The Magician’s Land (18 page)

Pushkar had an enormous rectangular oriental carpet unrolled on the grass, a gorgeous thing with a knotted floral pattern on it in cream and pale blue and lion-gold. Pushkar was studying it and nodding slowly, sometimes bending down and smoothing out folds and making small adjustments to the fringes and to the pattern itself—it looked woven into the material, but it altered at his touch.

A flying carpet. He’d never actually seen one. Pushkar wore a multicolored, utterly tasteless game-day sweater under his parka.

“Nice rug,” Quentin said, since it was.

“Guess how much it cost?” He didn’t wait for Quentin to guess. “Seventy thousand dollars. The bird paid cash, I saw it.”

They stood around the edges. The gathering looked like a cold, formal, badly planned picnic. The bird addressed them from the top of Lionel’s head.

“We found the Couple a week ago. They are in a house two miles northwest of here. A large estate, with nothing else near it. We have been watching it, learning their routines. This morning something agitated them. We are concerned that they are preparing for something—maybe they are going to leave, maybe they will upgrade security, we don’t know. But there is no more time. We will make our attempt tonight. Questions?”

Quentin couldn’t think of any. Plum sniffled in the cold. Stoppard picked up his cases.

“Is it OK if I—?”

“Sure.” Pushkar nodded, and Stoppard stepped gingerly onto the carpet, as if he were worried it would scoot out from under him, or roll up with him in it.

He kneeled down and opened both suitcases; one was full of tools, the other one, the heavy one, contained a stumpy, silvery steel cylinder about a foot in diameter and two feet long. That’s what he’d been working on in his room, apparently—Quentin had seen it in pieces, but never put together. It had a white enamel clock face on one end and a cluster of small wheels and dials on the other. Stoppard unfolded a spindly stand and placed the cylinder on it, then opened the steel case and started fiddling.

Lionel wandered off; he was wearing only a black sweatshirt, the same one he’d been wearing that night in the bookstore, but he didn’t seem to feel the cold. At least they had a big bastard on their side. Betsy began a stretching routine.

“I feel like we should be doing something,” Plum said.

“I wish I smoked. Do you want to go through the spells again?”

“Not really. You?”

“I would but I think my head would fall off.”

So they sat down cross-legged on the carpet in the cold and waited. Quentin could feel Mayakovsky’s coins in his pants pocket. They felt good. They felt like confidence. Stoppard took out a small metal crank, fitted one end into a socket on the back of the machine, and began furiously turning it.

“Mainspring,” he said happily, over the ratcheting sound. His breath puffed out white. “White alloy. Constant even source of kinetic energy. Tough to mess with magically.”

“What does this thing do?”

“Security mostly. It puts a bubble around us, makes us very hard to see or hear or detect magically. It should also keep us warm, which I personally can’t wait for.”

Quentin realized Stoppard didn’t know even basic personal warmth spells, so he cast a few on him as he cranked the mainspring. The bird watched it all. If it was anxious or impatient, there was no way to tell.

Once the machine had been ticking for a few minutes Stoppard detached the handle and stowed it away. He made a couple of adjustments, and there was a soft whirring sound, a hummingbird’s wings against a window, and the hands on the dials began to move. It chimed twice,
clearly and musically, and light flashed deep in its gleaming innards like lightning inside a thundercloud.

The wind died around them. There were no other perceptible effects, but Stoppard looked satisfied. He shut the case. Lionel wandered over, frowned, and nodded.

“Good,” Lionel said. “Everybody on. Pushkar, take us up.”

At a word from Pushkar the carpet stiffened under them and smoothed itself out, as if the squashy grass it was resting on had been replaced by a smooth ballroom floor. They all instinctively clustered in the middle, as far as possible from the edges, and the carpet rose rapidly and silently up into the sky: fifty, a hundred, two hundred feet, high enough to clear the tallest trees. It was a restful, dreamlike feeling—less like flying than like being in a glass elevator with no building around it. Now Quentin could see that they were in a sparsely populated area, lightly wooded, the houses large and far apart, some of them dark, some glowing with friendly yellow light.

