by Dante King
“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.”
