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

There was a blurring silver-black miasma that swept around and over Mallory from behind. A couple of dull pops. Then, when the thaumaturgical dust had cleared, the two guards had simply vanished, to be replaced by a pair of bright white rabbits.

“What the fuck?” was all I could say.

The two rabbits, still wearing minute bunny versions of their armor, looked at one another.

One of them let out a little squeak, which I interpreted as bunny for “Are you fucking serious?”

They huddled a little closer together, their ears drooping, their noses twitching nervously.

“Excuse me, pardon me, coming through, animal control here,” Leah said, stepping around me and tossing a black silk tophat that she had generated from out of the ether at the rabbits. The silk topper fell neatly over the top of the bunny guards, trapping them.

“Neatly done as that!” Leah said, turning to find Mallory and me looking at her in stony disbelief. “What?”

“What happened to letting me deal with them non-lethally?” Mallory asked severely.

“Yes, but you were taking so long,” Leah said, hopping from foot to foot. “I wanted to get through the door to see what it is we’re here to see! And it’s not as if I killed anyone. That Chaos Spell is a bit of a wily one—I’m never quite sure what animal my target’s going to be turned into, if I’m honest—so it’s lucky that they were turned into creatures that would fit under a hat.”

“What happens if they escape?” Mallory asked in exasperation.

“Oh, they won’t be escaping from under that hat,” Leah assured the other woman. “No, that’s one of those traditional tophats with the lead lining. No, the only thing that they need to worry about is going a little gaga from the lead.”

“How long do they stay in rabbit form for?” I asked resignedly, watching the tophat wobble from side to side as the trapped rabbits attempted to knock it over.

Leah shrugged unconcernedly. “Not forever. A day or so, maybe? I was a bit excited so it might be longer, might be shorter.” She shrugged again and said dreamily, “That’s the thing about Chaos Magic; keeps you on your toes.”

“I guess we should just concentrate on the business at hand,” I said.

Mallory nodded, but she still looked a little ruffled. I wondered briefly whether she had been hoping to impress me in some way by dealing with the guards in whatever way she had planned.

I looked around us. The hallway we were now standing in was completely deserted, except for the three of us, the pair of white rabbits under the silk top hat, and a single nondescript wooden door. It was a dead-end. It was dead quiet.

I studied the door that stood so innocuously in front of us. It was wood, but it looked to have been carved and cut out of a single huge piece of wood, rather than of many separate planks. There was nothing at all grand or out of the ordinary about it. It might very well lead to this fabled Chamber of Lock and Key, but it might just as well lead to the washroom, or a pantry. The only thing that pointed to it leading anywhere interesting was the carving chiseled across its lintel:

A KEY IS ALL WELL AND GOOD

BUT ONLY IF YOU KNOW WHAT LOCK YOU NEED

Cryptic. The inscription brought a whole lot of questions to mind; questions about what lay on the other side.

Currently, the real question, now that we were standing in front of the damned thing, was how we were going to open it. I looked down at the black hat under which the guards-cum-rabbits were now cowering.

Was the key on one of them?

Had it been shrunk, just as their uniforms and weapons had been, and no longer fit the lock?

I exchanged glances with Mallory. It looked like she had come to the same conclusion that I had. Namely, that we might have just fucked ourselves before we really got started.

“You’re thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked.

“Yes,” the Holy Mage sighed. “I believe I am.”

“Shit,” I said. I stuck my hands in my pockets, head down, while my brain went into overdrive to try and think how we could get out of this Chaosbane-related fumble.

Then, like a bolt from the blue, I remembered. All right, that’s not entirely true. What actually happened was that my hand closed on one of the few items that I kept in the pockets of my jacket at all times, along with my slim spellbook, my mother’s white crystal, and a clasp knife.

The Skeleton Key! The one I grabbed from the necromancer, Horatio, Arun’s cousin, who stole it from my frat house.

Just as I was congratulating myself on not putting things of importance back into a place where I could always find them, the sound of a door handle rattling brought me back to the present.

The dull creak of hinges echoed through the hallway.

“Door’s open,” Leah said.

“The door is open?” Mallory said in amazement.

“Yeah,” said Leah.

“Damn, that’s a bit of luck,” I said, the smile of relief spreading across my face.

“Luck?” Leah said. “You don’t think I’d just come running in and start turning people into small lagomorphs left, right, and center if I wasn’t sure that the fucking door was open, do you?”

Mallory looked at me and raised an eyebrow. I puffed out my cheeks and made an apologetic face at Leah.

“Honestly…” I said.

Leah cocked her head to the side and puffed out her cheeks. Then she said, in the voice of someone whose thoughts are miles away, “Because if you did, it shows that you’re really starting to get into the swing of the Chaosbane way of thinking and doing things. Much more fun to follow your gut into mayhem than follow