There was a final thump, and all at once the ice in the fountain exploded upward. Quentin and Poppy ducked as chunks of it shot in all directions and went skittering across the paving stones. With a metallic groan the great bronze lotus flower tore open, the petals spreading out in all directions as if it were blooming, and a huge, sinuous form came surging and wriggling up out of it. The thing lunged violently up into the air, spreading its wings and shaking off water and beating its way into the night sky, whipping the falling snow into great whorls and circles around it.

Another one followed it, and then a third.

“It’s the dragons!” Poppy shouted. She clapped her hands like a little girl. “Quentin, it’s the dragons! Oh, look at them!”

“It’s the dragons,” Penny said. “The dragons are going to help us.”

Poppy kissed him on the cheek, and Penny smiled for the first time. You could tell he didn’t want to, but he couldn’t help himself.

The dragons kept coming, one after the other. They must have emptied out every river in the world. The square lit up as one of them roared a gout of flame at the misty sky.

How did he know that was going to happen right then?

“You planned that, didn’t you,” Quentin said, or tried to say, but just then Penny’s spell took effect, and Quentin was no longer in the same world as the person he was talking to.

BOOK IV

BOOK IV

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 23

That morning in Murs, sitting around the table in the library, they gave Julia the full download.

In a way she was lucky she was only getting in now. She’d missed the early days, when they spent a lot of time just ruling things out. For example: they’d blown six months on a theory that spells picked up extra power the closer you got to the center of the Earth. A minor effect, barely measurable, but if it could be verified it would open up huge, ripe fields of new theory. It would change everything.

That had kicked off a barnstorming tour of abandoned mines and salt domes and other deep subterranean topography, not excluding an expensive sequence involving a rented tramp steamer and a secondhand bathysphere. But all they’d learned from half a year’s hard spelunking and deep-ocean diving was that Asmodeus’s spellwork performed slightly better once you got half a mile underground, and that the most probable explanation for that was that spelunking got Asmodeus really excited.

They pushed on into astrology and ocean magic and even oneiromancy—dream magic. Turns out you can cast some truly amazing shit in your dreams. But after you wake up it all seems kind of pointless, and nobody really wants to hear about it.