Bernt threw a gnce back toward the mairance. Ed’s force barrier was gone and more demons flooded into the cavern, followed by rank upon rank of Duergar soldiers. Many of them carried obvious signs of disease like open sores and boils – whatever Lin had doo them, it wasn’t temporary. A sed breach had opened nearby, and more of the gray dwarves poured out from it as well.

  “Back up! Get inside!” Dayle shouted over the din – his magically enhanced voice so loud that it echoed off the walls. All around him, people began to move. Bernt stepped back with them woodenly, still trying to process what he’d just seen.

  Was Ed dead? Did the big imp ma him into the hells? Was something like that even possible?

  Spells flew toward the enemy, unched by Dayle, Yarrod, and a few of the surviving warlocks, but nothing his time. The enemy had mages of their own, and more than a few warlocks who raised various kinds of barriers to deflect rocks, fire, force, and even shadows.

  Where was Kustov? What about Fiora? Were they still in their side-tunnel, harassing the duergar as they advaoward them?

  Moving quickly, they backed up into the Underkeepers’ headquarters, where the remaining guards were already f up into a new defensive line under Glim’s direost of them didn’t look in any shape to fight, but muards streamed in from behi, and he moved out of the way to let them through. Some of the warlocks worked in the back, administering healing potions, while others were armed and standing among the guards.

  Dayle ran up and down the line barking orders like a general, but he stopped when he saw Yarrrod.

  “Yarrod, I need you to foul up their geomancers. you do that?” The gnome nodded calmly, though Bernt noticed that his hands shook a little.

  Dayle gave him a stern look. “Don’t hold baow. If they take down this here wall, we’re done!”

  “Good sir, don’t you worry y head about it.” The gnome said, his genteel at a stark terpoint to Dayle’s drawl. “I have just the thing to put a burr in their shoe, so long as they don’t realize it’s there, it should slow them down good and proper. If I might borrow your shovel?”

  Dayle looked a little bemused, but then offered the little man his focus. Yarrod examihe spade for a moment before hefting it in both hands and muttering to himself as he scratched at the stone wall in a line. Yarrod, Bernt knew, specialized in modifying fortune and probability. It was aeric branagid ohat wasn’t taught at the Mages’ Academy at all. Bernt wasn’t sure exactly how that might help them keep the Duergar geomancers fring the walls down, but this wasn’t the time to question the gnome. He hurried toward the double-doors – maybe he could do something to slow dowackers, at least.

  Shouts sounded from outside as the st few guards filed in, followed by the csh of arms on armor. There was an odd sug sound and the wall o’s right – the one Yarrod hadn’t started carving into, began to melt away right in front of them.

  Torvald appeared in the remaining half of the doorway, hauling a staggering Palina back behind him. Bernt caught the guardswoman as Torvald leapt bad out of the way of an ining duergar soldier. Purely by reflex, Bernt flung burning white psma into the attacker’s face, who reeled back with a shriek. Nausea suddenly twisted in his guts as the stench of burned hair and flesh wafted in his face.

  “Close ranks!” Glim barked, echoed almost simultaneously by Dayle’s order. “Spears down!”

  Half of the outer wall of the Underkeepers’ headquarters was virtually go this point, exposing them. Torvald looked back at the defenders with a terrified expression, but then his head whipped up as he stared toward something at the ceiling. Bernt looked up, but there was nothing there.

  His face suddenly firm with resolve, Torvald turned back toward the enemy and threw himself forward, dug past a duergar soldier’s spear to ram his sword into a hellhound’s side. Fire erupted, but it missed him as he spun out of the way and began to single-handedly cleave his way through the first ranks of the enemy army. One of the duergar warlocks tried to throw hellfire at him, but it missed and strue of their own instead. Torvald pushed deeper into the enemy, and the enemy shrank back.

  It wasn’t skill – not just that, anyway. Torvald was good, but he was just a regur person. Or, he had been. Torvald’s sword was on fire, now. It had just happened, a sed or so before, when he drew it out of the hellhound. At first, it just looked like hellfire, but then the fmes ged color, transitioning from an angry red to a pure, bluish hue. To Jori’s eyes, the entire man had started to glow ominously and she hissed in arm and shielded her eyes.

  “Retribution es,” he shouted, “to the wicked who would harm those sheltered in Her hand!”

  Was he quoting scripture? What was happening? Was this what it was supposed to look like when a brand new padin was chosen? Torvald didn’t even sound winded.

