Creation Mage 6

War Mage Academy 6

Dante King

Copyright © 2021 by Dante King

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

v03

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Contents

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

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Immortal Swordslinger

Bone Lord

Chapter 1

“You better break out

the bourbon and rye,

Tequila and gin,

I'm telling you why;

The Chaosbanes are comin’ to town!”

Sitting out on the porch of our fraternity house with a steaming mug of Papa Djinn’s Extra Pungent Roast, I snorted as Igor Chaosbane walked past me and tossed another battered suitcase out onto the garden path.

Igor had been humming and singing carols for the past two hours, ever since we had all convened in the cavernous kitchen of my parents’ old house and prepared to part ways for the holiday break. It had not escaped me that this Yuletide carol of his was sung to the same tune as ‘Santa Claus is Coming to To Town’, but when I mentioned this to him, I received only a blank stare in return.

The Yuletide season had fallen upon the Mazirian Academy with all the abruptness and subtlety of a landslide engulfing a Swiss ski resort. The sleepy town of Nevermoor, which clustered at the feet of the hill on which the Academy squatted, was festooned with genuine, multicolored fairy lanterns—made and enchanted by real-life fairies. The thatched cottages—which were quaint at the best of times—were now covered with thick, fluffy blankets of snow. They now looked like iced gingerbread houses built by the type of mythical twee, plump grandmother-like baker who had maple syrup running through her veins and tinsel coming out of her butt.

“Why does Igor have so many suitcases?” I asked Nigel Windmaker as Igor disappeared back inside. “I swear he’s been wearing the same shabby duster ever since we met him.”

The halfling and I were sitting out on the front porch and watching the fat white flakes of snow drift down from a leaden sky stuffed from horizon to horizon with bulging clouds. The clouds looked like they could carry on snowing pretty much indefinitely. Whatever weird deity or god or mad mage who controlled the weather over the kingdom of Avalonia was clearly getting into the spirit of things.

Nigel sighed unconcernedly and shrugged. He took a sip from his own gently smoking mug of ember root and candied catnip tea. It smelled like cough syrup that had passed through a camel, but Nigel insisted it was extremely good for you. I had decided to take the Wind Mage’s word for it and stick to the new coffee that Bradley Flamewalker had recently purchased.

“He can have as many suitcases as he likes,” Nigel said. “The important thing is that we get a whole week away from the Academy, from study, and from any nutso adventures that might raise their ugly heads.”

I thought that last part was optimism bordering on the dangerously foolish, but I didn’t say anything. No point bringing my buddy down to earth like that. It was Yuletide after all.

“And you and Damien are really going to Earth?” I asked.

Nigel turned to beam excitedly at me. His glasses had fogged up due to the steam coming off his hot drink, and he pulled them off and polished them.

“That’s right,” he said. “Me and Damien are heading to another world! I can’t freakin’ wait, Justin! There are so many things that I want to see, what with everything you guys have told us about it.”

“That return portal must have cost you a pretty penny,” I said. “Not to mention a fair bit of wrangling with the B.I.T.”

The B.I.T. was short for the Bureau of Inter-Macrocosm Travel. It was the branch of thaumaturgical law enforcement on Avalonia responsible for organizing portals to and from different worlds. Like all good departments of government, it was slow, ineffective, and expensive, and somehow made something that should have been super cool—magical interplanetary travel, in this case—wrist-slittingly boring.

“Yeah, there were a lot of pointless forms to fill out,” Nigel said as a gust of wind flurried the falling snow this way and that. “And it cost a damned packet, but my parents’ estate pays me a reasonable allowance and I’ve been saving it up.”

“And Damien gets a free holiday,” I said.

Nigel grinned and took another sip of his foul-smelling tea. “I like to think that he’s going to be working too. I intend to live it up and turn this big old brain of mine down to low simmer. It’s why I’m bringing him along. I want someone who knows all about Earth customs; etiquette and manners, that sort of thing.”

“Where’s the portal spitting you out?” I asked.

Nigel’s brow furrowed briefly. “Damien said it would be smart to start off in a place that he knows, his old stomping ground. The City of Angels, I think he called it.”

I nodded. “Well, good luck finding manners there, my friend.”

The two of us lapsed into silence and settled back on the bench. I pricked my ears up and looked out into the swirling snow, scanning for the approach of Leah Chaosbane, who was supposed to be picking me and Igor up.

I was heading with Leah, Igor, and, I assumed, Reginald and Mortimer to the Chaosbane family ranch for the Yuletide break. I had been invited by Leah, and thought that it would be remiss of me to turn her down. The Chaosbanes were about as big a bunch of fruit loops as had ever breathed air. I imagined that a family gathering of them could be nothing short of spectacular. Surely, I would regret it if I didn’t go. Now that the time was drawing nearer to actually take the plunge though, I couldn’t help wondering if I was ready for this.

Off to our right, by the mound of snow that hid the flattened remains of an old sofa that Nigel had memorably landed on after crashing out of his bedroom window during a party, Ar-undead was chasing robins. The zombie was attempting to snatch the fluttering birds from the air, but was nowhere near fast enough. His odd growling laughter came muffled through the close air.

“Ar-undead is going away too?” Nigel asked me, following my gaze.

“Yeah,” I said, “Madame Xel and Odette are going to take him to some occult meeting or other. I’m not precisely sure why. Speak of the devils though, here they come. You can ask them yourself.”

Odette Scaleblade, wrapped in her usual collection of gypsy shawls and scarves, appeared out of the festive murk. She moved lightly through the snow, her head shrouded in a wrap that doubled as a hood against the fat flakes of snow. Behind her, wearing more clothes than I had ever seen her wear, was Madame Xel, the Succubus.

I say that Madame Xel was attired in more clothing than I had ever seen her in, but seeing as the beautiful mauve-haired woman usually opted for the kind of skirts that might more accurately be classified as belts, that was not really saying much. The only precaution she had taken against the slightly chillier weather was to wear a pair of luminous yellow tights under her miniskirt and a purple feather boa that almost exactly matched the shade of her hair.

“Ladies,” I said in greeting, “it’s lovely to see you. I was thinking that I might miss you, but, predictably, the Chaosbanes are running a little late.”

“You would ‘ave been fortunate indeed if they got the time right,” Odette said in her husky, exotic voice.

“Or the day, for that matter,” added Madame Xel.

“Mr. Windmaker, ‘ow are things with you? I ‘ear that you are going to Earth?” Odette said, turning to Nigel.

Nigel was getting more and more comfortable coming under the scrutiny of beautiful women these days. Only the traffic light red of his blushing ears suggested his pulse was racing at the mere sight of our two Academy teachers.

“That’s r-r-right,” he stammered.

Madame Xel made an envious little noise in her throat.  “Ah, Earth,” she said. “A world in which it is said that temptation and vice were invented. Remember, Mr. Windmaker,” she said, shaking snow off her bat-like wings and winking one bright purple eye at Nigel, “if you are faced with the choice between two sins, always choose the one that you have never sampled before.”

The blush spread from Nigel’s ears to envelop his whole head.

Odette slapped Madame Xel playfully on the arm with the back of her hand. “You are supposed to be a professional educator, Xel, don’t corrupt the young mage!”

“Oh come on, Odette, it’s the holidays, isn’t it?” Xel retorted, grinning.

Odette Scaleblade waved a hand and turned to look at me. “Justin, we cannot stay long—”

“Unfortunately,” Madame Xel interjected, her grin morphing into a lascivious smile.

“—as we ‘ave to get moving before the weather sets in and the roads are blocked,” Odette said.

“You’re here for Ar-undead?” I asked.

“Correct,” Odette replied.

“Where are you taking him exactly?” Nigel asked with interest.

“There is a special gathering of Academics taking place a few days journey from ‘ere,” Odette said. “As a zombie that ‘as been somewhat tamed—for lack of a better word—Xel believes someone like Ar-undead could prove invaluable in this gathering’s occult research and theorizing.”

“What research w-w-would that be?” Nigel asked.

“There are rumors, postulations, and hypotheses floating about. Speculations concerning the ability to restore someone from undead to life,” Xel said succinctly. “There are arcane scientists who would very much like a test subject. One like Ar-undead on whom they could perform cutting-edge spells. It is always preferable if test subjects are less likely to tear your head off and scoop out your brains, after all.”

Nigel nodded.

“Is there a chance that what happened to Ar-undead can be reversed?” I asked.

Madame Xel waggled her hand. “Perhaps,” she said. “Perhaps not. There is no harm in trying though, is there? An eagle cannot reach new horizons until it builds up the courage to lose sight of its eyrie.”

I couldn’t argue with that. Any chance that Ar-undead had of becoming one of us mortals once more was worth taking. He may have spent most of the time I’d known him being an award-winning shitcake, but I had caught a glimpse of the guy that he might’ve been just before he had been zombified. He deserved another chance at life.

Odette motioned to her companion, and the two women made to leave.

“Hey, wait a sec,” I said, getting to my feet. I stepped down into the falling snow and kissed both women. “Merry Yuletide,” I said.

Odette and Xel grinned at one another.

“See you when we get back, Mr. Mauler,” Madame Xel said, in her most officious voice. “We both will.”

Odette took Ar-undead by the length of chain that fixed him to one of the porch pillars. Xel severed the chain with a touch of magic, and then Odette led him away. I couldn’t help but smile to myself, watching the zombie gamboling and frolicking through the drifts of snow, totally impervious to the cold. He reminded me of a big old labrador heading out for a walk, albeit a labrador capable of twisting the top of your skull off and chowing down on your gray matter as if it was a bowl of ice-cream. It was not long before the trio had vanished up the garden path and into the slowly strengthening snowstorm.

I went and sat back down next to Nigel and continued to wait for my ride. The two of us were lost in our own thoughts when a huffing and puffing from inside heralded the approach of someone else. The front door opened, and Rick Hammersmith stumped out. Our fraternity brother was dressed in his usual traditional grass and leather skirt, fastened with the belt that was also his vector. His massive torso was bare. The only concession that Rick seemed to have made for the frigid conditions was a pair of enormous green earmuffs that were clamped over his dreadlocked head.

“There you are, friends,” he said in his deep bass rumble. “I wanted to catch you before I took off for home. I am heading out the back yard, from the cliff top.”

The big islander held out an enormous hand and engulfed first Nigel’s and then my own in a handshake that, had Rick been so inclined, could have broken most of the bones in our arms.

“I’ll see you boys when I get back, eh?” he said.

“You sure will,” I said. “At least you will see me. If Nigel gets tangled up with those lovely ladies on Figueroa Street though, I doubt any of us will ever see him again.”

“Wait, what?” Nigel said.

“You looking forward to head back to your island and the tribe, man?” I asked Rick, ignoring Nigel’s attempts at getting me to elucidate.

Rick rumbled his assent. “Sure, sure, friend,” he said. “Been a good long while since I have seen my folks. It will be good to get back out into the forge with my father, like we used to before I came here. It’ll be good to eat some of Ma’s homemade blue bark and shadow shrimp gumbo. I hope she doesn’t think that I’ve lost too much weight or that I’m looking peaky.”

I ran my eyes over the Earth Mage. The huge square shouldered elemental looked as full as a tick that’d been living at the gym. His body was covered in massive slabs of muscle and tattoos that looked like etchings in stone.

“I think that she’s going to see that you’ve been in a pretty good paddock, bud,” I said, slapping Rick on the arm. It was like slapping a telephone pole.

Rick chuckled. “I will prepare my father’s portable forge while I am away. When I return, we will unlock that white staff of yours so that you can converse with your ma.”

I looked over at the white staff, leaning against the wall next to my father’s black crystal one.

“It’s all good, Rick,” I said. “Unlike with my father, where we needed to chat with him about learning how to create more spells, we’re not really in a big rush to speak with my mother.”

I didn’t voice how I had felt a growing trepidation about talking to my mother over the past couple of weeks. Bringing this doubt to the attention of my frat bros was unnecessary, seeing as how I was yet to understand it myself.

“All right, well you guys enjoy your break,” Rick said. “See you when I see you.”

“Not if we don’t see you first,” Nigel said. “Which we most certainly will.”

Rick showed his tombstone teeth in an amiable grin and stomped back into the house, closing the door behind him.

“Bradley still around?” Nigel asked me when the Earth Mage’s heavy footfalls had faded.

I shook my head. “Nah, he left early this morning. Left a note by the coffee and waffles.”

Bradley had snuck off, under the pretense of a wilderness trip, to take part in an Avalonian cooking competition called the Great Yule Bake Off. Entering under a fake name and thaumaturgically disguised, he was hoping that, if he won this revered culinary accolade, his snooty highborn family might come around to the idea that the only son and heir of the Flamewalker wealth and estates actually wanted to follow his dream of becoming a world renowned chef.

Nigel looked at me. “There are waffles?” he said. “I didn’t see any waffles when I made my tea. I want a waffle.”

“There were waffles,” I informed him. “You wouldn’t have seen them because you were busy doing your hobbit yoga.”

“It’s not hobbit yoga,” Nigel said in a resigned voice.

“Well, whatever the hell it is, while you were doing your Swedish exercises, Rick was downstairs nailing waffles. You know once the big man gets into the kitchen you have to move like something built for speed not for comfort.”

Nigel stared glumly out onto the pristine snow that covered the front yard, turning the bushes and hedges into perfect blocks of white. Then he turned to me. “What’re Swedish exercises?”

“Exercises,” I said, “from Sweden.”

“And what’s Sweden?”

“Sweden is the country that makes the women’s volleyball tournament the saving grace of the modern day Olympics.” I  held up a hand to stem the inevitable flow of questions that were bound to pour forth from my genius fraternity brother. “Don’t ask me any more questions, you’ll find out all about this on your vacation.”

I fiddled with the capture orb that hung from my belt and now contained the dragon that we’d faced off against in the last Mage Games trial.

Nigel saw what I was doing and said, “I notice that you haven’t practiced with that little bit of gear just yet.”

“No,” I said, running my fingers over the beautifully smooth wood.

“Why?” Nigel asked.

I weighed the question. “I guess because I’m unsure about it.  Sure, I’ve captured something as inherently cunning and lethal as a dragon, but is it really going to let me order it around?”

Nigel considered this. “Yeah,” he said slowly, “that’s a fair point.”

“I thought so. Plus, I didn’t want to bring the frat house down around our ears this close to Yuletide, you know. I’ve grown pretty fond of the old place.”

“Yeah,” Nigel said. “Me too.”

“What are you lovebirds chatting about?” Damien asked loudly, striding around the corner of the house and waving merrily at us.

“Just discussing whether or not it’s true that you were the reason that the middle finger was invented,” I said.

Damien laughed and came to stand in front of us.

As he knocked the snow off the bottom of his Doc Martens, I thought to myself that there were a couple of things that the passerby might notice about the young, black haired man.

The first thing that might have piqued a stranger’s interest was that Damien, despite looking quite human, was not at all dressed for the inclement weather. He was wearing a pair of scorched black jeans, boots, and no shirt—hardly usual for a day that would have been lucky to touch forty degrees thus far.

The second thing was that the falling snowflakes were melting as soon as they touched his naked torso. You would have, were you blessed with acute enough hearing, been able to hear the pretty little things sizzling as they touched the Fire Mage’s skin.

“Where have you been?” I asked. “I haven’t seen you all morning.”

“You missed waffles. Apparently,” said Nigel morosely.

Damien grinned and swept a few strands of black hair out of his face with a beringed hand.

“Oh, I ate some serious waffle this morning, boys, don’t you worry about that,” the L.A. native said. “I was munching on waffle like it was going out of fashion.”

“Judging by the stress that you’re putting on the word ‘waffle’ and the criminally dirty way that you’re waggling your eyebrows, I assume you’re alluding to vagina?” I asked.

Damien feigned shock. “Was it that obvious?”

“You could have possibly knocked together some sort of incantation that set fireworks off when you said the word ‘waffle’,” Nigel proposed.

“Food for thought,” said Damien, cradling his chin thoughtfully in his hand.

“You were out getting a last little bit of action before you head back to L.A.?” I asked. “Who was the unfortunate female or farm animal, then?”

Damien ignored the jibe. “You know that nymph who works in the apothecary on Haswa Lane?”

I thought I knew the girl that Damien alluded to; a pretty thing with sapphire blue skin and a smile that could stop a charging rhino in its tracks. I nodded in the affirmative.

“Body like a golem, face like the back end of a troll?” Nigel asked.

Damien flicked a tiny fireball at the Wind Mage, but Nigel deflected it with a gust of air and sent it into a snowdrift with a soft sizzle.

“Well, she and I had been exchanging flirty looks over the past few weeks,” Damien continued, “and I needed to go in there to get some burn-reverse for some of my clothes. I saw her, standing there dressed in these candy cane pants, which were so tight that if she’d farted it would have blown her boots off—”

“Charming,” Nigel said.

“—and I thought fuck it, it’s Yuletide,” Damien finished. “So I asked her out. Next thing you know, she and I are out the back engaging in what I can only describe as a full-blown pornographic coupling.”

“Beautiful,” said Nigel.

Damien shrugged and grinned. Then he said, “Are you ready to go, Nigel? We have to be at the Portal Station in half an hour. Our shit is already down there waiting for us.”

“Forty-one minutes,” the halfling corrected him.

“Whatever. Shall we make tracks?” Damien said.

“Sure,” Nigel said and got to his feet.

Just then, when it looked like I was going to be left all on my lonesome, yet another voice rang out of the growing whiteness.

“Off on your Earthbound foray, boys?” Janet Thunderstone said.

I glanced up and saw a quartet of my favorite people crunching down the garden path. Janet led the way, followed by Cecilia Chillgrave, Enwyn Emberskull, and Alura, Princess of the Gemstone Elementals. Alura, a being with a glittering diamond-like skin that was practically transparent, looked particularly dazzling and otherworldly as she walked toward us. With the eddying billows of snow and the diffused light, she was almost invisible.

“That we are,” Damien said. “And, if you’ll excuse us, fair maidens, we have to be stepping.”

Janet laughed and held her hand up for a crisp high-five as Nigel and Damien passed the girls on the path. “I think calling any of us a ‘maiden’ is a bit of a stretch,” she said, “but I appreciate the sentiment.”

“Catch you guys, later!” I called after Damien and Nigel’s retreating backs. “And remember, Nigel! Thinking positive is all very well and good, but in Los Angeles, you want to make sure that you’re testing negative too!”

“What the hell is he talking about, Damien?” I heard the halfling say to Damien, “and what is Figueroa Street?”

Then their voices were lost in the thickening blanket of snow.

“What are you ladies doing here?” I asked the four women as they stamped snow off their boots and came to stand on the decking of the porch.

“Just thought we’d walk Enwyn over here and say goodbye to you at the same time, darling,” Cecilia said.

I knew that Cecilia, Alura, and Janet were going to spend Yuletide with Cecilia’s family. The girls looked super excited, and had been for the past week or so, because the Chillgraves were famous for throwing one of Avalonia’s premier Yuletide balls.

It was one of those luscious, glittering, regal affairs, from what I had gathered from Cecilia’s description. The sort of fancy hoedown that was simply stuffed to the rafters with pretentious guys who thought the sun rose just to hear them crow, and the sort of girls who walked around with their noses stuck so high in the air that they wouldn’t go out in the rain for fear of drowning.

Although the three girls were about as down to earth and badass as any trio of females I had ever met, there were times when even they needed to lock themselves in a bathroom for four hours to do their hair and makeup, wrap themselves in jewels and silks, and have a night of unadulterated glamorous hobnobbing.

“Well, you know I always appreciate a visit from you ladies,” I said,  “but I have to warn you, I’m supposed to be getting picked up… Well, an hour ago actually.”

Enwyn stepped forward. I noticed that she had a leather backpack slung over one shoulder.

“I’m glad to find you’re still here,” she said, “because I think you and I are catching the same ride together.”

“You’re coming to the Chaosbane ranch too?” I asked.

Enwyn nodded.

“Nice!” I said, with genuine delight. “Have you been there before?”

“No, never to the family ranch,” Enwyn said. “I believe that even the Chaosbanes only all get together there at this time of year. The only member of the family who lives there full time is the patriarch, Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock Chaosbane. From what Reginald has mentioned of his grandfather, the man sounds quite… cantankerous.”

“Hm,” I said. “A crusty old grave dodger, huh? The sort of crotchety bastard who’s kind of like a slinky—not really good for much, but they’d bring a smile to your face if you were allowed to push them down the stairs.”

Enwyn cocked her head to the side. “What in the world is a slinky?” she asked me.

“I just mean, he wouldn’t be the first crabby old fart that I’ve been introduced to,” I explained.

“There’s one thing that I think you should take into account though,” Enwyn said to me.

“What’s that?”

“The fact that this crabby old fart is a Chaosbane,” Enwyn said.

I puffed out my cheeks. “Yeah,” I said, thinking of the four members of the clan whom I had met thus far. “Good point.”

“Is there any more of that coffee, Justin, darling?” Cecilia asked me.

“I think so,” I said. “Should be sitting on the stovetop in a big-ass pot, unless Rick inhaled it on his way out.”

Cecilia squeezed my shoulder, leaned down, and gave me a lingering kiss. “I think the girls and I are going to sit inside and stay out of the cold.”

I raised an eyebrow at the Frost Mage. I knew for a fact that she felt the cold about as much as Damien did. Where Damien’s Fire Magic combated the frigidity, Cecilia’s Frost Magic absorbed it and embraced it.

The beautiful blonde elven aristocrat rolled her eyes and gave me a small smile.

“You know what I mean, darling,” she said. “Unless you want Alura, Janet, and I to bring our coffees out here and start discussing what awful skanks are going to be wearing what divine gowns at my parents’ party, of course?”

I considered this. For all of two nanoseconds.

“No, thank you,” I said.

“We’ll be cozying up inside, then,” Cecilia said. “Have a lovely vacation, darling. Try not to get yourself embroiled too deeply in the fecal matter while you’re away.”

“I can but try,” I said.

“There’s a good boy,” Cecilia said softly in my ear, as she stooped to give me another peck on the cheek. “See you when you get back.”

She strode inside, as if she owned the place. Gods, but I loved that girl’s style.

Janet and Alura both swooped down upon me too, whispering parting words in my ear as they kissed me goodbye.

Then, it was Enwyn and I left, alone on the porch. When the heavy front door had snapped closed behind Alura, Enwyn peered at me through those sexy heavy-rimmed spectacles of hers and smiled knowingly.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just, I look at you now, at the mage you have risen to be… It is a far cry from the young prospect whom I inspected in his uncle’s occult bookstore.”

I snorted softly, my breath pluming in the cold air. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said, “I’ve exploded at least half a dozen people since that first day.”

Enwyn nodded. “Yes,” she said, “but crucially, they have all happily been enemies.”

I made a face. “Yeah.”

A crooning purr emanated from out of a bush to our left. With a gentle sigh of  sliding snow, a rustle of branches, and a flash of opalescent eyes, Felicity, the saber-toothed tiger-cum-catwoman emerged from out of the snowy undergrowth in her beastial form.

On seeing the Great Dane-sized creature, I realized that I hadn’t told anyone about the fact that the cat was also a person, or a shapeshifter. Now that I thought of it, I should maybe have mentioned something about it to the fraternity boys, at least. Might save one of them an uncomfortable meeting one night, if one of them was to wander downstairs for a glass of water and find some random naked woman with purple hair and a  feline tail drinking milk out of the fridge.

Spurred on by this realization, I said to Enwyn, “She’s a shapeshifter you know. Well, a changeling, I think she said.”

“Who?” Enwyn asked.

I pointed at the saber-toothed cat that stood regarding us, its tail twitching. Snow settled on her thick outer coat.

“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 defy the cold, he also wore a long coat of rich blue velvet, and to combat the wind, he had a pair of flying goggles over his eyes.

Somehow, flying in the face of all logic, the man looked like a fucking movie star.

“All aboard!” the Headmaster bellowed. “As Mr. Mauler has so astutely observed, these beasts are nothing to be afraid of.”

“Reginald?” Igor said, walking boldly toward the sleigh, picking up one of his eight suitcases and hefting it into the back where Mortimer was standing waiting to receive it.

“Yes, cousin,” Headmaster Chaosbane said.

“Where in the bloody hell did you get this sleigh from?” Igor asked, adroitly avoiding a sideways kick from one of the enormous bulls by bending over to pick up another bag.

“Use that desiccated lump between your ears, my dear man,” Reginald said amiably. “I borrowed it from the Klaus family.”

I had just vanished the black and the white staffs into nothingness again and had picked up my leather traveling bag when the insanity of these words permeated my brain.

“The Klaus family?” I said dubiously. “As in the Klaus family?”

Reginald Chaosbane smiled mildly down at me from his perch on the sleigh. “That’s right, Mr. Mauler. Are you acquainted with the Klauses?”

Behind him, at the rear of the flying vehicle—if that was the right word—I caught a glimpse of the bubblegum pink bunches of Leah Chaosbane. She appeared to be sitting quite unconcernedly on what passed for a tailgate, swinging her legs and smoking one of her black clove-smelling cigarettes.

I looked around to see whether someone was going to give the game away and put an end to this joke. When no one did, I said, “You can’t mean the actual Klauses, you know? Like Santa and stuff.”

Reginald snapped his fingers. “You do know them. How extraordinary. Yes, well, the Klaus family is actually distantly—very remotely, in fact—related to the Chaosbane family. I actually borrowed this sleigh from Kris Kringle themselves.”

“Kris Kringle themselves?” I asked.

Reginald looked from Igor to Mort, as if one of the two men would be able to explain to him what the fuck I was talking about, but the two cousins simply carried on loading Igor’s luggage into the back of the sleigh.

“I’m afraid you’ve lost me, Mr. Mauler,” the Headmaster said.

With the fluidity of a snake, Leah flowed to her feet and turned easily on her heel.

“I think I can field this one, cousin,” she said, touching Reginald on the shoulder and coming to stand next to him. With marvelous balance, she slipped her long legs over the front railing of the sleigh and sat there.

“I think I can unravel this whole conundrum for you, cherrybutt,” she said to me. “Father Christmas, or Santa Klaus if you will, isn’t one man as I know your Earthling folklore says. Kris Kringle is, in actual bonafide fact, a whole clan of world-hopping folks who use Chaos Magic to jump like festive fleas from one world to another delivering presents.”

Leah blew a smoke ring that twisted itself into a figure eight, which slowly revolved until it was lying sideways and resembled a lemniscate.

“They’ve become very adept at stretching the rules of space and time, honey bunny,” Leah said as the infinity symbol faded.

My attempt to answer this very matter-of-fact explanation was drowned out by the arrival of Idman Thunderstone, Mallory Entwistle, and Barry Chillgrave, who came tramping out of the house. Each of the trio carried a traveling bag and was dressed for the bitter weather. Even Barry carried a ghostly green gladstone bag and was wrapped in the poltergeist version of an oilskin cloak. It looked like they were all coming along too.

“Barry,” I said, deciding to forget about the whole Santa Klaus being a franchised family business for the time being and focus on something that made a little more sense, “what’s with the cloak?”

“What d’ye mean, sir?” Barry Chillgrave asked me.

“I mean, you’re dead, man. What do you need a cloak for?”

Barry fiddled with the handle of his gladstone. “Just matchin’ the mood, you know, sir,” he mumbled.

“Fair enough,” I said. “You’re looking pretty sharp, pal.”

“Thank ye, sir,” said the founding member of Cecilia’s family.

“Can I ask what you’re planning on doing with the Blade Sisters, who are currently lodging in our dungeon, while we’re all away, Barry?” I asked.

“Ah, don’t you worry about them, sir,” the poltergeist told me confidently. “They’ll be just fine for a little while.”

“You’re sure?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” Idman Thunderstone said with a thin-lipped smile. “Barry has really spruced up the dungeon.”

I detected more than a bit of sarcasm in Idman’s tone, but could not be bothered to pursue it.

”Idman is right, sir,” Barry said, nodding vigorously. Janet’s dad’s irony had, as usual, gone right over his head. “Those blighters won’t be able to escape, and they might even enjoy themselves, sir! I’ve left them all kinds of fun little bits and bobs in there, sir, to keep ‘em entertained like.”

“What about food?” I asked.

“I’ve got a rather tricky little enchantment that’ll serve ‘em up a steamin’ portion of boiled spuds and corned beef for every meal, sir!” Barry said enthusiastically. “A whole month’s worth, should we be delayed for any reason.”

“Just boiled potatoes and corned beef?” I asked, wincing at the very thought of the effect that that diet would have on the air of the dungeon.

Barry clapped a ghostly hand to his head. “Argh, no! Not just boiled spuds and corned beef, sir. I was forgetting! Every Sunday they get some lovely boiled brussels sprouts too.”

I said nothing. It sounded rough, but I was not exactly in the mood to give the Blade Sisters too lavish a lifestyle after they had so recently tried to kill me.

“Now,” Barry said, “time to lock the old place up.”

“Whoa, whoa,” I said, putting out a pointless hand to stop Barry before he could start doing whatever jiggery-pokery he had in mind, “I just remembered something—the girls are in the kitchen having coffee and talking about gowns and shoes and balls.”

Barry looked puzzled at the mention of balls but then said, “Never fear, sir, I informed my dear relative and her two companions that we would shortly be raising anchor. They were quite happy to finish their hot beverages outside. I set them up a hasty fire in the brazier under the pagoda, sir. They’ll be snug enough until they decide to make for their home port. They told me to bid you farewell again.”

I gave the poltergeist an impressed look. “Barry, you’re the man. I don’t know what we did without you.”

“From what I gather, sir, it sounds like you were rowing with only one oar in the water.”

“You’re probably not too far off the mark there,” I granted. “All right then, do your thing.”

Barry turned, raised his spindly arms above his head, and closed his eyes.

A green radiance flowed from his hands. Twin rivers of phantasmal light wrapped themselves around the fraternity house, twining about it like coiling supernatural ribbons. They grew, twisting around the entire building faster and faster until the entire structure was cocooned in green light. Then, after glowing three times, the luminosity faded.

“Locked,” Barry said happily. “Nothin’ will be gettin’ into your parents’ old place while we’re away, sir. Or out.”

“Right, you horrible lot!” Reginald Chaosbane yelled. “As adorable as a herd of turtles might be, I think that we’ve been acting like one long enough. Let’s go!”

With that verbal prodding, Enwyn and I took our place alongside the four Chaosbanes, Idman, Barry, and Mallory Entwistle.

I sat next to Mallory. Dressed in her habitual flowing white robe and a wintery thick white coat, she looked like a statue carved from snow. Pressed together as we were though, I was quite aware of the heat emanating from her.

I swallowed and tried to keep my mind away from what getting intimate with her holy of holies might be like. It was hard, due to the squashy proximity of cramming that many people into a single sleigh.

“We haven’t forgotten anyone?” Reginald yelled over his shoulder. Against the whirling snow, he cut a damn dashing figure.

“Negative,” Mort replied.

“Not even Igor?” Reginald said.

“Negative,” Mort said.

“Pity,” Reginald said, not quite under his breath.

“I bloody heard that!” called Igor from near the back.

Chapter 2

The sleigh shot into the air, going from zero to a hundred in less time than it took to say it. The legs of the six bulls that pulled the thing were a blur, though the creatures themselves appeared about as calm and relaxed as if they had just been hanging out in a field and chewing the cud. Their great heads glanced occasionally from side to side, as me and the rest of the sleigh’s passengers were pressed back into our uncomfortable wooden bench seats.

“I’m going to have piles after this,” I heard Igor moan from the back, his voice barely audible over the rush of the wind.

“It was my understanding, cousin,” the feared bounty hunter, Mortimer, said in his polite, slightly apologetic voice, “that you already had piles.”

“Yeah, I thought you were telling me the other day how you had even named a few of your faves, Igor,” Leah cut in.

“Ah, shut up, you know what I bleeding well mean, you maniacs,” Igor yelled back.

With some difficulty, I leaned forward and managed to tug at the hem of Reginald Chaosbane’s flapping coat. I wasn’t sure how he was doing it, but the mage was still standing with one booted foot casually up on the front rail while he occasionally flicked the reins at the bulls. Feeling the pull on his coat, the Headmaster of the Mazirian Academy turned to face me.

“Headmaster,” I said loudly, “how the hell does this sleigh work?”

“Why’s that, Mr. Mauler?” Reginald asked me in return.

“Well, you know, we’re punching along at what must be about one hundred and fifty miles per hour at a height of…”

“About four thousand feet,” Reginald supplied.

“Right, and I was just interested in knowing the basic force that is keeping us from going into the very real and solid landscape below like a fuck—Like a dart, sir,” I said.

Reginald nodded understandingly. He leaned down so that I could not miss his whisky, rum, gin, and Irish cream laced words.

“This sleigh is powered by no other power than metaphor,” he said.

My face must have been a study of blankness.

“Headmaster?” I asked. “Metaphor?”

“Yes, my dear fellow! Metaphor!” Reginald said, a Cheshire Cat grin spreading across his dial. He flung out a hand and pointed at the half a dozen enormous beasts pulling us along.

“This sleigh is powered by nothing more than bullshit!” The man, who many considered to be the greatest living mage, crowed at the top of his voice and slapped his thigh.

I sat back in my seat.

I’d read somewhere that no truly great mind ever existed without a touch of madness.

I repeated that sentiment to myself as the sleigh climbed higher into the swirling maelstrom of snowy clouds and me and the rest of my fellow passengers huddled closer together.

Luckily, I was wearing the incredible morphing cloak that Igor had given me as part of his sponsorship deal. With a single thought, the black jacket I had been wearing changed into a long, thick woolen cloak with a hood I could pull snuggly up around my head.

I had just stuffed my hands under my armpits when someone slid down onto my other side, between me and the hard wood of the side of the sleigh.

“Budge up, budge up, ladybird-butt,” Leah said, slipping into the tight gap and forcing Mallory and Enwyn to shuffle along the bench as far as they could.

It should have been impossible for the pink-haired woman to clamber from the back of the sleigh to where I was at the front, but here she was.

“Don’t mind me,” Leah said dreamily. “I just saw you conjure up this lovely snuggly coat, and I thought that I’d come and take advantage of some extra warmth before we head into the wormhole.”

“Into the what?” I asked.

“Into that,” Leah said casually. She popped a piece of bubblegum into her mouth and began to chew languidly, nodding her head to indicate something in front of us.

There was a wormhole ahead. An honest to Betsy wormhole sitting in the middle of a vacuum of cloud free sky, into which we had just emerged. It was like a psychedelic black hole, bending air and light about its streaming, eye-watering rings.

“I’ve never been sucked into a wormhole before,” Leah said next to me, in a conversational tone. “We don’t usually travel to the ranch by sleigh.”

“Yeah,” I heard myself saying, my voice sounding weirdly calm in my own ears, “I’d have to say that I’m popping my wormhole cherry too.”

In the rear of the hurtling sleigh, Igor was laughing madly to himself—though at what could be anyone’s guess. Mort was chuckling politely along with him, although I doubt he had a clue as to what might be considered humorous about the situation.

There was nothing funny about it as far as I could see.

As we pelted toward the polychromatic wormhole, Leah reached up and grabbed my face. With a strength that belied her willowy model-esque build, she wrenched my head around and kissed me full on the mouth. It was a long, hard, passionate kiss with just a hint of flicking tongue. One hand slipped down from my face and dropped into my crotch to give my cock a firm squeeze.

“What. . . what was that for?” I asked, feeling slightly like I had just been clubbed over the head with a cosh.

Leah shrugged. “Well, you know what my cousin is like,” she said, indicating Reginald who was still standing in front of us and apparently conducting music that only he could hear, “we might all be quantum goo in a second, treacle-nips.”

There was something squishy in my mouth. Reaching between my lips I pulled something bright pink and sticky from off between my teeth.

It was Leah’s bubblegum.

At the head of the sleigh, Reginald now took up the words to the music that only he could hear—although I was put instantly in mind of Dean Martin’s “Let It Snow.”

And with the word ‘go’ stretching out all the way to the edges of the universe and back, the bulls, sleigh, and all its passengers were sucked into the gaping maw of the wormhole.

* * *

I had always imagined that being sucked into a wormhole would be like being, well, sucked down some enormous, mathematically charged plughole in the air. If I had thought about it, a luxury which I didn’t really have time for at that moment, I might have imagined being stretched into four different dimensions simultaneously or else being taken apart and put back together again in the blink of an eye.

What actually happened was far less dramatic than that. We simply entered a blackness that was so total, so complete and so still that, just for a moment, I thought that I must be dead.

“Excuse me for saying so,” Mortimer said from the row behind me, “but this is rather eerie.”

He was right. It was rather uncanny. What was uncannier still was the way that his words took shape in the air and started gamboling around us like a bunch of cartoon kittens, the letters forming out of the surrounding bottomless night so that we could actually see them.

We hung in that void for a handful of seconds. It was a mischievous handful of seconds though. A string of harmless little seconds that, nonetheless, could quite easily have turned out to have got together and allowed ten years to pass.

I’d seen Interstellar. I’d seen it twice. So I knew enough about quantum physics to know that I knew absolutely zero about quantum physics. However, what I’d taken away from that bit of film-making mastery was that space-time could be a wily son of a bitch.

An uncertain amount of time passed, while the bulls’ legs slowed to an apathetic walk. Back in the slow, the massive beasts appeared as deep dark as sable velvet. But here, in the endless, perfect inky void? They looked to be more gray than black.

And then, there was light!

A great swirling, kaleidoscope of light.

An immeasurable horizontal slit opened up ahead of us, ripping through the pristine nothingness like a world blooming out of the empty cosmos. It was like we had been flying toward a galaxy-sized monster that had lain completely camouflaged in the vast chasm of space. Now that monster had abruptly opened its jaws to swallow us. We could see the inside of its mouth and all the way down its infinitely long throat, as many-hued as an explosion in a paint factory.

“By the gods,” I heard Mallory say next to me, “it’s beautiful.”

And that final word extended and bent and distorted, as we all found ourselves going through the mildly uncomfortable sensation of briefly being squeezed and compressed into the size of postage stamps and then hammered out flat and thin enough to cover a football field.

Next thing I knew, the sleigh was hurtling along at breakneck speed and the world was an impenetrable dirty white.

All of us, bar Reginald Chaosbane at the helm, were thrown backward in our seat as the sleigh punched out from the cloud bank and into a quite normal-looking sky beyond. My stomach felt like it was crawling up my esophagus, which suggested we were heading downward. This hypothesis was supported by my registering a gorgeous, glittering city sprawled some few thousand feet below us.

There were the beautiful, delicate spires of tall buildings that stood like crystal stalagmites in the midst of the snow-blanketed city.  Myriad silver threads—rivers or canals —ran through it. Expanses of pristine evergreen woodland surrounded the whole metropolis.

And, sitting proudly in the middle of a sprawling high-walled estate, was a magnificent castle. Towers stood nobly on each of the four corners, towers that would have given Merlin a hard-on.

Before I could take in anything else, my view blurred and was obscured. I looked around us. We were tearing down what appeared to be a gleaming, translucent tube—a sorcerous version of the Lincoln Tunnel.

“What the fuck is this now?” I asked no one in particular. It was quieter in here, without the rushing of the wind to contend with.

To my surprise, Reginald Chaosbane turned on his heel to answer my question. For someone who was supposed to be manning the controls of a sleigh traveling at the top speed of a Corvette C5, I found his attitude to be on the casual side. If I hadn’t known the Headmaster, I might even have called it negligent.

“We have now passed into the city of Manafell’s border burrow,” the Headmaster said, pulling one of the many flasks that he carried on his person from the sleeve of his coat. “It leads directly to the border station where the guards will go about their boring business of quizzing us about any contraband that we might or might not be attempting to bring into the capital of Avalonia.”

The Headmaster took a long pull from his flask and smacked his lips. “Gods, that’s horrible,” he said. “Tastes vile enough to make a goblin gag.”

“Uh, sir, shouldn’t you maybe keep your eye on the… Ahead of you?” I asked tentatively, not wanting to sound like a worrywart.

“Hm? Oh! No, Mr. Mauler, you see, everyone that enters Manafell’s airspace is required to enter one of the five border burrows that are dotted on the edge of the city limits,” Reginald explained, taking another drink. “Once they are inside, a very clever bit of magic takes control of whatever it is they are flying and guides it down to the border station.”

“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.

“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 johnson. “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 kukri 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.

“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 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.

“Is that…” I began.

“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.

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 minutes 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.”

“Saved the day, you mean?” I shot back as I began to climb the rope ladder.

“Justin, you handsome ball of testosterone and magical prowess,” Leah called down, still waving her nails, “you are quite comely to gaze upon, but you must know there is a time and a place for splitting hairs. Now clamber up here and let’s go and get a drink.”

At the mention of a drink, a snuffling snort, like a boar trying to get a pea out of its nostril, burst from the back of the sleigh. Igor’s tousled head popped up over the edge.

“Somebody called?” he said.

“Your cousin was just suggesting that we all go and seek libations at your ranch house,” Idman said.

“Pass one over the tonsils, you mean?” Igor scratched the hair on his head and then the hair that covered his top lip. “What a capital idea. Lead on, driver!”

