At a word from Pushkar the carpet stiffened under them and smoothed itself out, as if the squashy grass it was resting on had been replaced by a smooth ballroom floor. They all instinctively clustered in the middle, as far as possible from the edges, and the carpet rose rapidly and silently up into the sky: fifty, a hundred, two hundred feet, high enough to clear the tallest trees. It was a restful, dreamlike feeling—less like flying than like being in a glass elevator with no building around it. Now Quentin could see that they were in a sparsely populated area, lightly wooded, the houses large and far apart, some of them dark, some glowing with friendly yellow light.

No one spoke. The carpet stopped rising, paused, and began to swim gently forward, smoothly, like a raft drifting on a calm river. The rug’s tassels hung down limp in the still air. As they got less afraid of the edges they gradually spread out. From this height they could appreciate the meticulous work of whoever had been the last person to mow these fields: they’d left a neat, even, looping pattern of darker and lighter stripes.

After five minutes the bird said:

“There.”

Lionel pointed for him.

It was a big gray-roofed mansion about a mile away. Not ostentatious, just a very big fieldstone house with white trim, in the Georgian style, though on a mega-Georgian scale.

“Tasteful,” Betsy said.

“Lotta money out here,” Lionel said. “Bankers. I hear Judge Judy’s house is here somewhere.”

It was hard to imagine a universe in which Lionel watched Judge Judy.

The shadows of the trees on the edges of the meadows stretched longer and longer, melting and running as the sun drifted downward. When they were half a mile from the house Pushkar stopped the carpet, and there was a rapid conversation between him and Stoppard and the bird as they dismantled some kind of invisible but ticklish outer security perimeter, which required a lot of careful massaging of Stoppard’s machine. The speed and pitch of the whirring spiked and then slackened again once they were through.

Meanwhile Betsy removed a three-foot length of brass wire from Lionel’s bag. She scored it every few inches with the blade of a Leatherman, then bent the ends with the pliers and hooked them together to form a rough hoop a couple of feet across. When she sang a couple of keywords—her voice was incongruously high and sweet—the area inside the hoop lit up with an artificially bright view of the landscape through it.

Holding it up, she turned in a slow circle, all the way around the horizon. She stopped facing east.

“Look,” she said. “Lionel. Big portal over there. Five, six miles. Weird one.”

Lionel squinted at it too. He frowned.

“Somebody else’s party,” he decided. “Let’s worry about ours.”