by Dante King
“I told you it was him, man,” one of the other guys said to his enormous compatriot.
This guy was about my height and looked, as far as I could tell, to be human. He was shirtless and as ripped as any cross-fit addict I’d ever seen on YouTube. His hair was shoulder-length and dark while his eyes were as black as coal and seemed to smolder deep in their sockets. He took my proffered hand in his, and we shook. His grip was sure, dry, and as warm as if I’d held my palm to a campfire.
“I’m Damien,” he said. “Damien Davis. This big old badass is Rick Hammersmith.” He slapped the huge Samoan-looking guy on the back. “And this,”—Damien jerked his head sideways at a small, scrawny dude with hair that fell over his eyes and the words ‘awkward genius’ practically tattooed across his forehead—“is Nigel Windmaker.”
I shook the hands of the other two young men. When it came to Nigel, I realized that this guy really was small. I was sitting down and yet he and I were eye to eye. He must have been four and a half feet tall max. Maybe he was a gnome or something?
“Pull up a stool, gentlemen,” I said graciously. “And enjoy the scenery.”
The other three pulled up stools and ordered drinks from the gorgeous barmaid. Watching the giant, Rick, sit down was an entertainment in itself. He looked like he’d have to sit down in shifts he was so massive.
“So, uh, now that the introductions have been made,” I said, “do you mind if I ask how the hell you guys knew my name?” I shrugged. “Might be there’s a totally ordinary magical explanation to it, but I come from the land of the Facebook stalk and there you need a name before you can put a face to it.”
Nigel gave me an inquisitive look. “Facebook?” he asked in a clear, almost melodic voice. “A book of faces that tells you names?”
I waved my hand. “In a manner of speaking. Basically, it’s a technological tool that allows you to check out how nuts the girl or guy you have your eye on is.”
Damien laughed at this. “That’s about it,” he said.
“So, you’re human?” I asked, putting the mystery of how this trio came to know who I was to the side for the time being.
Damien inclined his head. “That’s right, man,” he said. “Los Angeles born and raised, that’s me.”
“How’d you wind up here?” I asked.
Damien puffed out his cheeks and gave me a wolfish grin. “I ran with a gang back in LA,” he said with cool nonchalance. “Had a real affinity for fire, you know what I mean? Anyway, I had a few run-ins with the law, as you do. Bent a few rules. Made a few mistakes.”
I nodded. My latest mistake would no doubt have still been plastered over the ceiling of my uncle’s store, if it hadn’t been for that magical cleanup crew.
“Anyway, I was involved in a slight...incident,” Damien continued. “A rival gang’s headquarters went up in smoke one night. I’ve no idea who could have made art out of arson, but it was quite a spectacular sight.”
Damien leaned back against the counter, sipped his drink—which smelled a lot like Fireball to me—and studied the end of his finger. I followed his relaxed gaze. I blinked. There was a blue-orange flame burning at the tip of his digit, quite as happily as if his finger had been a candle. Damien caught my eye, winked, and snuffed the flame out in his closed fist.
“Next morning this jerk-off, Bernard, turns up at my door,” he said. “Turns out the reason that I was so adept at starting fires and was rarely—if ever burned—was that I was a Fire Mage. Next thing I know, I’m here.”
Despite the poor impression that the late Bernard had made on Damien, I refrained from divulging the fact that I had accidentally turned him into pate. That was the sort of thing that made people second-guess their decision to sit down with you.
“Speaking of Bernard,” Nigel chimed in, leaning eagerly forward and pushing his spectacles up his nose, “he was the reason that we knew who you were.”
It had taken Nigel a little while to open up and overcome his shyness, but now that he was speaking, he talked in a rapid-fire, excited staccato—the way I imagined a pocket calculator might talk. It was clear that there were no flies on Nigel Windmaker.
“And, what specifically was it about Bernard and myself that you heard?” I asked, taking a deep draught of the mead, which turned out to be unbelievably tasty.
“You don’t have to play coy with us, friend,” Rick rumbled. “Everyone is talking about it.” He cuffed me good-naturedly on the shoulder. If it hadn’t been for the strenuous gym sessions I’d been occupying myself with recently, there was no doubt that he would have knocked me off my stool.
