“Yes. Payment is two million dollars each, cash or gold. A hundred thousand tonight, the rest once we have the object. Make your decisions now. Bear in mind that if you say no you will find yourself unable to discuss tonight’s meeting with anyone else.”
Satisfied that it had made its case, the bird fluttered up to perch on top of its cage.
It was more than Quentin had expected. There were probably easier and safer ways in this world for a magician to earn two million dollars, but there weren’t many that were this quick, or that were right in front of him. Even magicians needed money sometimes, and this was one of those times. He had to get back into the swim of things. He had work to do.
“If you’re not interested, please leave now,” the cashier said. Evidently he was the bird’s lieutenant. He might have been in his mid-twenties. His black beard covered his chin and neck like brambles.
The Cro-Magnon guy stood up.
“Good luck.” He turned out to have a thick German accent. “You gonna need this, huh?”
He skimmed the greeting card into the middle of the room and left. It landed face up: GET WELL SOON. Nobody picked it up.
About a third of the room shuffled out with him, off in search of other pitches and better offers. Maybe this wasn’t the only show in town tonight. But it was the only one Quentin knew about, and he didn’t leave. He watched Plum, and Plum watched him. She didn’t leave either. They were in the same boat—she must be scrabbling too.
The red-faced guy stood against the wall by the door.
“See ya!” he said to each person as they passed him. “Buh-bye!”
When everybody who was going to leave had left the cashier closed the door again. They were down to eight: Quentin, Plum, Pixie, Red Face, Iridescent Glasses, the teenager, the Indian guy, and a long-faced woman in a flowing dress with a lock of white hair over her forehead; the last two had come in through the other door. The room felt even quieter than it had before, and strangely empty.
“Are you from Fillory?” Quentin asked the bird.
That got some appreciative laughter, though he wasn’t joking, and the bird didn’t laugh. It didn’t answer him either. Quentin couldn’t read its face; like all birds, it had only one expression.
“Before we go any further each of you must pass a simple test of magical strength and skill,” the bird said. “Lionel here”—it meant the cashier—“is an expert in probability magic. Each of you will play a hand of cards with him. If you beat him you will have passed the test.”
There were some disgruntled noises at this new revelation, followed by another round of discreet mutual scoping-out. From the reaction Quentin gathered that this wasn’t standard practice.
“What’s the game?” Plum asked.
“The game is Push.”
“You must be joking,” Iridescent Glasses said, disgustedly. “You really don’t know anything, do you?”
Lionel had produced a pack of cards and was shuffling and bridging it fluently, without looking, his face blank.
“I know what I require,” the bird said stiffly. “I know that I am offering a great deal of money for it.”
“Well, I didn’t come here to play games.”
The man stood up.
“Well why the fuck did you come here?” Pixie asked brightly.
“You may leave at any time,” the bird said.
“Maybe I will.”
He walked to the door, pausing with his hand on the knob, as if he were expecting somebody to stop him. Nobody did. The door shut after him.
Quentin watched Lionel shuffle. The man obviously knew how to handle a deck; the cards leapt around obligingly in his large hands, neatly and cleanly, the way they did for a pro. He thought about the entrance exam he’d taken to get into Brakebills, what was it, thirteen years ago now? He hadn’t been too proud to take a test then. He sure as hell wasn’t now.
And he used to be a bit of a pro at this himself. Cards were stage magic, close-up magic. This was where he started out.
“All right,” Quentin said. He got up, flexing his fingers. “Let’s do it.”
He dragged a desk chair over noisily and sat down opposite Lionel. As a courtesy Lionel offered him the deck. Quentin took it.
He stuck to a basic shuffle, trying not to look too slick. The cards were stiff but not brand new. They had the usual industry-standard anti-manipulation charms on them, nothing he hadn’t seen before. It felt good to have them in his hands. He was back on familiar ground. Without being obvious about it, he got a look at a few face cards and put them where they wouldn’t go to waste. It had been a while, a long while, but this was a game he knew something about. Back in the day Push had been a major pastime among the Physical Kids.
