The Magician’s Land (33 page)

She fell silent. The fridge buzzed. Eliot got up and shoved it.

“But you did go back,” Quentin said.

“I went back. I did whatever I wanted. Once I boiled a lake with everything in it. I chased birds and animals and burned them. Everyone was afraid of me, I was a bluebird of unhappiness. Sometimes they screamed or cried and begged me. Once—”

Alice gasped suddenly, as if something cold had touched her.

“Oh God. I killed a hunter.” A quick, convulsive sob gripped her, almost a cough. “I’d forgotten that till just now. He was going to kill a deer. I didn’t want him to. I burned him to nothing. It took no time at all. He never saw me.”

She was breathing hard, hoarsely, one hand on her chest, like she was trying not to pass out or throw up. Her gaze darted around the room.

“It’s all right now, Alice,” he said softly. “It’s not your fault.”

That seemed to revive her. Alice slapped her palms down on the table. Her expression was angry again.

“It is my fault!” She shrieked it at him, as if he were trying to take away her most precious possession. “I killed him, me! I did that! No one else!”

She put her head down on her arms. Her shoulders were tense.

“I hated him. But I hated everyone. And more than anyone I hated you, Quentin. Hate isn’t like love, it doesn’t end. It goes on forever. You can never get to the bottom of it. And it’s so pure, so unconditional! Do you know what I see when I look at you? I see dull, stupid, ugly creatures full of emotional garbage. Your feelings are corrupt and contaminated, and half the time you don’t even know what you’re feeling. You’re too stupid and too numb. You love and you hate and you grieve and you don’t even feel it.”

Quentin stayed very still. It wasn’t even that she was wrong. It was true, that’s what people were like. But she’d forgotten that he knew that too, and that once upon a time that was part of what brought them together.

But he didn’t say that. Not yet. She stopped and sat up again.

“I’m having weird cravings. Mangos. Marzipan.” She frowned. “And—what’s it called? Fennel? Then it goes away. It’s been so long since I tasted anything.”

Her voice when she said that last was the closest thing to the old Alice that he’d heard since she woke up.

“I had so much power. So much power. After a while I realized I could let myself slip backward in time. It was easy. If you think about it you’re moving through time all the time, one second forward every second, but you don’t have to. You can just let yourself stop. I could almost do it even now—it’s as if you’re on a rope tow, up a ski slope, and you just let your mittens go slack, let the rope slide through your fingers, and you slow down and stop. There goes the present, rolling on without you, it’s gone, and just like that you’re in the past. It’s a wonderful feeling.

“But you can’t change anything, you can only watch. I watched the Chatwins come to Fillory. I watched people be born and die. I saw Jane Chatwin have sex with a faun!” She snorted with laughter. “I think she was a very lonely person. Sometimes I just watched people read or sleep. It didn’t matter, it was all funny. It never stopped being funny.

“Once I let myself go all the way back, all the way to the beginning of Fillory. The beginning of everything, or this everything anyway. It was as far as you could go. You bumped up against it, like you’d reached the end of your string.

“You couldn’t call it a pretty sight, the dawn of creation. It was more like the corpse of whatever had come before. Just a big desert and a shallow, dead-looking sea. No weather, no wind, just cold. The sun didn’t move. The sunlight was . . . unpleasant. Like an old fluorescent light that a bunch of flies had died in. Looking back now I think the sun and moon must have collided and melted together into one single deformed heavenly body.

“I watched the sea for a long time. You wouldn’t think a body of water that big could be so still. Finally a big old tigress came loping down to the water. Her ears were notched, and she’d lost an eye and it had healed shut. You could see her padding along from a mile away. I thought she must be a goddess.

“She came down to the edge of the water. She looked at her reflection for a bit, then she went trotting into the water, up to her shoulders. She stopped then, and shuddered, and sneezed once.

“Obviously it was distasteful to her, but she did it anyway. She seemed very brave to me. She kept on going until she was totally submerged. And then nothing. She had drowned herself. I saw her body float up to the surface, on its side, slowly turning in place in the slack tide, and then it sank again for good.

