The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [153]
Asmodeus stared at him balefully across a table strewn with baguette crusts and smears of local jam. Her eyes looked hollow. She was wiped out from lack of sleep. A huge wasp, its legs dangling limply, airlifted from one jam smear to the next.
“No cyclops,” she said. “Sirens. I could get you a siren.”
“Sirens?” Pouncy brightened up. He banged the table with the flat of his hand. “Why didn’t you say so! That’s great!”
“They’re not Greek sirens though. They’re French. They’re half-snake, from the waist down.”
Pouncy frowned. “So like a gorgon.”
“No. Gorgons have snakes for hair. Except anyway, I don’t think gorgons are real.”
“A half-snake woman,” Julia said, “would be a lamia.”
“She would be,” Asmodeus snapped, “if she were in Greece. But we’re in France, so she’s a siren.”
“All right, but maybe she knows a lamia,” Pouncy said. “Maybe they’re related. Like cousins. You gotta think all the snake-bodied women have a network—”
“She doesn’t know a lamia.” Asmodeus put her head down on the table. “God, you have no idea what you’re asking.”
“I’m not asking you, I’m telling you, you’ve got to widen your search. I’m so sick of this cutesy Frenchy-French shit. Ever wonder why Clash of the Lutins was never a movie? The power levels around here are nothing! We can fly you to Greece, the money isn’t a problem. We can all go to Greece. But you’ve hit a wall here and you’re too stubborn to admit it.”
“You don’t know!” Asmodeus sat up, her red eyes flaming. “You don’t understand what I’m doing! You can’t just go knocking on doors like you’re taking a census. You have to build up trust. I’m running a network of agents here now. Some of these things haven’t talked to a human for centuries. The Golden Goat—”
“God!” He stuck a finger in Asmodeus’s face. “No more with the Goat!”
“Asmo’s right, Pouncy.”
All eyes turned to Julia. She could see that Pouncy had expected her to back him up. Well, she wasn’t here to play power games. If there’s one thing magic had taught her it was that power wasn’t a game.
“You’re thinking about this the wrong way. The answer isn’t wider, it’s deeper. If we start hopping around the globe cherry-picking myths and legends we’re going to burn through all our time and money and end up with nothing.”
“Well, so far we’ve got Golden fucking Goat cheese.”
“Hey now,” Failstaff said. “That stuff was perfectly edible.”
“You’re missing the point. If we go out there looking for something specific we’ll never find anything. But if we focus on someplace rich and really deep-dive it, work our way down through what’s there, we’re bound to hit something solid eventually. If there’s anything solid to hit.”
“Someplace rich. Like Greece. It’s like I was saying—”
“We don’t need to go to Greece,” Julia said. “We don’t need to go anywhere. All this stuff has to be connected at the roots. Everybody came through Provence: the Celts were here, the Romans, the Basques. The Buddhists sent missionaries. The Egyptians had colonies, and so did the Greeks, Pouncy, if you absolutely need the Greeks to get you hard. They even had Jews. Sure, it all got covered over with Christianity, but the mythology goes all the way down. If we can’t find a god in all that, there are no gods to be found.”
“So what are you saying?” Pouncy regarded her skeptically, not pleased by her display of disloyalty. “We should drop all the world religion stuff and just do local folk and myth?”
“That’s what I’m saying. That’s where our sources are. Let’s bear down on those and see what they get us.”
Pouncy pursed his lips, considering. Everyone looked at him.
“All right.” He threw up his hands. “All right! Fine. Let’s do a month just on Provençal stuff and see what it gets us.” He glared around the table. “But no more dicking around with leprechauns. Take us up the food chain, Asmo. I want to know who runs this area. Find out who all these small players are afraid of and then get that guy’s number. That’s who we want to talk to.”
Asmodeus heaved a