The Magician’s Land (30 page)

Maybe it was love, or courage, or the plastic fumes, but Quentin felt strength building up in him, a rising, cresting flood of it. He’d felt this way once before in Fillory, on Benedict Island. And even farther back, that first night at Brakebills, when it had all come tearing out of him for the first time. But he was even stronger now.

It felt good.

Not much time left. Thank God the building was already warded up tight, because he could feel the energy in the room pressing at the walls, bulging them outward, threatening to blow out the windows. Alice shoved harder at the envelope of force, frowning. His eyes flicked around the room for anything metal, found the bare steel frame of the couch, jerked it to him with a magnetic spell. Amping up his strength, toughening his hands, he bent it into the shape of an arch with two feet: an omega.

He was almost too late. Like tearing tissue paper Alice was through her prison and on him. Her blue hands gripped the sigil just above his, but she couldn’t get past it. Their faces were close together now. She was smiling as usual, showing her perfect sapphire teeth, as if she could barely keep from laughing her head off. Quentin smiled back.

This, at last, was right. He was meeting her head-on, like Plum said.
Strength to strength. He braced one leg behind him. No more skulking around in shadow worlds, this was real. He could feel the power of her, the buzz and snap of it. Could she feel him too? God, it was a relief to let go, to completely lose his shit and give it everything he had and find out once and for all if it was enough.

“Is that all, Alice?” he said. “Is that it? I want more. Give me everything.”

The metal glowed red and white around their hands now. Instead of shielding his own hands he made them metal too: he borrowed the steel of the couch frame and drew it into them. They started to glow as he dumped more and more of his precious energy into keeping the ward going and keeping himself from catching on fire. He was going to beat this thing, this magical abomination that had Alice trapped inside it, he was going to pry it open and pull her out like the jaws of fucking life.

His magician’s sixth sense warned him just as the balance shifted: this thing was going critical. His omega was steel, but at the end of the day it was only a couch frame, and he was asking more of it than it had to give. He managed one last shield, this one just around himself, then he let go. The metal glyph exploded into vapor in Alice’s hands.

The blast pushed them apart—he skidded backward a few feet across the living room floor. He let it all drop. His shield evaporated. His hands and arms were flesh again. It was just him and her, nothing between them, just empty air and silence and seven years of lost time.

All through the fight he’d kept expecting himself to panic, but the panic never came, and now he knew it wouldn’t. The old Quentin might have done it, but he wasn’t a creature of fear anymore, jumping at his own shadow, never knowing who he was or why. When he was younger it seemed like the only time he wasn’t afraid was when he was angry. He’d been so full of fear and self-doubt that the only way he could think of to be strong was to attack the world around him.

But that wasn’t real strength. He understood that now. They’d both come so far to be here. He was getting a second chance, and he wasn’t going to miss it.

“You,” she said.

“I’m not the boy you used to know, Alice,” he said. “Not anymore. That boy is gone. I know who I am now. But you don’t know me.”

A great, warm calm was in him, welling up out of the hidden reservoir where it had been waiting all this time, if only he’d known where to find it. Alice’s eyes narrowed. She hung back, suspicious, studying him. Quentin began pulling his shirt off, started unbuttoning it and then just tore it off. It was time to go all in.

He nearly missed his chance. Having decided, evidently, that Quentin was bluffing, Alice went for him, and this time she was coming to kill him. He turned away and shouted a word he hadn’t heard since he was twenty-two. He didn’t know if Alice was technically a demon or not, but either way he had an empty demon trap tattooed on his back, and he was going to use it. It was all he had left.

He didn’t see it happen, but there was a great inrush of air, like a giant gasping in surprise, and Alice cried out angrily—

“No.
No!
”

—and he heard the cry go up an octave and then cut off sharply.

Then the room was silent, and he was alone except for drifting motes of couch-fluff in the air. At the same moment his tattoo lit up with cold fire; it was like somebody had dumped liquid nitrogen on his back. When Fogg put a cacodemon in his back the night before graduation he’d felt nothing at all, but this wasn’t nothing. This hurt. And there was pressure inside him, massive pressure. He couldn’t breathe. He groaned like a woman in labor, trying to let some of it out, but it only got worse.

He could feel Alice in there. He felt her rage and her power and something like ecstasy. Quentin pressed his back against the coolness of the wall to try to ease the burning, but it did nothing. He felt like his rib cage was cracking. The veins were glowing in the backs of his hands.

