The Magician King (19 page)

Warily, Quentin followed Julia up a half flight of stairs and into the living room, which contained a weird assortment of people. The place could have passed for a halfway house for teenage runaways if it weren’t also a halfway house for twentysomething, middle-aged, and elderly runaways. There were your standard goth casualties, pale and skinny and worryingly scabby, but there was also a guy with five-o’clock shadow in a wrecked business suit of not negligible quality talking on a cell phone, saying “yah, yah, uh-huh” in a tone of voice that suggested that there was actually somebody on the other end who cared whether he said uh-huh or nuh-uh. There was a sixtysomething woman with an arctic-white Gertrude Stein haircut. An old Asian guy was sitting on the floor with no shirt on, all by himself. In front of him on the white pile carpet stood a burned-out brazier surrounded by a ring of ashes. Guess the cleaning lady hadn’t come today.

Quentin stopped on the threshold.

“Julia,” Quentin said. “Tell me where we are.”

“Have you not guessed yet?” She practically glittered with pleasure. She was relishing his discomfort. “This is where I got my education. This is my Brakebills. It is the anti-Brakebills.”

“These people do magic?”

“They try.”

“Please tell me you’re joking, Julia.” He took her arm, but she shook it off. He took it again and pulled her back down the stairs. “I’m begging you.”

“But I am not joking.”

Julia’s smile was wide and predatory. The trap had sprung and the prey was writhing in it.

“These people can’t do magic,” he said. “They’re not—there’s no safeguards. They aren’t qualified. Who’s even supervising them?”

“No one. They supervise each other.”

He had to take a deep breath. This was wrong—not morally wrong, just out of order. The idea that just anybody could mess around with magic—well, for one thing it was dangerous. That’s not how it worked. And who were these people? Magic was his, he and his friends were the magicians. These people were strangers, they were nobody. Who told them they could do magic? As soon as Brakebills found out about this place they’d shut it down with a goddamned vengeance. They’d send a SWAT team, a flying wedge with Fogg at the head of it.

“Do you actually know these people?” he said.

She rolled her eyes.

“These guys?” She snorted. “These guys are just losers.”

Julia led the way back into the living room.

The only thing the denizens of the safe house had in common, besides their general seediness, was that a lot of them had the same tattoo: a little blue star, seven-pointed, the size of a dime. A heptagram, but solid, colored in. It winked at Quentin from the backs of their hands, or their forearms, or the meaty part between their thumb and forefinger. One of them had two, one on each side of his neck, like Frankenstein’s neck bolts. The shirtless Asian guy had four. As Quentin watched he started in on some involved casting Quentin didn’t recognize, staring glazedly through the web of his working hands. Quentin couldn’t even look.

A redheaded man with freckles, a pint-sized Dennis the Menace type, was sitting up on the gray slate mantelpiece by himself, monitoring the scene, but when he saw them he boosted himself down and strutted over. He wore an oversized army jacket and carried a beat-up clipboard.

“Hi folks!” he said. “I’m Alex, welcome to my dojo. You are—?”

“I am Julia. This is Quentin.”

“Okay. Sorry about the housekeeping. Tragedy of the commons.” In contrast to everybody else in the room, Alex was chipper and businesslike. “Check your stars, please?”

Julia did the thing again where she showed him the nape of her neck.

“Right.” Alex’s ginger eyebrows went up. Whatever he saw impressed him. He turned to Quentin. “And you—?”

“He does not have any,” Julia said.

“I don’t have any.” He could speak for himself.

“So did he want to take the test? Because otherwise he can’t stay here.”

“I understand,” Julia said.

The really incredible thing was that she wasn’t even mouthing off to this guy. She was being civil! She, a queen of Fillory, respected the fucked-up protocol of this place.

“Quentin, he wants you to take a test,” she said. “To show you do magic.”

“I want lots of things too. Do I have to do it?”

“Yes, you have to fucking do it,” she said evenly. “So do it. It is just the first level, everybody who comes here does it their first time. You just make a flash. You probably have a fancy name for it.”

“Show me.”

Julia ran through three well-rehearsed hand positions, lickety-split, snapped her fingers, and said:

The snap produced a little pop of light, like a flashbulb.

“Okay?”

“Hang on,” Quentin said. “Those hand positions weren’t quite generic. Can you—?”

“Come on, people,” Alex said, not so chipper now. “Are we doing this?”

Quentin saw now that Alex had eight stars, four on the back of each hand. That must make him king of the flophouse.

“Come on, Quentin.”

“Okay, okay. Show me again.”

She did the spell again. Quentin came at it, trying to crook his fingers the way she did. Brakebills taught you all straight lines, your hands approximating platonic geometry, but these positions were loose and organic. Nothing lined up. And it had been two years since he’d worked with real-world Circumstances. He tried it once, snap, and got nothing. Then nothing again.

This earned him a round of ironic applause. The locals were taking an interest in this transaction.

“I’m sorry, one more try and then you’re out,” Alex said. “You can come back in a month.” Julia began to show him again, but Alex put a hand over hers. “Just let him try.”

The bouncer, Potions Master, had come in from the front door and was watching with his arms folded. Quentin could hear other people saying “
ışık!
” Every time they did, a flashbulb would go off.

