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 closed 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—?”
“Open it!”
“Better do it,” Quentin said. “She killed the woman.”
Betsy must be pretty worn out by now, he thought, but there was still no telling what she was capable of.
“Jesus,” Stoppard said. “Why’d you do that?”
He seemed to really want to know, but Betsy ignored him. Her face was grim and set.
“Open it. Do it now.”
“What makes you think I can open it?”
“You know what.”
Plum sighed, resigned.
“I guess I do.”
She sat down cross-legged in front of the case and snapped open the latches as if they’d never been locked. As soon as she did Betsy kicked her aside roughly.
“Hey!”
She rummaged through the contents. She picked up a book, tossed it aside, then she held up a long knife made of what looked like tarnished silver. It was a simple weapon, unornamented. It looked very functional and very old.
“Yes,” she whispered to it. Her voice cracked. “Oh, yes. Hello you.”
With a rush of air and a thunderous crackling whump the pool table bashed straight down through the canopy and landed solidly on its thick legs on the forest floor. Lionel rode it down standing up, the bird on his shoulder. There was no sign of Pushkar.
“Where’s the case?” Lionel took in the corpse, Quentin and Plum and Stoppard, Betsy and the knife. “You opened it.”
He’d unwrapped his parcel: it was a gun, a snouty-looking assault rifle that fit lightly under his arm. Stock and barrel were deeply engraved, swirls and tracery—it was obviously a hybrid weapon, high-tech but magically augmented.
“I sure did,” Betsy said.
“Where’s Pushkar?” Stoppard said.
Instead of answering Lionel smoothly raised the rifle to his shoulder, sighted down it and fired two controlled bursts briskly and efficiently at Stoppard’s chest.
He should have died right then. But even before Lionel fired Betsy was between them, holding the blade—she’d moved faster than Quentin could follow. The bullets sparked and clanged off the silver knife, two quick metallic triplets, and ricocheted off into the bushes. Whatever that knife was, it came with a lot of fringe benefits, and one of them was that it wasn’t going to let its wielder get hurt.
Quentin stared at Lionel.
“What the fuck? You fat piece of shit!”
Five minutes ago he’d felt so empty it was like he’d never cast a spell again, but there was power in fear, and in anger, and he got to his feet. He felt like he might be able to get a spell out of it, but before he could try Betsy took three running steps and launched herself at Lionel like a big cat—the knife must have given her a whole suite of powers, strength as well as speed and protection. Lionel turned quick and got off another burst, but the knife ate them up effortlessly, and then she was too close to shoot. They waltzed drunkenly around the pool table, Lionel grunting as she butchered him standing up.
Curiously, there was no blood. The knife met very little resistance—it sliced up through his torso, down through his collar bone, then she forced it deep into his chest. It went through him like a wire through wet clay. The next cut took his head off.
It fell and rolled through the leaves. It didn’t speak, but its eyes blinked. The stump of the neck looked like gray stone.
“Huh,” Betsy said, standing over the headless corpse. “Golem. It figures.”
Huh. Though it seemed like a notable fact that she hadn’t known he wasn’t human before she started murdering him. Only now did Betsy start breathing hard, like it was all catching up with her at once: the job, the flight, the fall, the killing, the case, the whole comprehensive fiasco.
“Where’s the money?” Stoppard asked.
“There isn’t any,” Quentin said.
It was catching up with him too. They’d been blindsided by the monks and then double-crossed twice: first by Betsy, then by the bird. It must have planned to kill them all along instead of paying them off. There never had been any money. He was farther back than when he started. Farther from home. Farther from Alice.
Though they did have the case, or whatever was left in it, unless the bird was coming back for it. For now it was gone; Quentin hadn’t even seen it go.
Betsy jumped down from the pool table, and her knees almost buckled when she landed. All the strength had gone out of her.
“I thought they’d try that.” She sounded weary and, for the first time since he’d met her, very young. She couldn’t have been more than a couple of years into her twenties. “Figures. Never trust anything without hands. Or with hands for that matter.”
“Thank you,” Stoppard said. “You saved my life.”
“Eyes are up here.” Betsy pointed. “But you’re welcome.”
“What is that thing?” Quentin said.
“This?” Betsy held up the knife, studying its edge. “This is why I’m here. This is what I’ve always wanted. This is a weapon for killing gods.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“Have you ever met a fucking god?”
“I guess I can see your point.”
Plum picked up the book that Betsy had tossed aside. It had a blank leather cover—it looked like a notebook or a diary.
“Are you sure gods can even die?” she said.
“I’m going to kill one and find out and then maybe I’ll let you know.” Betsy pushed the knife through her belt. “I’ll see you guys around. Don’t look for me.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Quentin said. “Take care of yourself, Betsy.”
“Yeah,” Stoppard chimed in. “Take care of yourself!”
“The name’s Asmodeus, bitches,” she said. “And if you see Julia, tell her I’ve gone fox hunting.”
She turned around and walked away into the night.