by Lev Grossman
The floor bounced once under them, hard, and then a second time—Quentin had to put a hand on the pool table to keep from falling over, and a couple of stacks of boxes toppled. They were trying to break through from below. He kept his place in the chant, just barely. Footsteps pounded by in the hall, then stopped outside the door. Something Betsy had left out there went off with a sharp bang, but it was hard to know if it did any good.
Almost time. Quentin and Plum kept their gazes locked to make sure they were in perfect sync. The door started to vibrate in its frame, hard, making an even tone that gradually rose in pitch. A thump, and a dent appeared in the wall at head height, then another, then a third.
But they had it. Time. The strings were chiming all at once, without even being plucked. If it was going to work, it was now. Quentin gripped the coin in his hand—he thought he could feel it getting warm, getting ready to give up its payload. He took a breath.
Soundlessly and all at once, the lights went out. Did he do that? No—he hadn’t said the keyword yet. Plum cocked her head in the semidarkness, confused.
The windows blew in. Torrents of broken glass gushed onto the floor. The shockwave chucked Quentin carelessly against the base of the opposite wall. It wasn’t enough to knock him out, not quite, but his brain got stuck for a few seconds, and he forgot where he was. When he’d recovered enough to get to his knees and take his hands away from his face, the room seemed to be full of struggling figures wearing robes.
“What the hell?” he whispered.
Something bad was happening. For a second he thought he’d lost Mayakovsky’s precious coin, but no, there it was, a few feet away on the rug, still shining with unexpressed power, and he had just enough presence of mind to sweep it up and shove it in his pocket. The dimness churned with strange people—two of them had Betsy pinned against the wall, and she was screaming curses at them. There was something strange about them: their hands. They weren’t flesh. They glowed a faint pale gold, and they were slightly translucent—you could see things through them.
He started to get up, but one of them was standing over him. She put a foot on his chest and pushed him over backward; it didn’t take much. Quentin looked at the foot. It was an ordinary foot, a woman’s foot, leather sandal, definitely human.
There were seven or eight of them—it was hard to get a good read in the dimness. Another woman stepped up to the case. Out of nowhere Pushkar popped up behind her and belted her in the back of the head with a pool cue, or he tried to: the cue snapped like balsa wood, like he’d hit a marble statue, and the one who had her foot on Quentin uncorked some spell one-handed that made him freeze and fall down flat, stiff as a board.
Ignoring the action around her, the woman studied the cage Quentin had set up; in the golden light of her hands her face looked mildly amused. She picked it up and tossed it aside, then she spoke a few words over the case in a businesslike tone—she could have been ordering a pizza. There was something weirdly familiar about the way she talked. She pulled the suitcase loose, just like that—there was a ripping sound, exactly as if it had been held down by nothing more than Velcro, then it came free. She tucked it under her arm.
These people were thieves, like them. They let Quentin and his pals be the fall guys and take out the security, then they walked in and robbed the robbery. In his concussed, addled state Quentin mostly felt admiration for their calm competence. They were doing a good job.
Moving in sync they backed away toward the windows, a coordinated withdrawal, each one keeping one of the opposition well covered. Quentin got his elbows under him and propped himself up to watch, trying not to pose a threat to anybody. They were organized as hell, whoever they were. Two of them were commandeering Pushkar’s carpet, unrolling it flat onto the air outside.
“No!” Betsy said. “You can’t!”
She was handling this way better than Quentin was. Already she was back on her feet and walking toward them, launching wild attacks with both hands, lightning and then fire flowing from her fingers, flooding the room with light. But three of the robed people had joined hands to create a defensive barrier, and her magic died against it. Quentin sat up all the way now. His head was clearing. She was right: this was their job. That case was theirs. Those people had no right to it. He got to one knee.
Now he knew why their magic sounded so familiar: they were speaking a distorted kind of archaic German, which he happened to know well, because it was the same language the page from the Neitherlands was written in.