“Talking about what?” I asked.
“The way that you fucking killed one of your assessment officers!” Damien said in a low voice. “What do you think, dude?”
I took a few more fortifying swallows of mead. I hadn’t a clue how alcoholic the stuff was, but it seemed to be taking the tension out of this conversation.
“Yeah, well…” I started.
“The rumors are that you hit him with a Level 3 Storm Bolt!” Nigel said.
“In my defense,” I said, “if I had known what the hell was going on and what might happen to the guy, I wouldn’t have used that spell—probably.”
The others grinned.
“So, it’s true?” Rick’s voice came down from up in the nosebleed seats.
“Let’s just say he would’ve needed a bucket rather than a body-bag,” I replied.
“Damn!” Damien said. “That’s impressive!”
“That’s what I hear,” I said. “That’s what Enwyn told me.”
“Enwyn? Enwyn Emberskull?” Rick asked.
“That’s her,” I said.
Rick made a deep rumbling sound of appreciation, like an unquiet volcano full of toffee. “Shit,” he said, “that woman is fine.”
I raised my tankard. “I’ll drink to that,” I said.
The others laughed, and we all drained our drinks and called for more from the water nymph.
“All right,” I said, “now that we’ve ascertained how lucky I am, what about you guys? Damien, you’re a Fire Mage, right?”
Damien nodded and said, “Correctomundo.”
“Nigel, with a last name like Windmaker I’d hazard a guess that you’re a Wind Mage or something?” I asked.
He nodded vigorously, his hair flopping in front of his eyes. “Air Mage is the correct term,” he said.
“And you’re. . .” I paused, unsure how to broach the subject of the guy’s origins. “You’re pretty short,” I ended up saying.
“That I am. Although I’m rather tall among halflings.”
“Halfling?” I asked. “No relation to Frodo or Bilbo, are you?”
Damien snorted beer through his nose and started to choke.
“Is that an Earther reference?” Nigel asked.
“Just a couple of famous dudes representing your kind,” I said. “But they weren’t authentic. Camera angles and maybe a bit of CGI.”
“CGI?” Nigel frowned at me, and I waved his question off with my hand.
I was just about to ask Nigel more about himself, when the halfling knelt on his stool and yelled eagerly down the bar for a round of ghoul venom shots.
I raised an eyebrow, impressed. I’d never been a man to judge a book by its cover. I was more the sort of individual that gave someone the benefit of the doubt for the first ten minutes when meeting them, no matter what they might look like or what I might have heard about them. After that, if they were a douchebag then they were a douchebag, if they were cool then they were cool. If I had to classify Nigel on sight, I would have said that he was a highly intelligent dude, but doubtless about as much fun as a mashed potato sandwich.
Just goes to show that first impressions didn’t always count.
I turned my head and adjusted the angle so that I was basically looking straight up.
“What about you, big man?” I asked Rick.
Rick belched, and I winced as his breath washed over me
. Whatever he was drinking, it smelled strong enough to take the enamel off your teeth. He set his mug down on the bar, and I noticed that what I’d taken to be tattoos all over his bulging muscular arms were actually more like...engravings.
“I’m a Stone Elemental,” he said, in his slow sonorous voice. “Natural Earth Mage. I come from a little tribe. A simple people. I’m the first Hammersmith to make it into the Mazirian Academy, and I shall make my family proud.”
His big mouth closed, and he looked down at me with his deep-set, friendly, dark green eyes.
“Shit, you’re a pretty concise guy, aren’t you?” I said. “I like that.” I patted him on the arm. It was like patting a granite statue.
Our drinks arrived, and we downed the shots of ghoul venom. It tasted how week-old roadkill looks.
“Holy shit!” I gasped. “That’ll put fucking hairs on your chest, won’t it! Man, what’s in that stuff?”
Nigel looked quizzically at me, wiped a tear from his eye, and said, “Ghoul venom…”
Figures.
