Creation Mage 6 by Dante King (red scrolls of magic .TXT) 📗

scene. Of course, with a Chaosbane at the helm of the sleigh, that was not quite how the last leg of the journey panned out.

We bombed across the countryside at what must have been easily a hundred miles per hour. Once more the bulls’ legs were a blur, but this time, the giant animals were close enough to the deck to show a little interest in their surroundings.

After managing to keep himself in relative check at the border burrow, the Headmaster appeared to be letting his hair down now that we were safely back on terra firma. He urged the sleigh on, showing evident delight at being able to get it dangerously close to the landscape hurtling by underneath him. In some of the bigger open pastures, Reginald managed to get the sleigh to within a few feet of the ground, sending a spray of snow up behind it like a jet-wash and knocking over at least four startled sheep.

There were times that he swooped in so low and so fast over the woodland treetops, that the snow was blasted clean off the trees as we passed them—along with a few tons of leaves and, on one occasion, a roosting drake.

We were flying around the city, keeping Manafell always on our right. After about a quarter of an hour, probably made longer by unnecessary diversions taken by our pilot, we started to pass over larger and larger estates that were spaced further and further apart.

Reginald finally eased up on the gas, or the bullshit, or the metaphor, or whatever the hell was propelling the sleigh along. We coasted over these gorgeous living homages to the landscapers and architects who had wrought them—and the money that had funded their construction.

As we crossed over the boundary fence of one sprawling estate, Reginald suddenly let out an exclamation and clapped his hand to his head. He leaned over the side of the sleigh, scanning the property below us as if to make quite certain we were where he thought we were.

I looked over too. The landholding below us was perhaps the most finely kept and luxuriously appointed one that we had seen thus far. It was a sumptuous confection of snow-covered hedge topiaries, ornate lakes that were frozen over but nonetheless impressive for that, and paddocks filled with honest-to-gods unicorns!

In the middle of all this stood an imposing manor house constructed of white marble. On the roof of this massive temple to wealth was a squat lighthouse-type structure, lit from within by a homely, cozy orange flame. It was, if you ignored the ostentatiousness of it, quite striking.

“Holy shit!” I said. “I don’t know what I was expecting the Chaosbane ranch to look like, but I didn’t think it would look like this!”

From the front of the sleigh, Reginald gave a great booming laugh. With a flick of his wrists, he put the sleigh into a slow holding pattern above the beautifully trimmed lawns and extensive patios that fronted the mansion house.

“Matey potatey, this isn’t the Chaosbane ranch,” Reginald said, wagging his finger at me. He was wearing his flying goggles, but I could see the telltale glimmer of his dark Chaosbane eyes shining through the lenses.

“It’s not?” I asked. “Then why are we cruising over it like this? I thought you were taking a moment to soak in the ancestral home or something.”

“This,” Reginald said, sweeping an arm over the fantastically laid out winter wonderland, “is the Flamewalker estate! They’re our lovely neighbors on one side.”

“Is a fly-over a little tradition in itself, Reggie?” Mallory asked from next to me.

“No, Miss Entwistle,” Reginald said. He looked at the bulls behind him, sniffed the air delicately, and smiled. “But this is.”

With a noise like a sumo wrestler that’d overdosed on laxatives, one of the bulls let off a loud and long fart.

“Good gods,” Mallory gasped, clamping her nose shut with finger and thumb.

If she thought that had been bad, the encore was worse. The bulls all started ripping off double-barreled-ass-blasters of such pungentness that everyone on the sleigh had to cover their mouth and nose with their hands.

And then, naturally, came the shit.

Huge turds, the size of basketballs, were excreted with a violence that was as impressive to see as it was horrifying from the bulls’ suddenly elastic buttholes. Lots of them.

The giant loaves of shit tumbled through the air and thudded into the lawn like unexploded bombs. I saw one particularly girthy asspickle smash through a rather nice outdoor table in a shower of glass and twisted metal. Another bum biscuit reduced a wooden sunlounge to firewood, while yet another crashed through a large birdbath.

A figure, dressed in a garish crimson dinner jacket, burst abruptly from the house, and stormed across the massive patio. From the height we were at, he was a little hard to make out, but he looked very much like an older, fatter Bradley.

“Is that…”

“Flamewalker Senior, yes,” Reginald said happily, waving down at the man.

Flamewalker Senior only just managed to avoid getting crushed by the last dook as it splatted down on the snow-covered lawn some ten yards from him. He looked up and started yelling incoherently up at us, shaking his fist and generally acting like a man who had lost his sense of humor about eight giant shits ago.

Reginald and the rest of the Chaosbanes all leaned over the side of the sleigh and waved chummily down at the irate figure, who was hopping from foot to foot and gesturing at the enormous steaming dingleberries that now decorated his lawn.

“You bloody Chaosbane bastards!” he suddenly yelled, his words carried by a sympathetic gust of wind.

“Does he seem a bit cross to you, Reggie?” Mort asked, in a slightly worried tone.

“No, don’t be daft, Mort,” Igor said.

“He seems agitated,” Mort insisted.

“He’s dancing with joy, see,” Igor