“For a long time after that nothing happened. Then the water kind of gathered itself into a wave, and the wave threw up two big curly shells on the shore. They lay next to each other for a while, and then another wave came and left behind it a sheet of foam. The sand underneath them kind of stirred and shook itself and it sat up, and that was Ember. The foam was His wool. The shells were His horns.

“Ember went trotting down the beach until He found a couple more curly shells, and He nudged them around for a bit till they were next to each other and then stood next to them so that His shadow fell over them, and then the shadow stood up, and that was Umber. They nodded to each other and then went trotting together up into the sky.

“They took turns licking at the big moon-sun in the sky until it split into two things again, and then Ember butted the sun in one direction and got it moving, and Umber butted the moon, and the whole business started again. And that was the beginning of Fillory.

“But mostly I didn’t give a shit about shit like that. Do you know what my favorite parts of the past were? I liked to watch myself sleep with Penny, because it hurt you. And most of all I liked to watch myself burn. I liked to go back to when I died and hide in the walls and watch it happen. Over and over again.”

“Could you see the future?” Eliot asked.

“No,” she said, in the same lightsome, detached tone. It was all the
same to her. “Something to do with timelines and information flow, I think.”

“Maybe it’s just as well,” Quentin said.

“If I could have I sure as shit wouldn’t have come back here.”

“That’s what I meant.”

“At first I couldn’t even get to Earth, but something changed. The barrier softened and I could. I found out by accident: I liked mirrors—I liked looking at myself without flesh—and then one day I touched one and went through into a weird space inside it. It was in between, like the Neitherlands. Mirrors within mirrors took you farther down, deeper and deeper, and at some point they became mixed up with the mirror-spaces of other worlds. I spent months in there. It was cold, and empty, or almost—I met a lost bird once, fluttering around, trying to get out. When I came back up it was into this world, not Fillory.

“I didn’t mind. Brakebills was interesting. Lot of magic there, and a lot of mirrors—it had a very complex mirror-space. I thought I might find my brother there, but I didn’t. But I found you, Quentin. You were a scab I wanted to keep picking. You hurt me, even then, and pain was something I enjoyed.

“And the people were interesting. I could tell Plum was connected to Fillory, though I’m still not quite sure how. I was so sure you were going to fuck her.”

“Why does literally everybody think that?” Plum muttered.

“And then you tried to make a land!” She was speechless with silent laughter for a few seconds. “Oh my God, it’s so pathetic! You—Quentin, you could never make anything! Don’t you see? How could somebody like you create something that was alive? You’re a hollow man! There’s nothing inside you. All you could make was that cold, dead mirror-house.

“And do you know why? Because all you ever do is what you think people expect you to do, and then you feel sorry for yourself when they hate you.”

“I’ve changed a lot, Alice,” Quentin said. “Maybe that was true once, I don’t know. But I’ve changed a lot in seven years.”

“No. You haven’t.”

“Think about this: could the Quentin you knew have made you human again?”

Alice was silent for a few seconds, long enough that Plum jumped in.

“Why are you telling us all this anyway?” Plum appeared to have had enough of Alice. “I mean it’s fascinating and all, but it’s sort of not what we expected.”

“I am telling you this,” Alice hissed, “so that he knows
what he did.
” She was answering Plum, but she stared at Quentin.

“Tell me what I did.” Quentin stared back at her. Her eyes had changed—they weren’t quite the same eyes she’d had before. “I want to know.”

“Then listen: you robbed me.” She spat it. But she was already losing steam, she didn’t even have the energy to be angry anymore. “I was perfect. I was immortal. I was happy. You took all that away from me. Did you expect me to be grateful? Did you? I didn’t want to be human again, but you dragged me back into this body.”

She held up her hands like they were low-grade meat, a butcher’s discards.

“I lost everything, twice. The first time I gave it up. But the second time you stole it.”

A
nother tremor. It shook Umber awake. He opened His eyes.

“My heart,” He whispered.

But when Janet looked away from the sunset, the sunfall, the god was already gone.

