The attack came from below.
A sea of black-clad Khrynsani guards surged up the stairs. The light was dim and I couldn’t tell how many there were, but my feet said it was too many and they had a strong opinion on what I should do next.
Kesyn charged up the stairs to the guards stationed on the other side of the temple-level door, snatching the attention of the guards running up from the lower level. In the two seconds that their attention was on the old goblin, I opened fire with satisfactory results.
Imala could handle herself just fine in any kind of fight, but outnumbered was outnumbered. Tam and his battlemagic were taking care of the rest of what came at either one of them.
Tam had said to kill any mages first. I shot whatever came into range first. A pistol crossbow held three bolts. I emptied both pistols in thirty seconds. I had two bandoleers full of bolts, but no time to reload. Whoever made these things assumed six bolts would do what you needed to get done. I threw the now-worthless pieces of crap aside, drew my swords, and pretended the next guard to reach me was the manufacturer. Though it wasn’t the guy who made the weapons’ fault; it was mine for wading into more trouble than six bolts (and no time to reload) could handle.
Sometimes it was good when your reputation got somewhere before you did. I was swinging a sword, not magic, but it was apparent that my wanted poster had been seen by more than Regor’s general population. However, it was just my luck that enough of the goblins coming at me weren’t afraid of being immolated by the wrath of the rock. However, a desperately-fighting-for-her-life elf swinging three feet of steel was at least given a little more respect.
Until I came face-to-face with a Khrynsani mage.
He was armed with a black staff carved with spells. For a goblin prison mage, that was all the weapon they needed.
The cat was probably out of the bag about my magic, but I had no way of knowing if Nukpana had shared that joyous news with his lackeys. But right here, right now, it didn’t matter. I’d come too far and was too close to pulverizing that rock to have some jail mage screw this up for me.
I attacked. I couldn’t give him time to breathe, let alone point the tip of that staff at me and incant anything. He wasn’t shielded; apparently he hadn’t thought it was necessary with me. If I had anything to say about it, I was going to show him how wrong he was. No one else was being shy about screaming and yelling, so I joined right in. It felt good. I’d kept too much penned up for too long. Magic had gotten me into this, and now magic, in the form of a Khrynsani jail mage, had the gall to try to take me out. I had news for him; I wasn’t going anywhere. And if I was going to die tonight, I wasn’t going to be a notch on this guy’s staff.
Then he did something I wasn’t ready for. He stopped fighting and took a step back. It wasn’t a retreat exactly, more like—
A blow across my shoulders drove me to my knees.
He was getting out of someone’s way. Someone who was determined to turn me into a notch on his staff. Literally.
The first mage timed it so that when my knees hit the floor, his staff hit the back of my wrist. My hand went completely numb. I saw, but couldn’t feel, the sword fall from my useless fingers.
Two Khrynsani prison mages, both armed with staffs, and the spells carved in those staffs were now glowing. I was on the floor and I was unarmed. This was very bad.
I blinked to clear my swirly vision. In that one blink, the jail mage population went from two to one. A fleshy smack against the far wall told me where one of them had landed, and an enraged bellow from the direction he’d been launched from told me I wasn’t the only one not using their inside voice. My mystery helper then used the staff he’d yanked from the now unmoving mage to club the remaining mage into unconsciousness.
I turned my head to look, wincing at the pain that lanced through my skull.
Chigaru was the launcher. Piaras was the clubber.
I tried to smile. Damn, even smiling hurt. “Nice,” I managed.
As fast as it started, it was over. No one had any obvious injuries that I could see, but Tam’s armor was sporting a couple of new dints. Once Piaras helped me to my feet, the two of everything that I’d been seeing lessened to one and a half; and as an added bonus, I could now make something that vaguely resembled a fist. I took both as positive signs.
Mychael rushed over and gently put a hand on either side of my face. He had his healer’s frown on as he examined my eyes and felt the base of my skull.
I tried to swat his hands away. “I only see one of you now. I’m fine.”
“Paladin,” Chigaru called. He’d grabbed a fallen Khrynsani by the back of the neck and had hauled him up for view. The prince grinned. “He looks to be about your size.”
“So he does. Are you sure you’re all right?” Mychael asked me.
“Yes, now go get dressed before you catch a cold—or a bolt.”
Tam had run down the corridor to the first cell door. He stopped about three feet away, hands out, palms facing iron-banded wood. If there were wards in and around those bars, I wouldn’t know about it. Tam would, and from the confused look on his face, what he’d expected wasn’t there.
No wards.
I’d seen Tam splinter wooden doors or snap cell bars and bend them back like they were hollow. He didn’t do that here. He didn’t need to.
The door was unlocked.
I looked over Tam’s shoulder.
The cell was empty.
Chapter 16
Imala snatched a ring of keys off the desk and threw them to Tam. Then she shoved a dead guard draped over the desk out of her way, and started scanning a book lying open there. Meanwhile Mychael and Tam ran down the corridor, looking in the rest of the cells, which had bars for doors, not wood. The cells appeared to be lit from inside, but Mychael and Tam hadn’t stopped at any of them. That meant only one thing.
Empty. All of them were empty.
I looked over Imala’s shoulder. She never looked up from the page, her finger running down the writing there, then flipped the page. “This says what cells are taken and by who. Knowing that also tells us what cells are still available.”
“I take it there are supposed to be prisoners up here?” I asked.
Imala furiously flipped the pages. “Yes,” she snarled. “And Tam’s father is supposed to be in that first cell. The Khrynsani keep meticulous records.”
Unless they’d been ordered to quickly move the prisoners and not keep meticulous records. I didn’t need an announcement complete with trumpets to tell me that we’d stepped in something we should’ve steered clear of. It was too late now; we were knee-deep in it.
“But Nukpana doesn’t start sacrificing until tomorrow night,” Piaras said. “There’s another level, right? The prisoners must be down there.”
I nodded, not taking my eyes from the stairs leading down to that level. The same stairs Khrynsani guards and those two prison mages had come charging up. Stairs that were now empty, leading to a level that was completely silent. With all the hell we’d raised up here, the prisoners should be shouting. If their guards had been in a knock-down, drag-out fight, chances were good that the people they’d fought were here to free them. The prisoners would be calling out to us, letting us know where they were.
No shouts. Silence. Crickets.
I had a really bad feeling about this, bordering on panic. By coming here, we might have doomed the mission—and ourselves. Though we’d all agreed to take the risk. The unspoken question that no one had asked but had to be thinking—what if those prisoners were no longer in the dungeon at all? It was looking like we were the only living people in the dungeon, new prisoners for the taking. This was feeling more like a trap every second.
Kesyn ran halfway down the stairs leading up to the temple. The sleeve of his robe was pushed back to his elbow, his arm extended, fingers spread, palm out toward the door at the top of the stair. The old goblin was out of breath, apparently from holding his spells in place. “Tam, can you track your father? Tell if he’s even here?”