The Magicians (24 page)

Later still they would guide fireflies through the same maze, influencing their tiny insect minds by force of will. They watched one another do this in silence, feeling envy at one another’s successes and contempt for one another’s failures. The regime had divided them against each other. Janet in particular was bad at it—she tended to overpower her fireflies, to the point where they would crisp up in midair and become puffs of ash. Mayakovsky, stony-faced, just made her start over, while tears of wordless frustration ran down her face. This could and did go on for hours. No one could leave the hall before everyone had completed the exercise. They slept there more than once.

As the weeks went by, and still no one spoke, they plowed deeper and deeper into areas of magic Quentin never thought he’d have the guts to try. They practiced transformations. He learned to unpack and parse the spell that had turned them into geese (much of the trick, it turned out, was in shedding, storing, and then restoring the difference in body mass). They spent a hilarious afternoon as polar bears, wandering clumsily in a herd over the packed snow, swatting harmlessly at each other with giant yellow paws, encased as they were in layers of fur, hide, and fat. Their bear bodies felt clumsy and top heavy, and they kept toppling over sideways onto their backs by accident. More hilarity.

Nobody liked him, but it became apparent that Mayakovsky was no fraud. He could do things Quentin had never seen done at Brakebills, things he didn’t think had been done for centuries. One afternoon he demonstrated, but did not allow them to try, a spell that reversed the flow of entropy. He smashed a glass globe and then neatly restored it again, like a film clip run in reverse. He popped a helium balloon and then knitted it back together and refilled it with its original helium atoms, in some cases fishing them from deep inside the lungs of spectators who had inhaled them. He used camphor to smother a spider—he showed no particular remorse about this—and then, frowning with the effort, brought the spider back to life. Quentin watched the poor thing creep around in circles on the tabletop, hopelessly traumatized, making little dazed rushes at nothing and then retreating to a corner, hunched up and twitching, while Mayakovsky moved on to another topic.

One day, about three months into the semester, Mayakovsky announced that they would be transforming into Arctic foxes for the afternoon. It was an odd choice—they’d already done a few mammals, and it was no tougher than becoming a goose. But why quibble? Being an Arctic fox turned out to be a hell of a lot of fun. As soon as the change was in effect Quentin shot out across the snowpack on his four twinkling paws. His little fox body was so fast and light, and his eyes were so close to the ground, that it was like flying a high-performance jet at low altitude. Tiny ridges and crumbs of snow loomed up like mountains and boulders. He leaped over them and dodged around them and crashed through them. When he tried to turn he was going so fast he skidded and wiped out in a huge plume of snow. The rest of the pack gleefully piled on top of him, yipping and yapping and snapping.

It was an amazing outpouring of collective joy. Quentin had forgotten he was capable of that emotion, the way a lost spelunker feels like there never was such a thing as sunlight, that it was just a cruel fiction. They chased one another around in circles, panting and rolling and acting like idiots. It was funny, Quentin thought, with his stupid little miniature fox brain, the way he could automatically recognize everybody as foxes. That was Eliot with the snaggle-teeth. That plump blue-white critter was Josh. That small, silky specimen with the wide eyes was Alice.

Somewhere in the goofing off a game spontaneously evolved. It had something to do with pushing around a chunk of ice with your paws and your nose as fast as possible. Beyond that the point of the game wasn’t really clear, but they frantically pounced on the chunk of ice, or pounced on whoever had pounced on it just before them, and pushed it until the next person pounced on them.

An Arctic fox’s eyes weren’t all that much to brag about, but its nose was unbelievable. Quentin’s new nose was a Goddamned sensory masterpiece. Even in the middle of the fray he could recognize classmates by snuffing their fur. Increasingly, Quentin noticed one scent more than the others. It was a sharp, acrid, skunky musk that probably would have smelled like cat piss to a human being, but to a fox it was like a drug. He caught flashes of it in the fray every few minutes, and every time he did it grabbed his attention and jerked him around like a fish on a hook.