So the driver, Reginald, clicked his tongue and turned the sleigh back toward the great log edifice that was the homestead of the Chaosbane clan.

Chapter 4

The Klaus Cruiser touched down with remarkable and, let’s face it, completely unanticipated delicacy on the large swathe of lawn on the edge of the forest.

“Home’s—” said Reginald, hopping down from the sleigh as it coasted to a halt.

“—where,” said Mort, stowing his throwing knives again.

“—the heart,” chimed in Leah.

“—is,” finished Igor, tumbling out of the back of the sleigh but managing to turn his fall into a smooth roll that brought him to his feet. “Not to mention a most notable barrel of Old Bizarro’s Ripsnort Brandy, if my memory serves me rightly,” he added, smacking his lips excitedly.

“Best not to let your great grandfather here you talkin’ about his brandy, sir,” said a voice that pronounced the letter ‘r’ with something approaching fanaticism.

A rotund figure wearing a cowboy hat and a plaid shirt was ambling across the lawn toward us.

The person heading over the snow with a rolling gait was so plump, with a beer gut of such immensity, that if you’d cut his stumpy legs and arms off, he would have been a beach ball. The belt holding up a pair of cut-off jeans looked like the equator of some small, hairy planet—for the wearer of the belt was hairy. Extremely so.

“Chubbs! Good to see you, you son of a bitch!” Igor boomed genially.

It was a rugged greeting, but when the figure—Chubbs—stopped by the head of the lead bull, I noticed that he was of the werewolf persuasion. The all-over body hair, reversed knees, pointed ears, and snout and tail were a dead giveaway.

Son of a bitch, indeed.

“Chubbs?” Enwyn asked Leah in an aside, as Igor and the werewolf fell into an easy conversation. “That’s a bit mean, isn’t it? I mean we all have our crosses to bear, don’t we? Don’t need to rub the poor werewolf’s snout in it.”

Leah pinched Enwyns’s cheek between my thumb and forefinger. “My! The golden heart that beats under that rather beddable bossom, Enwyn Emberskull! You’re a warrior-princess and a sweetheart, I knew it since the moment we met. Never fear though; Chubbs has one of those ironic nicknames, you know. Like tall people who are called ‘Shorty’ or really thick people that go by the name ‘Brains’.”

Enwyn glanced over at Chubbs. The almost spherical werewolf was panting and puffing as he took the reins of the six ginormous black bulls. His cowboy hat was pushed back on his head so that his pointed ears stuck out like the wings of an airplane. His legs were so fat that his knees were almost invisible.

“Yes,” Enwyn said slowly and tactfully, “but Chubbs is actually chubby.”

“Grossly fat, I think you’ll find,” Mort said helpfully, helping Mallory down from the sleigh like a footman helping down a lady from a carriage. “Excuse me for butting in.”

“Right,” said Enwyn. “That’s my point, really.”

Leah snapped her fingers. “I see what you’re getting at. Yes, that can be a bit confusing, sugar. When he started working here though, you see, he was rake thin. That’s why Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock coined the name Chubbs. Then, after working here for a few years and dealing with the constant strain of having Great Granddaddy going off his head every few moments, dear old Chubbs took refuge in chocolate pudding, thus taking took on the form that you see now.”

We watched as Chubbs nodded respectfully to Reginald and shook hands with Igor, and then ambled away with his bovine companions, toward a large barn.

“Don’t worry about Chubbs,” Leah said, patting Enwyn on the shoulder as Idman came to stand with us. “Having a vaguely insensitive nickname is probably the last thing on his mind.”

“Why—” Enwyn started to ask.

Our attention was diverted by the sound of the front door to the main ranch house crashing open behind us.

A portly old man, hobbling quickly along with the aid of a walking stick, came bursting out onto the porch. He was yelling incoherently and gesticulating wildly with his free hand, his slippered feet thumping on the wooden boards.

Without warning, he took the walking stick in both hands, aimed it in our direction like a shotgun, and a spray of spiraling silver Chaos Magic darts came spouting forth from its tip.

“Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock!” Reginald cried delightedly, throwing out his arms wide as if to hug the old man from afar. The swarming burst of silver swirling projectiles were stopped dead in mid-air, just as they were about to tear into the Headmaster of the Mazirian Academy. They contorted, scrunched inward, like a soda can being stepped on, and shattered into wisps of nothingness.

Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock stopped in his tracks and glared down at the sleigh and those of us who had just alighted from it. He was an imposing figure, despite only being about five feet tall. He had a heavy oval head, wobbling jowls, and the same dark, erudite eyes that all the Chaosbanes shared. He wore a small knitted blue hat, from under which bright white curly hair stuck out around the brim. Suspenders held up a pair of typical old man beige slacks. His feet were slippered, but his torso was clad in the most eye-watering paisley waistcoat that must ever have seen the light of day.

“Damn me, boy,” the old fellow bellowed, “you may go about most things completely backasswards, but it can’t be denied you’re a fine mage!”

Reginald walked up the steps of the ranch house, his arms still spread wide.

“Well, I had to get pretty good at warring, didn’t I, Granddaddy, what with you trying to curse me everytime I walked around a corner?”

“Kept you and your cousins sharp, didn’t it?” the old man said, lowering his walking stick.

“It kept us hospitalized for much of our youth as well, if I recall,” Reginald said.

The Headmaster moved in to embrace Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock, but the old man held up a warning hand.

“Hug me and I’ll tear you a new asshole,” the old man grumbled. “Gods, I always make the mistake of thinking that I’m dealing with an adult when you visit.”

Reginald dropped his arms. “Can I make the introductions then, Grandaddy?”

“Let me see my family members first, boy!” Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock snapped.

Mort, Leah, and Igor all trooped dutifully up the steps while the rest of us hung back.

Leah was the only one of the clan who got a quick embrace from the old patriarch.

When Mort came to stand in front of Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock, the oldest Chaosbane clapped the lanky assassin on the shoulder and said, “I’ve been following your work in the monthly periodicals, lad. Bounty Hunter Monthly thinks you're the dog’s bollocks, don’t they?”

Mort mumbled something and moved aside to make room for Igor, who was jostling behind him, no doubt eager to get at Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock’s cellar.

Grandaddy Chaosbane didn’t say anything for a while. He just ran his eyes over the delinquent-looking Igor.

“Why d’you smell of hotdog water, Igor?” the old man asked eventually.

Igor put a companionable hand on Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock’s shoulder. “Why indeed?” he said. “I think that’s one of many pertinent subjects we must touch upon this evening, Grandaddy. However, what say you to doing it over something cold and corrosive, hm?”

Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock snorted and jerked his thumb at the ranch. “I’ll be in to join you in a moment, you young reprobate,” he said, and there was a definite note of pride in his voice.

After the family had said their how-do-you-dos, Reginald introduced the rest of us to the old man.

Barry, Enwyn, and Mallory were let through with impartial grunts of welcome. Idman, as former lawman, was greeted with stony suspicion by the gnarled old Chaosbane clan chief. The old man’s demeanor thawed only after Reginald explained how Idman was no longer the owner-operator of the Eldritch Prison and was, in fact, a fugitive.

“And this,” Reginald said, beckoning me forward “is Justin Mauler.”

The clever dark eyes regarded me from under the snowy brows.

“I know who this one is.” Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock extended a hand that looked like it had been carved out of a piece of walnut.

I grasped the hand, intent on making a good impression. This man was, after all, the head of, despite their idiosyncrasies, one of the most formidable wizarding families around.

“A pleasure to meet—” I began, but then recoiled in surprise as the hand I had grasped turned suddenly into a very realistic dildo.

“What the shit?” I said.

Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock was snorting with mirth. He even went as far as to slap his thigh, so I figured he was pretty pleased with himself. I was left standing like a lemon and holding a big rubber wiener.

“Ah, just a jape on my part, Mauler,” he said, grabbing me by the elbow with a horny hand and guiding me toward the front door. “No need to look so shocked. You might not be aware, but we keep a reasonably relaxed house here.”

I was half-tempted to tell the old coot that I’d just seen how relaxed a place he kept; the wreckage strewn about his private carnival ground was testament to that.

“Gorlbadock!” a shrill voice called from the doorway as we approached. “Gorlbadock, have you been rummaging around in my pleasure chest again, you old pain in the— Oh, who have we here?”

An older woman had revealed herself in the spacious front doorway—older certainly, but not old like Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock.

She was dressed in the type of frock that you might expect a wealthy chick in a period drama to wear; all petticoats and flowing skirts and those cinched waists that made their knockers pop out so brilliantly. I’d always found that element of the fashion of those days to be such a contradiction. In an age where modesty was everything, these rich ladies would swan about with their magumbos squashed out for all the world to see.

I held out a hand.

“Justin Mauler,” I said.

The woman took my proffered hand, and we shook. Her grip was firm, her hand soft. Her hair was an artful arrangement of chestnut curls with streaks of silver through them. She had a heart-shaped face and crinkles at the corners of her eyes, which were dark and quick and clever, as I had thought they would be.

Slice it how you would, this woman was the definition of a cougar.

“I’m Aunt Ruth,” the woman said, hitting me with a modest little smile.

“You’re… You’re Aunt Ruth?” I said, just managing to keep the incredulity from my voice.

“That’s right,” Ruth said.

I looked at Leah, who was standing in the hallway behind Ruth.

“Aunt Ruth, as in Aunt Ruth, the ‘less’ is silent?” I asked.

Aunt Ruth gave a small smile and rolled her eyes.

“I can be a little… spiky,” she said. “Especially when it comes to getting things that I want.”

Was it my imagination, or did the cougar’s eyes flick over me, giving me the north to south in lightning fast time?

“Come,” Aunt Ruth said, taking me by the arm, “let me give you—and all our new guests—the grand tour.”

“Perhaps a drink might be nice…?” Igor prompted. “It’s been a hell of a trip.”

Aunt Ruth made a little tutting noise of annoyance. She glanced at the mustachioed Rune Mystic. “You’ve always been a rascally pain in the unmentionables, Igor dear, perhaps you can take the day off?”

“Perhaps, I could,” Igor said evenly, “but I’ll be dashed if I’ll be doing it sober.”

We stopped off for a drink or three in a lavishly decorated dining room, which looked as if it had been decorated by a team of paintballers who had been locked in there with a bear for company.

Afterward, Aunt Ruth, with Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock limping along at her side, gave us the tour of enormous log manor. Each room was totally different and unique to the one that had come before it, as if the layout and decor of the house as a whole had never been a consideration. It was so different from any home I entered that I thought it was overwhelmingly marvellous.

It was also stuffed with children.

“Aye,” old Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock said, when I mentioned this to him, “who knew Chaos Magic could lead to such fecundity, eh?”

“They’re all your family?” Idman asked, a note of horror just detectable in his voice. No doubt the thought of all these future Morts, Reginalds, Leahs, and Igors was one that he found deeply disturbing.

“Aye, they’re all kin,” Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock said. “The Chaosbanes have always been blessed with mighty enthusiastic jism.”

Aunt Ruth whacked the old man on the arm and shot me an apologetic look. She seemed a little too familiar with me during our extensive tour. She lingered with me when I stopped to look at some curiosity, and found any excuse to brush up against me.

I found myself dwelling on what I might do, should the opportunity to lift her many skirts present itself to me. She was a mature lady, sure, but I couldn’t help thinking that she was also very fuckable.

When the tour was complete, Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock excused himself and said that he had a date with a strong brandy and a good armchair.

“The rest of you have my leave to walk the grounds and house as you will. The only place that is off limits is the blasted cellar! Igor I am looking directly at you, boy! Reginald too!”

Both Reginald and Igor, who had been at the back of the group, slurping covertly from a decanter of milky blue liquor, started guiltily.

“Would never - would never dream of it, Grandaddy,” Reginald said, failing to stifle a hiccup.

Igor started burbling something, but Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock waved him down.

“Save it, Igor,” he said with a gruff good-naturedness, “if I wanted to hear from an asshole, I would have farted.”

Leah laughed.

“We’ll reconvene on the porch at nine o’clock sharp,” Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock said as he stumped away. “Your timing is impeccable as usual, for tonight we enjoy and take part in the Celebration of Chaos.”

* * *

It was some time after nine o’clock. After being summoned to the porch by a gong that echoed out through the woods, I found myself standing by the edge of the lake I had spied from the sleigh.

I tried to quiz the Chaosbanes as to what we could expect down at the lakeside for this Celebration of Chaos, but none of the clan were willing to divulge what this ceremony involved. All they would tell Idman, Enwyn, Mallory, Barry, and me was that we had to go down to the lake.

We took the single, tight path along with a host of other silent and somber folk from around the district. At the end of the path, there stood the giant rock I had glimpsed from the air. It was a statue of an animal of some kind, but of what exact kind I couldn’t tell. The huge carved boulder stood about three stories tall. It was set in the undergrowth on a small island in the middle of the still, partly frozen lake.

“It’s a… chimp?” I asked in a hushed voice. I turned my head to one side and then the other. “An ape?”

“A monkey,” Reginald said in a low voice from my right.

“A monkey...” I let the word hang in the air, hoping that someone would tell me exactly what the hell kind of significance it held.

“You ever seen how fucking chaotic a monkey can be?” Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock growled from my other side. “They’re clever little buggers. Can cause no end of mischief. Now shut up, the pair of you!”

At some signal that I did not see, the gathered throng of onlookers walked further around the lake until we all came to a row of benches made from logs with a quarter of their length cut out.

I took a seat beside Leah and Mallory, with Enwyn sitting in my lap. Chaosbanes surrounded us—a surreal experience in itself. From this new vantage point, I could see a stage set in front of the monkey statue, the monkey looking down on it with its stony, almost cartoon-like eyes.

The ritual began. A boat started to drift across the stream. Standing inside it were twelve hooded figures. Nine of the figures held torches that illuminated the night that lay thick and deep under the eaves of the fir trees. The other three were carrying what looked like a body across their right shoulders.

The body wiped away the incredulous smile that had been growing on my face. This whole thing had smelled of some kind of out there ritual, but a body being brought along gave it a sinister twist.

The boat landed on the shores of the monkey statue island, and the dozen robed figures alighted. One of the cultish figures, wearing a great diadem crown, took the stage. In somber tones, the diadem-wearing figure welcomed everyone.

I had never been a big one for religious or supernatural rituals. I had always believed what was presented in front of my eyes. I tried to stay focused and interested but, with the droning and the chanting, I soon zoned out and started thinking of all the dirty stuff that I’d rather be doing to Aunt Ruth.

The ritual relied heavily on smoke and mirrors, obtuse language, and some pretty low-grade spell work. After the first ten minutes, I had realized that the ‘body’ was most likely an effigy of some kind, and I started to see the funny side of things once more.

Eventually, the burning of the ‘sacrificial victim’ took place. The effigy was hauled by its three bearers and hoisted in a dignified manner up into the arms of the monkey. Then, in a suitably mystic and august gout of silver-black fire, the shrouded effigy was set alight. The outer wrappings burned and shriveled like chip packets in a campfire to reveal—

“A sex doll?” I blurted out.

It wasn’t just a sex doll, it was a pinata.

And it exploded after sitting in the monkey’s arms for only a few seconds.

Candy and fairies, tiny winged bottles of grog, and sparkling fireworks flew out of the burst effigy in all directions. The monkey statue opened its mouth and music poured forth. The gathered throng erupted in cheers. Corks were popped, and cloaks were thrown aside by the dozen figures on the stage.

“What the fuck is this now?” I asked over the swelling cacophony of noise.

Aunt Ruth shoved a goblet of something fizzy and smoky into my hand. Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock took me by the elbow and pointed across the lake, which now looked like molten silver in the light of the Chaos Magic fire.

“Have you learned your lesson, boy?” he asked me.

“My lesson?” I asked.

“Can you see the point of all this?” Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock pressed me.

I thought for a moment. I gazed across the water at the water at the monkey statue, lit with occult fire.

“It’s a lesson about Chaos…” I said slowly, sipping my drink.

The old man next to me smiled. Just for a second.

“Chaos…” I said.

“Chaos is the oil that greases the wheels!” Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock growled and raised his own goblet.

I looked around, raising my own goblet. “What’s next in the ceremony?”

“Next,” Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock said, “we drink!”

The music swelled, and dancers filled the forest. The stars peeking through sable fingers of bare tree branches glowed bright above our heads.

“All right,” I said, “then we drink!”

Enwyn, Mallory, Aunt Ruth, and Leah were gathered round, the supernatural black and white flames giving them a pleasant glow.

I raised my goblet higher. “We drink to Chaos!”

Chapter 5

Enwyn and I skipped across the pristine, untouched snow that ran down from the enormous log-constructed main house of the ranch. Our booted feet punched holes into the crisp virgin snow, twin rows of black dots stitched into an acre square of perfect blankness.

Ahead of us, the trees of the fir forest surrounding the ranch reached up into the starry night sky like the sable silhouettes of Yuletide trees drawn by a child. There were a few deciduous trees scattered among the pines and their bare branches clawed up at the heavens like the crooked, frozen fingers of the dying.

I wasn’t sure whether it was the copious amount of mixed alcohol that I had imbibed, or whether the monochromatic landscape really was as stunning as all that, but there was something very poetic about the contrast of the black shadows lying flat on the unblemished snow.

The shadows were so sharp, deep, and well-defined that they looked like tree shapes cut from a spotless white cloth.

Enwyn’s hand was warm in mine as I led her through the crunching, squeaking snow and into the edges of the trees where our large canvas tent had been pitched.

The tent looked more like a yurt than the type of a shitty triangular affair that my uncle had once tried to take me camping in back on Earth. It appeared to be tall enough for me to stand up in. It was as wide across as a school bus, and a black metal chimney protruded from the top of it. Snow piled up the sides and on the roof, but the doorway was quite clear. A welcoming sliver of warm, orange light peeped from between the two tent flaps. The smell of wood smoke permeated the still night air and gave the whole scene an  unreal quaintness.

“This is my kind of camping,” I gasped as we slowed down and walked the last ten yards. My breath plumed out in front of me, feathery and insubstantial. Planting my feet abruptly, I pulled Enwyn to me, and we kissed under the blazing white stars.

Enwyn’s warm hand snaked into the depths of my coat and ran across my stomach and down…

My own hands reached south, lifted the black coat that she was wearing, and kneaded the Fire Mage’s juicy buttocks together. Enwyn let out a slow, longing-filled breath that tasted like wine, even as her tongue continued to dance playfully against mine, writhing like a miniature belly dancer.

“Fuck this,” I groaned between kisses, “let’s get inside out of the cold.”

“You’re cold?” Enwyn murmured as she rubbed at my cock through my pants.

“Hell no, I’m not cold,” I said. “But if we undress out here, I soon could be.”

Enwyn chuckled, bit my bottom lip, and stretched it out just to the point of pain before releasing it.

I licked at my lip. I tasted blood.

“You savage,” I muttered. “I didn’t take you for the type…”

Enwyn grinned back at me, her teeth bright in the light of the moon filtering through the branches of the trees surrounding us.

“It’s the glasses, isn’t it?” she quipped. “You get lured into expecting a goody two shoes, but the reality is—”

“A wild harlot?” I suggested.

“I guess we’ll see just how much wildness you can bring out of me,” Enwyn said, her spectacles turning into opaque rectangles as she looked directly at me.

That was enough for me. We ripped open the tent flap, my arms reaching around from behind Enwyn as she led the way inside, my fingers fumbling at the clasps of her coat.

“Finally, my sugared plums,” said Leah Chaosbane.

She was lying on a king-sized, log-constructed bed piled high with furs of a multitude of different hues and levels of shagginess. Her long, model’s body was draped quite comfortably across the bed.

It was a good thing that the fire was roaring away, because what Leah was attired in did not lend itself much in the way of thermal coverage.

She was dressed in the skimpiest set of red lingerie that I had, not just ever seen, but ever imagined. The bra component looked like they constructed out of the same amount of material as the average handkerchief. The panties were… Well, they were something, all right—although they were barely anything at all, if you wanted to be technical about it. They covered just enough to spur my imagination into overdrive, while showing more than enough to ensure that it didn’t have to drive too far.

“You’re a liar,” my tongue said, after I had picked it up off the ground and picked bits of fluff and fur off it.

“Oh, I know that generally,” Leah said placidly, running one bright pink nail across her stocking-covered thigh so that the thin material laddered in the wake of her finger, “but you sound like you have something specific in mind.”

“Well,” I said, “you did say back at the border burrow that you weren’t a big underwear wearer…”

A slow, lazy smile spread across Leah’s face.

“So I did,” she said. “What an excellent memory you have.”

There was a shimmer in the air around the pink-haired vixen.

The lingerie melted away into wisps and tendrils of red smoke.

“You see,” Leah said pragmatically, “I never tell fibs when it comes to things that are that close to my heart.” She reached down and ran a sensual hand across her silky thighs, brushing across the naked mound of her sex and tickling at her clit with little finger. “Or things that are that close to my naughty bits, truth be told,” she said breathily.

The sound of the fire burning in the grate was loud in the silence created by Leah’s sudden disrobing. In those few moments, when no one moved a muscle, my eyes swept the tent.

The interior of the tent was as far removed from most people’s traditional notion of camping as it was possible to be. The floor under my feet was solid wood, elevated slightly from the iron-hard ground below, and covered in rugs. There was a goddamn stone hearth and fireplace directly across from the bed—which, I suppose, explained the chimney. A few pieces of wooden furniture were placed around the room and, in one corner was—

“A hot tub!” I said incredulously.

“Well, duh, honey bunny!” Leah said.

She stretched her arms over her head, flattening her small, pert breasts out so that her pink nipples pointed up at the ceiling. The muscles in her skinny torso stood out, like they had been drawn on by a make-up artist.

“Do you have any idea how dirty Chaosbanes and their guests are by the end of an evening’s frivolities?” Leah continued. “Every tent has a hot tub. They’re all dug out of the ground and filled with natural mineral waters that are heated geothermally—or so Reggie once tried to explain to me.”

I looked down at myself. Then across at Enwyn, who was unfastening the clasps on the front of her coat, even as her eyes were fastened on the nubile figure lying on the bed in front of us.

“I do feel a little… grubby,” I said.

Leah flowed bonelessly to her knees so that she was kneeling at the edge of the large bed, just in front of me and Enwyn. She took the Fire Mage’s hands in hers and sniffed.

“Oh yes,” she said. “You are filthy. Let’s get you out of those clothes and into some nice, hot water.”

I’d say that mine and Enwyn’s clothes were on the floor in under ten seconds. It was the exact amount of time that Leah needed to roll off the far side of the enormous king-sized bed and step down into the sunken hot tub.

On closer inspection, when Enwyn and I padded around the bed, I noticed that the hot tub was literally a hole scooped out of the earth of the forest floor, sealed and smoothed with sorcery. Hot water, milky with mineral deposits, flowed in from a channel on one side of the tent and flowed out again through a channel on the other side.

It was a simple set up, but oh so effective.

Leah was already waiting for us, lounging on one side of the hot tub, basking in the water up to her nose, when Enwyn and I entered. I couldn’t see her smile, of course, as it was obscured by the milky color of the water, but her dark Chaosbane eyes were turned up at the corners.

I momentarily worried that there might be some sort of female friction between Leah and Enwyn. But I remembered the sight of the practically naked, prostate form on the bed when Enwyn and I had entered the tent.

I needn’t have worried.

Enwyn and I had slept together a few times now, and she had been with me from the very first day that I had set foot in this strange world. I still remembered the first time that I caught a glimpse of her womanly wiles and delights, while she had been taking a shower in my uncle's shop, after I had accidentally exploded one of her work colleagues. She had been my first peep into the female side of the Avalonian Kingdom, and still she got my pulse racing.

Leah, on the other hand, was an unknown entity. She was as capricious as the sea, as unpredictable as the movements of a shoal of fish, as dangerous and clever as a shark. She was the new kid on the block and, as such, there was an element of the unknown about her.

I had fantasized alot about this moment—about what Leah Chaosbane might be like in the sack. If she was half as crazy and as impulsive in the bedroom as she was outside of it, I would be lucky to come out of this encounter completely unscathed.

Definitely not unchanged.

Judging by the mischievous and excited smile playing around Leah’s lips as she sat up and surfaced from the hot pool, she had come to a similar conclusion.

“Come,” she said, with water streaming down her slender neck and perky breasts,  “here.”

Enwyn and I stepped down into the organic-looking hot pool. The water lapping at my knees was deliciously warm, the perfect temperature. The milky, gently flowing water had a wholesome mineral tang to it, a smell somewhere between earth and sea.

Enwyn instantly dropped down to her hands and knees, so that her perfect ass was pointing in my direction, just visible over the top of the water. She crept slowly and seductively toward Leah. The pink-haired minx reached out and pulled the raven-headed Fire Mage toward her, and they kissed hungrily.

“Don’t want to break these now, do we?” Leah said, pulling away from Enwyn and gently taking her spectacles from her pretty porcelain face. “It won’t be me who fucks you blind.”

She tossed the glasses carelessly over her shoulder. Instead of falling out of sight, the spectacles spread their arms and flapped over to one of the bedside tables and alighted there like a bird coming in to roost.

“How…“ I started to say, but the rest of my question stopped in mid-sentence.

There are some sights, such as the spectacle of two women softly running a sponge over each other’s jugs while making out, that will snatch the words clean out of your mouth and toss them away.

For a couple of minutes, I simply stood dumbfounded in the hot pool, with the gently flowing mineral water lapping around my thighs, and watched the erotic show play out in front of me. My cock twitched, as the two mages kissed sloppily, tongues licking and lapping at mouths. It was fair to say that all but one of my muscles had started to relax thanks to the fantastically hot water.

Eventually, I managed to pry my eyeballs away from the sight. Watching was fine in its own way, but I wanted to tag in and get involved. A man could only stand on the periphery and let two stunningly hot women go through the foreplay handbook for so long.

I slipped further into the white water, though my eyes continued to move slowly over the glorious sight of the two naked females in front of me.

“I think we should definitely make it a required post-party and post-mission relaxation technique back at the frat house,” I said as Leah disentangled herself from Enwyn for just long enough to shut off the faucet.

“Well, we could broach it to Barry, couldn’t we?” Enwyn said innocently. “I’m sure he could have a hole dug out in your yard in a matter of seconds. I’m sure your other fraternity brothers are not going to baulk at a little landscaping if it means that they can bring girls home and entertain them in a hot tub. I don’t think such a facility ever hurt a young man’s chances when it came to bedding the opposite sex?”

Leah tittered with amusement as she dipped her sponge back into the water and rubbed it over Enwyn’s chest. Enwyn’s big, dark nipples stood up like a couple of guardsmen coming to attention under Leah’s surprisingly gentle ministrations.

“Damn me, but it’d have to quite the hole if that Earth Mage of yours wanted to ever make use of it,” the pink-haired Chaos Mage said as she sponged Enwyn’s shoulders and neck. She ran her hands over the Fire Mage’s slick skin, causing goose flesh to rise for an instant.

Enwyn sat now, like a queen, leaning against one end of the spacious sunken hot tub, while Leah administered to her. Enwyn’s legs were spread wide, and Leah was nestled up against the slightly fuller figured woman as she cleaned her down. Enwyn groaned gently and slipped a hand beneath the surface of the milky water. She began to rub at Leah’s crotch while the Chaos Mage continued to smooth the sponge over her tits, gently chafing Enwyn’s nipples with the slightly abrasive sponge and, every now and again, leaning forward to bite the skin around the other woman’s nipples.

As I watched, entranced, I reached out and ran my own hand over Leah’s wet back. It was only then, in the dim firelight coming from the hearth, that I realized the Chaos Mage’s back was covered in a series of small—and not so small—scars.

There was a smattering of little puckered marks running up one flank and across her shoulders. A couple of longer slashes of white scar tissue decorated her lower ribs, and a star-shaped scar lay an inch to the right of her spine, almost dead in the middle of her back.

“I feel your eyes on me, Creation Mage,” Leah said, the sound of laughter in her voice. “Care to hazard a guess at how I got them?”

“You’re a Chaosbane, so… falling down the steps of the library while on your way to some temple or other to offer up heartfelt prayers to some deity or other?”

Leah threw back her head and laughed. Then she turned and looked at me, her face suddenly dead serious, and said, “Good guess? How did you know?”

I snorted and slapped her ass.

“You can tell me after we’re done here,” I said, running my hand across her wet buttcheeks and squeezing each of them in turn.

“Good idea. You better join us then, Justin Mauler,” Leah growled, giving Enwyn’s nipples a firm tweak so that the other woman gasped and bucked up against her. “You still look a little soiled.”

My cock throbbed with a building lust and intensity that almost had me tearing the women apart so that I could plunge myself into one of them. Here I was, with a curvy MILF on one side and a gymnast-cum-cosplay woman on the other.

What a way to bring in my very first Yuletide.

“You just sit back and let Leah and I clean each other up a little more first though,” Enwyn purred, a wicked grin lighting up her usually composed and reserved features. I liked her with her glasses off. There was something particularly sexy about it. As if she had divested herself of the very last bit of her usual propriety.

“You want me to wait?” I said, unable to keep the note of longing from my voice.

“Like the gentleman that we all know that you aren’t,” Enwyn Emberskull said.

I moaned and reached for the black-haired beauty, but Enwyn slapped my hand down.

“Then Leah and I will take care of you,” she said, in her most prim and proper secretary’s voice. “You just sit back and enjoy the show for now.”

I did as I was told. I had learned enough in my time at the Mazirian Academy to know that, very occasionally, it was prudent to bow to your superior, whether it be in the training arena or in the hot tub.

Enwyn squirmed against Leah’s wet, lithe body, sending the water sloshing about like a tempestuous ocean. Leah’s hands continued to glide over Enwyn’s porcelain skin, occasionally leaving nail marks in their wake. She carried on toying and teasing the older woman’s nipples for a while, until I could see that they were stiff enough to cut through a block of diamond. Then, slowly, deliberately, she moved her hands down, under the opaque water, following the humping motions that Enwyn was making in the watery depths. Enwyn moaned loudly and started to fuck Leah’s hand as the other woman fingered her with reckless abandon.

All this was happening under the water, obviously. Out of my sight maybe, but not out of my mind. Just because I could not see precisely what was going on did not detract from the scenario. In fact, the whole situation was almost made sexier because of that. I had seen how Enwyn, at least, liked to get down, and knew exactly how she liked to get off, and my imagination easily stepped in to fill in the blanks.

In saying that, I was champing at the bit to get my hands on Leah Chaosbane.

It was all I could do not to jump in there myself, as the two beautiful females finger-fucked one another. The longer I held out though, the better and more of a pleasure-fest it would be when I finally allowed myself to dive headlong into the action.

Every now and again, both Enwyn and Leah glanced directly at me as they played with each other, their mouths open, tongues moist and stuck between their teeth, eyes brimming over with pure carnality.

“Do you like watching, Justin?” Enwyn asked.

“Of course he does, you little minx,” Leah said. “Just look at him. He’s. . . ughhh.”

Leah started bucking more and more forcefully against Enwyn’s hand, grinding hard against her, forcing her back into the corner of the spa bath. Despite being the slighter woman, a sexual frenzy drove her and lent her prodigious strength. The muscles across her shoulders stood out like cords. Spit flew from her lips as she snarled and giggled to herself.

“That’s it, that’s where I want it, right there,” the Chaos Mage said into the other woman’s ear, all the while looking at me. She gave Enwyn a couple of playful little slaps across the face, bringing a blush to her pale cheeks.

Her motions became jerkier, even more forceful. Enwyn grunted and gasped as Leah crushed her into the corner of the natural hot tub, but continued pleasuring the woman under the hot, milky water.

Suddenly, Leah convulsed, the muscles in her back tightening. She let out a scream of pleasure. Then she suddenly stood up in the hot tub, water cascading down her thighs and legs. She was breathing hard, her abdominals showing down her long torso. She grinned at me.

“That was a close one!” she giggled. “Almost let myself get carried away there! Almost overstuffed myself with the starter and didn’t leave any room for the fucking main course!”

“Now,” she said, her dark eyes glittering with bad behavior yet to be done as she turned them on Enwyn, “it’s the turn of our good, wholesome Academy administrator here.”

Leah held out her hands, and Enwyn grasped them. With surprising ease, the Chaos Mage hoisted Enwyn up out of the bath and sat her on the edge of the sunken tub.

“Stay right there,” she said.

She spread the other woman’s unresisting legs so that she was almost doing the splits on the edge of the tub. Enwyn inhaled sharply, as water ran down between her heavy, heaving breasts, down the planes of her flat stomach, and over her wide open, soaking, pink sex.

“I know we haven’t known one another that long, cutie pie,” Leah whispered, her lips almost brushing the Enwyn’s pelvis, her breath tickling at the opening of her clit and lips, “but I’ve always been of the opinion that if one wanted to get laid, they should attend the Academy, if they wanted to get educated, they should go to a fucking library.”

“Well, technically I’m part of the Academy,” breathed Enwyn, smiling. “Looks to me like your theory is sound.”

”So, what you’re telling me is that, technically, I’m enrolled once again!” Leah said, and pulled Enwyn’s crotch hard up against her face. “Tell me what you think of my choice of majors.”

Leah went down on the other woman like a hungry dog devouring its breakfast, tonguing and slurping at Enwyn’s slit while the other woman ground her pelvis into the manic Chaos Mage’s face.

Leah was submerged to her shoulders in the hot tub, while Enwyn had her legs stretched as far as they could go.

I had the best seat in the house. Beside the two panting women in the capacious tub. Hot water up to my shoulders. Enwyn’s soaking wet pussy close enough to touch. I was close enough to see the smears and flecks of her girl juice covering Leah’s face as she probed at Enwyn’s box with her tongue, running it in circles around her clit.

Leah grunted and growled like some feral beast while she ate Enwyn out. She used her fingers to open the other woman’s vaginal lips as wide as she could so that she could get her tongue as deep as she could manage.

Showing her flexibility, the female Chaosbane stood up out of the water again and bent at the waist. This meant that she could continue practicing the tongue tornado on Enwyn while giving me a view that wouldn’t leave me until the day I died.

I reached out, slid my hand up one long, wet leg, and gave her backside a playful swat. Leah gasped but carried on working on Enwyn with her tongue and lips.

It did not take long, a few minutes at most, before I couldn’t take it anymore. Happily, this feeling coincided with Enwyn breathlessly saying, “Get in here, Justin, please! This is… this is wonderful, but it could be so much better. So much steamier. Take Leah. Take her. Take her now.”

“Yeah, Justin,” Leah somehow managed to say through a mouthful of pussy, “how come you’re not involving me, huh?”

I surged up out of the water and, in one smooth motion, grabbed Leah by her hips and thrust into her gaping, tight sex from behind.

Leah cried out with pleasure, reaching backward to spread her asscheeks for me.

With that insertion, a surging tingle of magic flowed through me, from the tip of my cock all the way through my body to the ends of my hair and toes. It was a feeling that I couldn’t really quantify, a roiling confusion of energy that ripped through me, but I had never felt the likes of it before.

It was Chaos. Pure Chaos. It was the feeling of being capable of anything and everything, of being able to hold the very best and the very worst of yourself in the palm of your hand. It was the feeling of being your own boss, of being answerable to yourself and yourself alone.

Leah cried out in ecstasy as I pumped away at her doggy-style, my balls slapping into her clit with a wet smacking sound. With every stroke, her face was forced into Enwyn’s crotch. Soon, all three of us were grunting and gasping like we were running an epic marathon.

The weird energy I had felt on first entering Leah morphed into the more identifiable feeling of a need that required fulfillment. It was building and building and building.

Leah reached back with one hand and slipped a pink-nailed finger into her own asshole. I have to say, it was probably the most impressive feat of multi-tasking that I had ever witnessed.

“Harder, harder, harder!” she ordered me, her words jerking out of her as I rammed my rod into her.

I took the not-so-subtle hint and started fucking her with a renewed vigor. Trying to touch some place inside of her that would send her over the edge.

“Wait, wait, I’m close, I’m close!” Enwyn suddenly cried out after a while. Her fingers were tangled in Leah’s pink hair, pulling it out of the schoolgirl pigtails. “Justin come here and finish me off!”

I didn’t need to be told twice.

I pulled out of Leah, the Chaos Mage moving obediently aside and smacking my ass as I sloshed past her, while Enwyn lay back on the tiled floor. She was still on the edge of the sunken hot tub, but her back was now lying on the rugs and furs that littered the floor. The firelight danced off the drops of water on her naked body, turning the water droplets to shining silver beads. She opened her legs wide and pointed them at the tent ceiling.

I grabbed Enwyn by the ankles, forced her legs as wide as they would go, and speared her with my cock. It took only a few minutes of furious fucking before she started moaning and whining. Then, as I thrust into her, she abruptly convulsed and screamed in pure unadulterated satisfaction.

I pulled out, and a gush of liquid flowed out of my cock as Enwyn came like a storm cloud bursting, her girl cum flooding over my pelvis. Her face screwed up as she inhabited that middle world between intense pleasure and delectable pain.

At the touch of hands on my shoulders, I turned to see Leah right behind me.

“Fuck me,” she said simply. “Spin my fucking head.”

I gave my head a little shake.

“Not here,” I said in a hoarse voice, thick with longing. “On the bed. After we climax, I want us to be comfortable in our own space, laid back and chilled out.”

Leah didn’t waste words. Instead, she hopped out of the bath, wiped water from her body with her hands, and jumped with a girlish cry of delight onto the huge bed.

Hurriedly, I scooped up the still prostrate form of the orgasming Enwyn and deposited her on the rugs in front of the fire.

I turned toward the bed.

In the dancing shadows and orange glow of the fire, Leah looked like some sinuous she-devil kneeling on the bed. She swayed in anticipation, running her nails over her body. She bit her lip and made a high little whining sound in her throat.

“You look like you’re waiting for someone,” I quipped.

Leah launched herself at me.

She might have been built like a rapier, but she hit like a goddamn sledgehammer; all tight, hard muscle, taut abs, and sinewy arms that shocked me with their strength. Her nails raked across every exposed bit of flesh that she could get her hands on as she sprung at me like a cougar on heat and wrapped her legs around me.

With a grunt, I caught her slippery naked body. Her nails grazed my shoulders in the throes of her passion. As Enwyn watched contentedly from the collection of hearth rugs, I managed to wrangle Leah into a position that allowed us to come together, and my cock slipped inside her.

With my hands full of ass, I pressed Leah up against the smooth, giving wall of the tent, pounding into her with a savagery that she clearly delighted in. The springy tent wall only served to force the Chaos Mage back into me, doubling the force of my thrusts. Her long, pink hair, free of its bindings and wet with bathwater, slapped into my face as she lunged in to kiss my neck and face like a striking cobra. Her nails dug into my back as I spun her around. We knocked a hanging mirror and a matching hanging shelf full of agricultural knick-knacks, packets of gum, and magazines that looked ancient and highly pornographic off the wall.

“Fuck, yes!” Leah grunted, her lips mashed against mine. “That’s it. Don’t fuck me like a man. Fuck me like an animal! We’re in the woods, there are no rules here! Not on this ranch!”

We teetered around on the spot and fell over an innocent footstool, smashing the legs off it. With the impact, a surge of animal satisfaction passed through me, vibrating through every cell of me.

Chaos! Everything was possible. There were no limits except the ones that we imposed on ourselves.

I could feel that chaotic influence coming from Leah. It emanated from her crotch, mingling with her juices coating my hips and cock and balls.

It was far from an unpleasant feeling. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and the skin along Leah’s buttocks and legs turned to gooseflesh under my palms. I sensed, rather than saw, a halo of white fire surrounding the pair of us.

What made sex with this woman so electric, so fraught with dangerous possibility, was that somewhere behind our human emotions and human needs, lurked sexual deviance begging to be let through.

Leah and I smashed our way around the tent while Enwyn lay exhausted and content on the pile of rugs and mats and watched us, her fingers toying casually with her own nipples or, occasionally, her pussy.

Eventually, I put Leah down a sideboard and pounded into her with a single-minded intensity that can only lead to one outcome. The pink-haired mage’s hands were behind her head, pressed flat against the tent wall. Her eyes screwed shut in rapture as we fucked, her fingers digging into the canvas of the tent and threatening to tear through into the night beyond.

When my pumping pace had reached an unsustainable velocity, Leah arched her back, clawed desperately at my face and shoulders, and took a deep breath.

“Yes!” she screamed and, at the exact same moment as her, I came. There was a dull rip as the heavy leather seams holding the panels of the tent together broke, letting in a pleasant burst of fresh night air.

Both of us, it goes without saying, were too far gone to care about that.

Reeling on suddenly rubbery legs, I carried Leah to the bed and flung her down. With an exhausted sounding laugh, she rolled around and giggled. “Oh, that was nice. A lovely lullaby with which to be rocked. Yummy, yummy, yummy.”

Enwyn crawled up from the nest of blankets and onto the bed.

Breathing hard, I flopped down between the two women. The meat in the babe sandwich.

Enwyn and I lay back panting and grinning up at the canvas roof. Leah, still sitting up and looking into the fire with her back arched, slowly relaxed. The muscles across her back and shoulders visibly loosened, and she let out a long, shuddering breath which ended in a low contented giggle.

