Creation Mage 5

by Dante King

  Tat Croll was, as my note from Xel had hinted at, a wild-looking dude. He was bandy-legged and long-armed and dressed entirely in skins and furs. His skin was the mottled green of a rubber plant’s leaves. His long feet, which stuck out of the bottom of his rabbit-skin breeches, were bare and tipped with yellow claws. Behind him, lying quite unconcernedly on the grass, were a couple of huge dogs. They were the breed of canine you might get if you crossed a wolfhound with a black bear.

  “You’re Mauler?” he asked once I had stopped and sat myself down on a convenient boulder.

  “Sure am,” I replied, eyeing the dogs cautiously.. “You must be Tat.”

  The half-orc blinked his yellow eyes and nodded once. He glanced around as licked his lips with a bright red tongue. He snuffed at the air and peered up at the watery sun shining down from the washed-out blue sky. He reminded me of an old school hunter or poacher.

  “So, how can we help each other, Tat?” I asked. “My agent tells me that you might have something that could help me.”

  “Laws around hunting and game-gathering have tightened,” Tat said. His voice was rough as tree bark. I got the impression that he probably went for weeks at a time without talking to anyone. “The Arcane Council, the bastards, have made it so an honest trapper can’t make a fucking living from the woods and the fields.”

  I said nothing. It sounded to me like Tat had been stewing on these words for a while and needed to have a good, old-fashioned vent.

  “I’m having trouble turning in pelts and selling off particular animals that people would usually want,” he grunted sadly. “So, I’m looking to make some money. Legitimate money.”

  “Legitimate money, the most boring kind,” I said.

  “It’s not like what I do is criminal,” Tat said. “Well… it is now, but it ain’t wrong, is what I mean. I feed people. Clothe people. Keep them warm at night.”

  He gave his head a shake, and his pointed green ears flicked back and forth.

  “Point is,” he said. “I make things. Things that might help you. Might not. You decide. If you like them and use them, then others might use them too. I want to help people who don’t have access to,” and he twirled his clawed fingers in the air like he was trying to pluck the right word out of the ether, “shops, and things. If they like the look of my traps, then they might like to sign up for my classes and trips too.”

  “Classes? Trips?” I asked, intrigued.

  Tat licked his lips again. His wide nostrils snuffled at the air once more. It was clear that he was as cognizant of his environment as any wild animal.

  “Classes—lessons on how to look after yourself in the wild. How to move through the landscape without leaving any trace. Without hurting the land. Trips—trips into the mountains and through the marshes, hunting. Not hunting for prizes,” he said, spitting the word. “Hunting for meat, for food.”

  Weirdly, the half-orc looked embarrassed. As if what he was saying was in some way backward or rustic.

  I’d heard of similar classes back on Earth, where you could learn how to survive in the wild, so I thought Tat’s idea for a business was actually pretty damned brilliant.

  “Here,” Tat said.

  He thrust something that had been hanging from his belt at me. It was an item comprised of two pieces.

  I took the objects and turned them over in my hands. One was a noose woven together using the dried leaves or stalks of some plant. The other thing was a small carved wooden sphere the size of a tennis ball.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Tat pointed at the piece of rope. “If you use or manage to loop this noose onto a creature—any creature, mythical beast or monster—and secure it, you will trigger a battle of wills against whatever beast, monster, or animal you have snared.”

  “A battle of wills?” I asked, turning the carved wooden orb over in my fingers. “What does that mean?”

  Tat looked at me blankly.

  “A battle of wills,” he said to me.

  “Tat, with all due respect,” I said. “Repeating what you just said to me doesn’t actually clarify anything. What does a battle of wills entail?”

  Tat looked like he didn’t really understand the question—or maybe I didn’t understand what I was asking.

  “You pit your mind against that of the beast,” he said. “You fight for supremacy. It is the oldest battle in our world. The fight to see which creature is dominant.”

