It reminded her of somewhere else too, a place she’d never seen, let alone smelled—someplace green and unspoiled and far away, which she knew well even though she’d never been there, just as it knew her well. She felt its pull on her, as she always had. But for the moment she let its name escape her.

CHAPTER 9

They’d only been at the Newark Airport Marriott for a week and already Quentin didn’t know how much longer he could stand it. This was not somewhere humans were supposed to stay more than one night in a row. It was not a long- or even medium-term residence. The walls were thin, the food was lousy, and the interior decoration was worse. This place was bad for your soul.

He didn’t see much of the others, apart from Plum. Pushkar was busy overflying the East Coast at high altitude with Lionel and the bird, scouring it for any signs of the suitcase and/or the Couple. Stoppard was building something large and complicated out of tiny metal parts in his bedroom, from which he emerged only once or twice a day, at odd hours, wearing an oil-stained apron. The bird had sent Betsy off with a credit card to buy supplies. Meanwhile Quentin and Plum had been tasked with figuring out how to break the famous incorporate bond.

It was a bear of a problem, nasty and complicated, a real tarball. Quentin had heard about incorporate bonds, though he’d still never seen one in real life. The theory went as follows: picture a two-dimensional world, an infinite plane, full of infinitely flat two-dimensional objects. You, a three-dimensional being, could theoretically lean down from above it and fasten one of those objects in place, anchoring it permanently to its plane from above; if you did it carefully you might not even damage it too much. In the case of an incorporate bond the same operation was performed in three-dimensional space, using a four-dimensional anchor to fix the object immovably with respect to the fabric of three-dimensional space-time.

It was about as difficult as it sounded, and messy and expensive to boot. Four-dimensional paperweights didn’t grow on trees, or at least not in this plane of existence they didn’t. Incorporate bonds were the last word in magical security, and the Couple must have gone through a good deal of trouble to cast the spell, but in doing so they’d rendered the case unstealable. Except that the bird thought it wasn’t.

In Quentin’s experience magical creatures like the bird didn’t tend to know a lot about magic from a technical point of view. They didn’t work magic themselves, they just were magic, so the theory of it didn’t really matter. Also a lot of them weren’t terribly bright. But the bird had some ideas about it, or someone had supplied it with ideas, and on the face of it they weren’t demonstrably nonsense. But carrying them out posed a raft of thorny practical issues, and the bird had generously left the working out of said problems to Quentin and Plum.