One of them grinned until his fangs showed.
Mychael swore, seconded by Tam.
I didn’t need to sense what they did. I could see it.
A clawed hand, a massive hand, punched through the mirror right next to Carnades’s. The hand was attached to and followed by a scaled arm corded with thick muscle. Nothing that big should have been able to move that fast, but apparently no one had ever told that to it—whatever it was. There wasn’t any need to shatter the mirror it was coming through; the monster did that all by itself, squeezing its hunched shoulders and horned head through the glass, snapping and reducing the frame to splinters. That it had destroyed its own escape hatch didn’t seem to bother it at all. In fact, judging from its dingy, yellow eyes and a mouthful of smiling fangs to match, it looked downright happy about where he was.
Happy and hungry.
Piaras launched into a litany of curses in Goblin. Someone had been around Talon too long. Then I saw what Piaras had seen. Spellsongs wouldn’t do any good on this thing, either. It didn’t have plugs in its ears.
It didn’t have any ears.
Though I was betting it’d bleed. Problem was getting close enough to stick it with something sharp without having it do the same to us, namely with the hooked claws attached to the fingers that were dragging the ground.
“Down!” Justinius roared.
The old man didn’t have to yell twice. I hit the floor, with Piaras a split second behind me. At that moment, Justinius Valerian, archmage of the Conclave of Sorcerers and the most badass spellslinger there was, opened up on the monster. It was beautiful—in a seriously gory way. Justinius’s hands glowed incandescent white as he hit the monster with a fireball hard enough to embed the thing into the bedrock on the other side of the room.
At least that was what should have happened.
The fireball punched a hole the size of a shield through the monster’s midsection, but instead of the monster’s insides spilling onto the outside, suspiciously shaped blobs plopped wetly onto the floor.
Suspiciously shaped like the monster they’d fallen out of.
Oh hell.
Then Mychael was there, pushing me and Piaras toward Carnades’s mirror, away from the monster population explosion taking place before our eyes. Tam’s spells and Imala’s steel were trying to keep up, but some of the little buggers were getting past them.
Suddenly things seemed to slow down to the point that we had all the time in the world to get through that mirror. I knew it hadn’t, and I knew we didn’t; it was just my mind’s way of giving me a little more time to figure out how to survive the next few seconds.
“Go!”
Justinius Valerian roared that command and gathered his power for another strike. He probably had more power than anyone or anything in this room combined, but he couldn’t keep up that kind of attack for much longer. He knew it, and he didn’t care. What he cared about was getting us through that mirror to Regor.
“I’m not leaving you!” Mychael shouted at the old man.
“The hell you’re not!”
He was right. We had to go. The attacks in the city, the mirrors, the Khrynsani, and the monsters—they were all here in Mid to keep us from getting to Regor. Either we made it and got that rock out of Sarad Nukpana’s hands—or no one was going to make it.
Carnades was opening the mirror.
I got a throwing knife in my hand. If Carnades made a run for it without us, he wasn’t going to be alive when he got to the other side.
“Fall back!” Mychael shouted.
I told myself that Justinius and the remaining Guardians could handle this. Reinforcements would come charging through what was left of that door any second. I didn’t believe that and probably neither did the old man, but he was doing it anyway. He’d sacrifice himself if necessary to ensure that we got to Regor.
“I can’t hold it!” Carnades screamed.
We had to go. Now. Piaras was going with us. We had no choice and neither did he. The Khrynsani had earplugs, and the monsters didn’t have any ears. Piaras had Sarad Nukpana’s sword fighting skills, but he didn’t have the battlemagic skills to survive this. Though I didn’t know what would be worse: to stay here with the goblins and the rapidly growing mini-monsters, or dive through that mirror to possibly be ambushed by Sarad Nukpana and his sadistic Khrynsani.
Both sucked. Both were unavoidable. Choose one or the other; there wasn’t a third option.
Prince Chigaru’s two bodyguards put themselves between the prince and the Khrynsani. One guard took a crossbow bolt to the chest that’d been meant for Chigaru.
The other was poised to plunge a dagger into his prince.
I drew breath to scream a warning. I needn’t have bothered.
Imala saw the bodyguard move.
She moved faster.
The goblin never knew what hit him, and died staring at his prince, dagger still raised to strike, confusion in his dying eyes.
“Jabari? No!” Chigaru screamed in disbelief and denial.
Betrayal was contagious as hell today.
Another bolt came out of nowhere.
