he’d used to destroy the door with his armored fists.
Behind Tam came Imala, Prince Chigaru, and his two bodyguards. Since we’d be stepping through a mirror to Regor, they were all armed and armored for trouble. That was good, because we had plenty of trouble right here, no walking through a mirror needed.
Carnades Silvanus was now somewhere behind me. He was even more likely to kill me than the goblins were. Fry me where I stood, then claim that one of the goblins had done it, or that his shot went wide and it was a horrible accident. With all the heavy firepower flying around, accidents weren’t just possible, they were likely, and I was the first person one was likely to happen to. In an enclosed space, spells were just as likely to hit your own people as taking out the people you were actually aiming at.
I barely managed to avoid being brained by the pommel of a thrown knife. I had no clue who had done the throwing. Right now, my biggest challenge was finding space to fight without killing, or being killed by, my own people.
Technically, Carnades was one of my own people. That thought was just scary enough to make me risk a quick glance behind me. The mirror mage had his hands full, literally and figuratively, as one Khrynsani had jumped him and another was about to join the fray. I’d never thought of Carnades as the brawling type, but I’d learned never to underestimate survival instinct. He had nothing left to lose except his life, and everything to gain by taking ours and leaving the goblins with the blame.
Carnades’s hands were around a goblin soldier’s throat, his hands flaring with silver light. The Khrynsani let out a shriek you wouldn’t have thought could come from a grown man. The screams stopped and Carnades tossed him aside, the dead goblin’s throat a smoking ruin of blackened flesh.
Mychael wrenched the helmet off of a dead goblin and hurled it at the mirror they’d come through. Just a normal throw probably would have done the trick, but Mychael didn’t want to risk anything except a direct hit. There was magic behind that helmet missile, and it hit, turning the mirror’s reflective surface into a spiderweb of shattered glass. Nothing else would be coming through that.
Stopping the flow of goblins was good, but taking their escape hatch away had the undesirable effect of turning homicidal Khrynsani into homicidal and desperate Khrynsani.
But the remaining Khrynsani were outnumbered and they knew it.
Or they should have.
Anyone in their situation looking halfway happy was, in my opinion, all the way suicidal. If that was the case, these boys were about to get their wish.
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.
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.
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?
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.