  Someone pushed past Bernt, breaking him out of his stuate. It was Nirlig, bleeding from a nasty cut on his face. “e on, he’s not going to keep that up forever!”

  The goblin ran forward, running his spear into the side of a dwarf who wasn’t even looking their way anymore, too preoccupied by the mad spectacle that Torvald offered. Not to be outdone, Bernt followed and threw white psma at the staff-carrying mage as he wove together the spellform for banefire with his left hand. Torvald didn’t have to do all the work. Behind him came anoblin, followed by Glim and then Josie with her cws out.

  The enemy mage struck at the ining fmes with his staff, but only succeeded in spttering it into a thousand liquid droplets that ignited violently along the patterns carved into his staff and armor. “Don’t go too far!” Bernt called after Nirlig. “We don’t want to get isoted.”

  All the while, Torvald tio carve his way through the enemy in a wide loop. He hadn’t stopped quoting scripture, a would have thought it was silly in any other situation. Here it seemed… strangely appropriate. He should have gotten bogged down and killed immediately, running directly into the enemy army like that. But he didn’t. They ged back from him hesitantly, sensing that something was wrong even as Torvald moved through them as if following a well-practiced dance. A few enemy spellcasters threw force, fire, and sto him, but they couldn’t seem to hit him and stopped, realizing they were just injuring their own soldiers.

  Fog on what was in front of him, Bernt cast a fire shield in front of himself to burn the oning soldiers as he searched for more enemy mages. If he could only find enough of them, then maybe they could turn all his around. Maybe. He found one, and a few moments ter, another. Both tried to shield themselves from Bernt’s attacks, and both died seds ter with white fire lig up out of their mouths and eyes.

  Unfortunately, that got someone’s attention. A rock struck his left shoulder so hard that the entire arm went numb for a moment a reflexively activated his thorn skin amulet. Was it broken? There hadn’t been a pop or anything. He cursed himself – he should have dohat the moment this started! Determined not to make a simir mistake, he activated his spirit-infused belt as well and tried to raise a force barrier with his right hand.

  The spell failed.

  Another rock shot toward his face, but this time he saw its source. One of the soldiers, a beardless dwarf, held a hammer instead of a staff, like Kustov. He ducked, hoping that nobody behind him was tall enough to be hit by it. There was a crack as it shattered against the remains of the wall behind him. Before he could rise, though, something heavy barreled into him, bearing him to the ground. Bernt pushed back as hard as he could with one hand, f whatever it and away from him. The duergar soldier flew backward a few paces and crashed into those behind him, bowling them over.

  Seizing the advantage, Bernt pushed himself up and followed up with a handful of white fme from his right hand. The fire struck the offending dwarf directly in the face as he tried to rise, igniting his beard with natural yellow fme even as he tried to scrape the white psma from his bubbling face with a horrified scream. Bernt couldn’t see the mage anymore. Where did she go? Raising his ag left arm, Bernt hastily cast a force barrier. It was only a pale imitation of what Fiora or Ed could do, but it would stop a single rock – he hoped.

  Jori, who’d gone flying from his shoulder when the duergar soldier struck him, hissed angrily and threw hellfire into the crowd. That was too much for the soldiers pressing in on them, and they tried to back up. All but one. She brought the hammer down on the ground at an angle, and shards of stone shot toward him with unnatural power. Bernt flinched and raised a hand. Something struck him in the side and he felt it as Jori was hit on the side of her head, sending her spinning.

  With a panicked lunge, Bernt rammed a poorly trolled dribble of mana through the iure in his right arm and smacked his palm down on her chestpte with no visible effect. For a momehought the spell failed, but then her eyes grew wide and she gasped as she began trying to tear off her armor. She didn’t have enough time. An agonized wail tore its way from her throat as her face distorted with terror. Bernt looked away, disturbed.

  There was a gash in his robes, but the stone shard hadn’t made it through his armor after being slowed by his force barrier. Jori was already climbing back up to his shoulder.

  It felt like it had been only a moment, but when he looked back to see how the others were doing, the battlefield had been transformed. The duergar mages were proving to be mostly iive, for some reason. On a hunch, Bernt gnced back behind their lines and sure enough, there was Yarrod, busily flig a wand this way and that, tripping up enemy spells nearly as quickly as they could throw them. How long could he keep that up?

