Creation Mage (War Mage Academy Book 1)

by Dante King

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “It does not matter if I am sure or not. It is clearly the will of the staff. You could not have defeated the shaman without the staff’s willing obedience to grant you magic. It is meant to be.”

  I nodded. I wasn’t going to make too big a deal out of it. What the Prophet King said made sense. I figured that if anyone knew whether something was meant to be, it was probably him.

  I hurried to catch up with the others but was stopped once more by another voice. This was a woman’s and one that I had never heard before. It was sensuous and smooth but edged with a lethality that only awaited an excuse to burst forth. The real thing that captured my attention though, was the way that I heard it in my head and not with my ears.

  “Take me with you.”

  I looked about and saw the shaman’s massive saber-toothed tiger staring avidly at me.

  What am I, fucking Doctor Dolittle now?

  I looked at the majestic, powerful creature for a few moments. Hell, after the day that I’d already had a talking saber-toothed tiger barely registered as odd.

  “Sure,” I said, “why not?”

  The saber-tooth walked toward me and, as it did so, it shrank and morphed until it looked like nothing more than a little domestic kitten. It stopped at my feet and mewled. Raising my eyebrows and snorting amusement at what my life entailed these days, I picked up the kitten and put it in my pocket. Then I trudged, tired but satisfied, after the others.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The nine of us stepped through the portal, looking far more disheveled than when we left. Enwyn, Cecilia, and Janet were covered in crusty yellow gore from the Alpha Cockatrice, as well as streaks of blue troll blood. I could feel troll blood coating my own face, cracking and flaking off where it had dried.

  If I was honest with myself, I had thoroughly enjoyed the time that we had spent on our quest. Winston Churchill had it dead right when he said, ‘Nothing in life is so exhilarating than to be shot at without consequence.” We had gone out into a foreign world which, to our surprise, had turned out to be extremely hostile. We had fought for our lives and fought for each other. We had forged new alliances and made new friends. Some of us had learned new spells—in the remarkable manner of a Creation Mage. We all had each other’s backs. In spite of numerous unforeseen obstacles, we had completed the task that we had set out to accomplish.

  And, most importantly of all, we had all come back alive.

  I was the last to step back through the portal, behind Enywn, Cecilia, Janet, Rick, Damien, Nigel, Bradley, and Alura the Gemstone Princess. A slight change in pressure behind me told me that the magical doorway had sealed shut on my heels. When I turned, I saw that there was nothing left now except the crude chalk drawing on the wall of the amphitheater.

  The amphitheater itself was almost completely empty. This came as little surprise when I thought that it had been almost two full days since we had set out on our little task. No doubt, the other teams would have come back the day before.

  “Hey,” I said, tapping Bradley on the shoulder, “how is it that you guys were rocking about without an Induction Officer?”

  Bradley gave me a wry smile and ran a hand through his thick sandy hair. “We were the last team to be sent through the portal,” he said. “They ran out of IOs, but Chaosbane said that the little white moss he was sending us to get would be a walk in the park, and the four of us should make light work of finding it.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, gesturing at the gore-splattered young women in the group, “it was a fucking walk in the park all right. Except that it was a walk in one of those parks where there’s a body floating in the ornamental duck pond, people shooting up under the scenic footbridge, and kids with a penchant for mugging old people lurking about.”

  Bradley snorted and ran his hand through his hair again.

  What is it with the upper crust and their addiction to their hair? I wondered.

  “Fucking Chaosbane…” I said, shaking my head bemusedly. “How the hell did he end up running this place? He must have students getting killed left, right, and center if this is the sort of shit he has them doing on day one.”

  “Oh me oh my,” said a smooth, languid voice from up on the top tier of seats that ringed the amphitheater, “my ears are burning.”

