The Magician’s Land (17 page)

“It was pretty bad. All the usual stuff happened that happens in an ordeal. I peed myself. I practically went blind. I threw up at one point. It was really, really unpleasant. But at the same time I could feel the ordeal remaking me. You know? Like the desert itself was smelting me, melting away weaknesses and impurities and extracting what was hard and true. I thought a lot of that kind of crap while I was collecting my grains.”

“Janet.” Eliot didn’t know what to say. He’d never heard her talk this openly about her feelings. Whatever happened out there, something about her really had changed. He hadn’t seen it till now. “Janet, how could you do that to yourself?”

“I don’t know, I just knew I had to. I picked and I picked and I picked. My hands were shaking like crazy. The sun was going down the third day when I started to feel like maybe I was pretty close to done. It wasn’t a huge sack—more of a bag, really—but it was looking pretty full. If somebody asked you for a sack of ore you wouldn’t be embarrassed to give it to them.

“Supposedly if you had even one grain of regular sand in there the Smelter wouldn’t come, and I don’t know if I believed that or not, but I kept shaking the bag and fishing around in it to see if somehow one had gotten in. I really loved my bag of black metal. It felt cool, and oily, and so dense. It had a special smell. I was proud of it. I just could not wait to see what kind of weapon came out of it. I knew that whatever it was would be like the sharp, unbreakable expression of my innermost will. It would be what I’d been waiting for my whole life.

“I guess my defenses were low, because a lot of stuff came back to me out there that I’d been pretty much avoiding thinking about for a long time. Like I thought about Alice coming to Brakebills for the first time, thrashing through the woods, not even knowing if they’d let her in. I thought about how shitty I was to her before she died or whatever. I thought about Julia waiting for Brakebills to come and get her, waiting and waiting alone in her room, and Brakebills never coming.

“I thought about you, and how I used to feel about you, and how bad that felt. I thought about how far you’ve come. You really got yourself
together when you came here, Eliot, and I respect that. I guess I never told you that. Everybody does.”

“Thank you.” She hadn’t. It felt good.

“I thought about this one time when I was at boarding school. I never think about my childhood, ever, but that night it all just came oozing out. You know my parents sent me away to boarding school when I was eight? Now I think it was too early, but at the time I just assumed it was normal. I don’t even think the school takes students that young anymore. And as it turned out it was a rough year for my family—I had a baby brother die of SIDS—and I think they kind of forgot about me for a while there. What with all the grieving and such. They just figured I’d take care of myself.

“Which I guess I must have. But it was a pretty bad year.”

“Why haven’t you ever told me this?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I guess I never really let myself feel how much it hurt. But I kind of relived the whole experience that fourth night, waiting for this Smelter thing to come. I literally regressed to being eight years old.

“Anyway then it was June, and the school year was all over. Time to go home. But on the last day there was some kind of mix-up, my dad thought he sent a car for me, I guess, but his assistant forgot, or the driver never showed, either way nobody came for me. I sat on my suitcase in the lobby all day, while the other kids got picked up one by one, and I kicked my legs and read one of those big floppy
Peanuts
books over and over again, and nobody came. That was before cell phones, and they couldn’t track down my parents. The staff were whispering behind my back. They felt sorry for me, but I could tell they kind of wanted me the hell out of there too so they could go home.

“I can still remember the view from the lobby: the line of palm trees through the glass doors, the sunset highlights on the wobbly linoleum tiles, the smell of the varnish on the wooden benches. I’ll never forget it. I’d look at the shadows and think, definitely he’ll have come by the time the shadow of the window frame hits that corner of the bench, but then he wouldn’t come, and I’d pick a new spot. I was realizing for the first time what a small part of my parents’ world I was. They were everything to me, but I wasn’t everything to them.

“The staff let me eat dinner with them, which ordinarily students never got to do. They ordered in from Popeye’s. I felt so excited and special.”

Eliot wished he could go back in time and get that mini-Janet, scoop her up and take her home. But he couldn’t.

“Then after dinner my dad finally showed up. He came striding through the door, stiff-arming it open without breaking stride, tie loose, walking too fast. He was probably pissed off at himself, about the mix-up, but it came off like he was pissed off at me somehow. Like it was my fault. He was pretty much of an asshole about the whole thing.

“I guess you can see where this is going. I was seriously weak at that point. I had the spins. I was falling asleep every five minutes. I woke up at dawn on day five and I knew that the Smelter wasn’t coming. And I gave up. It was over.