I ran my eyes over Leah’s back, taking in the numerous battle scars that had so surprised me when she had twisted around in my lap and rode me in reverse cowgirl fashion. A little rivulet of sweat meandered its way past what was either a small sword cut or a large claw mark.

Most of the small, puckered shrapnel scars were hidden now by her long pink hair. I had to admit that I preferred it down like that, but figured having it tied up in schoolgirl-like bunches was an effective and simple misdirection. It helped create a thin veneer of innocence for a woman who was about as innocent as a man going for a nocturnal stroll through a mansion dressed in a striped sweater and a mask and carrying a sack with a dollar sign on it.

I laid a hand upon Leah’s petite, slender shoulder and pulled her back onto the bed to lie on my left side. On my right side, Enwyn was already breathing deeply. Her tits were pushed up against me, one shapely naked leg lying on top of the furs, her raven hair splayed across her pillow.

Leah settled in beside me, pulled a particularly fluffy white fur over her, and snapped her fingers. One of her trademark black cigarettes appeared between her fingers, and she lit it with a wink.

“Some magic,” I murmured. “You make it look so damned easy to use. You’re not a Fire Mage, but yet you can do shit like that. How?”

Leah took a drag on her smoke, and the tip crackled and spat salmon-colored sparks. She exhaled a plume of clove-scented smoke from her nostrils and watched as it languidly twined itself into something that might have been Celtic knot.

“How do you breathe?” she countered.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means, explain to me how you breathe, right this instant, how you know how to breathe, how you know how to do it, you little sugar snap pea,” Leah said.

I opened my mouth, but no words came out.

“That’s how I know how to do these little handy spells, you see,” Leah said. “I can’t explain. I don’t really care to know. Life is sweeter with a bit of mystery running through it, don’t you think?”

“Life would be dull if everything was explainable,” I conceded.

“Right.” Leah blew another stream of smoke up toward the tent ceiling.

I noticed the plain canvas was darkening, dots of light appearing in it. For a second, I thought that holes were being poked in the canvas above, but then I realized that more and more lights were appearing. One was far bigger than all the rest, although it was still only the size of my thumbnail: the moon.

Leah noticed my transfixed stare.

“Enchanted ceiling,” she said. “Standard camping spell for Chaosbanes.”

“Big star-gazers, are you?” I asked.

“Big medicament enthusiasts,” Leah said.

“Ah.”

“Now, if you put a vector to my pretty, muddled head and forced me to hypothesize on how I can work a bit of Fire Magic, though…” Leah continued. “I would probably say there’s a certain amount of potential Chaos in Fire, isn’t there? Even now, a teeny-weeny part of my brain was thinking what an adorbs spectacle this little tent would make were we to just fucking set it on fire!”

The fire, burning merrily in the stone hearth, seemed to lick a little higher up the chimney at her words. Almost like a dog raising its head from its basket, unsure if someone said ‘walk’ or simply a word that sounded a lot like it.

Without looking, Leah flicked the butt of her black cigarette at the fireplace, and it vanished into the hot incandescent heart of the flames.

“Still, it’s a little nippy out there,” the female Chaosbane said, stretching like one sexy-ass cat and snuggling closer into me, “and I don’t much fancy walking up to the house in nothing but my skin. That’d make it four Yuletides in a row.”

“Another pro for this blustery snowy weather, huh?” I said. “Keeping you in here with me and Enwyn.”

Leah made a little sighing sound that sent shivers through me. It boggled my mind that the airy-fairy enigmatic woman could even sigh sexily.

“Snow… rain… sleet, it’s all just another kind of good weather, honey bunny,” she said. “People just forget to see that, I think.”

We lay in silence for a few moments, the crackle and pop of the slowly dying fire and the deep, even breathing of Enwyn lulling the two of us closer and closer to sleep.

“I’m still a little disappointed that I couldn’t provide that sweet little tuchus of yours with a sexy little smidgen of Chaos Magic,” Leah said.

I shrugged very slowly, so as not to wake Enwyn. “Yeah, I mean it would have been nice, don’t get me wrong,” I said, “but this Inscriber up at the Castle of Ascendance, the one who was apparently in cahoots with my old man, should be able to help me open up some new spell slots.”

Leah rolled onto her side to face me. She smelled beguilingly of sweat, sex, and orange blossoms. In the fuzzy, post-coital glow, I thought that ‘Sweat, Sex, and Orange Blossoms’ would make a great title for a punk album. Maybe I could pitch it to NOFX or something.

“And if this mysterious Inscriber ally of ours is able to help you open up your slots,” she purred innocently in my ear, “I guess that means we get to do this again, and I’ll open up my very special slot for you, honey bunny.” Her voice dropped an octave lower. “And then, I’ll show you what I can really do.”

“That,” I said, “sounds extremely enticing. And I suppose that this was only day one of the Yuletide festivities.”

“That’s right,” Leah said, running a finger around my nipple and then pinching it hard. “So, it’s only right that we ease into things.”

If the first day on Chaosbane Ranch was anything to go by, our time here would see me and the rest of the gang as busy as moths in a mitten.

“Care to tell me what tomorrow might have in store for us?” I asked Leah, draping my arm around her and squeezing her nipple in return. It hardened under my touch, and the pink-haired beauty next to me gave a little moan.

“Do you need to prepare yourself, you delicate bloom, is that it?” Leah teased gently.

“With you fucking wackos? Absolutely,” I said.

Leah leaned forward and casually bit me on my pectoral muscle, leaving a perfect ring of teeth marks. Then she licked me.

“Oh, tomorrow!” she whispered enthusiastically. “Tomorrow, you’ll get to experience a real treat! You’ll be taking part in a genuine Chaosbane family tradition; the Hunting of the Eggnog Gnomes!”

The fire spat, the logs crumbling and settling down for the evening. I had no doubt  snow was falling outside, but inside the tent, all was calm, all was peaceful.

“Right,” I said, staring up at the enchanted night sky above me. “Eggnog Gnomes. Right. Just another day on the ranch, then.”

Chapter 6

The next morning we were up at a time that would have been offensive on any normal day, had it not been for a trifecta of key components that took the edge off the extremely early hour.

The first integrant was that the one doing the stirring was a half-naked Leah Chaosbane.

The leggy Chaos Mage stood next to the bed, peering down at me, her pink hair tumbling over her shoulders in waves that were at once both messy and, somehow, stylish. She was wearing her usual blue woollen sweater that rode up her navel, with its usual assortment of small rips and burn holes. From the hem of that sweater down, she was buck ass naked.

My sleep encrusted eyes opened a little wider. The contrast that the sexy young woman presented, with the top half of her looking like she had been dressed by a doddering grandmother while the bottom half revealed a tight ass and a perfectly shaved love-box, was one that even my drowsy libido could get behind—and in front of, for that matter.

Leah grinned down at me, looking as bright-eyed as if she had gone to bed with a mug of cocoa and a bedtime story and got a full eight hours into the bargain, instead of partaking in an all-night bender in the forests of the Chaosbane ranch. She held out her hand, and the second little bit of metaphorical balm was applied to my brow; she was holding a steaming cup of—

“A Chaosbane kickstarter,” Leah said.

I took the proffered cup gingerly. Probably in the same manner that I might have taken receipt of a claymore mine.

“What’s a Chaosbane kickstarter?” I asked.

“Coffee, silly,” Leah said. “A very rare djinn blend that Aunt Ruth gets smuggled in through the Port of Delaborg, but shhhhhhh, that’s our little secret.”

“Coffee?” I asked, sniffing at the steaming brew, which was as dark as sin.

“Coffee,” Leah assured me.

I took a sip.

“Mostly,” she added.

I swallowed.

“A very little bit of coffee, maybe,” Leah said.

Whatever alcohol was acting as the kick in this Chaosbane kickstarter ran across my tongue and down my throat like lighted petroleum. I gasped, waiting for the hammerblow to the cranium that surely must come next.

“Better?” Leah asked.

I opened my eyes, which I had unintentionally screwed up against the nauseating alcoholic punishment. To my incredulous delight, I felt fine—better than fine. I felt like a man who was ready to face whatever crap the day cared to fling at him.

“Yeah,” I said. “Much better. What’s the kick?”

“Twisted Dog Lips,” Leah said, turning around and bending over so that I was given a view that would have put a horn on a jellyfish, before she straightened up and started pulling on her pair of high-waisted trousers.

“What the hell is Twisted Dog Lips?” I asked.

“Great Granddaddy’s homebrew.” Leah pulled her pink locks up into her habitual messy pigtails. “He calls it Twisted Dog Lips because he reckons it makes your brain feel like how a dog’s lips look when you give it a spoonful of peanut butter.”

I twisted around and saw that Enwyn was already up and dressed, running a brush through her raven locks.

“Not bad stuff that, is it?” she said to me as she twisted her hair up into a very proper and dignified bun.

“Not bad at all,” I admitted.

I kicked off the blankets and took another slurp of the coffee concoction. The effects didn’t lessen. If anything, they increased.

“All right,” I said, “let’s go hunting for… What’re we hunting for again?”

“Eggnog Gnomes,” Leah said, sitting down on the edge of the bed to pull her boots on.

“Yeah,” I said, “those things.”

I always found myself being grateful for Igor’s morphing cloak when it came to getting dressed after a big night. The magical garment made getting ready an absolute breeze. I just slung it over my shoulders, pictured the sort of gear that I wanted to be dressed in that day, and pop, there I was attired in the very garb I had imagined. The magic held itself in place until I made a conscious decision to change it or remove it, which also gave me peace of mind that I wasn’t about to find myself with my pecker on show for the public during some inopportune moment, like a fight to the death.

We stepped out of the tent a couple of shakes of a lamia’s tail later, and I was greeted by the third thing that made waking up early today a wonderful thing.

The sun was just poking its face over the eastern horizon. A few fingers of crisp, early morning light managed to sneak their way through the pine boughs and the shaggy branches of the trees surrounding the ranch. The golden shafts of sunlight were so clear cut that they looked newly minted, almost like no one had laid eyes on them and sullied them. A few early birds called to one another. Except for them, there was not a single other sound, not even the wind.

“What’s the time?” I asked, looking around at the incredible peaceful stillness blanketing the forest like an invisible miasma.

“Why does that matter? Leah said, coming to stand next to me.

She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and exhaled happily. Her breath smoked in the air, drifting out to hang in the frosty halcyon air.

“It’s early,” the Chaos Mage said. “Fucking perfect o’clock in the morning, sugarplums. Time for us to go up to the house, get changed, and have breakfast.”

Leah started striding away through the trees, cutting through the sparse woods instead of taking the path with a confidence that told me she knew exactly what direction the ranch house lay in.

“Get changed?” I called after her.

“Oh, yes,” the long-legged stunner replied as Enwyn and I began to tramp after her through the creaking snow. “You don’t think that you can partake in something as steeped in tradition as the Chaosbane family Eggnog Gnome Hunt and not dress for the occasion, do you?”

Somehow, despite the warming glow that had suffused my brain and intestines after that Chaosbane kickstarter, her words still managed to fill me with trepidation.

We ate breakfast together around an enormous dining table in one of the ranch’s ludicrously appointed rooms. Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock presided at the head of the table, of course, with Aunt Ruth to one side of him and Mort to the other. Reginald sat at the other end of the table. The rest of us were spaced between them. The table was heaped with all the sorts of food that you crave after a night on the libations; fries, hamburgers, bacon and eggs, pancakes, pizza that looked like it had been taken out of the fridge and reheated, and curry.

Across from me, Igor was constructing a dish out of a selection of ingredients that I would not have thought would go together.

“What are you working on there, Igor?” I asked.

Igor looked up. His eyes, which were usually bloodshot to the point where the whites of his eyes could more accurately be called the reds, were surprisingly clear. His mustache was free of its usual powders, twigs, and bits of miscellaneous fluff and crumbs.

“This, young man, is my patented pancake sandwich,” Igor said happily, picking up the maple syrup bottle. “Sausage, eggs, bacon, and chocolate wafers sandwiched between two pancakes. Liberally doused in maple syrup.” He poured about half a gallon of syrup over the gastronomic heartstopper on his plate. “It’s a breakfast designed to stave off even the most dogged of hangovers. Step two in my two-step system, which enables a mage to rise early and without a morning head that makes them feel like if they sneeze they’ll have an aneurysm.”

“I can’t believe that I’m sayin’ this, sir,” Barry Chillgrave said, from where he was floating a couple of places along from me, “but ye don’t look hungover to me.”

“Ah,” Igor the wisenheimer said, “that would be thanks to step one in the two-step anti-hangover program.”

“And what’s step one?” I asked.

“At least a quart of Demon’s Mouthwash,” Igor replied at once. “Administered to the gullet and sent down to the stomach on the moment of waking.”

Igor picked up his pancake sandwich, syrup dripping all over his fingers. He took a bite and sighed appreciatively. He swallowed and said, “Best make sure that you don’t have a candle burning on the bedside table when you put step one into practice. Demon’s Mouthwash is one of those potent little numbers that’s roughly ninety-five percent alcohol.”

I laughed, shook my head, and applied myself to my bacon sandwich.

“Pass the ember salt will you, Idman, old chum?” Reginald asked Idman from his end of the table.

Idman took a sip of the tea that he was drinking and prodded with a finger the salt cellar. The glass and silver shaker set off sedately down the table, meandering its way through the maze of dishes, cups, and implements that littered the table until it came to a halt next to Reginald’s plate.

“Thanks kindly,” Reginald said, applying the ember salt to his meal.

“What is ember salt?” I asked the Headmaster. I was always intrigued by these small details of mage life. The more in your face things such as murderous trolls, Eldritch prisons, and regenerating after dying in the War Mage arena were preposterous aspects of life, but easy to understand. For some reason, the everyday, household things like this held their own little mysterious allure.

“Well, you know smoked salt, mate?” Reginald said. “That fancy seasoning that the swanky inns and eateries are all about at the moment, even in Nevermoor?”

I nodded.

“Ember salt is fancier still,” he said, “and packs a tiny bit more punch to the tastebuds than the smoked stuff.”

“Right, that’s enough of everyone’s blather,” Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock said, banging his coffee cup on the table in place of a gavel to call for order. The cup shattered and spilled coffee everywhere, but the old man paid it no heed.

“All my clan know what this hunt of ours entails,” he said in his cracked and cantankerous voice. “For those of you who are new here, I shall give you a brief explanation.”

The patriarch of the Chaosbane clan got unsteadily to his feet, unhooked his walking stick, which we all knew was his vector, and began pacing around the table, all the better to say his piece.

“The reasons that we Chaosbanes take part—and have always taken part—in the Eggnog Gnome Hunt around this time of year are twofold,” the crusty old fellow said. “The first reason is because the Eggnog Gnomes are annoying little shits. I’m a man who calls a broomstick a broomstick, and that’s the truth of the matter: they’re the sort of nuisance that makes my damn crotch itch! They’re—”

Leah snorted into her bowl of chicken and mud-nut noodles. “By the gods, it’s a bit early in the morning for talk of itchy crotches, Great Grandaddy!”

The old man scowled. “Oh, I’m sorry, my dear,” he said, “did the middle of my sentence interrupt yours?”

Leah rolled her dark eyes and blew Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock a kiss.

“As I was saying,” the grumpy codger continued, “the Eggnog Gnomes are overpopulated in this area and cause no end of mischief in the winter months when their sex drives make them a damned penance to the locals.”

I had a lot of questions already, but I knew when to keep my lip buttoned.

“To try and keep the numbers of the Eggnog Gnomes down and to stop the creatures from rampaging around the district stealing everyone’s underpants and raiding liquor cabinets,” Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock carried on seriously, “the first Chaosbane that built this fine settlement organized a hunt to be partaken by the family, and so the tradition was started. A few generations later, it was decided that the hunt could also be used as a point scoring system to decide who had the honor of carving the Yuletide Log on Yuletide Eve.”

“The Yuletide what now?” I blurted before I could stop myself.

“Log, Mr. Mauler,” Reginald said. “The big, long, steaming Yuletide Log, yet another Chaosbane family tradition.”

“Do you bake it?” I asked speculatively.

“In a manner of speaking,” Mort said.

“Enough blather!” Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock said once again. “Now that the reasoning behind it has been explained, how about we ruddy well get out there and get to blasting those little heathens out of the sky. Is everyone ready?”

“I feel a bit iffy,” Igor said thickly through a mouthful of pancake sandwich.

“Oh, Igor,” Aunt Ruth said, dabbing at her lips with a napkin, “don’t worry, dear. The first forty years of childhood is often said to be the hardest.”

Leah stood on her chair, walked across the table, and dropped nimbly down to stand next to me. She took me by the hand and pulled me toward the door. “Come on, you,” she said enthusiastically, “let’s get tooled up. We don’t want to get lumbered with the shitty thundercusses, do we?”

“I don’t know,” I said as I was dragged out of the room and down a hallway. “Do we? What the shit is a thundercuss?”

Chapter 7

Our group of ten was dressed in striking matching outfits: long robes over warm trousers tucked into our boots, warm woolen mittens, and the types of deer stalking hats made famous by Sherlock Holmes. All in a lurid, safety-orange color.

When I had asked whether the color was to protect us all from accidentally popping one another if we got separated, Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock had looked at me seriously and said, “Gods no, boyo, it’s because those little devils, the Eggnog Gnomes, can’t see this shade of orange for some reason. Means we can nail more of the pests before they can figure out where the fire is coming from!”

“So, you meant a blunderbuss?” I said to Leah as we walked across the untouched snow of the lawns, our footsteps the first things to mar the surface that day.

“I don’t know what you’re going on about with all your talk of blunderbusses,” Leah said, “but what you’re holding there is a thundercuss, a weapon of Chaosbane design that is only brandished to do humane battle against the Eggnog Gnomes.”

I turned the formidable-looking weapon over in my hands. It certainly looked like a blunderbuss, almost exactly like one. The device had a stock that could have been taken straight off the most expensive bespoke Purdey & Sons shotgun, all beautiful hand carvings and intricate etchings. The part of the thundercuss that passed for a barrel looked more like a brass instrument of some kind, a trombone possibly, or the horn from a gramophone.

“This is a Chaosbane design?” I asked.

“That’s correct, Justin,” Mort said quietly from behind me.

I almost jumped; the guy was just so quiet that you literally never heard him coming. No wonder he was one of the best and most infamous bounty hunters in Avalonia.

“It’s not going to explode in my face, is it?” I asked, only half-jokingly.

“Ye of little faith,” Leah scolded me theatrically. “You should know by now that genius lies along the edge of lunacy, honey-kitten.”

I had to smile at that. I didn’t think a truer description could have been given about any one of the Chaosbanes.

“Okay,” I said, “I trust you, so tell me how to work it and why we’re using these things instead of magic.”

“There would be no challenge, no honor, in using magic to pluck the Eggnog Gnomes from the sky,” Mort said.

“From the sky?” I asked.

Mort frowned slightly and stroked one long, pale finger down a wispy blonde-white sideburn.

“Of course, Eggnog Gnomes are tree-dwellers, Justin,” he said. “As the elder Chaosbane, Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock rouses them from their nests with the Hoodwinking Horn. Being nosy creatures, the Eggnog Gnomes exit the trees, gliding between their little hideouts on membranes of hide that are attached from their elbows to their ankles.”

I made a face. “They fly? I thought we’d be lying up by the lakeside somewhere, waiting for them to come down to do a spot of fishing while they sat on a toadstool or… something.”

Mort was looking at me as if I had gone completely bonkers.

“No,” he said simply.

Leah tapped the little sack of powder that hung at my belt. “Take a handful of blasting powder, drop it down the barrel, point and fire.”

“And this blasting powder just kills them, does it?” I asked.

“No, no, no, no, mate,” Reginald said, slowing down when he overheard the conversation Leah, Mort, and I were having. “Yuletide is not the time to go around killing things now, is it?”

“There’s the whole rest of the year for that,” Mort said soberly.

“Quite,” agreed Reginald. “No, the powder, along with the subtle spell that imbues the inside of each barrel, if it hits, simply sterilizes the Eggnog Gnome.”

“You blow its bits off?” I asked, shocked.

“Good grief, Mr. Mauler, I admit that I have made more than one morally skewed decision in my life,” the Headmaster said, “but as far as shooting the bollocks off random woodland creatures goes. That, sir, is where I draw the line!”

“The gnome is unconscious for a short time,” Mort explained in his calm, slightly eerie voice. “While they are insensate, the powder and spell render them unable to produce more young. They can still…” the pale bounty hunter turned a slight shade of pink and tailed off.

“They can still make twenty toes, is what my bashful cousin means,” Leah said, magicking a black cigarette out of thin air, sticking it between her teeth, and lighting it with a prod of her pinky. “The thundercusses don’t stop that. The Chaosbanes might be maniacs, but we’re not monsters.”

We continued onward, into the heart of a thick belt of woodland behind the house. The sun was still only a finger’s breadth over the eastern horizon when I lost sight of it. We found ourselves encircled by evergreen trees that looked like they had been young when the dinosaurs had been roaming the land—if there had ever been such things as dinosaurs on a world which still hosted dragons.

The smell of pinewoods relaxed my mind. They smelled of life, although life that was dormant and sleepy and brooding. The pine needles above, which made up the roof of this many pillared arboreal hall, kept out the worst of the snow and all but the most insidious breezes. The pine needles underfoot deadened all sound and muted our footfalls.

I fell in next to Enwyn as Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock led the way through the trees. Evidently, the old-timer had a specific spot in mind because he pushed along without hesitation even though I could not discern any visible path. The trees were healthy and full of needles and pine cones, but they were old and widely spaced too. The first of their boughs started some three yards above the lanky Mort’s head.

“We’re getting close to their first nesting site,” Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock told us. “Everyone, ready your thundercusses.”

I took a handful of purple powder from the small sack at my waist and dropped it down the wide mouth of the thundercuss’s barrel. It seemed strange that this was all there was to it, but scanning around at the others in the group, I saw they were all doing the same.

“Have you ever hunted Eggnog Gnomes before, Justin?” Enwyn asked me. She had not been with me when I had been chatting to Leah, Mort, and Reginald, instead walking along with Aunt Ruth, Igor, and Idman.

“Oh, sure,” I said drily. “The whole time that we’ve known each other, I’ve been getting dressed up as a traffic cone and sneaking off to go on these little Eggnog Gnome hunting trips. No, I don’t even know what the fuck an Eggnog Gnome is. At least, I didn’t know until I was given the rundown just now.”

Enwyn grinned. “The Chaosbanes keep you on your toes, don’t they?”

“That,” I said, “is putting it mildly.”

We continued onward until we were pulled up by Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock. The old man motioned everyone to remain quiet, and then unslung a small and battered horn from his shoulder. He put it to his lips and blew a blast on it that sounded like a decrepit foghorn. It echoed through the trees, bouncing off the boles like a lemur leaping from trunk to trunk.

As the last of the echoes died away, there was an abrupt rustling sound from all around us. The tree branches up in the heights began to shake and quiver. Pine needles started falling like vegetative rain.

Then, the Eggnog Gnomes emerged.

The little creatures were the size of the garden gnomes we had back on Earth, but that was where the similarities ended. They were wild, gnarled things, humanoid, and dressed in simple fur loincloths. Their bodies were covered in a downy fuzz. Their hands had only two long, clawed fingers that looked ideal for grasping onto tree boles and branches.

As Mort had described, they had stretches of membrane or skin running from their elbows to their ankles, much as flying foxes did. They zipped from tree to tree, dodging nimbly amongst the branches and trunks, as fleet in the air as swallows. As they swooped, they made a grating chattering sound, which I took to be their language.

“Ho, gnomes!” Aunt Ruth cried at the top of her lungs.

It became immediately apparent how the thundercusses had come by their names. They went off with detonations that would have done a mortar tube credit. The recoil from my weapon was equivalent to being kicked in the shoulder by a mule with a bug up its ass.

Eggnog Gnomes were blown from the air as they zipped backward and forward above us, tumbling down to land with soft thumps on the pine needles coating the forest floor like an organic crashmat.

Even in the face of that initial thunderous barrage, the gnomes continued zooming this way and that. Clearly, they couldn’t make us out, dressed as we were in our gaudy orange shooting apparel.

I missed my first gnome, my shot going slightly high and blasting a tree branch to smithereens in a cloud of purple dust.

I reloaded quickly and automatically, my hand reaching for the pouch at my waist. Once I was reloaded, I tracked a particularly plump flying Eggnog Gnome as he dive-bombed from on high, heading for a large branch off to my right. I tracked the fat flyer, took a breath, and squeezed the trigger.

The shot hit the Eggnog Gnome square in the guts and blasted him from the air. He landed almost directly at my feet. Looking down, I thought I couldn’t have picked a better specimen to scoop from the gene pool. He was the sort of ugly that would have frightened a vulture off a gut pile.

We continued plugging away at the gnomes for a good five minutes before the dumb little brutes packed it in and disappeared to whatever homes they made up in the treetops.

To nobody’s surprise, when the unconscious, snoring Eggnog Gnomes were counted, Mort was leading the scoreboard.

Seeing that there was no real way to distinguish who had shot what, I figured there would be a fair amount of cheating. However, it soon became obvious that the Eggnog Gnome Hunt was about as sacred a tradition as there could be and none of the Chaosbanes would even think about sneaking an extra gnome to their total or claiming one that had been popped out of the air by someone else.

The morning passed quickly in this fashion. It was, unsurprisingly, quite a nice, guilt-free way to hunt. Not only were we partaking in an activity that was just plain fun, but we were almost doing the local environment a favor: bringing down numbers of pests without actually killing anything. That sort of thing would have earned you a freakin’ Nobel Prize back on Earth.

We stopped for a simple hunters’ repast of cheese, bread, meat, and pickles in the mid-morning. While we all perched on logs and the Chaosbanes regaled one another with past Eggnog Gnome hunting exploits, Aunt Ruth came over to sit with me. It was quite a feat to look attractive dressed in the absurd hunting gear, but somehow the older woman did not look half as stupid as I felt.

“Are you enjoying yourself so far, Mr. Mauler?” she asked, handing me one of the bottles of port, which Igor had seen as his duty to bring along.

“I am, Aunt Ruth,” I said. “I mean it sounds fun on paper, but in practice, it’s one hell of a way to shake off the last cobwebs of a hangover.”

Aunt Ruth laughed. “I’m glad that we’re able to entertain you.”

“Yeah, there’s an element of entertainment, I guess,” I said, “but I’ll admit, I’m out to be the one that gets to carve that Yuletide Log.”

Aunt Ruth leaned forward. “Do you have a competitive nature?”

“I guess that all War Mages probably do, don’t they?”

“A fair point,” the older woman said, pushing a stray curl out of her face with one finger and tucking it behind her ear. “You strike me as a distinctly hot-blooded man, though.”

I shrugged and smiled. Took another bite from the chunk of delicious wholemeal bread I was holding and a swig from the port bottle. I handed the tasty, sweet wine back to Aunt Ruth.

“I have been known to get a bit carried away in the heat of combat,” I said to her after I had swallowed.

The older woman leaned further in. She placed a hand on my thigh, perhaps a little higher up my leg than might be considered acceptable in polite company.

“Just in the heat of combat?” she asked in a slightly husky voice.

I looked up, a little startled. “There are other times too,” I said, careful to keep my tone neutral. I cast an eye at Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock, who was sitting on a tree stump ten yards away and discussing something with Mort, Idman, and Barry.

“I bet there are,” Aunt Ruth said, a smirk playing across her lips. “I know exactly what you’re talking about, young man.”

She got to her feet and took a deep breath. Even through the shapelessness of the orange robe, I could detect the outlines of those great, full breasts of hers.

“Perhaps,” she said, “one day soon, we might get a chance to sit quietly together and compare notes.”

I didn’t have the chance to say anything smart. By the time I realized I’d just been propositioned, the sexy older aunt had sashayed away.

I puffed out my cheeks and got to my feet as Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock called the party to order once more.

What a holiday this was turning out to be.

Our next port of call on our hunting trip was a glade which was open to the sky. Within this wide, open scar in the forest were a smattering of mighty oaks.

“Right,” Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock instructed us, “this, as my kin well know, is somewhat of a hotspot for those pestilential gnomes. All of you spread out around this clearing. When you’re all set, I’ll let sound the horn and you can get to blasting!”

Full of vim and port, those of us who were shooting—everyone bar Barry and Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock—spread ourselves around the area as directed.

Our venerable, white-haired host, whose on-again-off-again geniality kept everybody on high alert, blew on the Hoodwinking Horn.

The Eggnog Gnomes descended in a swarming flurry the likes of which we had not yet seen. The grapefruit-sized humanoids zipped to and fro, nattering excitedly to one another in their awful language. Thundercuss shots ripped through the still forest air once more, sending birds cawing indignantly skyward. Gnomes fell, limp and out cold, to the deck. We all had our eyes in now. Had all become quick and adept at reloading the thundercusses from our powder sacks.

I spun in a crouch, drawing a bead on an athletic gnome that shot through the glade like a miniature F-15 Eagle. I pulled the trigger a millisecond ahead of the flying figure so that my shot caught it square on and the gnome tumbled from the air. I was reloading fresh powder into my weapon before the downed Eggnog Gnome had even hit the ground, then it was up on my shoulder once more as I tracked a new target. The next gnome swept in closer to me. When I nailed it, it was propelled through a tangle of branches that cracked and splintered. The gnome came to a halt, dangling upside down and snoring in one of the bare oak trees.

It was beautiful mayhem. The booming echo of the thundercusses, the purple smoke misting the area, and the whoops and yells of my friends as they blasted away at the plethora of targets. I was having a whale of a time, right up until the point that Igor shot me.

In the heat of the hunt, I was tracking a speedy little gnome that was more aware than the rest of the scatterbrained creatures. I got the impression that this Eggnog Gnome was taunting me; zooming from tree to tree just fast enough to thwart me from getting a clean shot.

“I’ve got you now, you little shit,” I muttered to myself, following the gnome around one of the oaks, my thundercuss pressed to my shoulder.

The Eggnog Gnome paused, peering down at me and jabbering from where it had come to rest on the trunk of a pine. My finger tightened on the trigger.

Another gnome chose that moment to drop down from a tree on my right. It opened its little wings with a soft snap and whizzed around behind me. Igor bumbled around another oak and caught sight of the diving gnome. He fired from the hip before he realized I was standing in his line of fire.

His shot of blasting powder hit me dead in the ass and blew me forward off my feet a second after I had squeezed the trigger of my own weapon and plugged the gnome I had been chasing.

I ended up face down in the dirt and leaves, the seat of my pants feeling like it had just been set on fire. The disbelief that Igor had fucking shot me dissipated in about the same time as the pain took to set in.

“Son of a bitch!” I hissed through gritted teeth.

A halt was soon called to the shooting, and the rest of the gang gathered around. By the time a circle had formed around me, I was back on my feet, managing to save a little of my tattered dignity, though my ass was killing me.

“I’ve always been mercurial on my views of the part the ass plays in times of recreation,” Igor said conversationally. His thundercuss was still smoking in his hand. “I’ve never baulked at introducing a little powder to the rectum, but never in such a forceful and straightforward way, my boy.”

“You make it sound like I shot myself in the ass,” I said, wincing a little as I flexed a cheek.

“Well, it takes two to tango,” Igor said.

“This shit, this powder,” I asked, “it’s not going to make me sterile, is it?”

“No,” Reginald said. “No, no, mate. I’m quite sure of that. For someone of your size and muscle mass, it would have no effect whatsoever.”

“I think it’d be best if I took you back to the ranch,” Aunt Ruth said, her forehead wrinkled in a slight frown.

“Oh, crap on a spatula!” Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock cursed. “We’ve only got one more hunting ground left before we can retire for lunch.”

“Don’t let me stop you,” I said hurriedly.

I flexed my right leg and then the left. My ass pulled tenderly. You don’t really give much thought to just how much work your butt does in the walking process until some half-drunken mage shoots you in it.

“Come on, dear,” Aunt Ruth said, pulling me away from the rest of the group, “let me take you back to the house and sort you out with some medicaments. I’m sure we have an unguent for these powder burns that would be most efficacious…”

As I allowed Aunt Ruth to lead me back through the trees, following the path we had already cut through the resinous undergrowth, I shot a look back at the group.

Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock stumped forward and clipped Igor around the back of the head.

“You can’t just go shooting guests on a gnome hunt, boy!” he snapped. “Who d’you think you are? A damned politician?”

I caught Enwyn and Leah’s gazes just before they were hidden by the trees. Enwyn’s eyes were shining with professionally suppressed mirth, while Leah’s were full of something else.

If I had to hazard a guess, I would have said her eyes were full of shrewdness at her Aunt leading me away.

Aunt Ruth and I got back to the ranch house in fairly good time. My ass was still tender and throbbing, but some of the stinging fire had been taken out of it. I wasn’t sure whether that was from the walk or from the cold air that now permeated the multiple holes in my pants.

Aunt Ruth led me up to a bathroom on the second or third floor of the ranch. It was hard to keep a track of what floor you were on in the Chaosbane family home. That morning at breakfast for instance, I had slipped out to use the washroom and, on glancing out of the window, had been surprised to see that I was now at the top of the house without ever having set foot on a stair. When I had returned to the breakfast room, the view from the large double doors had been straight out onto the back lawn.

Ruth and I were both still dressed in our orange hunting attire so, when she had shown me the door to the bathroom, Aunt Ruth excused herself, saying that she wished to change into something that made her feel less like a root vegetable and more like a human being.

I walked into the bathroom and shut the door. Igor’s cloak of many shapes had enabled me to emulate the get-ups of my fellow hunters that morning, so it only took me a moment to switch into something a little less silly. My usual attire felt a lot less baggy and heavy than the hunting garb. Thankfully, the damage the cloak had sustained from Igor’s blunderbuss was completely repaired.

I pulled my pants down and looked at my ass in the enormous mirror that made up one wall of the bathroom. Under close scrutiny, it did not look so bad. A few superficial cuts and abrasions from the blasting powder, but most of the damage had been done in welt and bruise form.

“Those gnomes must be tough little bastards,” I mused as I poked at a remarkably sore welt on my left buttcheek.

The door opened, and I hurriedly pulled my pants back up.

Aunt Ruth swept in, dressed in a very comfortable looking navy bathrobe.

“Ah, just missed the show, did I?” she said with a wink.

She looked a damn sight better out of that pumpkin costume, and doubly good in a robe.

“Not much to see, I’m afraid,” I said with an easy grin. “Just a lot of bruising. The pants took most of it.”

“I would have called it a good show, no matter what, dear,” the older woman said.

I wasn’t quite sure what to say to that.

Aunt Ruth held up a small glass tube and placed it on the counter. “This is for any grazes, cuts, or bruises,” she said. “I can vouch for it. It sorts out bruises when I’ve been a little… rough with myself.”

Those last three words were as loaded with innuendo as any three words uttered by a woman.

“Well,” I said, still quite unsure how to play this quickly escalating scenario, “if it has your personal seal of approval, that’s good enough for me.”

“One has to look after oneself, Mr. Mauler,” Aunt Ruth said, swinging her auburn curls back from her face. “It’s a bit of a mantra of mine. Take these for instance.”

Aunt Ruth opened her robe with as much insouciance as she might have shown had she been giving me a peek at the family photo album.

Her tits were glorious; full, heavy, natural-looking jugs that just cried out to be squeezed. In fact, if I was being totally candid, my first thought was how they’d perform under some strenuous titty-fucking.

“Now, the secret of these,” she said in quite a carefree manner, as my eyes feasted on the A-grade baps in front of me, “is fairy dust.”

“Fairy-fairy dust?” I stammered, trying to peel my eyes off the mature cans on display, but failing one hundred percent.

“Yes,” Aunt Ruth purred as she took a step toward me. “Fairy dust keeps them nice and perky. I take a line of fairy dust in the morning and then rub a special lotion onto them in the evening.”

She touched a finger to her lip like a woman who had just recalled something. “Now that I mention it, that lotion is on the shelf just behind you. Perhaps you’d be a dear and help me with it, hm?”

Her hands came up to knead her breasts together. Her fingers and thumbs rolled her large nipples so that they began to stiffen, even in the warm air of the bathroom.

There was just no way that me, or any man like me, would be able to resist that sort of offer. A snowman had a better chance at surviving a shift as a firefighter than I did at resisting the temptation moving closer and closer to me in that bathroom.

I looked behind me and found the bottle of lotion that the advancing cougar had mentioned, sitting on a shelf over the toilet. I reached for it with a slightly trembling hand. When I turned back, Aunt Ruth was standing right behind me.

“Sit,” she commanded and forced me down so that I was sitting on the closed toilet. Then she knelt in front of me with her enormous jugs still hanging out of her open robe.

“That lotion is not going to apply itself, Mr. Mauler,” she purred, tilting her head back so that I had an unencumbered view of her cans.

I squirted some of the lotion into my hand, dropped the bottle, and reached for the gorgeous older woman’s boobs. I slathered the cream over them, greasing them up until they were as slick and slippery as any pair of tits that had experienced a Nuru massage.

I ran my thumbs over the big, flat nipples, tracing circles around them, lapping them like a tiny little ice-skater might go around a frozen pond. Under my touch, they began to stiffen even more.

I took each nipple between thumb and forefinger and pinched them softly. I squeezed her tits hard, and then clamped her nipples in my fingers and twisted them gently, tugging at them as I did so.

A heavy sigh escaped Aunt Ruth, and she caught my eye and shot me a smile.

“Take out your cock, Mr. Mauler,” she said with a firm but polite authority.

I did as I was told. Her nipples were fully erect now, which was fitting because so was I.

My prick was twitching with anticipation.

“We don’t have much time,” Aunt Ruth said in a husky voice, “but allow me to treat you to a bit of Chaosbane hospitality.”

The older woman leaned forward, pressing her slippery, oily jugs together, and engulfed my cock between them. Then, slowly, she began massaging my dick between them, rubbing up and down in the best titty-fuck I had ever experienced.

It was more than just a titty-fuck. It was the Rolls Royce of titty-fucks. The pacing, the pressure, and the look that Aunt Ruth gave me while she pleasured me were all perfect.

I moaned softly as the cougar slowly but surely picked up her pace. The feel of her oily, creamy tits around my cock was unreal. Indescribable. But it wasn’t just the feel that was turning me on so much. It was the blistering, sultry gaze Aunt Ruth was giving me; the look of a woman who was loving what she was doing and grateful to be doing it.

The only sounds were my labored breathing, the occasional moan from Aunt Ruth, and the sloppy squishing sound of the older woman’s knockers as they massaged my pecker.

“That’s it, Mr. Mauler,” Aunt Ruth urged me as my balls began to tingle. “Cover my chest in that Creation Mage cum. There’s only one thing better than fairy-dust lotion for these boobs of mine, and that is it.”

It only took a few more quick strokes to send me over the edge. I bucked into Aunt Ruth’s tits, reaching out to curl my fingers through her auburn hair, as I spurted my load between her cans, up her throat, and even over her chin.

Aunt Ruth moaned like the filthiest of whores, her tongue flicking out to try and taste my jizz. She carried on jacking me off, making sure to catch every last drop of my seed between her jugs, until my nuts were completely drained.

“That a boy, Mr. Mauler. That a boy. Thank you. Thank you very much, indeed,” she said, slapping my prick against her tits and smearing my cum across her chest.

I tried to say something, but found that words had failed me for the present. The sight of the mature woman kneeling in front of me, like she was worshipping my cock, was pretty fucking fantastic. I could tell that I’d be revisiting this little episode in my daydreams.

With a burst of comparatively cooler air, the door to the bathroom was kicked open and Leah Chaosbane was revealed in the open doorway. She was breathing hard, as if she had run up the stairs.

“Aunt Ruth!” she cackled, eyeing my wilting cock and Aunt Ruth’s cum-covered knockers, “I knew you were up to no good. You and I are too much alike. Great minds and all that...”

I’d have thought that Aunt Ruth would have been more rattled than one of Banksy’s spray cans, what with getting busted having just pleasured me with one of the all-time great titty-fucks, but the older woman simply shrugged, pulled her robe closed, and wiped a fleck of spunk from the corner of her mouth with her thumb.

“I was just giving Justin here a more extensive tour,” she said innocently, tightening the cord that held her bathrobe closed. “He was also gracious enough to help apply my fairy-dust lotion, for which I had to give him a reward. Which reminds me dear, you really must borrow some. You can never start defying gravity and time too soon.”

Leah cupped her own breasts, which were concealed under her baggy orange robe.

“Thanks for the offer Aunt Ruth,” she said, “but I’m not as well-endowed as you are.”

“But you’re perfect nonetheless,” the older woman said.

“Your aunt is one hell of a tour guide,” I managed to crowbar into this escalating beauty regime talk, tucking my johnson away.

“Oh, I bet she is, I bet she is. This woman had quite the reputation back in her day. And it would appear that her day isn’t over yet, eh, Aunt Ruth?” teased Leah.

“A Chaosbane woman has got to get her kicks, deary,” she said to Leah. “You know that better than anyone.”

Leah gave me an openly lascivious look. “Boy, do I, Aunt Ruth,” she said. “I’ll tell you what, you won’t find much bigger, stronger and vigorous kicks than our friend here.”