  Reginald Chaosbane, Headmaster of the Mazirian Academy, hopped, jumped, and tripped down the rows of seating with the nimbleness of a mountain goat. He was holding a half-empty bottle of some sort of reddish-purple liquor and had another empty bottle tucked into his leather belt like a pistol. With a flamboyant twirl, he jumped down from the last row of stone benches and landed in the middle of the floor in front of us. He gave a low bow, as if we’d just had the good fortune to witness an impromptu performance of some magnificence, and then straightened up.

  “It’s about bloody time,” he said. “As soon as I was done with this bottle of rotgut, I was going to send in the search party.”

  Now that he was up close, I noticed that he had something that looked suspiciously like a joint tucked behind his ear. Despite his seemingly indifferent attitude to us having just been put through the ringer, I couldn’t help but admire the eccentric prick’s style.

  “Justin, my dear boy,” he said to me, suddenly turning that x-ray stare of his on me, “it’s only been a couple of days—surely you aren’t that glad to see me?”

  “What the hell are you—?” I began to say.

  I followed the headmaster’s gaze and saw where he was looking. The front of my robes were squirming. I reached down and into the deep pocket of my robes and extracted the kitten that had, until only a few moments before, been a couple of hundred kilos of man-eating saber-tooth.

  As one, the four women all said, ‘Ahhhh,’ in that instinctive way that women do when they see something small and fluffy.

  “Yes, yes,” Chaosbane said. He took a swig from his bottle—I could see that the label identified the spirit as Gods’-Know-What. That sounded about right as far as this character was concerned. “Yes, extremely, ah, cute.”

  His eyes flicked up from the saber-tooth cub and ran across the group until they alighted on the flawless face of Princess Alura. His face lit in sudden recognition.

  “Ah, you ran into the Gemstone Elementals, I see! I wonder, did you happen to set tongue to some of that moss-ale of theirs? I’ve tried it just the once, but every other beer I have ever sampled since has always seemed to be lacking to me. I’d give much to know the secret of that particular brew. It unlocks truths within oneself. All alcohol, of course, invites a certain amount of introspection, but the moss-ale of the Gemstone Elementals opens up and uncovers yearnings within ourselves that we might never have realized we had.”

  I couldn’t help it. I glanced over at Janet and Enwyn. They grinned back knowingly.

  “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Princess…?” Chaosbane said, holding out a hand.

  “Princess Alura,” the daughter of the Prophecy King said. She looked, as far as I could tell, completely nonplussed as to how Chaosbane even knew what sort of Elemental she was, let alone the properties of the moss-ale.

  Chaosbane took her hand and shook it. “Like I say; a pleasure. And an exceedingly rare one at that.”

  It was at that point, the formalities presumably having concluded, that Enwyn stepped from the group and strode out to meet the Headmaster.

  “Miss Emberskull, how glad I am to see my favorite IO with all her limbs still attached firmly to her body. How—”

  Enwyn’s hand shot out and cracked into the side of Chaosbane’s face. It was as fine an example of a slap as I had ever seen, and the sound of it echoed satisfyingly around the amphitheater.

  Chaosbane’s charming smile didn’t falter, but a slight frown appeared between his eyebrows.

  “Miss Emberskull,” he said, his lightning fast tongue beating her to the first word, “my usually crystalline perspicacity may have been dimmed somewhat by the copious
amounts of stimulants I have imbibed, but I get the feeling that something sits ill with you?”

  Enwyn looked as if she was trying to sort a whole tangle of sentences out in her mind, trying to figure out exactly which question or insult she was going to throw out first.

  “Are you drunk?” she asked eventually, in a low, dangerous voice.

  “I could very well be,” Chaosbane said grudgingly. “I feel quite sophisticated, but I’m not sure that I could spell the word.”

  “You left us out there! You locked the stone that could have brought us back—before we had to wade through an ocean of blood to get those damned tail feathers. Why?”

  Chaosbane took another swig from his bottle and swallowed slowly. “Because I had every confidence in your abilities to get the job done,” he replied.

  “But we might have been killed!”