“Somebody stronger would have stayed out there till they died. Julia might have. Alice, maybe. I guess if somebody really wants to break me, it turns out I can be broken. There it is. I didn’t know. Now I know.

“I walked back to the rock. I still had my sack of metal. I couldn’t let go of it—maybe they could use it for something else, I don’t know. I was not in good shape, I can tell you. I was so dehydrated I couldn’t even cry. It was pretty much of a mad scene, like Ophelia in
Hamlet
. Except, you know, a lot drier.

“And then I was back in the city, and they were taking care of me, helping me to a table where there was all this food and drink. They were having a party. The whole tribe was there. Everybody was smiling. The Smelter hadn’t come, but somehow it was all right. I’d failed, but that was just the way of things. The desert was eternal, and I had fought it and done my best and lost and that was all I could do. Everybody sat there smiling at me and after a while I was smiling too.

“The Foremost asked me to come up to where he was, at the head of the table, in front of everybody. He told me to kneel, and he took the sack of metal from me and held it up.

“You are an outsider,
he said.
But you came to us, and you bowed before the desert, and you combed through its sands with your fingers.

“Dramatic pause.

“You thought the desert would grant you its treasures. The treasures of
our people. You thought it would give up our secrets. Our metal. Our strength. You thought you would take our desert from us, and rule over us.

“Here is what the desert has given you: a bag of worthless sand.

“And he poured my sack out onto the floor.

“You will never find our metal. The desert guards its secrets. It shares them only with its sons and daughters. You may take this sand back to your High King of Fillory and tell him that I let you live. Tell him that he may send us more whores if he chooses, this one was adequate.”

Janet rode in silence for a minute. Her back was to Eliot. He didn’t know if she was composing herself at the memory or just lost in thought. He saw her touch her face once, that was all.

“Janet,” he said.

“The Foremost got a good laugh out of that last one, believe me.” Her voice was unchanged. “He knew his audience. All that black sand was in front of me on the floor in a little pile. It had seemed a lot bigger out in the desert. I still couldn’t believe it wasn’t metal. I almost died for it.

“But I didn’t finish the story before, about when I was at boarding school. You know what I did that day, when my father came for me? I fucking spat on him. I told him I would never go home again. I tore his expensive shirt. He slapped me and dragged me out to the car kicking and screaming.

“But I’m not eight anymore. I’m not a little girl. And the Foremost wasn’t half the man my father was.

“I whispered something to him. He had to lean down to hear me. I whispered:
I don’t need your secrets, Foremost.
But I’ll take your weapons
.
And I’ll take your desert too.

“Then I threw a handful of that fine black sand right in his eyes. And I got up off my knees. And I stopped whispering.

“And you can tell your god when you see him that I didn’t let you live. But I guess that’ll be kind of obvious.

“See, he’d made a big mistake. He thought when he sent me out there that he was going to crush me, but he was wrong. He made me stronger. The desert made me look at my own secrets, the ones I kept from myself, and I did. When I came back I didn’t have a weapon, I was a weapon.

“I can cast Woven Strength pretty quick when I have to. I was worn out from the ordeal, believe me, but nothing was going to stop me. Before he knew what was going on I punched the Foremost into the fucking wall. My hands were basically like stone. It felt good.

“For a minute everybody else just watched. I think they were thinking, OK, fair fight, let’s see if the Foremost can get out of this by himself. Don’t want to disrespect him by trying to help, sort of thing. By the time they changed their minds about that it was too late for him. And for them.

“Well, look, I was angry. I don’t think I commit a lot of gratuitous violence, but this was war, and he was a jerk, and I made a mess of him. I threw him through a couple of doors, and he cried like a fucking baby. You know what they used to write on cannons?
The last argument of kings.
I guess you could say magic is the last argument of queens.”

Eliot didn’t say anything. For all the years of his life he’d spent with Janet, he’d never really known her, not deep down. Sometimes he looked at her and thought, Gosh, I wonder what’s underneath all that anger, all that hard glossy armor? Maybe there’s just an innocent, wounded little girl in there who wants to come out and play and be loved and get happy. But now he wondered if maybe that little girl was long gone, or if she’d ever been there at all. What was under all that armor, all that anger? More anger, and more armor. Anger and armor, all the way down.

Janet’s face was white, but her voice was still calm.

“When the Foremost was done crying I made him show me everything. All their secrets. I didn’t even care anymore, I just wanted him to know how beaten he was. That rock went deep under the desert—they’d cut shafts down through it—and underground it was all ice caves. That’s where the water came from.

