Creation Mage 6 Read online

  The Galadriel-esque figure looked at me and nodded.

  “I imagine, Justin,” she said in a low, melodious voice, “that we’ll look back on that and think how normal it was.”

  The house alone would have been enough to convince me that this was the home of the Chaosbane clan, but it was what lay in the grounds that really drove the point home.

  It looked, essentially, as if some insane gypsy circus had rolled into the Chaosbane ranch house and erected a series of rides and entertainments for no other reason than that they felt like it. Masses of people milled around the collection of stalls and rides, screaming and yelling with delight.

  “They’re not all members of the Chaosbane clan, are they?” I asked incredulously.

  “No, no, no, mate,” Reginald chuckled. “We Chaosbanes are a fairly rare breed. There are bound to be a few members from the extended family down there, I don’t doubt, but most of the scallywags enjoying the attractions are just regular folk from around the district.”

  “Your family organizes it?” Enwyn asked. “I didn’t know that, Reginald.”

  “Our Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock likes to put on a bit of entertainment for the locals, my dear. It alleviates any miniscule feelings of guilt he might have built up throughout the rest of the year, from acting like the world’s biggest excrescence.”

  Magical fireworks rattled the treetops below us. Some were undoubtedly being fired by children, as they were getting entirely too close to the sleigh to be coincidental.

  I could make out that cheerfully creepy carnival music floating over the scene, nameless tunes that were so beloved by horror and teen romance directors alike.

  I noticed one ride where children were encapsulated by giant bubbles and then propelled into the air to join other bubble-captured patrons. These bubbles smacked and bounced happily into one another—like aerial bumper-cars. Behind this ride stood a massive inflatable figure.

  The figure reminded me of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man—at first glance. Then, I realized that the enormous, gray-white five-story inflatable humanoid was wearing a deep green elf hat with a bell the size of a beach ball on the end. Two banana boat-sized fangs protruded from its upper lip. Some kind of spell had animated the figure so that it winked periodically down at the crowd and occasionally snorted a rain of glittering gold snow over the throng of carnival goers.

  “What the hell is that thing?” I asked as we circled the giant figure.

  Enwyn leaned past Mallory and patted me kindly on the knee. “I forget how little you know,” she said in an intentionally condescending voice. “That, Justin, is the Yuletide Yeti!”

  “Of course it is,” I said. “And what’s his purpose? He’s the dude who gives out the presents is he?”

  Mallory laughed lightly at this.

  “Not quite, Mr. Mauler,” Idman Thunderstone said from just behind me, in his cuttingly dry voice. He had remained almost silent throughout the journey, but chose now, within the relative safety of the Chaosbane Ranch, to chime in.

  “What does he do, then?” I asked.

  “He is the legendary personage that visits the residences of all those who have been particularly ill-behaved throughout the year,” Idman said. “He spirits away such poor souls, to his lair on the top of Mount Pati where he skins and pickles them in jars.”

  I raised my eyebrows and nodded. “Typical kids’ story.”

  Barry floated over drift in front of me. “Funny you should say that. I remember when the whole premise for the Yuletide Yeti was cooked up. ‘Course, it’s a ‘legend’ now, but it all came about because, one Yuletide, a yeti wandered down from the mountains and actually abducted a bunch of younguns and pickled ‘em back in its cave.”

  “Grim,” I said.

  Barry made a face. “Aye, I s’pose,” he said. “I was an up and coming privateer at the time and one of the lads was our ship’s boy. Little shit he was. I always remember feelin’ slightly sorry for the yeti when the townsfolk hunted him down. Poor beggar was only tryin’ to make it as an entrepreneur in the condiments industry.”

  Hoots and cries of delight echoed up from the ground below. Screams of mirth and fear pierced the frigid air as children and adults alike enjoyed the adrenaline-spiking rides and attractions.

  “Reggie, dear?” Leah’s voice wafted lazily from the back of the sleigh.

  “Yes, cousin,” Reginald said as he rummaged in his coat, patently looking for something with which he could wet his whistle.

  “Is that inflatable yeti supposed to be doing that?” Leah asked.

