had been a blank wall. A small section was open and filled with an enraged old goblin, aged somewhere between sixty and roadkill.
Kesyn Badru, I assumed.
Tam hesitated, torn between possible death by the entity and equally likely death by his pissed-off teacher. That Tam was afraid of him—and that he’d ripped our shield like a piece of wet paper—told me Kesyn Badru was seriously badass. That was all I needed to know. I ran down the tunnel toward him. I’d take badass over bat- hornets anytime.
When I got within sniffing distance, I knew what the old man had been doing to pass the time while hiding out in a possessed house. Coming from a family of pirates, I knew what a crew coming back from shore leave smelled like. My nose told me loud and clear that Kesyn Badru had been on shore leave a long time.
Once the four of us were inside, he slammed the section of wall closed and rasped out some wicked-sounding words. The opening vanished, leaving us in a single room that had been sealed—walls, floor, and ceiling—with a thick, gelatinous coating. Ick. It must have been some kind of solid ward. Fortunately, the coating on the floor had hardened. However, since we were in here, and the entity and its playmates were out there, being in a room coated in ick was perfectly fine with me.
Kesyn Badru glared at us with some seriously bloodshot eyes. “What the hell are you trying to do, bring the roof down on my head?” He didn’t pause for an answer; he just turned those bloodshot eyes on me. “You’re that Benares girl, aren’t you?” His eyes darted up and down, taking me in, inside and out. He snorted. “That’s all you’ve got? I’m not impressed.”
I just stood there and blinked. “Uh…”
Badru turned on Tam. “And thank you once again for fucking up my life,” he snarled, “or what you left me of it. What are you going to do next, boy? Stomp my balls?”
The room shook like a toy building block some evil kid was trying to break in half.
That didn’t even slow Badru down. “The best damned hiding place in the whole city, and you screwed it up.”
Mychael put himself between the goblin mage and Tam. “Magus Badru, we need your help.”
Something hit the other side of the wall next to me like a giant fist.
“What do you call what I just gave you?” Badru snapped. “And who the hell are you anyway?”
“Paladin Mychael Eiliesor of the Conclave Guardians,” he responded in formal, flawless Goblin.
“Conclave, eh?” The goblin chuckled, a dry rasp that sounded like he hadn’t used his voice for anything other than yelling in a long time. “Those old bastards send you here to save their wrinkly asses?”
“We came to destroy the Saghred.” Mychael dropped the formality and went with angry paladin. Mychael had had it. We all had.
That got the goblin mage’s attention.
“That’s a fancy way to kill yourselves. I prefer staying drunk—and alive.”
Something hit the ward over our heads with enough force that fist-sized gobs of ward goop fell from the ceiling. I barely avoided getting splatted with the stuff.
Badru didn’t so much as bat an eye. His full attention had landed on Tam like a slab of granite. “Well, what do
Tam told him everything. Why we were here, what we had to do, and when we had to get it done.
And how we needed his help to do all of the above.
“So, you need me to be your Reaper wrangler,” Badru said. “If I’m all you’ve got, you’re scraping the bottom of a bone-dry barrel. Am I your last hope, too?” he asked Tam. “Or are you just slumming and playing tour guide for your friends?”
Tam drew himself up and I half expected to hear something Talonesque come out of his mouth. He surprised me. “Sir, you’re our
Tam had been eating an awful lot of humble pie since we’d arrived. It looked like he was developing a taste for it. Swallowing your pride might choke you the first time you had to do it; but apparently the next one went down a little easier.
“You were disgraced and banished because you refused to step back from what you stood for,” Tam continued. “You refused to teach rich, young thugs a level of magic they had neither the morals nor restraint to learn.” He paused. “I was foremost among them.”
The old goblin’s eyes glittered. “You think so?”
“I know so. I’ve turned from the dark path.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard people talking. Talk isn’t necessarily the truth.”
“I have renounced black magic.”
Kesyn Badru’s sharp black eyes looked like they were boring through to Tam’s soul. “Not entirely, you haven’t.”
Tam shifted uneasily. “When there is a great need, when no other magic would—”
“Save lives,” Mychael said. “Sometimes it is necessary to do what is distasteful for a greater good.”
Badru studied Tam, all signs of drunkenness gone. “And you think you’ve grown enough sense to tell the difference?”
“I’m trying, sir.” Another slice of humble pie. “Knowing the right thing to do isn’t always easy.”
“There’s more to why we need your help,” I told the mage. Best just to come right out with it. “My magic is gone.”
“Yeah. So?”
“And… I don’t have any magic.”
“That’s obvious. Don’t worry, I don’t think anyone inside these rotten city walls would have a clue.”
That was more than a little disconcerting. “How can you tell?”
“I don’t smell any magic coming off of you.”
“You mean sense?”
“I say what I mean. Smell. Others may sense, but I smell. Don’t let it worry you, little missy. It’s a gift—or a curse—depending on how you look at it. I can see people for who and what they really are.” He looked at Tam appraisingly. “So, while there’s no cure for stupid, you at least seem to have found a treatment.”
“Thank you, sir. I think.”
A chorus of disembodied howls, screams, and roars shook the room around us.
Kesyn Badru walked to the nearest wall, pressed his hands up past his wrists into the goop, and started murmuring. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but the wall began glowing with the same blue light of the tunnel he’d created for us to escape through.
The howling, screaming, and roaring stopped. Instantly and completely.
“The beastie thinks we’ve vanished.” He scowled at the lot of us. “Though with the four of you here raising a ruckus, we only have less than an hour before it cranks up again.”
I shifted uneasily. “It senses and feeds on emotions, doesn’t it?”
Badru nodded. “No emotion and no violence equals no problem. Staying drunk helps.”
Finally, an activity I could agree with.
Imala looked at the faintly glowing walls. “How do we get out?”
Badru shrugged. “With what you have planned, I don’t want to get out.”
“
“Then I imagine leaving this room, then running like hell, would be as good a plan as any.”
Tam moved close enough to his former teacher that Badru could have punched him in several sensitive areas. “Sir, we can’t do this without you.” He hesitated, the smooth muscles working in his jaw. “Please help us.”
Amazingly enough, Kesyn Badru seemed to be actually considering it, though he took his sweet time doing it. “I’ll be honest with you,” he eventually said. “I’m sitting the fence on that whole ‘saving the world’ thing the lot of you are bent on doing. From what I’ve seen lately, there’s not much out there that deserves saving. Now, destroying this rock that’s become Sarad Nukpana’s reason for living—I’ll have to admit that has a certain appeal. Not because it’ll save anyone; because it’ll annoy the hell out of Sarad.”
