“Raine, we have a situation,” Kesyn said.
Mirabai looked at the floor around the altar and jumped back, stifling a scream.
A numbing coldness lapped against my legs. A churning black mist was up past my knees and climbing fast. Admittedly, I’d been a little preoccupied, but I should have noticed that. I was fused to the Saghred and couldn’t escape, but Kesyn could.
“Kesyn, run!” I screamed.
The old goblin mage had seen it before I had, and not only did he not run; he stayed right where he was. I grabbed his arm and, with my free hand, tried with everything I had to drag him off of the altar.
“I’m not leaving you,” Kesyn told me. “I can help.”
“By getting yourself killed?”
In the next two seconds, the wall of mist was almost up to my waist. Parts of it broke off from the rest and rapidly spiraled upward even farther to form bars. I reached out with one finger and barely touched a single bar of mist. My hand instantly went numb to the wrist.
Kesyn was actually grinning. “Don’t worry. Getting killed is not going to happen.”
No. This was not happening. I didn’t nearly get the Scythe only to lose the Scythe, only to almost get the Scythe again, to be imprisoned in freaking mist bars, with a lunatic old goblin sitting behind me who wasn’t going to do a damned thing about any of it.
“It’s a Level Thirteen ward,” Kesyn continued, seemingly unconcerned. “We can’t get out and no one else can get in.”
The crazy coot. “Wards only go to twelve,” I snarled.
Kesyn shrugged. “These pricks are real go-getters. This level of work is beyond what I’ve ever seen.”
Not only was he crazy; he was hallucinating. “What pricks?”
“Remember those five black mages who were standing over there with Carnades?” Kesyn asked mildly. “Well, apparently they never left. I could kick myself for not noticing until now. Must be getting feebleminded in my old age. Though they do have the best damned veils I’ve ever seen.”
I looked into the shadows behind the altar. There had been several Khrynsani black mages standing with Carnades. They weren’t there now. I hadn’t seen them go anywhere, and with their fancy robes, I would have noticed that.
I stopped and sniffed. Spices and incense. Dammit, I could still smell them. With all the blood and smoke and dragon breath flying around here, I hadn’t noticed that the spicy smell hadn’t gone away, even though there was no incense burning. The bastards were still here, and obviously they weren’t just standing around anymore. They were veiled and working hard. If I hadn’t already been hurt enough, I would have smacked myself in the head for being so stupid. Sarad Nukpana would have been prepared for anything. He wasn’t depending on mere guards to keep the Saghred safe. The Khrynsani had been trying to get the Saghred back for nearly a thousand years. They would never leave it unguarded.
And it wasn’t unguarded now.
Why did Nukpana’s best black mages wait until now to encase the altar and Saghred in a ward? Maybe it had taken them that long to get the ward started. Carnades had said that he couldn’t activate a mirror in less than fifteen minutes; maybe this was similar. I didn’t know and it didn’t matter. That Kesyn and I were stuck in a ward with five of Nukpana’s biggest and baddest did. Even if Mychael or Tam found the Scythe, it wouldn’t do us a damned bit of good if they couldn’t get it to me.
The black mages hadn’t dropped their veils, but the mist flowed around them, outlining their shapes. One of the bastards was standing less than three feet away and I’d been completely clueless. The ward spinning and solidifying around us looked like black mist swirling with motes of bright red light like thousands of demonic eyes.
Kesyn shook his head in disgust. “These are Sarad’s top spellslingers; and the grandstanding sons of bitches can’t resist showing off.” He snorted. “Spells with sparklies. Why didn’t they just tie a bow around it?”
“Do something!” I hissed to Kesyn.
“I can’t use magic in here,” he said. “We’d fry. They wouldn’t.”
“There’s nothing you can do? Because there sure as hell isn’t anything I can do.”
“I didn’t say that. It’s taking all the strength and concentration this bunch has to hold the ward together. They can’t even risk letting their concentration waver to lower their veils, and I doubt they can even spare the thought to listen to us. They’ve positioned themselves between two layers of wards, so they’re shielded from the outside and inside against magic, weapons, and sound. So spellsongs won’t work, either.” The old goblin leaned back and twisted from side to side, cracking his back. “So we’re waiting on your lover boy to get back with that dagger. Though I do wish he’d hurry. I wouldn’t want this happening prematurely.”
I was tempted to smack Kesyn upside the head. “He won’t be able to get in!”
The old goblin gave me a sly wink. “I’ve got a key.”