The last one climbed out onto the stolen carpet.
“Stop!” Betsy shrieked.
She ran to the window as they slid away. The bird hopped out from under the pool table.
“They cannot open it,” it said, maybe to itself. “They still cannot open the case.”
Quentin staggered to the windows, but he could only send a futile, fugitive heat ray after them, which whanged straight back off their shield and burned a scribble on the wall of the house next to him. Plum was kneeling by Pushkar, who was shaking off the spell that dropped him. Lionel was still on his hands and knees staring spacily at the floor.
The banging on the door started again, more urgent now. The wood was splintering. Even the blond guy on the couch, the one Betsy had shut down, was stirring. But Quentin felt only calm. Fear and confusion were gone, he’d lost track of them in the fight. And they weren’t done fighting yet. They were going to finish this thing if he had to do it himself.
“Pushkar.” His voice sounded weird and distant in his bruised ears. He cleared the dust out of his throat. “Pushkar. Is there anything here that can fly?”
Still leaning heavily on the pool table, Pushkar looked around the room.
“Yes,” he said.
CHAPTER 14
They swarmed out through the empty windows like angry bees out of a hive. Plum and Stoppard rode leather club chairs; Betsy had a small prayer rug that had been in front of the fireplace, which she handled standing up, surfboard-style; Quentin got the penny-farthing bicycle. Pushkar himself, along with Lionel and the bird, had taken command of the enormous pool table, which despite its size and weight had turned out to be surprisingly amenable to flight spells. It was slightly wider than the window frame, but it bashed its way out anyway in an explosion of brick and plaster dust, shedding a stream of multicolored billiard balls from its innards.
The sun was setting, and it was twilight at ground level, but as they surged up above the tree line the sunset picked them out in thin golden light. They raced up into the freezing blue air, up into the early evening sky, accelerating as they went, up and to the west, chasing the dwindling speck of the fleeing carpet.
Pushkar’s spellwork was master-level, and the speed was exhilarating—Quentin had done a little flying on his own, but this was totally different. Already the house was shrinking behind them. The bike’s leather seat was rock-hard, but beggars can’t be choosers. At least it wasn’t the double bass. He wondered if it would go faster if he pedaled.
Quentin stuck close to the pool table, drafting off it. Through it all Lionel had managed to keep that long brown paper package clamped under his arm. No one spoke, they just bent over their makeshift aircraft, eyes streaming, urging all the speed out of them that they could. Betsy already had a lead on them on her rug, her short hair blown straight back from her face, leaning forward on her toes staring fiercely ahead like a ski jumper in mid-jump.
Foot by foot they began to overhaul the carpet, reeling it in. The thieves—the other thieves—were using Pushkar’s spells too, but he hadn’t set the carpet up for speed. Whatever the hell was in that case, they were going to take it back. Mile after mile of Connecticut woods rolled by underneath them; maybe they were already out of state, he couldn’t even tell. The carpet dove, skimmed the treetops, rolled and turned, then clawed back the altitude. Quentin shadowed it.
After ten minutes they’d clos
ed the gap to a few hundred yards. The people on the carpet sent a couple of fireballs back at them, and something else that flashed and popped, but nothing they couldn’t see coming in time. Stoppard was riding sitting down; Plum had turned her chair backward and was kneeling on the seat. There was no question they could overtake. But what were they going to do when they got there? Board it? Quentin was high on speed and risk now—he had to keep reminding himself that this wasn’t a video game, he only got one life, and magic wasn’t going to grow back any limbs he might lose along the way.
Maybe Pushkar could undo whatever he’d cast on the carpet, stop it in mid-flight. Quentin veered his bicycle over toward the pool table to try to talk strategy, but as he did a deep rumbling came from behind him, getting louder, and he risked a look over his shoulder.
