Brave the Tempest (Cassandra Palmer #9) - Karen Chance Page 0,98

stream of visitors from all over.

To accommodate the many different races, each of which had their own idea of what constituted comfortable surroundings, the city had long ago devised a spell that took images out of its visitors’ minds to project over whatever constituted reality around here. They didn’t bother with the area beyond the city, which just looked like a twilit desert, with long blue shadows even at midday—hence the name—and a lot of rocks. But the city itself . . .

Well, it looked like whatever you wanted it to.

Except for tonight, I thought, watching the fiery building change once again. Only this time, it didn’t resemble much of anything, or maybe I should say, it resembled everything. A Chinese upturned roof poked out over a sweet old Southern porch meant for moonlight and magnolias; a rustic log cabin was perched on top of that, with what looked like dung mortar peeking out from between newly stripped logs; and a precarious third story of Georgian red bricks teetered over it all, while beautiful Middle Eastern tile kept breaking out in patches, here and there, like the house had a rash.

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