No one spoke. The carpet stopped rising, paused, and began to swim gently forward, smoothly, like a raft drifting on a calm river. The rug’s tassels hung down limp in the still air. As they got less afraid of the edges they gradually spread out. From this height they could appreciate the meticulous work of whoever had been the last person to mow these fields: they’d left a neat, even, looping pattern of darker and lighter stripes.

After five minutes the bird said:

“There.”

Lionel pointed for him.

It was a big gray-roofed mansion about a mile away. Not ostentatious, just a very big fieldstone house with white trim, in the Georgian style, though on a mega-Georgian scale.

“Tasteful,” Betsy said.

“Lotta money out here,” Lionel said. “Bankers. I hear Judge Judy’s house is here somewhere.”

It was hard to imagine a universe in which Lionel watched
Judge Judy.

The shadows of the trees on the edges of the meadows stretched
longer and longer, melting and running as the sun drifted downward. When they were half a mile from the house Pushkar stopped the carpet, and there was a rapid conversation between him and Stoppard and the bird as they dismantled some kind of invisible but ticklish outer security perimeter, which required a lot of careful massaging of Stoppard’s machine. The speed and pitch of the whirring spiked and then slackened again once they were through.

Meanwhile Betsy removed a three-foot length of brass wire from Lionel’s bag. She scored it every few inches with the blade of a Leatherman, then bent the ends with the pliers and hooked them together to form a rough hoop a couple of feet across. When she sang a couple of keywords—her voice was incongruously high and sweet—the area inside the hoop lit up with an artificially bright view of the landscape through it.

Holding it up, she turned in a slow circle, all the way around the horizon. She stopped facing east.

“Look,” she said. “Lionel. Big portal over there. Five, six miles. Weird one.”

Lionel squinted at it too. He frowned.

“Somebody else’s party,” he decided. “Let’s worry about ours.”

Betsy turned back to the house. The grounds were so neatly laid out they looked like they’d been sketched directly onto the gray-green grass by an architect working with compass and ruler. In the twilight it looked motionless, but seen through the hoop six or seven guards stood out against it, phosphorescent.

“This must be what a Predator drone feels like,” Quentin said.

“Hold this steady.” Betsy handed him the hoop. “Plum, you ready? Like we talked about.”

“You can do it from here?”

“I can do it from here. Whenever you’re ready.”

Betsy didn’t seem the slightest bit worried; if anything her tone had become gentler and more relaxed than Quentin had ever heard it before. This must be her element. The carpet’s flight path angled lower.

“OK. Do that one first.” Plum indicated the nearest guard, farthest out from the house, who was standing alone at a gate in the wall.

Betsy made a fist, placed it over the image of the guard in the hoop,
and blew through it softly. The man slumped to the ground; it was as if she’d blown his pilot light out.

“Is he asleep?” Quentin asked.

“Sleep, coma. You say potato.”

Plum was concentrating, whispering in some Arabic language.

“Faster,” Lionel snapped. “Come on.”

She picked up the pace. A few seconds later a guard, or the shadow of one, appeared to draw itself up out of the ground and take its place where the man had stood. It didn’t glow in the hoop the way the man had, but otherwise it resembled him exactly. Plum let out a deep breath.

“OK?” she said.

Lionel studied it, then pursed his lips but nodded grudgingly.

“What did you make it out of?”

“Leaves. That’s all there was. He’ll look fine from a distance.”

“OK. Do it faster next time.”

The carpet drifted silently forward in its invisible bubble, now just fifty feet up, passing over the outer wall of the estate, then an outer lawn, a clay tennis court, a swimming pool, drained and covered for the winter. It was hard to believe no one could see them—Quentin didn’t
feel
invisible—but there were no shouts and no alarms. They cast no shadow. When they spoke it was in whispers, even though Stoppard insisted that they could have had a rock concert inside this thing and nobody would hear it.

Betsy and Plum dropped and then re-created four, five, six guards. Plum’s doppelgängers were convincing, at least from this distance. They were made from whatever she could grab from the immediate area—grass clippings, mulch, clay from the tennis court, just nearby shadows—but they wore the same clothes as their victims, and though they didn’t walk, they could shift their weight and turn their heads alertly the way a real guard would have, like minor enemies in a video game.

“There,” Lionel said. “It’s that window. The wing on the right, top floor, middle window.”

“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.”