It was a childishly simple game. Push was a lot like War—high card wins—with some silly added twists to break ties (toss cards into a hat; once you get five in, score it like a poker hand; etc.). But the rules weren’t the point; the point of Push was to cheat. There was a lot of strange magic in cards: a shuffled deck wasn’t a fixed thing, it was a roiling cloud of possibilities, and nothing was ever certain till the cards were actually played. It was like a box with a whole herd of Schrödinger’s cats in it. With a little magical know-how you could alter the order in which your cards came out; with a little more you could guess what your opponent was going to play before she played it; with a bit more you could play cards that by all the laws of probability rightfully belonged to your opponent, or in the discard pile, or in some other deck entirely.
Quentin handed back the cards, and the game began.
They started slow, trading off low cards, easy tricks, both holding serve. Quentin counted cards automatically, though there was a limit to how much good it could do—when magicians played the cards had a way of changing sides, and cards you thought were safely deceased and out of play had a way of coming back to life. He’d been curious what caliber of talent got involved in these kinds of operations, and he was revising his estimates sharply upward. It was obvious he wasn’t going to overwhelm Lionel with brute force.
Quentin wondered where he’d trained. Brakebills, probably, same as he had; there was a precise, formal quality to his magic that you didn’t see coming out of the safe houses. Though there was something else too: it had a cold, sour, alien tang to it—Quentin could almost taste it. He wondered if Lionel was quite as human as he looked.
There were twenty-six tricks in a hand of Push, and halfway through neither side had established an advantage. But on the fourteenth trick Quentin overreached—he burned some of his strength to force a king to the top of his deck, only to waste it on a deuce from Lionel. The mismatch left him off balance, and he lost the next three tricks in a row. He clawed back two more by stealing cards from the discard pile, but the preliminaries were over. From here on out it was going to be a dogfight.
The room narrowed to just the table. It had been a while since Quentin had seen his competitive spirit, but it was rousing itself from its long slumber. He wasn’t going to lose this thing. That wasn’t going to happen. He bore down. He could feel Lionel probing, trying to shove cards around within the unplayed deck, and he shoved back. They blew all four aces in as many tricks, all-out, hammer and tongs. For kicks Quentin split his concentration and used a simple spell to twitch the sex amulet out of Lionel’s pocket and onto the floor. But if that distracted Lionel he didn’t show it.
Probability fields began to fluctuate crazily around them—invisible, but you could see secondary effects from them in the form of minor but very unlikely chance occurrences. Their hair and clothes stirred in impalpable breezes. A card tossed to one side might land on its edge and balance there, or spin in place on one corner. A mist formed above the table, and a single flake of snow sifted down out of it. The onlookers backed away a few steps. Quentin beat a jack of hearts with the king, then lost the next trick with the exact same cards reversed. He played a deuce—and Lionel swore under his breath when he realized he was somehow holding the extra card with the rules of poker on it.
Reality was softening and melting in the heat of the game. On the second-to-last trick Lionel played the queen of spades, and Quentin frowned—did her face look the slightest bit like Julia’s? Either way there was no such thing as a one-eyed queen, let alone one with a bird on her shoulder. He spent his last king against it, or he thought he did: when he laid it down it had become a jack, a suicide jack at that, which again there was no such card, especially not one with white hair like his own.
Even Lionel looked surprised. Something must be twisting the cards—it was like there was some invisible third player at the table who was toying with both of them. With his next and last card it became clear that Lionel had lost all control over his hand because he turned over a queen of no known suit, a Queen of Glass. Her face was translucent cellophane, sapphire-blue. It was Alice, to the life.
“What the shit,” Lionel said, shaking his head.
