The Nagas slithered into the room. The archers moved swiftly, releasing their silent arrows once more. Of the scholars that had surrounded Prince Tzajin, only the two trying to rescue the burning scrolls-weaponless-were left alive.
Frost moved toward the prince. He knelt by the boy, whose eyes were wide with terror, and spoke to him. Oliver only heard phrases and words as the winter man tried to soothe Tzajin, told him they had come to take him back to Palenque, that all hell had broken loose and his people needed their prince. Tzajin said nothing. He could only shake his head, mouth open, as the corpses of his teachers bled and burned around him.
Cheval strode across the chamber and slapped Wayland Smith across the face. The Wayfarer’s face darkened with fury.
“You may’ve killed us all,” she said, rage making her more beautiful than ever.
“And you have no idea what you’re talking about,” Smith snarled. “I am not meant to interfere, to participate in any of this. I brought you here, and that is already more than I ought to have done. I could be made to suffer-”
The words were cut off by shouts from one end of the room. There were two entrances-the arch where they had come in, and double doors that led out toward the atrium and the winding stairs.
Atlantean soldiers appeared in the doorway. Kitsune growled and spun toward them. Oliver shouted to the Nagas. Arrows flew. Several found their mark, but others were stopped by Atlantean armor or knocked aside by the soldiers’ swords. These were no scholars. They would not die as easily. Still, against Li and Frost and the rest, they had no hope of survival.
The winter man raised both hands and a storm erupted in the room, the air whipping snow and ice around, blowing scrolls off of tables and shattering glass display cases. The two surviving scholars finally drew their weapons, but Kitsune leaped at them, and Leicester Grindylow followed. They did not slay the teachers, disarming them instead. Grin tossed one into a bookshelf. Kitsune drove the other to the ground with pummeling fists and a hard kick to the head.
The first two guards through the door froze solid in the winter man’s storm. One of the doors blew closed. The other guards retreated, but from the shouts out in the atrium, there were others on the way.
Oliver went to the boy, Prince Tzajin.
In the chaos, none of the others seemed to have noticed, but he still had the same slack expression of terror on his face, as though he had suddenly gone catatonic.
“Your Majesty?” Oliver said.
The boy’s gaze shifted slightly.
Oliver turned just in time to see the sorcerers coming through the arch at the back of the chamber, where he and his comrades had first entered. He shouted, raised his sword, and rushed at them. The first sorcerer-a bald, scarred Atlantean man with sallow skin-sneered at him and raised a hand. A Naga arrow took him in the throat from the side.
Then Oliver was there. He bypassed the wounded, jaundiced sorcerer and drove his sword through the chest of the second to enter the chamber. The tall, spindly Atlantean fell to his knees, shock on his features. The others were still out in the corridor. Oliver reached out, grabbed the archway, and with his mind he reached into it and called up the entropy that gnawed at the ties of the world.
Kitsune grabbed hold of him from behind, hauling him backward as the entire archway collapsed, blocking the path of the sorcerers still out on the back stairs.
Li appeared beside them. On the ground, amidst the rubble, the bald, scarred sorcerer clutched at the arrow in his neck. The Guardian of Fire bent and placed both hands on the Atlantean, and his skin began to smoke, and then he caught fire.
“Get away from there!” Wayland Smith shouted.
The Wayfarer gripped Oliver’s arm and hauled him back. A gust of blizzard wind snatched at Kitsune, shoving her aside.
The rubble of the collapsed archway blew inward, pieces of it colliding with Li. The Guardian of Fire crashed to the floor amidst the debris. Some of it began to burn, the flames out of his control. The fire began to spread.
Three sorcerers hurtled into the room at once.
At the doors to the atrium, the guards charged. Oliver didn’t bother turning to see how many there were. The sounds of their pounding footfalls were enough to tell him what he needed to know.
The killing, the dying, had sickened him from the first blood shed. But there would be so much more.
Smith stepped into the breach between the sorcerers and Oliver and the Borderkind. What the hell’s he doing? Oliver thought. He said he’s not supposed to interfere.
The three sorcerers all turned toward Wayland Smith. Tendrils of magic reached out from one-just as they had from Ty’Lis in the dungeon of Palenque-and grabbed hold of him. The Wayfarer’s feet went out from beneath him. The sorcerer reeled him in. One of the others opened his jaws and they stretched wider than ought to have been possible. Unhinged, showing rows of terrible teeth like the Manticore, things moving in the darkness of his gullet, the sorcerer bent to tear out Smith’s throat. The third, a female, touched him with hands that dripped burning, steaming venom like acid.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Oliver screamed at Smith. “Fight!”
Smith managed to turn his head. “I see, boy. I see the weave of the world, and I cannot alter it by killing them. But I may be able to…erase them. I’ll be back.”
All three of the sorcerers had contact with Smith in that moment. They faded to ghosts and then vanished entirely, the Wayfarer with them. Wayland Smith had taken them into the Gray Corridors.
Oliver swore again, turned and grabbed the hand of the drooling Prince Tzajin. He slapped the kid in the face, but Tzajin did not respond.
“We’ve got to go, pal,” he commanded. He tried to haul Tzajin out of his chair, but the prince did not budge.
Oliver used both hands and pulled on him, but could not move Prince Tzajin an inch from his seat. They’d come for Prince Tzajin, and Oliver wouldn’t leave without him. But Smith had gone off somewhere, and as he glanced around, panicked, two more sorcerers entered the room, their eyes black as storm clouds.
Damia Beck screamed as she spurred her horse toward the giant. The ugly thing with its sickly pallor raised its war hammer and brought it down upon one of Damia’s cavalry. Horse and rider-a woman named Tessa-were crushed into a stain on the battlefield.
If she could have taken a breath, Damia would have cried.
Her mind screamed, damning the giant. But only unintelligible roars came from her lips. So many of her people-cavalry and infantry-had been slaughtered. Her battalion fought on valiantly. Atlanteans by the dozens, perhaps hundreds, had fallen to their swords. But this would not be ended until nearly all were dead. The war, she had quickly learned, would be decided by attrition.
That meant the giant had to die.
A Mazikeen floated overhead, locked in magical combat with an Atlantean sorcerer. Their blood and magic fell like rain, spattering Damia’s hair and her horse.
A skirmish crossed her path. Yucatazcan soldiers surrounded two of her infantry. They were so covered in blood and sweat and dirt-this man and woman-she could not see their faces as the Yucatazcan warriors slew them, hacking them apart as they fell to the ground. Bloodlust ruled the day. The screams of the dying were music to their murderers.
Even to Damia.
She rode down one of the Yucatazcans, but three others came at her. Yet she had not become commander based only on her leadership. Damia slashed down with her sword, taking off the forearm of one warrior. She plunged her blade into the face of the other, the point punching out the back of his head with a spray of blood.