“Unfortunately, time did not allow us a more comprehensive testing…” Aunt Ruth said.

I did my best impression of a landed fish, looking from one woman to the other.

Aunt Ruth and Leah exchanged glances, and then burst into laughter.

“Bless him, he’s a fine man this one,” Aunt Ruth said, “but perhaps not used to our open-minded ways, even now. Even after being a Creation Mage this long.”

“Aunt Ruth, shhh,” Leah said in a theatrical whisper, “that’s a secret.”

“Not much of a Creation Mage just at the moment anyway,” I said. “I, uh, tapped myself out a little in that department.”

“Justin, Justin, Justin, I’m sure that I could still find a use for you,” Aunt Ruth said. “Leah dear, are the others on their way back?”

Leah nodded. “I ran ahead. Couldn’t make it too easy for you. Besides, you’d wear him out, and I might want to play with him later.”

Being talked about like I was a piece of meat should have annoyed me, maybe. The reality was I found this chat extremely hot.

“I get the impression that Mr. Mauler here has enough vim to handle both you and I back-to-back, should it ever be called for…” Aunt Ruth said.

Leah smiled broadly and kissed the other woman on the cheek as she walked slowly from the room. “The ‘less’ is silent,” she quipped as Aunt Ruth paused in the doorway.

“Oh, please, dear, there was nothing ruthless about it.”

Aunt Ruth turned back to me and blew me a kiss.

“But there might be yet, Mr. Mauler, hm?” she said with a wink.

Chapter 8

There were two days to go until Yuletide Eve. Two days to go until the big night.

To no one’s surprise, and to Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock obvious delight, Mort had popped the most Eggnog Gnomes out of everyone during the hunting trip. Apparently, despite heading back to the house before the final hunting ground, I had come in second, missing out on the coveted honor of carving the Yuletide Log by a matter of thirteen gnomes.

After falling victim to Aunt Ruth’s seductions, the rest of the day was fairly mellow and, surprisingly, followed a pattern of how normal people celebrated their festive holidays. Eating and drinking far too much throughout the day. Sitting around the fire and swapping stories and anecdotes.

A bunch of us were strolling around the property to walk off a delectable meal capped off with a treacle tart that would have left Nigella Lawson weak at knees and probably quite moist in the panties department. This pleasant afternoon walk was interrupted by an impromptu snowball fight. It was a short and vigorous affair. The snowball fight culminated in a spectacular display of projectile vomiting from Igor when Leah struck him square in the plums with a snowball that was at least eighty percent ice.

We all made our way back inside for fortifying cups of hot cider simmering inside a cauldron over the main hearth’s crackling fire. After that, the rest of the afternoon and evening were taken up with the customary family board game battle. The game of choice was a familiar-looking one called Gentrification Station; a game which involved players racing to buy up as much cheap land and real estate as they could, and then knock out the other players by driving up rents so that they were bled dry and couldn’t afford any properties for themselves.

It was a game that, apparently, never ended up reaching the final round. And a new set was purchased every year. It became evident why when, after being pitilessly knocked out by Aunt Ruth (the ‘less’ is silent), Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock picked up the game and threw it into the fire with savage glee.

After another gut-busting dinner, I was standing on the front porch and pulling on my boots. Despite the unguent Aunt Ruth had given me, I felt that my lacerated ass could use an early night. I was full of excellent food and fantastic drink and was ready to hit the hay in my cozy guest tent on the edge of the wood.

“There you are, honeypot,” Leah said from behind me.

I turned and saw her leaning casually against the jamb of the large, open front door. Her feet, which stuck out of the bottom of her high-waisted pants, were bare, despite the cold.

“Here I am,” I said, slipping my second boot on. “What can I do you for?”

“Hmmm, what can you do me for?” Leah mused. “Well, you could do me for breakfast, or you could do me to warm up your bed, or you could do me just because you felt like it.”

I grinned. “All of those options come across as equally logically sound and filled with merit, but tonight I think I’m going to have to tend to my wounds.”

Leah clapped her hands and giggled delightedly. “Oh gracious me, but Igor will not be living that one down for a while. Firing a shot into the ass of the first Creation Mage to show his head in however many years! Even for a Chaosbane, that’s fairly loose behavior. Still, at least you walked away with the same amount of holes as you started with, pumpkin-cakes.”

I laughed. “There is that, of course,” I conceded.

“Okay, well, you run along now and get some shut-eye and heal up that cute little backside of yours. And I shall come and collect you in the morning.”

“Collect me?” I asked. “Collect me for what?”

Leah blinked. She reached up and started twisting a lock of pink hair absentmindedly around one finger. “I didn’t tell you?” she asked.

“Tell me what?” I asked.

“We didn’t talk about it?” Leah said.

“Talk about what?” I asked patiently.

“Hm, I must have had that entire conversation with you in my head,” Leah mused, letting go of the lock of hair that she had been twirling around her finger so that it sprang back as a perfect curl. “How strange. Still, it doesn't matter.”

“What’re you talking about, woman?” I asked, laughing in exasperation.

“Nothing, nothing, it makes no difference. You’re at my host’s mercy anyway.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, bewildered. I knew Leah had some scheme or adventure in mind. When a Chaosbane started getting those kinds of notions into their head, insurance companies began to sweat.

“Oh, I just thought that I’d take you out for an airing tomorrow, you know,” Leah said airily.

“An airing? An outing, you mean?” I asked. “Where?”

Leah’s eyes shone. “To the big smoke!” she said. “I’ve been having a little natter with my dear cousin, Reginald, and he tells me that you need to get into Manafell—into the Castle of Ascendance no less—to see a particular Inscriber.”

This was true. My father had mentioned that there was an Inscriber, working inside the very heart of Queen Hagatha’s bastion of strength, who had been sympathetic to my parents’ cause. He had told me that this Inscriber would be able to help me unlock some new slots in my spellbook, so that I could get back to the pressing, and very fun, business of becoming a more powerful, more rounded, and more dangerous Creation Mage.

“The Headmaster knows a lot,” I said.

“Of course Reggie does,” Leah said, waving an unimpressed hand. “He’s got his fingers, toes, and clever little nose in so many pies and other assorted baked goods that he knows things before they happen. He is a powerful, powerful mage, obviously. But not all that power comes from his spell-casting, syrup-butt. Much of it comes from knowing lots. Knowing secrets.”

“So he knows about the Inscriber?” I asked. “Does he know the name of this person? It was one thing my old man seemed unsure about. I got the impression that this person probably kept a pretty low profile, used different names. Clandestine shit like that.”

“Reggie did mention a name, yes,” Leah said, tiptoeing across the boards of the front porch, being careful not to stand on the crack between the planks. She lay a hand on my chest and leaned in, filling my head with the smell of cloves and orange blossoms.

“Gertrude,” she whispered. “That’s who we’re looking for. Good old Gertrude. So, you and I shall go on a nice little excursion into the capital, see the sights, and slip with the grace and poise of two shadows into the Castle of Ascendance.”

“Slip like shadows?” I asked. “Can’t we just ask for her under some pretext?”

“Oh, sure,” Leah said, shrugging her gangly catwalk model shoulders. “Whatever you like, sweet-cheeks. I’ll play it however you like.”

“So, you’ll be playing tour guide tomorrow?”

“Looks that way. Would you like me to wear a uniform?”

“I don’t care what you do, but I have to say that Aunt Ruth has really set the bar as far as tours go,” I said with a sly smile.

Leah kissed me on the cheek and walked back into the house, the sway of her hips and ass drawing my gaze like a couple of ball bearings to a magnet.

“Justin Mauler,” she said over her shoulder, flashing her dark eyes at me, “you’ve seen nothing yet.”

* * *

While the Chaosbane’s ranch adjoined Queen Hagatha’s estate on one side, it was not quite as simple to gain access to the Castle of Ascendance as simply hopping the fence and walking over the lawn to knock at the back door.

“We had an aunt in the family a few years back,” Leah told me as we walked across the lawns the following morning, nursing mugs of steaming coffee and heading toward one of the large barns. “Her name was Wonky Chaosbane—after the accident, I mean. Originally it had been Palmera. I think Wonky was a bit more fun, all things considered.”

“Accident?” I asked. It was another fine day, perhaps the nicest weather we had seen since we left Nevermoor. The snow-filled clouds overhead were slightly less thick this morning, and wide blue cracks of sky showed through them.

“Yes,” Leah said, quite casually. “We had always strictly observed the warnings that the rulers of Avalonia gave their direct neighbors. These amounted, essentially, to warnings that if any of us trespassed one foot over the fenced borders, we would meet with an accident.”

“The Chaosbanes heeded a warning like that?” I asked in disbelief.

“Oh, sure,” Leah said. “Some of us might be a little on the eccentric side, but not a one of us are stupid.”

“Let me guess,” I said, “this Palmera aunt of yours got into the port barrel one night and decided to throw caution to the wind and jump the boundary fence. Whereupon she found the Queen was as good as her word and had enchanted the fence line or laid Arcane Mines across it or something. This resulted in Palmera losing an arm or a leg or a finger or an ear and taking on the moniker, Wonky. And thus, the Chaosbane Family learned an important lesson.”

Leah choked on her last mouthful of coffee and sprayed a brown mist of steaming droplets out onto the pristine snow.

“Very astute, very astute indeed,” she chortled. “You think you have the measure of the Chaosbane clan, don’t you, cocksure Earthling?”

“Was I close?” I asked as we approached the barn Leah had pointed out earlier.

“Way off,” Leah said. “What actually happened was that Palmera had been imbibing with lusty enthusiasm from the cooking sherry barrel one night—she couldn’t abide port. The silly old goose decided to throw caution to the wind and jump the boundary fence, whereupon she found the Queen was as good as her word and had enchanted the fence line with a series of Arcane Mines set about two paces back from the fence itself. This resulted in Palmera losing her head and taking on the very, very short-lived moniker, Wonky.”

“Your aunt got her head blown off by an Arcane Mine?” I said, not sure how much sympathy and incredulity I was expected to show at this insane revelation.

“Oh, and the Chaosbanes, as a family, learned an important lesson that day too,” Leah added cheerfully.

“Right,” I said slowly. “So what I can take away from that anecdote is that Aunt Palmera had the world’s shortest nickname, and also that it’s a terminally bad idea to try and take a stroll through Queen Hagatha’s garden?”

“That’s about it, yes,” Leah said.

“Then how are we getting there?” I asked. “Manafell doesn’t look like it’s that far away.”

“It’s not really, toffeetush,” Leah said, “but because we have to take the circuitous route, it would take a while to walk. So, I thought we’d save some precious time and take the pegasi.”

“Pegasi?” I asked. “As in the winged horses?”

“Smarty-pants,” Leah said.

We arrived at the barn, and Leah reached up and unfasted the large wooden bar across the doorway.

“Be a gentleman, would you?” she asked me, motioning to the bar.

I passed Leah my empty coffee cup. Then, puffing a little, I heaved the bar out of the brackets that held it and stood it up against a nearby fence. The wooden bar must have weighed about sixty pounds.

“Man,” I said, “it’s heavy enough, but is a bar the only security you have to keep people from stealing your horses?”

Leah patted me on the shoulder and then pinched my cheek. “You silly sausage,” she said dreamily. “That’s not for keeping people out. It’s for keeping Thunder and Lightning in.”

Leah pulled the doors open. The comfortable, warm smells of hay and leather, sweat and dung and horses came flooding out. Somewhere in the gloom, something let out a deep snort which reverberated through my chest.

“Hello, girls!” Leah said happily. “I’ve brought you a friend of mine to meet.”

“Meet,” I said. “Meet is what she said, not eat.”

Two pegasi mares walked forward out of the dimness of the barn. They were big beasts, about the size of a Clydesdale, but without a superfluous ounce of fat on them. Everything about the animals radiated speed, agility, and honed reflex.

They were a pearlescent silver gray color; the shade of a river at night under the light of a full moon. Feathered wings were folded, a slightly darker gray against their coats. Dark and foreboding eyes gleamed out of heads that were probably a little more pointed and streamlined than those of regular horses. They were eyes that spoke every language under this sun and all other suns and what they said was this: don’t try and fuck with us, mortal.

“Pleased to meet you,” I said to the two silent pegasi.

Some people might have thought it odd that I was engaging two four-legged beasts in conversation, but those would be people who had never looked into the eyes of a pegasus and seen the deep reservoir of intelligence in there.

These animals knew exactly what I was saying.

The pegasi didn’t reply.

“Uh, which one of you is Thunder?” I asked, not really sure what else I could say.

The animal standing on Leah’s right, who was nuzzling at the pink-haired woman’s neck, raised one dinner plate-sized hoof and stamped twice.

I nodded. “All right,” I said, turning to the other pegasus, “then you must be Lightning.”

The other animal thudded a hoof twice onto the ground too. I raised my hand toward Lightning’s nose, and the big creature moved its aquiline head toward me cautiously.

“It’s good that you’re treating them like you would any other intelligent creature,” Leah said to me. She was patting Thunder’s cheek and stroking her neck.

“I’m not really a big one on animals,” I said. “But I think I’m perceptive enough to know that these girls are not to be trifled with.”

Lightning nickered softly and bowed her head. It was a little disconcerting to hear how close that soft whinny came to a chuckle.

“You’re right on that score,” Leah said. “We had a little incident last year when one of our guests came out here, bad-mouthing Thunder and Lightning, calling these sweet girls old nags and whatnot.”

“Can’t imagine they put up with that.” I ran a hand down one of Lightning’s smooth flanks.

Leah pointed over to where a stable door leant against a wall. It was cracked and broken, the thick hinges bent and twisted.

“One of them kicked the door to make a point?” I asked.

“No, Thunder was a bit crosser than that,” Leah said. “She booted that foolish Mr. Fotheringay right through the door.”

Thunder snorted. It did not sound like an apologetic or remorseful snort.

I looked up at Lightning. The pegasus was still peering at me with a vaguely distrustful eye, although she was allowing me to continue to stroke her flanks.

“I promise, I’m all yours,” I said. “I won't try anything flashy. If you’re willing to carry me, then I’ll put my faith in you. How about it?”

The pegasus looked at me with a slightly dubious eye, as though she had scant regard for my potential flying skills. I pointed this out to Leah, who laughed.

“You forget,” she said, “Thunder and Lightning are not your average horses. These fine fillies are possessed of rare intelligence. I’ve met plenty of humanoids who, if brains were dynamite, would not have enough to blow their hats off. These girls though, they’ll take us exactly where we need to go. And take us fast too. They have carted more than a couple of Chaosbanes into Manafell for one reason or another. I imagine you are a good flyer, despite the fact that you have not flown a pegasus before. You strike me as a man who can turn his hand to most things, but in this case, you can just sit back and enjoy the ride.”

I liked the sound of that. I enjoyed the thrill of riding on a broomstick, but I was on vacation and what were vacations good for if not for turning off the old brain once in a while. Leah had made today sound like it would be innocent sightseeing. However, what a Chaosbane considered innocent most other people might consider a minor felony.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll follow your lead. I’m more than willing to trust Lightning, if she is willing to trust me.”

Leah clapped her hands. “Goodo. Let’s not beat around the bush any longer then, we're burning daylight here.”

With the athleticism of a gymnast, she vaulted onto the back of her pegasus. More slowly, I followed suit. I did not want to do anything to offend Lightning, not when our friendship was so young.

I managed to find a comfortable position behind the beast’s wing joints. Once I was on Lightning’s back, I was struck once again by how solid and strong the pegasus was. I figured I could have tried to break a lead pipe over the mare’s back and she probably would have taken about as much notice as she might have a horsefly.

With a snort, Lightning followed Thunder and Leah out of the barn and into the paddock.

“Right,” I said. “Now what do we do?”

“Easy,” Leah said. “Now you just hold on to your butt and let Lightning do the legwork.”

“Don’t you mean the wing-work,” I said.

Leah snapped fingers and pulled a mad face at me. “That’s right,” she said. “I’m always getting that line wrong.”

Without warning, the iron-hard muscles of the pegasus bunched beneath me. I just had time to suck in one reinforcing breath before Lightning leapt up into the frigid sky.

Holy shitballs, I had ridden on the back magical creatures before, and I had felt the sort of acceleration that only a broomstick could provide, but this was something else entirely. I had never experienced such insane acceleration at the hands of something that did not have an engine. Never, in all my life, had I gone from standing still to, well, I couldn’t even hazard a guess at how fast I was going.

It was like someone had strapped feathery wings to a Kawasaki Ninja H2 and screwed the throttle down all the way. I barely had time to grab onto Lightning’s neck and hunker down against the roaring wind. To my astonishment, once I had tucked myself alongside the neck of the flying creature, everything calmed down.

The pegasus was a marvel of aerodynamic natural design. I had to squint my eyes against the inevitable air that stung them, but apart from that, the ride was surprisingly comfortable. Leah and Thunder zooming along in front of me. Leah’s hair had been torn free of its normal bunches. Now, it flew behind her like a bright pink banner.

We passed over many fields and little rivers, estates as grand as any others that we had seen thus far. Always, the pegasi kept one wing dipped to the right so that they were continuously moving in a south easterly direction, toward the sprawling glittering mass of Manafell.

Leah had been right. The capital city was not that far from the Chaosbane ranch. Not as the crow flew anyway. Queen Hagatha’s estate, though, was obviously enormous, and it required us to circumnavigate it for about ten minutes before we began to descend toward the metropolis, toward the greatest city in the Kingdom of Avalonia.

We landed, with very little fuss, outside the city walls. Thunder and Lightning walked us along a wide dirt road filled with people coming to and from the city. Piles of slush lined either side of the side of the road, and the earth under the hooves of the pegasi was blackened and cracked.

When I pointed this out to Leah, she shrugged. “After heavy snowfall, the city guard brings forth a dragon, or a team of drakes, to melt the road to the capital for some miles.”

“A dragon used as a snowplow?” I said, amazed. “That’s nuts.”

“Is it?” Leah asked dreamily. “I thought it made rather good sense. Keeps the main trade route open, the taxes and merchant fees jingle-jangling into the Queen’s coffers, and the road free from highwaymen. There’s no deterrent quite like the threat of being barbecued by a monstrous lizard to keep a man walking the straight and narrow.”

“You may have a point there,” I said.

“Oh, I have points everywhere,” Leah said. A wicked-looking stiletto appeared in her hand for a moment, and then vanished just as fast.

“I thought you said that this was going to be more of a relaxed vacation sightseeing?” I said. “I didn’t realize that I should have been coming along armed.”

“Hope for the worst, prepare for the best,” Leah said.

“Don’t you mean, prepare for the worst, hope for the best?” I asked.

Leah considered this a moment. “No,” she said after a little while, “I think I prefer my way better.”

Chapter 9

As we approached the mammoth gates into the city of Manafell, my thoughts went quiet within my head. The sheer weight and size of the place squashed all the buzzing internal chattering into silence so that it was only me and my eyes and the great weight of stone in front and above me.

It was a bizarre sensation to be standing outside of a proper fortified city. Of course, I had seen such impressive and intimidating sites on the silver screen, and so there was this odd feeling of familiarity to it, almost as if I had been here before.

But all the tens of millions of dollars of cinema production in movies like Kingdom of Heaven or The Lord of the Rings or Troy could not emulate the feeling of weight and impregnability that those walls and their towers, which marked the outer limit of Manafell proper, impressed upon me.

The walls must have been as thick as four pickup trucks parked end-to-end. They were slightly overhanging so that scaling them was impossible. They were topped with crenellations, where stone-faced guardsmen patrolled. Steel glittered menacingly from brightly polished swords, shields, and chainmail. Every single one of the guards was dressed in an ensemble of bright green cloak, meticulously shined armor, and lethal looking morning-stars. The morning-stars were not pretty weapons, but they conveyed a sense of seriousness to the men holding them. They could be quite easily used to cave in the heads of anyone who fancied climbing a scaling ladder.

It was, undoubtedly, an impressive display of military might. However, I couldn’t help but notice that the soldiers’ helmets were almost identical to those worn by the men manning the border burrow. There was just no getting around the fact that they were very penis-like. It was a bit of a faux pas on the part of the chief armorer or whoever decided on the designs of the helmets.

The open gates were so big that they could have been repurposed as a keel for a war galley. The iron bolts studding the massive planks were as big as my fist. It was, all in all, a very serious gate and matched the four stern-faced guards standing on either side of them. Most of the people hurrying through the gates kept their eyes down and the faces averted from the guards, as if catching their eyes was a sure way to get yourself noticed and into a spot of hot water.

We left the pegasi tethered in a stable that some enterprising gentleman dwarf had set up just outside the gates. Leah flicked the dwarf a couple of coins and told him that it would be in his best interests not to do or say anything that would offend the great steeds.

“Not a problem, madam, not a problem at all,” the dwarf croaked in a froggy voice. “You can trust me to look after these fine fellows.”

Thunder snorted so hard that I was sure I saw one of the boards in the wall flap outward.

“Ladies, I mean! I do beg your pardon!” the dwarf said hurriedly, trying to soothe the pegasus.

“Are you not worried about leaving the pegasi with that guy?” I asked Leah as we walked away. “Pegasi can’t be all that common, can they? What if he tries to sell them on to someone else?”

Leah snorted. “Gods, I’d love that little chap to try. Thunder and Lightning would have him sailing over Manafell like a comet with a single kick.”

“Why couldn’t we just ride them in?” I asked.

Leah gave me a look. “Queen Hagatha likes a nice clean city,” she said. “And the thing about pegasi, horses, mules, and all the rest is that they have so little regard for humanoids. They’re quite happy to relieve themselves anywhere.”

“Lucky for some, eh?” I said drily.

“That’s what I’ve always thought,” Leah said, with no trace of irony in her voice.

We joined the river of travelers and traders, shadowy figures, and fantastically attired adventurers, and headed through the gates. Unlike the rest of the bustling pack of folk surrounding us, Leah made no attempt at hiding her face. She waved to the guards like an excitable child, not caring a whit for their flinty eyes and set jaws.

“Morning!” she said to an armored elven woman standing nearest to us. “Any idea whether the Queen’s in today?”

The elf looked dourly at Leah, in her holey blue woolen sweater and with her bright pink hair. “Have you got an invitation to tea or something?” the elf asked, her tone about as rude as it was possible to be without resorting to cussing.

“Tea? Gods, I hope not,” Leah said pleasantly. “Surely, she’d have something stronger than tea?”

The guardswoman did not get a chance to answer, because we were buffeted along by the horde of people shoving and pushing to get into the city. We flowed through the gate, under a portcullis, and found ourselves in a huge crescent-shaped piazza. I felt a hand on my wrist, and Leah dragged me out of the flow of incoming traffic and up onto an ornately carved fountain shaped out of glass and marble to resemble a spreading larch tree.

I took a breath, relishing the reprieve the female Chaosbane had granted me by pulling me out of the swirling foot traffic.

“What do you think?” Leah asked me. “Is it like the big cities on Earth?”

“No,” I said, looking around with wide eyes, “it’s way better than any city on Earth.”

And I wasn’t exaggerating just to please the woman.

The crescent piazza was filled with representatives of every kind of race or species imaginable, and plenty more that I had never imagined could exist. What was more, the magic casually on display made the everyday magic of the Mazirian Academy look like sleight of hand. True, at the Academy, it was generally assumed that anyone studying there didn’t yet quite have full control over their abilities, but it was really something to see how people in Avalonia used magic in their daily lives.

Not far from the fountain, a couple of mages dressed in bright yellow robes and sporting hats carved from some kind of hardwood, were using their vectors to lever up cracked paving slabs and replace them with new ones.

Up one side street, a Ghoulish woman, as fat as a tick and ugly enough to be hired out to haunt a house, leaned out of a window with an armful of washing. As I watched, the woman threw the washing carelessly into the air, made a slashing gesture with her hand, and fixed it in place. I blinked and squinted. It was like she had just lobbed the washing out and perfectly landed it on a line that did not exist.

Off to one side of the fountain, a collection of very tall figures, dressed from head to foot in fur-trimmed robes, pointed this way and that. Anyone who had ever seen tourists trying to figure out how the hell they were meant to get back to their hotel could tell what was going on with them. As they argued amongst each other, I caught brief glimpses of their faces and hands. They had strange metallic skin that reflected the light seeping through the breaking clouds above us.

“Who are those guys?” I asked Leah loudly, pointing at the group of metal men.

“No idea, sugar-butt,” Leah said amicably. One of the men had seen us looking, and he pulled the finger back at me. With him staring right at me, what I had taken to be metallic skin looked more like straight metal than actual skin.

“You don’t know what kind of people they are?” I asked the female Chaos Mage.

“No, I haven’t set eyes on their like before,” Leah said. “What does it matter anyway? I’ve only met a handful of Earthlings in my time, but I’ve always found the same odd thing about them.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Most of them struck me as the kind of people who wanted to eat a variety of foods and drink a mix of drinks, but weren’t really too keen on varying the kinds of people with whom they ate the foods and drank the drinks.”

I considered this. I thought that there could be something to her words.

“There are a lot of people in this world, aren’t there?” I said.

Leah grunted a laugh. She gestured about her. “As you see.”

There were elves, nymphs, humans, and dwarves, of course, but there were also armored knights with purple plumes floating form their plumes, ifrits with burning eyes, naga women with flat faces and swaying hips and no visible feet, ogres, orcs, and sirens, brawny barbarians carrying swords as long as I was tall, and all the usual rogues, mercenaries, and peddlers recognizable by anyone who had ever played an MMORPG.

Leah grabbed my hand again and began towing me through the mass of people. Clearly, she had spent her time up on the beautifully carved fountain a little more profitably than me. Rather than gawking around like a stunned mullet, Leah had been coming up with a route to get us to the Castle of Ascendance.

She towed me through the streets, while I tried to stop marveling at anything and everything. Huge banners hung from some buildings, which Leah told me were the different sigils of some of the more influential, richer, and older houses in Manafell.

“I think it’s safe to say that Queen Hagatha’s policy on no four-legged conveyances shitting in the street is a good move,” I said.

“How so?” Leah asked over her shoulder. She was still holding my hand, straining ahead like a hound following a scent.

“This is the cleanest city that I have ever been in,” I said.

It was too. Despite the people hustling and bustling, yelling and shoving and acting in a way that would have made the roughest New Yorker feel proud, the place was spotless.

There was no trash to speak of. Anything that was discarded on the street was usually organic; some food or a leaf wrapping or something like that. The snow was heaped into perfect mounds and strips, which I guessed had probably been achieved through magic. Even the advertising was less offensive to the eye in this world—cleverer and more thoughtful. There were trees everywhere. It gave the bustling metropolis this feeling of being out in the wild and yet with every convenience the average mage could ask for. It was London meets Aspen.

“Yuletide’s in full swing here too, huh?” I said to Leah as we skirted a group of gnomes piled up into a standing pyramid and singing carols.

“Of course,” Leah said, guiding me up a steep street leading out of the madness of the city center. “Any excuse for a party, treacle-lips. You’ve been in Avalonia long enough to know that about the people, surely?”

Decorations hung from fairy-lit lamp posts and trees. Above, shooting stars continuously streaked up and down. Baubles grew and grew like expanding shining bubbles before popping with festive tinkling noises, only to reappear further down the road. Sparkling lengths of tinsel snaked across buildings like glittering anacondas for an entire city block, occasionally snapping at passing white-feathered doves.

When we reached the end of the steep street, Leah turned us left. We made our way through a district with shops that sold books and scrolls. There were a few drinking establishments and restaurants, but none was doing much of a trade at this time in the morning.

There was a brief moment, as we walked past one uniquely rowdy bar, when I thought of maybe summoning my black crystal staff. Two centaurs came charging out of the swinging cowboy saloon style doors and began squaring off to one another in the street. They were big, burly creatures and were clearly filled to the molars with rotgut, for they were yelling at each other in what I thought was a foreign tongue, until I realized that they were just so drunk they were almost unintelligible.

“Ahhhhh, you’re a horse’s ass, Kadol!” a centaur with a mullet of long red hair and a series of prison tattoos up his arms yelled at the other.

The other centaur, Kadol, frowned. He removed the cigar he was smoking from between his lips and looked behind him at his black swishing tail. “What’re ye on about, ye daft scrote, we’re all of us horses’ asses, ain’t we?”

We left the two arguing centaurs behind us and carried on our way. The street that we were on was quite quiet compared to the crescent piazza below us. It slowly evolved into the sort of large, empty boutique shops in which nothing had a price tag. Large trolls stood at the doors as bouncers. Every single one of the trolls regarded Leah and me with the same implacable, stony bouncer’s stare that said, “You and I will get along just fine so long as you don’t embarrass yourselves by coming over here and trying to get into this shop.”

Eventually, we turned a corner into the middle of a great parade ground. To our right and ahead of us was a building that could only be the Castle of Ascendance.

It was a massive palatial structure that I had glimpsed from the sleigh. I had also seen the rear of stunning edifice from the Chaosbane’s ranch. This was clearly the front entrance. It couldn’t have been grander or more divine if it had been carved out of a golden nugget and had Charlize Theron working as the porter.

Walls of gleaming marble stretched out from either side of a gate that was so intricately worked that, for a few moments, I thought it was constructed of light made solid.

“That’s the front door?” I asked.

“Yep,” Leah said.

“That gate looks like it’s made of light.”

“It’s powered by pure magic, constrained through some very artful devices, blah blah blah, or so Reggie was trying to tell me before I kicked him in the shin because he was being so dull.”

“Sounds… tricky and impressive,” I said.

Leah magicked one of her black cigarettes from out of nowhere and lit it with a gentle word.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “Very tricky. You try and run through that and you’ll be sliced into lots of pretty shapes.” She drew on her cigarette, and the burning tip reflected in her dark eyes, turning them to orbs of burning coal. “Then, I’ve heard, they feed you to the hellhounds.”

My gaze flicked up and down the boulevard.

There were soldiers everywhere, standing guard and on high alert. About ninety-nine percent of them were looking in our direction.

“Is this the way that people normally come looking for people in the castle?” I asked as Leah stepped out and began ambling down the promenade.

Leah giggled and nudged me with her elbow.

“Don’t be silly! Did you take a spill and smack your peanut when I wasn’t looking? No one comes knocking on the front door!” she said.

I looked ahead at the looming gate and the small squad of soldiers starting to assemble in front of it.

“Oh good,” I said, my tone somewhat sarcastic.

When we were within twenty yards of the beautiful golden gate, one of the soldiers stepped out from the rank of a dozen. He held up a hand. Half a dozen of the soldiers behind him raised their crossbows to their shoulders.

Of course, in kingdoms like Avalonia, there were always little skirmishes, border wars, and fights breaking out. These head-to-heads were not always fought solely with magic. There were plenty of regular soldiers in Queen Hagatha’s armies who possessed no magical abilities whatsoever. Hand to hand combat was a popular method of resolving problems because, callous as it sounded, often the Queen could afford to lose a legion of foot soldiers better than she could afford to lose a single War Mage.

The points of the crossbow quarrels glinted fitfully in the sporadic sunlight filtering down from the cloudy sky. They were mean-looking weapons. I did not much relish staring down the business end of them, even if I could use magic.

I knew from my time at the Academy that crossbows were formidable little handfuls of tightly strung death. In lectures, I had listened with rapt attention while a tutor explained the difference between longbows and crossbows. Trained longbowmen could shoot two to five times more frequently in a given time than a crossbowman, but a crossbow could be effectively used by an untrained person with the IQ of your average politician. What was more, like a longbow, crossbows could fling their projectiles toward a target at around one-hundred and thirty-five feet per second.

That was plenty fast enough to cause even Leah Chaosbane some problems, I imagined.

The faces of the soldiers aiming the crossbows bore the cool, placid demeanors of six people who would quite happily turn Leah and myself into Swiss cheese should we do anything rash or foolish. I figured they would be quite happy to stay here pointing them at us all day.

My palm tingled with the compulsion to conjure my black crystal staff from the ether. However, that would probably be the single biggest, and potentially the very last, mistake that I could ever make. Seeing as Leah had led us here, I figured I’d wait and see what the hell she had planned. Color me intrigued.

“Halt,” the guard captain said, advancing a few steps with his hand still upraised. He stopped well short of us—out of grabbing range and far enough away so that his shooters behind could still pick us off as easy as pie.

“Hello!” Leah said cordially, fluttering her eyelashes a little and grinning.

“State your name and your business,” the captain said curtly. Now that he had drawn a little closer, I could see that he had the hard, square features of one who must have been at least partly gargoyle. The hand not raised rested on the pommel of a scimitar hanging at his waist.

“Cutting straight to the nitty-gritty,” Leah said. “How very professional.” She licked her lips. “I must say that I do so love a man in uniform. Except for postmen… There’s something about postmen. And those blokes who man the armored tax wagons.”

“Name and business,” the captain repeated stolidly. Here was a man who had earned his position by adhering to the rule book and showing about as much leniency and humor toward his fellow humanoid as a brick.

“Leah Chaosbane at your service, oh illustrious person in shiny armor!” Leah said extravagantly, sweeping a bow. “And this is my chum, Justin Mauler.”

I had been worried that the guard might have heard my name before, but I needn’t have worried. His train of thought had been derailed at the mention of the Chaosbane name. It was good like that, the Chaosbane surname. It threw people off their guard. Discomposed them like a black widow spider sitting on a birthday cake.

“And what is your business here, Miss Chaosbane?” the captain asked. There could be no doubt, there was definitely a note of uncertainty in his voice now. A slight irresolute waver in his commanding tone.

“We’re just taking in the sights, you know, captain,” Leah said breezily. “Doing the tourist thing; buying overpriced souvenirs produced in poor neighboring kingdoms, eating revolting ‘local delicacies’, getting sketches taken of us in front of quite innocuous objects and landmarks, and generally getting in the way of the locals trying to go about their daily business.”

The captain cleared his throat and tried to hit Leah with a meltingly authoritative stare. It might have worked on a lesser mortal—hell, it would have worked on me. Leah though, took about as much heed of it as she might have done a yappy little dog.

“I was referring more to what business brought you to the Castle of Ascendance, miss,” the captain reiterated.

“Oh, I see,” Leah said. “Well, in that case… We’re here to see Gertrude. She’s an Inscriber. Probably an Inscriber of the Royal Court.”

The captain blinked a couple of times while Leah’s words penetrated first his helmet and then his skull.

He grinned in a supercilious manner. It was a lofty smile that made me want to instinctively whack him around the back of the head, or at least hit him with a medium-strength Storm Bolt.

“Do you have an appointment with this Inscriber?” he asked.

“An appointment?” Leah echoed. “No. No appointment for us. It’s a surprise, you see. Very tricky to surprise someone if you’ve made an appointment with them.”

The captain’s smile became fixed as Leah countered his condescension with this patronizing explanation of her own.

“I’m afraid that without an appointment, Miss Chaosbane, I cannot let you through,” he said.

“Not even for just a quick visit?” Leah wheedled.

“No. Not even for the quickest of visits.”

Leah took a bold step toward the half-gargoyle. Crossbows shifted ever so slightly. I could practically hear the strings creaking.

“What if we were to bust in and scatter you and your little group of troopers here like ashes before a storm?” Leah said, still in the same jovial and friendly tone of voice.

My stomach clenched, and my palms went sweaty. Just what the hell was Leah thinking?

The captain’s jaw dropped, and his eyes twitched. He let loose a little groan of incomprehension. Before he could order his crossbow wielders to mow us down, Leah clapped her hands and stepped back.

“Gods, you should have seen your face!” she said, guffawing with mirth. “I’m just kidding. Messing with you and your tough and scary fellows? Bugger that for a game of backgammon! See you later and thanks very much for your help.”

Leah turned on her heel, leaving the guard captain spluttering in her wake.

“Come on, Justin,” she said. “Let’s leave these exemplary members of the Queen’s troops to their work.”

I hurried my steps to catch up with Leah’s loping stride.

“That’s it?” I hissed as we lengthened the gap between ourselves and the immobile troops that had barred our way. “That was your masterplan? Ask nicely if they’ll please let us in?”

“Masterplan?” Leah asked me, looking thoroughly discombobulated. “I don’t think anyone said anything about a master plan. I know I didn’t. A master plan… That sounds fancy!”

“I thought about using my Greater Flame Flight Spell to boost us both over the wall, if we could find a stretch that was relatively unguarded,” I said.

“An interesting plan. Could work. If it didn’t, I think it would be fair to say that you would make the most beautiful of corpses.”

I grunted as we rounded a corner and got ourselves off the main boulevard leading to the Queen’s castle. “So I can’t just fly up there and sneak into the castle?”

“Your enthusiasm does you credit, my little creampuff,” Leah said. “But you need to get your gorgeous, perfectly proportioned head around something. The arcane defenses surrounding Queen Hagatha’s castle make the wards and enchantments at my cousin’s school look rustic in comparison.”

“I thought that the Headmaster was supposed to be one of the most badass mages around?” I asked.

Leah led me down a winding lane, toward a cafe letting off scrumptious smells of baked goods and strong coffee. Our boot heels rapped smartly on the clean cobbles of the lane, while overhead a few cursory flakes of snow drifted down from the sky.

“Reggie is one of the cleverest clogs practitioners of the magical arts in Avalonia,” Leah said, making a beeline for a table in the corner. “But the Queen’s defenses are powered and maintained by dozens of lesser skilled mages. Reggie just doesn’t have the time or the attention span to do anything like that at the Mazirian Academy. Not that he would need to either.”

Leah made it to a table just as a sinewy elf and a pretty lamia—a demon-like creature with the torso of a woman and the body of a snake below her waist—arrived at the table too. Without preamble, Leah kicked one of her boots off so that it landed in the seat that the elf was just about to pull out.

“Dibs!” she said, smiling widely at the lamia, who gave her a look that could have curdled fresh milk.

The elf looked at her with annoyed disdain. “Some people…”

Leah swept out a chair and sat herself down at the table, crossing her bootless foot over the booted one.”I’m just calling this chair,” she said, wiggling her toes at the skinny elf. “You’re more than welcome to share the table with us, though I will warn you that I am an acquired taste, so if you’re not fond of me now, it’s probably better that you run along and acquire some taste.”

The lamia sneered and hissed something in a tongue that I did not understand. She and the elf moved on.

I snorted and shook my head. “Well, I’m pretty stumped then,” I said, taking a seat as Leah pulled on her boot. “What's our next move?”

“A bit of breakfast,” Leah said. “As sure as eggs is eggs, we could do with some eggs.”

I nodded my assent.

As much as Leah liked to give the impression that she was just playing things by ear, I knew her finely balanced, mercurial Chaosbane mind already had a ruse or stratagem. Hopefully one that would be more successful than the last.

“And, after eggs?” I asked patiently.

“Then we use another route,” Leah said casually. “There’s a special entrance, see. Located in a very special part of Manafell. Where you get the good gear, the royal gear, the gear that’ll make the hairs on your chest grow hairs on their chests.”

“Why don’t we get going, then? I’m not really that hungry. I’d rather—”

Leah raised a finger and placed it on my lips. She stared at me out of sparkling eyes full of vibrancy, despite their dark shade of chocolate brown. She might’ve been missing a few buttons off her shirt, mentally speaking, but she sure was a looker.

“A good breakfast is the key beginning to any adventure, Justin,” the pink-haired young woman said, in a fantastic impression of the bustling matron from a Dickens novel. “Hope make a good breakfast, as does sex, but if you can’t get your mitts on either of those two, then eggs served sunny side sideways are a good third option.”

“Sunny side sideways…” I muttered.

“Right,” Leah said. “When we’re fed and watered and feeling like everything is above board once more, sweet-cheeks, then I’ll take you to the place where we can go down on Manafell.”

Leah licked her lips and blew me a small kiss.

“This is going to be a goddamn shitshow, isn’t it?” I said, my stomach squirming with excitement.

“This,” Leah said, “is going to be fun.”

Chapter 10

We stood in the middle of a fetid and reeking alleyway, flanked by crumbling buildings. Garbage was strewn about the place, accompanied by an overwhelming stink of brussels sprouts about two decades past their prime.

“This is nice,” I said drily.

After wending our way like a couple of crawling bugs into the darker, poorer outer crust of Manafell, Leah had brought us here.

In the alleyway was the entrance to a tavern where having some sort of rare respiratory illness or venereal disease was a prerequisite for entering. It was at the base of one of the long hills that ran up to the Castle of Ascendance, though you could not see it from here. The peeling sign over the double doors read, YE OLDE SHITE PIPE.

Leah patted me on the back. “Don’t worry,” she said to me, “it’s not the sort of place you think it is.”

There was a man lounging against the double doors and eyeing us with a yellow and infinitely patient eye. I say a man, but while he was humanoid in shape, with a man’s arms and legs and torso, his head belonged to a Nile crocodile and a large crocodile’s tail poked out of his pinstripe trousers. His chest was bare, except for an aquamarine waistcoat. On his long, scaled head he had balanced a tophat, which contrasted nicely with the flip-flops he was wearing on his feet.

“Good look,” I said, not meaning to be sarcastic at all. It was a good look. I’d never seen anything quite like it.

Leah walked toward the lounging figure, who straightened a little as we approached.

“Roger,” Leah said, “what a lovely treat to see you again.”