  “Okay,” I said slowly, not really understanding. “I guess I can kind of see. What’s the wooden ball for?”

  “If you win the battle of wills,” the half-orc said, “the beast will be contained within the capture orb.”

  I turned the orb over in my hand. An unbelievable realization dawned in my mind and flooded my head with sunshine.

  “Holy shit!” I whispered to myself. “I’m holding a motherfucking pokeball!”

  Tat Croll frowned. “No,” he said. “You’re holding a capture orb.”

  I couldn’t believe it. It was like my ultimate childhood fantasy had just been realized. I was seized suddenly by an almost unstoppable urge to run off, there and then, into the wood that sprawled behind Tat and his massive dogs. Run off and see if I couldn’t find myself some incredible monster to put in this orb.

  I managed to calm myself down and keep myself seated. Breathing through my nose, I forced my voice not to quaver when I asked my next question.

  “Once I have captured an animal or a magical creature, does that mean it will be under my control?” I asked.

  Tat looked at me. “You will not own it, if that is what you mean. You will have something better than anything you could ever buy. You will have the creature’s respect. It will be your companion. It will help keep you safe, just as you will keep it safe. And you will keep it safe.”

  Tat’s heavy brows had lowered as he pronounced this final sentence. Behind him, his two enormous dogs had raised their upper lips to reveal teeth that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Jurassic Park movie.

  “I get what you’re saying,” I said. “I’m not going on some power-trip over animals or anything, it’s just that this, where I am from, was the dream of every little kid about twenty-five years ago.”

  I tossed the ball up in the air.

  “So, if I manage to capture a beast and best it through a mind battle, does that mean that I can then release it in the War Mage Games to help me?”

  Tat nodded curtly. “Yes. But you must remember that this beast will be a thing of flesh and blood and bone. It will be just as capable of being hurt as you are. You will not be able to spend its life as rashly as you might a re-animated undead creature or made solely from magic.”

  I guess there’s no making use of a Pokemon Center then.

  “I will take this brilliant invention of yours and use it, if you trust me to do so, Tat Croll,” I said. “I think it’s one of the coolest things that I’ve ever seen. What’s more, I really dig your vision. I’ll sign up for one of your survival trips, if I ever get a free moment. I know my fraternity brother, Bradley, would probably be super enthusiastic about going on one of your hunting trips too.”

  Tat nodded. Without any other ceremony, he whistled to his gigantic dogs and began to walk back out toward the forest and the mountains.

  “I trust you are a man of your word, Justin Mauler,” he said. “Do not make me regret it. My dogs are always hungry, and they cannot be reasoned with, bargained, or bought.”

  On the night before the final day of the week, when I would be competing with my brothers in a mystery match designed by Reginald Chaosbane himself, I lay awake in bed. I thought about the three different craftsmen that I had met and the items they had given me and the boys. There could be no denying that all of us—especially myself—had done exceedingly well out of the three meetings.

  “You did good, Madame Xel,” I muttered to myself, staring up drowsily at the ceiling.

  There was no doubt in my mind that the mystery match promised
to be just as grueling, just as fraught with peril and exhilaration, as the first round had been.

  Probably more so, if Chaosbane has anything to do with it—which he has, I thought to myself.

  At least now I knew what to expect, as far as the damned Blade Sisters went. It turned out that they had been wildcards selected by the judges to compete in the final match. The other teams had all finished their egg hunt matches, and there was a selection who would join me and my fraternity in the mystery round.

  Still, it was the Blade Sisters who most concerned me. Acer had told me why she and her sisters had entered the competition, and it was clear they had a single-minded desire to tear me from my perch.

