“Stop!” Quentin croaked.
But it was already too late. She let go and the woman fell face-first on the black earth, still twitching. Quentin smelled burned flesh.
“I stopped,” Betsy said. She kept walking.
She picked up the case, examined it skeptically for damage, hefted it in her hands. It looked like it hardly weighed a thing. Quentin crawled over to the dying woman but stopped short of touching her. There was no telling what kind of fatal magical juice was still in her body. Smoke rose from her black hair. It was too late anyway.
Betsy watched him. She spat on the ground.
“I’ll kill you too if you try to stop me.”
The forest was quiet. It was early spring, the undergrowth was still recovering from the rude shock of winter, and only a few crickets chirped. The woman had been a murderer. Three minutes ago she would’ve let either one of them die. Betsy squatted down and laid the case down and fumbled with the latches.
“Shit.” She strained at them, set herself and strained again. “Shit. I was afraid of that. Where the hell is Plum where you need her?”
“What do you want with Plum?”
More or less on cue Stoppard and Plum came crunching down through the branches, shielding their faces from the bristles. They were crowded together on the same club chair; something must have happened to the other one. Their landing was hard but controlled until the chair came down on a rock and one of its legs snapped off, spilling them onto the soft ground.
Plum got to her feet, rubbing her hands on her thighs.
“Jesus,” she said. “What happened?”
“The girl bit it,” Betsy said. “Open the case.”
“What, now? Shouldn’t we—?”
“Open it!”
“Better do it,” Quentin said. “She killed the woman.”
Betsy must be pretty worn out by now, he thought, but there was still no telling what she was capable of.
“Jesus,” Stoppard said. “Why’d you do that?”
He seemed to really want to know, but Betsy ignored him. Her face was grim and set.
“Open it. Do it now.”
“What makes you think I can open it?”
“You know what.”
Plum sighed, resigned.
“I guess I do.”
She sat down cross-legged in front of the case and snapped open the latches as if they’d never been locked. As soon as she did Betsy kicked her aside roughly.
“Hey!”
She rummaged through the contents. She picked up a book, tossed it aside, then she held up a long knife made of what looked like tarnished silver. It was a simple weapon, unornamented. It looked very functional and very old.
“Yes,” she whispered to it. Her voice cracked. “Oh, yes. Hello you.”
With a rush of air and a thunderous crackling whump the pool table bashed straight down through the canopy and landed solidly on its thick legs on the forest floor. Lionel rode it down standing up, the bird on his shoulder. There was no sign of Pushkar.
“Where’s the case?” Lionel took in the corpse, Quentin and Plum and Stoppard, Betsy and the knife. “You opened it.”
He’d unwrapped his parcel: it was a gun, a snouty-looking assault rifle that fit lightly under his arm. Stock and barrel were deeply engraved, swirls and tracery—it was obviously a hybrid weapon, high-tech but magically augmented.
“I sure did,” Betsy said.
“Where’s Pushkar?” Stoppard said.
Instead of answering Lionel smoothly raised the rifle to his shoulder, sighted down it and fired two controlled bursts briskly and efficiently at Stoppard’s chest.
He should have died right then. But even before Lionel fired Betsy was between them, holding the blade—she’d moved faster than Quentin could follow. The bullets sparked and clanged off the silver knife, two quick metallic triplets, and ricocheted off into the bushes. Whatever that knife was, it came with a lot of fringe benefits, and one of them was that it wasn’t going to let its wielder get hurt.
Quentin stared at Lionel.
“What the fuck? You fat piece of shit!”
Five minutes ago he’d felt so empty it was like he’d never cast a spell again, but there was power in fear, and in anger, and he got to his feet. He felt like he might be able to get a spell out of it, but before he could try Betsy took three running steps and launched herself at Lionel like a big cat—the knife must have given her a whole suite of powers, strength as well as speed and protection. Lionel turned quick and got off another burst, but the knife ate them up effortlessly, and then she was too close to shoot. They waltzed drunkenly around the pool table, Lionel grunting as she butchered him standing up.
Curiously, there was no blood. The knife met very little resistance—it sliced up through his torso, down through his collar bone, then she forced it deep into his chest. It went through him like a wire through wet clay. The next cut took his head off.
It fell and rolled through the leaves. It didn’t speak, but its eyes blinked. The stump of the neck looked like gray stone.
“Huh,” Betsy said, standing over the headless corpse. “Golem. It figures.”
Huh. Though it seemed like a notable fact that she hadn’t known he wasn’t human before she started murdering him. Only now did Betsy start breathing hard, like it was all catching up with her at once: the job, the flight, the fall, the killing, the case, the whole comprehensive fiasco.
“Where’s the money?” Stoppard asked.
“There isn’t any,” Quentin said.
It was catching up with him too. They’d been blindsided by the monks and then double-crossed twice: first by Betsy, then by the bird. It must have planned to kill them all along instead of paying them off. There never had been any money. He was farther back than when he started. Farther from home. Farther from Alice.
Though they did have the case, or whatever was left in it, unless the bird was coming back for it. For now it was gone; Quentin hadn’t even seen it go.
Betsy jumped down from the pool table, and her knees almost buckled when she landed. All the strength had gone out of her.
“I thought they’d try that.” She sounded weary and, for the first time since he’d met her, very young. She couldn’t have been more than a couple of years into her twenties. “Figures. Never trust anything without hands. Or with hands for that matter.”
“Thank you,” Stoppard said. “You saved my life.”
“Eyes are up here.” Betsy pointed. “But you’re welcome.”
“What is that thing?” Quentin said.
“This?” Betsy held up the knife, studying its edge. “This is why I’m here. This is what I’ve always wanted. This is a weapon for killing gods.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“Have you ever met a fucking god?”
