For a second they froze, vibrating with isometric strain while Ferret, with agonizing, comical slowness, stretched its neck forward to try to bite Fen’s bare throat with its big rodent incisors. But she had it outmuscled. Fen slowly forced the staff up under its chin, right into where its Adam’s apple would be, while her right foot stamped pneumatically on the outside of its hurt knee, over and over again. It gagged and twisted away.
Just as Quentin thought he couldn’t watch anymore, Ferret made its last mistake. It took its paw off the quarterstaff for an instant—it looked like it was going for a knife strapped to its thigh. With the extra leverage Fen flung it down hard on the turf, and the wind huffed out of it.
“Ha!” she barked, and stamped twice on its thickly furred throat, hard. A long, gargling rattle followed, the first sound Quentin had heard it make.
Fen popped up, visibly amped, her face red under her blond buzz cut. She picked up the quarterstaff, braced herself, and broke it over her knee in one try. Throwing the broken pieces aside, she leaned down and screamed in Ferret’s face.
The broken ends of the staff spat out a few feeble burnt-orange sparks on the grass. Sixty seconds had passed, maybe not even that.
“Jesus jesus jesus,” Quentin said, hugging himself. Someone was throwing up on the grass. It had never once even occurred to him to try to help. He wasn’t ready for this. This wasn’t what he’d come here for.
Meanwhile the other assassin, the squat muscular Bunny, had never arrived on the scene. Dint had done something to the ground beneath its long rabbit feet, or maybe to its sense of balance, so that it couldn’t seem to stand up. It was scrabbling around helplessly on the grass like it was wet ice. Fen, on a roll, stepped over Ferret’s body toward him, but Dint stopped her.
He turned back to the Brakebills crowd.
“Can any of you take him from here? Bow and arrow maybe?” Quentin couldn’t tell if he was pissed that they weren’t helping or if he was just being polite, offering them a taste of the action. “Anybody?”
Nobody answered. They stared at him like he was speaking gibberish. Every time the muscle-bound hare tried to get up its paws kept flying out from under it. Chittering and weeping, the hare shouted a guttural cry and threw one of its swords at them, but it slipped again and the sword landed safely short and off to one side.
Dint waited for an answer from the group, then turned away disgustedly. He made a quiet tapping gesture with his wand, like he was ashing a cigar, and a bone in the hare’s upper thigh snapped audibly. It screamed in falsetto.
“Wait!” It was Anaïs, pushing her way forward, past a waxwork Janet. “Wait. Let me try.”
The fact that Anaïs could even walk and talk right now was incomprehensible to Quentin. She began a spell but stuttered a few times, rattled, and had to start over. Dint waited, obviously impatient. On her third try she completed a sleep spell that Penny had taught them. Bunny’s grunting struggles ceased. It sagged onto its side on the grass, looking alarmingly sweet. Ferret was still gagging weakly, eyes open and staring at the sky, red foam pouring from its mouth, but nobody paid any attention to it. No part of it below its neck was moving.
Anaïs went over and picked up the short sword the hare had thrown.
“There,” she said to Dint proudly. “Now we kill it, no problem!”
She hefted the sword happily in one hand.
As a teenager in Brooklyn Quentin had often imagined himself engaging in martial heroics, but after this he knew, as a cold and immutable fact, that he would do anything necessary, sacrificing whatever or whomever he had to, to avoid risking exposure to physical violence. He wasn’t even ashamed. Shame never came into it. He embraced his new identity as a coward. He would run in the other direction. He would lie down and cry and put his arms over his head or play dead. It didn’t matter what he had to do, he would do it and be glad.
They trailed after Dint and Fen—and what kind of retarded names were those anyway, Dint and Fen? he thought numbly—through the doorway and into the hill. He barely noticed his surroundings. A square stone corridor opened out into a huge open chamber that looked almost as big as the hill that contained it, which must have been mostly hollow. Green-tinted light filtered down through a circular oculus at the room’s apex. The air was full of stone dust. The ruins of an enormous brass orrery stood in the center of the room, its skinny arms stripped of its planets. It looked like a broken, defoliated Christmas tree, the smashed spheres lying at its base like fallen ornaments.