  In the time between now and the meeting with my final sponsor, Tat Croll, I had kept a pretty low profile. During the day, I had spent time in the dungeon, working hard on perfecting my spells and going through various tactics with the boys and practicing with the new weapons Onico Mozat had given us. Earlier today, Barry Chillgrave and Idman Thunderstone had come up from the dungeon to see what all the noise was about. Barry, on seeing us using our daggers and swords on thin air, had conjured straw dummies from the dungeon and set them up in the backyard. For his part, Idman had sat stiffly in a chair and told us, mostly, what we were doing wrong—which was, apparently, everything.

  “It’s not so much that your technique is lacking,” he said as he watched Damien slash at his dummy with his flaming daggers like a Freddy Kruger who’d had too much sugar, “but that you are lacking any technique whatsoever.”

  I grinned up at the shadowy ceiling of my room, remembering the dirty look that Damien had shot Idman before he had asked him, very grudgingly, for some pointers.

  In the evenings, I enjoyed the festivities surrounding the arena with my girlfriends. I was finally getting used to the idea that the women in my life, each and every one of them, were going to be around for a good while. It was a satisfying feeling, one that I couldn’t have imagined only a short time ago.

  All in all, it was simultaneously one of the most relaxing and most gruelling weeks of my life.

  Now, my room, ever receptive to my mood, started to bring the lights down low. I loved how the very building could tell how sleepy I was. I wondered if it did that with the other guys too, or if it only did it with me because I was its owner.

  My eyelids were just settling down into a comfortable half-open half-shut configuration, when I sensed movement in the far corner of my room. It was the corner that was almost completely cloaked in shadow due to the bathroom door that opened out into the bedchamber.

  Instantly, I was on the alert. However, in another second, I relaxed. It was just the saber-toothed tiger cub. The little purple and mauve furred animal that had followed me, the boys, and a few of the girls home after a particularly sticky adventure involving a troll shaman and his troll warriors.

  “What are you doing up here?” I murmured, lying back in my pillows.

  The saber-toothed cub cocked her head at me and then prowled silently to the foot of my bed where she disappeared from my view.

  There was a shimmer in the air, like a heathaze outside the mouth of a crazy hot furnace or smelter.

  “What the…” I said, sitting up against the carved headboard.

  Then, with a sound like a sheet of aluminium foil being quickly torn in half, a woman was standing at the end of my bed.

  Her hair was short and messy and was the same purplish-mauve color that the saber-toothed cub’s fur had been. When she walked around the side of my bed and sat down, I noticed that her hair ran down the nape of her neck, down her spine, and stopped at the top of her ass. There, where a tailbone would be on a regular person, a long purple cat’s tail protruded. The tail flicked back and forth. Unsurprisingly, the woman had extremely feline features. Her eyes were a strange opalescent color and had vertical pupils.

  “I’ve seen you before,” I blurted, running my eyes curiously over the woman’s naked body. She seemed not even to consider the fact that she was standing completely nude in my room.

  The woman cocked her head to the side again, in the same way that the saber-toothed cub had just a moment before.

  “Yes, you have seen me before,” she said, her voice a soft and delightful purr.

  “In my dreams,” I said.

  The woman shook her head.

  “No. In the space between dreams and waking,” she replied matter-of-factly.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “Felicity.”

  “Well, Felicity, I’m not sure precisely what you mean when you say ‘between dreams and waking.’”

  The woman considered this. “I mean,” she said, “that I have watched you, sometimes, when you have been sleeping. On some of these occasions, you have responded to my presence; coming up to the very surface of consciousness without breaking through it. It is in that special place where memories and dreams come together and are often confused. It is that space which cats inhabit much of the time.”

  “Igor called you a changeling,” I said, suddenly remembering how Igor had greeted the saber-toothed cub when he had first met her. “Does that mean that you’re a cat or a woman?”

  Felicity shrugged. I had never seen a more languorous and sexy bit of shoulder work.

  “It has been such a long time,” she said, “that I really cannot recall. I cannot remember what came first; the women or the saber-toothed cat.”

  “What do I owe the pleasure of your company tonight, then?” I asked.

