The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(64)

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.