  “What?” Reginald replied, extracting a leather flask from a pocket and removing the stopper. He took a quick swig and spat it overboard. “Curse me, but that’s water!” he said.

  “The Yuletide Yeti seems to be somewhat more animated than usual,” Leah pressed, still in her usual dreamy voice.

  The screams and shouts below had taken on a slightly more panicked and urgent edge. I craned my head over the side of the sleigh, leaning right over so that I was half hanging out of our airborne ride.

  The giant inflatable Yuletide Yeti did indeed look to be moving more than it had been only a few minutes before. Its great sausagey arms were swaying from side to side, for one thing. It was also blinking a lot, like a somnambulist who has just had a bucket of cold water thrown over them. It had no vocal chords, obviously, but it was flapping its massive rubbery lips in a way that made its inflatable tusks beat against one another with an uncomfortably ominous noise.

  The carnival goers soon discovered an unscheduled change in the programming. Men, women, and children of all shapes, races, and sizes fled in all directions. Clearly, no one knew what terror had befallen them, only that they had to get out of there.

  There was sharp twanging sound as the guide ropes that had been restraining the inflatable figure were wrenched free of the stakes that held them.

  “Oh, dear,” Reginald said from the head of the sleigh as we performed a lazy circuit over the panicking people below, “looks like Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock has been a bit sloppy on his enchantments. Again.”

  “Again?” Mallory peered across me so that her warm body and sizable cans pressed into me.

  “Last year he enchanted a giant snowflake, made of real snow, to spin and flutter over our ranch,” Mort explained quietly.

  “It was a lovely bit of snow sculpting,” Leah said in happy recollection, picking at one of the many holes in her baby blue jumper. “Three tons of snow cleared from our lawn to make something pretty. I thought Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock had never shown more brains or festive goodwill than when he did that.”

  Idman Thunderstone snorted in derision of this statement.

  “Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock was a little, ah, lax on setting proximity limitations on the spell,” Mort said. His tone was awkward, as if he did not want to speak ill of his elders. “The snowflake drifted out of the ken of our ranch, over the boundary line and onto the Flamewalker’s property. It drifted too far from Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock, and the thaumaturgical bond was severed. It dropped out of the sky and obliterated part of the Flamewalker’s marine stable block by their lake.”

  “I did hear tell o’ that,” Barry said. “Ruined the chances of his prize hippocampus that was supposed to be competin’ in the Yuletide Subaquatic Derby, didn’t it?”

  “Squashed it flat,” Leah said matter-of-factly.

  “Speaking of things being squashed flat,” I interjected loudly, “how about we do something about what’s going on down there.”

  There was a loud crunching noise as the Yuletide Yeti brought one bulbous foot down and crushed a cart selling tingle-tongue taffy. It swiped at a rotund dwarf with its inflatable fingers and batted him through a coconut shy in an explosion of splinters.

  “No, not the coconut shy!” Reginald Chaosbane cried out in dismay. “Anything but that!”

  The Yuletide Yeti lumbered about, smashing things to pieces and generally ruining what had, only a handful of mi
nutes before, been a quite jolly time.

  “You should get down there, Headmaster!” Enwyn said sharply.

  “That’s a negative, my dear woman,” Reginald said. “I’m the only one insured for this craft. I can’t relinquish my hold on the reins without risking a crash and a hefty excess fee. Igor!”

  “Igor’s out for the count, cousin,” Leah called back, poking at the Rune Mystic with a finger. “Looks like he’s getting his weekly hour of sleep in. Poor timing on his behalf, really.”

  “Incoming!” Idman yelled from the back of the sleigh.

  “Fire off the starboard bow!” Barry joined in.

  The Yuletide Yeti had booted one of the bubble-ensnared patrons of the mid-air bumper-car ride right at us. The bubble, containing a terrified halfling with a bushy ginger afro, flew toward us at breakneck speed. With a deft twitch of the reins, Reginald Chaosbane performed a slow-motion airborne handbrake turn and used the tail-end of the sleigh to bat the bubble away.

  The bubble, and its screaming occupant, whizzed away. It ended up at the top of a pine tree some one-hundred yards distance, spraying branches, snow, and pine needles onto the ground below.