Something was happening to the game. It was losing its cohesion. Quentin was still playing, but fewer and fewer of his fellow foxes were playing with him. Eliot lit out in a streak off into the snow dunes. The pack dwindled to ten, then eight. Where were they going? Quentin’s fox brain barked. And what the hell was that unbe-fucking-lievable smell he kept stumbling on? There it was again! This time he tackled the source of the smell, buried his snuffling muzzle in her fur, because of course he had known all along, with what was left of his consciousness, that what he was smelling was Alice.

It was totally against the rules, but breaking the rules turned out to be as much fun as obeying them. How had he never figured
that
out before? The others were playing more and more wildly—they weren’t even
trying
to go after the chunk of ice anymore—and the game was disintegrating into little knots of tussling foxes, and he was tussling with Alice. Vulpine hormones and instincts were powering up, taking over, manhandling what was left of his rational human mind.

He locked his teeth in the thick fur of her neck. It didn’t seem to hurt her any, or at least not in a way that was easily distinguishable from pleasure. Something crazy and urgent was going on, and there was no way to stop it, or probably there was but why would you? Stopping was one of those pointless, life-defeating human impulses for which his merry little fox brain had nothing but contempt.

He caught a glimpse of Alice’s wild dark fox’s eye rolling with terror and then half shutting with pleasure. Their tiny quick breaths puffed white in the air and mingled and disappeared. Her white fox fur was coarse and smooth at the same time, and she made little yipping snarls every time he pushed himself deeper inside her. He never wanted to stop.

The snow burned underneath them. It glowed hot like a bed of coals. They were on fire, and they let the fire consume them.

 

 

To an outside observer breakfast the next day wouldn’t have looked much different than it usually did. Everybody shuffled in in their loose-fitting, all-white Brakebills South uniforms, sat down without speaking or looking at one another, and ate what was put in front of them. But Quentin felt like he was walking on the moon. Giant slow-motion steps, ringing silence, vacuum all around him, a television audience of millions. He didn’t dare look at anybody else, least of all Alice.

She was sitting across the table and three people down from him, impassive and unperturbed, calmly focused on her oatmeal. He couldn’t have guessed within a light-year what she was thinking. Though he knew what was on everybody else’s minds. He was sure they all knew what had happened. They’d been right out in the open, for God’s sake. Or had they all been doing the same thing? Did everybody pair off? His face felt hot. He didn’t even know if she was a virgin. Or, if she had been whether she still was one.

It would all be so much simpler if he even understood what it meant, but he didn’t. Could he be in love with Alice? He tried to compare what he felt for her with his remembered feelings for Julia, but the two emotions were worlds apart. Things just got out of control, that’s all. It wasn’t them, it was their fox bodies. Nobody had to take it too seriously.

Mayakovsky sat at the head of the table looking smug. He had known this was going to happen, Quentin thought furiously, stabbing at his cheese grits with a fork. A bunch of teenagers cooped up in the Fortress of Solitude for two months, then stuck in the bodies of stupid horny animals. Of course we were going to go crazy.

Whatever perverted personal satisfaction Mayakovsky got out of what happened, it became obvious over the next week that it was also a practical piece of personnel management, because Quentin reapplied himself to his magical studies with the laserlike focus of a person desperate to avoid meeting anybody else’s eyes or thinking about things that actually mattered, like how he really felt about Alice, and who it was who had had sex with her out on the ice, him or the fox. It was back to the grind, pounding his way through Circumstances and Exceptions and a thousand mnemonics designed to force him to embed a thousand trivial particles of data in the soft tissue of his already supersaturated mind.

They fell into a collective tribal trance. The depleted palette of the Antarctic world hypnotized them. The shifting snows outside briefly revealed a low ridge of dark shale, the only topographical feature in a featureless world, and the students watched it from the roof like television. It reminded him of the desert in
The Wandering Dune
—God, he hadn’t thought about Fillory for ages. Quentin wondered if the rest of the world, his life before this, had just been a lurid dream. When he pictured the globe now it was entirely Antarctic, a whole world over which this monochromatic continent had metastasized like an icy cancer.

