The Magicians (21 page)

“Ow!” The Natural grabbed his knee and looked up at Quentin with an outraged expression. That would bruise. “Foul!”

“Suck it,” Quentin said.

He whipped his shirt off over his head. Ignoring the rising yelps of dismay on all sides—it was so easy to ignore people when you understood how little power they really had over you—he walked over to where Alice stood, dumbstruck, on her square. He would probably regret this later, but God it was good to be a magician sometimes. He hoisted her over his shoulder fireman-style and jumped with her into the freezing, cleansing water.

Quentin had been wondering about the mystery of the Fourth Year ever since he got to Brakebills. Everybody did. The basic facts were common knowledge: every year in September half the Fourth Years swiftly and silently disappeared from the House overnight. No one discussed their absence. The vanished Fourth Years reappeared at the end of December looking thin and drawn and generally chewed over, to no particular comment—it was considered fatally bad form to say anything about it. They quietly mixed back into the general Brakebills population, and that was that. The rest of the Fourth Years vanished in January and came back at the end of April.

Now the first semester of Quentin’s Fourth Year was almost over, and he had acquired not one single new piece of information about what happened during that interval. The secret of where they went and what they did there, or what was done to them, was improbably well kept. Even students who took nothing else at Brakebills seriously were passionately serious on that one point: “Dude, I’m not even kidding, you so don’t want to be asking me about that . . .”

The disaster of the Beast had thrown off the previous year’s schedule. The regular contingent of Fourth Years had departed for the first semester—they were gone when it happened—but the second-semester group, which included Eliot, Janet, and Josh, had finished out the year at Brakebills as usual. To the extent that they speculated about it, they called themselves “the Spared.” Apparently whatever the faculty had in store for them was nasty enough as it was without the added threat of assault by an interdimensional carnivore.

But now it was back to business as usual. This year half the Fourth Years departed on schedule, along with a handful of the Fifth Years: the ten Spared had been split up between the two semesters, five and five. Whether by accident or by design, the Physical Kids would all be shipping out together in January.

It was a regular topic of conversation around the battered billiard table in the Cottage.

“You know what I bet?” Josh said, one Sunday afternoon in December. They were treating hangovers with glasses of Coke and huge quantities of bacon. “I bet they make us go to normal college. Just some random state school where we have to read
Cannery Row
and debate the Stamp Act. And like the second day Eliot’s going to be crying in the bathroom and begging for his foie gras and his malbec while some jock sodomizes him with a lacrosse stick.”

“Um, did that just turn into your total gay fantasy halfway through?” Janet asked.

“I have it on good authority”—Eliot attempted to jump the cue ball over the 8 and failed completely, pocketing both, which seemed not to bother him at all—“on the
best
of authority, that the whole Fourth Year enigma is a front. It’s all a hoax to scare off the faint of heart. You spend the whole semester on Fogg’s private island in the Maldives, contemplating the infinities of the multiverse in grains of fine white beach sand while coolies bring you rum-and-tonics.”

“I don’t think they have ‘coolies’ in the Maldives,” Alice said quietly. “It’s been an independent republic since 1965.”

“So how come everybody comes back all skinny?” Quentin asked. Janet and Eliot were playing, the rest of them lay on two beat-up Victorian couches. The room was small enough that they occasionally had to lean to one side to avoid the butt end of a cue.

“That’s from all the skinny-dipping.”

“Hork hork hork,” said Janet.

“Quentin should be good at that,” Josh added.

“Your fat ass could use some skinny-dipping.”

“I don’t want to go,” Alice said. “Can’t I get a doctor’s note or something? Like when they let the Christian kids out of sex ed? Isn’t anybody else worried?”

“Oh, I’m terrified.” If he was joking, Eliot gave no sign of it. He handed Janet the cue ball. It was decorated with trompe-l’oeil lunar craters to look like the moon. “I’m not strong like the rest of you. I’m weak. I’m a delicate flower.”

“Don’t worry, delicate flower,” Janet said. She made her shot without dropping her gaze, no-look. “Suffering will make you strong.”

 

 

They came for Quentin one night in January.

