The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(120)
They crashed straight into the impeccably ruled lines of the talking animals, a few of them meeting head to head with a brain-jellying smack that made you want to cringe and maybe vomit, even from this distance. It made it all ten times realer, that horrible sound, more even than the sun. It was the sound of death, the ultimate irreversible. This was really happening, and nothing would ever be the same.
Though more often the animals went in tearing and scrapping, and when they did they went for their opposite numbers, head to head, speaking versus nonspeaking. The cats went down immediately, snarling and pawing at each other in a haze of dust. You didn’t see any dog-on-cat action, or not yet.
The talking animals were calling out in the fray, just the way human soldiers would:
“To me! To me!”
“On my right! The right flank, right flank!”
“Hold, damn you! Hold the line! Hold! Hold!”
It was a pretty even matchup. The talking animals were smarter and more organized, and they were, on average, a bit bigger than the dumb kind, but the dumb animals had the numbers. Janet found herself rooting for the talkers, instinctively, but then asking herself why. Were they morally better than the dumb ones? Did they deserve to win? Maybe she was just prejudiced. The talking ones at least got to talk. Maybe she should give the dumb ones this much, a victory in the last battle, the one that didn’t count for anything.
Janet thought of the sloths. Probably there was a contingent of sloths like fifty miles from here, a whole fighting regiment of them, and they wouldn’t get here for a month, and by then it would all be over. Or maybe the sloths didn’t care enough to fight at all? Good God, was that Humbledrum the bear, laying about him in the press? Slow to anger, that one, but my God. What a monster. He had a steel collar protecting his neck, and he was in full-on berserker mode, no doubt fueled by a barrel or two of schnapps.
She hoped he survived. But then again none of them were going to survive, were they, so maybe it was better if he died like this, in the thick of it, rather than watching the ruins of his world break apart under his feet. The hippogriff soared on, and Janet lost sight of Humbledrum in the chaos and the gloom. She would never know.
She was dimly aware that there was fighting in the air around her now too, birds having at it, complex dogfights, sprays of blood and feathers. Once in a while a pair would lock together and go twirling down out of the sky, neither one willing to release the other to save itself. Janet wondered if they’d break apart before they hit the ground, but she could never follow a pair long enough to see.
Men were fighting now too, around the castle. She squinted at them, focusing her magically augmented, telescopic vision. Who were they going to fight? Lorians? Monkeys? No, just those beast-people, half animal, half human, the ones Ember’s Tomb had been full of, and a unit of dark elves in shiny black chitinous-looking armor. Where had they been all this time? Josh and Poppy were playing defense, Josh on the battlements, Poppy flying over the press like a leggy Valkyrie, taking some incoming fire in the form of spears and arrows that she was having trouble managing.
There, she was backing off, floating higher, out of range. She’d be all right. She’d better, she and Josh were her ticket out of this shitshow. The last chopper out of magic Saigon.
Janet swept her gaze across the landscape, searching out more bad news. It was all very voyeuristic, like porn. More! More apocalypse! And there was more. Loads more.
The centaurs were coming thundering down from the Retreat where they hung out. Strict formation for these guys, they’d probably been drilling for this shit for generations. They mixed into the fray—they mostly fought two-handed, heavy short swords in both hands, or with bow and arrow—and holy shit! They were going after the talking animals? There—that guy lopped the head clean off what had clearly till moments ago been a talking deer. A spray of blood mounted up over the heads of the struggling fighters, then it weakened and subsided.
Those f*cking dicks. Nobody liked them, and now she knew why. They were probably total Nazis—figured if they could take out the other sentient beings they could run everything according to their weird fascist philosophy. Even Janet couldn’t sit back for this. She sent a couple of bolts of lightning into their column, and got back a volley of arrows that the hippogriff evasively maneuvered around, after which it cocked its head back at her, just for an instant, to say with its furious yellow eye: WTF, I did not sign on for this.
“Sorry,” Janet said, and patted its neck. “I just can’t stand those guys.”
For a minute it looked like the centaurs were going to make the difference, but then boom: a spearhead of unicorns rammed into the side of their formation. Jesus. Janet had to turn away. You only had to see a unicorn lay open the side of a centaur once, the ribcage flashing white when the ripped skin flopped down, to swear a mighty oath never to f*ck with or even look at another unicorn again. I’m putting down the hearts and fluffy clouds and backing away slowly. Don’t want any trouble here. You can have all the rainbows.
It was—viewed from a certain detached, clinical angle—like Fillory was playing chess with itself. A band of minotaurs straggled up, panting, having been outdistanced by the centaurs but plainly on their side. But just as they did flocks of griffins and pegasi began crisscrossing the battle space from above, kicking and raking and tearing. Actually the pegasi appeared to be worth f*ck-all from an offensive perspective—their little hooves were too light and delicate to do much damage to anybody, and they were too fussy to beat anybody with their wings the way a swan might. But still, total respect to them for showing up. And what did it matter, because the griffins were cleaning house. Jesus, those guys were like flying tanks. Beak and claws. Built for war.