The crocodile-man, Roger, blinked a couple of times and grinned. At least, it looked like he was grinning. I imagined it was pretty hard to do anything but grin with a mouth that big and an assortment of teeth like that.

“Good day, Miss Chaosbane,” he said, in an accent that could have come straight out of Peaky Blinders, “I do declare, but I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me for a second! Fancy seein’ you here again, eh?”

“You’re still up to… this, then?” Leah asked.

Roger made a deprecatory noise in his huge throat. “My parents always said I’d go far. ‘Course, I think they rather hoped I’d stay there too. Miserable gits.”

“I know that feeling,” Leah said. “It’s more often than not that a Chaosbane gets treated like a walking menstrual cramp when they enter a room.”

“Or an alleyway,” Roger pointed out.

“Or an alleyway,” Leah agreed.

Roger’s yellow eyes slid in my direction. They regarded me, as if weighing up whether I’d be worth grabbing by the neck and drowning in the nearest river. “And you brought a little friend. How nice.”

Leah lit one of her black cigarettes. I was almost tempted to ask her for one. The smell of cloves under my nose would have been far preferable to the overwhelming fug of antique cabbage and forgotten gym bags.

“Yes, yes, we’re here to take a trip into the Underbelly, my friend and I,” Leah said cordially, while Roger managed to watch us both simultaneously from his eerie crocodile eyes.

“And what’s your name, sonny jim?” Roger asked me.

“Who wants to know?” I asked in return.

“The guy who decides whether this even is an entrance to the Underbelly,” Roger said through his mouthful of cruel teeth. “The guy who decides whether or not the Underbelly even exists.”

“Justin,” I said. “Justin Mauler.”

“There, that wasn’t so hard now, was it?” Roger said. He turned back to Leah. “All I need now is the password, love.”

Leah reached into the back pocket of her pants and pulled out a small pouch of coins. She tossed it to the crocodile-man who caught it with deft fingers.

“That’s the password?” I asked.

Roger grinned wider at me and picked nonchalantly at his teeth. “Only password that matters when it comes to a place like the Underbelly, bucko.” He stepped aside and pushed the door of the tavern open. “Have a nice trip.”

As I walked past the strange figure, I said, “I’m digging the tophat, buddy. It’s a refined look.”

Roger leered at me, swept off the hat, and revealed a dagger buried in the top of his head. It was stuck about two inches into the thick bone of his crocodile’s skull. Looked like it had been stuck there a good while.

“Thanks kindly, chum,” he said. “It’s a bit less intrusive than the alternative, ain’t it?”

“Hell of an ice-breaker though,” I said, trying not to stare too much at the knife in the dude’s dome.

“Not in the Underbelly, bucko,” the crocodile-man said. “It’s worth remembering that beauty might be only skin deep, but ugliness goes all the way clean down to the bone.”

He put on his hat again and waved cheerfully at us as we walked into the dark beneath the door.

There was no tavern inside those double doors of Ye Olde Shite Pipe. The doors opened into a large tunnel that stretched away into blackness. The murk was not total. It was punctuated and dimly lit by green lanterns that grew smaller and smaller as they receded down the tunnel. The smell was truly awful, pungent to the point of being able to taste distinct flavors on the air. They were not good flavors either. After a few minutes though, my nose simply gave up, battened down the hatches, and waited patiently for fresh air.

“This way,” Leah said, and we set off.

The tunnel looked like it delved straight on into the hill at first, but it was not long before the floor gradually rose, sloping upward. We followed it for maybe a mile or more when I heard the sounds of people up ahead. Many people.

The light broadened. The noise grew. It sounded like there was a city square, or the subterranean equivalent, lying just around the next bend in the gradually lightening tunnel.

We emerged out into the light, and my face split into a wide grin.

“Holy shit,” I said, “it’s the fucking Wild West.”

“This isn’t west,” Leah said. “We’re facing north. I think.”

“No, I mean… Never mind.” It was not important. What was important was that we had emerged into a massive underground cavity; a natural cavern in the hill on top of which part of Manafell was built.

Hundreds and hundreds of glowing lanterns illuminated the space. They floated and burned like occult versions of those paper lanterns that get released in Chiang Mai, Thailand whenever it’s a full moon.

My eyes moved upward, and I saw the mouths of several enormous pipes set into the upper reaches of the cavern. A few gushed out brown, turgid water which fell like waterfalls down the side of the subterranean cavern and flowed away like rivers of foul gravy. Others spurted out cleaner-looking water, while one of them was releasing nothing at all.

The Underbelly reminded me a lot of Powder Lane—the magical street which could be accessed through an opening at the back of a specific tavern in Nevermoor. Powder Lane was a haven for students and locals alike, who wished to buy or partake in illegal substances without the Queen’s Law breathing down their necks.

The Underbelly was obviously a place forged in the same mold, though this place was far less refined than Powder Lane. The buildings were all constructed out of repurposed and recycled materials; wood, stone, and metal that might have floated or washed down the sewer pipes.

The main street reminded me vividly of those street towns in Western movies, except here there was a distinct vibe of illegal magic being used and sold.

“Stolen vectors, bootlegged spells, illegal hybrid creature breeders, and smuggling,” Leah said, in answer to my starry-eyed look that I shot at her. “All of these things abound in the Underbelly.”

“How does us being here get us into the castle?” I asked Leah.

“Smuggling,” she replied.

“Smuggling? Smuggling what?”

“Smuggling us, sweet-pea,” Leah said. “If you slip a coin or two into the right hand you can get smuggled right into the bowels of the Castle of Ascendance from the Underbelly.”

Leah and I meandered our way through the crowds of swearing, spitting people, as they tried to hawk all sorts of illegal, stolen, or forged goods. She pointed toward the end of the long street, at the single sewer pipe that was not ejaculating any sort of liquid. I squinted and saw a rope ladder dangling about one-hundred feet down from the lip of the pipe.

Just before we reached the end of the main thoroughfare, we were forced to slip down a sidestreet by a sudden cry of, “Manananggal stand-off!”

Two vampire-looking creatures walked out into the street, which rapidly emptied around them; bare-chested, pale, and with leathery wings in their backs, they looked pissed about something.

Leah dragged me around the corner of an adjoining alleyway just as the first creature let loose a shrill screech and raised its hand at the other. Purple splinters of light flashed from its fingertips, punching into the ground where the other figure had been only a second before. Dirt and rock exploded from where the shards of light hit, sending splinters of stone flying in all directions, shattering shop windows and knocking people off their feet.

“What the hell are manananggal?” I asked Leah. I peered around the corner and watched as the other bat-winged creature let fly with a volley of neon blue needles that chewed up the ground near the other manananggal like fifty-caliber machine gun fire.

“Cave dwellers,” Leah said, leaning against the clapboard side of the building we were sheltering behind. “Grumpy folk who can’t hold their drink too well. There’s a manananggal stand-off at least three times a week down here.”

A burst of purple magic hit the second manananggal in the chest like a hammer-blow. The figure flew across the road and smashed through the front of an alehouse, disappearing inside in a shower of glass and brittle wood. I grinned. It was a pleasing reversal of stereotypes: this was the first time I had ever seen someone get thrown into a saloon window and not out of it.

Leah led us on, through the twisting streets, until we must have only been a few minutes away from the pipe she had indicated earlier.

The muggers over the Underbelly were obviously skilled. I didn’t hear a thing until two of them stepped nonchalantly out into the skinny street in front of Leah and me. A soft scuffling noise behind us told me that a couple more had closed off the only route of escape.

A thrill of anticipation went through me, as it always did when I smelled a fight on the horizon.

“Can we help you, boys?” I asked pleasantly, taking a couple of steps so that I was in front of Leah.

One of the slinking figures moved toward me. He was a bent-backed nymph with hair like seaweed, cut short. He smelled like brine and blood. His hand dipped into the pocket of his ragged coat and reappeared holding a clasp knife. He pulled it open and pointed it at my face.

“You’ll poke an eye out if you wave your knife around like that,” I advised him.

“More than your fucking eye, pal,” the Sea Nymph said. “Coin purse out. Now!”

“Bit forward of you,” I said.

The dull light of the lanterns overhead turned the blade of the knife orange as the Sea Nymph turned it. Orange to gray to orange.

“Do it,” my twitchy mugger hissed.

“Can’t do it, lads,” I said, raising my voice so the Sea Nymph’s accomplices would be able to hear me. “No cash will be forthcoming. But I will give you a couple of words of advice that will be worth more to you than all the gold in the Castle of Ascendance.”

“I’m all fucking ears, fancy-pants,” sneered the Sea Nymph.

He wasn’t for long.

My arm shot out to grab his wrist in my hand and wrenched it upward and away from me. He could have dropped the knife, of course, but it must have been a cherished possession or something because he clung onto it even as I swept his hand past his own face and nicked off his left ear.

The Sea Nymph let go of the knife then.

He screamed, though I didn’t give him long to show his vocal range. You can’t just have some guy wailing away in a back alley. That sort of thing draws all sorts of attention—you’ll end up with unwanted company faster than you can say assault with intent to injure.

I brought my hand down in an overhead knife hand strike with all the force at my disposal, landing the Sea Nymph a banger of a blow on the carotid artery. He dropped to his knees—unconscious or merely stunned, I couldn’t say—and I brought my knee up and cracked him hard in the face.

Then all hell broke loose with the sort of alacrity that is normally reserved for a drunken brawl inside a subway car.

I had not enjoyed a bit of good old-fashioned fist fighting like that since I’d been involved in an altercation at a fraternity party in college. It felt—though I’m sure polite society would frown on me for voicing it—rather fucking good.

There was a sharp silver flash from behind me, which I caught out of the corner of my eye, and I knew that Leah had engaged with the two muggers behind us.

The elation I felt at knocking out someone with my bare hands caused me to momentarily forget about the other guy in front of me.

I came back to my senses just in time to have this second shady figure crash into me. He bore back toward the stone wall of a building behind us. My assailant had his shoulder in my chest, his arms locked around my waist.

“You fucker!” he grunted in a cracked and broken voice as he drove me backward.

He was a short guy with a mop of tangled golden hair and spare tire around his gut. I guessed he was of the dwarf persuasion, though it was impossible to tell with him grabbing me like he was. He had a bit of weight behind him so, instead of trying to tussle it out with him like a couple of bar-room lemons, I grabbed his belt and back-pedaled with him.

My intent was to plow his head into the stonework behind me, but he pivoted and changed his direction at the last minute. I stepped to the side, and he crashed ribs-first into the rough stone, making a noise like a broken accordion.

Before he could recover, I summoned my black crystal staff to my hand, pressed it to his sternum, and hit him with a Paralyzing Zap.

I might, in retrospect, have overdone the spell a little, but it was hard to be sorry about that.

The dwarf went rigid as the Storm Magic filled him. He was blasted backward through the stone and into the brothel on the other side of it in a shower of dust and falling mortar.

I turned, intending to help Leah with the remaining pair of muggers. To my astonishment, Leah had what looked like a glowing silver dart of some kind embedded in her shoulder. Blood had spread in a small patch from the wound, soaking the light blue wool of her sweater.

One of the two remaining assailants was running down the alleyway toward her, while the other was peppering Leah with more of the little silver spell darts. I conjured up a Flame Barrier to protect Leah from the spell darts, which thudded into its incandescent surface and sizzled into greasy, gray arcane mist. Then I used my Telekinesis spell to dislodge a rickety red brick chimney and send it crashing down on top of him, effectively negating his ability to cause further trouble by breaking every bone in his body.

My attention flicked back to Leah just in time to see the perforated Chaos Mage dodge a big clobbering haymaker from the mugger who had closed with her. The mugger also held an effective-looking knuckleduster in his closed fist, giving his punch a little more weight. It might have stoved Leah’s head in had she been looking the other way. And drunk.

As it was, she had her face turned in the correct direction and was, as far as I was aware, as sober as a judge. She blocked the punch with an elbow, and then hammered the mugger twice in the armpit. He yelped like she’d stuck him with something sharp. As he staggered back, Leah raised her knee and stomped her foot into the side of the mugger’s kneecap. There was a juicy crunching pop, and her enemy went over like a tree, squealing.

Raising her hands, Leah hit her enemy with a scintillating blast of pearlescent pink Chaos Magic. It sent the mugger tumbling and skidding across the rough ground of the alley before slamming him into a far wall and sticking him there in a lollipop pink pat of…

“Bubblegum?” I asked, puffing out a breath and dusting off my hands. Nearby, the sylph owner of the brothel that I had just accidentally caved in was kicking at the prostrate figure of the dwarf and swearing at him in a continuous stream.

“Yes, bubblegum,” Leah said. “It was the first thing that came to mind.”

“How’s your shoulder?” I asked.

Leah frowned at me and looked over her shoulder at where I was pointing.

The silver dart had dissipated back into the ether, but the hole in her sweater and the patch of wet blood remained.

“Dang it,” Leah said. “I’m always letting the odd one sneak through.”

“Are you okay?” I asked.

Leah grinned at me; that strange half eccentric and half dazed smile. She pressed on the wound, and pink magic enveloped it. When she took her hand away, it was healed, but the skin was scarred where the dart had hit.

“Another scar,” she said. “Another story, eh, honeybunny? Let’s go.”

Chapter 11

Leah and I made it to the bottom of the cliff and scaled the rope ladder leading up to the pipe opening above us.

I had never been great with heights. My fears were soothed since I could easily save myself with magic if I fell. I considered using my Greater Flame Flight spell to carry Leah and me up, but figured I’d conserve my mana, in case I needed it later.

At the top of the ladder a crooked old witch with stereotypical green skin and a warty complexion greeted us.

“Two to the Castle of Ascendancy, basement level, please, you sweet little haggard crone you,” Leah said.

The witch didn’t seem all that offended by Leah’s words, but then Leah had also handed her a fat purse of coins. The witch led us along the disused and dusty sewer tunnel until we came to a phone box-sized booth cut out of the rock. It was a rough contraption made from hammered copper.

“Inside,” the witch croaked at us from under the brim of a shady hat.

We did as we were bid. Things were very tight. Leah was pressed up close to me, her ass squashed firmly against my groin.

“How long will this take?” I asked.

Leah wriggled her ass back into me, rubbing up against my other magic staff and said, “Not long enough for what you have in mind.”

The witch rolled her eyes at us. “When was the last time you nauseating lovebirds ate?”

I frowned. “I don’t know. An hour ago, maybe.”

The old crone harrumphed bitterly. “Well, just damn well try not to vomit in here, you hear?”

She stepped back and made a gesture. The open side of the bronze capsule closed, leaving us in impenetrable, inky darkness.

“What did she mean by ‘try not to vom—” I said.

The capsule exploded upward like a cork leaving a prosecco bottle. My words were lost, crushed back down my throat by the G-forces suddenly pressing down on us. The world was utterly black. The only sound was the occasional scrape as the capsule made contact with the sides of the shaft.

It was the longest six seconds of my life.

With a stomach-lurching suddenness, the hellride came to a halt. There came a grating sound of stone, and the door slid open. Leah and I fell out, landing on a rough floor.

I rolled over, trying to get at least some of my breath back and saw the battered copper door of the capsule slide shut behind us. Then, a section of stone wall, out of which we had apparently just emerged, slid back into place and the capsule was gone. The masonry covering the secret entrance to the capsule shaft was so well hidden that even a second after it had closed, I could not be entirely sure where it was.

“Where-where are we?” I managed to ask. “The base… The basement of the Castle of Ascendance?”

Leah had gotten shakily to her feet and was leaning against the cool stone wall with forehead. Somehow, she was grinning.

“Yeah,” she said in a breathless whisper. “Gods, but isn’t that fun?”

I burped and winced. “Oh yeah, lots of fun,” I said acidly.

When we had recovered our poise and breath, Leah led the way up a spiral staircase. We paused at a heavy oaken door, and the female Chaosbane said, “You go ahead and lead the way.”

“Why me?” I asked. “I don’t know where the fuck I’m going.”

“Neither do I!” Leah said delightedly. “It’s only fair that we get to share responsibility for our fate, isn’t it?”

I couldn’t really argue with that—one lost person’s guess was as good as another’s, I supposed—so I pushed the door carefully open and we exited the basement.

We had taken perhaps four randomly selected turns, walking down the quiet marble corridors about as conspicuously as a couple of foxes in a chicken coop, when we ran into someone who was most assuredly not an Inscriber.

“Halt!” a voice cried.

We had entered a particularly ornate and luxuriously appointed corridor. There were busts and statues of important-looking men and women with their regal noses stuck high in the air. Many were adorned with vine leaves and little crowns.

At the end of the stretch of white marble corridor, a group of half a dozen tall, armored women, attired from head to foot in flashing mail and gleaming plate rounded the corner.

“Halt, in the name of Queen Hagatha!” one armored woman called once more.

There were two possible options. Flee in the opposite direction and proclaim your guilt with the very first step you took, or remain where you were and try to talk your way out of the pickle you had suddenly found yourself in.

We opted, on this occasion, for option two.

“Oh look,” Leah said in her tranquil voice, “Arcane Knights!”

“And they are…?” I asked.

“Mages who are very, very powerful and very much intent on protecting the Queen,” Leah said calmly.

“The Queen?” I asked in a low, urgent voice. “You don’t mean we’ve just walked smackdab into Queen Hagatha?”

“So it would appear,” Leah said. She made a little noise of recognition in her throat, and her eyebrows rose up into her pink hair. “Yep, there she is.”

It was the first time that I had ever laid eyes upon the most powerful being in the Avalonian Kingdom, Queen Hagatha. As far as queens went, she was nothing like the kindly, doddering old biddy who was running the Brits back on Earth.

She was incredibly beautiful, with bright red hair kept back from her finely boned, well-proportioned face by a golden crown. She was an elf of some kind, pointed ears poking out from the bright red tresses proclaimed that much.

While I noted the Queen’s beautiful attributes, Leah and I were neatly surrounded by the six Arcane Knights accompanying her.

“State your business!” commanded one of the Arcane Knights, while the Queen gazed at the two of us with a suitably imperious set of green eyes. “Speak clearly and speak quickly!”

The words started coming out of my mouth before I was even aware of what I was going to say. All I knew was that I needed to cut off Leah before she said something that got the pair of us evaporated, obliterated, or squashed into jelly.

“Uh, Your Majesty,” I said, directing my words at Queen Hagatha, “you’ll have to excuse us, but we’ve managed to get a little bit lost.”

“You dare to speak directly to the Queen?” spat the Arcane Knight, who was a handsome nymph woman with a brown bob, deep blue eyes, and skin the color of honey. “Your impudence is astounding!”

Before things could go properly pear-shaped, the Queen unexpectedly stepped in.

Her voice was as cool, clear, and light as a good rosé wine.

“That’s enough, Braya,” she said, and the Arcane Knight closed her mouth immediately. “Let them explain themselves. Then, if I am not impressed by their reasoning for being here, you can berate them until you’re sore in the throat. Besides, these are clearly two of my loyal subjects. If I cannot make time to hear them out, who should I make time for?”

“Thanks very much, Your Majesty,” I said.

The Queen ran those haughty, perceptive green eyes of hers over me again. “Do not thank me yet, stranger. And speak your piece fast. I am meant to be meeting some ambassador or other from some far-flung place and really should not be late.”

“Then I’ll be brief, Your Majesty,” I said. “We’re just a couple of students who got let in by the guys on the front gate so that we could talk to some Inscribers as part of a bit of research we’re doing back at the Mazirian Academy.”

“You’re students?” the Queen asked. “Of the Mazirian Academy?” She seemed somewhat surprised at that, and rather than speak the name with disdain, it came out bearing a marked amount of interest.

I lowered my voice and continued conspiratorially. “In all honesty, I was hoping to ask them a few questions and leave. I’m eager to get to an inn for some food, but we got lost, and here we are.”

The Queen looked at me more than a little skeptically. I was aware that she wasn’t some empty-headed figurehead, but a savvy woman in her own right. I was hoping, though, that her pressing business might stop her asking for our names.

“Who are you?” she asked in her cool, calm voice.

“I’m Qildro Feybreaker,” I lied. I thought it would be prudent to leave the name of Justin Mauler out of this. I also thought that the sooner we parted ways the better. “Look, Your Majesty,” I said, pressing on, “if we could have one of your Arcane Knights here show us to where the Inscribers work, then we could be on our way and out of your hair.”

“Very well, Qildro Feybreaker,” she said. “I’ll allow you and your friend to go on your way in the company of one of my very own Arcane Knights.”

“I owe you one, Your Majesty,” I said. “Although, I’m not sure what I could give you to repay the favor.”

The Queen’s bright emerald eyes narrowed. A phantom smile played across her clever lips. “I shall think of something, I am sure,” she said, “should our paths ever cross again.”

I bowed, not wanting to push my luck.

“Eliz,” the Queen said, “escort these two to the Tower of Inscription. Tell the Inscriber with whom you leave them to conduct them to the gates after they are done.”

“Yes, Majesty,” Eliz the Arcane Knight said.

Queen Hagatha gave me one last look; it told me that while she was a queen, she was also, first and foremost, a beautiful young woman with desires like any other woman.

“Come,” Eliz said brusquely as Queen Hagatha disappeared down the corridor.

The Arcane Knight led Leah and me through a maze of corridors that we could never have hoped to navigate by ourselves. She knocked on an elaborately carved, all-metal door at the end of a straight hall with no windows. A window in the door snapped open, and we were admitted inside.

We entered a large round room carpeted with plush rugs and a selection of warmly colored tapestries hanging on the walls. A fire blazed in the spacious hearth. A selection of mismatched, squishy armchairs and a sofa were spread around the room. The smell of baking filled the air, and I located the source of the stomach-rumbling smell as a large tea trolley in one corner stacked high with scones, tea, and those little quartered sandwiches that I could go on eating indefinitely.

It was also, I couldn’t help but notice, full of little old women.

“These are the Inscribers?” I asked Eliz.

The Arcane Knight nodded curtly. “Choose one, Qildro,” she said, “so that I may pass on the Queen’s message and return to my duty.”

Her tone suggested she wasn’t impressed with being relegated from Arcane Knight to errand girl.

“Actually,” Leah said, pulling a scrap of parchment quickly from one pocket and pretending to read something off it, “we were meant to chat with someone specific…”

“Gertrude,” I chipped in, filling in the deliberate pause that Leah had left at the end of the sentence.

The Arcane Knight sighed impatiently. She scanned the room.

“There,” she said. “There is Gertrude. Come on.”

Eliz led us over to a particularly wrinkled old dear who was enjoying a short nap in an armchair nearest the fire. The tall Arcane Knight attempted to rouse the small, slumbering figure—complete with purple perm and round spectacles hanging about her neck by a silver chain—with a couple of subtle coughs. Then, when that did not work, she gave the chair the old woman was sitting in a surreptitious kick.

The old Inscriber awoke with a snort and looked up. She slipped her glasses onto her nose and peered owlishly up at Eliz.

“Tell me, Knight,” she said in a creaky voice, “is it common practice for those of your order to go around rousing weary old women who are trying to catch up on some much needed sleep?”

Eliz colored under her helmet. With a jerk of her head, she nodded at Leah and me.

“These two are from the Academy,” she said.

“The Mazirian Academy,” I said, putting the gentlest strain on the second word.

The old woman’s eyes seemed to sharpen at that.

“Quite,” Eliz said. “They wish to talk to you, Inscriber Gertrude. When you have helped them with their inquiries, please take them to the front gate and release them back into the city. Those are the orders of Queen Hagatha, Inscriber.”

“Yes, yes,” Gertrude said, “run along with you now, you great kicking brute.”

Eliz’s jaw worked, but she said nothing. She turned on her heel and marched across the room and through the door.

Once the Arcane Knight had disappeared, Gertrude got up from her chair.

“Follow me to my workshop, you two,” she said. “And bring us some tea.”

Ten minutes later, we were settled in the privacy of Inscriber Gertrude’s workshop. It was a tight space, filled with clutter of all sorts; paraphernalia of various magical purposes, stuffed animals, and heaps of scrolls lying all over the place. There was also a door at the back of the workshop that I imagined led to the old girl’s private sleeping quarters.

Cups of tea steamed in front of us. Leah was munching loudly through a scone slathered in jam and clotted cream.

It was the first time I had met an Inscriber. I had never had to visit one, not like everyone else, because I learned my spells the fun way. I grinned slightly at that. No tests or anything of the sort for me, just hardcore, no-holds-barred sex. It was lucky for some, all right.

Gertrude was a convivial old bird, as pleasant as anyone that I had ever met. With a cup of tea at her elbow, a scone on her plate, and company that weren’t wearing tinsuits, she was hospitality itself. I wondered if all Inscribers were like her and, if so, where their reputations for being hardasses stemmed from.

“Gertrude,” I began after we had exchanged a few pleasantries, “I’m—”

“I know who you are, Justin Mauler,” the little old woman said. She was sitting with her hands in her lap. Her face had been softened and lined by time and many frowns and smiles, but I imagined that she must have been quite a firecracker in her day. Her eyes were bright chips of blue set behind her glasses.

“I know who you are,” she said again, “and I know who your friend is. She has the Chaosbane look as clear as day.”

Leah licked her plate and smiled sweetly.

“The question is,” Gertrude said, “why is the son of Zenidor and Istrea here to see me?”

“You did know my father and mother then?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” the little old lady said. “I was one of your father’s conquests, many many years ago—a mature woman who showed him a few tricks. Although, maybe he was one of my conquests? It’s hard to recall sometimes.”

I snorted.

“You saucy wench!” Leah said. “Bravo, I knew I could tell that you and I shared a kindred thread in our souls!”

Gertrude giggled.

“I’ll cut to the chase, Gertrude,” I said, handing my scone to Leah, who had been eyeing it like a rattlesnake watching a gopher hole. “I’m not sure how much time we’ve bought ourselves.”

Gertrude nodded and sipped her tea, as if this was all a typical day for her.

“Now, you know who I am,” I continued, “but do you know what I am?”

“If you allude to the kind of mage that you are, Justin,” the old woman said, “then yes I do. You are a special and rare type of practitioner, indeed.”

“Okay, so you know I’m a Creation Mage,” I said, my voice low. “And I assume that you know what that entails—how I learn new spells etcetera?”

The old woman nodded once more.

“Well,” I plowed on, while crumbs flew from the chair next to me, “I’ve been a little over-zealous in, ah, cultivating new magic. I’ve run out of spell slots. A very reliable source recently told me that you were the woman to come and see about opening new ones.”

Gertrude’s eyes crinkled up as she smiled at me over her teacup. She set the teacup down and pushed the saucer away.

“I assume that your ‘source’ is none other than your father?” she asked.

Seemed pointless to deny it, so I nodded.

The old woman pursed her lips and muttered, “He really is a marvel.” She cleared her throat, and the ice-chip gaze locked on to mine. “Justin, I think you’re right in saying that you don’t have much time here so listen to me very carefully. You too, glutton!”

Leah jerked up, inhaled a scone crumb, and started choking. I whacked her on the back until the fit subsided.

“Sorry,” she gasped. “Love a scone. Continue.”

Gertrude turned to me once more. “The most expedient way for you to open up some spell slots is by acquiring three relics of power.”

I recalled my father mentioning something about relics, but he couldn’t tell me much about them.

“And where can I get my hands on some of these relics?” I asked.

“Thankfully,” the old Inscriber said, “the Castle of Ascendance itself holds a vast collection of such items. Unfortunately for you, these relics are all held tightly under lock and key, ward and curse, monster and demon.”

“I wouldn’t expect anything less in this joint,” Leah said.

Gertrude ignored her.

”The first relic will open one slot,” the old woman explained, “the second relic will open a second slot, and the third will provide three more slots.”

“Three relics, five spell slots?” I clarified.

Gertrude nodded her permed head.

“Then, you will find yourself running up against yet another thaumaturgical roadblock,” she said.

“Do you have any recommendations as to how to deal with that, when I come up against it?” I asked.

“At that point, it’ll require more than what I can do, or any of the Inscribers here in the Tower of Inscription,” Gertrude said.

“I can’t just find some more relics?” I asked.

“More relics won’t help. You’ll need to find a Legendary Inscriber, and those aren’t just rabbits you can pull from a hat, Justin Mauler.”

Leah and I sat and looked at one another for a moment or two. It seemed like this little clandestine mission of ours had borne fruit, just not as much as I, personally, was hoping for.

There was a soft sound of metal scraping on wood.

The sound of a door being pushed carefully open from behind us.

Leah was on her feet a millisecond before I was, but before I had conjured my father’s black crystal staff, the two of us heard an unexpected but familiar voice call from the back room.

“Gertrude, dear, do you think this dress makes my breasts pop?”

Out through the door, dressed in a slightly different, but just as dazzling, white gown came Mallory Entwistle. She acted surprised to see me and Leah sitting with Gertrude in her workshop, but it was clear that the radiant Holy Mage had been expecting us.

How, though, was beyond any leap of logic I could make.

“Excuse me for eavesdropping,” she said, “but I heard familiar voices and listened despite breeding being against such behavior.”

“How the hell did you know we were going to make our way here?” Leah asked.

“And how did you get here?” I added.

“That is immaterial now,” Mallory said in an offhand voice. “What is of chief concern is that I overheard what you were saying. It sounds very much like you’ll be going on a little relic hunt. You two really need a woman who knows her way around the Castle of Ascendance.”

“And you think that a woman with a bounty on her head is the right chick for the job, do you?” I asked.

Mallory laughed in a thoroughly unconcerned fashion.

“That little misunderstanding? That little bureaucratic error of paperwork? I’ve cleared it,” the Galadriel-like figure said.

“Ooooh, Mort’s not going to like that,” Leah said delightedly. “He hates it when people screw with the system!”

“How did you manage it?” I asked Mallory.

“Gertrude here kindly forged a few letters for me.” Mallory indicated the sweet old woman sitting contentedly in her chair. “She also placed some rather incriminating evidence here and there. Now, the true culprit for a great many bad deeds has a few of my misdemeanors added to her rap sheet. She is already on her way to being arrested, I believe.”

Next to me, Gertrude nodded.

“You’re saying you framed an innocent person?” I asked. “That’s a bit... icy, isn’t it?”

Mallory laughed again and placed a hand on my shoulder. “Oh, Justin. Finding a deservingly guilty and vicious party to take the fall is not hard in Avalonia. My crimes pale in comparison to hers. In fact, I believe I was doing a great deed in ensuring this particular criminal was apprehended.”

“Mallory is correct,” Gertrude assured me. “They were hardly innocent, Justin.”

“If this sweet old duffer is convinced,” Leah said, “then that is good enough for me.”

I looked around at the three women. “All right, then. If it means that you’re free to walk in broad daylight again, I guess I can get on board with that.”

“Fabulous! Now, shall we be about the relic hunt?” Mallory said.

Chapter 12

We left dear old Gertrude to sleep off her tea and scone in her workshop.

Mallory led the way out of the room, her new dress swishing softly about her ankles. Her long-legged strides made the same gentle noise a relaxed sea makes when it laps the shore.

“You’ve known Gertrude a long time, have you?” I asked the Holy Mage as we walked quickly through the echoing corridors.

Mallory thought for a second. In the time that she took to consider the question, I realized that I couldn’t even guess at the ethereal woman’s age. She really was like Galadriel in that respect; she might have been thirty or, then again, she might have been edging toward three hundred.

“Yes,” she said after we had gone ten more paces, “I have known the Inscriber Gertrude for a long time, I suppose.”

“And you trust the old biddy? That’s what Justin is trying to say, I think,” Leah said. “That’s the more pertinent question.”

Mallory smiled a thin-lipped smile.

“Yes, I trust Gertrude. She was one of the first to come over to Zenidor and Istrea’s way of thinking when it was first broached. When their theories for preserving the Universal Magic were first made public. When your father made such a splash with his talk of culling magic users to preserve the fabric of this world and all the others. Before your mother refined that theory, made one that was not so…”

“Morally reprehensible?” I supplied.

“Quite,” Mallory said.

“And even after seeing what my dad might have been prepared to do if no other way had presented itself, if my mother hadn’t come up with a better scheme, Gertrude was still happy to take his side?” I asked.

“Sounds like she took a little more than his side…” Leah said from behind me.

I bit back a retort.

“Gertrude can be trusted to help us, don’t worry,” Mallory said. “There is a common misconception that wisdom comes with age. This is not true. The aged do not grow wise; they grow careful. Gertrude has not survived so long under the very nose of Queen Hagatha by being careless. She has never wavered in her resolve to help the Twin Spirits.”

Whether by chance or by Mallory’s design, we didn’t come across any servants, guards, or palace denizens. I got the feeling that we were using lesser-known routes, perhaps those hallways that weren’t grand enough for the Queen and her chief lackeys to use, but not basic enough for the serving folk to walk through.

“So, how is it that you know your way around here so well, Mallory?” Leah asked as we cut quickly down a side passage to avoid the noise of scurrying feet from a corridor up ahead.

“Oh, I used to spend quite a bit of time here at the Castle of Ascendance,” Mallory said in a blithe tone of voice. “Before the little mix-up that saw me placed on Mort’s bounty list.”

“You should have been very honored,” Leah said, “so far as being put on bounty lists goes. My cousin really is top of his field, you know.”

“I don’t know if bounty hunters enjoy the same prestige and fame as, say, a good proctologist does, Leah,” I said drily. “I doubt people feel all that starstruck to see their friendly neighborhood bounty hunter when he kicks their door in, looking for their head. Even if he is the one with the best reputation in his field.”

Leah made a face. “I’m just saying, that if I was being hunted by someone who was going to take me dead or alive, I wouldn’t want it to be some greenhorn.”

I shook my head.

We carried on in silence for a few more steps, and then Leah said, “That’d be a good nickname for a bounty hunter, wouldn’t it?”

“What would?” I asked.

“The proctologist,” Leah said.

I only had to think about this one for a second. “Because both bounty hunters and proctologists hold the fate of your ass in their hands?”

“See, it’s a good one!” Leah said in a low, fervent voice. “I’m going to bring it up with Mort. You reckon he’ll go for it?”

I had to think about that one for considerably less time. “No,” I said. “I don’t think he will.”

“Pity,” said Leah glumly.

I touched Mallory on the shoulder.

“You’re absolutely sure that this first relic is where you think it is?” I asked the graceful, put together former priestess who was gliding along at the head of our three-person procession.

“Quite sure,” Mallory Entwistle insisted. “The Chamber of Lock and Key is famous, even outside the castle. I have never been inside the actual room itself, of course.”

“You haven’t?” I blurted.

“No,” continued Mallory in her composed voice, “but I know where the Chamber is located. There has never been any real threat posed for the security of anything in the Chamber of Lock and Key. There are too many doors, requiring too many keys. Coupled with the fact that it is inside the Castle of Ascendance, under the nose of Queen Hagatha and her Arcane Knights, and it is little wonder that it has become a byword for security throughout the kingdom.”

We rounded a corner and entered a large circular hall. Apart from the hallway we had just exited, there were three others entering the circular hall. A number of keys were set over the left and right passageway entrances. Over the central corridor, a large gilt lock was emblazoned.

“We take the central route,” Mallory said in a sure voice.

“The first relic is supposed to be under lock and key,” I reminded her. “Why are you going for the lock corridor and not one of the keys?”

“Because all those who come in search of a lock to open are presumed to have a key,” Mallory said evenly.

I didn’t point out that, as far as I knew, we were bereft of anything as helpful as a key.

At Mallory’s insistence, we padded very slowly and carefully along the last ten-yard stretch of the central corridor, after following its winding course for about two minutes. All sorts of bizarre pictures hung on the walls, all based around the theme of locks. They were painted in oil and watercolor, drawn in pencil, charcoal and, on more than one occasion, a brown liquid that I suspected was blood.

On reaching the end of the gallery of lock-based artwork, Mallory motioned us to stop. On flannel feet, she crept to the very edge of the wall and eased her head around. Then she eased it back.

“I see the single door,” Mallory said, leaning in close to Leah and me and speaking in a whisper so quiet that I struggled to hear it. “There are two guards.”

“Just one door? Just two guards?” I whispered. “What’s the big idea? You made it sound like some sort of thaumaturgical Fort Knox, like some sort of multi-doored vault.”

The corner of Mallory’s mouth twitched up. She regarded me calmly through her crystal blue eyes.

“You’ll see soon enough, Justin,” she said to me in her soft, sure voice.

“Right, so shall we bowl around there and—” Leah began, her fingers twitching with excitement.

“I think it is probably well advised to let me go first,” Mallory said diplomatically. “I will deal with the guards in a non-lethal fashion and open the way for us.”

Hell, taking a backseat sometimes didn’t bother me. Not if there was someone who had an alternate plan to simply crossing our fingers and hoping we didn’t bring a mountain of shit down on our heads.

I had been expecting Leah, as a Chaosbane, to insist on being involved in the action. Surprisingly, she bowed her head slightly and simply gestured for Mallory to go on ahead.

“Very good,” the Holy Mage said. “Follow behind me, but let me do the talking. Agreed?”

“Sure,” I acquiesced.

Leah grunted.

We walked casually around the corner, Mallory leading.

As Mallory had said, there were two guards stationed outside a single door. The guards were athletic-looking types, with sinewy forearms and well-defined calves. They were the types of individuals who had probably been fighters all their lives. They were dressed in the same uniform as the guards stationed around the exterior of the golden gate had been: all shiny plate, buffed chainmail and those dumb helmets that looked like helmets of a different kind.

The former priestess moved with the stately poise of a royal barge being towed up a river. Her chin was thrust out, as was her substantial bust. She strolled toward the two alert guardsmen as if she had every right to be there.

Leah and I followed, doing our best to stay behind the graceful woman. Her angel-like wings, despite being folded, mostly obscured us from view.

“Halt, if you please, madam,” said one guard, turning to face the approaching vision in white.

Mallory did not stop. She did not slow.

“Halt,” the man said again, more forcefully and less politely this time. The other guard, a dwarf, moved his hand casually from his belt where it had been resting to the haft of the morning-star hanging from his belt.

“I wish to speak with the pair of you,” Mallory said in her most austerely commanding voice.

“Madam, I must warn you that if you don’t stop in your tracks we will have to—” the guard who had been trying to call a halt to Mallory’s march tried to say, but he never got to finish his sentence.

There was a blurring silver-black miasma that swept around and over Mallory from behind. A couple of dull pops. Then, when the thaumaturgical dust had cleared, the two guards had simply vanished, to be replaced by a pair of bright white rabbits.

“What the fuck?” was all I could say.

The two rabbits, still wearing minute bunny versions of their armor, looked at one another.

One of them let out a little squeak, which I interpreted as bunny for “Are you fucking serious?”

They huddled a little closer together, their ears drooping, their noses twitching nervously.

“Excuse me, pardon me, coming through, animal control here,” Leah said, stepping around me and tossing a black silk tophat that she had generated from out of the ether at the rabbits. The silk topper fell neatly over the top of the bunny guards, trapping them.

“Neatly done as that!” Leah said, turning to find Mallory and me looking at her in stony disbelief. “What?”

“What happened to letting me deal with them non-lethally?” Mallory asked severely.

“Yes, but you were taking so long,” Leah said, hopping from foot to foot. “I wanted to get through the door to see what it is we’re here to see! And it’s not as if I killed anyone. That Chaos Spell is a bit of a wily one—I’m never quite sure what animal my target’s going to be turned into, if I’m honest—so it’s lucky that they were turned into creatures that would fit under a hat.”

“What happens if they escape?” Mallory asked in exasperation.

“Oh, they won’t be escaping from under that hat,” Leah assured the other woman. “No, that’s one of those traditional tophats with the lead lining. No, the only thing that they need to worry about is going a little gaga from the lead.”

“How long do they stay in rabbit form for?” I asked resignedly, watching the tophat wobble from side to side as the trapped rabbits attempted to knock it over.

Leah shrugged unconcernedly. “Not forever. A day or so, maybe? I was a bit excited so it might be longer, might be shorter.” She shrugged again and said dreamily, “That’s the thing about Chaos Magic; keeps you on your toes.”

“I guess we should just concentrate on the business at hand,” I said.

Mallory nodded, but she still looked a little ruffled. I wondered briefly whether she had been hoping to impress me in some way by dealing with the guards in whatever way she had planned.

I looked around us. The hallway we were now standing in was completely deserted, except for the three of us, the pair of white rabbits under the silk top hat, and a single nondescript wooden door. It was a dead-end. It was dead quiet.

I studied the door that stood so innocuously in front of us. It was wood, but it looked to have been carved and cut out of a single huge piece of wood, rather than of many separate planks. There was nothing at all grand or out of the ordinary about it. It might very well lead to this fabled Chamber of Lock and Key, but it might just as well lead to the washroom, or a pantry. The only thing that pointed to it leading anywhere interesting was the carving chiseled across its lintel:

A KEY IS ALL WELL AND GOOD

BUT ONLY IF YOU KNOW WHAT LOCK YOU NEED

Cryptic. The inscription brought a whole lot of questions to mind; questions about what lay on the other side.

Currently, the real question, now that we were standing in front of the damned thing, was how we were going to open it. I looked down at the black hat under which the guards-cum-rabbits were now cowering.

Was the key on one of them?