Lots to do. World ending. Can’t hang around. He bounced back pretty fast from His beating, she would give Him that. It crossed her mind that maybe He’d been faking—maybe He’d gone down easy, taken a dive. It would have been like Him.

Either way she was kind of relieved Umber was gone. She didn’t especially want to spend the end of the world with Him.

Meanwhile the action on the edge of the world was deeply, sublimely awful. The sun was squashing there like a rotten pumpkin—it hadn’t just grazed the rim of Fillory, it was definitively, agonizingly bottoming out there, grinding itself flat, spending its remaining thermal and kinetic energy on destroying itself and throwing stupendous curling gouts and ferns of fire in the air and erecting a vast pillar of steam reaching up to the sky.

She’d never even seen the edge of the world. The others had, but now she never would. Or even if she did it wouldn’t be the same: now it would have a big cigarette burn on it. Janet looked over her shoulder at the other horizon and saw that the moon was rising, as per usual. Good old moon. It must orbit twice as fast as the sun, she thought, to get in its eclipse at noon and then get back around again to rise in the evening.
Or no, it would have to go even faster than that. Variable speed? Multiple moons? She started trying to figure it out and then stopped. What did it even matter now.

“We shouldn’t be here,” Poppy said. “We should be back at the castle.”

“What does it even matter,” she said, out loud this time.

She wished Eliot were here. Or Quentin. Josh and Poppy were all right, but come on, they were short-timers, rookies. She would have liked the company of another old-schooler like herself. Even Julia.

“This means we’re the last,” she said. “The last kings and queens of Fillory, ever. I suppose that’s a claim to fame.”

“It’s not over yet. We should go back to Whitespire. The people need us.”

That’s the spirit.

“Go,” Janet said. “You’re right, take care of them. I’ll catch up. I’m going to stay here for a bit.”

She couldn’t have said why, but being here felt right. The weird, evenly spaced hills, lit up by the flickering, flaring light from the dying sun, casting long shadows back and away—she felt calm here. They would be fine back at Whitespire. What on earth would her presence add? She would sit her final vigil here, in the hills of the Chankly Bore.

Josh started to say something, but Poppy touched his arm and he shut up. She got it: they were out of their depth. In a quiet, businesslike way Josh began the portal ritual.

“I’ll leave it open after,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“When it gets too bad,” he said, “we’ll come back for you. With the button.”

“Yeah. I’ll be here.”

Then they were gone. Overhead the sky was a deepening blue, and with the green of the hills and the gray of the mountains and the flaming red-orange of the horizon it was a pretty striking scene. Too bad she didn’t have a camera, or an easel, or a powerfully developed aesthetic sensibility. Janet wasn’t much for rapt contemplation. She sat down on the chilly grass with her back to the hard, lumpy oak at the summit of
the hill. Maybe she should be wearing sunglasses, like those people who went out to the desert to watch the early atomic tests.

Janet shivered. It seemed wrong that of them all she was the one to bear witness to this. Her—the cynical one. No shits or fucks given. Well, maybe it’s better this way, better than somebody with a lot of big weepy feelings. Quentin would be a Trevi fucking Fountain of tears by this point. Somebody or something west of her winded a great deep horn, a massive sustained brass pedal note. There were a few seconds of silence, then it was answered from off to the south by a piercing silver trumpet tone, the same note a fistful of octaves higher. Then six or seven notes followed in unison, from all points of the compass, even out to sea, shifting between major harmonies and clashing tritones.

Who the fuck is playing that shit? Janet thought. How do they even know what notes to play? Probably it was Written somewhere, probably there’s always been a big alpenhorn somewhere under glass, with a sign that says
In case of Ragnarok break glass and play an E flat
.

Where’s my horn? It would have been nice to at least have a horn, she thought, allowing herself some bitterness, some self-pity, because if not now then when. It would have given her something to do. As one, all around her, the clock-trees began to toll. She didn’t know they could.

She got to her feet. This would never do. She was moping, and it wouldn’t do. She needed to get involved, find out what was happening. She stood up, and on cue the grass in front of her practically exploded as a hippogriff slammed down onto it, landing at speed and skidding halfway down the slope on its talons and hooves and ripping up half the hillside with it.

