Which was still there when the second fireball launched.
A mass of flames came boiling through the air, which is exactly as scary as it sounds when it’s coming straight at you. I screamed, Rosier screamed, and the bed suddenly leapt up off the street and traveled maybe eight feet through the air before hitting down again. Because we’d just taken a turbo shot to the ass.
And then it burst into flames.
“What are they doing?” I screamed.
“Keeping us from escaping!”
Great.
Especially since we weren’t escaping now, not on top of a merrily burning bed. And these weren’t normal flames, and they were eating this way fast. And Rosier was still chained in place and the mages were still gaining and we were still tear-assing down the hill, until suddenly we weren’t.
We were tear-assing through an open-air market.
An open-air market on earth.
A row of Victorian-looking buildings flashed by on either side, with tables set up in front piled with wares, and people diving for cover. At least most people. A vendor nimbly danced out of the way, but his cart didn’t. And there was no way to avoid it with no steering and no brakes. And then it didn’t matter when we hit it head-on and were inundated with a wave of hot water filled with . . . pigs’ feet?
What had to be a couple dozen boiled pigs’ feet slapped us in the face as we barreled through the man’s big metal cauldron and kept right on going. Right at a bunch of kids who had been playing in the street, but who were now just standing there, mouths hanging open. Probably because they’d never seen a burning, speeding bed before.
I grabbed Rosier, who was trying to free himself by pulling the footboard apart, where it had been scored the deepest. “Shift! Shift!”
“Would you give me a minute?”
“No! Do it now!”
“We can’t do it now! We’re not clear yet!”
I didn’t ask clear of what, because there wasn’t time. I grabbed his head and forcibly jerked it up, pointing at the kids. “Now!”
Rosier’s eyes got big, maybe because we were close enough to see the whites of theirs, and he gave a little screech—
And the next second, we were back in the Shadowland.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
I’d never been so glad to be in hell before.
Until a virtual hail of swords clanged off the bed frame from in front, hard enough to dent it. And a bunch of fireballs lit up the sky from behind. And the only question was, which group was going to kill us first?
The answer was neither, because we abruptly shifted back to earth again, Rosier shrieking and the bed burning and now sword-riddled, and speeding more than ever because it had just gotten renewed life from its brief stint on the hill from hell.
A lot of life.
Like a Mach 2 amount of life, or maybe that was just the impression conveyed by all the shrieking. And the clackity, clackity, clackity of the cobblestones. And the neighing.
Neighing?
We burst out of the pedestrian-only street, which I guess had been closed off for the market, into one filled with horses and carriages and buses and—
And then our luck ran out. Or maybe it was the horse’s luck. I don’t know. I just know that I saw a flash of rearing horse belly and flailing hooves and the screaming white face of a cabbie. And then we were careening off course and heading straight for—
Well, crap, I thought, as the fetid stench of the Thames hit my nose, right before we broke through a barrier and took a flying leap—
Back into hell.
The bed hit down from maybe six feet up, hard enough to bounce me back up to the point where we’d flashed in, before I smacked down on top of Rosier.