“That’s where the case is?” Quentin said.
“That’s where we get in.”
For a second Quentin didn’t know what was missing, then he did: Stoppard’s machine had stopped ticking. Stoppard reacted faster than he did—he lunged across the carpet from where he’d been trying to talk to Betsy, fumbled the crank into its hole, and cranked the handle madly. The device started up again almost immediately.
“You fucking shitbag!” Lionel hissed. “How long were we visible for?”
“I don’t know!” Stoppard didn’t stop cranking. “Couple of seconds maybe! I’m sorry, I don’t know what happened!”
They all waited for the alarm to go up. Everyone held still. It was not unlike being in a submarine and waiting for the depth charges to start dropping. The carpet kept sailing forward, unfazed. Quentin stepped rapidly through a very hard shield spell that would stop a bullet, probably, if he were facing in exactly the right direction.
But the depth charges didn’t come, and they kept going. When Stoppard got tired Quentin dropped the spell and cranked instead, until the mainspring protested. This is ridiculous, Quentin thought, but coldly—he wasn’t going to let himself panic. We’re making it up as we go along.
Pushkar slowed them down and commenced fine adjustments, drifting a little left, then right, up and down, whispering patiently to his steed, a pilot steering a tanker into a narrow slip. They were close to the house now, passing over a tiled terrace strewn with weathered Adirondack chairs, and they could see into a few rooms where the lights were on. Quentin got a glimpse of a woman standing up at a counter, drinking coffee and reading a magazine. Two men stood outside on the patio smoking; they held their cigarettes Eastern European style, like darts. They could have been anybody, in any house, anywhere. The carpet was going to pass barely ten feet over their heads.
The invisibility field brushed a tree branch. Instead of just passing through it the branch snagged, as if the field were a bubble of tacky glue, then curved and bent. They watched helplessly until it finally gave and a handful of oak leaves tore off.
Quentin’s toes curled. But at the same moment the oak branch snapped something fell inside the house—a coffee cup, it sounded like—and smashed on the floor. The two men turned. Someone swore, a woman. They were distracted. The moment passed.
That wasn’t luck; luck doesn’t come that good. Somebody must have—yes, Lionel was finishing up some arduous piece of probability-warping magic, breathing hard with the effort.
“Nice,” Quentin said.
“Shouldn’t have needed it.”
“It’s not his fault,” Quentin said. “He never even got to test it. We’re lucky we got this far.”
Lionel looked at him more surprised than angry—like he didn’t realize Quentin had the power of speech.
“Shut the fuck up,” he said, and turned back to the house.
They came to a stop in front of the window and hovered there, the tasseled edge of the carpet pushed up against the white clapboard of the house. There was no light inside. Stoppard took out a little brass scarab from one of his cases and placed it on the window. It crawled around it in a large square, and wherever it crawled it left behind a cut in the glass. When it was done Stoppard placed the cut square on the carpet, carefully, and returned the scarab to its case.
“Quentin, you’re up,” Lionel said.
“What am I up for?”
“That.” He pointed to the hole in the window. “Time to pull your weight.”
It had actually occurred to him that he was the only one who hadn’t done anything so far. Quentin peered into the hole. It was scary, but he was glad the wait was over, he needed something to do. Quentin thought back through his brief inglorious history with wet ops. Invading Ember’s Tomb with Dint and Fen; attacking the castle on Benedict Island. He was less terrified than he had been the first time, and less manic than he had been the second. Maybe that was experience.
“Give me a minute. OK to do spells?”
Lionel looked at Stoppard for the OK, then nodded. Quentin closed his eyes, placed two fingers on each lid—opposite hands, so his wrists were crossed in front of his face—and pronounced the words of an Indian night-vision charm. When he opened them it was as if the brightness and contrast on the world had been turned up and all the colors dialed down. Pushkar shook his head pityingly.
“Later we will discuss your Hindi.”
Stoppard was fussing with his clockwork.
“She’s getting pretty warm,” he said. “I’d say she’s got about fifteen minutes.”
He shushed it gently, as if it were a feverish child.
“Fifteen minutes?” Plum said. “It’s going to take that long minimum just to break the bond. Minimum.”
“So get moving,” Lionel said.
Quentin stuck his head through the hole and saw perfectly clearly, though in slightly false pastel colors, a huge empty guest bedroom, lavishly furnished. It was a lot nicer than the Marriott. He crawled the rest of the way inside. The bird fluttered through and lit on his shoulder. He flinched, but not as hard as the first time.
“Walk out into the hall, turn right, then left at the corner, left again, then first door on your right. There is no one else on this floor. We will follow with the device. Just stay within its range.”
As it turned out the device followed all by itself: the stand on which it rested clambered nimbly through the window on its six jointed legs, like a giant ant with one staring white clock eye. The thick white carpet swallowed their footsteps.
Quentin peered out into the hall, left then right, feeling like a kid sneaking out at a sleepover. The bird was right: no one there. The walls were bare of pictures; the house looked like the anonymous luxury vacation rental that it probably was. For just a minute Quentin allowed himself to think about what he would do if this actually worked. He’d buy a house. He’d study niffins. Could he summon Alice? Bind her? Was she a demon now? He would break back into Brakebills if he had to; maybe Hamish would let him in. He’d go back to Mayakovsky if he had to.
