by Dante King
There it was again. It felt like someone was pulling on a string that was connected to my very core, to the well from which my mana reserves bubbled up from.
I opened my eyes but continued to stay intune with the feeling. I let it guide me, pull me onward.
There was a loud, crisp bang from behind me, and I heard Bradley yell, “Leah, watch out! Shit!”
Not an encouraging string of words. That sounded like that just left me and Bradley to take the dragon and the Abomination down.
Not great odds.
I squared my shoulders and forced the trepidation down. It’d be a cold day in hell when I let that Abomination kill us all, or a dragon turn me and my friends into a bunch of museum pieces, just waiting to be picked up and eaten like candy.
No, sir.
Not today.
I followed the thaumaturgical pull and rounded a golden, claw-footed bathtub filled with myriad crowns and other uncomfortable and expensive-looking headwear. The pull was getting more insistent now, stronger and more regular. I waded through a patch of emeralds and went around the back of a small pyramid of gold bars stamped with a goblin head seal.
And there it was.
It had to be it.
It wasn’t a staff, but it was white crystal, and it pulled at me in a way that none of the other glittering, expensive items in this place did.
The gemstone was about the size of my fist and, if it had been a diamond, could probably have been traded in for a couple of desert islands, the latest Gulfstream, and a Ferrari for every day of the week.
There was a huge crash of cascading treasure and an acerbic hiss from the Abomination as the dragon sent it toppling, somewhere out of my sight. With the jewel right in front of me, it was not hard to ignore the sound of the fight.
I reached out to the beautiful, multifaceted gem. As I did so, there came a voice, right on the edge of my hearing.
“Justin…” the voice whispered.
I didn’t remember ever hearing my mother’s voice before, but the way that single word hit me right in the heart said it belonged to her.
Gently, almost reverently, I picked up the white crystal and put it into my pocket.
“Goddamn it, I’ve got what we came here for, but I’m going to get turned into a lozenge along with the rest of my pals if I don’t find a way to beat this big-ass iguana. Think, Mauler, think!”
The universe, being the sort of good-humored and kind operating system that it is, did not even give me five seconds to come up with a plan of attack.
There was a deafening, bellowing roar from behind a large silvery knoll, and Bradley came flying over the top of it. A second later, a burst of amber followed him, narrowly missing him as he tumbled down the hill to land at my feet.
“Everything ticking along nicely up there, bud?” I asked drily.
Bradley turned saucer-sized eyes on me. His hair was all over the place. It looked like my fraternity brother had been put through the ringer and then hung out to dry in a hurricane.
He pointed back the way he had come, but words failed him.
There was the sound of something large and lizardy making its way toward us. It sounded like it was throwing a tantrum that would have made Christian Bale proud.
The dragon lumbered backward, right past where Bradley and I stood, its tail thrashing in agitation. Behind it, the Abomination whipped it with its tentacles, scoring the dragon’s scales with long welts.
Both monsters looked like they had taken a battering from claws, teeth, tentacles, and tails. The Abomination’s bag-like body was covered in weeping wounds from where the dragon had sliced at it, while the dragon had a number of raised scars from the ministrations of the Abomination’s tentacles.
Bradley and I watched from behind a heap of treasure as the Abomination lashed out once more with its tentacular arms. The ancient and cantankerous dragon, clearly having had enough, snapped one of the tentacles in its jaws and yanked the Abomination toward it. The sudden, powerful jerk threw the revolting magical beast off its feet. The dragon then reared up on its hind legs and let loose with a deluge of viscous amber onto the Abomination’s back.
The Abomination hissed and screeched, forced downward by the sheer weight of the dragon’s orange vomit. It flapped its tentacles in a futile gesture.
The dragon closed its great mouth with a snap and, with the finesse and grace of a sumo wrestler performing a bodyslam, drove all its substantial bodyweight down onto the jellyfish-like body of its foe.
