All Spell Breaks Loose (5 page)

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.

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.

Instead of punching through the mirror, that bolt could have just as easily punched through any one of us. When Carnades had slammed that mirror shut behind us, the bolt
had been trapped like a fly in amber. There was definitely a cracked mirror here and most likely a destroyed mirror there. Neither one could get us out.

Tam, Imala, and Chigaru were home. The rest of us were trapped in Hell.

I didn’t know about everyone else, but my morale had just hit an all-time low.

Chigaru was speaking in low hissing tones with Imala. Without his bodyguards—or at least the one who hadn’t tried to kill him—the goblin prince no doubt felt as naked as the day he was born. He’d been on the run from his brother for years, and every second of that time he’d been surrounded by guards and armed courtiers. Now he was within ten or so miles of his brother and his army—without any guards. I sympathized and could have told the prince that I knew exactly how he felt. I was in a similar predicament without my magic. Since Carnades didn’t know that, I kept my mouth shut.

“Jabari would never betray me,” Prince Chigaru was saying. “It was chaotic; he must have—”

“It was no mistake, Your Highness,” Imala told him firmly.

“I don’t believe it. I can’t.”

“Well, obviously you’re wrong,” Carnades snapped.

Chigaru growled and lunged for the elf mage. Fortunately, Tam got the prince by the arm as soon as he saw Carnades open his mouth to speak. A wise man, Tam. At this rate, Carnades would be lucky to make it out of the cave alive.

“Are there any unbroken mirrors nearby?” I asked anyone who might know.

“In the city,” Imala replied.

Tam released the prince’s arm, but kept his eye on him. “There are dozens… in the palace.”

Lovely.

“Say we destroy the Saghred and find a nice, big, intact
mirror.” I was looking at Carnades. “Could you get us home with one of those?”

“Of course.”

“Details of how you can accomplish that would be nice.”

“There are four blanks in the citadel mirror room,” Carnades said. “I have one in my home, and another in my Conclave office.”

“Blanks?”

“A mirror that is not linked to a specific destination.” Carnades’s words dripped with contempt, presumably at my ignorance.

I ignored it and him. I could always punch Carnades later. In fact, that image was going to be my happy thought for the entire trip.

Mychael shot a warning glance at Carnades. “The four blanks in the mirror room were against the opposite wall from ours,” Mychael explained. “Their surfaces were flat, no ripples, no reflections of the people in the room. They could be our way back.”

Mychael left “if they weren’t destroyed” unsaid. My low morale appreciated that.

“We would need to locate either a blank or active mirror in Regor,” he continued. “Carnades would redirect it to one of the blanks on Mid.”

“How long does that take?” Piaras asked.

“About half an hour for most mirror mages,” Mychael replied.

“I could do it in fifteen,” Carnades said disdainfully.

A jerk, but a talented one. “That could be fatally slow if we’ve got half the goblin army on our collective ass,” I noted. “Do you think you could speed it up?”

“That is as quick as
anyone
could link two mirrors,” Carnades hissed. “I have just as much motivation to escape Regor as you do.”

That statement couldn’t be more true. Sarad Nukpana hated Carnades as much as he did me. So hopefully there’d
be plenty of potential getaway mirrors to choose from—and Carnades would be plenty motivated to break his own speed record when we found one of them.

I knew I couldn’t see past our meager lights into the rest of the cave, but that didn’t stop me from trying. “Why isn’t there a welcoming committee here? Not that I mind Nukpana being rude, but I do have a vested interest in why.”

“And I have a vested interest in air,” said a muffled and all-too-familiar voice—from
inside
the crate. “Could someone let me out?”

Never think that a situation couldn’t get any worse.

Our crate contained something besides supplies.

It had Talon stowed away inside.

It probably should’ve taken a crowbar to get into that crate, but Tam ripped into it just fine with his bare hands—probably so he could wrap them around Talon’s neck. From the look on Tam’s face, the kid would have been better off staying in the box, air or no air. Once Talon got a look at his father’s face for himself, I think the kid agreed with me.

Talon was even more scrunched up in the crate than I had been when I slammed into it. He’d wedged himself into one corner, his knees tight against his chest, head bent forward, hands clutching what looked like a small ham. My stomach rumbled.

Tam was virtually shaking with suppressed rage, and for once, Talon did the smart thing and kept his mouth shut.

“Cadet Nathrach,” Mychael said. “What a completely unpleasant and
unauthorized
surprise.”

Talon looked from his dad to his commander. “I can explain.”

“I seriously doubt that.” Tam reached in, grabbed his son by the front of his uniform, and, with a hard twist and pull, popped Talon free from the supplies, leaving a roughly Talon-shaped indentation in a stack of blankets. But Talon, being Talon, the moment he was out he started talking. Bad idea. It was like the kid couldn’t help himself.

“I didn’t take any supplies out to make room for me.”

I didn’t think Tam heard one word the kid said.

Discipline—either of the self or the plain variety—wasn’t a big part of Talon’s thinking. He’d been on his own for much of his young life, and had used his magic any way he had to in order to survive. Talon was nearly as talented a spellsinger as Piaras, so the kid had some nifty tricks up those gray uniform sleeves, and he didn’t think twice about whipping any of them out. That there were consequences to his actions, especially to others, was just beginning to occur to him. If he ran into a problem, he had a trick to fix it. Magic wasn’t the cure-all solution to everything. Tam was trying to teach his son that. Regor was no place for Talon to continue his education.

The kid was the proverbial loose cannon. Powerful but unfocused, the majority of his magic remained uncharted waters—deep uncharted waters. That description applied to Piaras, too.