The cornugon wheezed once and buckled to its knees.

«Wow,» said Hezekiah. «I always thought angels fought with magic swords.»

«First,» I replied, «he's not an angel, he's a deva. Second, devas don't fight with swords, they use maces. Third, he's not going to whack a cornugon with his mace in the middle of Sigil unless he wants an all-out war that will get both sides ejected from the city. Finally, in case you haven't noticed, the one thing that was shielding us from the flames is now sprawled gasping on the ground.»

Indeed, we were completely exposed to the rest of the rotunda, and a hideous sight it was. The three false guards must have stood back-to-back and loosed their fireballs simultaneously, launching bright orange flames in all directions. I could immediately identify the three points of impact from the bursts: those three areas were littered with dead bodies, the corpses' flesh roasted and split into hard red cracks. Farther out, some people had survived the initial flash… or maybe they were just taking longer to die. Their skin was puckered and oozing out fluid, their eye sockets empty pits running with melted jelly. A few made shrill whistling cries, the only kind of scream possible through a throat ravaged by fire. Most simply lay silent, squeezing themselves into balls of agony and shuddering with misery.

The explosions had focused on the three interior walls of the rotunda. The fourth side of the room, the arch opening into the street, was still untouched, and people who remained on their feet had begun to mob the exit, crushing together in a panic. Shorter beings, gnomes and halflings, would surely be trampled in the stampede down the front steps… not to mention children and the elderly. After the first casualties fell, some of those jamming in behind would trip over the broken bodies, and they too would be battered by the feet of the crowd.

At the center of the rotunda, impassive in the heart of chaos, stood the three false guards – even the most fear-crazed members of the mob gave the guards a wide berth. The impostor facing our direction was a heavily-bearded man with bleached white hair, his eye carefully watching the deva; and when the deva turned away from the cornugon to confront the creators of this destruction, the false guard calmly lifted his wand to shoot again.

The cornugon was on its hands and knees, providing no cover at all. Any fireball aimed at the deva would easily catch Hezekiah and me in the blast radius. I had time to scream, «No!»…

…and then I was standing in a paper-stacked office, facing a young halfling woman in judicial robes. She looked as surprised to see me as I was to see her. «Who are you?» she snapped.

Before I could answer, Hezekiah stepped forward from my side. «Hezekiah Virtue,» he said, holding out his knuckly hand for her to shake. «Sorry to pop in on you, ma'am, but we were in a nasty situation and I had to teleport us out of there.»

I stared at him in disbelief. «You can teleport?»

«Sure,» he answered. «Learned it from Uncle Toby.»

«Of course you did,» I sighed.

As soon as we began to explain about the fire attack, the halfling hurried us down the hall to the office of Her Honor, Judge Emeritus Oonah DeVail. I had never met DeVail personally, but all of Sigil knew her by reputation – an old bone-rattler, a basher, a woman of action. Unlike the majority of Guvners who prefer the academic approach to knowledge, Oonah DeVail had spent much of her life exploring the planes in person, leading expedition after expedition into the far corners of the multiverse and bringing back a wealth of arcane curiosities. It didn't surprise me that the halfling went running to DeVail when looking for someone to cope with an emergency situation.

«Firewands?» DeVail roared. «In the rotunda?»

«Yes, Your Honor,» I said. «Three men just walked in…»

That was as far as I got. DeVail was a woman in her sixties, but with darting speed, she snatched up a staff bound with gleaming silver wire and used its support to hike herself to her feet.

Hezekiah scampered to open the door for her. «It'd be a mighty big honor to help you to safety, ma'am,» he said.

«Help yourself to safety,» she snapped. With one hand, she swept her staff off the floor and swung it high over her head. An arc of sparkling ice crystals spattered out of its swinging tip. «No flamethrowing berks will give our courts the laugh while I'm around.» With that, she dashed out the door, suddenly as spry as a twelve-year-old. The halfling woman waved at us to stay where we were, then hurried along behind DeVail to a wide-open waiting area some dozen paces down the corridor.

Pausing just a second for the halfling to catch up, DeVail slammed the butt of her staff onto the floor with an echoing whump. Beneath her feet, carpet and floorboards faded to an inky blackness, like a hole filled with deepest midnight. The halfling woman looked at the hole, looked at DeVail, then leaped, grabbing Her Honor around the waist. Together the two of them sank into that hole: the halfling wearing a grim expression, DeVail's lips moving in some kind of silent incantation. The moment their heads disappeared into the hole, the blackness sealed itself shut again with a muffled rumble.

Hezekiah let the door close slowly, his face filled with wonderment. The feeling was mutual – I had no idea what else DeVail's staff could do, but the short ivory firewands used by the false guards now seemed a lot less formidable. The Sensate in me sighed with regret that I'd miss the coming battle in the rotunda. Then I remembered the charred skin of the dead, the horrid moans of the living… and I decided there were some things even a Sensate didn't need to see.

«Shall we try to find a way out?» I said to Hezekiah. «We may be safe from the fire for the moment, but if the whole building starts to burn…»

«In a minute,» he replied. «I want a chance to look at this great stuff.»

And indeed, Guvner DeVail's office was cluttered to the rafters with «great stuff»: delicately painted porcelain, brassbound chests, mummified animals hanging from ropes attached to the ceiling… dozens upon dozens of outlandish curios, and most no doubt reeking of magic.

«Don't touch anything!» I snapped at Hezekiah, who was about to pick up a copper-framed handmirror. «For that matter, don't even look at anything! If you stare into that mirror, you have no idea what might stare back.»

«I wasn't hurting anything,» he answered defensively. He closed his eyes, furrowed his brow for a moment, then opened his eyes again to look at the mirror in his hand. «It doesn't matter anyway,» he said. «The mirror's okay. It's not magic.»

«How do you know?»

«If I concentrate, I can sense a kind of radiation coming off magical things. Uncle Toby taught me that whenever I'm in a strange place, I should —» Hezekiah stopped abruptly and snapped his head around toward the door. In a low whisper, he said, «Something with a lot of magic is coming straight at us.»

«Probably Judge DeVail and that staff of hers.»

He shook his head. «I don't think so.» Once more his brow furrowed in concentration, then he whispered, «Hide!»

Much as I hated taking orders from a Clueless, the worry on Hezekiah's face suggested this was not the time for argument. Beside me stood a coat-tree with several bulky cloaks hanging from its hooks; I nipped behind it and quickly fanned out the cloaks so they'd conceal me without looking too unnatural. Given a little luck, none of the cloaks would turn me into a frog. Given a lot of luck, maybe one of the cloaks would make me invisible.

I left a tiny gap in the arrangement of clothing, just enough to let me peek out with one eye. Hezekiah was nowhere to be seen, but I could hear him shuffling around outside my line of sight, no doubt burrowing into the jumble of souvenirs Guvner DeVail kept from her trips across the planes. After a few seconds, his scurrying stopped… and a good thing too, because half a second later, the door eased open with a creak.