The Magician King (23 page)

He gave them the tour. The palazzo was four floors, the lower two for business, the upper two for Josh’s private apartments, to which they retreated. The floor was massive pink-swirled marble slabs, the walls crumbling plaster. All the rooms were odd sizes and seemed to have been built as they were needed, on a series of whimsical impulses that it was now impossible to reconstruct.

All glory to the great quest for Fillory, but they needed a break. Julia requested a hot bath, which frankly she badly needed. Quentin and Josh retired to the tremendous dining room, which was lit by a single modest chandelier. Over plates of black spaghetti, Quentin explained as best he could what had happened and why they were here. When he was done Josh explained what had happened to him.

With Quentin, Eliot, Janet, and Julia safely installed on the thrones of Fillory, Josh had taken the button and embarked on an exploration of the Neitherlands. He’d seen as much as he ever wanted to see of Fillory, and it hadn’t been pretty, and anyway he was sick of scraping along in the others’ shadows. He didn’t want to be co-king of Fillory, he wanted to do his own thing his own way. He wanted to find his own Fillory. He wanted to get laid.

Josh could be careless about a lot of things—what he ate, wore, smoked, said, did—but you don’t get into Brakebills without being a genius of some kind or another, and given the right stakes he was fully capable of being highly methodical, even meticulous. In this case the stakes were just right. He began a careful survey of the Neitherlands.

This was not a thing to be undertaken lightly. As far as anyone knew the squares and fountains of the Neitherlands extended an infinite distance in all directions, never repeating themselves, and each one led to a different world, and maybe a whole different universe. It would take no effort at all to get so lost that you could never find your way home.

Josh had it in mind to go to Middle Earth, as in the setting of Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings
. Because if Fillory was real, why not Middle Earth? And if Middle Earth was real, that meant a lot of other things were probably real: lady elves and lembas wafers and pipe-weed and Eru Ilúvatar knew what else. But practically speaking anywhere would have done as long as it was reasonably warm and life-supporting and inhabited by people endowed with the appropriate organs and a willingness to make them available to Josh. The multiverse was his TGI Friday’s.

He had it in mind to spiral outward from Earth’s fountain, square by square, mapping carefully as he went. He wouldn’t need much. You didn’t really get hungry in the Neitherlands. He brought a loaf of bread, a good bottle of wine, warm clothes, six ounces of gold, and a stun gun.

“The first world was a complete bust,” he said. “Desert everywhere. Incredible dunes, but no people at all that I could find, so I buttoned right back out of there. Next one was ice. Next one was pine forest. That one was inhabited—sort of a Native American thing. I stayed there two weeks. No love, but I lost about ten pounds. Also scored a fuck-ton of wampum.”

“Wait, hang on. These worlds were the same all over? Like each one had a single climate and that’s it?”

“Well, I don’t know. I don’t even know if these other worlds are spheres, you know? Or discworlds or ringworlds whatever else. Maybe they don’t work the same way. Maybe they don’t have latitude. But I wasn’t about to hike to another climatic zone just to find out. Much easier just to hit the next fountain.

“God, the things I saw. Really, you should do it sometime. Some days I would hit a dozen worlds. I was just like free-falling through the multiverse. A giant tree that didn’t have any beginning or end. A sort of magnetic world, where everything stuck to you. One was all stretchy. One was just stairs, stairs and stairs and stairs. What else? There was an upside-down one. A weightless one, where you drifted around in outer space, except that space was warm and humid and smelled sort of like rosemary.

“And you know what’s real? Teletubbies! I know, right? Crazy, crazy stuff.”

“You didn’t . . .”

“No, I did not hit that shit. Totally could have. Anyway. Not everything was that exotic. Sometimes I’d find a world that was just like ours only one tiny thing would be different—like the economy was all based on strontium, or sharks were mammals, or there was more helium in the air so everybody had little high voices.

“I did meet a girl, after all that. Man, it was so beautiful. This world was mostly mountains, like one of those Chinese paintings, just rising out of the mist, and actually everybody looked kind of Asian. They lived in these ornate hanging pagoda cities. But there were hardly any of them left—they were always fighting these endless wars with other people on other mountains, for no special reason. Plus they fell off cliffs a lot.