The Abomination burst like a plastic bag filled with rotting fish. The stench was appalling—so bad that my vocabulary paled in the face of describing it. A couple of its tentacular arms twitched and then it lay still.
The dragon bellowed its triumph so that the walls of the cave shook.
Bradley shifted a foot and knocked over a golden breastplate studded with rubies.
The dragon’s head snapped around. “Where are you, slayer of Cousin Vanyir?”
“Right,” I said, coming to an instant decision, “if you stay here, Brad, and play the role of bait, I’ll roll the dice one last time.”
“Wait, what? Bloody bait? You’re having a laugh, aren’t you?” Flamewalker said, aghast.
The dragon exploded through the mound of silver that divided Bradley and I from it. The scaled beast steamrolled right past where I had rolled into hiding, saw Bradley, lumbered to a halt, and screeched at him so loudly that the coins and jewels in a five yard radius jumped and rattled like peas on a drum.
Without hesitation, I reached for my hip, pulled free the noose that Tat Croll had given me, and threw it over the muzzle of the dragon.
The dragon turned out to be far too big for the noose, but the rope fortuitously looped over one of the dragon’s protruding bottom fangs and snapped tight.
Instantly, I found myself mind to mind with a creature that so vastly surpassed me in cunning, guile, and patience. The incredible power of the dragon’s mind almost dropped me to my knees.
The Battle of Will.
It was a contest that deserved capitalization.
It was like no confrontation I had ever been in. Muscle played no part in it; but my mind, my ego, and my pigheaded stubbornness battered at the dragon’s mental prowess so vividly that everything else faded to a background blur.
It only took perhaps four seconds for me to realize that there was no way I could best this creature. It had thousands of years of experience in everything on me. It knew its way around the human consciousness like a Grandmaster around a chess board.
I felt my legs shake as the dragon bent its will upon mine.
Then, in a flash of mental and spiritual strength, the crystal in my pocket blazed forth like a micro sun. I had no definite idea what was going on, but I had an inkling that my mother was lending me a hand. I just let that power wash over me though, and mentally crossed my fingers that I wasn’t about to be trapped in a goddamn pokeball.
It must have lasted all of a few seconds, but when I opened my eyes the dragon was…
“Gone,” I croaked.
I became aware then that I had fallen to my knees.
“Gone,” I said again, looking around to make sure that the huge dragon wasn’t hiding behind a treasure chest or something.
Bradley was at my side. He helped me to my feet and pointed at the wooden capture orb that was hanging off my belt.
It was a shiny amber color.
I coiled the noose and hung it from my belt, next to the dragon that was now contained in a wooden sphere.
“Come on,” I said, “let’s see if we can help the others.”
We walked back through the treasure cavern, past the grim, stinking remains of the Abomination, which had already begun to dissolve back into wisps of pure magic and vanish. We saw that, as the dragon’s will had been broken so had the amber cocoons that trapped my friends.
The seven of us gathered together in the center of the dragon's cave and looked at one another.
“How the hell—” Damie
n began.
I held up my hand. “Later,” I said. “For now, I think it’d be a fine idea if we load up our pockets with some of this loot and then make like a fart and get out of this shithole.”
Mallory made a face at that, but everyone else leapt into action. Within two minutes, we were all as laden with treasure as we could be while still being able to walk.
“All right, Priestess Entwistle,” I said, “if you’d be so kind as to guide us to the exit…”
We had crossed the iron bridge, and almost made it all the way back to the portal, when the two surviving Blade Sisters made another pass at us. Where they had been hiding we weren’t sure, but they fell upon us like a couple of hawks dive-bombing a flock of pigeons.
Only, unbeknownst to these two hawks, these seven pigeons had had a gutful of trouble for one day.
They swooped in on their flying swords, riding them like pro surfers. They ripped right over our heads, silent except for the soft hiss of the blades cutting through the air. It was only a chance look over a shoulder by Nigel that prevented a series of buzzcuts. Everyone managed to hit the deck in time and roll out of the way of the two sisters as they passed over.
