In addition to Tam, there was Imala Kalis, director of the goblin secret service; Prince Chigaru Mal’Salin; two of his bodyguards; and my father, Eamaliel Anguis. Imala had been secretly helping to organize and equip the goblin Resistance while seemingly loyal to the goblin king. Prince Chigaru was the choice of Tam and Imala—and the saner members of the goblin nobility—to displace and replace his brother, the king. My father, Eamaliel Anguis, was the previous Saghred bond servant and, thanks to prolonged contact with the rock, was now 934 years old. His soul’s present home was in the body of a twenty-year-old Guardian. He’d led the original team that had taken the Saghred from another insane goblin king about nine hundred years ago, so he had firsthand experience with the crap we’d be stepping into when we stepped through that mirror.

Good people to have with us. Now, if they’d just get their asses down here, we could go.

“Sir, they’re not engaging,” Vegard was saying. “At least not fully. Hit-and-run tactics. It’s like they just want to be seen.”

Mychael scowled. “Draw our men out.”

Out, as in away from the citadel.

Justinius answered my unspoken thought. “The citadel’s on lockdown; no one’s getting in.”

“Unless they’re getting in the same way as the rest of them,” Mychael growled. “And the same way we’re getting out.”

Mirrors.

Oh no.

That didn’t have to mean here in the mirror room. There were other mirrors in the citadel. Last month, we’d come through one to escape the demon queen. It led from the bowels of the old citadel on the other side of the island to the containment rooms here. Down here.

With us.

Even the best-kept secrets were seldom completely kept secrets. It’d been my experience that the bigger the risk, the bigger the chance that secret had sprung a leak. If Sarad Nukpana knew we were coming to Regor through a mirror in the citadel, then he probably knew our exit mirror was in that cave; which meant that goblins could be waiting for us on the other side to escort us to the front of Nukpana’s Saghred sacrifice line, starting with me.