Two blazing comets were ripping up at him through the still evening air, trailing smoke and sparks. They bulled right through the formation, overtaking him from behind like outbound meteors; one passed within five feet of him and the shockwave nearly knocked him off the bike. But it wasn’t him they were after. The twin comets smashed hard into the carpet, one-two.
It was the Couple. They’d come to take their suitcase back.
The carpet dipped with the force of the double impact. Betsy dived after it, and Quentin followed. Shouts floated back to him on the wind, fragments of screams, obscenities, orders, spells, all instantly whipped away on the wind. A desperate close-quarters scrum was in progress. One of the Couple, the woman, stood wreathed in light in the center of the carpet, surrounded by a circle of angry robed thieves. The man had caromed off whatever defensive shell was on the carpet but circled back immediately, like a moth pinging off a light bulb, and clung to the underside, where he began ripping his way up through it with both hands.
For the moment Quentin just watched and kept pace. He’d wait it out, then they could pounce on whoever survived, taking advantage of their hopefully weakened state. He looked around, picked out the others in the deepening twilight. They were doing the same—all except for Betsy, whom he’d now lost track of.
A lake flashed past far below, then more trees. They shot through thin wisps of low-flying cloud. The amount of magical energy being expended in the fight on the carpet was truly awesome; the Couple must have been carrying artifacts, because their energies were radically heightened. They might have been bad people, but they were terrifyingly strong spellcasters and apparently totally without fear. Thank God he hadn’t had to face them toe to toe. Quentin saw the man—grinning his face off—punch a fist up through the carpet and get a grip on the ankle of one of the golden-handed monks, drag him scrabbling through and fling him spinning down and away toward the darkening landscape below. The woman was already closing in on the case itself, but she was fighting her way through a storm of defensive magic.
A monk stepped forward and squared off hand to hand. They closed, and then it was chaos, a blur of lights and speeded-up movement. In the middle of it something came careening down from above at a steep angle like a diving cormorant and hit the carpet with a solid whump that shook dust out of it.
It was Betsy.
“Dammit!” Quentin said.
She should have waited, but apparently whatever personal stake she had in the case, coupled with her native eagerness to get herself killed, had gotten the better of her. Dammit dammit dammit. Discarded, her rug flew by him in the wake of the fight. Quentin urged his ridiculous penny-farthing forward, slowly closing the gap between himself and the carpet. She was out of her mind, but a team was a team.
He recognized the feeling of cold inevitability that came right before a fight. This was going to be close-quarters action, and he hastily hardened his hands and face. He tried to focus on a sense of righteous anger: it was their case, they’d taken it, and he was going to get it back. For Alice. He ducked as a dark form came flipping back at him head over heels, nearly colliding with the pool table. It was the man of the Couple. He looked limp, barely conscious, but he wasn’t falling, and Quentin let him go.
Now the trembling trailing tassels of the carpet were only a few feet ahead. He saw Betsy backhand the woman—a burst of light and a concussive thump accompanied the strike, which snapped her head around a quarter-turn—then clamp one hand on the handle of the case. The woman recovered and lunged for it too, while the remaining monks jockeyed around them, waiting to see who they had to take on. But before that could happen Betsy crouched down and placed her free hand on the carpet. He saw her mouth move but couldn’t place the spell. It must have been some powerful antimagic because the carpet instantly lost all internal cohesion and dissolved into a cloud of threads.
A whole flock of bodies flashed past Quentin and fell behind and down. Quentin struggled to track Betsy: she was dropping like a rock, still holding the case with one hand. Incredibly the woman had a grip on it too. They spun around each other, their clothes rippling and burring frantically in the wind. Quentin pointed his handlebars at them and dived, as close to vertical as he could get.
He hit terminal velocity and kept accelerating, speed stripping away what was left of conscious thought. The land loomed up toward them, dark green and wrinkled with low mountains. He clenched his teeth and pushed the ancient bicycle down faster and harder, the wind singing in the spokes, the effort tearing at his chest from the inside. They were coming into focus now: neither woman could break her fall without letting go of the case first, and neither one was willing to let go, so they were going at each other with their teeth and free hands and whatever spells they could work one-handed under the circumstances.
