The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(62)

“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from Pushkar the carpet stiffened under them and smoothed itself out, as if the squashy grass it was resting on had been replaced by a smooth ballroom floor.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.