Carnades spun to face it as if he had eyes in the back of his head. A nimbus of glittering frost formed in front of this hand, deflecting the bolt and sending it slamming into the chest of the goblin who’d fired it.
The shooter wasn’t aiming at Carnades.
He was aiming at the mirror. Our mirror.
More Khrynsani crossbows were raised, all with one target—a mirror they were hell-bent on shattering.Mychael stood back-to-back with Carnades, shielding the elf mage while he worked frantically to stabilize the mirror.
Tam shoved Imala and Chigaru through the mirror, and all but threw Piaras toward it.
Mychael didn’t turn and look; he knew I was still there. “Go!” he screamed.
Tam’s hands gripping my shoulder made sure that this time, I’d do as told.
I dived into darkness.
Chapter 3
I landed flat on my face, and spent the next few seconds spitting out dirt.
My hands were out in front of me with gravel embedded in my palms. My knee had rammed itself into something painfully solid. My other leg was pinned under some kind of weight. Basically I was folded up and smushed. After my eyes had finished tearing up, I started to blink them open, then realized with a rush of panic that they were open.
Dark. Pitch-dark. Hand-in-front-of-your-face, no-can-see dark. Not to mention cold and wet. Water drizzled like a light rain from somewhere in the darkness behind us.
I tried to make a lightglobe and got a pitiful spark. No amount of effort would get it any bigger or brighter.
The weight on my leg moved. Instinctively, I kicked.
“Ow!”
Piaras.
“Sorry. Where are you?”
“Right where you kicked,” came his pained retort.
A blue lightglobe flared to life, and hovered briefly above Mychael’s open palm before he released it to hover by his right shoulder, and he peered into the dark as best as he could see with elven eyes.
“Tam?” he called in a low whisper.
“Clear as far as I can tell,” Tam said quietly from somewhere ahead in the dark.
No Khrynsani. But for how long?
Mychael’s lightglobe showed me that I’d somehow managed to slam my shoulder and knee into the corner of what I assumed was our supply crate. No wonder I hurt.
Mychael, Tam, and Imala were on their feet; the rest of us had landed on other body parts, none of them particularly dignified. I grunted as I got to my feet and rotated my shoulder. Not dislocated, no breaks.
“My lucky day,” I muttered.
Piaras looked around him. “Yeah, lucky.”
I didn’t want Piaras to be here, though it was better to be here and alive, than in that mirror room and probably dead. But the last place he needed to be was in the same city as Sarad Nukpana. The glance I shot at Mychael said all of that and then some. After me, Piaras was next on Sarad Nukpana’s slow-and-agonizing-revenge list. Mychael knew all of that as well as I did.
“Welcome to the team, Cadet Rivalin,” he said.
Carnades muttered something that I couldn’t quite make out, but Mychael heard it clearly enough.
The rocks I’d landed on were softer than Mychael’s expression. “He’s here and a member of this team—a qualified member.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the glint of the magic-sapping manacles that Mychael held loosely in one hand behind his back. My heart went into double-time beating. Carnades wasn’t cuffed. Dammit, dam—
Tam took a quick step toward Carnades from the side. For a split second, Carnades’s attention was on Tam—not on Mychael, who closed the distance and snapped the manacles on the distracted elf mage.
Mychael stepped back. “Thanks, Tam.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Carnades’s glare, at them both, was pure murder.
Piaras laid his hand flat on the damp cave wall. “This is Regor?” he whispered to no one in particular.
My knee popped and I winced. “A cave a few miles outside of it.”
“Damn,” he whispered in awe.
I agreed with the word, not the sentiment. There was nothing awe-inspiring about being within a few miles—or even closer—of Sarad Nukpana. Terror-stricken was about right. I didn’t think any of that had sunk in for Piaras. Yet.
Tam had conjured a lightglobe of his own and sent its glow back toward the mirror. Carnades’s eyes followed the light to get a look at his mirror. The elf mage’s face suddenly contorted with rage.
“Fuck!” he roared. The echo in the cave ensured that we all got to hear the word at least five times.
“Silence!” Imala hissed.
Tam spat a choice word of his own, drew one of his swords, and vanished back into the dark of the cave. If anyone was waiting to ambush, beat the crap out of, and dump us at Sarad Nukpana’s feet, Carnades had just done a damned fine job of announcing our arrival.
I looked back at the mirror and bit back my own verbal contribution.
The tip of a crossbow bolt protruded from the mirror’s surface. The mirror itself was cracked, broken, worthless. Cracks radiated out from the bolt like a spider’s web. Carnades’s word choice confirmed loud and clear that we had no way home.