“Traitor!” Obek roared, his bloody hand thrust out at Shikiloa. “Like your father.”
Another crash against the glaze left a crack exactly the size of the sliver that had fallen from Shikiloa’s hand. She met his gaze, cold and distant. “You are a traitor to all humanity. And your kin, the demons, are coming to claim you.”
“Fool,” growled Biri-Daar. Another crack appeared in the surface of the mirror. The Mage Trust, save Uliana, fell back toward the shadowed galleries in the points of the star-shaped room. “Who turned you against the trust?”
A chip of the mirror came loose and plinked on the hexagonal stones of the floor. Sound came from it: a profusion of roaring and screeching, the scraping of what sounded like claws on the other side of the mirror.
“No one turned me,” Shikiloa sneered. “I am my own creature. My choices are my own. The tiefling dies if the city has to die with him.”
“How did you know he would be here?” Remy asked.
From the look on her face, he knew the answer.
“Philomen,” he said.
She did not deny it. She raised a short staff, its head transforming before their eyes from a crescent moon to an iridescent green skull.
“No,” Uliana groaned. Her eyelids fluttered as she tried to open her eyes and get free of the vision. “No,” she said again-and then she reached out her left hand, pointed unerringly at Shikiloa, and incinerated the youngest trustee before Shikiloa could defend herself.
At that moment the mirror exploded in a hail of obsidian shards. They stung and sliced across the exposed skin of Remy’s face and hands, tearing also at the leather of his tunic and boots. He ducked away, hearing the fragments ricochet around the room. Already there were screams; the unprotected and unprepared trustees were badly cut and slashed.
The demons that came through the opened portal were about the size of dwarves, but a burnt red in color with cruel wide mouths and four-fingered hands ending in ragged black claws. They tumbled over one another coming through the mirror frame. Behind them, the fiery hellscape of Thanatos belched its miasma into the council chamber.
“Demons aren’t my kin,” Obek snarled, and cut two of them in half before their feet had found the floor.
Since leaving Avankil, Remy had seen many things he’d never seen before. Most of them he had no name for, but these he recognized. They were known as evistros, or carnage demons. Remy had heard stories of them rampaging in packs near places where Abyssal energies spilled into the mortal world. They existed only to destroy. And they were destroying now, tearing the Mage Trust to bits as the embattled trustees, few of whom had ever fought with anything other than words, found themselves overrun by the savage demons who clawed and bit and rent them without mercy. They died despite the best efforts of Biri-Daar and Remy and the rest, who cut down the evistros nearly as fast as they could pour through the violated mirror.
Of the Mage Trust, only Uliana fought with courage. Her first victim had been Shikiloa the traitor, but in the moments since she had cut a swath through the evistros as she fought to close the portal they had opened. With the mirror destroyed, she opened her eyes and began to lay waste to the enemies of the trust and her city.
“Eladrin!” she shouted above the infernal yowling evistros and the sounds of steel on demonic flesh and bone. “With me!”
The star elf vaulted clear of the melee, leaping to catch a wall sconce and swinging up to brace against a timber supporting the vaulted ceiling. Grimly and with absolute calm he began to destroy the evistros that approached Uliana. Remy too fell back to protect her, as did Obek from the other side. Keverel swatted a leaping demon out of the air as it cleared the portal. It scrambled on the ground, but before it could find its feet he broke its back and turned to the next, the name of his god repeated over and over again on his lips.
The second focus of the battle was Biri-Daar, who stood alone, her enchanted blade describing an arc of maiming and death around her. Lucan’s arrows whispered through the air to catch those evistros that got out of the portal past Keverel and Uliana. They were everywhere, in frenzied groups dismembering the dead and swarming over the living. Some, caught up in the bloodlust, turned on one another, splattering their black and sulfurous blood to mix with the spilled red of the Mage Trust.
Something tugged at Remy’s belt, pulling him off balance. He looked down and saw one of the demons, gnawing on his belt-and the pouch where he had carried the chisel across the long miles from Avankil. Remy flicked his knife out of his sleeve, the way he’d learned back home on the waterfront, and stabbed it through the eye. It lashed him across the face with one claw and kept digging for the chisel with the other. He twisted the blade, feeling the bones of its skull crack. Malignant light still shone in its remaining eye, but with the twist of the blade its arms and legs fell limp and it dropped away as a blinding flash brought tears to Remy’s eyes. When his vision cleared, he saw tumbled and blackened bodies of evistros all around, yet he was untouched save for the fading afterimage.
“Mind the chisel, Remy,” Uliana said. “If they get their hands on it, the seal is as good as destroyed.”
Looking down, Remy saw ragged claw marks scored into the leather of his belt and the pouch containing the chisel in its box. Then the evistros came again in another wave, and he lifted his sword to meet them. Over his head, Uliana’s magic swept and flared, the evistros falling back before it as slowly-slowly, and with the help of Paelias, whose fey magic was anathema to the carnage demons-she choked off the open portal. The evistros came through fewer and fewer at a time, Keverel and Lucan exacting a terrible toll at their emergence; then they came through one at a time, wriggling through a diminished hole too small to admit a full grown man; then, as Keverel caved in the snarling face of a last single demon, Uliana closed off the portal, severing the dying evistro at the waist.
Still there were dozens of them in the Council Chamber. Cut off from Thanatos, they knew they could expect no mercy-not that they knew anything of mercy in Orcus’s realm. Gathering into knots of three or four, they banded together and fought to the death. Lucan ended the fight with a final arrow through the gut of an evistro that had already taken a half-dozen blows from Obek’s sword.
Of the Mage Trust, Uliana alone survived. She bent to pick up a large sliver of the Black Mirror, slick with the commingled blood of the rest of the trust. “Karga Kul will never be the same,” she said quietly. “And things may yet become more desperate. Remy of Avankil.”
Remy took a step forward.
“Have you the chisel?”
“I have it,” Remy said. He remembered the stubby, grasping fingers of the evistro feeling along his belt, and shuddered at the thought of what might have happened.
“At least some of the evistros knew of it, and you may yet meet more adversaries who will. Yet you must keep it,” Uliana said. “You have brought it this far under terrible pressure and with commendable courage. Now you must keep it a little longer, for there is no one else who can be trusted to do it.”
“I would trust any of them to do it,” Remy protested, extending his arm to encompass his companions.
“Which speaks well of you. Yet you have brought it this far, and we do not know whether that is luck or strength. It would be foolish to risk a change now. You will keep it until the time comes to destroy it. Biri-Daar.”
Biri-Daar offered a shallow bow.
“You will select six Knights of Kul, the six whom you would most trust to uphold the precepts of the order. You will go with them to the guard at the Cliff Quay and you will give him this.” She wrote on a parchment and pressed it shut with her seal. “Quickly. Meet us in the Chamber of the Seal. You have the quill, yes? Make sure you keep it with you.”