“Those naughty little slutty-pants!” Leah hissed, getting to her feet with fluid grace of a boneless ballerina. “Don’t they know that it’s vulgar to force yourself on people like that?”
With a flick of her wrist, Leah fired a glob of her acid glitter at the hovering broadcasting sphere.
“Whoopsie daisy,” she said as the magical gizmo shriveled like a chip packet in a campfire.
“Leah,” Mallory warned as she rolled up the sleeves of her spotless white robes, “let’s bring these two in.”
Leah pouted. “But I fancied using them to decorate the walls. This cave’s interior decor is very substandard. It could use a splash of color. A bit of arterial red. A dash of viscera purple, perhaps?”
”Your cousin may want to question them,” Mallory said soothingly. “Their motives did seem selfish, but there is a chance they work for someone else. I thought I would have them stay with me in your fraternity house dungeon, Justin,” she said, turning to me. “Idman is also there, and we might as well make use of him. He was a torturer once upon a time.”
Torture wasn’t something I was too eager to have take place under my roof, but there was a time and a place to debate such things and this was not it.
“Make it quick,” was all I said.
“Urgh, fine,” Leah said. “It’s a tough thing for a cat—not being able to play with the mice.”
The Blade Sisters had banished their flying swords and now stood between us and the temple. They didn’t look angry. They didn’t look sad. They showed no sign of any emotion that one might think was normal to observe on the face of someone who had just lost three of their sisters.
It was, as I had hoped but barely expected, a short contest.
Now that there was no chance of any Arcane Council members watching the magic that she laid down, Mallory hit the Blade Sisters with twin volleys of ethereal feathers that shot out from her fingertips and swirled around the two women like a cyclone.
There was not a sign that the Holy Magic she was putting forth cost her much in the way of mana or energy. Her face was just as set and coldly calm as it always was.
The Blade Sisters were crushed together, as if they were held in an invisible fist. The looks on their faces told me that, whatever they might have been expecting from this quiet and serene woman, it had not been power the likes of which she was putting forth.
Pravum screamed in frustrated terror, but Acer merely gritted her teeth and glared daggers at Mallory—real daggers, as it turned out.
The daggers flew through the air like a pair of metallic missiles, aimed directly at Mallory’s heart and throat.
And then they stopped, caught in the same bubbles that Leah had used to arrest the flight of the crossbow quarrels earlier.
Giggling and clapping her hands delightedly, Leah then opened her arms in an embrace. What looked like glittering ribbon shot from out from behind her back and wound itself around our two enemies. The ribbon appeared to consist of air made solid or liquid glass. It trapped Mallory’s feathery spell beneath it, and then appeared to harden like resin.
The Blade Sisters were picked up into the air and hung there, rotating slowly.
“Ho-ho, do they look pissed off or what, friends?” Rick guffawed.
Leah grinned and cocked her head on one side.
“Oh, yes,” she said, twirling a strand of pink hair around her finger, “they are very cross. Full of lovely bubbling black vitriol they are. Yes, let’s take them home to play with.”
“Will your magic hold?” Entwistle asked the other woman.
“They’re strong, and they’re fighting it, but it’ll hold until we get back to the Nevermoor,” Leah said happily. “Cousin Reggie will have tweaked the portal so that it spits us out right at the bottom of your hill, Justin. Barry will be waiting for us there, and dear old Barry Chillgrave has forgotten more about chains and locks and clever bindings than any of us will ever know.”
With that settled, we walked slowly toward the portal, the Blade Sisters hovering in front of us.
I puffed out my cheeks and listened to the merry chink-chink-chink of gold in my pocket. It had been one hell of an outing, one in which we had walked the line between victory and death a little less surely than usual.
But we had come out the other side intact, with pockets full of treasure and my mother’s disguised white staff in my keeping. All in all, it had been a good adventure. I touched the pocket where the crystal sat heavy and reassuring against my thigh.