The front door slammed open.

“What did you do? Where’s Alice?”

Plum and Eliot were staring at him. They’d burst in ready for the fight of their lives.

“And you took your shirt off,” Plum added.

“She’s in my back,” he whispered. He couldn’t speak any louder. “I know.”

He detached himself from the wall and began walking stiffly up the stairs. Sweat was starting out across his forehead, trickling down his chest.

“You should go,” he whispered.

“What are you doing?” Plum asked, but he couldn’t even answer her. He could feel Alice stirring inside him like a genie in her lamp. She wanted out by whatever exit she could find or make. In his mind he was putting things together, doing back-of-the-envelope calculations and then ignoring the answers when they weren’t reassuring.

“What are you doing?” Plum shouted after him.

“Come on,” Eliot said. “We have to help him.”

They followed him up. He couldn’t stop them, and Eliot was right, he needed their help. He climbed the stairs to the fourth-floor workroom, the skin on his back sore and stretched tight like a third-degree sunburn.

“Coins,” he whispered. “Mayakovsky’s.”

There was enough room here. The spell came to him easily, automatically, like it had worn a deep channel right down the middle of him, even though he was casting it for the first time. He could see the page from the Neitherlands in front of him in his mind: the columns of numbers, the turning orbits that spun around each other like a magician juggling rings, the plant with its long leaves rustling demurely in a wind from somewhere out of frame. He knew the whole thing by heart. Until now he just hadn’t understood why.

This was what it was for. This was why he’d snatched it out of the air and saved it. Matter and magic. He’d thought it was about making matter magical, but now he had something that was pure magic, and he was going to give it matter. Reverse the flow. He was going to bring Alice back into the world of the physical.

He snapped out orders—there was no time to be polite—and Plum and Eliot handed him things as he called for them: powders, liquids, books open to such and such a page, one of the gold coins. He took them without looking, like a surgeon up to his elbows in a patient.

It was like he’d been assembling the pieces without knowing it. He
couldn’t have done it without his newfound strength, and not without minor mendings either: he knew how to knit broken things together. He scraped at his insides for every last scintilla of magical strength. He was feverish, and his knees felt like they could buckle at any moment, but his mind was clear. He knew what he had to do, if he could just stay upright long enough.

When everything was complete, when the enchantment was hovering latent in the air like a thundercloud about to burst, he turned his back to the room and opened the trap.

It was like letting out an enormous breath that he’d been holding for way too long. The room flooded with blue light, the light in a swimming pool on a summer afternoon. Quentin almost blacked out with relief. Later he would look at his tattoo and find a raised, blackened scar in the center of the star.

Alice’s blue form was floating limp in the center of the room, on its back, listless but stirring. She wasn’t smiling now, not at all. Her expression, when she focused on him, was black. She was angry, a wasp who’d been trapped in a jar and then shaken, and she was ready to sting. She was the most beautiful, terrible thing he’d ever seen, like an acetylene flame, an incandescent filament, a fallen star right in front of him.

He met her gaze and held it and spoke a word in a language so old that the linguists of the world believed it to be lost and forgotten forever. But magicians had not forgotten.

Mayakovsky’s coin, the second coin, flared in his hand, and he forced himself to grip it tight even though it felt like a fistful of molten gold or dry ice—like his fingers must be melting or blackening and curling up. Alice startled as if she’d heard a sound. Not his voice, but something else, something far off. A distant church bell tolling at dawn.

Then the air around her darkened, and the world began falling into her. It had begun: the spell was pulling atoms from the room around her. Her skin darkened and became dull and opaque. She writhed as particles swarmed around her like insects, embedding themselves in her form. Matter rushed at her, crowded into her, substituting crude substance for her luminous, translucent blue flesh.

Quentin stumbled back, and Plum and Eliot caught him, and
together they staggered out through the doorway; it wouldn’t do to be too close, to have any of their atoms pulled into Alice. The spell would do it if it had to, the spell didn’t care. Alice was convulsing now, growing heavier, condensing out of the air, being forcibly embodied. She moaned, a deep agony moan, already half human. Her niffin-light was fading. She sounded like she was dying, and for a horrific second Quentin wondered if he’d been wrong, if he was killing her instead of saving her. But it was too late to take it back.

