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, flying 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 metalcraftingtool 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.

The spells I’d carved into the new staff were much the same as the ones in my old shield bracelet, if less efficient and less capable of tightly focusing power, but it was much better than I could have managed without any focus at all, and it was sufficient to protect me from harm as I crossed the still smoldering-hot ground.

Passing from the mortal world into the Nevernever is both more and less dramatic than you’d think. There’s no real sensation to it, apart from a mild tingle as you pass through the Way itself, kind of a protracted shiver along your skin. But when I stepped into the Underworld, I knew that I had just crossed an unimaginable distance. My body felt slightly heavier, as if the gravity itself was different from that on Earth. The air was hot and tainted with sulfur and other minerals, and it felt utterly alien in my nose and mouth. The ground around me was all stone, covered in protruding chunks of what might have been still-glowing charcoal, and I could see the melted stumps of what must have been, at one point, stalagmites, their limestone now running like candle wax. Shattered, half-molten remnants of what must have been stalactites fallen from a ceiling out of sight in the darkness overhead were scattered around my line of vision.

Of course. We were in a cave. An unthinkably enormous cavern that stretched out of sight in the glowing light of the Way behind us and that was interrupted by a wall at least forty feet high and the archway set into it in front of us.

I crossed the ground rapidly to Ascher’s side. My shield was good when it came to stopping fire, but it probably wasn’t quite as good as a single one of the layers she’d held in place around her. “Hey,” I said. “You all right?”

“I was sweating,” she said, her face twisted with pain, and she lifted her hands to show me blisters bubbling up in a line along her palms where she had grabbed the lever. The lever itself still glowed red with heat that it hadn’t yet lost. “Dammit. The sweat went into steam and screwed up the last few layers of protection.”

“You just grabbed freaking red-hot metal with your bare hands and you’ve got nothing to show for it but blisters,” I said. “Totally badass.”

A smile fought its way through her expression of pain for a moment, and she said, “Yeah, it really kind of was, wasn’t it? Was that a Salamander?”

“Pretty sure,” I said.

“They’re so much bigger than in those Xanth books.”

“No kidding,” I said. “Maybe Ha—our client got one some hormone treatments.” I offered her the clothes I held cradled in my broken arm. “Shellac free.”