  “Ah,” Chaosbane said, smiling broadly and patting Enwyn chummily on the arm, “now we are straying into the murky waters of the hypothetical. You may have been swallowed by an earthquake, the world you were on may have been struck by a meteor, you may have stumbled across a long-lost relative who was insistent on catching up with the latest family news over a fish supper. There are a plethora of things that might have happened. The point is that you survived your adventures and are now standing before me.” Chaosbane looked at me and tipped me a wink. “Mission accomplished, mate.”

  Enwyn seemed unwilling to be defeated by Chaosbane’s infuriating logic and reluctant to waste the head of steam that she had built up.

  “But you knew?” she snarled.

  “Knew?”

  “About Justin?”

  “What about him?”

  “About his parents being goddamn Istrea and Zenidor!” Enwyn yelled, trying to keep her voice under control with some effort.

  Chaosbane took another long swallow from his bottle. “Yes, I did,” he said.

  “And you don’t think that piece of information is something that I might have wanted to know? Did you not think it was a serious piece of intelligence?”

  Quick as a scalded cat, Chaosbane drew the empty bottle that he had tucked into his belt, threw it high into the air, and fired a small bolt of green fire at it from the tip of his finger. The bottle exploded, glass shards raining down but, before they reached our upturned faces, they vanished like snowflakes melting above a fire.

  “Serious as the business end of a forty-five,” he said, in a stunningly good impersonation of Clint Eastwood. He blew at the end of his finger as if it was a smoking gun barrel.

  “Then why the hell didn’t you tell me?” Enwyn said through gritted teeth.

  Suddenly, Chaosbane’s demeanor became as chilled and focused as the edge of a scalpel. His eyes twinkled like a pair of distant stars; cold and remote and yet burning with the intensity of the sun.

  “I said nothing to you about it because it had nothing whatsoever to do with the acquisition of tail feathers from a Fern-tailed Cockatrice,” he said. “It was not something that you needed to know.”

  His gaze swept through the group like a wildfire through grassland. Each and every member of the assembled mages looked away, shriveled under the intensity of that stare.

  All except me.

  Perhaps it was because he was talking about my parents—people who I thought had been run-of-the-mill humans, but were turning out to be a couple of the most accomplished and dangerous mages in the history of Avalonia—or maybe I just had the sort of personality that refused to be cowed by a mysterious manner and some ominous words.

  “Yes,” Chaosbane said, his eyes locked with mine, “it was of no consequence when you set out. But now…”

  He turned to look at each member of the company in turn and gave them a long penetrating gaze. I got the impression that he was subjecting them to some sort of weighing.

  “This secret, for lack of a better word, is extremely sensitive,” the Headmaster said. He took another deep pull from the bottle of Gods’-Know-What and grimaced. “How I despise secrets,” he muttered, more to himself than the people around him. “Weighty, annoying, dangerous things. Words that can be used as weapons. To most, they are so much breath and meaningless noise, but to a few, they can act as keys to the future, as a staircase to the stars or a trapdoor to hell.”

  “So, what you’re getting at is that this little nugget of information should not go beyond this group?” I asked.

  Chaosbane snapped his fingers and a little light flared above his head. “There’s a good idea,” he said.

  I smiled thinly. His words might have been full to the brim with foreboding, but I could still appreciate a humorous bit of magic when it popped up.

  Chaosbane continued. “Creation Mages are few and far between—but they do exist—and no one would suspect that Justin, being a Creation Mage himself, is the son of Zenidor and Istrea. The Arcane Council did a spot of magic on the entire world, so the secret should remain safe, even with a little tongue-wagging on the behalf of you lot. Still if this were to get out, if it becomes common knowledge that Justin Mauler is none other than the son of Istrea and Zenidor, it could prove to be catastrophic for all the worlds. So, please,”—he pressed the neck of the bottle to his lips—“shhhhhh.”

  I looked around at the men, women, and Elemental that I’d fought alongside. It had been the haireiest episode of my life, but with these fine folk around me, I had survived.

  “I think everyone here can be trusted,” I said. “So, what now?”

