He had no idea where he was going, he just worked room to room, clearing the building. Twice he heard the Muntjac’s guns boom in the distance. Once he threw open a door and found Bingle and Julia backing down a crowd of soldiers amid the wreckage of a drawing room full of ornate furniture. Bingle’s magic sword flickered in front of him, as fast and precise as an industrial machine, its glowing tracery leaving hypnotic neon tracks in the air. He seemed to be in a state of martial ecstasy, his tunic wringing with sweat but his face calm, his hooded eyes having drooped almost to slits.

But the real terror was Julia. She’d summoned a kind of transformative magic Quentin didn’t know, or maybe whatever it was in her that wasn’t human had come to the surface in the fight. He hardly recognized her. Her skin was shining with that phosphorescent silver, and she’d grown at least six inches. She fought bare-handed—she advanced on the soldiers till somebody was foolish enough to thrust a spear at her, at which point she simply grabbed it like he was moving in slow motion and began beating the shit out of him and his friends with it. Her strength looked enormous, and metal blades just skated off her skin.

She didn’t look like she needed help. Quentin found the stairs up to the top floor. He kicked open the first door he saw and almost died when a massive fireball rolled over him.

It was a colossally powerful casting. Someone had spent a long time setting it up and pumping energy into it. It enveloped him completely, and he felt the flames licking him, icy through the fireproofing spell. But the spell held. When the fire had dissipated his limbs were smoking but undamaged.

He was standing in the doorway of a darkened library. Inside, sitting at a desk with two lanterns on it, was a skeleton in a nice brown suit. Or not quite a skeleton, a man, but an obviously dead one. He still had flesh on him, but it had shrunk and turned leathery.

It was very still in the library. Bookshelves smoldered and crackled quietly on either side of Quentin, from the fireball. The corpse watched him with eyes like hard dry nuts.

“No?” it said finally. Its voice buzzed and flapped, a blown-out speaker. It obviously didn’t have much left in the way of vocal cords. Some unnatural force was keeping it alive, long after its sell-by date. “Well. That was my only spell.”