They stopped and stared in both directions, blinking. It was like they had stumbled into the dream of a starving man.
“Nobody eats!” Dint called. “Don’t touch it! Nobody eats, nobody drinks!”
“There are too many entrances,” Anaïs said, her pretty green eyes flicking in all directions. “They can attack us.”
She was right. A door opened farther down the hall, admitting two large, rangy individuals of the monkey family, though Quentin couldn’t have said exactly what to call them. Their glazed simian eyes looked bored. In perfect synchrony they dipped their hands into pouches slung over their shoulders and came up with golf-size lead balls. With a practiced windup of their overdeveloped shoulders and overlong arms, they whipped the balls at the group at big-league fastball speeds.
Quentin grabbed Alice’s hand, and they cowered back behind a heavy tapestry, which caught one of the balls. The other one clipped a candlestick on the table and then spectacularly vaporized four wineglasses in a row. Under other circumstances, Quentin thought, that would actually have been cool. Eliot touched his forehead, where he’d been hit by a shard of glass. His fingers came away bloody.
“Would somebody please kill those things, please!” Janet said disgustedly. She was crouched under the table.
“Seriously,” Josh complained through clenched teeth. “This shit isn’t even mythological. We need some unicorns or something up in this piece.”
“Janet!” Eliot said. “Do your demon!”
“I already did!” she yelled back. “I did it the night after graduation! I felt sorry for it!”
Huddling behind the rough fabric of the tapestry, Quentin watched a pair of legs stroll by, unhurriedly. While the rest of them hunkered down, Penny strode confidently toward the two ball throwers as they wound up again, no expressions on their stiff monkey faces. He was gesturing fast with both hands and singing an incantation in a high, clear tenor. Calm and serious in the shifting candlelight, wearing just a T-shirt and jeans, he looked much less like a puffy wannabe than he used to. He looked like a hardened young battle-mage. Was that how he’d looked to Alice, Quentin wondered, the night she slept with him?
With one hand Penny stopped a lead ball in midair, then a second. They hovered there unsupported for a moment like surprised humming-birds before they recovered their weight and dropped to the floor. With the other hand Penny lobbed back a fiery seed that grew and expanded like an unfurling parachute. The tapestries on either side of the hall blazed where the fireball brushed them. It engulfed the two monkeys, and when it dissipated they were simply gone, and a ten-foot section of the banquet table was a roaring bonfire.
“Yeah!” Penny yelled, momentarily forgetting his Fillory-speak. “Boom, bitches!”
“Amateur,” Dint muttered.
“If my hairline is messed up,” Eliot said weakly, “I will bring those things back to life and kill them all over again.”
They retreated along the banquet hall in the opposite direction, awkwardly shuffling past the straight-backed wooden chairs. The hall was just too narrow—with the table in the center there wasn’t enough room for them to form up properly. The setup had a zany
Scooby Doo
feeling. Quentin took a running step and half leaped, half slid across the banquet table, clearing dishes as he went, feeling like an action hero sliding across the firebird-emblazoned hood of his muscle car.
A curious Alice in Wonderland menagerie was crowding into the hall from either side. As military order broke down in the room so did taxonomical order. Species and body parts were mashed up seemingly at random. Had everything collapsed after the Chatwins left, to the point where humans and animals interbred? There were ferrets and rabbits, giant mice and loping monkeys and a vicious-looking fisher, but there were also men and women with the heads of animals: an astute-looking fox-headed man who appeared to be preparing a spell; a woman with a thick-necked lizard head with huge independent eyes; an oddly dignified pike-bearer upon whose shoulders swayed the sinuous neck and tiny head of a pink flamingo.
Fen plucked a sharp knife off the banquet table, gripped the blade carefully between her thumb and forefinger, and threw it spinning so that it took the fox-man point-first in the eye socket.
“Move,” she barked. “Everybody. Fall back. Don’t let them bog us down. We have to be close now.”
