heads almost too fast to see, and the ones right behind them had unsheathed very sharp-looking swords. Then what he'd said hit me. I reached over my shoulder to grab the top of my lopsided star. It was still there, but its slight ridges lay quiescent under my fingertips.
'The Circle can't remove it unless they have you in their power,' he added. 'But it won't flare. Don't depend on it.”
'And you were planning on telling me this when?!”
Pritkin didn't answer, being busy pulling an old-fashioned.45 from his belt and pumping rounds into the nearest knights. The bullets all connected, leaving sizable holes, but there was no spray of blood or mangled bodily tissue. The torchlight glimmering through the punctures in the nearest armored head showed why-all I could see was the empty interior of the helmet and part of a tapestry on the far wall. There was no one in there to hurt.
Pritkin must have figured this out, because he shoved the gun back into its holster and sent a bright orange fireball at the line instead. It was powerful enough to catch one of the banners hanging down from the ceiling alight, quickly reducing it to a few burning shreds of material. But when the flames cleared, I saw that it had had less of an effect on the knights. The closest two emerged looking like contestants in a three-legged race, lurching along with their bodies melted together from the hips down. But they were still coming, and the others had only been scorched and knocked off their feet.
'Their weapons are enchanted,' Pritkin said grimly. 'And I've been using my shields almost nonstop all day. They won't last, and few spells will work within the casino's wards. Shift us out of here!”
I'd have liked nothing better, but there was a slight problem. I might be in possession of a whopping amount of power, at least temporarily, but I really didn't want to use it. Power wasn't free, especially in such large amounts. I'd been around magic users enough to know that if you borrow power, eventually you get a bill. I didn't like not knowing what that bill might be, or who might be sending it.
'Why are the knights attacking us?' I asked, hoping for another solution-any other. 'We haven't done anything!' Maybe I was misreading the situation, and the casino's defenses were actually trying to take out the mages for us. In that case, all we needed to do was get out of the way.
Pritkin quickly destroyed that hope. 'Andrew and Stephan triggered the automatic defenses by drawing arms inside the casino. I didn't respond, so we should have been safe, but they came too close. The defenses have confused us with the aggressors, and now we're all targets. Shift us now!”
I didn't have time to explain my views on my new power, because I had to dodge a spear thrown by a knight down the corridor. I jumped aside just before it slammed into the floor where I'd been standing, sending bits of painted concrete flying up at me. I felt liquid slide down my left cheek and raised a shaking hand to it. My fingertips came back painted red, but my ward never so much as twinged. I stared incredulously at my blood-smeared hand. So much for supernatural protection.
'Do it!' Pritkin yelled.
'I can't!' I would break my resolution, but only if I was sure that the only alternative was death. If anyone sent me a bill for London, I could reasonably argue that I had been getting myself out of the mess I'd been dragged into against my will. I'd have no such excuse for calling the power now, and I didn't intend to end up owing somebody my life if I could avoid it. That sort of debt in magical terms can be a very bad thing.
Pritkin might have argued, but the charred knights were quickly regaining their feet. He sent his animated arsenal into the crowd, the wildly weaving knives giving the knights some new targets. I added my daggers to the mix, just in time to take out a mace spinning straight at Pritkin's skull. He hadn't noticed it because he was using the sword to block a pike that had been about to run him through from the other direction. The last opportunity I'd had to see Pritkin fight, he'd looked like he was enjoying himself. His face showed no such emotion this time. Of course, the dangling ear might have had something to do with that.
I looked around for a way out, but there didn't appear to be any. The back stairs were surrounded by a minefield of broken glass, not that it was a huge obstacle. My bare feet wouldn't have enjoyed it, but if Pritkin could lift that huge sword, he could probably haul me across. But I doubted he could manage that while also fighting off the line of knights between us and that part of the hall. The same was true for the door to the kitchen. It was blocked by a fallen suit of armor, which was being dismembered by one of my gaseous knives, and the thing's three companions, which were still on their feet.
'Are there hidden stairs?' Pritkin asked in a calm voice that sounded really out of place at the moment. 'They should have difficulty navigating them.”
'How should I know?' I looked around frantically, but my attention was monopolized by a knight brandishing a wicked-looking two-headed axe. Alphonse, who collected weapons of all kinds, had an identical item on his safe- room wall. It had looked menacing enough just hanging there; it was a lot worse now that it was almost close enough to take off Pritkin's head-or mine.
'Check the tapestries!' Pritkin ordered, darting forward to take a swing at the armor's knees. 'There might be a hidden door!' His blade took off one of our attacker's legs, causing it to topple over. But it kept coming, dragging itself forward by its arms and using the remaining leg to push. Even more disconcerting, its severed limb wiggled along the ground behind it, trying to catch up to the main event. To stop one of these things, we'd have to completely dismember it, and there were too many of them and too few of us for that to be practical. We'd be in pieces long before they would.
I yanked the nearest curtain aside, but nothing except more faux stone met my eyes. I felt around, hoping to encounter a hidden door, but no such luck. I glanced at the elevator, but the indicator light showed it to be five floors away. Not to mention that the two mages were having a hell of a battle right in front of it.
While I snatched aside the other tapestries in our dwindling safe zone, looking for nonexistent exits, the armor's detached leg reunited with its body. The metal at the top of its thigh grew liquid, like quicksilver, and the two parts merged seamlessly. A second later, you couldn't tell there had ever been a wound. I finally accepted that we were in an impossible situation. Even dismemberment was no more than a brief inconvenience for these things. Tony was a cheap bastard, but not when it came to security. Damn it.
'No stairs!' I yelled.
Pritkin whirled around, sweeping another knight's feet out from under it, and clipped me with his elbow. I fell in front of an empty plinth, my ears ringing. My brain automatically translated the phrase in front of my eyes:
While I struggled to sit up, the six knights from the far end of the corridor, which had been making their cumbersome way towards us, got within striking distance. That gave us the choice of being skewered by them or being dismembered by their buddies on our other side, since it was obvious that we weren't going to hold them all off for long. I was about to damn the consequences and shift us away when I noticed something interesting.
One of Pritkin's larger knives was slicing busily away at a nearby knight. The armor had lost its weapon, which was clenched in the fist that had just been severed at the wrist. But it was making no effort to retrieve it, despite the fact that it lay on the carpeted strip only a few feet away. The mailed hand was also motionless, not trying to rejoin its body as the other knight's leg had done. I suddenly realized that I had a clear view of it because not a single knight was anywhere near the center of the hall.
They were grouped on either side of the narrow strip of carpet, which they were going out of their way to avoid touching. I glanced back at the fight behind us and it was the same story. The knights on one side had gone after the mages, those on the other had come after us, but neither group came in contact with the ratty-looking piece in the center. For a brief moment, I almost felt like giving a cheer for paranoid Tony, who always designed a way out of every trap, even his own.
Pritkin had been driven to his knees blocking another pike attack, while a second and third knight converged on his position with raised swords. I didn't wait to see whether he would be fast enough to deal with the predicament, but launched myself at him, hitting him with a thud that rolled both of us onto the carpet strip. We landed catty cornered, with Pritkin's left leg and my whole right side dangling off the edge. Before I could do anything about that, a knight brought a sword down, spearing Pritkin's calf where it stuck out from between my legs.
'Don't move!' I yelled as the mage pushed me aside and plunged his sword into the knight's belly. The blow forced the heavy thing backwards, but it also ripped the sword brutally out of Pritkin's leg. He gasped but started after the knight as if there weren't almost a dozen others within striking distance, converging on us from both sides. I climbed up his body and sat on him, grabbing a handful of hair to swing his face around. 'Safe!' I