When it was finished, when the blue was all gone, Alice fell to the wooden floor with a dull smack, hard enough to bounce once and lie still. The room reeked of rarefied gases, sharp spikes in his nostrils.

Alice lay sprawled on the floor on her back, her eyes closed, breathing shallowly. She was flesh again. The old Alice, human Alice, pale and real and naked.

He knelt down next to her. Her eyes opened, just barely, narrowed against the light.

“Quentin,” she said hoarsely. “You changed your hair.”

L
isten up, everybody. I got a letter from Eliot.”

Janet felt comfortable in Eliot’s chair in the meeting room in Castle Whitespire. She could have conducted business from her own official chair, but she liked Eliot’s. It didn’t look different from the other thrones, but there was something about it that felt more . . . pleasant. Accommodating.

Power, she supposed it was. It suits me.

“Point of order,” Josh said. “Are you, like, High Queen now? Like with Eliot gone?”

Was she?

“Sure. Why not.”

“It’s just—”

“Your constitutional arguments are kind of
de trop
at this exact moment, Josh. Also I wrote most of the constitution, so you will definitely lose them. All of them.” Josh opened his mouth. “Bup bup
bup!
Do you want to hear the letter or not?”

“Yes,” Josh and Poppy said together. Then they gave each other a loathsome little miniature married smile.

“Sure,” Poppy added.

Their deaths would be awesome—I mean the balcony was
right there—
but hard to justify politically. Janet moved on. For now.

“It goes like this.” She held up the little paper tape, like a ticker tape, or a fortune-cookie fortune. “THICK PLOTTENS STOP UMBER
WAS SLASH IS EVIL AND MAYBE ALIVE STOP WHO KNEW RIGHT STOP FIND HIM ASAP STOP MIGHT SAVE WORLD STOP TRY UNDER NORTHERN MARSH MAYBE STOP BACK SOONEST KISS STOP.”

There was silence in the room.

“That’s it?” Poppy said.

“You were expecting . . . ?”

“I don’t know. Something a bit more formal maybe.”

“He doesn’t even say hi to us?” Josh said.

“No. Other questions?”

“Does he really have to do it like that? Like a telegram?”

“No, not really. I think he just enjoys it. Any questions of a more substantive nature?”

Josh and Poppy shared another marital glance.

“I don’t know how to phrase this exactly but what the fuck?” Josh said. “Umber’s not evil. Or wasn’t evil. He was Ember’s brother. Plus He’s been dead for like a million years or something. Martin Chatwin killed Him.”

“Or,” Janet said, “maybe he didn’t. Or He came back to life or something.”

“Why hasn’t Eliot come back?” Poppy said.

“That I don’t know. I’m a little peeved about it myself. A little worried too. I’ve become quite attached to our High King. Maybe there’s something more interesting going on on Earth, but I can’t imagine what. Josh?”

“How does Eliot send you letters?”

“Oh. We rigged it up before he left. They sort of float to the surface in that little gazing pool in the courtyard outside my bedroom, on these strips of paper. It’s very picturesque. Then you dry them out, and the words develop like a Polaroid. Poppy?”

“Should we do it? Should we try to find Ember? I mean, Umber? Sorry, I get Them mixed up. Baby brain, it’s started already. Seriously, we have to get moving with this because I’m almost in the second trimester here. We’ve got six months.”

One thing about Poppy, she had a can-do attitude. It was one of the
things Janet liked about her. Maybe the only thing. Or she guessed Poppy’s hair was all right too.

“But hang on,” Josh said. “What if we do find Umber? What do we do with Him? I mean, you gotta figure He’s pretty far up the power scale. It’s not like we’re going to intimidate Him.”

“Well, I’ve been thinking about that,” Janet said. “Maybe we stick Him in Ember’s Tomb. Martin managed to trap Ember in there once, and He couldn’t get out. Seems to me that thing is like a ready-made purpose-built ram-god-containment facility.”

“But it’s risky,” Poppy said. “Could we even get Him in there? Maybe this is all a little precipitous?”

Just then Janet was overcome by the strangest sensation. She felt herself pulled ever so slightly to one side, her whole body, like she was starting to lose her balance. Then the room gave a little bump and jostle, and the feeling was gone again. It affected the others, too, she could see it.

Josh figured it out first.

“The room’s stopped moving,” he said.

