All Spell Breaks Loose Read Online Free PDF Page B

accident. With all the heavy firepower flying around, accidents weren’t just possible, they were likely, and I was the first person one was likely to happen to. In an enclosed space, spells were just as likely to hit your own people as taking out the people you were actually aiming at.
    I barely managed to avoid being brained by the pommel of a thrown knife. I had no clue who had done the throwing. Right now, my biggest challenge was finding space to fight without killing, or being killed by, my own people.
    Technically, Carnades was one of my own people. That thought was just scary enough to make me risk a quick glance behind me. The mirror mage had his hands full, literally and figuratively, as one Khrynsani had jumped him and another was about to join the fray. I’d never thought of Carnades as the brawling type, but I’d learned never tounderestimate survival instinct. He had nothing left to lose except his life, and everything to gain by taking ours and leaving the goblins with the blame.
    Carnades’s hands were around a goblin soldier’s throat, his hands flaring with silver light. The Khrynsani let out a shriek you wouldn’t have thought could come from a grown man. The screams stopped and Carnades tossed him aside, the dead goblin’s throat a smoking ruin of blackened flesh.
    Mychael wrenched the helmet off of a dead goblin and hurled it at the mirror they’d come through. Just a normal throw probably would have done the trick, but Mychael didn’t want to risk anything except a direct hit. There was magic behind that helmet missile, and it hit, turning the mirror’s reflective surface into a spiderweb of shattered glass. Nothing else would be coming through that.
    Stopping the flow of goblins was good, but taking their escape hatch away had the undesirable effect of turning homicidal Khrynsani into homicidal and desperate Khrynsani.
    But the remaining Khrynsani were outnumbered and they knew it.
    Or they should have.
    Anyone in their situation looking halfway happy was, in my opinion, all the way suicidal. If that was the case, these boys were about to get their wish.
    One of them grinned until his fangs showed.
    Mychael swore, seconded by Tam.
    I didn’t need to sense what they did. I could see it.
    A clawed hand, a massive hand, punched through the mirror right next to Carnades’s. The hand was attached to and followed by a scaled arm corded with thick muscle. Nothing that big should have been able to move that fast, but apparently no one had ever told that to it—whatever it was. There wasn’t any need to shatter the mirror it was coming through; the monster did that all by itself, squeezing its hunched shoulders and horned head through the glass, snapping and reducing the frame to splinters. That it haddestroyed its own escape hatch didn’t seem to bother it at all. In fact, judging from its dingy, yellow eyes and a mouthful of smiling fangs to match, it looked downright happy about where he was.
    Happy and hungry.
    Piaras launched into a litany of curses in Goblin. Someone had been around Talon too long. Then I saw what Piaras had seen. Spellsongs wouldn’t do any good on this thing, either. It didn’t have plugs in its ears.
    It didn’t have any ears.
    Though I was betting it’d bleed. Problem was getting close enough to stick it with something sharp without having it do the same to us, namely with the hooked claws attached to the fingers that were dragging the ground.
    “Down!”
Justinius roared.
    The old man didn’t have to yell twice. I hit the floor, with Piaras a split second behind me. At that moment, Justinius Valerian, archmage of the Conclave of Sorcerers and the most badass spellslinger there was, opened up on the monster. It was beautiful—in a seriously gory way. Justinius’s hands glowed incandescent white as he hit the monster with a fireball hard enough to embed the thing into the bedrock on the other side of the room.
    At least that was what should have happened.
    The