The Magician King (49 page)

“Now slide down the slide.”

It was clear what the sloth meant. He was supposed to slide down the plank like a playground slide. Though this wasn’t a playground slide, and it was a bit of a circus act to get into position without any bars to hang on to. The slide wobbled and at one point almost collapsed, but Josh and Eliot managed to hold it together.

Quentin sat at the top of the triangle. He hadn’t imagined that his journey to the underworld would be quite this ridiculous. He’d rather hoped it would involve drawing unholy sigils in the sand in letters of fire ten feet high, and flinging open the portal to hell. You can’t win them all.

“Slide down the slide,” the sloth said again.

It was a raw pine board, so he had to scooch himself along for a few feet, but eventually he managed to slide the rest of the way to the bottom. He was ready at any moment for a splinter to stab him in the ass, but none did. His bare feet planted in the firm cold sand. He stopped.

“Now what?” he called.

“Be patient,” said the sloth.

Everyone waited. A wave flopped. A gust of wind ruffled the fabric of his pajamas.

“Should I—?”

“Try wiggling your toes a little.”

Quentin wiggled them deeper into the cold, damp beach. He was about to get up and call it a night when he felt his toes break through something into nothing, and the sand gave way, and he slid down through it.

The moment he passed beneath the sand the slide became a real slide, made of metal, with metal guardrails. A playground slide. He slid down it in total darkness, with nothing around him as far as he could tell. It wasn’t a perfect system—every time he got up a decent head of speed he would get stuck and have to scooch again, his butt squeaking loudly in the pitch-black.

A light appeared, far ahead and below him. He wasn’t moving very fast, so he had plenty of time to check it out on his way down. It was an ordinary unshaded electric light set in a brick wall. The brickwork was old and uneven and could have used some repointing. Below the light was a pair of metal double doors painted a gray-brown. They were absolutely ordinary, the kind that might have opened onto a school auditorium.

In front of it stood someone who looked too small to be standing in front of the entrance to hell. He might have been eight years old. He was a sharp-looking little boy, with short black hair and a narrow face. He wore a little-boy-sized gray suit with a white shirt, but no tie. He looked like he’d gotten fidgety in church and come outside for a minute to blow off steam.

He didn’t even have a stool to sit on, so he just stood in place as well as an eight-year-old boy can. He tried and failed to whistle. He kicked at nothing in particular.

Quentin thought it prudent to slow down and stop about twenty feet from the bottom of the slide. The boy watched him.

“Hi,” the boy said. His voice sounded loud in the silence.

“Hi,” Quentin said.

He slid down the rest of the way and then stood up, as gracefully as he could.

“You’re not dead,” the boy said.

“I’m alive,” Quentin said. “But is this the entrance to the underworld?”

“You know how I could tell you were alive?” The boy pointed behind Quentin. “The slide. It works much better if you’re dead.”

“Oh. Yes, I got stuck a few times.”

Quentin’s skin prickled just standing there. He wondered if the boy was alive. He didn’t look dead.

“Dead people are lighter,” the boy said. “And when you die they give you a robe. It’s better for sliding than regular pants.”

The bulb made a bubble of light in the darkness. Quentin had a sense of towering emptiness all around them. There was no sky or ceiling. The brick wall seemed to go up forever—did go up forever, as far as he could see. He was in the subbasement of the world.

Quentin pointed behind him at the double doors. “Is it all right if I go inside?”

“You can only go inside if you’re dead. That’s the rule.”

“Oh.”

This was a setback. You’d think Abigail the Sloth would have briefed him on that wrinkle. He didn’t relish the thought of trying to climb back up that long slide, if that was how you got back to the upper world. He seemed to remembered from being a kid that it was possible, just about, but that slide must have been half a mile long. What if he fell off? Or what if somebody died and came sliding down it while he was going up?

But it would also be a relief. He could get back to business. Back to the search for the key.

“The thing is, my friend Benedict is inside. And I need to tell him something.”

The boy thought for a minute.

“Maybe you could tell me, and then I’ll tell him.”