  Thinking that the time for worrying about property damage was past, I let loose with a Blazing Bolt. The ball of crackling red energy streaked downward, hit the Yuletide Yeti between its big eyes, and rebounded off. The diverted spell sizzled across the clearing and cut through a hefty fir tree. The tree swayed for a moment, then, in a flurry of snow and cracking of branches, toppled sideways and destroyed the strongman booth.

  Not one to let a single failure dampen my enthusiasm, I reached within my mana reserves and summoned three undead wolverines—one of the latest additions to my spell arsenal.

  The trio of skeletal beasts were bundles of rending, tearing, slashing fury that fell away from the sleigh toward the forest floor. They hit the deck hard, but being dead, this didn’t slow them much.

  What slowed one of them, though, was instantly being crushed under one of the enormous inflatable feet and ground into the earth like a finished cigar stub.

  The other two wolverines, powered by the slow release of mana from within me, launched their raggedy, bony bodies at the leg of the Yuletide Yeti. Powered by blind, fearless undead compulsion to end life, it was not enough. They were thwarted by the rubbery, giving skin of the inflatable foe. They bounced and rebounded off the giant yeti’s legs, their sharp claws and crushing jaws unable to find purchase on their foe.

  “This is fucking ridiculous,” I said as another one of the undead wolverines was kicked so hard into a cluster of boulders nearby that it burst apart in puff of green magic.

  With only one annoyance to focus on, the cursed Yuletide Yeti quickly snuffed out the final wolverine by spearing it with an enormous, fairy-light festooned yule log. This job done, it resumed its slow methodical destruction of the carnival.

  While Igor snored in the back and Leah painted her nails and watched the carnage with the same interest that I might have watched daytime TV, I instructed Reginald to maneuver the sleigh over to a nearby towering pine.

  “What’s your plan, Mr. Mauler?” the Headmaster asked, trying to calm the six massive bulls as they drew nearer to the giant yeti.

  “I haven’t quite got that far,” I admitted.

  “Well, it is Yuletide,” the Headmaster conceded understandingly. “Anyone with a prearranged plan of how to take down a gargantuan, enchanted, inflatable Yuletide Yeti blundering through a funfair has obviously been working far too hard. I will watch your future progress with considerable interest, dear fellow!”

  “You don’t have a plan?” Enwyn asked me.

  “Not as such…” I began.

  Below me, the Yuletide Yeti bent at the middle so that it could reach down with its clumsy, bouncy fingers and start tearing pegasi off a revolving carousel.

  And, just like that, I saw how I could let the Yuletide Yeti down with a bang.

  I jumped from the sleigh, reaching for the tree branches, and caught them. Snow cascaded down at the impact, and one of my feet slipped off the rimy branch I had aimed for.

  “If you guys wouldn’t mind distracting it from time to time that would be really handy, I’m sure,” I said, looking back over my shoulder at Leah, Enwyn, Mallory, Idman, and Mort.

  Leah made a comisterating face and held up her freshly painted pink nails.

  “Dear sweet pot of honey, you know I would,” she said, “but you can’t hurry this shade, you know.”

  Mort pulled some throwing knives from the depths of his brown monk’s robes and held them up. “I have your distraction right here, Justin,” he said amicably.

  “Great,” I said, and began shimmying down the tree.

  I reached the bottom and dropped to the fragrant, pine needle covered floor with a soft crunch. With the speed of thought, my father’s black crystal staff appeared in my hand.

  The sleigh had moved away, and I could see Enwyn leaning over the side, firing the occasional Fireball down at the Yuletide Yeti. It was a distraction fraught with peril though, as the spells bounced and ricocheted from the yeti’s rubbery hide and ignited small spot fires in a couple of the stalls.

  Sparks flurried through the air and all around me as I ran around the back of the huge inflatable monster. Large clumps of snow thudded down as the Yuletide Yeti smashed its way around the funfair. Mindless destruction seemed to fill whatever passed for its mind. I preferred not to be a part of its plan.

  That quickly went out of the window when I got too close to my adversary, looking for the opening—literally—that I needed to take it down.