“I guess I can see your point.”
Plum picked up the book that Betsy had tossed aside. It had a blank leather cover—it looked like a notebook or a diary.
“Are you sure gods can even die?” she said.
“I’m going to kill one and find out and then maybe I’ll let you know.” Betsy pushed the knife through her belt. “I’ll see you guys around. Don’t look for me.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Quentin said. “Take care of yourself, Betsy.”
“Yeah,” Stoppard chimed in. “Take care of yourself!”
“The name’s Asmodeus, bitches,” she said. “And if you see Julia, tell her I’ve gone fox hunting.”
She turned around and walked away into the night.
CHAPTER 15
Following a restorative stop in Barion, Eliot and Janet forded the Great Salt River, half a mile wide and six inches deep, a vast gray-brown ribbon spilling through the green countryside like somebody left a hose on somewhere. They passed a low, grassy hill on which an enormous white figure was etched; the grass and soil had been cleared away in lines so that the white chalky substrate underneath showed through. It was a simple cartoon of a man holding a staff horizontally above his head. He was usually there, or thereabouts—sometimes he wandered, but he was there today. It was good to see him still at his post.
They trotted through open country, following paths in the grass like an old carpet that had worn thin. They crossed sun-blessed fields with stone walls crisscrossing them, real classics, almost pristine. Every way you looked the landscape of Fillory composed itself into even lines, ridgelines and tree lines, near, middle and far distance, each one a shade paler than the last, gently sloping to the left and the right and the left. A long, heavy tranche of cloud lay above the horizon, utterly still, its outline etched finely against the sky, like the silhouette of a breaking wave cut out of paper.
“Look at it all,” Janet said. “Just look at it. It’s almost like the world isn’t ending.”
“Almost.”
Even now it still felt unreal. With so much beauty everywhere it was easy to forget that Fillory was a dying land. Maybe this was Fillory’s hectic glow.
Then they plunged out of the sunlight into the gloom of the Darkling Woods, where they’d appeared the very first time they came to Fillory. This was a more chaotic scene than the Queenswood; not all the trees were sentient, and the ones that were tended to be loners, and not very civic-minded. They spent a morning looking for the exact spot on which they’d arrived—there was a clock-tree there, they remembered, and a sort of a gully—and there would have been a nice circularity to it, paying their respects to where it had all started. But they argued about where it was, and in the end it turned out that neither of them was right, by which time they were both in bad moods. They couldn’t even find the Two Moons Inn, where they’d kind of hoped to stop for some lunch and a beer.
The next morning they broke out of the woods again and into the Clock Barrens, which turned out to be a vast flat plain sparsely covered with tiny twisted scrub trees, the tallest of them only waist high. It was a bonsai forest. The Barrens began more or less abruptly, as things tended to in Fillory: it was one of the peculiarities of Fillory that it bore an uncanny resemblance to a map of itself.
Eliot had never seen the Clock Barrens before. There had never been any particular reason to go here, and he guessed he’d just never gotten around to it. Good to check that box before it was too late.
“So that’s it,” he said.
Words failed him. They sometimes did. Eliot wondered if he was seeing it for the last time as well as the first, and what else he hadn’t seen, and wouldn’t ever see.
“I thought it would be . . .” Janet said. “I don’t know. Clockier.”
She poked at one of the stunted trees with a headless axe.
“Me too.”
“Maybe it is and we’re just looking at it wrong. Maybe from overhead it looks like a giant clock or something.”
“It so does not look like a giant clock from overhead.”
There were no paths, but they didn’t especially need any. The little scrub trees were far enough apart that the horses could walk between them. Eliot had to fight a feeling of panic, an urgent need for decisive action. This was day six of Janet’s timeline, and even though she’d made it up on the spur of the moment it had taken on an authoritative feel. They had a lead, a slim one, but it was a stretch to call it an adventure. It wasn’t much to hang a quest on. They were trotting along in search of they didn’t even really know what, and there was no way to speed up the process, if there even was a process. It was quixotic, was what it was. Not even that, it was sub-quixotic. My kingdom for a windmill to tilt at.
“I had an idea last night,” Janet said. “For saving the world. I woke up with it in the middle of the night but then forgot all about it till now. Are you ready?”
“Ready.”
“We hunt the White Stag, like Quentin did. We catch it or shoot it or whatever you do with it. We get three wishes. We wish Fillory would last forever and not die. Done. Mischief managed.”
Eliot was silent.
“You have to admit—”
“No, it’s good,” he said. “It’s definitely good. You think the stag could do that?”
“No idea. But it’s worth a try, right?”
“Definitely worth a try. Agreed. If this quest is a bust we’ll do that.”
“Plus we’d still have two wishes left over after we saved the world,” Janet said. “One each. What else would you wish for?”
“I feel like I should wish for Quentin back.”
Janet laughed.
“Then I could use my wish to wish him away again. Psych!”
They slept that night in the barrens; they had to burn flat a circle of ground to make room for their tent. The trees were surprisingly fireproof—the wood was fantastically hard and dense—but when they caught they burned like rocket fuel, hot on their faces, sending sparks and spears of light up into the night sky and leaving fountainous afterimages on their vision. It made for a July Fourth atmosphere, a summer carnival in a wasteland, and they broke out the last of the wine. After a couple of bottles Janet suggested they start a huge forest fire, because it would look cool; Eliot thought it would be more prudent not to, but he agreed that if they couldn’t save the world they might as well come back here and burn the Clock Barrens before the end.
By mid-morning the next day, day seven, they could see where they were going: a single clump of trees sticking up on the horizon, regular-size non-bonsai ones. As they got closer they saw that the trees stood in a circle, a thin ring one tree deep, and that there was a house in the middle.