Creation Mage 6

that he had captured her and was bringing her in. I had only heard them muttering to each other out of the corner of my ear and hadn’t really been paying too much attention to their conversation, as I had been speculating too deeply on how the damned sleigh was staying in the air at that point. That made sense though, as far as it went, thanks to Mort being one of the most infamous bounty hunters in Avalonia.
Slowly, not wanting to draw the attention of any of the guards, I scanned the five armed border custodians.
Sergeant Mullock was still having his ear chewed off by a loquacious Reginald Chaosbane. The Headmaster was lamenting the fact that so few citizens of Manafell took the Mazirian Academy’s War Mages seriously in the big kingdom-wide tournaments. The Sergeant looked like a man who was torn between wanting to shut the Headmaster up with his truncheon and knowing that, if he did, it would mean bringing a shitload of paperwork down on his head.
Randulf was, of course, still checking vectors. Loinsan had pulled a small fox-like creature with a mirror on its back out from somewhere. The animal was on a lead and was snuffling about under the sleigh, while Loinson, using the mirror strapped to the fox’s back, checked that there was nothing under the sleigh that shouldn't have been. The other two armored guards were lounging around, but keeping a general eye on us.
I turned to the back of the sleigh. Leah had scrambled back there as we had come to land, saying something about wanting to spread out. I was expecting to see Idman and Barry sticking out like a couple of sore, and wanted, thumbs.
They were nowhere in sight. There was only Leah lying sprawled in the back with the luggage, her long legs crossed and one foot jiggling to some song that she was humming tunelessly. She was smoking one of her black cigarettes. The way that the guardsman stationed at the rear of the sleigh was grinning dazedly, I imagined that the female Chaosbane was smiling guilefully through the clove-scented smoke at him, causing his attention and eye for detail to become as skittish and restless as a long-tailed lizard in a room full of rocking chairs.
Barry, being a denizen of the spectral realm or whatever, could have been hiding anywhere. There were, however, only so many places that you could hide a six-and-a-half-foot-tall man like Idman Thunderstone.
My eyes ran over the pile of luggage that Leah was reclining on. Was that a meticulously shined boot toe that I could see? I swallowed and readied myself to deal with the shit that was moving closer and closer to the fan.
“Vectors all checked, Sergeant!” Randulf yelled, coming over to stand next to the leader of the small company.
“And?” the Sergeant asked, gratefully peeling himself away from Reginald’s incessant chatter.
Randulf gave me a shrewd look over his superior’s shoulder, as if to ascertain whether or not he was going to regret not mentioning my two vectors.
“Negative, sir,” he said.
“Good,” Sergeant Mullock said. “What about you, Loinsan? Anything to report?”
“No, sir,” Private Loinsan said. “The carny fox has detected nothing.”
“As it should,” Mallory said, in her smoothly authoritative voice. “This is a certified Klaus Family Cruiser, is that not right, Reginald?”
“That’s enough out of you, miscreant,” one of the guards said, his words coming out edgeways through tight lips.
Mallory raised an imperious eyebrow at him and tucked a strand of bright blonde hair behind her ear.
“Look down at me all you want,” the guard sneered, “but I’ve seen you on the wanted posters. You're just another infractor. I recognize him too.” He jerked his blocky head at Mort.
Mort cottoned on quicker than I would have suspected a man who spent most of his time assassinating criminals could. “My bounty here is correct though,” he said. “Isn’t she, Reggie?”
“Hm? What? Oh yes, cousin,” Reginald Chaosbane said, his clever dark eyes swiveling from the pile of luggage in the back of the sleigh to Mallory Entwistle. “That’s right. Klaus Cruiser. Lovely little sleigh. Everything above board.”
Sergeant Mullock rubbed thoughtfully at his chin. He probably did that a lot. Enough to make it shinier than the rest of his face. Evidently, he was just as eager as his men to see the back of us, but his slightly more robust sense of duty stood in the way.
“Okay,” the sergeant said slowly and without much hope. “There are a couple of ways we can go about the next part. The first way—the easy way—is that you can, honestly and openly, declare any contraband that you might be carrying.”
Leah made a little excited noise. “And what’s the hard way, Sergeant?”
Sergeant Mullock’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down in his thick neck like a cork in a tempest tossed sea.
“The, um, the hard way is that my men and I go through your belongings by hand,” he said.
Reginald Chaosbane gestured expansively. “Oh, that would be jolly, mate.”
“It takes a lot longer, Headmaster Chaosbane,” Sergeant Mullock said.
“That’s no trouble, no trouble at all, my dear fellow,” Reginald said. “It’ll give me time to expound on my theory of how Chaos Magic affects cepheid variables of stars. It all hinges around the faculae that I have observed on our sun and the geosynchronous orbit that the Chaos Magic is hypothesized to—”
“Headmaster,” Enwyn interrupted, “we really are on quite a tight schedule…”
“Yes, cousin,” Leah said, “we are. Anyway, I wouldn’t fancy having my ears bored off and I’m sure this scrumptious sergeant and his palatable privates feel the same. Let’s just cough up anything we have on us that we think might be a bit on the naughty side and be on our way. I’ll start.”
A bright crimson G-string, skimpy enough to have been used by the beefy Sergeant