“I was probably the fattest person they’d ever seen, but they didn’t care about that. I think they thought it was hot. Like it meant I was a good hunter, something like that. They’d also never seen magic before, so that went a long way. I was kind of a celebrity for a while.

“I started hanging out with this one girl, big-time warrior for one of the cities. She was very into the magic thing. And also I guess their menfolk weren’t especially well-endowed in the hardware aisle, if you take my meaning.”

“I believe I grasp the essence of it, yes,” Quentin said.

“Anyway she died. Got killed. It was awful. Really, really sad. At first I wanted to stay and fight and try to get the people who killed her, but then I couldn’t do it. It was all so stupid. I just couldn’t get into the war thing the way they did, and that was shameful to them, I guess, so they kicked me out.”

“God. I’m sorry.”

Poor Josh. The way he talked all the time, you sometimes forgot he had feelings. But they were all there, if you dug deep enough.

“No, it doesn’t matter. I mean it did, but what can you do. It was never going to work out. I think she wanted to die that way. Those people weren’t that into life, or maybe they were and that’s what life is,
I don’t fucking know.

“That’s when it all went to shit. All the fun was gone. I went to this kind of Greek world, all white cliffs and hot sun and dark seas. I slept with a harpy there.”

“You had rebound sex with a harpy?”

“I don’t know if that’s what she was. Wings for arms, basically. Her feet were kind of talon-y too.”

“Right.”

“She practically took off in the middle of it. Feathers going everywhere. Way more trouble than it was worth. I still have a scar from where she clawed me. I can—”

“I don’t want to see it.”

Josh sighed. All the humor had drained out of his face, leaving it gray under the stubble. Now Quentin saw those years that he’d missed before.

“I mean, all I was looking for basically was some kind of
Y: The Last Man
setup, right? Where I was the only dude in a world of chicks. I know it’s out there. They could even all have been lesbians, and I would just watch. I’d be good with whatever.

“Anyway after that I started just sliding through worlds. Worlds worlds worlds. I stopped caring. It was like when you’ve surfed too much porn on the Web and none of it seems real but you keep going anyway. I’d get to a world and immediately start looking for any excuse to quit and go on to the next one. As soon as I’d see one wrong thing—oh, this one has flies, or the sky is a weird color, or no beer, anything that wasn’t perfect—I’d bail.

“Then one of those times I came back and the whole Neitherlands was busted.”

“What? How do you mean, busted?”

“Broken. Fucked up. Do you know about this? If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

He drained his wineglass. A man came to refill it, and Josh waved him off. “Whiskey,” he said.

He went on.

“At first I thought it was me, I must have broken it. I used it too much, something like that. When my head broke the water that last time it was like the cold punched me in the face. The air was freezing, and the wind was just
whipping
this dry powdery snow through the squares.”

“How is that even possible?” Quentin said. “I didn’t think the Neitherlands even had weather.”

It made him think of that silent storm, the one that had thrashed the clock-tree back in Fillory. Maybe it was the same wind?

“Something’s deeply messed up there, Quentin. Something’s wrong, something basic. Like systemic. Half the buildings were in ruins. It looked like the place had been bombed. All those beautiful stone buildings just laid open to the sky. Do you remember how Penny said once that they were all full of books? I think he was right, because the air was full of pages, blowing along through the city.”

Josh shook his head.

“I guess I should have grabbed a few, to see what was on them. You would have. I never even thought of it till after.

“You know what I was thinking about? Not dying. I was pretty far from the Earth fountain at that point, a mile maybe. I’d brought warm clothes, but I ditched them when I met the harpy. It was hot as hell there. And she kinda tore at my clothes a lot of the time anyway.

“So I was practically naked, and a lot of my landmarks were gone. A lot of the fountains were gone too. Some of them were leveled, some of them were frozen. You know how you can’t really do magic there? A couple of times I just squatted down in a corner. I thought maybe I’d wait out the storm, but really I just wanted to go to sleep. I didn’t think I could go on. I could have died, easily. I was out there for about half an hour. It’s a miracle I found the Earth fountain at all. I really thought I wouldn’t make it.”