“No metal though. There wasn’t any. Can you believe that? Those weapons were all they had—I think it must have come from a meteorite or something, a long time ago. Forged from star-metal, kinda thing. They just passed them down, father to son, mother to daughter. I locked the Foremost in an ice cave and left him there. I figured his buddies would find him eventually. Maybe he’d die, maybe he’d be OK, I don’t know. What am I, a fucking doctor?”

Eliot urged his horse forward a bit, right up beside Janet’s, and as well as his horsemanship would allow he leaned over, put his arm around Janet, and kissed her on the cheek. He felt her smile.

“Before I left I took his spear away from him. I still had the strength going, so I broke it in half with my bare hands, right in front of him, and I formed an axe-head on the end of each one, out of ice. Not bad, right? I was going to say, ‘Consider yourself annexed, bitch!’ or something like that, but sometimes an exit line just feels
de trop,
you know?”

“Yeah,” Eliot said quietly. “I know. I really do.”

“So anyway,” Janet said, “that’s how I got my new axes.”

She spurred her horse down the trail toward Barion.

O
ne day, about a week after Quentin got back from Antarctica, Lionel knocked on his door. It was two thirty in the afternoon.

“Ten minutes.” Lionel didn’t wait for him to open it. “In the lobby. Bring your gear.”

By the time Quentin got there Lionel was already down the hall at the other suite.

Mid-afternoon had become a dead time in the daily life cycle of their little criminal cell. They’d already gone over their parts in the plan one more time, as best they could in the confines of a hotel room, which was probably nothing like the field conditions, which they still knew way too little about. Stoppard didn’t seem to mind tinkering with his apparatuses eighteen hours a day, but the rest of them were slowly going out of their minds. They’d spent the morning tweaking a couple of things that didn’t really need tweaking. Quentin had taken this as far as he could, and he was impatient. Alice was out there somewhere.

It was too cold to go outside, and if they did go outside they were at Newark International Airport, so they played cards or read or watched TV or did finger exercises or ran on the treadmills in the athletic center. Betsy scribbled in a voluminous diary. Sometimes they swam in the shallow hotel pool, which was enclosed in a damp, dripping glass grotto on the top floor and was so chlorinated that they felt slightly poisoned for half an hour after they got out. Quentin was happy to have a break
in the routine. Maybe they were going off-site, for a dry run of the whole business.

They met in the lobby, all except for Pushkar, who was nowhere in sight. Stoppard arrived carrying two hard plastic suitcases, one of which was obviously pretty heavy. Quentin brought a duffel bag with everything he figured they’d need to break the bond, if it could possibly be broken, which was still an open question. It wasn’t like they had one to practice on. He had Mayakovsky’s coins in his pocket.

Betsy came empty-handed.

“Field trip!” she said. “Thank God. Now I can say it. Are you ready? Plum snores. There, I said it.”

“I’m glad it’s finally out there,” Plum said.

“Do you think this is it?” Stoppard said. “I mean, is this the job?”

“No.” Betsy shook her head. “Dress rehearsal. Shakedown cruise.”

“We’ll meet the others on-site,” Lionel said, and he led them outside. It was the white limo again. This time the driver got out, and Lionel got behind the wheel. The rest of them climbed in the back.

It was a good idea. Quentin was all for improvisation when there was absolutely no other choice, but it would be nice to be as overprepared as possible. Maybe the bird had even set up an incorporate bond for them to play with? The limo accelerated onto the highway, heading north.

The intercom clicked on.

“Cardboard box,” Lionel said. There was one, on the floor in a corner. Quentin slit the tape with a key. It turned out to be full of clothes: shiny black parkas and black jeans and watch caps. “Find your sizes. Get changed.”

It was all very black-ops. Stoppard rooted through the box excitedly till he found a parka that fit him. He pulled it into his lap and fingered it tenderly.

“I am in love,” he said. “I am in love with this coat.”

Betsy had already whipped off her pants, revealing practical white underwear and a pair of very pale legs, and begun pulling on her jeans.

“This tapered shit is so Jersey,” she said.

“I think I’ll wait,” Plum said.

The limo crossed the Hudson into Manhattan, then forged on farther north, through Yonkers and then veering east into Connecticut. Quentin watched the world flow by: hulking overpasses, brick housing projects dense with too-small windows, strip malls with giant signs shouting at the traffic, more housing projects and then finally, like a sigh of relief, trees. In the permanent twilight of the tinted windows it all looked as far off and alien as the contents of an aquarium.