Sarad Nukpana was directing his dragons to slaughter the Resistance; he wasn’t defending the Saghred, because he knew it was being taken care of. He knew that I wasn’t going anywhere and neither was the Saghred. To keep the two of us right where he wanted us until he dealt with the Resistance, Nukpana had tasked his top black mages with wrapping us in a lethal Level Thirteen blanket.
Suddenly the air in the temple crackled with static like right before a lightning strike, quivering, eager, and alive… and wrong.
At its epicenter stood Sarad Nukpana.
He began gathering his power like one of the dragons drawing in a massive breath. In an instant, all of the chaos and death fell into the background as a sound like a distant thunder built until it vibrated the very air around us with its intensity. It shook the ground beneath our feet with a rumbling throb. Once. Twice. Three times.
Everyone felt it. Most of the combatants down on the temple floor retreated to the far walls, thinking another dragon was coming up through what was left of the floor.
I couldn’t drag my eyes away from Sarad Nukpana. “I have a feeling this is worse than dragons.”
Kesyn was off of the altar and standing beside me, his face grim, all signs of humor gone. “It’ll make them look like puppies. Sarad hasn’t even broken a sweat yet, but he’s about to. I hear he picked up a major power boost a few weeks ago.”
I nodded and continued staring. Sarad Nukpana had more power to draw on now, more magic at his command than anyone or anything except the Saghred itself. Nukpana had recently eaten the souls and consumed the life forces and magic of history’s strongest and most evil sorcerers. Men who had been conquerors and killers, who had cut swaths of death and destruction through entire kingdoms. They had been prisoners inside the Saghred along with Sarad Nukpana. And along with Nukpana, they had escaped. The goblin had methodically hunted them down and consumed every last one of them.
Sarad Nukpana had all of that knowledge, all of that killing power at his disposal, and he had yet to truly unleash it.
Until now.
Time slowed to a stop.
It hadn’t really, but my mind made it seem that everyone was moving in slow motion. This had happened to me before when I was in the middle of something that had a high probability of getting me killed. It was my mind’s way of giving me a chance to figure out how to undo my stupid.
This wasn’t my doing, not this time.
Sarad Nukpana stood as a statue, his beautiful face drawn into a rictus of rage, releasing his power, giving his magic flesh.
It took form, born from what Nukpana had become, created out of his own poisoned mind, the manifestation of his twisted soul. The air wavered before the goblin’s upraised hands, wavered and came together as a living thing that only vaguely held a human shape. It was easily three times Mychael’s height, its pallid skin stretched and rippling, not from muscle, but from things moving inside. Huge, distorted faces with mouths stretched in silent screams, fangs pressed against the skin, stretching it to the point of splitting open, eager and desperate to feed. Monstrous hands, grasping and pushing, arms and legs writhing inside determined to escape the skinform Sarad Nukpana had created.
Prince Chigaru and a handful of army officers were closest to the thing when it manifested. The prince led the attack. The creature bent and, with a mere swat of its fingers, sent Chigaru flying toward the opening in the floor. The prince stopped just short of falling in. Princess Mirabai ran to his side, armed with nothing except her broken pike. The officers rushed to protect their prince.
The remaining people still in the temple who had stood with Sarad Nukpana for whatever reason—terror, intimidation or like-minded sick souls, twisted by an all-consuming desire for power—they all ran. Loyalty held by fear or intimidation was quickly abandoned when something even scarier showed up.
I spotted Mychael using Tam’s curved blade, carving his way back toward us.
“Does he have it?” Kesyn snapped.
If Mychael had found the Scythe, I couldn’t see it. “Your eyes are better in this murk than mine,” I shot back.
The old mage stared intently. “I think he’s got it in his other hand. Come on, elf; get your ass up here.”
Mychael saw Nukpana’s living nightmare come to unholy life at the same time as everyone else. He glanced sharply between where Kesyn and I were sealed in the Khrynsani’s ward to the gigantic, patchwork monster that Nukpana had created and was about to unleash on the Resistance. Even with the dragons against them, they had been winning, but Nukpana’s creature was about to change that. Mychael’s frustration and rage were clear. He could take on one, not both.
Tam made the choice for all of us.
Only one thing could keep Sarad Nukpana occupied long enough to at least give us a chance to destroy the Saghred. Only one thing had the strength and cunning to bring down a monster.
A major-class demon summoned by black magic.
Mychael had found the Scythe of Nen.
Now Tam was going to sell his soul to buy us time to use it.