“All right, guys,” I said, washing my mouth clean with a hearty draught of mead. “I’m aware that we are literally up to our eyebrows in sensational-looking women in this place, but are there any people in particular in this room that I should know about?”
My three companions swept the milling throng with their gazes.
“Ah, th-th-there’s Cecilia Chillgrave over th-there,” Nigel said, somehow managing to point with his eyeballs and stuttering with exuberance.
I looked across the room and saw the beautiful elfin countenance, the legs that went up to here, and the tight, gymnast body that would have drawn a sigh from Michelangelo.
“Seen her, met her, would most definitely bang her,” I said, with freshman succinctness.
Damien smirked. “You’d be lucky sleeping with her, my man,” he said in his laid-back tone. “She’s a fucking Chillgrave—practically royalty.”
“C’mon now, Damien,” I said, giving him a nudge with my elbow, “a man has got to have aspirations, doesn’t he?”
I turned back to face the room as Rick said, “Over there. Bradley Flamewalker.” The words came out as a rumble—they always did with Rick—but this time, rather than the rumble of some enormous, contented cat, it was the ominous rumble of encroaching thunder.
“Who is—” I began, but Damien beat me to it.
“Fucking Flamewalker,” the Fire Mage spat. He took a pull on his drink and curled his lip. “Wish he’d flamewalk his pompous ass off a cliff.”
“I’m detecting notes of dislike in your voice, Mr. Davis,” I said. “My intuition tells me that this guy is not among your favorite people?”
Rick snorted, and Nigel grinned.
“Ah, he’s just some stuck-up prick that walks around like he owns the damned place,” Damien said.
I ran my eyes over this Flamewalker character. He had the square jaw, imperious eyes, and smug impression of the professional asshole.
“He does look like a bit of a douchecanoe,” I said.
“He’s a High Elf,” Rick said, as if this was explanation enough.
It wasn’t.
“Right,” I said, “and that’s lame because…”
“Because he was born with everything and wanted for nothing,” Nigel said. Before we could stop him, the halfling had ordered another round of ghoul venom shots.
Who would’ve thought? Nigel had a party streak in him a mile wide. I couldn’t wait to see the antics the guy got himself into.
“He comes from a prominent Avalonian family,” Nigel continued, “and trust me, I should know.”
This last comment came across as pretty cryptic to me, but before I could delve into the matter further, Rick said, “A rich High Elf, from a preeminent family, and with some serious natural talent as a mage if you listen to the gossip and bullshit. It’s no wonder that he treats us three like the dirt under his boots.”
Then it dawned on me. This was a classic case of entitled, wealthy butthole, picking on the oddballs. I looked around at the suddenly sour-faced trio that had taken me under their wings.
Odd? Maybe. Balls? I guess only time would tell.
“What did he do to you guys, huh?” I asked. “Give you all fucking wedgies at the back of the bus?” I looked up at the towering monolith that was Rick Hammersmith. “What the hell could that dude do to you, big man?”
Rick mumbled something indecipherable.
At that moment, just about as I was about to launch into some booze-fueled teamtalk on how the three outcasts could make Bradley Fuckface Flamewalker their bitch, I was distracted by a woman unfolding herself from a leather couch. She had been sitting with a group of people by the gargantuan stone fireplace, in which someone had tossed in a couple of pine trees. A wooden keg of ale sat between four identical leather sofas, and the group around it was well on their way to Rowdytown. I couldn’t see her face, as her back was to me, but something in the way she languidly stretched her arms over her head tugged at my memory.
As I watched, the girl—who was shortish, about five foot five, maybe—walked over to the keg.
I know her, my brain told me, tentatively.
There was something very familiar about the back of her head that was for sure.
As I watched, the girl walked over to the massive keg and cracked the tap. She bent down to fill her drinking horn.
I swore I knew that ass.
“Who’s that brown-haired girl over there, helping herself to the keg?” I asked.
Rick looked over and squinted. Then, his face cracked in a knowing smile.
“Thunderstone,” he said. “Janet Thunderstone.”
