They bulled through a door into a tapestry that was apparently concealing it from the other side. Behind the tapestry was a candle-lit banquet hall set with food, fresh and steaming. They were alone; it was as if the waiters who placed the dishes there had just moments earlier scampered out of sight. The table stretched out in both directions with no end points. The tapestries were rich and detailed, the silverware gleaming, the crystal goblets full of wine, deep gold and arterial purple.
They stopped and stared in both directions, blinking. It was like they had stumbled into the dream of a starving man.
“Nobody eats!” Dint called. “Don’t touch it! Nobody eats, nobody drinks!”
“There are too many entrances,” Anaïs said, her pretty green eyes flicking in all directions. “They can attack us.”
She was right. A door opened farther down the hall, admitting two large, rangy individuals of the monkey family, though Quentin couldn’t have said exactly what to call them. Their glazed simian eyes looked bored. In perfect synchrony they dipped their hands into pouches slung over their shoulders and came up with golf-size lead balls. With a practiced windup of their overdeveloped shoulders and overlong arms, they whipped the balls at the group at big-league fastball speeds.
Quentin grabbed Alice’s hand, and they cowered back behind a heavy tapestry, which caught one of the balls. The other one clipped a candlestick on the table and then spectacularly vaporized four wineglasses in a row. Under other circumstances, Quentin thought, that would actually have been cool. Eliot touched his forehead, where he’d been hit by a shard of glass. His fingers came away bloody.
“Would somebody please kill those things, please!” Janet said disgustedly. She was crouched under the table.
“Seriously,” Josh complained through clenched teeth. “This shit isn’t even mythological. We need some unicorns or something up in this piece.”
“Janet!” Eliot said. “Do your demon!”
“I already did!” she yelled back. “I did it the night after graduation! I felt sorry for it!”
Huddling behind the rough fabric of the tapestry, Quentin watched a pair of legs stroll by, unhurriedly. While the rest of them hunkered down, Penny strode confidently toward the two ball throwers as they wound up again, no expressions on their stiff monkey faces. He was gesturing fast with both hands and singing an incantation in a high, clear tenor. Calm and serious in the shifting candlelight, wearing just a T-shirt and jeans, he looked much less like a puffy wannabe than he used to. He looked like a hardened young battle-mage. Was that how he’d looked to Alice, Quentin wondered, the night she slept with him?
With one hand Penny stopped a lead ball in midair, then a second. They hovered there unsupported for a moment like surprised humming-birds before they recovered their weight and dropped to the floor. With the other hand Penny lobbed back a fiery seed that grew and expanded like an unfurling parachute. The tapestries on either side of the hall blazed where the fireball brushed them. It engulfed the two monkeys, and when it dissipated they were simply gone, and a ten-foot section of the banquet table was a roaring bonfire.
“Yeah!” Penny yelled, momentarily forgetting his Fillory-speak. “Boom, bitches!”
“Amateur,” Dint muttered.
“If my hairline is messed up,” Eliot said weakly, “I will bring those things back to life and kill them all over again.”
They retreated along the banquet hall in the opposite direction, awkwardly shuffling past the straight-backed wooden chairs. The hall was just too narrow—with the table in the center there wasn’t enough room for them to form up properly. The setup had a zany
A curious Alice in Wonderland menagerie was crowding into the hall from either side. As military order broke down in the room so did taxonomical order. Species and body parts were mashed up seemingly at random. Had everything collapsed after the Chatwins left, to the point where humans and animals interbred? There were ferrets and rabbits, giant mice and loping monkeys and a vicious-looking fisher, but there were also men and women with the heads of animals: an astute-looking fox-headed man who appeared to be preparing a spell; a woman with a thick-necked lizard head with huge independent eyes; an oddly dignified pike-bearer upon whose shoulders swayed the sinuous neck and tiny head of a pink flamingo.
Fen plucked a sharp knife off the banquet table, gripped the blade carefully between her thumb and forefinger, and threw it spinning so that it took the fox-man point-first in the eye socket.
“Move,” she barked. “Everybody. Fall back. Don’t let them bog us down. We have to be close now.”