Had it been shrunk, just as their uniforms and weapons had been, and no longer fit the lock?

I exchanged glances with Mallory. It looked like she had come to the same conclusion that I had. Namely, that we might have just fucked ourselves before we really got started.

“You’re thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked.

“Yes,” the Holy Mage sighed. “I believe I am.”

“Shit,” I said. I stuck my hands in my pockets, head down, while my brain went into overdrive to try and think how we could get out of this Chaosbane-related fumble.

Then, like a bolt from the blue, I remembered. All right, that’s not entirely true. What actually happened was that my hand closed on one of the few items that I kept in the pockets of my jacket at all times, along with my slim spellbook, my mother’s white crystal, and a clasp knife.

The Skeleton Key! The one I grabbed from the necromancer, Horatio, Arun’s cousin, who stole it from my frat house.

Just as I was congratulating myself on not putting things of importance back into a place where I could always find them, the sound of a door handle rattling brought me back to the present.

The dull creak of hinges echoed through the hallway.

“Door’s open,” Leah said.

“The door is open?” Mallory said in amazement.

“Yeah,” said Leah.

“Damn, that’s a bit of luck,” I said, the smile of relief spreading across my face.

“Luck?” Leah said. “You don’t think I’d just come running in and start turning people into small lagomorphs left, right, and center if I wasn’t sure that the fucking door was open, do you?”

Mallory looked at me and raised an eyebrow. I puffed out my cheeks and made an apologetic face at Leah.

“Honestly…” I said.

Leah cocked her head to the side and puffed out her cheeks. Then she said, in the voice of someone whose thoughts are miles away, “Because if you did, it shows that you’re really starting to get into the swing of the Chaosbane way of thinking and doing things. Much more fun to follow your gut into mayhem than follow your brain into monotony.”

Leah kicked the door open wide and led the way inside the Chamber of Lock and Key.

Stuffing the Skeleton Key back into my pocket, I followed.

“You see,” said Mallory from behind me, “this is why this place is a byword for security in Avalonia.”

“Fort Knox eat your fucking heart out,” I breathed, staring around me.

We walked out into a corridor that stretched for… for miles. It was so long that, to both my right and left, it tapered off into a distance that I could not see. It was far too long to be contained within the Castle of Ascendance, so it must have been some kind of enchanted room or pocket dimension, perhaps.

The huge hall was lit by large fairy-filled globes hanging from the vaulted ceiling. The ceiling itself was high, high enough to accommodate three doors stacked on top of one another—and there were three doors stacked one atop the other.

Three doors high and a gazillion wide. The two higher doors were reached by catwalks that stretched to infinity and beyond, like the rest of the corridor.

Literally thousands upon thousands of doors of various kinds in a single wall that went on for what felt like forever. Each door had a very elaborate and fancy looking keyhole.

“Denoting a fancy fucking key,” I murmured to myself.

I ran my hand through my hair. I felt like I was basically standing in front of the Universe’s safety deposit box.

“Well, it looks like we’ll still need to use the Skeleton Key,” I said. “But which damned lock do we put it in?”

Leah started laughing to herself.

“What is it that you’re finding humorous about this particular situation?” Mallory asked. Her usually placid face was tight with worry.

“Oh come on, Mallory, you beautiful little worrier you!” Leah chuckled. “Look at this. This is outrageous!”

I was inclined to agree with Leah.

“The question of where to start is an apt one,” Mallory said, her face softening a little at the sight of Leah’s slightly despairing laughter.

“One door is as good as another,” I said. “You never know your luck. May as well just dive in and see if we can’t pull something miraculous out of our asses.”

“You know what I’ve always found interesting about miracles,” Mallory said as I approached the door directly in front of me.

“What’s that?” Leah asked.

“Is that people always see miracles as being synonymous with good. You know, you find a sack of money in an old tree or your dog gets its collar caught on a lucky branch just before going over a waterfall. But, just because something is bad—someone gets hit by lightning, for instance—doesn’t make it any less miraculous.”

That was food for thought, certainly, but now was not the time to chew it over. I reached out a hand, grasped the door handle, and slipped the Skeleton Key into the lock.

The door opened to reveal a portal. The portal was a greasy, opalescent, multicolored mess that spoke of pure magic, but almost as soon as the door was open, it changed and flowed into something that most closely resembled a window.

A window that opened onto a white sandy beach.

“Where the hell is that?” Leah blurted.

It was a picture-perfect scene. A strip of white sand, a bright blue ocean behind and an even brighter blue sky above. There were a set of yellow and red flags waving to either side of the panorama. Gorgeous, plastic-looking women wearing tiny bikinis, with deep tans and fake boobs bigger than their heads strutted about. Athletic guys with bodies like Adonis, covered in tattoos and wearing caps backward prowled through the throngs of women muttering to each other and high-fiving. Almost everyone was holding a cellphone and taking pictures of their friends or themselves. Off to one side, I noticed a sign that read, Welcome to the Gold Coast, Queensland!

“That looks like… like Earth,” I said, though I had no idea where the hell the Gold Coast was.

“Must be a coast filled with gold,” Leah said. “That’s why everyone is so shiny and healthy looking.”

“Whatever,” I said. “It’s not what we’re after.”

I slammed the door closed.

We moved onto another randomly selected door. This time it looked to me like we had opened up a portal that stared out of a locker in the locker room of the Golden State Warriors. It was either that or Klay Thompson had been abducted and sent to some other universe.

The third door was filled completely with smoke, and there was only a single burning candle sitting on the floor.

“Creepy,” Leah said and booted the door shut.

Door four held the smell of baking, golden light, and a whistled tune.

“All right, that’s enough,” I said. “We need a way to harden the target here!”

We lapsed into thoughtful silence. It was not a feeling that struck me often but, right then, I felt like I could have given up. I mean, when you’re faced with that sort of problem it’s difficult to ignore what all your senses and your brain is telling you: that you don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell at figuring this problem out.

If only I had someone to talk to, someone like my parents who had been here, who had more experience in figuring this sort of shit out…

My thought trailed off, as another one came crashing into it like a truck T-boning a minivan.

I couldn’t speak to my parents inside their staffs, but maybe they could help me out all the same. Maybe I could use their joint vectors, their twin spirits, to direct me.

I pulled my mother’s white crystal from my pocket and made my father’s black crystal staff materialize in my other. I pressed the two crystals together, held them tight in my hands and closed my eyes, willing my problem into them.

While I attempted to draw help from the two staffs, I pointed them both at the many, many doors that lined the wall opposite me.

The staffs twitched in my hands. My eyes flew open.

“Did you just see that?” I asked Mallory, who was watching me intently.

The staffs twitched again, and then began vibrating. Twitching this way and that like divining rods that had locked onto water. Only they weren’t sensing water, they were sensing an answer; an answer to the problem that I had posed them.

I followed the trembling vectors as they twitched and flicked. I walked back past the door that led to the corridor outside and one-hundred yards further on. I followed them until they led me to a shabby door covered with black paint. Under the peeling black paint, clean, white holly wood shone through.

Black and white.

“Seems almost obvious, doesn’t it?” Mallory asked from over my shoulder.

“Pretty unobtrusive,” Leah said. “Just the place to hide a relic.”

I pulled out the Skeleton Key to open the door. I twisted the knob, and the portal swung open. It revealed a bog-standard broom cupboard. A plain, gray feather quill with a sharpened nib of pure gold sat on the floor.

“That’s our relic,” I said, vanishing my father’s staff and pocketing my mother’s crystal. I reached down, picked up the quill, and slipped it carefully into my pocket.

Our business concluded, the three of us walked back toward the exit.

Just as we reached it, the door burst open.

The two guards who had been manning the door, disheveled and only half dressed, came charging out. They looked wild-eyed. Not surprising, really, what with them having just been turned into rabbits. The dwarf still had a fluffy tail.

I tossed the Skeleton Key to Leah to keep her from performing any more magic on the poor bastards. They had just been doing their job and didn’t deserve to get cursed into any more unexpected shapes if it could be helped.

“Open a door!” I yelled. “Any door!”

The taller guard charged at me as Leah unlocked a door close by.

He was still bamboozled in the head. I doubted he would have hopped toward me in the way he did under ordinary circumstances, flailing at me with his morning-star as if he’d like nothing better than to put an irreversible dent in my head.

He swung the length of spike-ended steel at me, but his heart wasn’t really in it. More accurately, his heart was in it, but his arm and his head were on separate wavelengths.

I stepped easily inside his guard and caught his right arm between my left arm and my body so that the morning-star was waving uselessly around behind my back. Generating the power from my elbow, rather than my shoulder, so I didn’t telegraph my punches, I struck the guard hard in the throat with my open palm. I had seen Jet Li do it in a movie once, and it worked a treat here. The guard squawked, and I drove my elbow into his temple before bringing my foot around to stamp hard on his ankle with my boot heel.

Then with a hard shove, I pushed him backward through the portal that Leah held open for me.

While I had been involved in my little bout of fisticuffs, Mallory had dealt with the dwarf by wrapping him in a spell that resembled fluffy white clouds. His morning-star was lying useless and unbloodied on the ground nearby.

The dwarf was struggling, his bunny tail twitching angrily as he hurled curses at Mallory. Raising her hands, the former priestess propelled the cotton wool wrapped guard through the door after his friend with a spontaneously conjured gust of wind.

“I bet those guys will love it there,” I said as Leah pulled the door shut and locked it again. “Got to be better than guard duty outside the Hall of a Hundred Gazillion Doors anyway.”

“What makes you say that?” Leah asked. “We might have just sent them to hell.”

“Nah,” I said. “It was another little slither of Earth I saw in that door. If I read things right, we just dumped those two lucky little bunny rabbits through a time portal. That was the Miss America pageant of 1983 when Vanessa Williams won!”

The two women looked blankly at me.

I grinned, took them by the shoulders, and guided them through the door that led out of the Chamber of Lock and Key.

“Trust me,” I said, “those guys are going to be A-okay.”

And, with that, we closed the door and dashed back to the Inscriber’s workshop.

Chapter 13

Gertrude the Inscriber set down the golden-tipped quill, closed my spellbook, and then sat back in her chair. She handed me my spellbook and clasped her hands in front of her.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” she said, raising her ice-chip eyes to study my face. “Don’t you want to learn a new spell? I haven’t got all day, and I must ensure that my magic worked effectively. Can’t have you walking out of here only to have to come back tomorrow, can we?”

For a second, I was nonplussed. “You want me to test it?”

“Of course,” the old woman said. “What else do you think you should do?”

“Here?” I asked.

Gertrude pointed to the little door at the back of her workshop, the one through which Mallory had emerged earlier.

“My bedchamber is through there,” she said. “It is not large, but it should be more than adequate for you to run an experiment.”

I looked at Leah. I was after her Chaos Magic. I don’t know what sort of reassurance I was expecting to find in Leah’s face though. The woman probably would have been happy to have sex with me right there in the workshop. She probably would have invited Gertrude to join, and to hell with what we’d do to her once her hips had both been dislocated.

“You’re sure?” I asked the Inscriber.

“Get in there with the Chaosbane girl,” the old woman griped. “Before I pin you down and test it myself! I’ll get someone to come and tidy the place up before I turn in, don’t you worry.”

“All right, then,” I said.

Leah and I moved to the back of the room, leaving Gertrude and Mallory sitting in the workshop.

Leah kicked the door closed behind us with a casual backward boot.

I scanned the room we were in, feeling suddenly a little awkward. I mean, I was down like James Brown to fuck Leah, just name the time and the place. Using some purple-haired old love’s bedroom though, who I had only met a couple of hours before… Well, I could think of sexier places to do the horizontal bop. It smelled like tea, biscuits, and lavender in there.

I opened my mouth to point this out to Leah, but Leah curtailed any objections by sticking her tongue down my throat. Her hands moved automatically, intimately, down my stomach and stopped when they got to the bulge in my pants. My penis was ready to rock and roll.

“Whoa, what were you thinking about back in the office, honeysuckle?” Leah breathed into my face, pulling away from me a little so her lips brushed mine when she spoke.

Privately, I was kind of surprised about Justin junior’s almost telepathic knowledge of what was going to go down. It was quite literally like having a dick that had a separate brain.

“Creation Mage has got to be ready to fuck at a moment’s notice,” I said. “With great power comes—”

“Great responsibility, right?” Leah growled, unbuttoning her high-waisted trousers so that they slid down around her ankles and she was left standing bare-assed in the middle of Gertrude’s bedchamber.

“I was going to say: With great powers comes great strain on the lower back,” I said.

Leah chuckled throatily while she fumbled with my belt. “This damn thing.”

All the clothing I was currently wearing, bar my boots, had been constructed by Igor’s magical morphing cloak, exactly as I had pictured them in my head when I had got dressed that morning.

“Allow me,” I said, and willed the cloak to revert back to its original, singular form.

I was left standing completely naked except for my boots and the cloak fastened at my throat.

Leah raised an eyebrow at me. “I simply love that look,” she smirked at me. “I can see that taking the capital by storm.”

“Shut up,” I smiled back, kicking off my boots and reaching up to untie the cloak from my throat.

Mimicking my actions slightly, Leah reached up and unbound her hair out of the bunches she had tied them into. She shook the spray of mad pink locks out and it cascaded over her shoulders. Then she peeled her baby blue sweater over her head, with all the grace and poise of someone who has downed a bottle of wine, then tossed it to the floor.

I ran my eyes eagerly over her lithe frame, while she checked me out too.

Her pale body gleamed like ivory in the soft light coming through the slitted turret windows of the small bedchamber. To my lust-filled eyes, she looked as fine and fuckable as any woman I had ever seen.

My gaze moved from the mane of wild pink hair that surrounded her dark, roguish eyes down to her small, pert tits with their perfect pink nipples. Southward, her stomach was all flat perfection—not muscular and defined like Janet Thunderstones, but toned and without a spare ounce of fat. Her long torso drew my eye irresistibly downward to the glistening pink slit of her sex.

Like me, Leah looked ready to go.

The door opened, and Mallory Entwistle stepped into the room. Her composure did not slip one iota when she saw the state of undress that we were both in. The only reaction she made was to smile broadly at us. She pressed her back to the door of the bedchamber and bit her lip.

“I understand that this is a test and that there is only one slot that can be filled in your spellbook, Justin,” she said. “But if it is not too much inconvenience, perhaps I might stay and watch? I’ve a feeling that Gertrude is going to nod off in a matter of minutes and this would prove a more invigorating way to pass the time.”

I didn’t feel weirded out at all at the thought of being watched. On the contrary, I found the idea of a chick as hot and proper as Mallory Entwistle watching Leah and I fuck each other’s brains out quite the turn on. It’d be a thrill, like performing in front of a crowd at the Mage Games. Only much more intimate.

“Sure,” I said, grinning at her and winking. “Take a seat and enjoy the show, priestess.”

Mallory slipped into a small chair by a cluttered desk. Slowly, she pulled the hem of her gown up and began to tickle herself through her panties.

“Don’t mind me,” she said. “I’ll be as quiet as a mouse.”

“Right, then,” I said, turning my attention back to Leah, “where were we?”

“Ladies first,” Leah said, after we had ogled one another for a few seconds more.

The room was tight, with barely enough room in it to swing a cat—though why anyone felt like they needed to swing cats around to measure how big a space was had always been beyond me. It was made all the tighter by the addition of Mallory.

Leah slid down so that her back was pressed to the one wall not lined with scroll-stuffed shelves. She tilted her head back so it rested against the wall, lifted one leg up, and peered at me from under heavy lids.

I ran my gaze hungrily over her athletic body once more, my eyes stopping at her pussy, which was bedewed with wetness. Leah noticed me looking. Watched me delightedly as I checked her out quite brazenly. Casually, she reached down and spread the pale lips of her box with one hand, revealing the pink insides.

“Are you looking at this, Justin Mauler?”

My cock was throbbing so hard it almost hurt. I reached down and stroked it a little and watched Leah’s eyes rove up and down its length. My balls were tight against the base, tingling with anticipation.

“I guess you’re going to be the star of the show today, huh? We’re going to need to make sure that everything is shipshape with you, is that right?” Leah asked. She cocked her other leg up so that she was in a froggy squat and opened herself wider.

I smiled slowly. I already knew Leah had a filthy side of her personality, but it looked very much like it was about to get a real airing.

I took a step toward her, my dick still in my hand.

Leah rubbed herself, teasing her clit. She slipped a finger inside her box, then another. She moaned.

“Come on then, honeybun, let’s make sure that Gertrude hasn’t been pulling your leg,” she said.

I stepped in front of her. I waited for a second, thinking that Leah might take the lead as was her tendency, but the Chaos Mage just laughed and tugged at her nipples.

“That’s how it’s going to be, is it?” I asked.

Leah made a face and shrugged theatrically.

Unable to contain my rampant lust anymore, I grabbed Leah by her bubblegum pink hair and thrust my cock into her mouth. She gagged, and I pulled it out, leaving a long strand of saliva connecting her lips to my rod.

“That’s the spirit!” Leah gasped, her eyes watering. “I want it rough. Give it to me rough, Creation Mage!”

I stuck my cock into Leah’s keen mouth again and started to face-fuck her, making sure that each push hit the back of her throat. I kept this up for a minute or so, allowing Leah to catch her breath when she needed. Then I pulled my member out of her mouth and shoved her face into my groin. Leah took the hint and started to tongue and suck my balls, stuffing my tight sack into her mouth and slurping on them like the keenest, most disreputable prostitute there ever was.

“You filthy Chaosbane slut,” I gasped as I felt her darting tongue flick over my nuts and the base of my knob. “What would Aunt Ruth say about this, do you think?”

Leah stood up abruptly and kissed me—her mouth and face and chin slick with her own saliva—and our tongues stabbed each other in a frenzy.

“She’d probably say I was doing it all wrong,” Leah grunted. “She’s a Chaosbane, after all. People say we can be a cocky bunch.”

“Never,” I said.

“Are we even going to fuck then?” Leah purred at me, her hand around my shaft. “Or are we just going to stand around here talking about my naughty aunt?”

“Gods, you’re a bit demanding today, aren’t you?” I replied. “We need to get Aunt Ruth to teach you some manners.”

I spun her about and slapped her hard on the ass. Leah gasped loudly. I bent her over so that her hands were propped on the shallow stone ledge of the windowsill.

Outside the lead-paned window, the clouds and sun were still battling for supremacy over the sky. A couple of blackbirds flapped past the window, perhaps hurrying to find some nice snug corner before it started snowing again.

I could see Leah’s hand between her legs, working feverishly away at her pussy.

“Open your bloody legs,” I ordered her.

The Chaos Mage obeyed.

“Now, spread your cheeks,” Mallory butted in.

I had almost forgotten Mallory was in the room with us. I motioned to Leah, however, and Leah followed Mallory’s instructions, showing off her sublime love box and little puckered butthole.

I leaned down and started to lap hungrily at her opening. My tongue probed with no real finesse at the holiest of holies. Every now and again, I flicked it as fast as I could across her engorged clit. My nose was pressed into Leah’s ass crack—pressed all the harder because Leah had reached back and squashed my face into it.

I pulled back and, stiffening my tongue, started to stab at her asshole while I shoved three fingers into her pussy. Leah let loose a giggling moan, then long deep animal groans of pleasure.

I stood up, finger fucking Leah harder and harder until her face was pressed up to the stone façade of the bedchamber wall. She moaned and panted.

With no warning, I slipped my cock deep into her vajayjay, so hard that Leah cried out with pleasure.

“Yes,” she panted. “Yes, yes, yes, yes. Fuck me like a fucking animal. Come on. Yes. Like a fucking whore!”

I closed my eyes and lost myself, as the red dam of desire rose, burst, and flooded over me. My balls slapped against Leah’s pussy as I fucked her from behind, the noise echoing loudly in the Inscriber’s stone bedchamber.

I was sweating. And hot. I fumbled with the window to let a little cooling breeze in. I pulled my cock out of Leah’s slot with a sucking noise. Then I sat down on the edge of Gertrude’s narrow bed and pushed Leah’s head down so that she could suck her juices off the end of my prick.

Leah’s hair was all over her face and her eyes were streaming from the throat fucking I gave her before.

“Spit on it,” I said. Leah did, covering my whole shaft in slimy spit.

“Now turn around and sit on it,” I said.

Leah performed a one-eighty and then lowered herself onto my cock, grasping it so she could guide it into her glistening hole.

“Uh, uh, uh,” I said reproachfully.

“What?” Leah asked, pausing.

“This isn’t going in there, Leah,” I said. “You wanted it rough, you’re going to get it rough. And I want some dirty, filthy Chaos Magic. If I can influence the spell, I get with the kind of sex we have, then this sex needs to be as crazy and out there as we can manage.”

“Try me,” Leah hissed delightedly.

“How are you going over there, Mallory?” I asked.

Mallory replied with a groan and bit her lip until a bead of blood shone like a ruby between her teeth.

I held Leah gently, but firmly, by the throat and with my other hand directed my cock up an inch until it was pressed against her asshole.

“Do you want it in your ass?” I asked.

“Yes,” Leah gasped. “Yes, please, Mr. Creation Mage, sir.”

“Good.”

Leah spread her ass cheeks wide and slid slowly down onto my cock.

The incredible tightness of Leah’s ass, coupled with the sight of my dick disappearing into her butt, almost made me blow my load right then and there. Somehow, though, I managed to hold off.

“Sweet merciful banshee balls, that feels fucking amazing!” Leah cried.

I pawed at Leah’s tits as she ground down on my cock, while she fingered herself. It was sex as I had rarely experienced; primal lust between two people who instinctively knew exactly how to get the other off.

Leah writhed on top of me, grinding and gyrating as my dick pounded into her butt. She was growling and screeching like a wild thing, uttering words that might have been nonsense or might have been trollish for all I knew. We twisted and turned this way and that, rucking up the blankets and sending embroidered cushions scattering about the place.

Abruptly, I felt the pink-haired Chaosbane stiffen. A thin wail broke from her lips, and she started to shudder uncontrollably. Phantom flame, flickering fire comprised of silver and white and black tongues, whooshed across her body, as if she had been soaked in gasoline and a match dropped on her. It was the ghostly show of the Chaos Magic that infused every fiber of Leah’s body, set off, maybe, by the Creation Magic within me.

With a sudden gush, Leah came, spraying her girl cum out so that it showered across the floor and soaked into a prettily patterned rug that looked like it had taken someone weeks to weave by hand.

That was the final straw for me. As Leah collapsed against me, my dick slid out of her ass. Holding my cock in one hand and her hair in the other, I surrendered to my orgasm. My prick was stuffed between her thighs so when I ejaculated, thick ropes of cum went up Leah’s stomach and onto her tits.

Utterly spent, the two of us collapsed onto the bed.

Or, at least, Leah collapsed onto the bed. I thought I was in Gertrude’s narrow cot, but I had become disoriented while Leah had been oh so vigorously riding the baloney pony. I fell half off the bed and landed on the rug-covered floor.

“I can’t help but notice that it’s a little soggy down here,” I panted, sucking deep breaths in through my nose.

Leah snickered to herself between breaths. “My bad,” she managed to say. “I should have warned you that the way to my heart is through the back door. Slipped my mind!”

I couldn’t help but laugh wheezily along with her.

“Very graceful,” Mallory said, laughing along with us. Her cheeks were flushed. For someone who had not joined in directly she looked like she had had a good enough time. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go and check on Gertrude.”

She slipped from the room like a ghost.

“So?” Leah said, rolling off her back and onto her side to look down at me.

“So, what?” I asked.

“So, did we make some fucking magic or what?” she asked, her hair tousled.

“You don’t think that what we just did could be construed as making magic?” I asked teasingly.

“Hells bells, you know that lovestick of yours is my kind of candy cane,” Leah said languidly, “and I think what we just did blew every spell that I know right out of the water. But you know what I’m getting at. Check your literature, why don’t you.”

Lying upside-down, hanging half off Gertrude’s skinny cot, which was in utter disarray now, I reached for my spellbook. It had fallen out of my cloak when I had willed my clothes from my body and now lay just within my reach on the floor.

My heart was pounding as I got my fingertips to the book, although I could not tell whether that was because Leah had just taken me on a sexual rollercoaster ride, or because I was nervous to see whether or not Gertrude’s magic had worked.

I opened the book and flicked through the pages, my eyes scanning for any sign of a new Chaos Spell.

“C’mon… C’mon… c’mon…” I muttered. “Where—Ah, there she blows!”

Chaos Spell: Rain of Toads - Summon a torrential downpour of toads in plague-like proportions.

The arcane ink was still wet on the page. I wasn’t entirely sure how helpful a rain of toads might be in the middle of a battle, but I figured that’s what you got when you fucked a Chaos Mage: you rolled the dice and the results spoke for themselves.

“Are we good to go again?” Leah asked. “Good to go for round two?”

I looked up at the gorgeous woman. She was lying on her side on the thin cot. Stark naked and sweating, jizz still smeared across her belly and tits. Her long legs were crossed and petite tits on show under a spreading fan of pink hair, she was the sort of figure that Bernini might have sculpted—had the fifteenth century allowed him access to Vegas strip joints for inspiration.

I scanned the room for somewhere to wash my dick, and found a basin with a jug of water beside it. I figured Gertrude wouldn’t mind if I cleaned off before we began round two.

Once I was done, I turned to Leah. “Alright, we’re ready for round two.”

I went and pulled Leah down on top of me once more. Her sweaty body was slick against mine, her nipples pressing into my chest. She opened her legs, and I felt the warmth of her sex, wet and slippery against my thigh.

“There won’t be a spell at the end of this,” Leah said between labored breaths as I pumped her, “but you’re going to give me a good fucking all the same.”

“You bet,” I said as I drove myself deeper and deeper into her, my cock as hard as it had ever been. If Gertrude didn’t interrupt us, we could be in here all damn day.

Chapter 14

Leah and I left Gertrude’s chambers in a far more disheveled and sex-smelling state than we’d found it. I closed the door after we exited.

Leah looked as unconcerned at just having used a sweet old lady’s bedroom as an anal sex dungeon as only a Chaosbane could. She traipsed lightly over to where Mallory was sitting opposite Gertrude. Mallory fiddled with the quill relic, turning it over in her fingers and looking at it.

“How peculiar it is,” said the former priestess and bounty hunter target, “that so much power—the power to grant someone the ability to form a new spell—should be contained in such an innocuous thing. Such a small thing.”

Leah plucked the quill from Mallory’s unresisting fingers. “Size is no guarantee of potency,” she said dreamily. She looked at me and flashed me a reflective smile. “Although sometimes it helps.”

“You make a good point,” Mallory said, stirring herself and sitting up in her chair. “Look at words, for instance. They are as insubstantial as breath and yet they hold the power to pull down the walls of this castle, to raise the dead, and change futures.”

I cast an eye at Gertrude. The old Inscriber looked to be asleep. Her chin was resting on her chest and she was breathing steadily through her nose, but I thought that I could see a shining slit of eyeball gleaming out from under one lid.

“Mallory tells me that you two certainly did not waste too many words in my bedchamber, be they powerful words or not,” the old woman said. The purple perm rose and the eyes with their many wrinkles in the corner opened up to regard us. There was no sign of sleep in them that I could see.

“Uh, yeah, we certainly did what was required,” I said, a little stiffly.

“And some!” Leah said.

“And?” the old woman asked.

“You were as good as your word, Gertrude,” I said. “You came through for us. The quill relic opened up a slot just like you said.”

“And we filled it,” Leah said.

Gertrude did not say anything, but she looked pleased. I wondered if she would look as pleased when she saw the state of her bed.

And her rugs.

And the wall Leah and I had only noticed after she had painted it with her juices.

“Good,” the Inscriber said, reaching for the teapot.

“Oh, yes please,” Leah said, pushing her teacup toward Gertrude. “I’m a little parched after all that important business we had to do.”

Gertrude gave a little snort and pulled Leah’s teacup closer. As she poured, she said, “I like you, Leah Chaosbane.”

“I like you, Inscriber Gertrude,” Leah replied, off in her own world as usual. “I like that you let us borrow your bedroom. Kind. Selfless. Open minded.”

“I have had a little to do with your cousins over the years” Gertrude tapped the strainer on the edge of the thin porcelain cup to get rid of any clinging drips and replaced it on its little plate.

“You’d be amazed at how many people have had something to do with our family over the years,” Leah said. “It’s like people can’t get enough of us.”

“I helped your cousin Igor in a professional capacity when he was an up-and-coming Rune Mystic,” the Inscriber continued, reaching for the milk and pouring a dash into the cup. “I have supplied information on inscriptions I performed to your bounty hunting cousin Mort—he seemed a strange, quiet, and dangerous young man.”

“Yeah, he gets that a lot, bless him,” Leah said.

“And, of course, I have much correspondence with the Headmaster of the Mazirian Academy,” the old woman said, pushing the cup of tea smoothly back to Leah. “Regarding both Academic affairs and extracurricular concerns.”

Leah took her tea with a nod of thanks.

“And then, of course, your Great Grandaddy and I courted for a time, many years ago, before I became an Inscriber and married myself to my work,” Gertrude said with a wistful sigh.

Leah, who had just taken a sip of tea, snorted and choked. A little of the brown liquid came out of her nose. Distractedly, she wiped it away with a finger and sucked on the digit.

“You and my Great Granddaddy used to…” Leah said. She trailed off, then formed a circle with her index finger and thumb and poked her other index finger through it a couple of times.

“Oh yes,” Gertrude said. “Your Great Granddaddy was—”

Leah held up a hand. “With all due respect, Gertrude,” she said, “you make a lovely cup of tea and you’re like the grandmother that I never had—actually you’re like the grandmother I did have up until she was embroiled in a scandal involving a unicorn, a piece of ginger, and some rather unsavory characters at the racetrack.” Leah shook her head and shivered. “But I don’t wish to hear any anecdotes involving my Great Granddaddy. There are just certain subjects, like a basilisk’s fangs, that should remain untouched.”

I laughed. Mallory looked down and twiddled her fingers. Even Gertrude smiled.

“A fair enough protestation,” the old Inscriber said. “All I meant to say, in my roundabout way, was that of all the Chaosbanes with whom I have had dealings, you are, perhaps, my favorite. You are truly, unapologetically yourself. And that is a rare thing in this world.”

Leah shrugged and slurped her tea with one hand, while twirling a lock of hair with the other.

“I don’t really know who else I’d be,” she said.

“There are many two-faced people wandering outside these castle walls,” Gertrude said. “And even more so inside the Castle of Ascendance.”

Leah considered this, staring vacantly into space for a couple of seconds, and then said, “I’ve always thought that if you’re going to be one of those tricky duplicitous, two-faced bastards, then you should at least try and make sure that one of those faces is pretty.”

Mallory laughed happily at this bit of philosophy. “Snakes do always seem to be ugly creatures, don’t they?”

Leah nodded. “Thing about snakes is,” she said, “no matter how often they shed their skins, they’re still a snake.”

“Ah, that kind of mentality is exactly the type of talk that reminds me of Gorlbadock,” Gertrude said. “He always used to tell me that—”

“I don’t want to jump out from an alleyway and steal your purse while you’re taking such a nice trip down memory lane,” I said, “but, now that you’ve proved that you are to be trusted—”

“And you three have proved that you are, indeed, as capable as I thought you’d be,” Gertrude cut in.

“—could you tell us how we can get our hands on the next two relics?” I finished.

Gertrude pointed at Mallory. “Priestess Entwistle here knows well where the next relics are kept,” she said. “I need not direct you.”

Mallory inclined her head in affirmation of this declaration.

“She is well aware that the Garden of Ward and Curse is at the top of the next tower over from the Tower of Inscribers. It is a fair trek through the Castle of Ascendance, finishing in a long, winding stair of a one-thousand, one-hundred, and eleven steps, but one that you should be able to make without running into trouble.” Gertrude sipped her tea and pursed her lips before continuing. “After that, the Hall of Monsters and Demons can be found on your way back here.”

It might have been my imagination, but there seemed to be a cold note of dread in the Inscriber’s voice when she mentioned the place that the third and last relic was to be found. Of course, a place that was named the “Hall of Monsters and Demons” was hardly the type of venue that made you want to call up and make a dinner reservation. I don’t think I’d ever heard a more ominous and horror-steeped name for a hall.

“Okay, so we travel slightly further afield for the second relic and then pick up the third relic on our way back here,” I said. “That would seem to be the smart play here, wouldn’t it?”

“I think so,” said Mallory. “Now that Gertrude has shown what an asset she is, it would be prudent to collect the relics, come back here, and have her unlock your spell slots. Then, after that is done, we can figure out how to get out of the Castle of Ascendance without causing a fuss. After we have accomplished that, we should probably vacate Manafell.”

“We have two pegasi waiting outside the city gates,” I said. “I’m pretty sure Thunder and Lightning will be capable of carrying an extra passenger, won’t they?”

“Of course,” the Chaos Mage said. “Especially one as slender and fat-free as our lovely Mallory here.”

“Okay, that’s decided then. We go to the Garden of Ward and Curse first, then to the Hall of Monsters and Demons,” I said.

Leah slurped up the last of her tea. “Oh goody. Doesn’t that sound like just the outing to relax and unwind?”

Mallory got to her feet and reached out a hand to cup Gertrude’s wrinkled cheek. “Thank you, as always, for your help, Inscriber Gertrude.”

“A pleasure, my dear,” the old lady said, sitting back comfortably in her chair. “Try not to barge back in too loudly when you return.”

“We’ll do our best,” I said. “Fingers crossed we won’t be on the run from anything or anyone.”

* * *

It took us the best part of an hour to fetch up outside the door that Mallory told us opened onto the staircase of eleven-hundred steps. We’d had to combine all our guile and stealth with Mallory’s knowledge of the Castle of Ascendance to make it to the staircase. The Castle of Ascendance was surprisingly lightly guarded, but from what Mallory told us, that was out of the Queen’s aesthetic tastes rather than due to a lack of men.

“Queen Hagatha views the Castle of Ascendance as her ancestral home,” Mallory said in hushed tones as we waited for a troop of four armored guards to pass our shadowy hiding place by, “and not a military barracks. She is correct, of course. It is her ancient family seat, but it is an ancient family seat with its own private army.”

“What you’re saying is that, while we might not be able to see many soldiers right now, they’re waiting to come swarming out of the woodwork should the alarm be raised?” I asked.

“Yes, that’s right,” Mallory said. “Our footfalls must be feather-light, our eyes keen, and our ears sharp if we wish to get in and out without causing a stir.”

We slipped inside the doorway that led to the stairs. There was no one around, no guards posted at the bottom. No one.

“Is anyone getting that uneasy feeling that, I think, the poets would describe as boding ill?” Leah asked casually.

“A little,” Mallory admitted.

Privately, my sense of foreboding was coming more from the copious amount of stairs that we were going to have to climb. Eleven-hundred steps was no small feat, especially when I considered that, most likely, we were going to have to fight something fairly dangerous at the end of them. I doubted the second relic would be attained by simply completing a trial of intense cardiovascular exercise.

Eleven-hundred and eleven steps… The Empire State building had roughly fifteen hundred if my memory served.

“There’s nothing to be gained by waiting around, I guess,” I said. “Let’s get on.”

All three of us were puffed and aching when we reached the top of the stairs. We stood, breathing heavily for a moment, hands on knees. Even Mallory, who was usually composure personified, dabbed the back of her hand to her forehead to wick away a bit of perspiration.

“Jeez, you’d have calves of steel if you worked that into your daily workout routine,” I said.

“Ew,” Leah said, “don’t mention the r-word around me, if you’d be so kind, honey-nuts. It’s the antithesis of my being.”

Mallory gave a little breathless laugh. “That should be the Chaosbane aphorism,” she said. “‘Clan Chaosbane: The Antithesis of Routine.’”

“I’ll talk to Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock about it,” Leah said. “It would look good on a seal, wouldn’t it?”

“Speaking of aphorisms,” I said, pointing behind the two women, “how does that one strike you?”

Mallory and Leah swiveled their heads.

Behind them, set into the wall where a door should have been, was a thin crack. Above this crack, which passed as the entrance to a passage that I presumed must lead to this Garden of Ward and Curse, was a short, cheerful message cut into the stone:

LONELINESS IS LIFE’S GREATEST CURSE.

LONELINESS MAKES EVEN GIANTS SMALL.

“That sounds hopeful,” Leah said acidly.

I reread the inscription above the looming crack. It did not, as the poets might have said, bode well.

I started to wonder what it might mean. It was not as if these sorts of legends were carved into stonework on a whim. There had to be a reason for it.

I sighed. It didn’t take too much imagination to guess what the words might allude to. I looked at the crack in the wall. I was fairly broad and tall, and it would probably give me just enough room to maneuver my way through. The ladies would fit easily enough, but there was no chance that any of us would be able to walk abreast down there.

“Loneliness is life’s greatest curse,” I muttered,

Not much could be seen down the passageway from the entrance of the crack. It was too meandering, and the view was quickly obscured.

Still, if I had learned one thing from my time in the magical world of Avalonia, it was that shit rarely got less hectic just because you waited around to think about it a little more. Better to rip off the bandaid, even if it might turn out to be attached to your nutsack with superglue.

“Allow me to go first, ladies,” I said.

I stepped sideways into the crack in the wall and wormed my way into the space beyond.

Immediately, a horizontal portcullis of slithering metal vines, which looked more like razor wire than anything organic, snaked out from one side of the crack’s opening. The vines squirmed across the aperture and anchored themselves in the rock of the other side, cutting me off from my two companions.

Leah looked up at the inscription above the crack and snapped her fingers. “Loneliness,” she said. “Loneliness is a bitch.”

I turned to face the unknown of the rough-hewn corridor. I conjured my black crystal staff into my hand with a thought.

“I’m going on,” I said to the two women over my shoulder.  “See you when I see you. Any last words of wisdom for me?”

“Yes,” Mallory said solemnly. “Know that caution isn’t just for the timid. It can be a useful tool. But like any tool, you have to know when to use it and when to drop it.”

“Yeah,” Leah said. “I always find it helpful to remember that there’s just no fun in tiptoeing through life just so that you reach death nice and safely at the end of it, is there? Was that helpful?”

“As a trapdoor on a canoe,” I said. “Be right back.”

I squeezed myself through the narrow passageway, the ends of my staff scraping and tapping along the stone. It was a very narrow ravine alright, tight and winding.

“Designed so that cocky idiots like you can get in,” I said to myself, “but whatever the hell’s lurking down here can’t get out, I bet.”

I could feel the tension starting to rise in my guts. I wasn’t afraid, mind you. I hadn’t been properly scared for a long time. Ever since I landed in this insane world, really. However, there was definitely a familiar blend of excitement and curiosity beginning to spread out from my stomach.

My imagination, regardless of all I could do, began ruminating and hypothesizing on what exactly might be lurking in wait for me at the end of this damned skinny passageway. It was one of the crosses that anyone living in Avalonia had to bear, I supposed, knowing and being able to picture a whole smorgasbord of giant, hairy, slimy, toothy, multi-legged pains in the asses that would like nothing better than to gobble you down.

Being scared of monsters, though, in this fantastically dangerous environment, would be like a gynecologist having an aversion to bearded clams.

A glimmer of light up ahead hinted at the narrow fissure coming to an end. Sure enough, when I reached it, the passageway suddenly opened out into a fairly big open space. I stopped at the very end of the passage, making sure I was still enfolded in the shadows. The last thing I wanted to do was set off any other wards that might be a landslide of fecal matter raining down on my head before I was ready.

In front of me was the Garden of Ward and Curse.

In truth, I thought that it could have used a bit of a wash and brush up. A little TLC from a landscaper that knew his business.

It was a circular area, surrounded by waist-high stone walls. At first glance, it reminded me of that scene in The Fellowship of the Ring, when Frodo and the rest of the hobbits are accosted by the Ringwraiths on the top of Weathertop. There was a dilapidated feeling to the place; tumbled stone and tussocky weeds growing up through cracked stone.

There was a pool in the middle of the garden. It was so still that it might have been painted on the ground, like one of those cool illusions that people draw with chalk or paint on sidewalks. Even the slight breeze blowing over the parapets of the tower did not stir it. The water was flat and dull, and only the reflection of a smattering of stars gave it any semblance of reality.

Stars?

I looked up and caught my breath. I hadn’t really noticed it at first, as you so often don’t take note of the most obvious things, but the night sky was spread across me like a veil. I knew I was standing on top of the tower that we had just climbed, but there was no way that it could be nighttime. Leah and I had arrived almost first thing in the morning. It could only just be lunchtime now, if that.

An enchantment then. A way to disorientate the lonely adventurer. To compile the exhaustion that they were expected to feel after ascending that fucking staircase.

The stars, in contrast to the gloomy pool and gardens, shimmered in a way that made me feel as if I was at the business end of an acid trip.

I puffed out my cheeks, shrugged my shoulders, and mentally touched the mana reserve that all mages carried deep within themselves. My father’s crystal staff felt good in my hands; familiar.

I had one last scan of the area.

Everything looked quite serene and boring. No sign of any prowling nasty. No bones or arbitrarily discarded lumps of meat. As secret relic gardens went, this was most definitely one of the less diabolical and sinister looking ones that I might have imagined.