What the shit was right. Quentin clung to his nerve. The sight of Alice’s face shook him, it froze his gut, but it also stiffened his resolve. It reminded him what he was doing here. He was not going to panic. In fact he was going to take advantage of this—Alice was going to help him. The essence of close-up magic is misdirection, and with Lionel distracted Quentin pulled a king of clubs out of his boot with numb fingers and slapped it down. He tried to ignore the gray suit the king wore, and the branch that was sprouting in front of his face.
It was over. Game and match. Quentin sat back and took a deep, shaky breath.
“Good,” the bird said simply. “Next.”
Lionel didn’t look happy, but he didn’t say anything either, just crouched down and collected his amulet from under the table. Quentin got up and went to stand against the wall with others, his knees weak, his heart still racing, revving past the red line.
He was happy to get out of the game with a win, but he’d thought he would. He hadn’t thought he’d see his long-lost ex-girlfriend appear on a face card. What just happened? Maybe someone here knew more about him than they should. Maybe they were trying to throw him off his game. But who? Who would bother? Nobody cared if he won or lost, not anymore. As far as he knew the only person who cared right now was Quentin.
Maybe he was doing it himself—maybe his own subconscious was reaching up from below and warping his spellwork. Or was it Alice herself, wherever she was, whatever she was, watching him and having a little fun? Well, let her have it. He was focused on the present, that was what mattered. He had work to do. He was getting his life back together. The past had no jurisdiction here. Not even Alice.
The red-faced guy won his game with no signs of anything out of the ordinary. So did the Indian guy. The woman with the shock of white hair went out early, biting her lip as she laid down a blatantly impossible five deuces in a row, followed by a joker, then a Go Directly to Jail! card from Monopoly. The kid got a bye for some reason—the bird didn’t make him play at all. Plum got a bye too. Pixie passed faster than any of them, either because she was that strong or because Lionel was getting tired.
When it was all over Lionel handed the woman who’d lost a brick of hundred-dollar bills for her trouble. He handed another one to the red-faced man.
“Thank you for your time,” the bird said.
“Me?” The man stared down at the money in his hand. “But I passed!”
“Yes,” Lionel said. “But you got here late. And you seem like kind of an asshole.”
The man’s face got even redder than it already was.
“Go ahead,” Lionel said. He spread his arms. “Make a move.”
The man’s face twitched, but he wasn’t so angry or so crazy that he couldn’t read the odds.
“Fuck you!” he said.
That was his move. He slammed the door behind him.
Quentin dropped into the armchair the man had just vacated, even though it was damp from his wet windbreaker. He felt limp and wrung out. He hoped the testing was over with, he wouldn’t have trusted himself to cast anything right now. Counting him there were only five left: Quentin, Plum, Pixie, the Indian guy, and the kid.
This all seemed a hell of a lot more real than it had half an hour ago. It wasn’t too late, he could still walk away. He hadn’t seen any deal-breakers yet, but he hadn’t seen a lot to inspire confidence either. This could be his way back in, or it could be the road to somewhere even worse. He’d spent enough time already on things that went nowhere and left him with nothing. He could walk out, back into the rainy night, back into the cold and the wet.
But he didn’t. It was time to turn things around. He was going to make this work. It wasn’t like he had a lot of better offers.
“You think this is going to be enough?” Quentin asked the bird. “Just five of us?”
“Six, with Lionel. And yes. In fact I would say that it is exactly right.”
“Well, don’t keep us in suspense,” Pixie said. “What’s the target?”
The bird didn’t keep them in suspense.
“The object we are looking for is a suitcase. Brown leather, average size, manufactured 1937, monogrammed RCJ. The make is Louis Vuitton.”
It actually had a pretty credible French accent.
“Fancy,” she said. “What’s in it?”
“I do not know.”
“You don’t know?” It was the first time the teenage boy had spoken. “Why the hell do you want it then?”
“In order to find out.”
“Huh. What do the initials stand for?”
“Rupert John Chatwin,” the bird said crisply.