George Martin - The Way of the Wizard

But they were all currently snow-free, since no one had shaken them up recently. All but one. One snow globe on the top shelf — about the size of a baseball mounted on a round black base — was full of swirling snow, nothing in view but churning whiteness. Now, maybe it was some fancy wind-up or battery-powered snow globe or something — Marla didn’t keep up with the cutting edge in snow globe technology — but so far it was the likeliest one to be magic. She stepped closer, peered in at the glass, and saw what looked to be a tiny shapeless black figure moving in among the whiteness, disappearing and reappearing in swirls of snow.

“I’ll be taking this.” She stood on tiptoe and snatched the snow globe down.

“No, you won’t.” Savery Watt’s eyes began to glow more intensely. “I think I’ll wipe your mind and sell you to some gentlemen I know in the next valley instead.”

“Praesidium,” Marla said, though she thought using incantatory trigger words in Latin was dumb — why couldn’t she just say “protection” or “force field” or something? But Viscarro had woven the spell, so she was stuck with his technique. She felt the spell click into place, the room around her becoming faintly shimmery as if seen through warped glass, and then triggered the garage door opener in her pocket.

No explosion. She jammed the button harder, to similar lack of effect. Shit. Was it a double cross? No, Viscarro wanted the snow globe, she believed that, and the spell he’d designed to protect her from the explosion was working, after all. He’d probably just had one of his idiot apprentices put the bomb together and not bothered to double-check the work.

Fortunately the magical shell protected her just fine against the jagged lances of lightning that sprayed from Watt’s body. Marla ran as fast as she could—“run like your ass is on fire and your head is catching,” her mother used to say — and the force field bobbed around her like an impregnable soap bubble. Which was fine as far as that went, but the bubble wouldn’t last for more than a few minutes. Watt bellowed behind her — high pitched bellowing, yes, but still loud — and Gold and Silver Ugly popped out and started firing at her, shots bouncing harmlessly off her shield… for the moment.

She pulled the stopwatch out of her pocket. The whole thing, walk and all, had taken only twenty-eight minutes, so even if she hauled ass down the driveway, Jaws wouldn’t be there waiting to pick her up yet. She had to lose her pursuit first, so Marla veered into the trees and started looking for a place to go to ground. For the first minute her force field snapped tree branches all around her, leaving a clear trail, no doubt, but then the field sputtered out and she started stepping more carefully, trying to cover her tracks, though she was crap as a woodsman.

The noise of Watt crashing around behind her was still audible, but getting quieter. She was about to cast a look-away spell to make herself less noticeable — it probably wouldn’t fool Watt, but it might work for his meth monkeys — when she jumped over a big log and found a steep drop-off on the other side. Her mom always said “Look before you leap,” which invariably pissed Marla off, both because it was a stupid cliché and because her mother liked having one-night-stands with abusive rednecks and was thus hardly qualified to counsel caution, but this was a situation where the advice could have helped.

Marla managed to snag the stem of a bush as she fell instead of rolling down the hill. As far as upsides went, she’d had better. And to make matters worse, as Marla clung halfway down a muddy hillside in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina, she couldn’t stop thinking about her mother. She hadn’t seen the woman in almost seven years, since running away at fifteen, and she didn’t miss her much at all, but she had to admit, life with her was better than waiting for a junkyard robot to come kill you. Marla’s mom had been most tolerable during her occasional forays into 12-step programs, though she usually hit a wall right around step 4: making a searching and fearless moral inventory. Marla’s mom wasn’t much for introspection. In that respect, mother and daughter had something in common.

Marla decided to do a fearless personal inventory of her own, though — not of her morals, but of her resources.

In the hand not clutching the bush, she held a battered leather knapsack, which had slid off her shoulder and nearly tumbled down the hill — it seemed a lot more like a mountainside than a hillside to her, but she was from Felport by way of Indiana, so what did she know from mountains? — which would have been bad, since the bag contained various valuable things, fragile and otherwise, including:

A pair of knives: an antique dagger her mentor had given her, and another balanced for throwing that she’d purchased herself;

A coil of thin, strong line fifty feet long, attached to a clever collapsible grappling hook;

A pair of brass knuckles with a wicked inertial enchantment worked into the metal, perfect for face-punching;

Spare socks;

A rain poncho;

A slightly-rusty Altoids tin that contained a survival kit in miniature, consisting of a small signal mirror, waterproof matches, flint and a little hacksaw blade, cotton balls, a tiny (non-magical) compass, a brass wire small animal snare, a twist of nylon fishing line with fishhooks, a bit of candle, a flashlight the size of a lipstick, a plastic bag for carrying water, and iodine tablets;

And, of course, a cursed snow globe. Everything else would be more or less useful if she had to hide out in the woods overnight — hideous thought — but she wasn’t sure what good the snow globe could possibly do her.

For now, if she could get the grappling hook out and snag it on the bush she was clinging to, then she could lower herself down this slope, hoping it didn’t end in a river or leg-breaking deadfall or something, and from there maybe hike to high ground, climb a tree, figure out which way the road was, hike that way, and maybe possibly get to her extraction point before—

“She’s down there!” shouted a voice up on the ridgeline. Sounded like one of the meth-lab-monkeys.

“So go down and get her,” Watt said, his voice weirdly high and fluting and artificial, but his annoyance and impatience still coming through loud and clear.

Oh well , Marla thought. Let’s go, gravity. She relinquished her grip on the bush. Marla bumped and slid and rolled along, collecting a full suite of bruises. Damn I wish I had my cloak, she thought, and then she rolled over an especially big rock and went airborne.

Marla sailed through the air, though not far, since falling human bodies are not especially aerodynamic. She landed in a mound of damp leaves at the base of the hill and sat up groaning, but nothing was broken, just generally battered. Marla tore open her knapsack, slipped on her brass knuckles, considered her knives, and finally just lifted out the snow globe. Running away hadn’t worked so well, and from the sound of things Watt and his imps were coming down the hill in a more controlled way than she had, so it was time to make some kind of stand.

The scatterguns came sliding down the hill first, no doubt lost in transit, and Marla grinned. That was a bit of luck. She snatched up one gun and chucked the other behind her into the trees. The meth monkeys landed a moment later, covered in mud and not too happy about it, and they looked less happy when Marla pointed the gun at them, low, and fired. They both collapsed, their legs riddled with shot, howling. They’d live, but their injuries probably hurt badly enough they wished they wouldn’t.

Marla tossed the gun down. Shooting the junkyard golem where Savery Watt’s spirit resided wouldn’t even piss him off. It’d be like tossing snowballs at the sun.