Vicious Magick (26 page)

The shop itself is spacious, the walls lined
with longknives, handbombs, and powderblasts. Novanostrum picks up
an elephant-bone staff, waving it around, checking its balance.
Zanther, meanwhile, holds two matching longknives, taking a few
practice swings. He throws them into a large sack.

They grab a bunch of powderblasts, all of
them with gleaming steel barrels, and toss them into the bag, along
with two dozen pouches of ammunition.

“Do we need crossbows?” Novanostrum asks.

“No, I don’t think so. Oh…wait. What’s
that?”

Hanging just out of reach, their eyes are
drawn to a showy master longknife, inlaid with gold and jewels.
There are large chips in the polished blade, a blade stained with
ancient blood.

“Is that…?”

“Leave it,” Zanther advises, “it’s time to
get out of here.”

They emerge from the sewer to find Madra and
Risma waiting for them. Madra paws through the sack as a group of
shadows amass at the end of the alley.

“Foreigners! Darrinia does not take kindly to
thieves!”

Zanther and Novanostrum bare their new
weapons, but Risma holds up a finger to them. She walks over to
Novanostrum and gives him a kiss on his mouth.

“Let me save
you
for a change,” she
says, waving her arms and opening a portal in the air which looks
like a rippling whirlpool. She pushes the three of them
through.

Madra, Zanther, and Novanostrum fall a few
feet to the ground to find themselves on the road just outside the
city gates.

“I think I’m in love,” Novanostrum says.

“You think she’ll be okay back there?” Madra
asks.

“Risma? I have a feeling she’ll be just
fine,” Zanther says, “It’s this guy I’m worried about.”

On the edge of the horizon, the spires and
glimmering contours of the Deus Palatium loom ominous. Platoons of
troops march in scattered groups, and the clangs of metal-on-metal
and reports of shots can be heard as a few of these groups are
engaged in combat with red-skinned malefactors. Novanostrum,
Zanther, and Madra are perched on the top of a hill, watching the
carnage separating them from their destination.

“How many damn demons did they summon?”
Zanther asks.

“It appears someone conjured the whole of
Hell’s High Guard, and they’re converging here,” Novanostrum
says.

“Yeah, but if the daemons are targeting the
Crucifers, why would they be after us as well?” Madra asks.

“Daemons will kill indiscriminately,”
Novanostrum says, “it’s hard to tell who’s the target and who’s the
collateral damage. Still, it would take a Maximagus of the First
Circle to pull off a trick like this. There are only four or five
wizards of that caliber on the entire continent, and I killed one
of them.

“Regardless, we must fight our way through
this rabble and make our way into the Deus Palatium if we want to
find the Original Painting.”

Zanther pulls his longknives off his back
with a dramatic flair. “Let’s get to killing.”

The Kleighton Gadabout

There’s a non-stop debate which perennially
rages throughout the whole of Upper Kleighton concerning that
moonthly publication, the
Kleighton Gadabout
. The thing
being debated is this: does the
Kleighton Gadabout
inform
people of what is hip and trendy, or are these places and
activities hip and trendy because the
Kleighton Gadabout
tells us they are?

Before an article in the
Gadabout
touted the culinary merits of their meat, yafbeests were plentiful,
mainly due to their nearly impenetrable hides of bristly fur and
their razor-sharp claws and fangs. Yearly fatalities from run-ins
with yafbeests numbered in the low hundreds, and they were
basically left alone.

Fast forward to a few years ago when the
article, titled ‘Yafbeest: A Cavalcade of Gastronomic Delights,’
informed us that Paterlingual word-traders on the high plains had
been enjoying yafbeest stew since time immemorial. So far, so good,
right? A periodical learns about a delicious meatstuff and informs
the mainstream, who proceed to hunt the yafbeest into extinction.
Seems like good reporting, yeah? Not so fast.

An exposé in the
Gadabout’s
main
rival, the
Ne’er-do-well
, revealed two interesting facts:
first, no sane Paterlinguist would go within ten smoots of a
yafbeest, and secondly, Starkes Madrigal (Editor-in-chief of the
Gadabout
) had recently been attacked by a yafbeest at a zoo
and, according to a source who overheard him ranting about the
incident at a pub, had sworn to ‘rid the world of every last one of
those buggers.’

So much for journalistic integrity.