It gathered itself and trotted back up the slope to her. It had come to find her.

“Your highness, Queen Janet, ruler of Fillory. This hippogriff awaits your pleasure.”

Respect. From a hippogriff. It really was the end of the world. She strode to him, set a foot on its thigh and swung her leg over its broad, tawny, close-furred back. It helped that the slope of the hill was on her side.

She realized she knew this one—it had a red crest. She’d ridden it to the Northern Marsh before.

“Let us fly then, you and I, brave beast,” she said. “Though it be for the last time, on the last day.”

Whatever, she told herself. Don’t judge. If there was ever a time for this kind of talk, this was it. She wasn’t sure if it was tears or the wind or both, but her eyes were streaming as they took to the sky, and she had to blot them with her sleeve.

Janet gave the hippogriff its head, and it spiraled up over the Chankly Bore (was it a tidal bore? No, that was something else, she was almost sure) and turned south. The light was indescribably weird: dying, flickering sunlight from the west, on her right, and on her left the light of the rising moon, the two meeting and mingling into a silver-gold radiance unlike anything she’d ever seen.

“Higher, higher!” she called, and the hippogriff obeyed. As it did Janet laid a few spells on herself, specifically on her eyes: distance, focus, resolution, night vision. If she was going to witness this she wanted to see everything, to spare herself nothing. Ears too; she jacked up her hearing. She would be the recording angel, this night.

The effect was disconcerting—data came flooding in, more than her brain was really meant to process, and she literally jerked her head back as her vision exploded with detail. But she had to see it all. It was on her now, no one else.

Fillory seethed with motion—it was a restless night for the magic land, and everybody was out on the town. Even the trees were moving: the huge inky mass of the Darkling Woods to the west was no longer keeping to its customary outline. The trees, or the animate ones anyway, had pulled up their roots and were marching east in the direction of Castle Whitespire, cracking their gnarly knuckles as if to say, oh yeah, at last, we’re going to get this done. It must have some ancient beef with the Queenswood, she thought, and now they were going to throw down. The trees left behind them a five-o’clock shadow of regular inanimate trees, a skeleton crew where the original forest was.

Yup: the Queenswood was in turn adopting a defensive crouch, elongating itself into a protective crescent around the borders of Whitespire.
Moving from the south to intercept the Darklings (presumably, it was what she would have done) were the smaller but no less game trees of Corian’s Land, bolstered by the plucky little apple and pear trees of the Southern Orchard.

Fateful. Like Birnam Wood to Dunsinane. It’s so
Macbeth.
Or
Hamlet,
I forget which.

Whitespire itself was lit up, every window; it looked like a Manhattan skyscraper full of high-powered lawyers pulling an all-nighter. The courtyard was full of men armoring up. Who were they going to fight? They must have no idea what was going on. Or maybe it was her, Janet, who was out of the loop. They’d probably read a bunch of prophecies. It’s not like she had a fucking horn, was it?

Her eyes were two invisible searchlights, pitilessly clear, and she swept their twin beams over the eerily lit grassy hills of Fillory. It wasn’t just the trees that were moving, animals were running below her too, and galloping and scampering and lumbering and fluttering. Deer, horses, bears, birds, bats, smaller things that might have been foxes or weasels or something. Wolves and big cats coursed along side by side—my but this was a biodiverse nation she presided over, at least for, oh, the next couple of hours anyway. All of them, all of them were flowing in vast numbers on various vectors in the direction of Castle Whitespire.

Or whoops—her eyes cut over—not all. Some of them were already there. More animals were already formed up around Whitespire to meet them. The penny dropped. God, all the buried tensions of this gorgeous, fucked-up place were just spilling over tonight. Those must be the talking animals at Whitespire, and the regular animals were marching to war against them. She knew they’d always avoided each other, but she never realized that they actually loathed each other. They must have been planning for this night for centuries.

