Creation Mage 6 by Dante King (detective books to read txt) 📕

I pressed the two crystals together, held them tight in my hands and closed my eyes, willing my problem into them.

While I attempted to draw help from the two staffs, I pointed them both at the many, many doors that lined the wall opposite me.

The staffs twitched in my hands. My eyes flew open.

“Did you just see that?” I asked Mallory, who was watching me intently.

The staffs twitched again, and then began vibrating. Twitching this way and that like divining rods that had locked onto water. Only they weren’t sensing water, they were sensing an answer; an answer to the problem that I had posed them.

I followed the trembling vectors as they twitched and flicked. I walked back past the door that led to the corridor outside and one-hundred yards further on. I followed them until they led me to a shabby door covered with black paint. Under the peeling black paint, clean, white holly wood shone through.

Black and white.

“Seems almost obvious, doesn’t it?” Mallory asked from over my shoulder.

“Pretty unobtrusive,” Leah said. “Just the place to hide a relic.”

I pulled out the Skeleton Key to open the door. I twisted the knob, and the portal swung open. It revealed a bog-standard broom cupboard. A plain, gray feather quill with a sharpened nib of pure gold sat on the floor.

“That’s our relic,” I said, vanishing my father’s staff and pocketing my mother’s crystal. I reached down, picked up the quill, and slipped it carefully into my pocket.

Our business concluded, the three of us walked back toward the exit.

Just as we reached it, the door burst open.

The two guards who had been manning the door, disheveled and only half dressed, came charging out. They looked wild-eyed. Not surprising, really, what with them having just been turned into rabbits. The dwarf still had a fluffy tail.

I tossed the Skeleton Key to Leah to keep her from performing any more magic on the poor bastards. They had just been doing their job and didn’t deserve to get cursed into any more unexpected shapes if it could be helped.

“Open a door!” I yelled. “Any door!”

The taller guard charged at me as Leah unlocked a door close by.

He was still bamboozled in the head. I doubted he would have hopped toward me in the way he did under ordinary circumstances, flailing at me with his morning-star as if he’d like nothing better than to put an irreversible dent in my head.

He swung the length of spike-ended steel at me, but his heart wasn’t really in it. More accurately, his heart was in it, but his arm and his head were on separate wavelengths.

I stepped easily inside his guard and caught his right arm between my left arm and my body so that the morning-star was waving uselessly around behind my back. Generating the power from my elbow, rather than my shoulder, so I didn’t telegraph my punches, I struck the guard hard in the throat with my open palm. I had seen Jet Li do it in a movie once, and it worked a treat here. The guard squawked, and I drove my elbow into his temple before bringing my foot around to stamp hard on his ankle with my boot heel.

Then with a hard shove, I pushed him backward through the portal that Leah held open for me.

While I had been involved in my little bout of fisticuffs, Mallory had dealt with the dwarf by wrapping him in a spell that resembled fluffy white clouds. His morning-star was lying useless and unbloodied on the ground nearby.

The dwarf was struggling, his bunny tail twitching angrily as he hurled curses at Mallory. Raising her hands, the former priestess propelled the cotton wool wrapped guard through the door after his friend with a spontaneously conjured gust of wind.

“I bet those guys will love it there,” I said as Leah pulled the door shut and locked it again. “Got to be better than guard duty outside the Hall of a Hundred Gazillion Doors anyway.”

“What makes you say that?” Leah asked. “We might have just sent them to hell.”

“Nah,” I said. “It was another little slither of Earth I saw in that door. If I read things right, we just dumped those two lucky little bunny rabbits through a time portal. That was the Miss America pageant of 1983 when Vanessa Williams won!”

The two women looked blankly at me.

I grinned, took them by the shoulders, and guided them through the door that led out of the Chamber of Lock and Key.

“Trust me,” I said, “those guys are going to be A-okay.”

And, with that, we closed the door and dashed back to the Inscriber’s workshop.

Chapter 13

Gertrude the Inscriber set down the golden-tipped quill, closed my spellbook, and then sat back in her chair. She handed me my spellbook and clasped her hands in front of her.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” she said, raising her ice-chip eyes to study my face. “Don’t you want to learn a new spell? I haven’t got all day, and I must ensure that my magic worked effectively. Can’t have you walking out of here only to have to come back tomorrow, can we?”

For a second, I was nonplussed. “You want me to test it?”

“Of course,” the old woman said. “What else do you think you should do?”

“Here?” I asked.

Gertrude pointed to the little door at the back of her workshop, the one through which Mallory had emerged earlier.

“My bedchamber is through there,” she said. “It is not large, but it should be more than adequate for you to run an experiment.”

I looked at Leah. I was after her Chaos Magic. I don’t know what sort of reassurance I was expecting to find in Leah’s face though. The woman probably would have been happy to