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

Leah fell to the deck, landing like a cat on all fours and rolling out of any potential retaliatory stomp.

“That’s going to leave a bump in the morning,” I said grimly, watching as the liderc tottered and turned a full three-sixty on the spot.

It probably would have done too, if it had not been for the sudden eruption of Holy Fire that engulfed the monster’s head.

Mallory Entwistle, white gown billowing around her in the backdraft pushed out by the Holy Fire she was channeling, stalked determinedly down the gallery of statues. Her arms were outstretched, and her wings were unfolded. She looked very much the avenging archangel. A thin beam of celestial fire, thirty-five yards long, connected her open palms to the head of the liderc.

“Go back to the shadow!” she cried in a fell voice.

I don’t mind saying that I almost popped a nerd chub then and there. To have this beautiful, powerful mage quote Tolkien without even knowing it, just as she was about to—

The liderc’s head glowed incandescent white and exploded.

It ruptured, like some gray boil, spraying dark blood and smoking bits of skull in all directions. Chunks of evil-smelling eggplant-colored gunk splatted down around us—liderc brain.

With a final spasm, the headless monster stood bolt upright, as tall as it could, and then flopped over backward, smashing through one last statue as it came to rest.

As soon as I was sure the decapitated thing was staying down—never a given in Avalonia—I ran past the fallen liderc and straight to Mallory’s side.

The woman, who had looked so heavenly and queenly as she strode toward the liderc with her hands full of fire, spouting out Gandalf’s best one-liners, looked run-in now. She was exhausted, sitting on the remains of a shattered plinth, though she still held her chin up as Leah and I approached.

“You’ll get piles, sitting on stone like that,” I said,

The Holy Mage laughed tiredly.

“You killed it, sugar-butt!” Leah said, putting a hand on Mallory’s shoulder.

“We killed it,” Mallory corrected.

“It was a solid team effort,” I said.

Leah gazed over at the huge corpse of liderc and then around at the stricken courtyard.

“You’re thinking that we’ve slain ourselves a monster,” I said, “so—”

“Where’s the demon?” Mallory finished my sentence.

“Exactamundo,” Leah said. Her breath plumed in the air.

I frowned. “That wasn’t the demon?”

“It was the monster,” Leah replied.

It had been a warm winter’s day up until then. Our breath had only smoked first thing in the morning, by the time we had entered the Shite Pipe, the day had warmed sufficiently not to see it anymore.

Slowly, with a growing sense of dread that was an external force more than it was an intuitive leap of logic, I turned to look at the corpse of the liderc.

The drop in temperature was quite noticeable now. The breath of all three of us smoked in the air. I shivered as goosebumps erupted on the back of my neck and hands. The shadows seemed to deepen and lengthen, though no discernable change came over the sun slanting into the courtyard.

“Would you look at that,” Leah said. “It’s kind of fetching.”

I looked where she was pointing. Hoarfrost crept up the nearest statue. Pretty patterns of ice crawling slowly along the stonework.

My eyes moved down.

Rivulets of ice snaked out from the liderc’s dead body, which was now coated in a thick frost. The entire courtyard was getting a fine covering of rime. There was a soft crackling sound from all around as frozen water found its way into nooks and crannies and expanded.

“Now this is what the poets would describe as not boding well,” Leah said lightly. She drew one of her black cigarettes out from behind her ear. The fact that she could not have concealed one of the clove-scented smokes behind her ear never seemed to bother her or the universe.

The huge corpse of the liderc burst with a sound like the mother of all eggs breaking open combined with a hill of dry leaves being suddenly set ablaze. Ribs and collarbones snapped and crackled and popped as the monster’s headless corpse opened like the most ghastly and macabre flower imaginable.

“There, I believe, is our demon,” Mallory said. Her eyes were fever bright, and dark bags hung from under them. I was fairly certain that Leah and I would most likely not be relying too heavily on our Holy Mage companion. Not for a while at least.

Well, shit, it looked like we would have to deal with the liderc’s demonic form with only two mages.

Chapter 17

The demon pulled itself from the shattered, tangled mess of the monster that had been playing host to it. It was a creature of shadow and lightning; alien, even in a world like Avalonia, which still hosted centaurs, trolls, and giant flying bulls.

It looked like a naked bird. A giant vulture that had been roasted clean of feather and flesh in one of the underworld’s most fearsome boiling tarpits, and then animated with undistilled malice and pure, unadulterated evil. It was cloaked in darkness, ice running over its diseased marrow. In its bottomless eye sockets, there burned a flame fed by a boundless contempt for anything that was not it. The demon was not as big as the liderc had been, but it gave off an infinitely more sinister vibe.

“Yuck,” said Leah.

The demon ripped itself free of the dead body like some vile grub coming out of a cocoon. It looked more like a pterodactyl now that it was clear of the liderc’s corpse. While it walked on four legs, the front two legs were connected to the body, from the wrists, by stretched pinion. This was not skin that formed these wings, but shadow made solid.

“I hope that’s not what I think it is,” Mallory said.

The