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“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