They stopped twice, once for gas and once at a long low brick building with a sign outside proudly identifying it as a rehab center, where Lionel took receipt of a long brown paper package from someone who barely opened the door. Stoppard fidgeted in his black coat, which he’d already put on even though it was too hot for it in the limo, and he’d added a pair of aviator glasses. His hands kept straying to the controls for the disco lights.

“Don’t,” Plum said in a warning tone.

There was a lot of pent-up energy in the car.

“So,” Betsy said. “Stoppard. What the hell are you doing here? I mean, on this job?”

“Same as everybody else,” he said. “I’m here for the money.”

With startling quickness Betsy plucked the sunglasses off his face. Stoppard snatched at them but she made them vanish; she had a quick, fluid casting style that reminded Quentin powerfully of someone else’s, he couldn’t place it and then he could: Julia’s. Without the glasses Stoppard looked a lot younger.

“Don’t bullshit us, Maverick,” she said. “You’re like nine years old. You can have the glasses back when you tell us how you got here.”

“I’m seventeen! For your information. And anyway how did
you
get here?”

“Well, let’s see . . .” She put a finger on her chin and looked up and to one side, pretending to think. “I’m the best there is at what I do. I have some things I need to take care of, and it’ll be a lot easier to do that with two million dollars. And I enjoy violence and riding around in stretch limos with nerds. The end!” She smiled. “Now you.”

If Stoppard had not already had a raging crush on Betsy, he had one
by the end of that speech. Either way some of the attitude went out of him.

“I just like building stuff, I guess?” He wanted to play the game the way she had, but he had nowhere near the necessary reserves of sarcasm and sangfroid, so he wound up just being honest. “I was into computers for a while, but it was hard to get what I needed, you know? Even when you build your own gear the chips are still pretty expensive. And I’ve been with a couple of foster families—you don’t get any privacy. You can never hang on to your stuff. Especially when it’s worth something.

“None of my families were magic. A couple of guys at the Best Buy, they got me into it, but pretty soon I kinda left them behind. When I get focused on something I just have to figure it out, you know? I don’t stop. I wasn’t going to school much at this point, and where I live you don’t want to be outside too much . . . I had a lot of time on my hands. And my last family, I got my own room. Give a nerd enough time and a door he can close and he can figure out pretty much anything.

“But anyway magic plus computers, not a good combination, so I figured I had to choose one or the other. But then I found horology. Horomancy.”

“Please tell me that word doesn’t mean what it sounds like it means,” Plum said.

“Clock magic. It was the best of both worlds really. I always liked the hardware side, and it’s easier to scrounge parts for clocks than computers—you would not believe what people throw away. Plus you can, uh, steal stuff sometimes too, if you have to. After a while I got some pretty sophisticated apparatus going. Seeing what kind of magic I could get traction on—temporal effects, obviously, but that’s just where you start. You work your way outward. Weather. Optics. Probability. Field effects.

“Mostly I was figuring this stuff out on my own. It has a different feel from all that gobble-gobble stuff you guys do.” He waggled his fingers like he was casting a spell. “This is more slow and steady. Tick-tock, tick-tock.”

Quentin was developing some respect for Stoppard. Genuine loners were rare in the magic world, but this guy was the real thing. A total
outlier: self-motivated, self-taught, on the fringes even of the safe-house scene. He was his own one-boy, one-room Brakebills. He wasn’t much to look at, but Quentin never would have gotten anywhere near magic all by himself in Brooklyn.

“Anyway I must not have kept it as quiet as I thought because one morning I woke up and there was a letter on my bed, about the meeting at the bookstore. After that it was a no-brainer. I mean, forget about the cash, the gear that bird got for me—he must have pretty much infinite money. Stuff I only ever read about. Pretty much my wet dream.”

“Pretty much,” Betsy conceded.

She could have made a joke, but somewhere in there she’d lost her bloodlust—Stoppard wasn’t quite the juicy target she was hoping for. Too innocent. Too easy.

“If you’re into watches,” Quentin said, “take a look at this.”

He fished his pocket watch out of his coat on the end of its silver chain and handed it across. Even with his newly discovered skill at mending he hadn’t made any headway with it. Stoppard took it the way a vet would take charge of a wounded sparrow. He regarded it from different angles, held it to his ear. His manner became quick and professional.

“Doesn’t run?”

“Not at the moment,” Quentin said. “Think you could get it going?”

“I don’t know. Probably.”

