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

The trees were healthy and full of needles and pine cones, but they were old and widely spaced too. The first of their boughs started some three yards above the lanky Mort’s head.

“We’re getting close to their first nesting site,” Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock told us. “Everyone, ready your thundercusses.”

I took a handful of purple powder from the small sack at my waist and dropped it down the wide mouth of the thundercuss’s barrel. It seemed strange that this was all there was to it, but scanning around at the others in the group, I saw they were all doing the same.

“Have you ever hunted Eggnog Gnomes before, Justin?” Enwyn asked me. She had not been with me when I had been chatting to Leah, Mort, and Reginald, instead walking along with Aunt Ruth, Igor, and Idman.

“Oh, sure,” I said drily. “The whole time that we’ve known each other, I’ve been getting dressed up as a traffic cone and sneaking off to go on these little Eggnog Gnome hunting trips. No, I don’t even know what the fuck an Eggnog Gnome is. At least, I didn’t know until I was given the rundown just now.”

Enwyn grinned. “The Chaosbanes keep you on your toes, don’t they?”

“That,” I said, “is putting it mildly.”

We continued onward until we were pulled up by Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock. The old man motioned everyone to remain quiet, and then unslung a small and battered horn from his shoulder. He put it to his lips and blew a blast on it that sounded like a decrepit foghorn. It echoed through the trees, bouncing off the boles like a lemur leaping from trunk to trunk.

As the last of the echoes died away, there was an abrupt rustling sound from all around us. The tree branches up in the heights began to shake and quiver. Pine needles started falling like vegetative rain.

Then, the Eggnog Gnomes emerged.

The little creatures were the size of the garden gnomes we had back on Earth, but that was where the similarities ended. They were wild, gnarled things, humanoid, and dressed in simple fur loincloths. Their bodies were covered in a downy fuzz. Their hands had only two long, clawed fingers that looked ideal for grasping onto tree boles and branches.

As Mort had described, they had stretches of membrane or skin running from their elbows to their ankles, much as flying foxes did. They zipped from tree to tree, dodging nimbly amongst the branches and trunks, as fleet in the air as swallows. As they swooped, they made a grating chattering sound, which I took to be their language.

“Ho, gnomes!” Aunt Ruth cried at the top of her lungs.

It became immediately apparent how the thundercusses had come by their names. They went off with detonations that would have done a mortar tube credit. The recoil from my weapon was equivalent to being kicked in the shoulder by a mule with a bug up its ass.

Eggnog Gnomes were blown from the air as they zipped backward and forward above us, tumbling down to land with soft thumps on the pine needles coating the forest floor like an organic crashmat.

Even in the face of that initial thunderous barrage, the gnomes continued zooming this way and that. Clearly, they couldn’t make us out, dressed as we were in our gaudy orange shooting apparel.

I missed my first gnome, my shot going slightly high and blasting a tree branch to smithereens in a cloud of purple dust.

I reloaded quickly and automatically, my hand reaching for the pouch at my waist. Once I was reloaded, I tracked a particularly plump flying Eggnog Gnome as he dive-bombed from on high, heading for a large branch off to my right. I tracked the fat flyer, took a breath, and squeezed the trigger.

The shot hit the Eggnog Gnome square in the guts and blasted him from the air. He landed almost directly at my feet. Looking down, I thought I couldn’t have picked a better specimen to scoop from the gene pool. He was the sort of ugly that would have frightened a vulture off a gut pile.

We continued plugging away at the gnomes for a good five minutes before the dumb little brutes packed it in and disappeared to whatever homes they made up in the treetops.

To nobody’s surprise, when the unconscious, snoring Eggnog Gnomes were counted, Mort was leading the scoreboard.

Seeing that there was no real way to distinguish who had shot what, I figured there would be a fair amount of cheating. However, it soon became obvious that the Eggnog Gnome Hunt was about as sacred a tradition as there could be and none of the Chaosbanes would even think about sneaking an extra gnome to their total or claiming one that had been popped out of the air by someone else.

The morning passed quickly in this fashion. It was, unsurprisingly, quite a nice, guilt-free way to hunt. Not only were we partaking in an activity that was just plain fun, but we were almost doing the local environment a favor: bringing down numbers of pests without actually killing anything. That sort of thing would have earned you a freakin’ Nobel Prize back on Earth.

We stopped for a simple hunters’ repast of cheese, bread, meat, and pickles in the mid-morning. While we all perched on logs and the Chaosbanes regaled one another with past Eggnog Gnome hunting exploits, Aunt Ruth came over to sit with me. It was quite a feat to look attractive dressed in the absurd hunting gear, but somehow the older woman did not look half as stupid as I felt.

“Are you enjoying yourself so far, Mr. Mauler?” she asked, handing me one of the bottles of port, which Igor had seen as his duty to bring along.

“I am, Aunt Ruth,” I said. “I mean it sounds fun on paper, but in practice, it’s one