Phaelan went back-to-back with me. “If we just stand here, they’re going to eat us.”
“Shield and torch,” Vegard said calmly.
“Phaelan can’t shield,” I hissed.
“Mine aren’t that good,” Piaras added quickly.
“And I can’t torch,” I told Vegard. He knew why. No containments on the Saghred meant no containments on me. If I used the tiniest fraction of what I’d used in the watcher station, the demon queen herself would be down here in nothing flat. We needed a quick, quiet, hot burst, not a volcanic eruption.
“Can you shield them?” Vegard asked me.
“Yes, but I have to drop my blades.”
Vegard couldn’t believe what he just heard. “What?”
“I need a hand on each of them, bare palm.”
“Can’t you—”
“No, I can’t!” I snapped. “I’m a seeker, not a soldier!”
“If we survive this, I’m teaching you how—”
“Whatever! I’ll shield; you roast!”
I slowly sheathed my blades with dozens of hungry demons within touching distance and grabbed hold of Phaelan and Piaras and pulled them close.
Vegard did his thing. A wave of ice-blue flame rolled off of the Guardian and engulfed the demons. It didn’t burn them—it froze them. The ones on the ceiling started falling to the floor like fanged icicles. Once the last one hit the floor, I let Phaelan and Piaras go.
Vegard took a couple of deep breaths. War magic like that was like lifting weights, and he’d just lifted more than his share.
“Ma’am, when we get out of here, I’m going to teach you how to—”
The shadows shimmered and parted, revealing a Volghul that had probably been there the entire time. I didn’t know if all Volghuls looked alike, but this one could have been the twin to the one Tam and I crammed into that bottle.
The demon looked straight at me and smiled, his teeth pointy and sharp, handy for things like ripping throats out. His claws seemed to be flexing with a life of their own and were similarly practical. Others flowed out of the offices ahead and behind us.
My steel was sheathed; I reached for my magic.
A Volghul’s claws whipped out, wrapping themselves around Phaelan’s throat. The tip of one razor-sharp claw rested confidently against the big vein in my cousin’s throat. Phaelan wasn’t going anywhere.
And neither were we.
“Our queen wants the Saghred bearer alive.” The Volghul’s smile broadened, showing me all of his teeth. “As do I.”
Chapter 26
I wanted to get to the Assembly chamber as quickly as possible, but this wasn’t what I had in mind.
Fate was a bitch with a warped sense of humor.
“No resistance and this one lives,” said the Volghul holding Phaelan captive. The demon looked down at my cousin with confused distaste. “This one has no magic; it is a waste of skin.”
Phaelan opened his mouth to say something he shouldn’t. The demon’s hooked claw penetrated his skin just deep enough that a single drop of blood welled around the claw’s tip. “You wish to contradict me, little mortal?”
I shot Phaelan the mother of all shut-up looks. I’d seen what those claws could do. My cousin was not going to die in a pool of his own blood.
The demon queen wanted me alive, but I suspected that distinction was only temporary, and it applied only to me. The Volghul that had Phaelan’s entire neck in his hand wanted to play—and he was looking for an excuse. In our family, snarky one-liners came as naturally as breathing. But if Phaelan wanted to continue breathing, we both needed to keep our big mouths shut.
Phaelan was a hostage, the rest of us were prisoners. My cousin had no magic to defend himself, and now he had no weapons. And in a matter of moments, neither did the rest of us. I’d gotten my cousin into this; I’d get him out. I’d get us all out. Piaras was being treated like a prize. I knew why, and so did he. Phaelan was a hostage; Piaras was going to be a royal gift.
With an escort of nine Volghuls that I could see, and more that I could sense, we weren’t going anywhere but where our captors wanted to take us. And I couldn’t see them going anywhere but the Hellgate. We’d be there in minutes. Any plans I’d come up with until now had centered on getting in, locating the Scythe, stealing it if possible, then getting out, preferably without being seen by anyone. Capture by demons had put a major crimp in those plans. Not that the finding, stealing, and escaping parts of my plan couldn’t still happen. A master thief might be able to snatch the goods out from under their mark’s nose.
But their mark wasn’t the queen of demons. And I wasn’t a master thief.
Phaelan and Vegard weren’t going to die, and the demon queen wasn’t getting her hands on Piaras. The only way either would happen would be over my dead body, and I’d take as many demons with me as I could.
