“Sure,” I said. “If you’re immune to fire, it’s a piece of cake.” I blew out my breath. “I can make that sprint before my shields fail. I think. Assuming I don’t trip and fall on anything. I can’t see what the ground is like.”
“Dammit,” she said. “No. No, I guess this is where I earn my cut.” She stared at the Way and dropped the two empty backpacks she carried over one shoulder. Then she took a short breath and stripped out of her black sweater in one smooth motion, revealing a black sports bra beneath.
“Wow,” Grey said. “Nice.”
She rolled her eyes and gave him a short look, then pressed the sweater into my hands. “Hold this for me.”
“Okay,” I said. “Why?”
Her boots and fatigue pants came off next, and Michael resolutely turned slightly to one side and studied an empty section of the strong room’s wall. “Because my clothes wouldn’t survive it, and I would rather not spend the entire rest of the trip without any clothes.”
“I would,” Grey said. “I would rather that.”
“Grey,” I said. “Stop it.”
“We’re wasting time,” Nicodemus said.
Ascher met my eyes for a second, a fairly daring thing to do between two practitioners, and her cheeks flushed a little bit pink before she shucked out of her socks and underwear, motions quick and entirely without artifice. She pressed the rest of her clothes into my hands and said, “Don’t do anything weird with them.”
“I was going to shellac them into a dining set and serve a four-course meal in them,” I said, “but if you’re gonna get all squeamish about it, I guess I’ll just hold them for you.”
Ascher eyed me obliquely. “Did you just ask me out to dinner?”
I felt myself baring my teeth in a smile. Nothing much I like more than a woman with guts. “Tell you what. We both get out of this in one piece, I’ll show you where to buy the best steak sandwich in town,” I said. “Good luck.”
She gave me a quick, nervous smile and turned to the Way. She stared at it for a couple of seconds, licked her lips once, twitched her hands in a couple of nervous little gestures, then clenched her jaw and strode through the Way, naked, into the fires of the Underworld.
Granted, I hadn’t ever seen anyone with quite her degree of precision and power in pyromancy before, but even so, I cringed as she hit the first wall of flame. It surged up to meet her like it had an awareness of its own and was eager to devour her—and had about as much luck as a wave breaking on a stony shore. The fire wreathed her and recoiled, twisted into miniature cyclones that whipped her long dark hair this way and that. The wind from the flame roared and shifted, blowing hard enough to make her balance wobble. She put her hands out to either side of her, like someone walking on slippery ice, and proceeded slowly and carefully. I could see the way that focus and concentration made her spine straight and tense, and no, I was not staring at her ass. To any inappropriate degree.
I realized that Grey was standing beside me, watching her intently, his expression unreadable. He keyed in to my realization, even though neither of us looked at the other, except in our peripheral vision.
“Got to love a woman with guts,” he said.
“You talk too much,” I said.
“How is she doing that?” he asked. “I know the basics, but I’ve never seen anything quite like that.”
“She’s redirecting the energy,” I said. “See how when the waves hit her, they bounce off, all swirly?”
He grunted.
“She’s taking the heat and turning it into kinetic energy as it reaches her aura. It’s impressive as hell.”
“So far,” Grey said. “But why do you say that?”
“Because it’s hard to deal with that much heat, when you’re immersed in it,” I said. “She’s not just stopping it at one point. She’s dealing with it from every angle, and she’s got to be doing the same enchantment about a dozen times at once to stop it all, in successive layers.”
“And that’s hard?”
“Tell you what,” I said. “Why don’t you go play Simon, Concentration, checkers, chess, solitaire, Monopoly, Sudoku, Clue, Risk, Axis and Allies, poker, and blackjack all at the same time, while counting to twenty thousand by prime numbers only, standing on one foot and balancing a Styrofoam cup of hot coffee on your head. And when you can do that, we’ll start you with walking through a small campfire.”
“I can play poker,” Grey said seriously. “So she’s gutsy and she’s good.”
“Yep.”
“Good person to have on your team.”
“Or a bad one to have on the other team,” I said.
His eyes moved to me. They were an almost physical pressure. “Meaning?”
I shook my head and said, “Meaning nothing.”
They stayed on me for a second, and then he shrugged and looked at Hannah Ascher again. Who wouldn’t?
She was almost all the way to the gate before the Salamander made its move.
From the thickest flame beneath the gateway, something that looked like a Komodo dragon made of material from the surface of a star came roaring forth. It moved with the same scuttling speed as a lizard, and Ascher only just managed to skitter to one side and avoid its first rush. The Salamander hissed out its displeasure in a blast-furnace roar, and the light around it grew even brighter and more intense. The flamestorm around Ascher intensified, and she staggered a few steps back, her face tight with concentration. The fire around her swirled and became thicker, a miniature hurricane spinning slowly around her, with her vulnerable flesh as the eye.
The Salamander roared again, and came for her.
“Dammit,” I said.
Michael came to my side and said, “She’s got no weapons.”
“Can you get to her?” I asked my friend.
Michael shook his head, his eyes worried. “She isn’t an innocent in danger. She chose this.”
“Grey?”
“I can’t help her in that,” Grey said. “I wouldn’t last any longer than you would.”
I turned to look at Nicodemus and said, “Help her.”
He eyed me once, and then nodded. Then he drew the sword from his side, narrowed his eyes, took two smooth steps and cast it in a throw.
Swords are not meant for such things. That said, flyin
g pieces of metal with long, sharp edges and pointy ends are inherently dangerous, and Nicodemus had probably spent the idle afternoon, every few decades, throwing a sword around just for fun. After two thousand years of that, he knew exactly what he was doing.
The tumbling blade struck the Salamander on the snout, drawing a line of molten fire along its furnace-flesh and sending up a shower of scarlet sparks. It roared again, in surprised pain, and staggered a few steps to one side, then whirled toward the Way, lashing its tail. A blast of hot, sulfurous wind blew out, making my duster flap wildly and drawing tears from my eyes. Michael lifted a hand to shield his face, his white cloak billowing.
“The lever!” I screamed. “Go for the lever!”
I don’t know if Ascher heard me or just reached the same conclusion I had. When the Salamander turned from her, she sprinted for the gateway and the lever in it. The Salamander saw her and whirled, snapping at her legs, but she was past it, quick and lithe. She flung herself at the lever and hauled down on it—letting out a scream of pain as she did so.
There was an enormous rushing sound, and a vast metallic grinding—and suddenly the flames of the entire room shifted down the spectrum in color and dropped lower. I got what was happening at once. That much fire needs an enormous amount of oxygen to supply it, and the lever had somehow reduced that supply.
The Salamander’s flesh went from yellow-white to a deep orange within seconds, and it let out another roaring blast of heat from its mouth—and then retreated, much more slowly than it had moved a moment before, toward a low hole in one wall of the archway. Its fire and light filled the tunnel beyond the hole for a moment and then faded, and as it did, the flames all around the Gate of Fire withered away and flickered into scraps and remnants.
“Not yet!” called Ascher in a panting, tense voice, as Nicodemus stepped toward the Way. “Give it a couple of minutes to cool off!”
I waited about forty-five seconds and then muttered a spherical shield into life around me, channeling it through my staff. I would rather have had my old shield bracelet, but assembling a decent metalcrafting tool shop takes money and time, and I hadn’t had time to rebuild much of either—and certainly not to the degree I’d been prepared back in my old lab at my apartment.