Castle Whitespire was built on clockwork foundations that rotated its towers very slowly in a stately, never-ending dance, like the teacups in a really slow, boring carnival ride. They were driven by windmills. Ordinarily you hardly noticed it, but they noticed now, because it had just stopped. As far as she knew Whitespire’s towers had never stood still before, even in the dark times, the worst times.

“Does that answer your question?” Janet said. “This world is falling apart. We have to do something, and this is the only lead we’ve got. I think we’d better use it.”

“I’m just saying, we’re talking about hunting a god here,” Poppy said. “It’s not going to be easy.”

“If it were easy everybody would do it.”

As soon as the tower stopped moving Josh had gone out on the balcony and leaned on the stone railing, looking down. Now Janet and Poppy followed him. Far below tiny people were spilling out of doorways, into the streets and courtyards, staring around them uncertainly, blinking in the late-afternoon sunlight. One by one they stopped and
looked up, looked to the three of them, shading their eyes, as if their kings and queens could possibly have any answers.

“Idiots,” Janet said, softly, but just for form’s sake. Maybe the great ever-spinning towers of Whitespire had ground to a halt, mayhap even the heavenly spheres themselves no longer danced to the music of time. Who the fuck knew. Maybe the only place she’d ever been happy was about to fall apart. But not even the end of the world was going to stop Janet from being a bitch. It was the principle of the thing.

—

They all went, all three of them. Four counting the baby. Josh and Poppy had bickered—it didn’t quite rise to the level of a fight—about whether Poppy should come, but Poppy came out on top.

“You’re worrying too much,” she said. “I’ll take good care of the baby. You just take good care of me.”

The trip to the Northern Marsh went more quickly this time. No need for gallant-but-aimless diagnostic wandering in the wilderness. This time they could take the direct route, the express train: hippogriffs, the fastest fliers in the fleet.

You couldn’t use them all the time. They were independent bastards, valued their freedom, practically libertarians, and they were very fussy about their feathers too, which you always ended up pulling out a few, it was impossible not to. But desperate times, etc. They were better than the pureblood griffins anyway—those things were just anarchists. Chaotic neutral all the way.

Janet’s particular hippogriff had a funny red crest between its ears, a feature she’d never seen before. It made a show of ignoring her as she mounted, with the help of a boost from a loyal retainer. Just once before the end of the world she wouldn’t have minded a little gesture of respect from one of these things. Ah well.

It was good to get a hippogriff’s-eye view of Fillory, anyway, because it at least confirmed that the halting of Whitespire wasn’t an isolated phenomenon. There were signs all over that things were seriously out of joint. It was nothing like when she and Eliot had been traveling, just a few days ago, and thinking about that she already felt nostalgia for it.
Now the grass in open fields waved and bent in strange, regular patterns, expanding circles and moving lines—from high overhead they looked like old-fashioned analog TVs on the blink, their vertical hold shot.

Then the eclipse that was a daily event in Fillory simply failed to happen. At first Janet couldn’t put her finger on what was missing, but then she looked up and saw it: the moon and the sun were out of true. Where they should have lined up at midday, they missed each other, the horn of the moon just grazing the sun’s corona and moving on, like a doomed aerialist who’d missed the catch.

“Shit!” Josh called out. “The Chalk Man’s down!”

It was true: he had dropped to his hands and knees on his hillside, his featureless head drooping as if overcome by gravity, or just despair. His staff had fallen from his blobby hands. It floated beside him, in mid-hill. It was an incredibly pathetic sight.

And there was this endless goddamned summer. She had had enough of heat. Josh and Poppy were if anything even more shocked by all this than she was. They’d been snug in Castle Whitespire this whole time, breeding. They’d seen even less of it than Janet had.

The hippogriffs wouldn’t set them down right in the swamp, because sure the world was ending, but that was no reason why they should get their precious talons and hooves muddy. But they found a reasonably clear, solid helipad-type spot on the perimeter and came in for an admittedly supernaturally graceful landing.

“Wait here,” she told them. “Give us twenty-four hours. If we’re not back by then you can go.”

The hippogriffs stared at her with their angry yellow eyes and gave absolutely no sign as to whether they would or would not give her twenty-four hours. Janet struck out into the mud with Poppy and Josh trailing behind her.

“Not being critical at all,” Josh said, “but if I were High King or High Queen or whatever, I would have brought maybe a detachment of soldiers with us? Like in a support capacity? Maybe that elite Whitespire regiment thing that’s so hard to get into. You ever seen those guys drilling? It’s nuts the stuff they can do.”