Nevertheless, in my admittedly brief but varied experience, it was precisely at moments like this that I could almost guarantee I was about to be shit-fanned.

I cracked my neck and rolled my shoulders, loosening the muscles. Magic tingled in my palms and itched at the back of my throat. I could feel the pulse thudding, strong and heavy, in my chest.

Still alive, baby.

Not being one to play things by convention, I cleared my throat and bellowed, in a throaty roar, “Honey, I’m home!”

Even though the garden was at the top of a tower and open to the air, the acoustics were phenomenal. My voice bounced and rang around the cracked stone pillars for what felt like a full twenty seconds. It was extremely satisfying. Iron Maiden could’ve put the show of the century on in that little al fresco amphitheater.

A deep growl resonated from out of the murk.

“Here we go,” I said to myself.

A dog emerged from behind a large clump of ratty weeds.

Now, to make a clean breast of things, it was a big dog. A very large dog indeed. Like Rottweiler sized. It was the kind of dog that looked like it was powered mostly by the need to shred the flesh off anything or anyone it encountered. The kind of dog that junkyard dogs aspired to be when they grew up. It was an animal made to kill; yellow teeth, psychotic red eyes, and fur that looked more like the bristles you might find on the Calydonian boar.

A hellhound, though of a variety I had not encountered before.

Still, though, after all the shit that had tried to have me for lunch, it was just a dog.

I took a couple of steps into the cavern. Behind me, another horizontal portcullis snapped across the passage entrance, barring my exit. I took a deep breath and prepared to let loose my best battle cry, before I used a Blazing Bolt to send this hellhound to whatever afterlife awaited it.

There was a swishing sound, and a ripple spread from the very center of the pond in the middle of the Garden of Ward and Curse. The ripple reached the edge of the pond and continued, taking to the air. It spread until it lapped up against the edge of the circular space and engulfed me.

Nausea assailed me. I bent over involuntarily, clutching at my cramping stomach.

And as I bent forward, the ground seemed to come up to meet me.

“What the fuuuu—” I moaned as the world contorted, stretched, and grew suddenly large.

In the space of five heartbeats, the desolate garden seemed to have grown around me. I felt about as large as the average garden gnome.

Comprehension dawned.

The garden had not warped and grown—I had shrunk.

A deep, volcanic rumbling filled my tiny ears.

“Ah,” I said.

The murderous dog did not look so little anymore. On the contrary, it now looked like it was the size of an elephant.

I nodded and bared my teeth in a smiling snarl.

“Should’ve known it was looking too easy,” I said to the enchanted night.

Chapter 15

The hellhound roared its challenge and charged toward me, its claws kicking up sparks on the stone.

“Sit!” I yelled.

No luck. I hadn’t thought it would work, but it had been worth a shot. The hellhound pelted onward. It crashed through the pond, not bothering to go around it, and a spray of water saturated me.

“If that starts to chafe, you’re really going to get it,” I growled, thinking of the stairs that I still, hopefully, had to descend.

A high, snarling scream of rage came out of the mists of water that the monstrous dog had plowed up. Briefly, through the curtain of silver rain, I caught a glimpse of flashing yellow fangs and mad, rolling red eyes.

The dog emerged out of the spray of water and lunged at me. Its face was a mask of disbelieving fury that something had been ballsy and foolish enough to come trotting into its domain.

I threw my miniature ass to the side at the last moment, rolling out of the way as the hellhound went past like the California Zephyr. Snapping and snarling and spraying water droplets every which way.

Bizarrely, despite the fact that the hellhound wanted to turn me into hamburger meat, I found myself hesitant to blast the dog with magic.

“Come on, Justin, it’s not your average Fido, no matter what it might look like!” I said to myself. “Fido doesn’t have teeth that big, or eyes that look like they’re on fire. Fido can’t fucking swallow you whole!”

The hellhound skidded around after it had missed me. Its claws scrabbled once more on the stone, so eager was it to get back to the pressing business of tearing me to pieces. I couldn’t fault its enthusiasm. It was obviously earning its wage as relic guardian. It boomed out a couple of barks that actually made me step back a couple of paces and blurred my vision. It charged once more.

I used my miniature black crystal staff to send a Storm Bolt fizzing toward my enemy, but the magical shot missed, thanks to my unfocused vision, and blew a chunk out of a stone pillar over the dog’s shoulder.

I just had time to blink a few times and thrust my staff out and let loose a Compulsion curse. The ribbon-like spell hit the dog in the mouth just before its jaws were set to snap closed on me and made it veer off to the side. One of its forelegs clipped me and sent me sprawling across the stones. I rolled to my feet, but my foot caught on a crack in the stonework, and I went tumbling again.

The Compulsion spell was a curse that increased the target’s anger and fanned it into a murderous rage. Might not sound ideal, but if the target was as insanely pissed as this hellhound was, then it actually acted as distraction.

I regained my feet and saw that the hellhound was busy ripping apart random lumps of stone with its bare teeth. As I watched, it headbutted a tree stump and exploded it into shards of rotten wood.

I almost felt sorry for the creature, but I reminded myself that a quest was a quest. I was a War Mage at the end of the day. I could puzzle out any moral complexities after I lopped this frenzied fucker’s head off.

I planted my feet, took a long, slow breath through my nose, and exhaled. A plan had popped into my head. All that was required now was to put it into practice.

I charged.

I sprinted toward the hellhound. It was a big and ugly thing, and it loomed ever larger in front of me as I ran toward it. As I hurdled bits of wood and rock, and ran around clumps of weeds that were now like the size of small trees, I summoned a Frostfire Golem.

I couldn’t believe that it had taken me this long to think of whipping up a little bit of thaumaturgical help. The golem would be able to make short work of the dog while I looked for the relic.

The Frostfire Golem appeared just in front of the hellhound, and I was suddenly made very aware that it was not just me that had been shrunk.

It was my magic too.

The golem should have been about nine feet tall. Instead, it was about ten inches high.

It brandished its icy, fire-filled fists at the dog. The hellhound, caught in the throes of the Compulsion curse, paid it no heed. The golem reached out and grabbed clumps of the hound’s hair and yanked them, probably trying to rip the legs from its foe.

Instead, the golem came away with two fistfuls of hair, and the hellhound found itself bald from the shins down.

The hellhound yelped and whirled about in a perfect three-sixty bound. It landed on its feet and stared down at the little Frostfire Golem with popping eyes. Its maw was gaping, showing off its sizable and very lethal teeth, each easily long enough to go right through the golem. Its pupils contracted as it focused on the thing that had just given it an impromptu wax job.

It roared throatily and brought a meaty paw down on the Frostfire Golem.

The Frostfire Golem exploded under the force of the blow. It burst apart in shards of fire and ice, the magic that animated it disappearing like mist under the sun.

I was sad to see it go, but by that time, I was already in position.

A flaming orange axe blossomed in my hand, like an elemental lightsaber being activated. I let loose a cry of determination that the hellhound couldn’t have missed or mistaken for anything other than a challenge.

The hellhound turned, saw me standing just to its right, cocked its head at me, and shrieked in defiance, enveloping me in a hot gust of putrid breath.

“Fuck a duck, somebody’s been cleaning out their asshole with their tongue again!” I yelled.

The Flame Barrier spell that I had shaped into an axe swept upward. It sliced neatly through the hellhounds neck and sent its surprised-looking head tumbling. It rolled away and splashed into the pond. The dog’s body thudded limply to the ground.

I breathed a sigh of relief. Not too tough, all things considered.

“Now, where the hell is that relic?” I asked my tiny-ass self.

The body of the hellhound shuddered. The skin around the severed stump of neck wrinkled and puckered. With a gross speed, like the most repugnant flower blooming in fast forward, the dog’s head reformed. It bulged out; bone solidifying, flesh knitting, skin stretching.

And, alongside that first head, another grew.

“Ah, not a hellhound then,” I said. “A… hydrahound?”

The rumbling growl emanating from the dog’s throat spoke of an animal that was really pissed.

“Great,” I said.

The left head darted out, mouth open wide, hoping to make a snack out of my pint-sized ass. I rolled to the side and felt the head whisk over me. Hot saliva rained down, pattering around and over me. I gained my feet but immediately had to roll out of the way of the right head as it lashed out.

I activated the Flame Barrier spell again. In my haste, I only had time to form the fiery spell into a crude spear. I caught the hydrahound square in one of its four maniacal eyeballs. A viscous goo gushed out, and the right head reared back in pain, the beast snapping and growling with annoyance.

If things had been hard fighting a one-headed hellhound, they became doubly so with two heads. I needed all my reactions and all my skill to ensure I didn’t end up as mush in the hellhound’s colon.

I managed to keep the two-headed dog at bay through a combination of spells and quick feet. As the fight went on, it became all too evident that my magic potency had been drastically reduced by whatever charm had rippled out of the pond.

A thick, muscled paw whipped out of nowhere and caught me squarely in the chest with the force of a battering ram. I was clubbed through the air and landed hard on my back, but I used the impact to roll myself backward and away from another paw that smashed downward, sending up stone chips.

I fired off a series of Frost Shards, one spell after another, as I backed away from the massive two-headed dog, and tried to gain myself a little breathing room, a little time to think. The shards punched into the hydrahound’s beefy chest but did not penetrate to anything vital. I had a feeling that I could stick the thing with enough shards to make it look like a porcupine and still not bring it down.

The hydrahound was clearly losing the little patience it possessed. The two heads kept lunging at me, forcing me back. The obvious solution to their continued assault would have been to blow or cut their heads off, but I knew what that would mean. I wasn’t going to fall into the same trap as fucking Hercules. I wasn’t going to let the red mist come down and then end up with a twenty-headed hydrahound. No, thanks.

The beast had backed me up against the parapet. It thrust one of its heads toward me once more, going for the kill. I used my Telekinesis spell, straining to the max, launching a rock right into the side of its thick head and sending the whole creature lurching sideways.

I took the opportunity to glance over the side of the tower’s waist-high wall. There was only darkness down there. No sign of Manafell, no sign of anything.

No escape.

Running out of ideas, I activated Flame Flight and, wreathed in ghostly flames, I boosted up into the air, over my tenacious enemy. I landed in a fighting crouch on the other side of the garden. Staff at the ready, mind fizzing as I thought of some way to get out of this jam.

The problem that faced me was the same one that had probably faced every bounty hunter and adventurer in Avalonia, ever since the first one had strapped on armor and weapons and dipped into their mana reserves with action at the forefront of their mind. The problem was this: how was I going to kill this fucking thing?

That’s what it boiled down to. I needed the hydrahound dead and out for the count. How the hell was I going to do that when my magic was proving less efficacious than usual, I couldn’t slice or explode its head off, and I was the size of a loaf of bread standing on its end?

Talk about a pickle.

What I needed was something that could completely annihilate this creature. Annihilate it either so completely, or keep working on it so continuously, that I would have time to find and grab the relic and get out of there. I was betting a lot on the assumption that, as soon as I had the relic in hand, I would be able to flee back through the crack, but a guy needed something to hope for.

I tossed down some Arcane Mines, as far as my little gnome-like arms could chuck them, while I waited for inspiration to strike.

“Come on, genius lightning bolt, strike me in the fucking head, why don’t you?” I hissed to myself.

The hydrahound was still on the other side of the garden. It was bucking like a mustang now, which I guessed was another after-effect of the Compulsion spell. I cast Rain of Toads, and little amphibians started to fall from the sky. Because they had also been shrunken, they were no larger than flies, but there were a good number of them. The hydrahound scratched at them, like it had the worst case of fleas imaginable. The toads didn’t look like they were doing any damage, but at least they were distracting it, but it would not be long before—

Both heads, as one, snapped around to look at me. The growling, which had been an ever-present soundtrack to this little dance we had been enjoying, raised in pitch and grew in intensity. There was blood in the hydrahound’s stare, death in its heart.

“Whoa Nelly, this is it,” I said to no one.

The beast came on, the toads apparently having disappeared. It seemed to happen in slow motion, so I was able to make out every muscle bunching under the thick, bristling fur. I could see every drop of foaming spittle as it flew from the quivering, snarling jowls.

And then, finally, inspiration flowered in my mind. In a cold, hard moment, a path fell into place in my head, laid out before me, gleaming with possibility.

The dog came on, a mess of teeth and claws and destruction.

It bounded over the pond this time, so enthusiastic was it to peel the skin from my flesh and use me as a chew toy. Its eyes were fixed on me, unwavering orbs of hate.

As the hydrahound hit my proximity sensitive Arcane Mines, I used my Crystalize spell to transform my right arm into an unyielding crystal club.

The Arcane Mines went off under the hound’s feet like firecrackers. They didn’t cause much damage, only blowing a couple of its claws off in bursts of Earth and Storm magic. It checked its stride though, making it falter in its charge, which was my intention.

Thrown off-balance, the hydrahound skidded to a halt in front of me. Its heads reared  above me, as big as a pair of bull elephant heads. The left head, the one with the busted eye, came in, snapping ferociously. I kept my composure and dodged it, sidestepped a lunge from the right head, and smacked the right head with my crystal arm-club before it could withdraw. The right head’s red eyes crossed at the force of the blow, and it ceased its movements for a second, allowing me to leap up and onto its snout.

“Don’t mind me!” I said as I clambered agilely up the wide, meaty face, between the rolling, dazed eyes and onto the hydrahound’s bony forehead.

I ducked as the other head snapped half-heartedly at me, but the thing was still smarting from the mess I’d made of its eye, and obviously struggling a little with its depth perception.

I was just about to continue with the next devilishly cunning part of my plan, when the left head came launching unexpectedly in again. I was forced to roll over its snout like a guy rolling onto a car bonnet to avoid being run over. I found myself on the top of the left head. I smacked the hydrahound again with my crystal club-arm, but was then obliged to break the spell so I could use both hands to hang onto the hound’s head as it shook and tried to dislodge me.

“Fuck it, this’ll do!” I muttered.

And, flying in the face of commonsense, I summoned the Abomination into the world.

The Abomination was a creature from the depths of the void, from the place of pure, undiluted magic. It was chaos incarnate. It was a creature that had no allies. A monster that would consume friend and foe alike given half a chance.

Happily, as I thought it might be after seeing the Frostfire Golem, it was also much smaller than it usually was—about the size of a tennis ball, in fact.

I didn’t dare touch the thing so, holding onto one of the furious hellhound’s eyelids with one hand, I used my Telekinesis spell to levitate the tentacle covered, stinking, slimy jellyfish nightmare of an Abomination into the ear canal of the head onto which I was currently clinging.

It was the work of a moment, which was good, because a moment later, the hydrahound flicked me loose from its noggin and sent me cartwheeling through the air.

“Shit,” I managed to say, before I splashed down into the icy water of the pond in the middle of the garden.

I came up gasping, spitting water from my mouth. In my shrunken state, I was up to my neck in the pond that turned out to be quite shallow. Wiping water from my eyes, I saw that all was not well with the hydrahound.

The two-headed hellhound was shaking its head in anguished fury, no doubt trying to dislodge the parasitic Abomination that was doing gods-knew-what inside of it. The beast lumbered over to me, pawing blindly at the air, biting and roaring at nothing, at the thing inside itself that it could not reach.

I threw myself out of the way of a swipe from the hydrahound’s foreleg, climbed quickly up, sprang off the already severed head that was lying half-submerged in the pool, and tossed a couple of Crystal Magma Bombs at my enemy. I landed on the edge of the pool as the grenade-like spells went off and knocked the hydrahound over backward.

“Please, please be dead,” I said, getting to my feet and willing the creature to stay down.

The hydrahound moaned, legs thrashing and then, with a suddenness that would have gained Ridley Scott’s approval, the Abomination burst out of the center of the hydrahound’s chest in a spray of blood and gore and buckled ribs.

Small it might have been. Slow, certainly. But, fucking deadly nonetheless.

The body of the hydrahound went limp, while the disgusting little Abomination continued to feast on and dissolve the corpse.

Water was running off me in rivulets, pooling in the stone around me. I felt pretty beat, I’m not going to lie. It had been a tough fight, and I hoped more than anything that it was over.

I looked over at the blocked exit, but the horizontal portcullis was still drawn across the opening.

There was a soft, bubbling noise from the pool. Being careful to keep one eye on the miniature Abomination, I glanced over at the shallow pond and saw that a small podium had risen out of the waters.

“You fucking good thing, you,” I said.

On the dais was what surely must have been the second relic—it certainly tied in nicely with the first.

It was a bottle of red writing ink, complete with a cork stopper and sealed with wax.

I was still of gnome height, and so hopping back down into the pool, picking up the bottle of ink, and lugging it on my shoulder back to the edge of the pool was actually a fairly arduous task. But I managed it, and was able to carry it all the way back across the Garden of Ward and Curse to the exit, from which the metal vine portcullis had been withdrawn.

I did not relish the walk back through the stony passageway in my new height. Despite the corridor now resembling the Siq Canyon rather than a narrow passage, I could barely squeeze through. With legs only a couple of inches long, it promised to be quite a long walk. Thankfully, on stepping over the threshold and into the shadows of the corridor, I was hit by a rolling wave of nausea and shot up to my usual height and build.

“Thank the gods,” I muttered, waiting for the blurry vision and sickness to pass.

By the time that I had wended my way through the claustrophobic corridor and reached the exit that led to that goddamn staircase, I was feeling almost as fit as I had been walking in there in the first place.

“He lives!” Leah cried overdramatically as I rounded the final jagged corner.

“You sound like you doubted it would happen,” I said.

“Do you have the relic?” Mallory asked, running her eyes over me. “I don’t see it.”

I pulled the bottle of ink from a pocket and held it up. “Got it,” I said.

Mallory let out a breath that might have been a sigh of relief.

“Why are you so wet?” Leah asked.

I tucked the bottle back into my pocket and laughed drily. “Man, I would love to relive that again, but I think it’s going to have to wait. Suffice to say that the garden had a pond and I got to enjoy it on a couple of occasions.”

“Lucky for some,” Leah said absently. “I wouldn’t have minded a quick dip.”

I eyed the stairs with deep dislike, then scanned the faces of the other two women. They looked about as exuberant to tackle the eleven-hundred and eleven steps as I felt.

“Come on,” I said, “let’s get going. Only one more relic to get our hands on now. Then we can head back to the ranch for some lunch and some time by the fire.”

“Or the hot tub?” Leah said casually.

I made a face of pained keenness. “Or the hot tub,” I agreed.

We descended the stairs more quickly than we had ascended them, but with the same amount of puffing and sweating.

We were just about to sneak out of the door and into the hallways beyond, when I grabbed Mallory by the elbow. My brain, probably coaxed into a supreme effort after having to face all those fucking stairs, had coughed up an unexpected idea.

“Mallory,” I whispered, “something happened back with the second relic that has got me thinking… Are you able to use your Holy Magic to shrink us by any chance?”

Mallory gave me a surprised look but said, “Yes, I should think so. Why?”

I outlined my plan to her. After I was finished, the Holy Mage smiled radiantly.

“Clever, Justin Mauler,” she said approvingly. “Very clever.”

A few minutes later, the door to the staircase of eleven-hundred and eleven steps creaked open. If there had been any guards about to see, they would have watched as three miniature figures, riding on the backs of a trio of undead wolverines the size of hares, raced out of the cracked door and pelted up the corridor and out of sight.

Chapter 16

To my profound disgust, the location of the third relic was at the top of yet another lengthy staircase. Thankfully, it was not as long as the last one and switched back and forth in short lengths rather than spiraled. Having been transformed back into our usual sizes by Mallory’s clever Holy Magic, we ascended and soon found ourselves outside yet another door.

“This is more what I would have imagined if someone had told me we’d be hunting three relics,” I said as the three of us caught our breath from the climb and stared at the doorway looming in front of us.

“How so?” Leah asked dreamily.

“How so?” Mallory repeated. “Come, Leah, simply look at it.”

The doorway must have been all of fifteen feet high and was shaped in the Gothic design—the top curving up to meet at a rounded point at the pinnacle. Constructed of dark wood and rusted metal, it was carved in the likeness of some horrifying creature, one that I could not identify no matter which way I tilted my head. Even so, the purpose was clear: to invoke a sense of inescapable dread in whoever was standing in front of the door.

“I kind of like it.” Leah cocked her head to first one side and then the other. “It’s… invigorating. It conjures up all the sorts of feelings that someone should feel when they’re standing outside my bedroom door.”

Mallory turned to look at the slighter woman and arched a blonde, stately eyebrow. “Dread, despair, and overwhelming feeling of ominous doom?”

“No, silly,” Leah breathed. “No. The very real and tangible feeling that you’re about to step into something else’s domain. Something that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Something that should be respected. The feeling that you’re taking your future in your own hands and tossing it up in the air like a coin, unsure of what side it’s going to land on.”

I snorted. “You might have a point there,” I said, thinking of how domineering the pink-haired woman probably could have been back in Gertrude’s bedchamber, had it been just a bit bigger.

Mallory tucked her shining bright golden hair behind her ears and took a deep breath. She faced the door, her cobalt eyes running along yet another inscription that was worked in rusted metal over the arch. She pointed it out to Leah and me.

THERE ARE NO GREATER DEMONS THAN A PERSON’S OWN

THERE ARE NO FOULER MONSTERS THAN THOSE WE BECOME

“There’s another nice cheerful one that you can put on a bumper sticker,” I muttered, scanning the writhing metal words.

“Who wouldn’t want to go inside after that?” Leah asked enthusiastically. Her tone did not change, but I figured she was probably being sarcastic. I hoped she was, at any rate.

“Monsters and demons,” Mallory said. “It would be a dull world without them, would it not?”

I was about to hit her with a sardonic retort, but then I perceived that she was right. When it came down to it, if we did not have the monsters, we would not have their direct opposites, we would not have the flip side of the coin.

“We would not have the angels without them,” Mallory said softly, almost to herself.

“Damn, is that what we are, then?” Leah guffawed.

I considered all the crazy shit that we had pulled in the last few months. A lot of it—well, most of it—had been pretty damn crazy, and involved fighting and killing and blowing stuff up, sure. But, crucially, all that had gone down because we had been trying to do good things. None of our manic adventures had taken place because me or any of my friends had any nefarious purpose in mind. We had been reactionaries.

Maybe, we were the angels, if we had been fighting the demons.

“The Celestial Realm must really have been scraping the bottom of the bargain barrel if that’s the case,” I said.

The two women laughed.

“Okay,” I said, making my black crystal staff appear in my hand and patting the pocket in which my mother’s vector, disguised as a white crystal, resided. “Let’s go in and shake the tree and see what falls out.”

It took our combined efforts to heave the door open. It creaked gratifyingly as it swung open, splitting in half down the middle to reveal the space beyond.

The space beyond was, I was happy to see, a huge open area lit by the light of the midday sun. It was a courtyard, perhaps as large as a football field, paved in a circular pattern of well-crafted and well-laid slabs of alternating light and dark stone. Its four edges were enclosed, walled in but decorated with leaping columns of masonry.

It looked like it had once been a gallery of sorts—perhaps it still was. There were statues dotted about the place; some quite fresh looking, others weathered and worn to the point where they seemed like blank stone mannequins. The statues were not all human. They were not all humanoids. Some were more beast than elf or man or nymph.

The monster sat near the rear of the courtyard; a great, brooding foul thing.

It was like nothing that I had encountered in my experiences in Avalonia. Like nothing I had ever seen. That wasn’t to say that it was the grossest thing that I had feasted the old eyeballs on. I think that top honor was still held by the Abomination, which was a hideous creature that made you cherish every moment that you weren’t in its company. This thing, though, was definitely new to me.

The three of us walked further into the courtyard. I was half expecting the door to boom theatrically closed behind us, but it remained open. It was almost tempting us to tuck tail and run.

There was no chance of that.

As we approached, our footsteps crunching on bits of loose stone and crumbled plaster from the statues and busts set on plinths all around us, the monster looked up and we were able to get a decent look at it.

“A liderc!” Mallory breathed from next to me. “I have not heard tell of one for a long time. I can’t even think of when I last heard rumors of such a monster still existing.”

“Liderc?” I asked. “What the hell is a liderc when it’s at home?”

“A Nightmare,” Mallory said, an unfamiliar trace of grimness in her tone.

The monster was crouched like a bad dream at the far end of the courtyard. It was vaguely humanoid in shape: massive, lumpy, and gray as slate. Its back was covered in thick, bristling spines like a porcupine, which stuck through the roughly beaten steel and iron of the back and breastplate that it wore. Its arms were long and ape-like, ending in three-fingered hands tipped with vicious claws. Its legs were thickly muscled and looked like they were built for pouncing.

It was the thing’s head, though, that really captured the attention. The head was an amalgamation of orangutan and bat. It had large, twitching ears, a squashed nose with enormous nostrils, and bulbous eyes, which could have been scooped straight out of a tarsier’s head and inflated about a thousand times. Teeth like shards of broken black glass filled its mouth.

I narrowed my eyes at the enormous beast. It must have weighed a few tons and been about twenty-five feet tall. It rocked backward and forward, the tiny pupils of its protuberant eyes fixed on us, gibbering quietly to itself. Drool hung in thick ropes from its slavering, many-toothed jaw. Hideous open nostrils were crusted with yellow goo.

“Handsome son of a bitch, isn’t it?” I said, wrinkling my nose as the monster’s smell was wafted toward us by a quickening breeze that had slipped over one of the walls.

Mallory covered her mouth with her hand and said, “Handsome, yes. Could do with a bath though, I think.”

After my battle with the hydrahound, I was far from at full capacity in the mana department, but I had two extremely capable mages standing to either side of me for which I was pretty damned grateful.

It was commonly said that Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, but I was hoping that Mallory and Leah would prove that idiom to be incorrect. Hopefully, the combined wrath of two women out to complete a quest would make the passion they showed at being scorned look like a fucking picnic.

The monster continued to rock and gibber, eyeing us balefully. It looked the part of a monster: mean, scary, grotesque.

Currently though, it was not acting like one.

And if a monster didn’t act like a monster, then was it actually a monster?

I took a few more steps toward it.

“Do you reckon that, just for once, we might be able to actually reason with this thing?” I asked the two female mages. “Do you think that for once, just this once, we might not have to fucking explode something into a glutinous mess just so—”

With an elastic, terrifyingly fast spring, the nightmarish liderc leapt upward and landed with a bone rattling thud in the middle of the courtyard. It was no small jump. Must have been thirty yards. I felt the impact of it landing through my boots. It sent shards and chips of stone in all directions, rattling off the walls and pinging off the statues.

The liderc opened its disgusting, gaping maw and roared out a challenge of unbridled, insane bloodlust.

“Never mind,” I said, and fired a Blazing Bolt at it.

The Blazing Bolt flew across the space between us and the monster, crackling red energy trailing behind it like the tail of a comet. The magical projectile hit the liderc square in its armored chest but ricocheted off. The spell made the liderc cut off its roar and grunt, but it deflected off its breastplate and hit a statue, blowing it to smithereens. Stone fell like rain.

“Plan?” Mallory shot at me as the liderc hissed menacingly.

“Same as usual!” I yelled sprinting left, while Leah went right. “Stay alive!”

“Same as usual,” I heard Mallory repeat. She dove and vanished into the scattering of statues.

The stink of the monster was thick in my nostrils, and I could hear it blithering and snuffling to itself.

“Yoo-hoo!” I heard Leah caw from off to my right.

The Chaos Mage cartwheeled out in front of the liderc and hit it with a spray of her sparkling pink acid. Her Chaos spell bubbled and ate up the armor that adorned the beast, pock-marking its bare gray skin where it touched it and sending little tendrils of steam hissing into the air.

The liderc looked irked, but not much concerned with the attack. It swung a long arm at Leah in retaliation. Leah vaulted nimbly over the scything claws, and they raked the ground where her feet had been, sending sprays of stone chips and dust into the air.

Mallory appeared from behind the liderc just as I sent a few Frost Shards at it. The monster turned to confront the Holy Mage as the two-foot-long icicles shattered across its armored back harmlessly.

Mallory floated into the air and opened her hands wide, her eyes glowing with a white fire.

“Foul creature, be cleansed with Holy Fire!” she said, in a high, cold, terrible voice.

She thrust her hands forward, and a beam of scintillating gold-white flames erupted from her palms.

I had to shield my eyes as the Holy Fire chewed up a strip of stone flags, racing toward the liderc. Before the potent spell could hit our adversary, the liderc sprung away nimbly and landed some yards distant, crashing through a minotaur statue.

Mallory attempted to follow the creature, but the magic she was wielding seemed cumbersome and awkward. The Holy Fire changed course, leaving patches of melted, bubbling stone in its wake and cutting through a statue like a welding torch through metal. However, before the Holy Mage could target the liderc once more, the fire faltered and faded. She dropped heavily to the floor, landing on her feet but staggering a little.

That particularly potent spell, which would doubtless have caused the monster some real problems, had also seriously depleted Mallory’s mana reserves. Her pale face was flushed with effort and shining with perspiration.

I conjured two Crystal Magma Bombs and chucked them toward the liderc before I sprinted over to check on Mallory. The thaumaturgical grenades detonated with twin whumpfs and sprayed viscous magma across the liderc, eating into its armor and burning its gray hide.

“Are you okay?” I asked Mallory, pulling her out of the line of fire as the liderc ripped up a large statue and tossed it at us.

“Y-yes,” the Holy Mage stuttered as the hurled statue crashed down not too far away and cracked into five chunks, each the size of a mini-fridge. “I tried t-to end things early and save us all some effort, b-but I missed. Just give me a moment. I’ll be fine.”

Mallory’s lips were blue, and her teeth chattered, but there wasn’t anything I could do, except keep the liderc’s attention away from her.

So that is what I did.

I ran out, sprinted toward the liderc, at the same that Leah appeared and began peppering it with twirling silvery-pink birds that fluttered out of the ether and shot toward the liderc like bullets.

The liderc narrowed its huge eyes at the storm of silver-pink projectiles and let loose an eerie scream from its slobbering mouth.

It was a roar that could only just be discerned by the human ear, and it set my teeth on edge. It hit the oncoming Chaos Magic missiles like a wave and flung them right back at Leah, who threw herself to the side. The projectiles ate up the area where she had just been like machine gun fire, blowing chunks out of the stone slabs and scarring the nearby statues. Bright pink sparks erupted.

The spellfire died just as I reached the spot. I ran through a cloud of dust, pelting toward the liderc.

The liderc’s eyes scanned the area for Leah. As I approached, the monster heaved itself up onto its stringy, muscular legs so it could peer around all the better.

It caught sight of me just as I reached it.

I conjured a smooth, slick magical surface between the liderc’s lanky legs using my Flame Barrier spell and threw myself under its stinking lumpy body.

Boy, I would have been in the shit if the liderc had possessed the presence of mind to just sit down and crush me. Happily, it did not. I slid through its legs, stabbed upward with my staff as I shot by, and hit the unarmored groin of the liderc with my Leech spell.

I was spat unceremoniously out the other side of the liderc’s legs, shot off the end of the slide I had created for myself, and tumbled across the tiled floor.

As the liderc let out a deep, sick-sounding moan and shook its head, I felt a renewed energy course through me. That was the Leech spell at work; it was a degenerative curse that stripped an enemy of their strength and invested it into me, the caster.

After the taxing time that I’d had against the hydrahound, a fresh shot of mana was just what the doctor ordered.

I bellowed wordlessly as the fresh power flooded my body, invigorating my limbs and setting new hope burning in my heart.

“Come on, you bastard!” I yelled and let loose almost every projectile and offensive spell I had on hand and could easily call to my buzzing mind.

Storm Bolts, Frost Shards, Blazing Bolts, and Paralyzing Zaps pummeled into the liderc. The assortment of Ice, Storm, and Fire Magics flickered and flashed off the monster’s armor. Most of the spells deflected, crashing into the stone floor and spraying up geysers of earth and stone like IEDs going off.

The liderc, despite its sheer size and bulk, was buffeted backward by the force of my spells. It growled and slathered its fury as it was forced to take steps backward, as my magic compelled it to retreat.

My pummeling continued for over ten seconds as I sought to find a chink in its armor, but to no avail. I could feel my mana reserves waning once more, and I was starting to experience that familiar sensation of maybe having bitten off more than I could chew.

Then I saw a flash of movement from my right.

Through the haze of stone dust and the thaumaturgical smoke that my reflecting spells were giving off, Leah shot toward the liderc. She was moving far too fast for her to be simply running. She was weaving in and out of statues with unnatural smoothness, like someone on a…

“Hoverboard,” I said, in dumbfounded amazement.

Leah was standing, perfectly balanced, on a hot pink and white board composed of crackling pearlescent pink Chaos Magic. The skimboard-shaped device zipped along about a foot off the ground.

“Build me a ramp will you, honeypie?” Leah cried as she boosted toward the liderc.

Pausing in my magical broadside, I constructed a gelatinous-looking orange ramp with my Flame Barrier spell and set it directly in Leah’s path.

The brief cessation I had to take in my barrage while I constructed this magical ramp allowed the beast to turn and set its sights on Leah.

Leah hit the ramp, a smile on her face and a cry of delight on her lips. She catapulted into the air, kicking herself free of the Chaos board and shifting into an elegant floating backflip.

The board, made from Chaos Magic, ignited due to its proximity to the Flame Barrier spell. It shot at the liderc like a cheerful, pink missile and slammed into its breastplate in an intense explosion of sparks and fire.

The liderc screeched angrily at the impact, rocking back on its muscly legs. Its thick armor clanged to the floor, the bonds that held it severed by the intensity of Leah’s spell.

It was a freaking fantastic move by Leah, a wonderful bit of War Mage work. However, regardless of how pretty the magic was and how cool she had looked zooming in on a goddamn magical hoverboard, it didn’t change the fact that the liderc snatched her out of the air mid-backflip.

The nightmarish creature looked pissed that the pink-haired woman had just broken its only suit of clothing. It held her up and sniffed as Leah’s hair tickled its hideous open nostrils. A rancid deep purple tongue snaked out from between the glistening black teeth and licked at the pink hair.

“No!” Leah screamed.  “I just fucking conditioned last night, you motherfucker!”

There was no time for asking questions and second-guessing answers.

With a mighty mental heave, I ripped a statue, which looked a lot like The Rock, from a nearby plinth with my Telekinesis spell. With a monumental effort, I heaved it over the back of the liderc’s head.

The liderc opened its cavernous mouth. If it dropped Leah, it would be like she’d been deposited into a mincing machine. The creature’s mouth was so full of razor-sharp higgledy-piggledy teeth that it wouldn’t even have to bite down to kill her.

I let the statue fall and, as I did, I used my Crystalize spell to encase it in a translucent crystal and increase its weight by half.

The statue plummeted down and struck the liderc on the back of its skull with a sickening cracking sound. The creature’s bulbous eyes went fixed. Its hand opened, and Leah fell to the deck, landing like a cat on all fours and rolling out of any potential retaliatory stomp.

“That’s going to leave a bump in the morning,” I said grimly, watching as the liderc tottered and turned a full three-sixty on the spot.

It probably would have done too, if it had not been for the sudden eruption of Holy Fire that engulfed the monster’s head.

Mallory Entwistle, white gown billowing around her in the backdraft pushed out by the Holy Fire she was channeling, stalked determinedly down the gallery of statues. Her arms were outstretched, and her wings were unfolded. She looked very much the avenging archangel. A thin beam of celestial fire, thirty-five yards long, connected her open palms to the head of the liderc.

“Go back to the shadow!” she cried in a fell voice.

I don’t mind saying that I almost popped a nerd chub then and there. To have this beautiful, powerful mage quote Tolkien without even knowing it, just as she was about to—

The liderc’s head glowed incandescent white and exploded.

It ruptured, like some gray boil, spraying dark blood and smoking bits of skull in all directions. Chunks of evil-smelling eggplant-colored gunk splatted down around us—liderc brain.

With a final spasm, the headless monster stood bolt upright, as tall as it could, and then flopped over backward, smashing through one last statue as it came to rest.

As soon as I was sure the decapitated thing was staying down—never a given in Avalonia—I ran past the fallen liderc and straight to Mallory’s side.

The woman, who had looked so heavenly and queenly as she strode toward the liderc with her hands full of fire, spouting out Gandalf’s best one-liners, looked run-in now. She was exhausted, sitting on the remains of a shattered plinth, though she still held her chin up as Leah and I approached.

“You’ll get piles, sitting on stone like that,” I said,

The Holy Mage laughed tiredly.

“You killed it, sugar-butt!” Leah said, putting a hand on Mallory’s shoulder.

“We killed it,” Mallory corrected.

“It was a solid team effort,” I said.

Leah gazed over at the huge corpse of liderc and then around at the stricken courtyard.

“You’re thinking that we’ve slain ourselves a monster,” I said, “so—”

“Where’s the demon?” Mallory finished my sentence.

“Exactamundo,” Leah said. Her breath plumed in the air.

I frowned. “That wasn’t the demon?”

“It was the monster,” Leah replied.

It had been a warm winter’s day up until then. Our breath had only smoked first thing in the morning, by the time we had entered the Shite Pipe, the day had warmed sufficiently not to see it anymore.

Slowly, with a growing sense of dread that was an external force more than it was an intuitive leap of logic, I turned to look at the corpse of the liderc.

The drop in temperature was quite noticeable now. The breath of all three of us smoked in the air. I shivered as goosebumps erupted on the back of my neck and hands. The shadows seemed to deepen and lengthen, though no discernable change came over the sun slanting into the courtyard.

“Would you look at that,” Leah said. “It’s kind of fetching.”

I looked where she was pointing. Hoarfrost crept up the nearest statue. Pretty patterns of ice crawling slowly along the stonework.

My eyes moved down.

Rivulets of ice snaked out from the liderc’s dead body, which was now coated in a thick frost. The entire courtyard was getting a fine covering of rime. There was a soft crackling sound from all around as frozen water found its way into nooks and crannies and expanded.

“Now this is what the poets would describe as not boding well,” Leah said lightly. She drew one of her black cigarettes out from behind her ear. The fact that she could not have concealed one of the clove-scented smokes behind her ear never seemed to bother her or the universe.

The huge corpse of the liderc burst with a sound like the mother of all eggs breaking open combined with a hill of dry leaves being suddenly set ablaze. Ribs and collarbones snapped and crackled and popped as the monster’s headless corpse opened like the most ghastly and macabre flower imaginable.

“There, I believe, is our demon,” Mallory said. Her eyes were fever bright, and dark bags hung from under them. I was fairly certain that Leah and I would most likely not be relying too heavily on our Holy Mage companion. Not for a while at least.

Well, shit, it looked like we would have to deal with the liderc’s demonic form with only two mages.

Chapter 17

The demon pulled itself from the shattered, tangled mess of the monster that had been playing host to it. It was a creature of shadow and lightning; alien, even in a world like Avalonia, which still hosted centaurs, trolls, and giant flying bulls.

It looked like a naked bird. A giant vulture that had been roasted clean of feather and flesh in one of the underworld’s most fearsome boiling tarpits, and then animated with undistilled malice and pure, unadulterated evil. It was cloaked in darkness, ice running over its diseased marrow. In its bottomless eye sockets, there burned a flame fed by a boundless contempt for anything that was not it. The demon was not as big as the liderc had been, but it gave off an infinitely more sinister vibe.

“Yuck,” said Leah.

The demon ripped itself free of the dead body like some vile grub coming out of a cocoon. It looked more like a pterodactyl now that it was clear of the liderc’s corpse. While it walked on four legs, the front two legs were connected to the body, from the wrists, by stretched pinion. This was not skin that formed these wings, but shadow made solid.

“I hope that’s not what I think it is,” Mallory said.

The demon looked unconcernedly over at the three of us. We had backed away from the apparition as it had torn itself out of the liderc’s body, and we now stood about sixty yards away.

With a choking screech, the demon began to hawk up something from deep inside itself. Its skeletal avian head leaned back on its spindly neck and began jerking backward and forward.

“Please be allergic to oxygen,” I muttered.

With spasmodic jerks, the vulture-like head bobbed forward a couple of times. A ball of burning blue light, wreathed in black flame, spewed out of its mouth and landed with a thud on top of the corpse it had just crawled out of.

I didn’t know how, but I got the impression that the ball of blue light was so cold that touching it would have burned me in reverse. I didn’t know how to explain that feeling to myself, but I was almost positive that would be the case. It reminded me, somehow, of a black hole.

“Oh no,” Mallory said flatly.

“Bad news?” I asked.

“Some of the worst,” Mallory replied.

The blue burning ball instantly consumed the body of the liderc, reducing it to sable ashes before drawing it into itself and expanding from the size of a beach ball to a La-Z-Boy.

“The very worst,” Mallory said, her eyes fixed on the blue ball of dense light.

“You’ve opened up the can, honeybunny,” Leah said, her pale face aglow with sapphire light, “why not spill those beans?”

“It’s a Doomsday Demon,” the Holy Mage said, her head drooping a little as she spoke.

“Sounds promising,” I said drily.

I watched as the expanding ball of blue and black magic or energy, or whatever the fuck it was, continued to expand, shriveling solid rock like it was cardboard and consuming it.

“And what’s with the pretty light?” Leah asked.

“That,” Mallory said wearily, “is an Armageddon Sphere.”

