“I remember.” Quentin stared at the chart. His confidence was flagging. It all seemed very inadequate now. “How much more power?”

“Much. Orders of magnitude.” Megnitude. “You want to break the bond with these?” He grabbed Quentin’s fingers in one pawlike hand and shook them in front of Quentin’s face. “These little things? Waste of time. Would take one hundred years! Or one hundred Quentins!”

“Or a hundred Plums,” Plum said.

“Feefty Plums,” Mayakovsky said gallantly, with a quick yellow grin. “But you are nowhere near it. Nowhere near. Waste of time.”

He crumpled up the diagram and threw it at the wall.

Quentin watched it roll to a stop under a table. He would have liked to take a few minutes to go back through the spell in a patient, civil, collegial fashion, looking for areas of flexibility, places where the multipliers could be tweaked, maybe, to make up the difference. But Mayakovsky rolled over him, frog-marching him briskly through the math of it, brutally multiplying three and four digits in his head as he went. It was all Quentin could do to keep up. There was nothing that Mayakovsky didn’t know about incorporate bonds, apparently; it was like he’d studied up on them specifically in anticipation of their arrival. He understood their spell far better than they did.

Quentin wondered what Mayakovsky’s own work looked like, if he did any. He was alone out here half the year every year. What the hell did he do with himself? With a mind like his there was no limit to what he might have accomplished, if he wanted to. But Quentin had no idea what Mayakovsky wanted.

Quentin closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. He could picture the whole spell in his head, and he could follow what Mayakovsky was saying, just, but he couldn’t see an answer. There had to be a way through. He was damned if he was going to go back empty-handed.

“Maybe I could store it up,” he said. “Build up the power over time. Construct a kind of containment device—I could cast the spell a hundred times, store it up, release it all at once.”

“And you stabilize how? ‘Store’ how? What is storage matrix?”

“I don’t know. A gem, a coin, something like that.”

Mayakovsky made a rude noise.

“Bad magic. Dangerous magic.”

“Or,” Quentin said, “I could get a hundred magicians together. We’ll cast it all at once.”

“I think you will not be telling one hundred magicians about this little project.”

Fair point. “Probably not.”

“It would be very risky.”

“True.”

“I do not know why you want to break an incorporate bond, but whatever it is is not legal, I don’t think. Even me you should not have told.”

Mayakovsky was studying him across the table. Quentin studied him back. His stolid face was impossible to read. Plum watched the exchange alertly.