Screw this. He wasn’t going to pick up some corrupt hedge-witch spell in thirty seconds that would probably screw up his technique. He was classically trained, and a master sorcerer, and a king to boot. Let there be light.

“
,” he said. “
”

Let’s see who here’s got good Aramaic. He closed his eyes and clapped his hands loudly.

The light was white and blinding—a flashbulb at close range, right up in your face. For a second the whole room—shitty carpet, listing torchiere lamps, staring faces—was frozen, all the color driven out of it. Quentin had to blink his vision back to normal, and he’d had his eyes closed.

There was a beat of silence.

“Holeeee . . .”
someone said. Then everybody started talking at once. Alex didn’t look happy, but he didn’t throw them out either.

“Sign in,” he said. He blinked and blotted his eyes on his sleeve. “I don’t know where you learned that, but just get your flash working next time.”

“Cheers,” Quentin said.

Alex peeled a blue star sticker off a sheet and stuck it on the back of Quentin’s hand. Then he handed Quentin the clipboard. Where it said “Name” he wrote
King Quentin
and handed it to Julia.

When she was done Quentin dragged her out through the kitchen, with its bumpy linoleum floor and its fifteen-year-old Easy-Bake-looking range and its countertops crowded with a multicolored metropolis of unwashed glassware. Enough was enough.

“What the hell are we doing here?” he hissed.

“Come on.”

She led him deeper into the house, down a hall that in another, saner universe would have accessed Daddy’s study and a TV room and a laundry room, until she found the cheap hollow-core door that opened on the basement staircase.

He closed it behind them. The chilly mildewed silence of suburban basements everywhere embraced them. The stairs were unfinished pine planks, shaggy with cobwebs.

“I don’t understand this, Julia,” he said. “You don’t belong here any more than I do. You’re not like these people. You didn’t learn what you know from a bunch of unlicensed losers in a frat house. You can’t have.”

They were alone except for a roomful of taped-up cardboard boxes, a dead TV the size of a washing machine and half a Ping-Pong table.

“Maybe I am not who you think I am. Maybe I am an unlicensed loser too.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.” Was it? He was still trying to get his head around this place. “I can’t believe they haven’t burned this whole house down by now.”

“I think what you are trying to say is that you do not think they are good enough. They do not meet your standards.”

“This isn’t about standards!” Quentin said, though he felt the ground getting marshy under him. “This is about—look, I paid my dues, that’s all I’m saying. You have to earn this kind of power. You don’t just pick it up at the 7-Eleven with your Big Gulp and your Pokémon trading cards.”

“And what did I do? You think I did not pay dues?”

“I know you paid your dues.” He took a deep breath. Slow down. This place wasn’t the problem. The problem was getting back to Fillory.

“What did he call this house? A ‘dojo’?”

“Dojo, safe house, same thing. They are safe houses. He is just a dork.”

“Are there a lot of them?”

“A hundred maybe, in this country. There are more on the coasts.” Jesus Christ. It was an epidemic.

“What was that test back there?”

“You mean the one you flunked? That is the test to be a first-level magician. You have to be one to come in here. You pass the test, you get a star tattooed on you, you can stay. Most people get them on their hands, somewhere obvious. The more tests you pass, the more levels you go up, the more stars you get.”

“But who runs all this? That Alex guy?”

“He is just a den mother. Takes care of the house. The ranking system is self-policed. Any magician can ask another magician of equal or lower level to demonstrate the test corresponding to their level or any of the levels below that,” she recited. “To prove they know their shit. If you do not know your shit, you get busted down pretty fast.”

“Huh.” He wanted to find fault with the idea but couldn’t quite do it on the spur of the moment. He filed it away for later discrediting. “So what level are you?”

By way of an answer she turned around and showed him what she’d shown the doorman, and Alex: there was a blue seven-pointed star tattooed on the nape of her neck. Its upper points disappeared into the roots of her hair; she must have had to shave to get it done. It was like the ones he’d seen upstairs except bigger, a silver dollar, and it had a circle in the middle. Inside the circle was a number 50.

“Wow.” He couldn’t help but be impressed. “Ginger Balls back there only had eight. So you’re a fiftieth-level magician?”

“No.”

She took hold of the hem of her blouse, crossing her arms in front of her.

“Wait a minute—”

“Relax, playa.” She yanked the back of her shirt up, but only halfway. It was covered in blue stars, dozens of them in neat straight rows. He counted ten across—there must have been at least a hundred. She dropped her blouse and turned back to him.

“What level am I? I am the best there is, that is what level I am, and fuck you for asking. Come on. I am getting us back to Fillory.”

She knocked on a heavy fireproofed door, the kind that in most basements leads to a furnace room. It slid sideways on rollers. The man sliding it sideways looked like a by-the-numbers prepster, with short blond hair and a salmon-colored polo shirt, except that he was only about four feet tall. Dry prickly heat billowed from the room.

“What can I do for you this fine evening?” he said. His teeth were bright and even.

“We need to go to Richmond.”

The small man wasn’t completely solid either. He was translucent around the edges. Quentin didn’t notice at first, until he realized that his eyes were tracking things behind the man’s fingers that he shouldn’t have been able to see. They were well and truly through the looking glass now.