The nonspeaking animals came on in a massed rabble; the talking ones stood stock-still in neat squares in the fields outside Whitespire, trampling the crops the way crops had been trampled by every army since the beginning of time. It was a black mass, a night with no rules. In the vanguard for the nonspeakings were a few of the very fastest beasts, bounding singly and in pairs over the low stone walls, clearing
them by ridiculous margins that bordered on the show-offy: cheetahs and antelopes, ignoring each other for once, or maybe they were gazelles, plus a couple of lions and wild horses and some gnuey-looking motherfuckers that might have been wildebeests. Who knew those bastards could run like that? It was pretty awesome actually. Behind them, just ahead of the second wave, came a pack of very large, ambitious, energetic dogs.

They crashed straight into the impeccably ruled lines of the talking animals, a few of them meeting head to head with a brain-jellying smack that made you want to cringe and maybe vomit, even from this distance. It made it all ten times realer, that horrible sound, more even than the sun. It was the sound of death, the ultimate irreversible. This was really happening, and nothing would ever be the same.

Though more often the animals went in tearing and scrapping, and when they did they went for their opposite numbers, head to head, speaking versus nonspeaking. The cats went down immediately, snarling and pawing at each other in a haze of dust. You didn’t see any dog-on-cat action, or not yet.

The talking animals were calling out in the fray, just the way human soldiers would:

“To me! To me!”

“On my right! The right flank, right flank!”

“Hold, damn you! Hold the line! Hold! Hold!”

It was a pretty even matchup. The talking animals were smarter and more organized, and they were, on average, a bit bigger than the dumb kind, but the dumb animals had the numbers. Janet found herself rooting for the talkers, instinctively, but then asking herself why. Were they morally better than the dumb ones? Did they deserve to win? Maybe she was just prejudiced. The talking ones at least got to talk. Maybe she should give the dumb ones this much, a victory in the last battle, the one that didn’t count for anything.

Janet thought of the sloths. Probably there was a contingent of sloths like fifty miles from here, a whole fighting regiment of them, and they wouldn’t get here for a month, and by then it would all be over. Or maybe the sloths didn’t care enough to fight at all? Good God, was that
Humbledrum the bear, laying about him in the press? Slow to anger, that one, but my God. What a monster. He had a steel collar protecting his neck, and he was in full-on berserker mode, no doubt fueled by a barrel or two of schnapps.

She hoped he survived. But then again none of them were going to survive, were they, so maybe it was better if he died like this, in the thick of it, rather than watching the ruins of his world break apart under his feet. The hippogriff soared on, and Janet lost sight of Humbledrum in the chaos and the gloom. She would never know.

She was dimly aware that there was fighting in the air around her now too, birds having at it, complex dogfights, sprays of blood and feathers. Once in a while a pair would lock together and go twirling down out of the sky, neither one willing to release the other to save itself. Janet wondered if they’d break apart before they hit the ground, but she could never follow a pair long enough to see.

Men were fighting now too, around the castle. She squinted at them, focusing her magically augmented, telescopic vision. Who were they going to fight? Lorians? Monkeys? No, just those beast-people, half animal, half human, the ones Ember’s Tomb had been full of, and a unit of dark elves in shiny black chitinous-looking armor. Where had they been all this time? Josh and Poppy were playing defense, Josh on the battlements, Poppy flying over the press like a leggy Valkyrie, taking some incoming fire in the form of spears and arrows that she was having trouble managing.

There, she was backing off, floating higher, out of range. She’d be all right. She’d better, she and Josh were her ticket out of this shitshow. The last chopper out of magic Saigon.

Janet swept her gaze across the landscape, searching out more bad news. It was all very voyeuristic, like porn. More! More apocalypse! And there was more. Loads more.

The centaurs were coming thundering down from the Retreat where they hung out. Strict formation for these guys, they’d probably been drilling for this shit for generations. They mixed into the fray—they mostly fought two-handed, heavy short swords in both hands, or with bow and arrow—and holy shit! They were going after the talking
animals? There—that guy lopped the head clean off what had clearly till moments ago been a talking deer. A spray of blood mounted up over the heads of the struggling fighters, then it weakened and subsided.