A lake flashed past far below, then more trees. They shot through thin wisps of low-flying cloud. The amount of magical energy being expended in the fight on the carpet was truly awesome; the Couple must have been carrying artifacts, because their energies were radically heightened. They might have been bad people, but they were terrifyingly strong spellcasters and apparently totally without fear. Thank God he hadn’t had to face them toe to toe. Quentin saw the man—grinning his face off—punch a fist up through the carpet and get a grip on the ankle of one of the golden-handed monks, drag him scrabbling through and fling him spinning down and away toward the darkening landscape below. The woman was already closing in on the case itself, but she was fighting her way through a storm of defensive magic.

A monk stepped forward and squared off hand to hand. They closed, and then it was chaos, a blur of lights and speeded-up movement. In the middle of it something came careening down from above at a steep angle like a diving cormorant and hit the carpet with a solid whump that shook dust out of it.

It was Betsy.

“Dammit!” Quentin said.

She should have waited, but apparently whatever personal stake she had in the case, coupled with her native eagerness to get herself killed, had gotten the better of her. Dammit dammit dammit. Discarded, her rug flew by him in the wake of the fight. Quentin urged his ridiculous penny-farthing forward, slowly closing the gap between himself and the carpet. She was out of her mind, but a team was a team.

He recognized the feeling of cold inevitability that came right before a fight. This was going to be close-quarters action, and he hastily hardened his hands and face. He tried to focus on a sense of righteous anger: it was their case, they’d taken it, and he was going to get it back. For Alice. He ducked as a dark form came flipping back at him head over heels, nearly colliding with the pool table. It was the man of the Couple. He looked limp, barely conscious, but he wasn’t falling, and Quentin let him go.

Now the trembling trailing tassels of the carpet were only a few feet ahead. He saw Betsy backhand the woman—a burst of light and a concussive thump accompanied the strike, which snapped her head around a quarter-turn—then clamp one hand on the handle of the case. The woman recovered and lunged for it too, while the remaining monks jockeyed around them, waiting to see who they had to take on. But before that could happen Betsy crouched down and placed her free hand on the carpet. He saw her mouth move but couldn’t place the spell. It must have been some powerful antimagic because the carpet instantly lost all internal cohesion and dissolved into a cloud of threads.