Tempt the Stars

incubus rose out of its unconscious host and came for us, at about the same time that a dozen or so guards who’d been searching shops down the street realized they’d just hit the jackpot.
    Well, this part’s normal, I thought, and grabbed the reins. And Caleb started firing off spell after spell in what in a lesser mage might have looked like a panic. But war mages didn’t panic. Or if they did, they made sure everyone in the vicinity was right there with them.
    And there’s nothing like the threat of imminent death to turn formerly meek people into a raging mob. A few fire spells setting half the street alight, a few pulse-types causing all the overhead lanterns to burst in a colorful rain, a few hammerlike percussion blows to wagons and piles of goods and tables outside eateries, and suddenly, the guards had more to worry about than us. Like being trampled as everyone on our end of the street, all couple hundred of them, suddenly decided they wanted to be somewhere else.
    Everybody but His Assholeness, that is, who just kept coming.
    But that was okay, because the fire had finally done what we couldn’t and gotten the camels moving. Only they weren’t just moving, they were
moving
, in a blind panic and with no more concern than their owner had shown for anybody else’s person or property. I tried to steer them away from the people at least, but it was a little hard with so many running everywhere, and while also holding on for dear life. And Caleb couldn’t help me, being busy trying to find out what in his arsenal worked on an incubus.
    Not much, it looked like, and the demon was still coming and the state of the street didn’t seem to bother him, because now he wasn’t so much running after us as flying, and I didn’t think we’d like what would happen when he caught up.
    “My bag,” I gasped at Caleb as we barreled through a gate, the incubus right on our heels and extra sparkly in the dimmer light of the brief tunnel.
    “What bag?”
    “That one!”
    I bumped him with my hip, and the small tasseled piece of uselessness I’d bought to replace the pockets I’d lost with my robes shimmied. It was as tacky as, well, hell, but I’d had to have something, because I wasn’t crazy enough to show up entirely unprepared.
    And because I’d never given Pritkin back his little, silver demon-fighting gun.
    “What does this do?” Caleb yelled, pulling it out.
    “Shoot it and find out!”
    I guess he agreed, because a second later he got off a perfect shot into the incubus’ sparkly cloud formation. And a second after that, it broke apart into a bunch of smaller clouds, which hovered in the air for a moment, looking a lot less sparkly. And then flowed back together, both dimmer and smaller, but still moving fast.
    In the other direction.
    “Damn!” Caleb looked at it with bright eyes. “I gotta get me one of these!”
    “Stop quoting and help me!” I yelled back, because the camels were demented and the streets weren’t even close to level and the incubi weren’t going to have to kill us in a minute, because we were going to capsize on our heads. “Take the reins!”
    “I don’t want the reins!”
    “Damn it, why not? You can’t be any worse than—”
    “That’s why not!”
    I didn’t have to wonder what he meant. A bolt of something red and sizzling hit down beside us almost the moment the words were out of his mouth, causing the camels to rear and then swerve across to the other side of the street. All the way across. Suddenly, we were throwing sparks off the unyielding stone, having to duck baskets and rolled-up awnings and lunging through a pile of crockery, which was definitely going to be in the scratch and dent and shattered-to-bits bin tomorrow.
    Of course, we might be, too.
    Because in between trying to pull the damned creatures back into something like the middle of the street, and avoiding decapitation, and trying to miss the darting people, who luckily appeared to be used to horrifically bad driving, I saw security forces converging on us from all sides.
    But not out of the gate ahead, where I guess the guards hadn’t got the memo yet. Or maybe old training just died hard. They were so used to letting their lords and masters do whatever the hell they wanted that they just stood there with confused looks on their faces as we barreled past, despite having a dozen yelling guards right on our tail.
    “How many gates is that?” Caleb asked, throwing a spell that caused the