Once we were through the mirror, Mychael shattered it. There wasn’t a Hellgate for the demons to escape through anymore, but Mychael didn’t want them leaving the citadel, at least not alive.
Mychael held up a hand for me and Tam to stay put, and he and Vegard took up positions on either side of the door. Mychael nodded once and they made their move. When Vegard’s shoulders relaxed, I knew the hall was clear. Suspicious as hell, but clear.
At least of men or demons.
The air was literally vibrating with magic. It was coming from all around us, but mainly from the floor beneath our feet. Tam clenched his dagger in his teeth to free his hands and quickly tied back his long black hair in a tail.
“We’re one level above the Saghred’s containment room,”
Mychael said in mindspeak. “There should-”
Screams, shouts, and demonic roars damned near deafened us, like someone had opened a soundproof door to a madhouse. That someone had used a sound veil, a good one. Apparently they didn’t need to be quiet anymore-my money was on the demon queen.
Mychael ran down the hall and all but threw himself down the stairs; Vegard, Tam, and I were hot on his heels. It suddenly occurred to me that my hands were empty. I didn’t have a weapon to my name, and no one I was with had one to spare. I silently swore a blue streak. I was running full-speed and unarmed into a nest of demons. Usually I’d get what I needed from the first bad guy I could knock down and pilfer, but this time the bad guys were demons-naked demons. No sword belts there. Though when you had claws, horns, and a mouth full of fangs, steel was redundant.
No one had been upstairs, because everyone was down here.
Too many Volghuls and not nearly enough Guardians. The only Volghul I’d seen go through the mirror was the one with the demon queen. The number of Volghuls down here didn’t bode well for the number of Guardians left alive up in the citadel. Where was Sora and a demon trap when you needed them?
Open space was at a minimum, which made for ugly, close-quarters fighting.
And Piaras was in the middle of it.
He had his back to the Saghred’s containment room door with a pair of long daggers in his hands. The blades were glowing. Not the white of Mychael’s magic, but like polished silver infused with pure light. I didn’t know Piaras could do that. Like Justinius said, the kid could rise to the occasion. He wielded those silver blades with feline grace and, hell, even with flair. Piaras couldn’t move like that-but Sarad Nukpana could.
However, Piaras was killing demons, not Guardians. Nukpana would have been doing the opposite. Piaras’s lips were moving in spellsong incantation. I couldn’t hear the words, but the Volghuls that got too close to him obviously could. They screamed and staggered back, and when they went down, they didn’t get back up.
Piaras’s eyes were wide and terrified, but determined. They were his eyes, not Nukpana’s. What abilities the Saghred had enhanced in me, I’d kept. It looked like the same was true for Piaras. The goblin’s sword skills must have rooted themselves deep in Piaras’s reflexes. Creepy as hell, but anything that kept him alive was good.
Helping Piaras stay alive was Archmagus Justinius Valerian.
The old man was kicking demonic ass and having the time of his life. It was beautiful.
He’d staked out ground in the hall near Piaras, and the forces of Hell literally couldn’t budge him from that spot. He vaporized a knot of demons trying to overrun him and Piaras. That move alone went a long way toward evening the odds, and it boosted the heck out of Guardian morale. The men redoubled their efforts and more Volghuls died. Justinius was flushed, but he was grinning like the spell-happy maniac he was. The archmagus was back, and I didn’t see Carnades anywhere. Maybe Phaelan and his rock had another talk with him.
Mychael jerked his gaze up toward the ceiling. He heard something, and so did I. It wasn’t coming from the ceiling; it was coming from inside the ceiling. Scuttling, scratching, and moving fast.
Running away from the Saghred’s chamber. The little purple bastards had gotten their claws on the rock.
“They’re taking it to the queen,” Tam said. Like their elven counterparts, goblin ears did more than just look good.
Mychael shot a glance back at Justinius. His duty was to protect the old man, but the old man didn’t look like he needed or wanted any help. It’d just piss him off. As six more demons went down in blue-flamed death, I knew I never wanted to piss him off, either.
“Where does that air duct go?” I asked.
Mychael actually growled. “All over the damned citadel.”
I felt a tugging in my chest and grinned in fierce determination. The Saghred wanted me to follow it, and I was only too happy to oblige. The rock had been stabbed with the Scythe once, and it didn’t want it to happen again.
“I can track it,” I said.
No one asked how I could; they knew. I took off running down the hall in the opposite direction of the Saghred’s containment room with Mychael, Tam, and Vegard right behind me. The tugging led up, so up the stairs I ran. Up was good; up meant out. I was sick and tired of being stuck underground. The tugging led to a dark hall with a pair of doors about twenty feet ahead. I stopped. There were lightglobes set into the walls, but they were as dark as everything else. I was impulsive, occasionally dim, but never suicidal.
“What’s through those doors?” I asked Mychael in mindspeak.
“Our gym.”
The gym. The place where Guardians worked out, trained-learned to kill.
“It’s packed with weapons.” My lack of enthusiasm was evident.
“Yes.”
“Is there another way in?”
Mychael nodded once.
A room with weapons was good for me since I didn’t have any; but it would be bad for all of us if the demons got to them first, which they probably had. Just because they had claws, fangs, and horns didn’t mean they wouldn’t take anything hanging on the walls-like those demon-slaying, green-bladed, hooked spear thingies. I swallowed. Killed by demons with weapons that were made to kill demons. Irony sucked.
A faint clinking came from the darkness, not just inside the doors, but farther into the room-much farther than I wanted to go without knowing exactly what was in there.
“Chains,” Mychael said before I could ask.
I arched a brow.
“Attached to punching bags,” he clarified.
Oh.
I wondered if the demon queen knew that we’d destroyed her only way home, and now her situation was all or nothing, do or die, kill or be killed. She was cornered and we had no choice but to go in after her and however many Volghuls were sharing the dark with her. The queen had the Saghred and the Scythe; and if she managed to stab the former with the latter, she’d have all the backup she needed, and we’d have Hell on earth-thousands, maybe millions of souls looking for new bodies, and the inhabitants of Mid would be just the beginning. And the four of us would be at the front of the line. It was up to us to stop it all, and my hands were as empty of blades as the day I was born. We didn’t want to rush in, but it only took a second for a demon to stab a rock.
The whole situation had suicide mission written all over it.