  Felicity crossed her legs. “I wished to warn you about this,” she said, pointing a long finger at the capture orb and its accompanying noose that hung from the end of my bed.

  “What about it?” I asked. “If you’re worried that I’m going to go out, with my eyes peeled for mythical, magical beasts and try to catch ‘em all, then I assure you I won’t.”

  The saber-toothed woman, whom I noticed now did have quite pronounced canines, shook her head. “It is not that,” she said, “although that is a comfort to know.”

  “What is it then?” I asked.

  Felicity held a hand out to the carved wooden sphere but did not touch it.

  “The capture orbs are powerful objects that can bend a creature’s will,” she said. “That much you probably know. Myself and the other saber-toothed cats that the trolls used in battle—against you on the day that we met—were taken in capture orbs just like this.”

  I shifted a little awkwardly in bed. This story had a faint whiff of slavery about it.

  “I wish to warn you that you should be careful what you bind to this orb, or what you try and bind to it.”

  “Why?” I said. “Look, Felicity, you can be honest with me. Don’t worry about hurting my feelings or freaking me out. With all the crazy stuff that I’ve seen since moving to Avalonia, it’s got to be something pretty next level to shake me.”

  Felicity seemed to consider this. Her tail twitched backward and forward. I found myself staring at it, as hypnotized as the cobra is by the flute.

  “Tell me, did the beastmaster who gave it to you tell you about the battle of wills?” Felicity said, breaking into the blankness that had enveloped my mind while I watched her tail move through the air.

  “Yes, he did,” I replied.

  “Did he warn you about what happens if you lose the battle of wills?”

  “No, Tat—the beastmaster—failed to mention anything about losing,” I admitted. It was weird that I hadn’t thought to ask Tat that. “He only said what would happen if I won.”

  The saber-toothed woman watched me carefully. It was one of the most patiently predatory gazes I had ever been scrutinized by.

  Then, Felicity said, “The binding of wills is, like most things in nature, a two-way process. Should you lose it, the monster or beast you have pitted yourself against will control you, instead of you controlling it.”

  That took some of the shine off the potential of the capture orb, that was for sure. I didn’t fancy becoming the
plaything of some sort of monster. Or living in a ball for that matter.

  Still, it would be incredible if I could catch a badass monster, since I’d enjoyed summoning my Lightning Skink, the Frostfire Golem, and the Undead Wolverines. They had proved extremely helpful on numerous occasions. It wasn’t as if this monster would necessarily have to live in the capture orb when we were at home either. Depending on what it was, and how easily I could train it not to eat people who came over to visit, it could just chill out like the fraternity house pet.

  My musings were interrupted by a flickering in front of me. Felicity was shimmering. She was fading in and out, cutting from woman to saber-toothed cub like a poorly tuned TV station.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “It takes a lot of power for me to assume this form,” she said. “When you rescued me from the troll shaman, you broke the hold the capture orb had over me.”

  “Was that good?” I asked.

  Felicity shrugged again. “It was neither good or bad, perhaps. It was simply a thing that happened. Although, I must say that I enjoy my life here more than I did with the shaman.”

  I smiled. “I’m glad about that,” I said. “That guy was a fucking a-hole.”

  Felicity made no sign that she either agreed or disagreed with me. She was possibly the calmest, most laid-back lounge lizard that I had ever met. She could have complained about how harsh or unfair her time under the control of the troll shaman had been. She seemed, though, to have embraced the it’s-done-now-so-who-cares mentality.

  I wasn’t sure if that was something I could have done myself, so I admired her for it.

  “I wish to speak with you more, Justin,” Felicity said, “but holding this form taxes my mana reserves. I will need to save my power to do so.”

  “Well, my door is always open if you fancy a chat,” I said cordially. Of course, technically, my door hadn’t been open this time, but I imagined Felicity had probably been taking a nap under my bed or something, so she wasn’t really to blame for that little oversight.

  “Yes, I know it is,” Felicity said. “I live here.”