead that protruded from under the rim of his helmet-shaped helmet.

  “Yes,” Leah said, as she flounced prettily away, “you really must tell me how you get it to grow so luciously out of your nose like that, sweetie-pie.”

  Once Mort had been given his weapons back and Igor had divested himself of the last of his illegal drugs, Reginald backed the bulls and turned the sleigh.

  Sergeant Mullock gave a signal, and one of the guards slipped a stone keycard into a slot. The end of the border burrow, which had been closed up as tight as a flea’s sphincter, opened up to reveal a rutted dirt road and lush green grass.

  As Reginald got the titanic black bulls moving again, I turned in my seat to talk to Igor.

  “Aren’t you annoyed that you had to hand over your stash, Igor?” I asked. “I have to say that, when the sergeant told you to dump it all, I thought you took it really well.”

  Igor’s bushy eyebrows rose like a couple of helium-filled caterpillars until they disappeared into his sandy thatch of hair.

  “My stash?” he said. “What are you on about, my friend?”

  “You know, all your herbal and chemical delicacies,” I said.

  Igor started chuckling and patted me fondly on the shoulder. “You silly ass, that wasn’t my stash. I’ve been through the border burrow many times, under a few different guises. I know the procedure and always come prepared with an honorary sacrifice of medicaments. So long as the border guards feel like they’ve got one over on old Igor, then they’re happy.”

  I frowned. “What, so you’re having some of your ‘medicaments’ delivered? Or are you going for a sober Yuletide this year?” I asked, not quite getting him.

  Igor looked appalled at the thought. “Gods no, lad!” he said. “With my family? Are you barking mad?”

  “But, you were shaken down,” I insisted.

  Igor winked at
me and jerked his thumb behind him.

  “What in the blazes do you think I’ve got in all those bags back there, Mr. Mauler? Clothes?” the disheveled mage said, and started laughing his ass off.

  Chapter 3

  We flew low over the countryside that lay around the edges of the capital city of Manafell. A patchwork collection of fields and farmhouses, roads and rivers, large estates, and groups of thatched cottages that might have been called villages if you were feeling particularly generous. Smoke rose from chimneys in elegant white plumes, reaching up to clouds that were still heavy with the promise of more snow to come.

  Everything was dusted and covered in a layer of crisp glittering snow, as neat and white as if that annoying bastard from Ace of Cakes had gone nuts with the sieve and powdered sugar.

  Or Steven Tyler had been held upside-down on a Friday night and given a good shaking.

  It was a very pretty sight indeed. A landscape that could have been slapped on any biscuit label, cracker tin, or syrup bottle. It was the sort of panorama that would have given the marketing executives of everyone’s favorite cola brand a hard-on had they seen it.

  It should have been an appropriately languid and festive pace at which we flew over this gorgeous scene. Of course, with a Chaosbane at the helm of the sleigh, that was not quite how the last leg of the journey panned out.

  We bombed across the countryside at what must have been easily a hundred miles per hour. Once more the bulls’ legs were a blur, but this time, the giant animals were close enough to the deck to show a little interest in their surroundings.

  After managing to keep himself in relative check at the border burrow, the Headmaster appeared to be letting his hair down now that we were safely back on terra firma. He urged the sleigh on, showing evident delight at being able to get it dangerously close to the landscape hurtling by underneath him. In some of the bigger open pastures, Reginald managed to get the sleigh to within a few feet of the ground, sending a spray of snow up behind it like a jet-wash and knocking over at least four startled sheep.

  There were times that he swooped in so low and so fast over the woodland treetops, that the snow was blasted clean off the trees as we passed them—along with a few tons of leaves and, on one occasion, a roosting drake.

  We were flying around the city, keeping Manafell always on our right. After about a quarter of an hour, probably made longer by unnecessary diversions taken by our pilot, we started to pass over larger and larger estates that were spaced further and further apart.

  Reginald finally eased up on the gas, or the bullshit, or the metaphor, or whatever the hell was propelling the sleigh along. We coasted over these gorgeous living homages to the landscapers and architects who had wrought them—and the money that had funded their construction.

  As we crossed over the boundary fence of one sprawling estate, Reginald suddenly let out an exclamation and clapped his hand to his head. He leaned over the side of the sleigh, scanning the property below us as if to make quite certain we were where he thought we were.

  I looked over too. The landholding below us was perhaps the most finely kept and luxuriously appointed one that we had seen thus far. It was a sumptuous confection of snow-covered hedge topiaries, ornate lakes that were frozen over but nonetheless impressive for that, and paddocks filled with honest-to-gods unicorns!

  In the middle of all this stood an imposing manor house constructed of white marble. On the roof of this massive temple to wealth was a squat lighthouse-type structure, lit from within by a homely, cozy orange flame. It was, if you ignored the ostentatiousness of it, quite striking.

  “Holy shit!” I said. “I don’t know what I was expecting the Chaosbane ranch to look like, but I didn’t think it would look like this!”

  From the front of the sleigh, Reginald gave a great booming laugh. With a flick of his wrists, he put the sleigh into a slow holding pattern above the beautifully trimmed lawns and extensive patios that fronted the mansion house.

  “Matey potatey, this isn’t the Chaosbane ranch,” Reginald said, wagging his finger at me. He was wearing his flying goggles, but I could see the telltale glimmer of his dark Chaosbane eyes shining through the lenses.