  The yeti must have spied me through its beefy blow-up legs because it lumbered about and flapped its tusks at me. A huge hand swatted at me, and I stumbled and rolled backward, feeling the great wash of cold, smoky air roll over me as the massive paw missed me by a foot or two. There was a rending screech of metal as a small Ferris wheel took the brunt of the blow. It wobbled dangerously from side to side.

  “Don’t you do it,” I hissed.

  The Ferris wheel passed the point of no return and began to fall toward me.

  I ran. There was no thinking involved.

  Hurdling an upended hotdog cart, I charged on, trying to outdistance the falling Ferris wheel. The sudden realization caused me to turn and remember that I was a fucking mage. Still backpedaling, I used my Telekinesis spell and managed to halt the heavy Ferris wheel.

  This taxing effort, while resulting in me not getting smushed into paste, almost completely drained my mana reserves. A wave of light-headedness surged over me, and sweat broke out across my brow. The earth wobbled under my feet.

  The Yuletide Yeti took a couple of ungainly steps toward me. It raised its big fat fist, clearly intent on flattening me.

  Mort stood on the very edge of the sleigh, as it swung low over the fairground. Despite only having an inch of wood to balance on, he looked as steady as a man standing on a sidewalk. Two throwing knives were held in each of his hands.

  I blinked hard a couple of times, focusing first on the yeti about to pulverize me and then at the bounty hunter standing on the cruising sleigh.

  Mort let fly his knives.

  The throwing daggers glinted as they flashed through the air. One after another they smacked into the hide of the Yuletide Yeti and—

  —were flung away, right back toward Mort and the sleigh.

  The quartet of blades thunked heavily into the edge of the sleigh, right next to Mort’s sandals-wearing toes.

  “Mortimer, you tomfool!” Reginald cried. “You know how those damned Klauses take a sketch of the sleigh before they let you borrow it! They’ll be in my pocket in a big way for this, mark my words!”

  The inflatable yeti swiped at the sleigh, its attention momentarily diverted.

  Seeing my opening, I leapt over a mound of smoldering cotton candy and darted between the yeti’s stumpy legs. Looking up, I spotted the concealed flap in the space between the yeti’s legs,
the flap that I had spied when it had bent over. It was, I figured, the place where old Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock had somehow filled the thing with air.

  Essentially, it was the Yuletide Yeti’s butthole.

  It was a good job that the marauding inflatable asshole didn’t seem to possess the capacity to feel pain because, if it had, it sure as hell would feel what I was about to do.

  The Yuletide Yeti flapped its fangs at the sleigh, while the Chaosbanes continued to argue amongst themselves, seemingly unaware that the sleigh was descending slowly toward the massive inflatable yeti. It stretched on its fat, bulbous legs.

  I made my move.

  I ripped its ass flap down, stuck my black crystal staff inside, and unleashed the most powerful Frost Shards spell that I could with the mana remaining to me.

  Five spear-like icicles materialized and fired up into the cavity of the mammoth inflatable yeti. Almost immediately, I was blown off my feet by the explosive deflation of the gigantic blow-up enemy.

  I was catapulted backward, but had my flight arrested by a conveniently placed wand range—a booth at which kids could fire muted down Storm Bolts from enchanted fake vectors at targets. I smashed through the flimsy counter and into a wall of cuddly dragons, basilisks, and phoenix.

  For its part, the Yuletide Yeti deflated like a punctured balloon. It let off a satisfying, drawn-out squeaking noise, like a fart being deployed by someone sitting on a hard plastic chair, and collapsed into a hefty pile of empty canvas.

  I let out a long breath.

  Fuck me, but there was never a dull moment when the damned Chaosbane clan were involved.

  I hauled myself to my feet and brushed off snow, splinters, and dirt.

  There was a thud a few feet away, and a bundle of rope laddering hit the deck.

  “Mr. Mauler,” Reginald cried down from the sleigh, “an exemplary performance! Fine thinking on your part: when in doubt, shoot it up the backside. Bravo!”

  I waved up at the sleigh, while I caught my breath and fought off the fatigue of my mana being tapped out.

  “Now, when you’re ready, Mr. Mauler,” Reginald continued, “we’ll continue onto the ranch house. I’m sure Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock won’t be too irate that you destroyed his inflatable.”