There was a faint brimstone smell eventually. It wasn’t as strong as I’d expected, nor were things as hot.

Or maybe that was just me. I glanced at Kanesha, who was looking around with her lips set. “You can tell this place was made as a prison.”

She was right. So far we’d moved through tunnels that were stark and unwelcoming. Now we’d come out under open sky, but it was a sky in which roiling clouds, deep red and gold in color, flared with brilliant lightning.

The ground around us was baked hard as if by eternal drought, and smoke came up through the cracks. “More like a transportation colony.”

“Australia’s supposed to be nice,” she quipped.
“Hush.”

Because, we’d been seen. It was time to act like we belonged here. Small imps scurried towards us, varied kinds. Not lust imps, thankfully. But all kinds of other kinds. Pain imps, I suspected, from the sharp claws. Fire imps that glowed with an aura of heat.

They scurried around us for a moment, then lost interest. That meant our disguise was holding…and with less concentration than I’d feared I’d need to maintain it.

Holding against imps, anyway. The real question was where Tyz’vel was. And I realized I didn’t know all of his titles.

Maybe Coyote did. He certainly was giving a good pretense of knowing exactly where we were going, setting out across the cracked ground with no concern for the heat.

I glanced at Kanesha again. “Hot?”

She nodded.

“I’ll see what I can do about it.” Heat didn’t bother me, but if I concentrated I could tell how hot it actually was. And while we both looked like scantily dressed succubi…we were both dressed for a fight. Leather jackets and the works. I focused on drawing heat out of the air.

And immediately regretted it. “Or maybe I can’t.”

It felt disgusting. It felt like slime. “Sorry. We don’t belong here.”

Coyote was leading towards a door into a fortress. Stepping through it, the temperature dropped.

Infernal air conditioning?

“This is the fortress of Bar’Gur. Stay close to me or somebody might mistake you two for camp followers.”

I laughed. “Got it.”

We walked through the fortress, and I felt eyes on me. War demons, watching me. Yeah. They wanted a piece of the action alright.

“How are we going to get where we need to?”

“We’re going to ride a dragon.”

I shuddered. My last experience with infernal dragons… “Not that kind of dragon.”

“That kind of dragon. Please don’t fall off this time.”