They fell back along the length of the banquet hall. The basic idea was to try to keep a coherent line of scrimmage between them and their attackers, but the line kept getting disrupted. One of their party would get hung up—the chairs kept getting in the way—or the tomb dwellers would group together and make a charge, or worse, one of them would blunder in from the side through a hidden door straight into the center of their party. He and Alice managed to hold hands for the first ten seconds, but after that it just wasn’t possible. This wasn’t like the earlier fights. The whole thing kept degenerating into the running of the bulls. The hall seemed to go on forever; possibly it did. The candles and mirrors and food gave the whole scene an incongruously festive air. Even if they decided to take the button home, at this point it would be hard to muster everybody in one place to actually do it.
Quentin jogged along with his knife out, though he didn’t know if he was capable of using it. He felt like he had in gym class, trying to look like part of the team while at the same time desperately hoping nobody would pass him the ball. A giant house cat popped out from behind a tapestry right in front of him, and Fen almost certainly saved Quentin’s life by cannoning fearlessly into the thing so that they rolled together on the floor, grappling and thrashing, until she knocked it out with a furious
inc aga
head-butt. Quentin gave her a hand up and they ran on.
Dint was putting on a show. He’d hopped spryly up onto the banquet table and was striding along it, rapping out percussive syllables with astonishing speed and fluency, his wand tucked back behind his ear. His long black hair crackled, and crazy energies flashed out from the tips of his long fingers; sometimes he actually had two different spells going simultaneously, Quentin noticed, a primary attack in one hand and a second, lesser piece of witchery simmering in his off hand. At one point he made his arms swell up hugely, picked up two chairs in each giant hand and clubbed down a half dozen opponents with them in three businesslike swings—left, right, left.
Penny managed to persuade a section of the table to rear up like an angry centipede and attack the Fillorians until they chopped it to pieces. Even Quentin got off a couple of sweaty-palmed Magic Missiles into the press. Fen’s tunic was soaked with sweat. She closed her eyes and placed her palms together, whispering, and when she parted them they gleamed with a terrible white phosphorescence. The next foe she met—a sinewy scimitarwielder who was either wearing a leopard skin or was half leopard from the waist up—she shouted and punched her fist through its chest up to her shoulder.
But the close calls were getting closer. The situation was disintegrating, and they needed an exit strategy. The corridor was filling with bodies and smoke. Quentin’s breath whistled through his teeth, and in his head he was singing a psychotic nonsense song.
Somewhere along the line Quentin left his knife in a furry Fillorian stomach. He never saw the creature’s face—it was a creature, not a person, not a person, not a person—but later he would remember the sensation of jamming it in, how the blade punched through the tough rubbery muscles of the diaphragm and then slid easily into the underlying viscera, and how the muscles gripped the blade after it was in. He snatched his hand away from the hilt like it was electrified.
Quentin registered first Josh, then Eliot, hunching their shoulders and letting loose their cacodemons. Eliot’s was particularly awesome-looking, banded from head to foot in horizontal yellow and black danger stripes. It slid sideways across the smooth table, scrabbling like a flung cat, then charged into the fray with unself-conscious glee, clinging and tearing and leaping and clinging again.
“Goddamn it!” Janet was screaming. “What else? What the fuck else?”
“This is bullshit,” Eliot yelled hoarsely. “Side door! Pick a side door and go through it!”
There was a moment of premonitory silence, as if some of the creatures actually sensed what was going to happen next. Then the floor jolted, and a giant man made of glowing red-hot iron shouldered his way sideways through the wall.
He took the whole wall down with him. A flying brick nicked Fen’s head, and she dropped like she’d been shot. Waves of heat poured off the giant, warping the air around him, and anything he touched burned. He stood bent over, hands on the floor—he was about a third again too tall for the confined space of the banquet hall. His eyes were molten gold, with no pupils. Dust filled the air. The giant put his foot on Fen’s prostrate body, and she burst into flames.
Everybody ran. Anybody who fell was trampled. The heat coming off the man’s smooth red skin was unbearable. Quentin would have done anything to put distance between it and himself. There were pileups at the nearest exits; Quentin pushed past them and farther down the hall. He looked around for Alice and couldn’t even find anybody human until he risked a look back and saw Josh standing in the middle of the hallway, all alone.
