“And as such stand between them and power. I pushed everyone a step farther away from the throne the day I returned.”
“But if they can’t kill you in front of your father—”
“They can’t. At least not openly, although half the guards around here are in the pay of one faction or another. But they’re not the main—”
“Augghhh!” That was Casanova, bloodstained face lit up by a ruddy spell, giving him a truly hellish look. Not that he needed the help right now. “Am I the only sane one here? Am I the only one who realizes this is not the time for a chat? I don’t care what you do or how you do it, but flying carpets are supposed to fly!”
“In the movies, maybe,” Caleb said. “But in case you didn’t notice, this is not in a movie. That”—he pointed at the glittering city, so far below us now—“is not CGI and you are going to get shoved off this rug if you don’t shut up and let us think!”
Only that didn’t seem to be going so well.
And that was before something rumbled the air around us like thunder. Only this place didn’t look like it got a lot of thunder. And I didn’t think thunder would put quite that expression on Pritkin’s face.
“What is that?” Casanova asked, voice strained. Like he couldn’t take any more bad news right now. Which was too bad, since that was the only kind we seemed to get.
“A demon prince in the seat of his power,” Pritkin said tightly, as a massive sandstorm broke over the cliffs.
Chapter Eighteen
It dwarfed the city, making the considerable sprawl look like a child’s toy in comparison. All along the horizon, as far as I could see in both directions, it came, a boiling mass of dirt and dust and outraged fury dozens of stories high. Casanova stared at it for a second, wild-eyed and disbelieving, like a man who had successfully dodged death for centuries seeing it come straight at him.
And then he started stripping.
He ripped off the dusty robes he’d worn all day even as the first gusts hit us and sent them billowing out all around him. He was fumbling and cursing and acting like a crazy man. But for once, I didn’t think he was.
For once, I thought he had a damned good idea.
I grabbed Pritkin’s pretty green caftan.
“Take it off!” I yelled, over the howl of the winds that were already almost on us, and for a miracle, he didn’t argue.
Maybe he’d figured it out, too, or maybe the noise made discussion impossible. All I know is he skinned out of it, and thankfully, it was good, heavy wool, comfortable, but warm for those cold desert nights. And sturdy—I hoped.
I lashed one end of it around a corner of the rug and reached for the other one—and realized we didn’t have it thanks to the spell that had burned it away. There followed a mad scramble to get the robe untied and to crawl around to the other end of the rug and get it into place with Pritkin’s help. He said something, but I couldn’t hear him with the wind howling in my ears and the first flurries of dust scouring my face and panic making my hands fumble as badly as Casanova’s, who I couldn’t even see anymore.
But we got it tied, and the makeshift craft turned just before the storm hit. A furious blast of wind and sand slammed into us, with enough force to have launched us to the moon. Or across a city at insane speeds, like a bullet shot out of a gun.
A really, really unsteady gun. The jury-rigged “sail” bowing out in front of us was only tied at the bottom, meaning that Pritkin and I had to hold on to the top ends because we didn’t have a mast. We also had to cling to the far side of the rug, so we didn’t get launched over the top and end this whole thing real quick. But crazily enough, it worked, maybe because the spell keeping the rug level also seemed to stabilize it, leaving only one small problem.
The human body wasn’t designed as sailboat rigging.
Really, really wasn’t, I thought, glancing desperately over at Pritkin. He was holding his end of the rug in his teeth and fumbling with something he’d looped around one arm. But I couldn’t tell what it was, or what he thought he was doing, because I was too busy feeling tendons stretch and ligaments pull and muscles shriek that this was not good, not good, not good—
And then I was bouncing onto the middle of the rug.
I panicked for an instant, thinking I’d just screwed us over, but we were still skipping ahead of the storm, and were as level as a jury-rigged vessel made out of scraps could be. Pritkin must have grabbed the piece I’d been holding, and was somehow managing to control both of them at once, because the sail was as full as ever. But I couldn’t turn around to find out how, because I was half-blind from the sand and trying desperately to cling to a bucking magic carpet that wasn’t nearly as fun as the legends would have you believe—
Until it suddenly evened out.
I twisted around, desperately hoping that Rosier had reconsidered, even knowing the odds on that. But over my shoulder was the same boiling mass of fury, just darker now as it swallowed the lights of the city we’d just left behind. But I barely noticed, because Pritkin was . .
“No,” I said, immediately rejecting what my eyes were telling me.
I blinked, and then I pushed a fluttering scarf out of my face and blinked again. But the scene didn’t change. Pritkin was still leaning off the back edge of the rug, his feet were still anchored behind a rigid wrinkle in the cloth, and he was still arching back, to the point that he was lying almost flat. But now his forearms were looped around the ends of the long fabric sash he’d been wearing, which were tied securely around the top two corners of our sail.
Our wind-filled sail. That he was directing by pulling on one side of the makeshift rope or the other, or by turning his body this way and that. So, basically, he was—
“No!” I said again, because he was absolutely, positively not windsurfing in hell. It hurt my brain, my relatively sane-no-matter-what-Casanova-said brain, to even think the words, because things like this didn’t happen.
Unless I really had gone nuts. An idea reinforced a second later, when Pritkin suddenly grinned—grinned—at me, and said something that the wind blew away. “What?”
“Why do these plans of yours always involve me getting naked?” he yelled, making me blink again. And then scowl, because damn it, brain, this was no time to lose it.
“You’re not naked!” I yelled back, because it was true, if not by much. He still had on a pair of silky gold trousers, ruffling in the wind and looking ridiculous next to the hard lines of his body.
And because what else do you say to a grinning, windsurfing demon?
He said something that sounded like “disappointed?” but wasn’t because that would be absurd.
And then Caleb and Casanova dove by, just missing the front of our crazy contraption, because they didn’t seem to have figured out Pritkin’s modification. But with vampire strength and Caleb’s brawn, they seemed to be doing okay just holding the ends of the sail, although that gave them a lot less control than we had. But the bucking, weaving, crazy course they were on didn’t seem to bother them.
At least, it didn’t seem to bother Caleb. Who I finally saw laughing and whooping and giving a good representation as to why war mages were viewed as being slightly off by the rest of us. Like Casanova, who was upholding the banner of sanity with a lot of horrified screeching.
I turned toward Pritkin, to point out that, see—that was how a normal person reacted when being chased by a giant storm of a demon lord through the skies of hell. But I didn’t, because he yelled something. Something that sounded like “the gate.”