They fell back along the length of the banquet hall. The basic idea was to try to keep a coherent line of scrimmage between them and their attackers, but the line kept getting disrupted. One of their party would get hung up—the chairs kept getting in the way—or the tomb dwellers would group together and make a charge, or worse, one of them would blunder in from the side through a hidden door straight into the center of their party. He and Alice managed to hold hands for the first ten seconds, but after that it just wasn’t possible. This wasn’t like the earlier fights. The whole thing kept degenerating into the running of the bulls. The hall seemed to go on forever; possibly it did. The candles and mirrors and food gave the whole scene an incongruously festive air. Even if they decided to take the button home, at this point it would be hard to muster everybody in one place to actually do it.
Quentin jogged along with his knife out, though he didn’t know if he was capable of using it. He felt like he had in gym class, trying to look like part of the team while at the same time desperately hoping nobody would pass him the ball. A giant house cat popped out from behind a tapestry right in front of him, and Fen almost certainly saved Quentin’s life by cannoning fearlessly into the thing so that they rolled together on the floor, grappling and thrashing, until she knocked it out with a furious
Dint was putting on a show. He’d hopped spryly up onto the banquet table and was striding along it, rapping out percussive syllables with astonishing speed and fluency, his wand tucked back behind his ear. His long black hair crackled, and crazy energies flashed out from the tips of his long fingers; sometimes he actually had two different spells going simultaneously, Quentin noticed, a primary attack in one hand and a second, lesser piece of witchery simmering in his off hand. At one point he made his arms swell up hugely, picked up two chairs in each giant hand and clubbed down a half dozen opponents with them in three businesslike swings—left, right, left.
Penny managed to persuade a section of the table to rear up like an angry centipede and attack the Fillorians until they chopped it to pieces. Even Quentin got off a couple of sweaty-palmed Magic Missiles into the press. Fen’s tunic was soaked with sweat. She closed her eyes and placed her palms together, whispering, and when she parted them they gleamed with a terrible white phosphorescence. The next foe she met—a sinewy scimitar wielder who was either wearing a leopard skin or was half leopard from the waist up—she shouted and punched her fist through its chest up to her shoulder.
But the close calls were getting closer. The situation was disintegrating, and they needed an exit strategy. The corridor was filling with bodies and smoke. Quentin’s breath whistled through his teeth, and in his head he was singing a psychotic nonsense song.
Somewhere along the line Quentin left his knife in a furry Fillorian stomach. He never saw the creature’s face—it was a creature, not a person, not a person, not a person—but later he would remember the sensation of jamming it in, how the blade punched through the tough rubbery muscles of the diaphragm and then slid easily into the underlying viscera, and how the muscles gripped the blade after it was in. He snatched his hand away from the hilt like it was electrified.
Quentin registered first Josh, then Eliot, hunching their shoulders and letting loose their cacodemons. Eliot’s was particularly awesome-looking, banded from head to foot in horizontal yellow and black danger stripes. It slid sideways across the smooth table, scrabbling like a flung cat, then charged into the fray with unself-conscious glee, clinging and tearing and leaping and clinging again.
“Goddamn it!” Janet was screaming. “What else? What the fuck else?”
“This is bullshit,” Eliot yelled hoarsely. “Side door! Pick a side door and go through it!”
There was a moment of premonitory silence, as if some of the creatures actually sensed what was going to happen next. Then the floor jolted, and a giant man made of glowing red-hot iron shouldered his way sideways through the wall.
He took the whole wall down with him. A flying brick nicked Fen’s head, and she dropped like she’d been shot. Waves of heat poured off the giant, warping the air around him, and anything he touched burned. He stood bent over, hands on the floor—he was about a third again too tall for the confined space of the banquet hall. His eyes were molten gold, with no pupils. Dust filled the air. The giant put his foot on Fen’s prostrate body, and she burst into flames.