I laughed. Sometimes that’s all you can do. It’s either that or run off screaming with your arms flailing over your head.

“And that will, I presume, bring about some localized end of world event?” I guessed.

Mallory nodded. “That’s right, Justin, it will burst when it reaches its optimal size and obliterate and consume all matter within its radius.”

“I don’t suppose Armageddon Sphere is one of those ironic names, is it?” Leah asked airily.

“What?” Mallory asked.

“One of those, you know, names that means its opposite. Like, this is the Armageddon Sphere because when it explodes it just destroys, say, something as big as a pig?”

Mallory blinked. I guessed she was too exhausted to even roll her eyes.

“I would speculate, from what I have read in texts back in the Celestial Realm, that this blue Armageddon Sphere, when it has reached approximately the same size and mass as a wagon, will detonate and consume an area roughly the size of this castle. It might even take out a decent chunk of Manafell too.”

My jaw dropped. “Why would this be part of the test for someone who is after the third relic?”

“Honestly,” Mallory said, “I don’t think it is. It is something more sinister.”

“Fuck it,” I said. “I’m going to try and take it down then.”

“Tread carefully, Creation Mage,” Mallory cautioned me. “This demon is unlike any foe that you would have faced before. It is no monster. This is something more. This is something of the endless night.”

“Ominous words,” I said, smiling tightly. “My favorite kind. You coming?” This last sentence was shot at Leah.

“Duh,” the female Chaosbane said. “Wouldn’t miss this show for the world.”

Leah and I converged on the malignant Doomsday Demon firing spells like we were Old West gunslingers. There was no point in pussy-footing around. The thing knew we were there, it just seemed not to care.

I aimed to make it care.

Leah hit it with reams of Chaos Magic that spiraled out of her long-fingered hands. At the same time, my staff was pointing at the demon and emitting Blazing Bolt after Blazing Bolt.

The spells splashed against the demon’s shadowy black hide like pebbles plopping into water, disappearing without leaving even the slightest mark behind.

The Doomsday Demon cawed in harsh condescension at our efforts, obviously mocking us even though we could not hope to understand its tongue.

“What the hell?” I said to Leah in frustrated disbelief as we both ducked behind a statue to have a quick head-to-head. “Magic doesn’t hurt it? What the fuck are we supposed to do about that?”

Leah, for once, looked genuinely puzzled. There was a slight frown in the middle of her dark eyes.

“Hand-to-hand?” she said, but her tone told me that she was far from convinced that this was a good idea.

I slinked behind the statue, my back against the cold stone. The demon glared at me, while it crouched over the Armageddon Sphere.

“It doesn’t even look like it’s going to attack us,” I said.

“If I was impervious to magic and was fighting mages,” Leah said with a kind of detached thoughtfulness, “I wouldn’t stir my ass to fight either. I’d just wait for that glowing egg thing to go off and—pop! Everyone dies.”

That was what it was doing, wasn’t it? Goddamn it, it was just waiting us out, while we ran around like a couple of idiots trying to kill it with magic that could do it no harm.

“It’s a head-scratcher,” Leah said mildly. “How do you kill something that is more myth than living being?”

“I’ve got a plan. Sort of,” I said.

I darted out of hiding and stood my ground in the middle of the destruction that had been caused by the fight with the liderc. Using my rapidly depleting mana, I summoned my Lightning Skink and a pack of Undead Wolverines. I followed it up with a Rain of Toads spell, hoping that an onslaught of amphibians of plague-like proportions would cover my summoned monsters.

“Go!” I ordered my magical allies, pointing my black crystal staff at the Doomsday Demon. “Go and do your worst, fellas!”

As toads started to fall from the sky and drop onto the Doomsday Demon, the Undead Wolverines bounded away, but the Lighting Skink took the lead. The slick, sinuous thaumaturgical beast shot forward, blue lines of energy running along its gleaming flanks and its glassy teeth bared. It closed on the demon like a cheetah and leapt straight for its throat, claws slashing as it propelled itself through the air.

It hit the Doomsday Demon and froze. It spasmed violently, glitching in and out of existence as smoke rose from its predatory body.

“Shit!” I cursed.

The Undead Wolverines dived into the flank of the Doomsday Demon, like a bunch of overzealous NHL defensemen piling onto an opposition center. They too froze as soon as they came into contact with their foe. They started twitching, their undead flesh smoldering.

It was obvious that the Doomsday Demon was surrounded by some demonic aura that melted flesh and magic alike. The body of the Lightning Skink was sucked into the Armageddon Sphere in the form of ectoplasmic goo. The Undead Wolverines did the same. Along with every last toad that fell from the sky.

“Fuck!” I yelled.

The blue light from the sphere was glowing brighter and brighter. I imagined it would not be long before some poor guards from the Castle of Ascendance came up here to investigate, like a bunch of hot blondes inadvisably exploring the basement in your typical B-grade horror flick. I guessed that their initial reaction would be to try and kill this Doomsday Demon with conventional weapons. They’d be wiped out as easily as one, two, splat.

“Leah!” I yelled. “Can you rig up a bit of magic on the door that will stop anyone stumbling in here and getting themselves killed?”

Leah gave me a thumbs-up and a wink and headed for the door, taking the circuitous route around the Doomsday Demon.

“You’re not going to say anything? No empty words of good luck?” I called after her.

Leah turned. “I was going to make a joke about your luck and life,” she said, “but life beat me to the punch!”

She had a point there.

“Great, Justin, very selfless, you’ve taken care of the potential collateral damage like a good boy,” I said to myself, “but those good intentions are going to come to the square root of absolutely fucking nothing if that Armageddon Sphere goes off! Now, think, man, think!”

Leah was back in no time at all. She fired ribbons of sparkling Chaos Magic at the Doomsday Demon as she ran toward me, but her spells were absorbed by the hellish entity just as easily as they had been before.

“Well, I’m out of ideas,” she said with resignation as she pressed her back to the statue of a fat Orc that we were sheltering behind. “I wonder what it’s going to be like to be blown into dust and then compressed into a single atom—if that’s what’s going to happen.”

“Wait—be quiet a second,” I said.

Something that Leah said to me a few minutes before had only just sunk into my brain.

“How do you kill something that is more myth than living being?”

“...something more myth than living being…”

“...more myth…”

You fought fire with fire, didn’t you?

Maybe you had to fight myth with myth.

We needed a myth of our own.

And I just so happened to have one dangling at my belt.

Time was of the essence, and only time would prove whether this theory of mine held any credence.

I stepped out from behind the statue, ripped the wooden capture orb from my belt, and threw it toward the Doomsday Demon.

“Fuck it,” I said, “let there be dragons!”

The dragon I had captured expanded into being in the blink of an eye.

It was as long as two buses, amber in color, with a pair of eyes that were completely black except for the vertical amber pupils.

It looked regal, it looked legendary.

It looked like the embodiment of light, the very antithesis of the Doomsday Demon.

“Go get it, big boy,” I growled.

The dragon might have been old—ancient, in fact—but he had lost none of his zest for a good fight. Dragons, so I had learned since defeating this one in a battle of wills, fought until they died. There was no such thing as defeat for a dragon. They either won or they gave up the ghost.

The dragon lumbered toward the Doomsday Demon, which regarded it with the same frosty contempt that it had reserved for Leah, Mallory, and I. It looked scornful right up until the dragon hit it with a burst of the gelatinous amber spray that it spewed instead of fire.

Mallory had once told me that the reason that Amber Dragons fired this amber goo instead of fire was because they preferred to eat their meat live. They encased their prey in porous amber, trapping it. It allowed the captured prey to still breathe through the dense, glutinous substance, but rendered them completely incapable of moving. When the dragon wanted to feed, it simply chewed up its victim and released all the blood and juices from the amber casing, which it then digested along with the victim.

I had no idea how this skill would translate to something like the Doomsday Demon, but I was sure as hell happy to find out.

The fact that the gelatinous amber affected the Doomsday Demon at all was a promising start. Whether it was because the spray of liquid amber was issued from a creature that was just as much part of the mythology of the multiverse as it was part of the physical world of Avalonia, I could not say for sure. All I knew was that the deluge hit the Doomsday Demon across the flank and knocked it over.

The dragon roared with glee, knocking aside the Armageddon Sphere with apparent impunity so it could jump on the shocked Doomsday Demon.

It was a true clash of the titans, the coming together of those two big, magical entities. Stone cracked and the hoarfrost that covered basically everything dissolved under the Amber Dragon’s hot scales.

As the two huge creatures wrestled and batted at one another, making the courtyard tremble and shake with every blow, Leah came to join me in the metaphorical front row.

“What did you do about the door?” I asked, not taking my eyes off the epic contest taking place in front of us.

“Set up a portal,” Leah said absently. She winced as the Doomsday Demon lashed out with a cold skeletal hand and scored the dragon three long black gashes across its snout. The wounds smoked with the fervor of liquid nitrogen, and the Amber Dragon bellowed in pain.

“A portal?” I asked as the dragon tail-whipped the Doomsday Demon and sent it crashing through a series of quite fresh-looking statues. “Where does the portal take them?”

“Back to the bottom of the stairs,” she said.

I snorted. “Annoying.”

“Very,” Leah agreed.

The Doomsday Demon flapped upward, but it could barely manage because of the amber goo clinging to its skeletal insubstantial sides. The dragon reared up on its hind legs, following it, while the Doomsday Demon beat at its head with claws and wings.

The Amber Dragon, staunch and smelling victory, ignored the blows. It grabbed the slightly smaller nightmare creature and pulled it back down to earth. The move, the grapple, looked slow and ponderous because the two beasts were so big. However, the impact when they hit the courtyard was so massive that it knocked Leah and me off our feet.

Rolling over and squinting against the cataclysmic dust cloud that was pushed out by the collision of such huge bodies hitting the deck, I saw that the dragon had the Doomsday Demon pinned under his vast bulk.

“Go on, finish him!” I managed to choke out, through a mouth that was full of dust.

The dragon reared its neck, opened its mouth, and spewed a torrent of amber slush all over the Doomsday Demon. The awful, skeletal creature flapped and struggled, but whatever power it had left and whatever its demonic flesh was knit from, it could not stand up to the raw power and unconquerable pride of the ancient dragon.

The amber goo was piled on and, even while it was covering its prey, the dragon began to rend and crush the Doomsday Demon under its massive body and powerful claws.

It was amazing to watch—something of such potent fear and terrible potential reduced to wisps of nothing. I figured that was the thing about nightmares; they were terrifying and paralyzingly real right up until they weren’t.

Within minutes, the dragon had completely destroyed the Doomsday Demon, as well as most of the courtyard.

I took a deep breath and hauled myself out of the rubble that I had been unaware I had been lying in, so engrossed had I been in the fight. I reached down and helped Leah to her feet.

“It’s not over yet,” I said before Leah could say a word to me.

“No,” the Chaos Mage said. “We’ve still got to go and dump the trash.”

The Armageddon Sphere was still glowing bright blue. Black flames flickered over its bulging surface, which was no longer a steady cobalt but pulsated.

I had hoped the object would vanish along with the demon that had created it, but I guess that would have been too much to ask for.

“Go and get Mallory,” I said. “Then meet me back here.”

Leah hurried off. There was, or so I had heard, a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted. There was also a time for smart-ass comments, but this, seemingly, was not that time.

I turned my attention to the dragon.

“I enjoyed your work,” I said in a loud voice, “but we have one little job left to do.”

The Amber Dragon gave me a stony look.

I willed a mental image of what I was going to need the huge beast to do into the dragon’s head. The Amber Dragon let out a snort, which was most definitely a sigh.

“Come on, pal,” I said. “You’re on my side now, remember?”

Leah and Mallory arrived on the scene just as I was climbing onto the dragon’s broad back.

“Get up here,” I said. “We need to find a safe place to dump this ticking time bomb, but I can’t leave you here to face the wrath of the Queen. Otherwise, I’d do this alone.”

“How chivalrous,” Leah said, sketching a mocking bow and sticking her tongue out at me.

Mallory tossed something up to me.

It was a stick of silver sealing wax bound to a seal. I looked at the bottom of the seal and saw that it depicted a pair of crossed quills. I looked at the Mallory in puzzlement.

“The third relic,” she explained.

I stowed the innocuous relic away in the pocket that held the bottle of red ink. I had been so caught up with defeating the monster and the demon that I had almost forgotten the reason we had gone to all this trouble in the first place.

“Okay,” I said, holding out a hand for Leah and helping her up into the space between the Amber Dragon’s wing joints in front of me, “time to fly.”

“One moment,” the Holy Mage said.

She swirled her hands in a broad circle and enveloped the Armageddon Sphere in a similar cloudy spell as the one she had used to subdue the dwarf guard earlier in the Chamber of Lock and Key.

“That will buy us a few extra minutes,” she said, allowing me to pull her up to sit behind me. “The Armageddon Sphere has almost reached capacity—you can tell by the pulsation. My Holy magic should give us enough time to get clear of the city.”

Without discussing anything further, I gave the dragon we were all sitting on the mental spurs.

With a lurching of titanic muscles, the Amber Dragon boosted into the air. Its tail was wrapped around the Armageddon Sphere and, as it rose, it brought the ticking time-bomb with us.

On a normal day, the power of the mythical creature might have astounded me, and the cold of the air might have taken my breath away. However, when you have the magical equivalent of a nuclear bomb in your trunk, there’s not much room left in your head for anything else.

We soared out of the courtyard and over the walls of the Castle of Ascendance. The dragon may have been an older model, but the old-timer still flew like a champion, its great wingbeats thumping through the air and propelling us on at a hell of a speed.

It was not long until we were out over the open country. Snow-covered fields spread out below us like a checkered blanket. Smoke rose from chimneys. Patches and swathes of woodland looked like smears of brown and green acrylic paint. All in all, it looked like a happy little accident that Bob Ross might have painted. It was a cozy scene. One that I was reticent to drop a magical bomb on.

“There!” Mallory cried from behind me, sticking her arm past my face and pointing ahead to a patch of dirtier white amongst all the white.

For a brief moment, I didn’t know what the hell she was indicating. Then I realized: a lake. A frozen lake.

“I see it!” I said, and relayed the order to the Amber Dragon.

The dragon tucked its legs into its body a little tighter and banked in hard to the left. Mallory, Leah, and I huddled in closer to the creature’s scaly hide and watched the frozen lake come closer and closer.

Then, we were over it.

The dragon opened its wings, applying the air-brakes, and uncoiled its tail.

The Armageddon Sphere dropped away from us. A pulsing blue globe, a cloud-wrapped weapon of mass destruction.

It hit the surface of the lake, punched through the ice, and disappeared.

“Bit anticlimactic, wouldn’t you—” Leah started to say.

The lake evaporated in a truly, truly cataclysmic reverse explosion.

The air around us seemed to vanish for a moment, and the dragon plummeted about a hundred feet before the void was filled. Below us, evergreen trees on the banks of the lake were sucked inwards and bent like straws until they snapped. The water and ice simply vanished. Poof. Gone. The noise was like a couple of drunken tornadoes yelling over one another in a busy bar. Ice and snow and dirt were thrown skywards as the atmosphere reeled.

And then…

Silence.

I looked down.

What had been a fully frozen expanse of freshwater only a few seconds before was now nothing more than a vast crater.

“Holy… Holy fuck,” I said.

“Yeah…” Leah said. “That about sums it up.”

“Demonic power,” Mallory said.

We sailed along in silence for a full minute, each of us lost in thoughts of how close to being turned to atoms we had come. Eventually, I cleared my throat and stirred.

“Do we head back to the Castle of Ascendance?” I asked. “We’ve left Thunder and Lightning at that stable, Leah. What if that guy does manage to sell them? When word gets out about what happened here, he’s going to assume that we’re either dead or on the run.”

From her position in front of me, Leah waved a casual hand. It never ceased to amaze me how unflappable the Chaosbane clan were. It had been one hell of a day, in anyone’s books, but even after all we had been through, Leah looked just as unfazed as she always did. Her eyes were closed as she enjoyed the sensation of flying, despite the frigid air that rushed over us.

“Nah, don’t worry about it, syrup-lips,” she said breezily. “I’ll get Chubbs to go and get them. If the guy has somehow managed to sell them, they’ll only end up giving their new owner the slip and heading back to the ranch.”

“We have the third relic,” I said thoughtfully, looking down at the Christmas card countryside that slipped by below us “but we left Gertrude back at the castle. I doubt we’re going to be able to sneak back in there after just unleashing a demon.”

“Now that she knows who you are and what you need,” Mallory said, “I should be able to have her meet with you again. But, for now, you should focus on the important things.” She reached around from behind me and gave me a squeeze. “Haven’t you heard? It’s Yuletide! I’m sure that tomorrow morning, when things have calmed a little, I can get word to her and make sure that she takes a nice, refreshing ride out into the countryside. She and Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock were close, after all. Perhaps she might come and visit the old grouch?”

I sighed as Mallory nibbled affectionately at my earlobe and rested her head on my shoulder. Things sounded like they were all coming together.

“Where to then?” I asked.

Leah leaned back into me and said in her snootiest voice, “Home please, driver!”

I laughed, relief flooding through me, replacing the adrenaline that had been powering me along for the past however many hours.

I willed the Amber Dragon to take us back to the Chaosbane Ranch, grinning as I imagined the faces of the rest of the clan as they saw us swoop in on dragonback.

I shook my head. What was I thinking? Enwyn might be vaguely surprised. As for the Chaosbanes though, they’d probably act as they always did and take it in their strides.

Chapter 18

The Amber Dragon touched down with surprising grace on the main lawn in front of the Chaosbane Clan Ranch. The sail-like wings snapped open with a deep boom, arresting our forward motion and jerking us only a little where we sat. The massive shoulder muscles acted as shock absorbers as the clawed feet sunk into the snowy lawn.

We slid off the Amber Dragon’s back and waited for the welcome committee to show up. What we got, though, when the huge ranch door was booted open, was Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock stumping out onto the front porch. The old boy was limping a little, as he was once again carrying his walking stick vector like a Remington 870.

When he saw that it was one of his kin who had parked a fully grown, airplane-sized dragon on his lawn, he lowered his stick and leaned on it.

“It’s about fucking time, whippersnappers!” he yelled. “Get that thing out of sight and get inside. You’re just in time.”

With this jovial greeting, he turned around and crabbed off back into the warmth.

I snorted. I loved how the old boy simply told us to get the dragon out of sight, like it was a stolen Camaro or something.

Leah tossed me an object, and I caught it instinctively. It was the capture orb.

“Thought you might need this,” she said casually, putting her arm around the still weak Mallory. “I was going to leave it behind because, honestly, what girl hasn’t always wanted a dragon as a pet, but I didn’t think that Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock had the barn space to accommodate Kazrith.”

“Kazrith?” I asked.

“The Amber Dragon,” Leah said reproachfully. “I’m surprised you didn’t ask him what his name was, sweet-tip.”

“I’d rather mine wasn’t sweet-tip,” I said to her.

Mallory laughed.

I focused my will on the dragon, thanking the ancient being for, basically, saving the day. I tried to instill in its mind just how grateful I was to be able to be standing in front of it, instead of floating on the wind in a zillion separate particles.

The dragon cast one rheumy amber eye at me and growled deep in its throat.

“Well, you’ve earned some R&R,” I said. “As soon as I’m able, and if you’re interested, I’ll have you out of this orb and you can chill out by our pool back home or something.”

The dragon made another rumbling growl, and I heard it speak inside my head.

“The orb is plenty spacious enough for me, Earthling,” it said, its powerful, primordial voice echoing through my head like a rockslide in a subterranean ravine.

I’d heard him speak before, but that had been when he was trying to kill me. This time, his tone had a different quality, something that might have almost been approaching goodwill.

“When a dragon is contained in its spiritual form, space means little,” Kazrith continued. “In that pure, elemental form, we are as capable of filling the sky just as we are capable of filling an oyster shell.”

Sounded like some hippy shit to me, but Kazrith was pretty old—he probably knew what the hell he was talking about.

I held the capture orb out and, this time, instead of willing the dragon inside, I invited him.

Kazrith’s slightly cloudy eye widened at this unexpected, and probably quite unfamiliar, show of respect. Its great head bowed, and the dragon vanished into the wooden orb in my hand.

“Manners,” I muttered. “They’ll get you far.”

I caught up with Leah and Mallory just as they reached the steps to the ranch. Mallory had shrugged off Leah’s help and was walking determinedly under her own steam. She still looked a little exhausted, but the warm orange glow emanating from the ranch windows and the smell of cooking that permeated the air seemed to be restoring her.

“You going to tell me how you got the rest of your scars?” I asked Leah from behind her as we mounted the wooden steps. I was looking at the small patch of blood on the shoulder of her baby blue sweater. The crimson had long faded to a dull brown. “Or am I going to have to guess?”

Leah turned and cocked her head to one side. She smiled lazily. “You want to know how I got these scars?” she asked, reaching a long arm behind her and touching her back.

“If you want to tell me,” I said.

“My father,” Leah said, “was a drinker, and a fiend. One night he goes off crazier than usual—”

I waved my hands in front of my face. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, are you fucking kidding me? Have you been to Earth or haven’t you?”

Leah’s smile widened mischievously. “What makes you think that?”

“I mean you’re quoting one of the all-time best villain monologues,” I said. “That shit can’t be coincidence.”

Leah shrugged her skinny, slightly gangly shoulders.

Once again, I was struck how she could have made a killing on Earth as a model—and not one of those lame Instagram ‘models’ that any egomaniacal, delusional woman who pulls her swimsuit up her ass and poses on a beach seems to like to label themselves. Leah could have been a proper, cigarette smoking, Rockstar-dating, Kate Moss, I-don’t-give-a-fuck models. One of those models who could swap clothes with a homeless person and make filthy threads look like she had just brought them from a Tom Ford store.

“Everyone should have a few scars,” she told me, in a voice that was simultaneously dreamy and prosaic, “just like everyone should have a few enemies. They help weld you and meld you. They show that you raised some hell and ruffled some feathers. They show that, at some time, you just didn’t give a shit, honey-bunny. That’s becoming a rarer and rarer quality in this world.”

We walked into the house, down the warm, oak-paneled hallway, and out into one of the spacious living areas. It was a huge room, lit with a couple of peryton antler chandeliers and liberally decorated with comfortable mismatched sofas. There was a log fire doing a damn good, festive job of roaring away in the massive hearth, alternating between burning with red, green, and orange flames.

Around the shelves and sitting on tables and the backs of sofas were small elf-like creatures, which at first glance might have been mistaken as being ornaments. On closer inspection, these little guys were alive and kicking—literally kicking in many instances, as the only thing the Yuletide race liked better than drinking eggnog from thimbles was kicking the snot out of one another once they’d drunk their fill.

All this was peripheral, though. The main feature of the giant, festive sitting room was the group of people gathered in it.

Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock, Aunt Ruth, Reginald, Mort, and Igor were there, naturally, as were Idman and Barry. Idman, for a dude who continually proclaimed what an excrescence he found the poltergeist, sure did spend a lot of time chatting to the ghostly keeper of our fraternity dungeon. I kept my thoughts to myself, but I suspected that the former High Warden of the Eldritch Prison had taken a bit of a shine to the poltergeist. I imagined that Barry’s long memory held a lot of interest for a man of Idman Thunderstone’s intelligence.

More notably, next to Idman, occupying high-backed armchairs near the fire, were none other than the beautiful figures of Alura, Cecilia, and Janet. I opened my mouth to express my surprise, when I was stopped by a cork that flew across the room and hit me in the side of the dome.

“Where the hell have you been, friend?” Rick boomed from where he was sitting in an opposite corner with Damien and Nigel.

“Where the hell have I been?” I said, trying to not act too surprised at seeing all my pals gathered here. “I think the better question would be, what the hell are you three assholes doing here? Can’t a guy enjoy Yuletide in peace?”

I went and sat down with my fraternity brothers and shook hands with all of them. Call me Sally and fuck me with a fruit fork, but it was good to see them.

“So,” Damien said, “what kept you? Nigel and I must have arrived just after you and Mallory and Leah left. We got here first thing and you’ve been gone all day. Some chubby little werewolf cowboy told us that you’d gone to the Castle of Ascendance on a couple of Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock’s prized pegasi, or some such shit. What were you three doing?”

I sank a little deeper into the comfort of my armchair and gratefully accepted the goblet of ale that Nigel Windmaker handed to me.

“Cheers, Nigel,” I said. “And lads, please excuse me, but I really cannot be assed to get into what we just went through. Maybe, I’ll tell you tomorrow. Right now, though, I just want to chill and hear what the hell you guys are doing here.”

“Well, somehow, I got the feeling that you would be needing my services sooner rather than later,” Rick rumbled, slurping from a huge tankard that some knowing Chaosbane had acquired for the big Earth Elemental. “I spent a bit of quality time with my father in the forge—there is no better or more intense time than sharing the cramped confines of a forge with a tribal chief, especially when he also happens to be your old man.”

The Earth Elemental’s amiable green eyes glinted merrily.

“You and your dad are both big men with big personalities,” Damien hedged. “Was three days all it took for the two of you to want to murder one another?”

We laughed at this, but Rick remained diplomatically silent, only the twinkle in his eye telling us how close to the market Damien had hit.

“So, you’re ready to bust into my mother’s crystal?” I asked, taking a sip of ale. It tasted like the ambrosia of the gods. “The forge is hot and ready to rock, metaphorically speaking?”

Rick inclined his head. “Ready when you are, friend,” he rumbled.

I tilted my head back and stared at the ceiling. “I’m sure my mom wouldn’t mind if I had a few more days of relative peace before we start kicking the hornet’s nest around like a soccer ball again.”

Rick grinned, showing almost every one of his tombstone teeth. He raised his tankard in salute.

“And what about you guys?” I asked, turning my attention to Nigel and Damien, who were lolling on a couch, looking as relaxed and full of good cheer as I was feeling. “How was Earth?”

Nigel leaned forward. He was bright-eyed and had the dangerous look about him that he sometimes got. It was the look that informed his conversational partner that he was about to start giving an account of such detail and length that the only way they were going to be able to stop him talking was with a heavy, blunt instrument.

“Justin,” he breathed, after he had wet his whistle with a slug of delicious smelling apricot brandy, “there is so much that you neglected to tell me of your home-world. So many wonders!”

I chanced a glance at Damien. The L.A. native was obviously trying hard not to laugh.

“Wonders like what?” I asked.

Nigel began patting his pockets feverishly, while Damien carried on getting slowly redder and redder with suppressed mirth.

Finally, Nigel extricated a small, wrapped package from the depths of his jacket and held it up for me to look at.

It was a burger. A bog-standard dirty cheeseburger from everyone’s favorite global fast-food corporation.

I looked at it. Looked at Nigel. Looked back at the ninety-nine percent heart attack he held in his hands.

“Uhh, what’re you showing me here, Nigel?” I asked. I was at a total loss.

Behind Nigel, Damien was crying with silent laughter.

“You never told me that your world had developed such robust travelers’ fare!” Nigel said. “I have had this burger in my pocket for days now and it has shown absolutely no sign of change. No mold, no alteration in scent or appearance. It has cheese on it, Justin! And that cheese has not fouled or gone bad, despite being exposed to the air for days. It’s a culinary marvel.”

I let out a little confused noise. I still wasn’t sure if Nigel was making some kind of joke, or if he was deadly serious. I didn’t know for sure of course, but I would have put a crisp twenty on the fact that nobody had ever referred to one of Ronald’s finest as a ‘culinary marvel’.

“What is p-p-particularly extraordinary about this foodstuff,” Nigel continued enthusiastically, “is that it contains almost no nutritional benefit and yet droves of Earthlings consumed it by the ton! What’s more, they know that this kind of traveling ration is bad for them yet continue to chow down on it with gusto! It’s incredible. Damien took me to one of the burger dispensaries and on trying my first one of these, I thought that he was trying to poison me.”

“I’d never poison you, buddy!” Damien managed to choke through his mirth, slapping the halfling Wind Mage on the back.

“Okay, n-n-not poison me, then,” Nigel admitted, “I thought though, that maybe you’d pulled a prank on me, like you did a month ago when I was hungover and you got a shart slug out of the garden, wrapped it in a lettuce leaf, and told me that it was sushi.”

Rick snorted.

Damien leaned back and said reminiscently, “Oh yeah, that was a good one.”

“Anyway,” Nigel said, returning excitedly to his point, “I ate that f-first one, and it tasted like a mixture of cardboard and poo, but then, I found myself gravitating to the idea of getting another one. It’s quite marvelous as a traveling food, don’t you see? Long-lasting, impervious to degradation, and it compels you to eat more of it, even when your brain is telling you that you’d get more out of eating the box it came in! Genius!”

“Any other highlights?” I asked, smiling at hearing this alien’s interpretation of certain facets of Earth culture.

“Well, the metal boxes that everyone zooms around in really took me back at first,” Nigel said. “I didn’t know what the hell was going on.”

“Yeah, Nigel would have been dead in about the first fifteen seconds after leaving the portal if I hadn’t been there,” Damien said matter-of-factly. “Or the Feds or C.I.A. would have scooped him up.”

Nigel flushed. “There was a lot going on,” he said defensively. “How was I meant to know that the braking capabilities of an automobile were so poor when compared to a broomstick, or even a magic carpet.”

“There’s some poor bastard of a taxi driver in Spaulding Square who is going to go to the grave swearing that he saw some bespectacled kid fly over his cab a few seconds before he was due to run him over,” Damien said. “You should have seen him on day one, Justin. Like something out of Encino Man.”

I laughed. I could definitely imagine it. The phrase, “curiosity killed the cat” had been coined for men like Nigel Windmaker.

“Yes,” Nigel said, his eyes staring far off to a different world, “there certainly was a lot to see. A lot that was familiar and yet a lot that was so different and puzzling. Like the intriguing way folk say ‘no offense’ right before they say something offensive to you—this happens so often! Or how people will organize to meet up with their fellows in bars and parks, and then sit in a circle with their eyes on their tiny screens and not talk to one another. Or how—”

“Did Damien take you to Figueroa Street?” I cut in, afraid that we were about to get sucked down a rabbit hole of Nigel’s pet peeves of American culture.

“Yes,” the halfling said, his eyes turning misty at the recollection. “It reminded me a lot of Powder Lane in a way.”

“I can see that,” I said. “But with less magic.”

“Less obvious magic,” Nigel corrected me vaguely.

I sat up a little at this declaration. Well, my head jerked up an inch from the headrest and then settled back once more.

“What do you mean by less obvious magic?” I asked.

“You guys told me that there was no magic on Earth,” Nigel said. “But I saw that you were just being lazy in your speech. There’s magic there, but deep down. More underground, you know.”

Before I could ascertain his meaning, a crashing din of the magnitude that might have accompanied a pair of armored knights wrestling down a staircase resounded through the room.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Reginald Chaosbane said with his usual roguish suavity, “may I ask you to grab your coats and jackets and beverages of choice and join me out on the lawn. Once we are gathered there, my dear cousin Mort will kick off the Yuletide festivities by carving the Yuletide Log!”

There was a scrabbling for warm coats and jackets. The afternoon was waning. The light of dusk started to fall like a spell over the sparkling, snow-covered back lawns of the ranch. Snowflakes fell with picturesque frequency from the sky. The woolen clouds had reclaimed the heavens, but off to the west, there was just enough room for the sun to peep out and stain the underside of the fluffy canopy with pink and orange light.

Very agreeable. The perfect sunset for someone who had spent the majority of their day dashing about a castle and fighting monstrous, demonic beasts of various degrees of difficulty and spite.

I followed Aunt Ruth, Leah, Reginald, and Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock outside. Behind us came Igor, Mort, Janet, Rick, Nigel, Cecilia, Alura, Enwyn, Damien, Mallory, Idman, and Barry. I watched everyone troop outside. Seventeen of us. Seventeen of the most motley assortment of misfits that there might ever have been.

Milling around us were also a host of children and other family members that we, or at least I, had not yet been introduced to.

“Hey, where the hell is Bradley?” I asked Rick, suddenly noticing that one of the crew was absent.

“You didn’t hear?” Rick asked.

“Hear? Hear what? How am I going to hear anything, I’ve been in the woods for the past few days, drunk off my ass or naked,” I said. “Today, I’ve been busy enough just trying to keep from getting killed or worse. Hear what?”

Rick gave me that tombstone grin again.

“Bradley won that fucking competition,” Damien said, slapping me on the shoulder as he came to stand next to me. “He was going to come and meet us, but he’s had to do all these interviews for periodicals like, Big Buns Weekly, Flambéeboy, and Avalonian Housewife.”

“No shit,” I said, smiling and clapping my hands with delight. “Well, that’s awesome! How are the Flamewalkers taking it?”

Nigel frowned. “He’s managed to keep it from them for now. His letter didn’t go into detail, but apparently his father has been rather irked because a neighbor’s flying bulls pooped all over his lawn and destroyed some of his antique garden furniture…”

I turned to look out across the grounds at the distant, white, architectural confection that was Flamewalker Manor.

“Yeah,” I said, smiling at that particularly fresh and steamy memory, “judging by the size of those chocolate hotdogs, I’m not surprised.”

Reginald raised his hands for silence, and the hubbub of voices died.

“As many of you know,” he said, “and, also, some of you do not, the carving of the Yuletide Log is an ancient tradition that has long been observed in the Chaosbane clan. My dear cousin Mort here, renowned bounty hunter and owner of perhaps the vilest set of sideburns in all of Avalonia, was champion of the Eggnog Gnome Hunt. As ancient right decrees, the carving of the Yuletide Log falls to him!”

There was a round of polite applause. One of the Chaosbane toddlers said, “Who the fuck is cousin Mort?” and Mort raised a shy hand in thanks.

“Bring forth the Log!” barked Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock.

The doors through which we had just walked opened once more. A huge, long platter came floating outside. There was nobody bearing the tray, but it floated along on a cushion of Chaos magic that appeared to be controlled by that saucy minx, Aunt Ruth.

From afar, I could not make out much of the contents of the tray. It just looked like a long loaf of meat, like an enormous kebab shop shawarma. As it drew nearer, I noticed that it was steaming in the cold late afternoon. It was when it drew level with where I was standing in the crowd that the smell of the thing hit me.

It smelled goddamn terrible. It smelled like…

“Is it just me,” I said in an undertone to Janet, “or does the Yuletide Log smell like shit? Like an honest to goodness turd?”

Janet, whose nostrils were dilating but otherwise seemed unaffected by the stench emanating from the Yuletide Log, glanced at me.

“Of course, it smells like crap,” she said, shooting me a funny look.

“And after Mort cuts it, are we supposed to all eat a slice or something?” I asked, horror stricken at putting something that pungent smelling near my face. I was already having visions of having the sort of reaction that dudes had when they tried to eat canned fish back on Earth.

Janet’s funny look morphed into one of disgusted confusion before settling into one of abject mirth.

“Oh my goodness!” she said, almost choking with laughter. “Oh my goodness, that is hilarious!”

I glanced at Cecilia, who was also trying to stop her ribs from breaking in her fit of laughter.

“What?” I asked.

“The reason that it smells like crap,” Janet managed, wiping tears from her eyes, “is because it is crap!”

“What?” I said again.

“Why the hell do you think they call it the Yuletide Log, friend?” Rick guffawed.

“You’re telling me that the cutting of the Yuletide Log is, principally, the slicing of a huge butt muffin?” I said.

Nigel started cracking up.

“That would be a fairly accurate description, yes,” said Alura.

“That,” I said, with perfect truth, “is probably the most fucked up holiday tradition that I have ever heard. And I come from a country that holds a vacation to mark a bloody strike that led to dozens of deaths and millions of dollars in damage on the first Monday in September every year.”

“Mortimer Chaosbane,” Reginald called, “are you ready to do your festive duty on this festive dookie?”

Mort stepped from the crowd and said solemnly. “I am.”

Reginald turned to Aunt Ruth.

“Auntie, release the Yuletide Log, if you please!”

Aunt Ruth made a motion with her hand and the Yuletide Log shot, blazing silvery-white Chaos Magic behind it, into the dusky sky.

The giant shit rocket, which must have been at least twelve feet in length, arced out over the pristine white lawn.

Mort pulled one of the many daggers from out of the folds of his Franciscan-style robes. It was one of those crescent-bladed things, deadly sharp and ornate. He strode out across the lawn, executed a balletic side flip, and threw the dagger into the log as hard as he could. It hit the Yuletide Log bang in the middle and severed it cleanly in two.

A great cheer rose up from the clan, and I followed suit. I was running on autopilot, I think, still trying to grasp the notion of a holiday being opened by someone cutting a massive load of shit in half. There was a metaphor and a life lesson in there somewhere, I was sure of it, but it had been a long day and I was ready to turn my brain off and enjoy myself.

“Well done, Mortimer m’boy!” Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock bellowed happily.

Mort rejoined the rest of the party, walking lightly through the snow, and accepting a brimming beaker of something that smoked in the cold air from Igor.

“Now,” Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock cried out over the rising babble of his kith and kin, “let’s all of us head back inside where libations and victuals shall be brought forth and we can settle in for a good Chaosbane party!”

The company started to head back inside, and I followed along slowly behind. It had been an interesting few days, but it looked like things were not quite over yet.

All of us gathered around the vast Chaosbane family dining table and feasted. There were heaped tureens, piled plates, overflowing bowls, and generous platters of every kind of food I could imagine—as well as some that I couldn’t. The conversation flowed like wine and the wine flowed like water. It was one of the most pleasant dining experiences I had ever had the pleasure of being involved in, and was only slightly interrupted when Igor somehow managed to set his end of the table on fire.

Halfway through the feast, Madame Xel and Odette Scaleblade appeared, bringing with them none other than Gertrude the Inscriber. It only took Gertrude a few minutes at the end of the table that had not recently been set ablaze to bolster my spellbook with four new spell slots. I felt like she made a concerted effort to get the business taken care of so she could wander casually down the table and take up conversation with the patriarch, Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock.

“You know,” Damien said, gesturing expansively and slopping red wine into his lap, “I was expecting a Chaosbane Christmas to be a little more… I don’t know, nuts than this.”

I exchanged glances with Leah and Mallory. Mallory gave me one of her austerely patient looks and rolled her eyes, while Leah carried on gnawing at a succulent, meaty fowl leg and paid absolutely no attention.

“Well, boys,” I said, “I think it would be fair to say that you missed out on a lot over the past few days.”

“Like what?” Nigel asked.

I puffed out my cheeks. “Nigel,” I said, “where the hell should I start?”

“How about the beginning?” the halfling said.

I thought back to the sleigh ride through the wormhole. “How about the beginning,” I muttered.

An enthusiastic ding-ding-ding-ding-ding of a teaspoon on the side of a thin glass—followed by the predictable shatter of said glass—floated up from the head of the table.

Reginald Chaosbane cleared his throat and drew the attention of all onto himself. The mustachioed man slouched nonchalantly in his chair. It never ceased to amaze me how he managed to somehow strut while sitting down, but there he was doing it. When everyone’s attention was fixed on him, the Headmaster of the Mazirian Academy stood, brushing broken glass off his waistcoat.

“Thank you, thank you,” he said. “Just a few quick words before we all become too addled with all this exquisite food and drink, if you’ll indulge me. As you all doubtless know, thanks to the fantastically insidious properties of gossip, there was quite the kerfuffle up at the Castle of Ascendance today.”

There was some sniggering and a few waggish jeers from some of the assembly.

“It was something that had to be done,” Reginald said, his clever eye flicking briefly onto me, “but it has ruffled some feathers amongst the higher-ups, amongst our betters. They were feathers that were inevitably going to be ruffled somewhere down the foggy road of the future, and that future is now upon us.”

“What are you on about, lad?” Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock said peevishly.

“I mean, that Queen Hagatha and her Arcane Council, who were never great fans of mine, will soon be positively shitting kittens when they find out what actually transpired at the Castle of Ascendance and why,” Reginald said. “The Council will no longer play their games in the shadows and will no longer allow me to do things at the Academy as I have been doing them.”

This sounded like something serious, but looking at Reginald’s excited and confident face, it was clearly something he had been orchestrating for a while. My going to the castle and causing a bit of a stir didn’t seem to be the real reason behind why the Queen and the Council were suddenly no longer turning a blind eye. I wondered if it had anything to do with my parents’ plans for the future of universal magic.

Reginald Chaosbane grinned like some sort of roguish pirate tiger and raised his glass.

“So,” he said, “after we have celebrated another splendiferous Yuletide here at the Chaosbane family seat, we will not be heading back to school straightaway, but onward unto unknown shores!”

Everyone raised their glasses. There were smiles all round. Butterflies of excitement awoke from their slumber in my stomach and began stretching their wings. I looked around at my friends. The unknown was to adults as the dark was to kids: something scary to reach into. People usually liked to see what it was that they were grasping for, but the people at this table didn’t give a damn. To them, it was all an adventure, and the future was there to be stretched out for and grasped with both hands.

I raised my glass higher and intoned with the rest of my friends, “To unknown shores!”

End of Book 6

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Dante King is an author of Men’s Adventure fiction in various flavors. His books involve strong male protagonists who know what they want and do what’s required to get it.

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