Our captors led us up the last flight of stairs and the heat hit us. A broad hall curved in both directions—my guess was we were in an entrance hall to the Assembly. A sickly green glow, like some sort of fungus, had been smeared along the walls at irregular intervals, dimly lighting a space big enough to hold hundreds of mages. The heat was stifling; but it wasn’t a dry heat, this was like walking into a greenhouse. Directly across from us were a pair of massive doors that must have been at least three times my height. They were closed and were guarded by more Volghuls.
All of that registered in the only part of my brain that wasn’t screaming.
The floor was covered with eggs.
We were in a demon incubator.
I didn’t want to meet the demons that had laid these things. The eggs were oval and almost came up to my knees. Some kind of sticky goo held them upright on the floor. Half of the eggs had hatched, the rest were glowing softly, their shells nearly translucent. Things were squirming inside, things that wanted to be outside. With us. In the middle of several of the already hatched clutches lay pale bones and what looked like the remains of shredded robes. The newborn demons’ first meals had probably been Rudra Muralin’s now-deceased allies. No wonder Muralin was topside playing ambassador. He wasn’t in control down here anymore. No one was—at least no one from around here.
No wonder he wanted me to come down here to close the Hellgate.
The Volghul that had my arm clutched in his claw saw where I was looking and knew what I had seen.
“Yes, the mortal spellcasters made fine food for our children. They grow quickly and eat much. There is no more food here, so they have gone to the surface to hunt.”
My stomach knotted. Newborn demons. That was what we’d run into downstairs, hatchlings on their way to feed. Swarming through dark tunnels that emptied all over the city. Except the demons weren’t going all over the city, at least not yet. First they’d take what food was closest.
Campus. Hundreds of students.
I remembered the terrified chaos in the Quad yesterday that had been caused by one demon. These were swarms, nothing but teeth and starving stomachs, small enough to go anywhere, ravenous enough to eat anything.
I saw Vegard out of the corner of my eye. His face was an expressionless mask. Guardians protected the Conclave mages and students. Mychael would defend a student before a mage anytime, and Vegard thought like his commander. He needed to get away; we all needed to get away. Now. Someone had to warn those kids. Sora and her faculty were expecting Volghul-sized demons and larger—not hundreds, maybe thousands of piranha with feet and endless appetites.
“Your young ones will be sweet.” The demon’s sharp black tongue flicked across his lips in anticipation. “Our young will feed first, then we shall join them.”
I felt the pull of the Hellgate through the closed doors. Actually it was the Saghred doing the feeling; I wanted to be doing the running. What lay beyond those doors was the entryway into our world for a horde of demons. In the midst of my growing panic, it dimly occurred to me that I had absolutely no clue how many demons were in a horde.
The Assembly was huge. Row after row of crumbling stone tiers that had once held chairs fanned up and out from the massive round stage with steps leading up to a dais that dominated the chamber. Seven columns rose from the edge of the stage to meet the vaulted ceiling.
The Hellgate was on the dais, and it was only a gate in the loosest sense of the word. A slickly wet membrane was suspended between two of the columns like a spiderweb, opaque around the edges where it touched the columns, and increasingly transparent as it neared the center, with a narrow opening that looked more like a slit than anything else. A demon slid through and landed with a wet plop on the stone floor. It looked up, quivering in its eagerness. Demons only got that excited over one thing. Food. It scrambled to its feet, claws, whatever, and with two bounds disappeared through one of the five man-height mirrors set up at the base of the other columns. Depending on where the receiving mirrors were on the island, the demon might not have to go far to find what it wanted.
“Oh shit,” Vegard breathed.
I couldn’t have said it better.
As fascinating as incoming demons from Hell were, my attention was riveted to a stone slab to the right side of the Hellgate opening, a slab that bore a disturbing resemblance to an altar. Or more to the point, I was riveted to who was on that slab.
Carnades Silvanus. Chained, gagged, and laid out in a white robe like a demon snack.
Rudra Muralin stood at the head of the altar, and at the sight of me, what was a confident smile twisted into a smirk. He was one happy goblin. My goal—with my dying breath, if necessary—was to ruin his day.
I wanted to yell out “I told you so” to the elf mage, but I looked around me at an uncountable number of yellow, green, and red eyes shining out of the darkness—and every last pair of those eyes were staring unblinking at us.
We were newcomers, prisoners, playthings.
We were food.
I couldn’t see the stairs beneath my feet all that well, but it didn’t really matter since my feet didn’t touch them but once or twice. The two Volghuls who gripped my upper arms decided that I was easier to lift and carry.