“Thunderstone… Thunderstone,” I mused, taking another sip of mead. “Isn’t that the same name that warden guy has? He’s the chief of some nasty-sounding prison. What’s his name? Ipman, or something?”
Damien snorted into his drink. “Idman,” he said.
“That’s the one,” I said.
“Yeah,” Damien said, “that’s old Warden Hardass’s daughter herself, Janet.”
“Girl can drink,” I said admiringly as Janet Thunderstone downed a full horn of ale, much to the jubilation of the onlookers.
“What I’d love to know is,” Nigel said, his words contrasting bizarrely with his clear, quick fluting speech, “is how that babe fucks.”
I was going to give Nigel the stern word for using such uncouth language—the word ‘babe’ went out with the Nineties, for God’s sake—but before I could tell him off, Janet put down her horn and turned her face in my direction.
Mead didn’t spray out of my mouth, because that shit didn’t happen in real life, but a little of the tasty beverage did decide to make a break for my lungs rather than my stomach. I coughed a couple of times, and my eyes might have popped just a little.
“Fuck me,” I spluttered. “It’s her!”
It was the chick from the fucking Iron Maiden concert.
“You already know her?” Nigel asked. He sounded impressed.
“Uh, intimately,” I said.
No wonder the back of her head looked so familiar…
A wave of sobering realization hit me then like, well, a wave. Dashed me right in the face and did the work of a couple of Red Bulls and a line of Peruvian flake.
My conversation with Barry returned to me, and everything he had been saying suddenly made sense. I’d had sex with someone electrifying and “stolen” something from her.
Could that be why I could do magic? I fucked this Thunderstone girl, and I caught magic off her—like an STD, or something? That couldn’t be a thing, could it?
I’d had no magic that could be discerned—by me anyway—then I’d gone to that concert, got drunk, and slept with this Thunderstone chick. Next thing I knew, I’d blown up Bernard.
Could that really be what had happened?
I’d gotten to my feet without even knowing it. I didn’t know where my drink went. Maybe I drank it, maybe I threw it over my
shoulder, who could say? All I knew was that I needed to talk to Janet.
I needed to goddamn thank her.
I started forward, but before I’d gone more than five paces, I was intercepted. A firm hand grasped me by the bicep. It could only fit about halfway around—thank you gym sessions—but it stopped me in my tracks nonetheless. I looked down at the hand, along the arm that it was connected to it, and into the face of the man responsible for impeding my progress.
Credit given where credit was due; the guy holding me was a handsome bastard. Dark hair, falling in short curtains to either side of his face, stubble that was on the right side of perfect, and a mustache that was slightly longer than the rest gave him an artistic look. He was dressed in a loose-fitting shirt in some deep purple, midnight black material. His pants were tight, but not ridiculously so, and his leather boots looked well-worn and travel-stained. Over it all he wore a dashing crimson cloak that hung roguishly off one shoulder. In short, he was the kind of guy I would have instinctively liked to kick in the nuts, if I hadn’t been too busy wishing that I’d thought to buy that exact ensemble when I was getting outfitted at the Mazirian Academy’s expense.
The only incongruity about this stranger was that he seemed to be a little too old to be a student here. In his late thirties or early forties, he reminded me of Enwyn. I wondered if he was a teacher or another one of the prospective student assessors.
“Oh, you don’t want to chat to dear Miss Thunderstone, do you, mate?” he said, in a voice that was at once suave, reassuring, and amiable. “I’d say that’d be an errand bordering on the foolish. After all, you did something rather naughty with the lass last time you met, didn’t you now?”
I glanced behind me, at my new friends at the bar, but all three of them were studiously looking in any direction but mine.
“I’m not going to lie to you, buddy,” I said, “but I find it hard to trust the words of strangers when they lay hands on me and start blathering away in riddles.”
Why was this guy? Some kind of psychic? Did they have mind-reading mages here?
“Mm,” said the enigmatic weirdo, “quite right, quite right. A most sensible policy, mate. Though, if I were a true riddler, I would have opened with something more along the lines of: What four-letter word begins with ‘f’ and ends with ‘k’, and if you can’t manage to get one, you can always use your own hands to get the job done?”