He went a little insane. They all did, though it took them in different ways. Some of the others became obsessed with sex. Their higher functions were so numb and exhausted they became animals, desperate for any kind of contact that wouldn’t ask words of them. Impromptu orgies were not unheard of. Quentin came upon them once or twice in the evenings—they would gather in apparently arbitrary combinations, in an empty classroom or in somebody’s bedroom, in semi-anonymous chains, their white uniforms half or all the way off, their eyes glassy and bored as they pulled and stroked and pumped, always in silence. He saw Janet take part once. The display was as much for other people as for themselves, but Quentin never joined in or even watched, just turned away, feeling superior and also strangely angry. Maybe he was just angry that something kept him from jumping in. He was disproportionately relieved that he never saw Alice there.

Time passed, or at least Quentin knew that, according to theory, it pretty much had to be passing, though he didn’t personally see much evidence of it, unless you counted the weird menagerie of mustaches and beards he and his male classmates were growing. However much he ate he got thinner and thinner. His state of mind devolved from mesmerized to hallucinatory. Tiny random things became charged with overwhelming significance—a round pebble, a stray straw from a broom, a dark mark on a white wall—that dissipated again minutes later. In the classroom he sometimes saw fantastical creatures mixed in with his classmates—a huge, elegant brown stick insect that clung to the back of a chair; a giant lizard with horny skin and a German accent, whose head burned with white fire—though afterward he could never be sure if he had imagined them. Once he thought he saw the man whose face was hidden by a branch. He couldn’t take this much longer.

Then, just like that, one morning over breakfast Mayakovsky announced that there were two weeks remaining in the semester, and it was time they gave serious thought to the final exam. The test was simply this: they would walk from Brakebills South to the South Pole. The distance was on the order of five hundred miles. They would be given no food and no maps and no clothing. They would have to protect and sustain themselves by magic. Flying was out of bounds—they would go on foot or not at all, and in the form of human beings, not as bears or penguins or some other naturally cold-resistant animal. Cooperation between students was prohibited—they could view it as a race, if they liked. There was no time limit. The exam was not mandatory.

Two weeks wasn’t quite long enough to prepare properly, but it was more than long enough for the decision to hang over them. Yes or no, in or out? Mayakovsky stressed that safety precautions would be minimal. He would do his best to keep track of them in the field, but there was no guarantee that if they screwed up he’d be able to rescue their sorry, hypothermic asses.

There was a lot to study up on. Would sunburn be a problem? Snow blindness? Should they toughen the soles of their feet or try to create some kind of magical footwear? Was there any way to get mutton fat, which they could need to cast Chkhartishvili’s Enveloping Warmth, from the kitchen? And if the test wasn’t even mandatory, then what was the point of it? What would happen if they failed? It sounded more like a ritual or a hazing than a final exam.

 

 

On the last morning Quentin got up early with the idea of foraging for contraband spell components in the kitchen. He had made up his mind to compete. He had to know if he could do it or not. It was that simple.

Most of the cupboards were locked—he probably wasn’t the first student to have thought of it—but he did manage to load up his pockets with flour and a stray silver fork and some old sprouting garlic cloves that might come in handy for something, he didn’t know what. He headed downstairs.

Alice was waiting for him on the landing between floors.

“I have to ask you something,” she said, her voice full of crisp determination. “Are you in love with me? It’s okay if you aren’t, I just want to know.”

She made it almost all the way through, but she couldn’t quite say the last phrase full voice and whispered it instead.

He hadn’t even met her eyes since the afternoon they’d been foxes together. Three weeks at least. Now they stood together on the smooth, freezing stone floor, abjectly human. How could a person who hadn’t washed or cut her hair in five months be so beautiful?

“I don’t know,” he said. His voice was scratchy from lack of use. The words felt more frightening than any spell he had ever cast. “I mean, you’d think I would, but I don’t. I really don’t know.”