  The duergar were still pushing in, but not nearly as enthusiastically as before. The Solicitors had joihe fight in ear now, scattered among the guards. Josie’s cws inflicted an effect even more extreme than her scream, to the point that her victims’ hearts gave out more often than not. Bernt had seen it kill before, but he didn’t realize that other warlocks had simir methods. In fact, she was one of the less effective fighters among them, since she had to get in close a her hands into her enemies’ unarmored skin.

  Radast stood he ter and his shadow flickered out from him ing individual enemies in darkness and leaving behind pale corpses with wide sightless eyes and mouths agape with screams that never came..

  While the duergar warlocks seemed to favor fire and the direct support of demons that fought alongside them, the Solicitors relied on less visible, but no less potent abilities. Bernt shivered at the sight. A few had abilities like Josie’s, while others incapacitated their victims as the whisperer had done up on the surface weeks before. Only one of them, the old woman, cast hellfire at her ehe duergar who saw pushed bad away with disturbed expressions on their faces, trying not to get too close.

  Bernt heard a shout and barely mao cel his fire shield in time to avoid burning Nirlig, who came stumbling sideways into the space it had been. Another balding, gray-haired goblin raced forward, pulling him ba time to keep him from getting skewered. It was Morix, Nirlig’s father. The oblin loudly scolded his son, but Bernt couldn’t make out the words. The pressure was off him for a moment and his attention was drawn to Jori’s senses, who had noticed something on the far end of the cavern.

  Sitting on his shoulder, the imp was head and shoulders above every dwarf iag army and had a clear view across the cavern. The painful light that marked Torvald had made its way to something else that registered sharply in Jori’s senses. A cart, sittihe middle of the Uy Market. Bernt could see it with his own eyes, and it was just a big crystal of some kind, but Jori’s sight told a very different story. It glowed with unimaginable power, a knew as sure as the sun rose that drinking it in would taste like icy spring water on a hot day. To Jori, at least.

  The newly minted Padin was clearly making for the crystal and still shouting as he did, though the words didn’t carry far enough to make out over the din of battle. Several demons were clustered around it, as well as a ti of armored duergar and a group of robed spellcasters, probably warlocks. One, dressed in ornate armor, was standing up in the cart aed his hand on it.

  Jori could see the power shift ihe crystal, a didn’t wait to find out what it would do. He wasn’t sure what they meant to use it for, but it couldn’t be good. Fog as quickly as he could and doing his best to guide the mana along the right pathways in his arm, he cast a fireball with his right hand. If he could hit the enemy warlock, maybe he could solve this problem right here.

  The indest projectile flew true, but the dwarf didn’t stay put. Instead of doing whatever he was going to do, he stood up and stepped baeatly sidesteppi’s attad exposing a robed figure behind him. The fireball struck the figure in the side and broke apart, spttering fmes over several other Duergar behind. While those were also burned, only the robed figure truly caught fire – the warlock had likely been wearing ented armor.

  Taking the time to cast a fireball came with a cost, though. He’d had to take his eyes off the fight right in front of him, and now found a broad-shouldered Duergar soldier rushing him, shield first. Jori had seen him ing and flung hellfire at him, but the fmes slid right off the shield’s dwarven runework. Bag up a step, Bernt kicked down at the shield as hard as he could, breaking the soldier’s arm and awkwardly scraping his leg against his on as he did. Both went stumbling in opposite dires, but Bernt caught himself quickly while his attacker crashed bato his fellows as Jori flung more fire at them. That belt was worth every crixit had charged.

  Bernt looked back toward the crystal and found his target up on the cart still hadn’t even realized that he was utack. He pointed iirely the wrong dire, shouting something, a looked. At the mairao the cavern, tall figures poured in, wearing bd gold and f ranks.

  Bernt suppressed a sudden urge to ugh.

  “The army is here!” he cried. “It’s Arice’s people!”

  Others were shouting, too, and he could see the duergar line shrink bader the renewed fury of the defenders. Inspired, Bernt began quickly casting burning glue trips with his left hand, holding the retreating duergar bad tripping them up to be cut down by the Underkeeper guards. With his right, he kept pooling mana and flinging it into the enemy while he worked more plex spells with his left. He wasn’t as effective as two mages, but he was casting two different spells at the same time. After a fashion, at least. And his mawork didn't feel strained in the least.

  For a moment, it was going so well that Bernt fot what Torvald was doing. Then there was a fsh of light sht it made stars dan his vision. At the same time, a loud crack reverberated through the cavern and the light dimmed. In Jori’s vision, a bzing et flew over the enemy army and nded hard on the ground some distance away from the battle, rolling to a stop a few seds ter.

  It was Torvald.