The white staff. If I could gain access to my mother’s trapped spirit within, I would be one step closer to saving this world; a world that I had come to love with a fierceness that almost took my breath away.
I looked at the two Blade Sisters hovering long in front of us. As they revolved slowly in the air, Acer’s eyes found mine and held them. It looked very much to me like I had made an enemy for life there. It was a bit of a shame, really. Apart from the irritating habit she had picked up—the one that saw her repeatedly trying to slay me and my friends—I quite liked her.
There was fire in her.
If only we could figure out a way to redirect it.
Chapter Twenty-Four
We escorted the two captured Blade Sisters all the way back to the fraternity house, down the garden path, and inside. Acer and her sister, Pravum, were wrapped tightly in ghostly green chains, supplied by the waiting Barry Chillgrave. The bonds didn’t clink or make any other sound whatsoever.
As I opened the front door and held it open for the prisoners, Acer shot me a look that held equal parts contempt, resentment, and admiration. Despite all we had gone through, I still could not get a truly accurate read on the woman.
I had killed three of her sisters, but bizarrely that seemed not to rankle her as much as it probably should. I figured that the Blade Sisters prided themselves on being the best fighters out there. To fall in battle was, I felt, the only really acceptable way to bite the dust, in their eyes.
While Acer’s feelings toward me might have been slightly confusing, Parvum’s were not. As she stalked past me, the woman with the slicked back silver hair glared balefully at me through her bright silver eyes. She hawked up a nice wad of phlegm and spat it at my feet.
“I guess that answers the question of whether you spit or swallow, huh?” I said sweetly.
Parvum’s face contorted, as if she would very much like to hit me with another phlegm ball right in the kisser, but Rick prodded her forward with a sausage-like finger and she continued past me.
“Lock them up and throw away the key, Barry,” I said grandly as the poltergeist took over chivvying the two surviving Blade Sisters across the hall floor and through the dungeon door.
“Is that really wise, sir?” Barry asked. “I mean, no disrespect, sir, but your average key isn’t that
heavy, you see. I highly doubt whether even young Master Hammersmith would be able to get more than a hundred yards distance if he were to toss the key away. And where should we toss it? Not just straight off the front porch, surely, sir?”
I held up my hands in supplication to Barry’s surprisingly relentless logic and literal-mindedness. Surprising for someone who had made sex innuendos on our first meeting. I almost thought he knew exactly what I was talking about but chose to pretend like he didn’t, just to get a rise out of me.
“It’s just an expression, Barry,” I said. “Just a fucking expression. Do not throw the key away, whatever you do. It’s not good fire safety.”
“Right. Very good, sir,” Barry said.
We trooped down into the dungeons after Barry and his two charges.
I had not been down in the dungeons since my brief chat with Idman and Mallory however many days before. I saw immediately that, in that short space of time, Barry Chillgrave had been a busy bee.
Along the far wall, Barry had somehow manipulated the very space of the dungeon and expanded it. He had filled that newly enlarged rear area with a row of cells which, while being the kind of home renovation that I wouldn’t necessarily have thought of installing, would be kind of handy.
Idman Thunderstone was pacing up and down by the cells with his hands behind his back. When he heard the door open and saw us crossing the floor with our two bound prisoners, he straightened his immaculate suit and long-tailed coat and swept toward us.
“Mr. Mauler,” he said, with every ounce of his old hauteur, “I wished to speak with you about something.”
I gave Janet’s father the quick once over. His attire was flawless, as clean as a whistle and sharp as a thistle. There were bags under his eyes though, and a slight tightness around the severe lips that spoke of a man battling with whatever withdrawals pixie dust put a person through.
“What’s up, Idman?” I asked.
“I wish to speak with you about the living arrangements down here,” the tall man said.
“What about them?” I asked. “Before you start complaining to me about your roommates, I would like you to recall that if you weren’t staying here with us, you’d be on your own and on the run.”
