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combined.
    He shrugged his right arm now, sending a golden loop of spell stuff sliding down off his shoulder into his hand—some sort of entrapment magic by the look of it and one of his presets. With a snap of his wrist he lashed the golden line at Stel. Good. Tying her up might keep him distracted long enough for me to get in close and—
blood of the goddess!
    Instead of being caught by the line, Stel dropped under the ensnaring spell while simultaneously lunging toward the Elite lieutenant in a fencer’s extension with her right-hand rod. Far more startling was the way she brought her left-hand rod up and back, using it to snag the spell-line. Looping it quickly around the tip a half dozen times, she brought it down and around behind her back, jerking the lieutenant off balance and into her other rod. The iron tip caught him in the floating ribs with an audible crack of breaking bone.
    His stone dog lunged forward then, and would probably have bitten her arm in half if a blast of raw magical force hadn’t caught him squarely in the chest, spinning him half around. A second blast hit him in the shoulder and threw his thousand-plus-pound bulk into the wall just to the left of the door frame, scattering stone chips in his wake. The wall came apart in a cloud of shattered boards and plaster and I turned a quick eye toward the source of the blast. Vala.
    She held a pair of short wooden wands, hilted likefighting daggers and likewise positioned. Both glowed with an intense green light in my magesight and I wondered what had gone into their making. But I didn’t let that distract me from my main goal—the lieutenant was still alive and that meant he was still a threat.
    For about two more seconds. Stel let the spell-line she’d caught fall across her shoulders. Then she pivoted, using her own body as a sort of spool to take up the line and pull the lieutenant in closer before she crushed his throat with her right-hand rod. She was terrifyingly fast, completing the whole maneuver before the Elite had time to even begin the process of unweaving his spell. Somewhere outside the stone dog thrashed and gurgled as its own life boiled away in sympathy with its dying master’s.
    Suddenly, Stel dropped to the floor. I had an instant to wonder why before a beam of bright blue light passed through the space she’d just been occupying. About as thick around as my thigh, it came from the door behind her and punched a hole through the dust and debris from the broken wall. It likewise punched a hole through Boquin, the post he was leaning against, the guy across the table from him, an unknown drinker near the fireplace, and the fireplace itself.
    A moment later, a second stone dog charged into the room through the wreckage left by the first, and a third came in through the front door. Panic ensued as everyone, including several of the Crown Guards tried to find someplace else to be. One particularly clever shadowsider took a moment to throw his shirt over the mage-light chandelier, plunging the already dimly lit room into near blackness. I left the second Elite by the back door to Vala and her friend and headed toward the one coming in through the front.
    I went by way of rolling under the nearest empty table, picking up the gods-alone-know what kind of vermin from the filthy straw in the process. An odd choice perhaps, but one that came out of a lifetime of hiding what I am. In the dark and the chaos, the table provided plenty of cover as I called on Triss to cover me with his darkness. In a worldwhere spells shine bright in magesight, there’s no such thing as true invisibility, at least not from your fellow mages. Triss and his Shade cousins can, however, provide a very effective substitute.
    Triss is both a part of my personal shadow and apart from it, a creature of elemental darkness. With the table and the madness around it hiding us from most eyes, he flowed up from the floor to encase me in a thin layer of condensed darkness