Stoppard put it in his lap and cracked open one of the hard plastic suitcases, which was evidently purpose-built to hold a set of tiny, glittering steel tools. He took out a jeweler’s loupe and selected one pair of tweezers and put another in his mouth, then he opened the back of the watch to look at the works—something Quentin had never been able to do.

A faint pale light filtered out. Stoppard’s face went slack.

“Oh my God,” he whispered. “Oh my God. Where did you get this?”

“It’s come a long way.”

“What is it?” Plum leaned over. “Ooh—so many little wheels.”

“These mechanisms don’t exist. Nobody does this. Look, it’s got a second face.”

He swung back the outer dial to reveal another one underneath it.
His expression communicated the fact that he had somewhat underestimated Quentin and that he was, to the extent to which he was capable of it, sorry about that. Then he went back to the watch, ignoring Plum’s attempts to look over his shoulder.

He didn’t say anything for the next hour, until the limo rolled to a stop. Lionel walked around to their door and opened it. Cold air washed in.

“This is it, guys,” he said. “Keep it quiet. No magic till I tell you. We’re still a couple of miles from the house, but we don’t know much about the security.”

“Wait, what?” Plum said. “But this isn’t the real thing?”

“This is it,” he said again, impatiently. He looked even paler and lumpier than usual, and he’d let his beard get even more unruly.

“For Christ’s sake,” Quentin said. “You realize we’re nowhere near ready!”

“Then get ready. We’re out of time. You guys are professionals, right?”

The answer to that was a rousing chorus of silence.

“Look, just do your jobs.”

He disappeared, leaving behind a limo full of shocked silence. Plum turned to Quentin.

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Quentin said. “We could walk away.”

Giving up now would be hard. He’d be set back months, and that would hurt. But this was more risk than he’d signed on for.

“Oh come on,” Betsy said. “It’s just a job.”

“That’s my point. No way is this worth getting killed over.”

“Just breaking the bond alone, I’m putting us at about a fifty-fifty shot,” Plum said. “Let’s think about that for a second.”

“Let’s think about this.” Betsy leaned across from the seat opposite. She smiled as if she were confiding a wonderful, intimate secret. “If you leave now? I will hunt you down and kill you. I will never stop till I find you. I’ve given up too much, and I am too close. Do you understand?”

She stared at Quentin, not blinking.

“Not even remotely.” Quentin didn’t blink either. He didn’t like
being bullied. “Why do you care? What are you close to? It’s only money.”

“Do you know what’s in the case?”

“No. Not even the bird knows what’s in the case.”

“I know what’s in the case,” Betsy said. “And I’ll give you a fucking hint: this isn’t about money.”

“Maybe you could be a little more specific.”

“You want to know what’s in the case? Freedom.” She held his eyes for another long second, then sat back against the banquette. Quentin looked over at Plum, then at Stoppard, who’d gone back to picking at the insides of the watch. The prospect of starting over again at the beginning, finding some new way in, was not appealing. If they could just get it right and get it over with he could move on with his life.

And there was the Chatwin connection, he couldn’t let that go. And there was Alice. Who was he trying to fool? He wasn’t going to walk away. He was in this much too deep already. He opened his eyes. Betsy was still watching him.

“You’d better believe,” he said, “that if this starts getting ugly, I’m going to be the first one to bolt. Then maybe I’ll hunt
you
down. Think about that.” Quentin put a hand on Stoppard’s shoulder, who looked up at him as if he were waking from a dream. “Better give me that back for now. You can look at it later.”

Stoppard nodded and closed up the watch and mutely handed it over, though his eyes followed it until Quentin tucked it back into his jacket.

They climbed out of the limo. It was late March, around four in the afternoon, and the temperature hovered around freezing. They were on a back road, really just a gravel track, somewhere in rural Connecticut, with a row of trees running along one side and dead-looking blackberry bushes on the other. Hayfields were all around them. There were no houses in sight.

Plum stayed behind in the car to change, and when she got out they were all in matching black. Quentin wore his overcoat instead of a parka, because it looked more magicianly, and it was black anyway, and he had no idea when if ever he’d see the limo again. He had the page from the Neitherlands folded in an inside pocket, along with the watch.

“Well,” Plum said. “This doesn’t look suspicious.”

The breeze was icy, and even though they weren’t supposed to use magic Quentin quietly added a couple of charms to keep himself warm. Off in one of the meadows Pushkar was waving at them, and they struck out toward him through the dry, unmown grass. Lionel stood behind him, looking as big as a haystack, and the blackbird came winging over from the darkening trees to settle on his shoulder. It looked much more like a wild animal out here in the country. Quentin wondered what the other birds made of it.