“I think it should come from me.”

The boy chewed his lip.

“Do you have a passport?”

“A passport? I don’t think so.”

“Yes, you do. Look.”

The boy reached up and took something out of the shirt pocket of Quentin’s pajamas. It was a piece of paper folded in half. It took Quentin a beat to recognize it: it was the passport the little girl had made for him, what was her name, Eleanor, all the way back on the Outer Island. How had it gotten into his pocket?

The little boy studied it with an eight-year-old’s version of intense bureaucratic scrutiny. He looked up at Quentin’s face to compare it with the picture.

“Is this how you spell your name?”

The boy pointed. Under his picture Eleanor had written in colored pencil, all capitals: KENG. The
K
was backward.

“Yes.”

The boy sighed, exactly as if Quentin had just bested him at a game of Chinese checkers.

“All right. You can go in.”

He rolled his eyes to make sure that Quentin knew that he didn’t really care if Quentin went in or not.

Quentin opened one of the doors. It wasn’t locked. He wondered what the boy would have done if he’d just barged in past him. Probably he would have transformed into some unspeakably horrible
Exorcist
thing and eaten him. The door opened onto a vast open space dimly lit by banks of buzzing fluorescent lights overhead.

It was full of people. Stale air and the muttering roar of thousands of conversations washed over him. The place was a gymnasium, or that was the closest analogy he could come up with off the cuff. A recreation center. The people in it were standing and sitting and walking around, but mostly what they were doing was playing games.

Right in front of him a foursome was listlessly swatting a shuttlecock back and forth over a badminton net. Farther off he could see a volleyball net set up that no one was using, and some Ping-Pong tables. The floor was heavily varnished wood and striped with the overlapping curving lines of various indoor sports, painted over each other at odd angles, in odd colors, the way they were in school gyms. The air had the empty, echoing quality of large stadiums, where sound travels a long way but doesn’t have much to bounce off of, so it just gets gray and ragged and indistinct.

The people—the shades, he supposed—all looked solid, though the artificial light washed all the color out of them. Everybody wore loose white exercise clothing. His pajamas wouldn’t look that out of place after all.

The dry air pressure pushed into his ears. Quentin resolved to take everything as it came, not think too hard, not try to figure it out, just try to find Benedict. That’s why he was here. This was a situation where you really needed a Virgil to show you around. He looked behind him, but the doors had already closed. They even had those long metal bars on them that you pressed to open instead of a doorknob.

Just then one of the doors opened, and Julia slipped inside. She looked around the room, the same way Quentin had, but without his air of utter bewilderment. Her ability to take things in stride was just awesome. Her fever and her listlessness seemed to be gone. The door closed behind her with a metallic clunk.

For a second he thought she was dead, and his heart stopped.

“Relax,” she said. “I thought you might want company.”

“Thank you.” His heart started up again. “You were right. I do. I’m so happy you’re here.”

The shades didn’t seem especially happy to be in the underworld. They mostly looked bored. Nobody was running for shots on the badminton court. They were swinging limp-wristed, and when somebody netted a shot his partner didn’t look especially pissed off about it. Mildly chagrined, maybe. At most. They didn’t care. There was a scoreboard next to the court, but no one was keeping score. It showed the final score of the game before it, or maybe the game before that.

In fact a lot of them weren’t playing the games at all, they were just talking or lying on their backs staring up at the buzzing fluorescent lights, saying nothing. The lights hardly even made sense. There was no electricity in Fillory.

“Did he take your passport?” Quentin said.

“No. He didn’t say anything at all. He did not even look at me.”

Quentin frowned at that. Weird.

“We’d better start looking,” he said.

“Let us stay together.”

Quentin had to force himself to start walking. The deeper they went into the throng, it felt like, the greater the risk that they would get stuck here forever, whatever the sloth said. They threaded their way between the different groups, sometimes stepping over people’s legs, trying not to tread on people’s hands, like it was a crowded picnic. He was worried he would attract attention by being alive, but people just glanced up at him and then looked away. It wasn’t an underworld like in Homer or Dante, where everybody was dying to talk to you.