He knew it would happen at night—it was always at breakfast that they noticed that the Fourth Years were gone. It must have been two or three in the morning, but he woke up instantly when Professor Van der Weghe knocked on his door. He knew what was going on. The sound of her husky European voice in the darkness reminded him of his first night at Brakebills, when she’d put him to bed after his Examination.

“It’s time, Quentin,” she called. “We are going up to the roof. Do not bring anything.”

He stepped into his slippers. Outside a file of silent, rumpled Brakebills students stood on the stairs.

Nobody spoke as Professor Van der Weghe led them through a door in a stretch of wall that Quentin could have sworn had been blank the day before, between a pair of ten-foot-high oil paintings of clipper ships foundering in heavy seas. They shuffled up the dark wooden stairs without speaking, fifteen of them—ten Fourth Years, five leftover Fifth Years—everyone wearing identical navy blue Brakebills-issue pajamas. Despite Van der Weghe’s orders, Gretchen sullenly gripped a worn black teddy bear along with her cane. Up ahead of them Professor Van der Weghe banged open a wooden trapdoor, and they filed out onto the roof.

It was an awkward perch, a long, narrow, windy strip with a shingled drop falling away steeply on either side. A low wrought-iron fence ran along the edge, providing absolutely no protection or reassurance whatsoever; in fact it was the perfect height to take you out at the knees if you accidentally backed into it. The night was bitingly cold, with a lively cross-breeze. The sky was lightly frosted with high, wind-whisked clouds luridly backlit by a gibbous moon.

Quentin hugged himself. Still nobody had said a word; no one even looked at anybody else. It was like they were all still half asleep, and a single word would have shattered the delicate dream in which they walked. Even the other Physical Kids were like strangers.

“Everyone take off your pajamas,” Professor Van der Weghe called out.

Weirdly, they did. Everything was so surreal and trancelike already that it made perfect sense that they would all, guys and girls alike, get naked in front of each other in the freezing cold without a hint of self-consciousness. Afterward Quentin even remembered Alice putting a warm hand on his bare shoulder to steady herself as she stepped out of her pajama bottoms. Soon they were naked and shivering, their bare backs and buttocks pale in the moonlight, the starlit campus rolling away far below them, with the dark trees of the forest beyond.

Some of the students clutched their pajamas in both hands, but Professor Van der Weghe instructed them to drop them in a heap at their feet. Quentin’s blew away and disappeared over the ledge, but he didn’t try to stop them. It didn’t matter. She moved down the line, dabbing a generous gob of chalky white paste on each forehead and both shoulders with her thumb as she passed. When she was done, she walked back the other way, lining them up, checking her work, making sure they were standing up straight. Finally she called out a single harsh syllable.

Instantly a huge soft weight pressed down on Quentin, settling on his shoulders, bending him forward. He crouched down, straining against it. He tried to fight it, to lift it. It was crushing him! He bit back panic. It flashed through his brain—the Beast was back!—but this was different. As he doubled over he felt his knees folding up into his belly,
merging
with it. Why wasn’t Professor Van der Weghe helping them? Quentin’s neck was stretching and stretching out and forward, out of his control. It was grotesque, a horrible dream. He wanted to vomit but couldn’t. His toes were melting and flowing together, his fingers were elongating enormously and spreading out, and something soft and warm was bursting out of his arms and chest, covering him completely. His lips pouted grotesquely and hardened. The narrow strip of roof rose up to meet him.

And then the weight was gone. He squatted on the gray slate roof, breathing hard. At least he didn’t feel cold anymore. He looked at Alice, and Alice looked back at him. But it wasn’t Alice anymore. She had become a large gray goose, and so had he.

Professor Van der Weghe moved down the line again. With both hands she picked up each student in turn and threw him or her bodily off the roof. They all, in spite of the shock or because of it, reflexively spread out their wings and caught the air before they could be snared by the bare, grasping treetops below. One by one they sailed away into the night.

When it was his turn, Quentin honked in protest. Professor Van der Weghe’s human hands were hard and scary and burned against his feathers. He shat on her feet in panic. But then he was in the air and tumbling. He spread his wings and beat his way up into the sky, thrashing and punishing the air till it bore him up. It would have been impossible not to.

