The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [123]
Up he rose through the twilight air. The ancient brick rushed by his face in the dimness. There was no noise. He felt his chest empty out a little with the effort. It wasn’t so much a feeling of being weightless as one of being supported, touchlessly, somewhere around your shoulders. You were a baby being lifted up by a giant parent. Who’s a good boy?
Quentin’s long legs hung down as he cleared the treetops. He wished the others could see him. He shot up above the rim of the tower, arms spread out, one hand holding his stolen sword, the other lit up and crackling with violet witchery in the dimness. At the last second he cocked one knee up, the way superheroes did in comic books.
The man on the rooftop had time to stop swinging his arms back and forth and crane his neck back in shock, squinting, all blond hair and buckteeth, before Quentin extended his hand toward him, two fingers pointed. Two deep indigo pulses shot out of them and caught the man in the forehead and dropped him; the pulses ricocheted off into the darkness to points unknown. Quentin had had a long time to tinker with Penny’s old Magic Missile spell, and now it ran smooth and precise, with glowy special effects on top. The man’s head snapped back and then forward, and he went down on his hands and knees. Another shot, to the ribs, sent him sprawling over on his side.
Three down. Quentin landed lightly on the stone roof, which had a low wall around it. Again he felt the absence of a sound track keenly. There was a gun up here, a squat black cannon with a neat pyramid of cannonballs next to it. He took the flat rock that he’d collected from the beach out of his pocket. Drawing a dagger from the belt of the unconscious lookout—it was all the man was armed with—he began scratching a rune on it. It was a complicated business, but he could see the rune in his mind—could picture the page of the book where he’d read about it, a left-hand page. It didn’t have to be exact, straight lines and right angles, but the structure of it had to be right. You couldn’t mung up the topology.
When it was done, when he connected the last line to the first one, Quentin felt the join in his gut. It was good enough. The power was locked in there. The stone buzzed and jumped in his hand as if it were alive.
He waited for just a moment at the top of the stairs. Once he threw that rock there would be no going back, no slipping off into the darkness. The warm ocean wind poured over him under the darkening sky. The weather was picking up, and the sea was flecked with combers. A storm was rolling in. He had a sudden worry about the man he’d left down on the beach. What if the tide came in? Quentin was pretty sure the water would wake him up before it drowned him.
A quick, soundless flicker of blue-white light caught Quentin’s eye, in his peripheral vision. It came from the other watchtower, on the far side of the keep, through the trees—it was exactly as if somebody had taken a flash photo inside it. He squinted into the half darkness. Had he been spotted? Had he imagined it? A long moment passed. Ten seconds. Twenty. He relaxed again.
The other tower ripped open. Something hot and bright and white exploded inside it. The whole top floor blew out, and arcs of power flashed out in all directions, setting the treetops around it on fire. Stones went crashing away through the underbrush. The tower’s roof pancaked down onto the floor below it.
Just then, out at sea, the rough, bold shape of the Muntjac came heeling silently around the point. It was like an enormous friendly dog he hadn’t seen for weeks and weeks, bounding toward him. The others had come. It was all happening.
Grinning like a loon, Quentin threw his stone down the stairs and stepped away.
A colossal whump made the roof under his feet resonate like a drum, as the stone gave up the energy he’d locked inside it all at once, explosively. Dust spurted up from between the roof tiles, and air blasted out of the mouth of the stairs. Instinctively Quentin half squatted, and for a second he wondered if he’d overdone