The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(67)

Two blazing comets were ripping up at him through the still evening air, trailing smoke and sparks. They bulled right through the formation, overtaking him from behind like outbound meteors; one passed within five feet of him and the shockwave nearly knocked him off the bike. But it wasn’t him they were after. The twin comets smashed hard into the carpet, one-two.

It was the Couple. They’d come to take their suitcase back.

The carpet dipped with the force of the double impact. Betsy dived after it, and Quentin followed. Shouts floated back to him on the wind, fragments of screams, obscenities, orders, spells, all instantly whipped away on the wind. A desperate close-quarters scrum was in progress. One of the Couple, the woman, stood wreathed in light in the center of the carpet, surrounded by a circle of angry robed thieves. The man had caromed off whatever defensive shell was on the carpet but circled back immediately, like a moth pinging off a light bulb, and clung to the underside, where he began ripping his way up through it with both hands.

For the moment Quentin just watched and kept pace. He’d wait it out, then they could pounce on whoever survived, taking advantage of their hopefully weakened state. He looked around, picked out the others in the deepening twilight. They were doing the same—all except for Betsy, whom he’d now lost track of.

A lake flashed past far below, then more trees. They shot through thin wisps of low-flying cloud. The amount of magical energy being expended in the fight on the carpet was truly awesome; the Couple must have been carrying artifacts, because their energies were radically heightened. They might have been bad people, but they were terrifyingly strong spellcasters and apparently totally without fear. Thank God he hadn’t had to face them toe to toe. Quentin saw the man—grinning his face off—punch a fist up through the carpet and get a grip on the ankle of one of the golden-handed monks, drag him scrabbling through and fling him spinning down and away toward the darkening landscape below. The woman was already closing in on the case itself, but she was fighting her way through a storm of defensive magic.

A monk stepped forward and squared off hand to hand. They closed, and then it was chaos, a blur of lights and speeded-up movement. In the middle of it something came careening down from above at a steep angle like a diving cormorant and hit the carpet with a solid whump that shook dust out of it.

It was Betsy.

“Dammit!” Quentin said.

She should have waited, but apparently whatever personal stake she had in the case, coupled with her native eagerness to get herself killed, had gotten the better of her. Dammit dammit dammit. Discarded, her rug flew by him in the wake of the fight. Quentin urged his ridiculous penny-farthing forward, slowly closing the gap between himself and the carpet. She was out of her mind, but a team was a team.

He recognized the feeling of cold inevitability that came right before a fight. This was going to be close-quarters action, and he hastily hardened his hands and face. He tried to focus on a sense of righteous anger: it was their case, they’d taken it, and he was going to get it back. For Alice. He ducked as a dark form came flipping back at him head over heels, nearly colliding with the pool table. It was the man of the Couple. He looked limp, barely conscious, but he wasn’t falling, and Quentin let him go.

Now the trembling trailing tassels of the carpet were only a few feet ahead. He saw Betsy backhand the woman—a burst of light and a concussive thump accompanied the strike, which snapped her head around a quarter-turn—then clamp one hand on the handle of the case. The woman recovered and lunged for it too, while the remaining monks jockeyed around them, waiting to see who they had to take on. But before that could happen Betsy crouched down and placed her free hand on the carpet. He saw her mouth move but couldn’t place the spell. It must have been some powerful antimagic because the carpet instantly lost all internal cohesion and dissolved into a cloud of threads.

A whole flock of bodies flashed past Quentin and fell behind and down. Quentin struggled to track Betsy: she was dropping like a rock, still holding the case with one hand. Incredibly the woman had a grip on it too. They spun around each other, their clothes rippling and burring frantically in the wind. Quentin pointed his handlebars at them and dived, as close to vertical as he could get.

He hit terminal velocity and kept accelerating, speed stripping away what was left of conscious thought. The land loomed up toward them, dark green and wrinkled with low mountains. He clenched his teeth and pushed the ancient bicycle down faster and harder, the wind singing in the spokes, the effort tearing at his chest from the inside. They were coming into focus now: neither woman could break her fall without letting go of the case first, and neither one was willing to let go, so they were going at each other with their teeth and free hands and whatever spells they could work one-handed under the circumstances.

Given time he might have stopped one of them from falling with magic, but there were two of them and there was no time. Details in the landscape were resolving themselves, magnifying and magnifying, a stream, a field, individual trees. He matched course with them, swayed over to them, bumped them—the woman grabbed at him but tore loose again. He wasn’t going to be able to do this gracefully. He wasn’t sure he could do it at all. Now the ground was close, very close. Quentin’s knees were shaking, and the spindly front wheel collapsed and tore away. He bulled into them again, felt both of them clutch at him with their free hands. He heard the woman screaming wordlessly, and he felt her get a hand in his hair. She wasn’t screaming, she was laughing.