get a glimpse of me flailing wildly for my balance as the carpet moved. But on the other hand, I didn’t want to just fall off, either. I could probably come up with something to keep me from getting hurt when I hit the ground, but it would look awfully bad, and I don’t care how close to dead he might be; a wizard has his pride.
Granted, the imagination was the only place where I was going to get one of these darned things to work. I’d tried the flying-carpet thing before, when I was about twenty. It had been a fairly horrible experiment that had dropped me into a not-yet-closed landfill during a thunderstorm. And then there was the famous flying-broomstick incident of Wacker Drive, which wound up on the Internet as a UFO sighting. After that, I had wisely determined that flying was mostly just a great way to get killed and settled for driving my old car around instead.
But hey. In my imagination, that carpet had worked great—and that was how it went as a guest in Molly’s imagination, too.
I went up high enough to get a good view—and was impressed with the kid. The city of fortresses stretched for miles. There were hundreds of them, and fighting raged all the way through. It was the opposite of what the kid usually did in a mental battle—an inverse Mongol horde, with endless defenders pouring out like angry bees to defend the hive. Corpsetaker, unfortunately, was playing mama bear to Molly’s queen bee. She’d get hurt coming in, but as long as she wasn’t stupid, not very badly. She could crush all the defenders eventually—and then rip the hive to shreds.
I leaned forward a little and the carpet began to gather speed, moving ahead. Shifts of my weight to the left or right let me bank, and it wasn’t long before I was cruising through the rain as fast as I could and still keeping my eyes clear. I flew a spiral pattern, scanning the city beneath me. The battle kept going in the skies, too—mostly flying demon things and lightning bolts that kept smashing them out of the air. It got boring to watch after the first dozen spectacular lightning strikes or so, and I tuned that conflict out, too, as I kept searching.
Finally, I spotted what I was looking for: a ruined building that had been reduced to a crater by an artillery shell or some other explosion. It was impossible to tell what it had been from what was left, and burned rubble covered the area around it, coating a thick-bodied old oak tree and the tree house on its lower branches in dust, dirt, and debris.
I went past the tree house without stopping or slowing down for several more minutes, and then went evasive. I couldn’t be sure the Corpsetaker didn’t know I had ridden in on her coattails, and if she was following me, or had sent a construct to do so, I didn’t want to lead her to Molly. So the carpet went from forty or fifty miles an hour to more than a hundred, and at the same time I constructed a veil around me so that I surged forward and simply vanished. I flew low, snaking through the streets, and only after I’d crossed my own trail five or six times without spotting anything shadowing me did I finally soar in to the tree house.
It looked like a miniature home, with a door and siding and trim and windows and everything. A rope ladder allowed one to climb up to the porch, but it had been pulled up. I floated up to the door on the flying carpet and knocked politely.
“I have you now,” I said, as much like James Earl Jones as I could. I do a better Yul Brynner.
Molly’s strained face appeared at the window and she blinked. “Harry?”
“What’s with the come-hither, grasshopper?” I asked. “You practically vacuumed me in with the Corpsetaker.”
Molly narrowed her eyes and said, “What was I wearing the first time we met?”
I blinked at her, opened my mouth, closed it, thought about it, and then said, “Oh, come on, Moll. I have no idea. Clothes? You were, like, eight years old and your mom tried to shut the door in my face and I was there to see your dad.”
She nodded once, as if that was the answer she’d been looking for, and opened the door. “Come on.”
I went into the tree house