He seemed to be undergoing one of his freakish power surges. He’d summoned another of his miniature black holes, the way he’d done that day on the welters pitch. It had nearly swallowed a tree that day; now as Quentin watched an entire length of tapestry wavered toward it and then flowed into it all at once, ripping free of its curtain rod with a sound like a fusillade of pistol shots. The light in the hall dimmed and became amber. The red giant was momentarily stalled by this. He was squatting down, studying the apparition, apparently fascinated by it. He was bald, and his expression was blank. His huge, hairless, glowing-red cock and balls swung loose between his thighs like the clapper of a bell.
Then Quentin was alone and running along a cool, dark side corridor. It was silent—the noise switched off like a TV. He was sprinting flat out, and then he was running, then jogging, and then, after a while, he was just walking. It was over. He couldn’t run anymore. The air scorched his lungs. He bent over and put his hands on his knees. His back itched painfully, behind his right shoulder, and when he reached back to scratch he found an arrow dangling from the hump of muscle there. Unthinkingly, he pulled it out, and a freshet of blood trickled down his back, but there wasn’t much pain. It had only gone in an inch, probably not even that far. He was almost glad it hurt. The pain was something to hang on to. He held the wooden shaft, grateful to have something solid in his hands. The silence was amazing.
He was safe again. For a few minutes he allowed himself to luxuriate in the simple joys of breathing cool air, of not running, of being alone in the semidarkness and not in immediate danger of dying. But the gravity of the situation kept seeping through, messily, until he could no longer blot it up. He could be the last one alive for all he knew. He had no idea how to get back up to the surface. He could die down here. He felt the weight of the dirt and rock over his head. He was buried alive. Even if he made it out, he didn’t have the button. He had no way to get back to Earth.
Footsteps in the darkness. Somebody was coming, walking. The figure’s hands were glowing with a light charm. Wearily, Quentin started in on yet another Magic Missile spell, but before he could finish he realized it was just Eliot. He let his hands drop and sagged to the floor.
Neither of them spoke, they just leaned together against the wall, side by side. The cold stone soothed the little divot of pain the arrow had punched in Quentin’s back. Eliot’s shirt was untucked. His face was all smudged with soot on one side. He would have been furious if he’d known.
“You all right?”
Eliot nodded.
“Fen’s dead,” Quentin said.
Eliot took a deep breath and ran his glowing hands through his thick wavy hair.
“I know. I saw.”
“I don’t think there’s anything we could have done,” Eliot said. “Big Red back there was just out of our league, that’s all.”
They fell silent. It was like the words had spun off into some void where they had no meaning. They’d lost any connection with the world; or maybe it was the world that had peeled away from the words. Eliot passed him a flask with something strong in it, and he drank and passed it back. It seemed to restore some link between him and his body.
Quentin drew his knees up and hugged them.
“I got hit by an arrow,” he said. It felt like a stupid thing to say. “In my back.”
“We should go,” Eliot said.
“Right.”
“Backtrack. Try to meet back up with the others. Penny’s got the button.” It was amazing that Eliot could still be so practical after everything that had happened. He was so much stronger than Quentin was.
“That big glowing guy though.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe he’s still back there.”
Eliot shrugged.
“We have to get to the button.”
Quentin was thirsty, but there was no water. He couldn’t remember when he’d dropped his pack.
“I’ll tell you something funny,” Eliot said after a while. “I think Anaïs hooked up with Dint.”
“What?” In spite of himself Quentin smiled. He felt his dry lips crack. “When did they even have time?”
“Bathroom break. After that second fight.”
“Wow. Tough break for Josh. But you have to applaud their initiative.”
“Definitely. But hard cheese on Josh.”
“Hard cheese.”
It was the kind of thing they used to say back at Brakebills.
“I’ll tell you something else funny,” Eliot went on. “I don’t regret coming here. Even now that it’s all gone to shit, I’m still glad I came. Could that possibly be the stupidest thing I’ve ever said to you? But it’s the truth. I think I was going to drink myself to death back on Earth.”