  “It’s not?” I asked. “Then why are we cruising over it like this? I thought you were taking a moment to soak in the ancestral home or something.”

  “This,” Reginald said, sweeping an arm over the fantastically laid out winter wonderland, “is the Flamewalker estate! They’re our lovely neighbors on one side.”

  “Is a fly-over a little tradition in itself, Reggie?” Mallory asked from next to me.

  “No, Miss Entwistle,” Reginald said. He looked at the bulls behind him, sniffed the air delicately, and smiled. “But this is.”

  With a noise like a sumo wrestler that’d overdosed on laxatives, one of the bulls let off a loud and long fart.

  “Good gods,” Mallory gasped, clamping her nose shut with finger and thumb.

  If she thought that had been bad, the encore was worse. The bulls all started ripping off double-barreled-ass-blasters of such pungentness that everyone on the sleigh had to cover their mouth and nose with their hands.

  And then, naturally, came the shit.

  Huge turds, the size of basketballs, were excreted with a violence that was as impressive to see as it was horrifying from the bulls’ suddenly elastic buttholes. Lots of them.

  The giant loaves of shit tumbled through the air and thudded into the lawn like unexploded bombs. I saw one particularly girthy asspickle smash through a rather nice outdoor table in a shower of glass and twisted metal. Another bum biscuit reduced a wooden sunlounge to firewood, while yet another crashed through a large birdbath.

  A figure, dressed in a garish crimson dinner jacket, burst abruptly from the house, and stormed across the massive patio. From the height we were at, he was a little hard to make out, but he looked very much like an older, fatter Bradley.

  “Is that…”

  “Flamewalker Senior, yes,” Reginald said happily, waving down at the man.

  Flamewalker Senior only just managed to avoid getting crushed by the last dook as it splatted down on the snow-covered lawn some ten yards from him. He looked up and started yelling incoherently up at us, shaking his fist and generally acting like a man who had lost his sense of humor about eight giant shits ago.

  Reginald and the rest of the Chaosbanes all leaned over the side of the sleigh and waved chummily down at the irate figure, who was hopping from foot to foot and gesturing at the enormous steaming dingleberries that now decorated his lawn.

  “You bloody Chaosbane bastards!” he suddenly yelled, his words carried by a sympathetic gust of wind.

  “Does he seem a bit cross to you, Reggie?” Mort asked, in a slightly worried tone.

  “No, don’t be daft, Mort,” Igor said.

  “He seems agitated,” Mort insisted.

  “He’s dancing with joy, see,” Igor soothed.

  The figure below fired a Fireball up at us as Reginald pulled on the reins and we took off once more.

  “Yes, you see, old man Flamewalker was glad to see us,” Leah said. “He’s sending up fireworks to welcome us back! Kindly old soul.”

  The sleigh sped onward, while Igor and Leah provided a rousingly festive chorus of a song that I could swear was sung to the exact same tune as one of my favorite childhood movies.

  “Cold frosty beers and kindly drug sellers,

  Pink powders and pills and drinks with umbrellas,

  Enormous big doobies all tied up with string,

  Chaosbanes simply love all of these things!

  Naughty magazines and silicone breasts,

  Girls dressed in leather with tattoos on their chests,

  Wild forest orgies, or a quick midday fling,

  Chaosbanes simply love all of these things!”

  I knew the Chaosbane ranch when I saw it. From miles away. Anyone who had said more than five words to any of the four members of the family sitting
on that sleigh would have been able to guess. It could belong to no other family. From my aerial vantage point, it looked like a cross between a mental asylum and Disneyland.

  “That would be the Chaosbane ranch then,” I said as we cruised across the boundary and flew smoothly over the large estate.

  “Not the Chaosbane ranch, but Chaosbane Ranch,” Mort clarified from behind me.

  “We didn’t capitalize the name, mark you,” Igor said, leaning over the back of Mort so that I could hear him. “No Chaosbane would be that flashy and crass, old boy.”

  “No,” Mort said. “It was the local authorities that did that.”

  “Zip up your soup-coolers, cousins,” Reginald called amiably over his shoulder, “and allow our guests to enjoy the aerial tour of our family seat in peace.”

  The land was as nature had made it: mixed woodland, punctuated with open pastures and meadows. Trails and tracks cut through the brush and trees, some only mere lines in the forest while others were proper bordered paths of shingle.

  A large lake lay flat and still in a patch of particularly thick fir trees to which only a single thin path led. It sat as dull and tranquil as a giant, unpolished coin, its surface barely reflecting the flat light of the snow-burdened clouds. As we flew over it, I glimpsed a large chunk of rock half-hidden in the trees hemming the lake. It might have been a statue, but before I could take another look, we had passed on by.

  Not far from this lake, at the other end of the thin path running through the woodland, was an enormous log cabin. At least, I called it a log cabin, because it was crafted from huge whole logs, but it was much more a country mansion than a cabin. The pitched roof was free of snow, and icicles as long as a man hung from the eaves. There were balconies and windows in profusion. In true Chaosbane style, some of the many chimneys were emitting smoke in shades of green and yellow and red. Even as I gazed upon the property, a bright blue flash came from one of the windows and the glass exploded outward. A second later, a turkey—a plucked, naked turkey—soared out of the broken window and began flapping as fast as it could for the far horizon.

  “Did you see that?” I murmured to Mallory.