He turned left at the corner and immediately the corridor was revolving around him like a tunnel in a funhouse. He flopped over and hit the carpet hard. He gripped it, tried to wind his fingers into it, feeling gravity shift around him. Christ—what did he expect, invading a magician’s house? He looked back over his shoulder, but he was alone, everyone else was gone, and the spinning corridor stretched out to infinity.
And then it didn’t. The others were standing there watching him with expressions of mild concern as he lay flat on the floor, desperately groping for a handhold, and Plum waved away the last shreds of the illusion.
“Get up,” Lionel said.
“Trap,” Plum said. “You’re fine.”
He got to his feet cautiously. His heart rate was already easing off. She was right. He was fine.
Left again, and there was the door on the right. Quentin couldn’t find a whisper of magic on it, but Betsy pushed past him and began taking a series of traps offline—weird, unpleasant psychic snares. He heard the muffled boom of faraway thunder: a storm, it must have blown in fast. He looked back at the others, strung out behind him down the hall. Pushkar and Lionel had rolled up the carpet and were lugging it with them on their shoulders.
When Betsy was done he pushed open the door. It wasn’t even locked.
It was a pool room, long and well appointed, with a row of windows along one wall and couches along the other. The overall impression was of slightly artificial clubby gentility. Brown leather armchairs occupied the corners, and there was a cavernous fieldstone fireplace at one end that showed no sign of ever having been used. Boxes and crates of all possible sizes and shapes lay strewn around, which ruined the genteel atmosphere, along with some items too big or too unwieldy to be boxed or crated: a stuffed deer, a penny-farthing bicycle, an old-timey jukebox, a double bass made of dark wood.
An older man with thinning blond hair, not one of the Couple, was sitting on a couch playing with his phone. He looked up, surprised, but before he could speak Betsy calmly froze him in place with a spell she’d obviously had ready, then knocked him out cold with another one. He stayed sitting up, but his eyes were now closed.
The pool table itself was a beast, eight-legged and carved and inlaid to within an inch of its life, with a matching cabinet against the wall for cues and racks of scorekeeping beads and such. It must have weighed a ton; it looked like the kind of thing that shouldn’t be on the second floor of a house. One end was half buried in boxes and teetering stacks of books. It also supported, in plain view, an old brown leather suitcase.
It was a little the worse for wear, but otherwise it was the twin of the one Lionel had shown them at the hotel. It had an oval sticker from the Cunard–White Star Line on one side.
“All right,” Quentin said quietly. “Close the door. Nobody touch it.”
It was his and Plum’s show now. Stoppard crouched down and studied one of the smaller dials on his machine.
“Nine minutes,” he said.
Working quickly, they cleared away everything around the case so that it sat by itself. He whisked the felt around it with a little broom, then dusted it with fine white ash. Plum stuffed a wet towel against the bottom of the door and got a little fire going in a brazier; she set it up in the fireplace. The room began to fill with aromatic smoke. In the background Quentin could hear Betsy laying down barriers and traps, prepping for the moment when Stoppard’s bubble popped and the owners of the house abruptly and calamitously became aware of their presence. She was sealing the room off like a vault, from every side, floor and ceiling included.
Plum chalked off angles on the felt around the suitcase, using a ruler, doing sums in her head. Quentin bolted together a skeletal metal frame around it which they then strung with wires at high tension in an asymmetrical pattern. They used violin strings—E strings, the highest ones.
“Two minutes,” Stoppard said.
“Not ready!” Quentin, Plum and Betsy said it together. Jesus Christ, it wasn’t even going to be close. Thin white smoke drifted up from the works of Stoppard’s device, and there was heat shimmer above it now. It was ticking more slowly. It looked about ready to melt down.
“You’d better believe the Couple’s going to be ready,” Lionel said.
“Dammit.” Betsy pressed some soft red wax hastily into the door lock, then mashed a seal into the wax. Pushkar took down a pool cue from the rack and practiced a couple of businesslike bo staff strikes. He looked like he knew how to use it, though if it got to the point where they were fighting with pool cues they were all pretty much screwed anyway.
Pushkar broke off his routine.
“Something’s coming.” He tapped his temple. “Precognition.”
“Get the carpet ready to go,” Lionel said. “Quentin and Plum, how much longer?”
Still reciting smoothly, Plum held up four fingers. Quentin took a tuner out of his pocket and began plucking the strings on the cube—perfect fifths, and they had to be precise to within a couple of hertz. Betsy formally addressed herself to each wall, then the floor, then the ceiling, hands pressed together, her lips moving. Each wall flashed silver as she did so. Plaster dust drifted down from the corners.
Stoppard’s device sighed quietly as something inside it snapped or melted fatally, and the ticking stopped. No one moved. For a long moment the only sound in the room was Plum whispering over the case. Quentin gripped one of Mayakovsky’s coins in one hand.
Hoarse shouting came from somewhere on the first floor, then silence. A door slammed. Pushkar peered out a window, shook his head: nothing yet. Betsy was bobbing up and down on her toes, flexing her fingers, practically humming with excitement. Lionel stared grimly at the door, grinding his teeth. He squared off his blocky hands in front of him at chest height, fingers spread, thumbs touching.
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.