Chapter 3
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.