Janet took a deep breath. Patience.

“We’re hunting a god, Josh. You know how that movie goes. You send the shock troops in first, the really bad-ass ones, the definitely undefeatable guys, and what happens? They get slaughtered like instantly. And it’s like
ooo, scary, nuh-uh, those guys were supposed to be undefeatable!
Then the heroes go in and do the real work. It’s all just to build dramatic tension. I thought maybe we’d skip that part and cut to the chase.”

“But I love that movie,” Josh said, a little forlornly.

“That raises a good point though, Janet,” Poppy said. “Since we’re cutting to the chase. How are we supposed to go about fighting a god?”

“Not fighting,” Janet said. “Hunting.”

Even she wasn’t that clear on the distinction she was making, but she thought it might shut them up for a few minutes so she could think. Somebody had to.

“And not we,” Josh said. “You’re not fighting. You’re taking care of the baby.”

“I’ll take care of the baby,” Poppy said, “by fighting.”

It was warm and muggy, but the mud-water that kept oozing up through the sodden grass they were walking on was bitter cold. There were depths to this place that the sun couldn’t touch. Fortunately Janet had on awesome boots.

“Anyway,” she said, “Martin Chatwin beat Ember. So it can be done. What’s Martin Chatwin got that the three of us don’t have?”

“Like about six more fingers,” Josh said. “For starters.”

It was good to be out in the field again, whatever the odds. And it was good to be in charge. Before the desert she’d never really given things her all, at least not when the others were around to watch. It was too vulnerable-making; in a way she hadn’t really had her all to give. No wonder the others hadn’t taken her as seriously as they should have. Plus she’d done a few fucked-up things. She wondered whether Quentin felt angry about what happened that night. Like it was her that broke up him and Alice! She’d only done it out of habit. If you’ve got a junkie in the house, you don’t leave your meds just lying on the table.

And like they would have lasted two more weeks anyway, given what a loser Quentin was back in those days anyway. The funny thing was,
the more Quentin got his shit together the less she wanted to sleep with him. Weird how that worked.

When they found the boardwalk Janet started trotting along it, double-time. Poppy jogged along behind her but Josh called out “Hey, wait up!” and when they didn’t he started sort of slowly motivating his doughy body along. Guy lives in a fantasy world without junk food or cars or trans fats or TV and he’s still fat. You had to admire his dedication to the cause.

On the way Janet noticed a pair of child’s shoes, ancient and weathered, abandoned on a rock. It was the oddest thing. They looked pitifully small. She wondered what could have brought a boy that young—they were a boy’s shoes—all the way out here, this deep into the Northern Marsh, and what could have happened to him. Nothing good.

When the pier was in sight she drew the crossed axes from her back.

“Awesome axes,” Josh said. “Where did you—”

“Your mom gave them to me,” Janet said. “After I fucked her.”

“Why—”

“Because she enjoyed it so much.”

Not her best work maybe, but they couldn’t all be winners. And she really didn’t feel like telling that story again.

Janet stopped at the very end of the pier and looked around, hands on hips. Everything looked normal. Not a lot of apocalypse going on here. But then swamps already looked like the end of the world anyway. Maximum entropy, land and water commingled chaotically. There wasn’t much farther downhill they could go.

Stray windlets roughened the surface of the bog. A couple of dead, thunderstruck trees poked up in the middle. I was just here, she thought. Like a week ago. Suddenly she felt powerfully aware of the circularity and futility of life.

Eliot had said Umber was under the swamp, which was both very specific and very vague. She thought about just jumping in blind, a leap of faith in Eliot and his intelligence-gathering skills. But then, giant turtle. While she was weighing the options, Poppy passed her and began climbing down the ladder. It was a slight breach of discipline, but this once she was going to let it pass. Poppy dipped an elegant toe in the water, then put her whole foot in.

“Huh,” she said.

“Careful.”

Poppy wasn’t careful. With the traditional Australian’s indifference to personal dryness and venomous underwater predators, she dived right in. The bog swallowed her up in one gulp, her entire lean length.

“Poppy!” Josh peered down after his vanished wife-and-child. “Poppy! Jesus!”

Nothing. Then Poppy’s hand broke the still surface of the water, like the Lady of the Lake, except in this case instead of offering up a magic sword the hand just delivered a big enthusiastic thumbs-up.