It was more depressing than spooky, really. It was like visiting a summer camp, or a senior center, or somebody else’s office: it’s all well and good, but the knowledge that you don’t have to stay there, that you can go home at the end of the day and never come back, makes you so relieved you get dizzy. Not all the equipment was in its first youth. Some of it was actually fairly shabby—the board games had cracked leathery creases across the center where they folded up, and some of the badminton rackets were waving a loose string or two. He got his first real shock when he saw Fen.

He should have expected it. She’d been one of his guides on their trip down into Ember’s Tomb. She was the good one, the one who didn’t betray them. He barely knew her in life, but she was unmistakable, with her fishy lips and her short dykey haircut. The last time he’d seen her she was being simultaneously crushed and set on fire by a giant made of red-hot iron. Now she looked as healthy as she ever had, if a little wan, playing a slow-paced, low-pressure game of Ping-Pong. If she recognized him she didn’t show it.

Now he allowed himself to wonder the thing he’d been trying not to wonder ever since the sloth first brought it up: whether Alice was here. Part of him was yearning to see her, would have given anything if one of the faces in the crowd could just belong to her. Another part of him hoped that she wasn’t here. She was a
niffin
now. Maybe that counted as still alive.

There were big metal pillars here and there holding up the ceiling, and Benedict was sitting leaning against one of them, staring off into the pale, empty distance. Half a game of solitaire was arranged in front of him, but he’d lost interest in it, even though it was pretty obvious he wasn’t stuck. He could put a red five of diamonds on a six of clubs.

He looked more like the Benedict Quentin had first met in the map room, than the suntanned bravo he’d become on board the
Muntjac.
He was pale and thin-armed, with his old black bangs falling over his eyes. His hair had grown back. He looked like a sullen Caravaggio youth. Death made him seem younger.

Quentin stopped.

“Hello, Benedict.”

“Hello,” Julia said.

Benedict’s eyes flicked over to Quentin, then back to the distance.

“I know you can’t take me with you,” he said quietly.

The dead didn’t mince words.

“You’re right,” Quentin said. “I can’t. That’s what the sloth said.”

“So why did you come?”

Now he did look at Quentin, accusingly. Quentin had worried that he would have a gaping wound in his neck, but it was smooth and whole. He’s not a zombie, he’s a ghost, Quentin reminded himself. No, a shade.

“I wanted to see you again.”

Quentin sat down next to him and leaned back against the pillar too. Julia sat down on his other side. Together the three of them looked out at the milling throngs of dead people.

A period of time passed, maybe five minutes, maybe an hour. It was hard to keep track in the underworld. Quentin would have to watch that.

“How are you, Benedict?” Julia said.

Benedict didn’t answer.

“Did you see what happened to me?” he said. “I couldn’t believe it. Bingle said to stay on the ship, but I thought—” He didn’t finish, just frowned helplessly and shook his head. “I wanted to try some of the stuff we’d been practicing. For real, in a real fight. But the minute I stepped off the boat,
tschoooo!
Right in my throat. Right in the hollow of it.”

He pressed his index finger into the soft part below his Adam’s apple, where the arrow went in.

“It didn’t even hurt that much. That’s the funny thing. I thought they could pull it out. I turned around to get back on the boat. Then I realized I couldn’t breathe, so I sat down. My mouth was full of blood. My sword fell in the water. Can you believe I was worried about that? I was trying to figure out whether we could dive down later and get my sword back. Did anybody get it?”

Quentin shook his head.

“I guess it doesn’t matter,” Benedict said. “It was just a practice sword.”

“What happened next? You went down the slide?”

Benedict nodded.

Quentin was evolving a theory about that. The slide was humiliating, that’s what it was. Deliberately embarrassing. That’s what death did, it treated you like a child, like everything you had ever thought and done and cared about was just a child’s game, to be crumpled up and thrown away when it was over. It didn’t matter. Death didn’t respect you. Death thought you were bullshit, and it wanted to make sure you knew it.