  “Now?” Chaosbane said. “Now we go about our business as usual. The Mazirian Academy will remain the playground of a Creation Mage. There are others—as I have said—but none within our beloved Kingdom. Perhaps a few more on this world, if my intel is correct. And perhaps a few dozen more on the other worlds. But their powers are limited—gotta keep such potent mages in check, you see. Me, however, I am not a strict man, nor am I interested in anything being contained. I am, after all, a Chaos Mage. And what better way to allow nature’s chaotic work than to encourage the path of you, Justin, Mazirian’s very own Creation Mage? I say to you once again, Justin: make sure that you are the consummate gentleman when it comes to the ladies in your life. Remember, with each new, ah, union, you will gain power and the harder it will be to keep this secret.”

  I nodded. I understood just fine. He didn’t need to spell it out to me. “I’m a gentleman,” I sai, with a grin. “You don’t have to worry yourself on that score. I’ll keep them close.”

  “Excellent. In that case, might I suggest that Miss Emberskull accompanies the young women here back to their frat house, so that she may show Princess Alura where she is staying. Justin, you lead your fraternity back to your house.”

  “Our frat house, you mean,” I corrected him automatically.

  “Ah, that is another thing that I suppose would be apt to mention at this juncture,” Chaosbane said. “That house—your frat house—was in fact the property of your parents. It was, for a fleeting time, your family home, Mr.Mauler. It has been your family seat for some generations.”

  I blinked. The old awe-bucket, as previously mentioned, was already well past overflowing point, and the fact that I had suddenly become a proud homeowner was slightly lost on me.

  “The house is yours,” Chaosbane elaborated. “I had it moved here at the start of the year and placed at the top of that hill. I know, I know, I must be getting sentimental in my old age.”

  I nodded. “Is there anything else you’d like to tell me why we’re at it?” I asked. “Do I have a Golden retriever too somewhere?”

  Chaosbane gestured to my robes, where the saber-tooth cub was still squirming sleepily. “You have something far better than a domesticated dog,” he said.

  “Good point,” I said.

  Chaosbane drained his bottle.

  “That,” he said, “will just about do it.”

  We had parted company with the ladies—a deep kiss to both Janet and Enwyn, while Cecilia looked on enviously and Princess Alura wa
ited in anticipation, as though I might dance tongues with her too. I didn’t, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t planning on doing so at some point in my Academy life.

  The beautiful mages—and the lone Gemstone Elemental, whom I assumed was also a mage—then walked away, hips and asses moving with that delightfully hypnotic female rhythm, safe in the knowledge that we’d be looking after them, and us, well, watching them go.

  I walked out through the front gates of the Mazirian Academy with Rick, Nige, Bradley, and Damien beside me. The afternoon was setting in, and I let out a long sigh. The most exerting thing that would partake in for the rest of the day was opening a bottle or picking up a glass. The sky was an agreeable deep blue with a few fluffy white clouds strewn about the heavenly vault for decoration.

  The five of us strolled along, reveling in the serenity that seemed to abound when there was nothing and no one actively trying to kill you.

  A question kept bouncing lazily around my head as we walked along in companionable silence, one that I knew would take a deal of answering—which was why I had refrained from asking Chaosbane it back at the amphitheater.

  Just who the hell were my parents?

  It was a question that was bound to take a helluva lot of answering. So, as well as I could, I pushed it aside for the time being. I looked up at the sky, took a deep breath, and exhaled happily.

  “Shit,” I said to all of my frat brothers, “life doesn’t get much better than this, huh?”

  “Well, I know how it could be slightly improved,” Nigel said.

  “Oh yeah,” I laughed, “you know how being young, alive, surrounded by gorgeous women, and imbued with some fucking sweet magical abilities could get better, do you? You know what would make coming off the back of our first serious wizarding test victorious even cooler?”

  “How about the barrel of mead that I had stashed under the stairs of your house?” Nigel said smugly. “Would that add a certain cherry to the sundae that is life at the moment?”