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A second later, the flames spread across the roof, and the building really lost it, morphing faster than I could blink into things I was pretty sure hadn’t come out of my brain, since it couldn’t even comprehend most of them.
And then it started shaking.
“Get down!” Pritkin yelled, knocking me to the ground and covering me with his body. But that wasn’t necessary. The guards made a shaking motion with their arms, all at once, and formed a wall from the huge shields that popped out of their armor, which must have been twelve feet tall.
We needed every inch of them. A second later, the house exploded, sending a powerful rush of magic and strange fiery sludge shooting over us, hard enough to knock some of the guards off their feet. But the ones in front of us held the line, the bottoms of their shields buried in asphalt—which was now cobblestones, I noticed, since my nose was all of an inch away from them—while their bodies braced above.
I stared up at the lines of fire painted on the bronze armor the Allû wore and finally realized that they weren’t there to hurt us. They were there to protect us. Because it looked like the whole city was going up.
Buildings were writhing and morphing on every side, the usually twilit sky was burning with a reddish haze, and the spell that covered this place was getting rents in it, allowing me to glimpse mind-altering things beyond it. Meanwhile, the guards were straightening up again, ripping their shields out of the ground, and hedging us around. And, as soon as we scrambled back to our feet, starting a quick march forward.
“Here,” Pritkin told me, handing me a pair of boots. His boots. Or, at least, they were the same big, black combat variety he often wore.
“You grabbed boots?” I asked, hurrying along. And wondering how I was supposed to get them on.
“Always protect your feet.”
“And other things?” I asked, because other things were hanging out right now.
“Priorities. If you can’t move you can’t fight.”
“Well, you’ll fight better in these,” I said, and handed over the jeans.
He pulled them on, then took back the boots and put those on, too. Because no amount of tight lacing was going to keep them on my feet. And then he picked me and my fluffy bathrobe up, because the street ahead was actually smoking. But the area to either side was even worse, so we soldiered on, all but blind once we descended from the hill we’d appeared on into a valley where the guards’ huge bodies blocked most of the view. But I didn’t feel like complaining, because they blocked other things as well. Including a vending machine that came running down the street, screaming.
The spell was definitely getting screwy and assigning completely wrong images to things. Normally, the other people here looked like the somewhat harried city types you could see anywhere from New York to Bangkok. That wasn’t true in all cases; there were things the spell didn’t seem to work on, or that maybe my seer’s eyes occasionally saw through. But for the most part, the denizens of the Shadowland looked like regular Joes, just as I was pretty sure I looked like whatever bug-eyed, tentacle-draped, horn-wearing thing they considered everyday and boring.
But not now. Now the spell was losing it and was just slapping any old images onto the backdrop, like it was pulling stuff randomly from my mind but couldn’t be bothered to make sure that it fit or not. Hence the flailing snack machine. And the potted people outside the entrance to a building, waving back and forth in the breeze off the fires, with creepy, fixed smiles on their faces. And the bicycle and taxicab, the latter full of what looked like looted merchandise, throwing down in the middle of the street. I also saw a sapling just uproot itself and walk off, apparently getting tired of the bullshit, and found myself in full solidarity with the tree.
What the literal hell was going on?
“Some kind of attack,” Pritkin said, when I asked. “Although I can’t imagine who would be this foolish. The entire council will come down on whoever broke the peace.”
“Wouldn’t want to be him,” I said, gazing around.
Pritkin started looking worried for some reason.
“You haven’t been . . . up to anything . . . while I was away?” he asked.
“What does that mean?”
He shot me a look. “You know perfectly well what it means. Marco informed me that you went shopping yesterday and then to a meeting with the senate.”
“Um. More or less.” Now I was starting to get worried, too.
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Did anything unusual happen on either of those two occasions?”
“. . . Define ‘unusual.’”
Pritkin’s frown tipped over into a scowl.
But he didn’t get a chance to reply, because we were being quick-marched into a familiar building. I don’t know what the demon council’s meeting hall actually looked like, but my mind had assigned it the facade of a drab, slightly shabby-looking hotel with the most boring lobby imaginable. And, thankfully, it was still as boring as ever, because whatever was happening outside hadn’t made it this far.
The beige carpet that met my bare toes when Pritkin sat me down was still beige and still in need of cleaning. The potted plants were still just plants, ones that looked like they’d seen better days. The reception desk was still a cheap wood laminate that had a few chips in the surface, and a fat little demon on the other side who looked relieved to see us. He waved us on back.