Given time he might have stopped one of them from falling with magic, but there were two of them and there was no time. Details in the landscape were resolving themselves, magnifying and magnifying, a stream, a field, individual trees. He matched course with them, swayed over to them, bumped them—the woman grabbed at him but tore loose again. He wasn’t going to be able to do this gracefully. He wasn’t sure he could do it at all. Now the ground was close, very close. Quentin’s knees were shaking, and the spindly front wheel collapsed and tore away. He bulled into them again, felt both of them clutch at him with their free hands. He heard the woman screaming wordlessly, and he felt her get a hand in his hair. She wasn’t screaming, she was laughing.
He was going to slow gradually, then he checked the ground and panicked and braked hard. Underneath them a pine tree exploded from a toy into a grasping, pricking monster and together the three of them slammed into the penny-farthing and the penny-farthing slammed into branches. He had time to think: fuck them all if he died like this! For a case that he didn’t even know what was in it! Pine needles slapped him and then they hit the ground and his vision went white.
Something was ringing like a bell. It was his head. His chest was empty, and he writhed on the ground like a grub. He tried to take in some air, any air at all, and weird creaking and crying sounds came out of his mouth. Either his ribcage had collapsed and crushed his lungs and he was dying, or he’d just got the wind knocked out of him and would be fine in a minute.
He pushed himself up. The world was turning around him like a carousel.
As it stabilized he saw Betsy already up and staggering in circles. Quentin started to say something, but he could only cough and spit.
“Where is it?” she said hoarsely. “Where is it? Do you see it?”
The woman was still down, ten feet away, but she was stirring. Quentin got a close look at her for the first time: tall and model-thin, older than her picture, with ringletted black hair and a bad cut on her forehead that would need stitches. Quentin spotted the case resting in a patch of ferns, as neat as if it had just come off a baggage carousel, a few yards from her.
The woman saw where he was looking. She made a noise in her throat and began to crawl toward it, but Betsy was way ahead of her. As she walked past her Betsy bent and put a hand on the woman’s neck. She spasmed, arching
her spine like a cat. Betsy touched her with the other hand, then straddled her like a horse, pumping energy into her—her fingers sparked. The woman’s body bucked under her like she was being defibrillated.
“Stop!” Quentin croaked.
But it was already too late. She let go and the woman fell face-first on the black earth, still twitching. Quentin smelled burned flesh.
“I stopped,” Betsy said. She kept walking.
She picked up the case, examined it skeptically for damage, hefted it in her hands. It looked like it hardly weighed a thing. Quentin crawled over to the dying woman but stopped short of touching her. There was no telling what kind of fatal magical juice was still in her body. Smoke rose from her black hair. It was too late anyway.
Betsy watched him. She spat on the ground.
“I’ll kill you too if you try to stop me.”
The forest was quiet. It was early spring, the undergrowth was still recovering from the rude shock of winter, and only a few crickets chirped. The woman had been a murderer. Three minutes ago she would’ve let either one of them die. Betsy squatted down and laid the case down and fumbled with the latches.
“Shit.” She strained at them, set herself and strained again. “Shit. I was afraid of that. Where the hell is Plum where you need her?”
“What do you want with Plum?”
More or less on cue Stoppard and Plum came crunching down through the branches, shielding their faces from the bristles. They were crowded together on the same club chair; something must have happened to the other one. Their landing was hard but controlled until the chair came down on a rock and one of its legs snapped off, spilling them onto the soft ground.
Plum got to her feet, rubbing her hands on her thighs.
“Jesus,” she said. “What happened?”
“The girl bit it,” Betsy said. “Open the case.”
“What, now? Shouldn’t we—?”