Quentin’s new goose-brain, it emerged, was not much given to reflection. His senses now tracked only a handful of key stimuli, but it tracked those very, very closely. This body was made for either sitting or flying, not much else, and as it happened Quentin was in a mood to fly. In fact, he felt like flying more than he had ever felt like doing anything in his entire life.

With no conscious thought or apparent effort, he and his classmates fell into the classic ragged V formation, with a Fourth Year named Georgia at the apex. Georgia was the daughter of the receptionist at a car dealership in Michigan, and she had come here against her family’s will—unlike Quentin, she had confessed fully the nature of Brakebills, and as a reward for her honesty Georgia’s parents had tried to have her committed. Thanks to Fogg’s subtle spellcraft Georgia’s parents believed her to be attending a vocational institute for troubled adults. Now Georgia, whose Discipline was an obscure branch of Healing roughly analogous to endocrinology, and who wore her wiry black hair cinched at the back with a tortoiseshell barrette, was leading them southward, her brand-new wings pumping vigorously.

It was just chance; any one of them could have led the flock. Quentin was vaguely aware that, although he’d lost the lion’s share of his cognitive capacity in the transformation, he’d also picked up a couple of new senses. One had to do with air: he could perceive wind speed and direction and air temperature as clearly as whorls of smoke in a wind tunnel. The sky now appeared to him as a three-dimensional map of currents and eddies, friendly rising heat plumes and dense dangerous sinks of cool air. He could feel the prickle of distant cumulus clouds swapping bursts of positive and negative electrical charge. Quentin’s sense of direction had sharpened, too, to the point where it felt like he had a finely engineered compass floating in oil, perfectly balanced, at the center of his brain.

He could feel invisible tracks and rails extending away from him through the air in all directions into the blue distance. They were the Earth’s lines of magnetic force, and it was along one of these rails that Georgia was leading them. She was taking them south. By dawn they were a mile up and doing sixty miles an hour, overtaking cars on the Hudson Parkway below them.

They passed New York City, a stony encrustation crackling with alien heat and electrical sparks and exuding toxic flatulence. They flew all day, following the coastline, past Trenton and Philadelphia, sometimes over sea, sometimes over frozen fields, surfing the temperature gradients, boosted by updrafts, transferring seamlessly from current to current as one petered out and the next one kicked in. It felt fantastic. Quentin couldn’t imagine stopping. He couldn’t believe how strong he was, how many wing beats he had stored up in his iron chest muscles. He just couldn’t contain himself. He had to talk about it.

“Honk!”
he yelled. “Honk honk honk honk honk honk
honk!
”

His classmates agreed.

Quentin was shuffled up and down the V in an orderly fashion, in more or less the same way a volleyball team rotates serve. Sometimes they plonked down and rested and fed in a reservoir or a highway median or a badly drained spot on the lawn of a suburban office park (landscaping errors were pure gold to geese). Not infrequently they shared these priceless scraps of real estate with other V’s, real geese who, sensing their transformed nature, regarded them with polite amusement.

How long they flew, Quentin couldn’t have said. Once in a while he caught sight of a land formation he recognized, and he tried to calculate time and distance—if they flew at such and such a speed, and the Chesapeake Bay was so many miles south of New York City, then X number of days must have passed since . . . what again exactly? The X’s and blanks and other equationly such-and-such’s stubbornly refused to fill themselves in. They didn’t want to do their dance. Quentin’s goose-brain didn’t have the hardware to handle numbers, nor was it interested in whatever point those numbers were supposed to prove anyway.

They had gone far enough south now that the weather was perceptibly warmer, and then they went farther still. They went south over the Florida Keys, dry, crusty little nubbins barely poking their heads up out of the ceaselessly lapping turquoise, then out over the Caribbean, bypassing Cuba, farther south than any sensible goose had license to go. They overflew the Panama Canal, no doubt causing any bird-watchers who happened to spot them to shake their heads at the lost little V as they dutifully logged it in their bird journals.