“It’s incredible that you did.” Good old Josh. Just when you were ready to write him off he kicked into gear, and when he did he really was indomitable. Like that time in Fillory, when he’d beaten the red-hot giant with his black hole spell. He’d probably outlive them all.

“I keep trying to figure it out,” Josh said. “It was like somebody’d attacked the Neitherlands, or cursed it, except who could do that? I didn’t see anybody there. It was just as empty as it always was. I thought maybe—I know it’s silly—I thought maybe I’d see Penny.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, not that I wanted to. I couldn’t stand that guy. But it’d be nice to know he’s not dead.”

“Yeah. It would.”

Quentin was already trying to calculate whether this meant he and Julia couldn’t get back to Fillory through the Neitherlands. It was still possible, in theory. They’d just suit up for cold weather. Bring an ice ax.

“I always thought the Neitherlands were invulnerable,” Quentin said. “They felt like they were outside time, I didn’t think they ever changed. But it sounds like an earthquake hit them, an earthquake and a blizzard at the same time.”

“I know, right? What are the odds?”

“I don’t suppose you noticed whether the Fillory fountain was still there?” Quentin said. “I thought maybe we’d go back that way. Back to Fillory.”

“No. So you are going back? I didn’t exactly pop in while I was passing through. But listen, I don’t know if you can go back that way anyway.”

“Why not? I realize the Neitherlands is a disaster area, but it’s worth a try. You got back to Earth. You seem pretty settled here. We’ll just borrow the button and be on our way.”

“Yeah, see, that’s the thing.”

Josh didn’t meet Quentin’s eyes. He studied a painting hanging on the flaking wall behind Quentin as if he’d never seen it before.

“What?”

“I don’t have the button anymore.”

“You don’t—?”

“Yeah. I sold it. I didn’t realize you still wanted it.”

Quentin could not be hearing this.

“You didn’t. Tell me you did not do that.”

“I totally did!” Josh said, indignant. “How the hell do you think I could afford a fucking Venetian palazzo?”

T
he old wood of Josh’s dining room table felt cool against Quentin’s forehead. In a few more seconds he’d sit up again. That’s how long it would take to roll his brain back to the state it was in before it thought that their troubles were over. Until that happened Quentin would just enjoy the cool solidity of the table for a second more. He let the despair wash over him. The button was gone. He thought about banging his head a few times, just lightly, but that would have been overdoing it.

He was aware for the first time of how quiet the city had gotten. After dark the streets and canals seemed to empty out. As if Venice felt less of an obligation to pretend to be part of this millennium at night, and had reverted to its medieval self again.

All right. He sat up. The blood drained back out of his face. Back to work.

“Okay. You sold the button.”

“Look, you must have had some other plan,” Josh said. “I mean, don’t tell me you were actually planning on randomly running into me in Venice and bumming the button off me. That’s not a plan.”

“Well, no,” Quentin said, “it’s not a plan. The plan was not to get booted out of Fillory, but that ship has sailed, so I’m working on a new plan. Who the hell did you sell the button to?”

“Well, that’s a story too!” Josh launched straight into the tale, untroubled by any further self-reproach. If Quentin had moved on then so could he, and this was obviously a much happier story than the one about his sojourn in the Neitherlands. “See, I realized I was through with that button. I was done with the Neitherlands and Fillory and all that stuff. If I was going to get laid—and I was—I was going to get laid right here in the real world. So I looked around for something to do on Earth, and I started picking up on this underground scene. The safe houses, all that stuff. Have you heard about that?”

“Julia’s been catching me up.”

“I mean, I always knew there were hedge witches out there, a few of them, but this thing goes deep, man
.
I had no idea. There are a lot of those guys. And a lot of them come through Venice—they figure it’s really old, so, hey, magic. They think maybe they’ll pick something up. It’s kinda sad, really. Some of them are the business, they’ve figured out a lot of what we know, and some stuff we don’t, but most of them have no idea what they’re doing, and they’re desperate. They’ll try anything.