The Magician King (51 page)

In one hand She held a gnarled staff like Julia’s. In the other She carried, oddly, a bird’s nest with three blue eggs in it.

“Enough,” She said again.

The shades did what She said and kept still. Julia knelt in front of the goddess, her face buried in her hands.

“My daughter,” the goddess said. “You are safe now. It is over.”

Julia nodded and looked up at Her. Her face was streaming with tears.

“You’re Her,” she said. “Our Lady.”

“I have come to take you home.”

The goddess motioned to Quentin. She wasn’t glowing exactly, but it was hard to look at Her, the same way it’s hard to look at the sun—She was that intense. Only now did Quentin really register the scale of Her. She must have been ten feet tall.

The dead watched them mutely. No more Ping-Pong. For a moment the entire underworld was silent.

Julia rose to her feet, drying her tears.

“What happened to you?” Quentin said. “You’ve changed.”

“It is over,” Julia said. “I am a daughter of the goddess now. A dryad.” I am partially divine,” she added, almost shyly.

He looked at her. She looked magnificent. She was going to be all right.

“It suits you,” he said.

“Thank you. We must go now.”

“I’m not going to argue with you.”

The goddess gathered them both in with one tremendous arm. She held them, and together they all began to rise into the air. Someone cried out, and Quentin felt Benedict’s hand grab his ankle and hang on.

“Don’t leave me here! Please!”

It was like the last chopper out of Saigon. Quentin reached down to grab Benedict’s wrist and for a moment he had it.

“I’ve got you!” he yelled.

He didn’t know what he was doing, but he knew he was going to hold on to Benedict with all the strength he had. They were ten feet up, twenty. They could do this. They were going to steal one soul back. They were going to reverse entropy. Death would win the war, but it wasn’t going to do it with a perfect record.

“Hang on!”

But Benedict couldn’t hang on. His hand slipped from Quentin’s and he fell back down among the shades without a word.

Then they were flying up past the fluorescent lights, and then up through where the ceiling would have been. There was nothing more he could do. Without Benedict to hang onto, Quentin gripped the key so hard it bit into his palm. He had lost Benedict, but he wasn’t going to lose that. They rose up into the darkness, through fire, through earth, through water, and then out into the light again.

B
efore they did it they took a vacation. It would take a week to order some of the necessary materials: mistletoe, more mirrors, some iron tools, chemically pure water, a few exotic powders. The ritual was pretty involved, more so than Julia would have thought, given the source. She’d expected something crude and pagan, a brute force play, but the reality was more complex and technical than that. They would have to clear a lot of space.

So while they waited for the FedEx guy to arrive, and for a few slowrolling preparatory spells to mature, the magicians of Murs, the secret genius-aspirants to the sacred mysteries of the godhead, played tourist. It was the final furlough before their unit shipped out overseas—some last-minute R&R. They went to Sénanque Abbey, which despite being familiar from a million advertisements and in-flight magazines and five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzles, was stunningly beautiful, the oldest, stillest place Julia had ever been. They went to Châteauneuf-du-Pape, which really had been the pope’s new castle at some point, though all that was left of it now was a single scrap of wall with a few empty windows in it that stood out above the flat vineyards around it like an old, rotten tooth. They drove down to Cassis.

It was October, the ass-end of the season, and Cassis was the ass-end of the Côte d’Azur, barely part of it at all, low-rent and chock-full of teenage day-trippers out of Marseille. But the sun was hot, and the water, while it was colder than Julia thought water could be and still remain in liquid form, was a legitimate and spectacular azure. There was a small hotel there, not far from the beach, in a grove of stone pines full of invisible cicadas that trilled incessantly and amazingly loudly. When they sat on the porch they could barely hear each other talk.

They drank the local rosé, which supposedly lost its flavor if you drank it anywhere besides Cassis, and took a boat tour of the calanques, the hullshredding limestone fingers that stuck out into the sea all along the coast. Nobody noticed the magicians. Nobody looked at them twice. Julia felt wonderfully normal. The beaches were all pebbles, no sand, but they spread out their towels over them and did their best to get comfortable, alternating long stretches of sunbathing with terrified, hilarious dashes into the water. It was so freezing it felt like it would stop your heart.

They all looked pale in their swimsuits. Following the local custom, Asmodeus took off her top, and Julia thought Failstaff’s heart would stop just from that. And it wasn’t just Asmodeus’s breasts, which were indeed small and high and remarkably jiggly. Failstaff was obviously in love with Asmodeus. Six months in a house with them, and how the hell had Julia missed that? These were her friends, the closest thing she had to a family now. All this business about being gods was impairing Julia’s ability to think like a human. Which was never her strong suit to begin with. She’d have to watch that. Something was getting lost in translation.

Julia watched the seafoam draw webs and Hebrew letters on the surface of the water and then erase them again. She shook her head and closed her eyes against the hot white Mediterranean sunlight. She felt happy and contented, like a seal on a rock, with her seal family around her. She was coming out of a dream, and all her friends were here with her—it was like the end of
The Wizard of Oz.
But the frightening thing was that she knew she was about to sink down into the dream again. It wasn’t over. This was just a brief lucid interval. The anesthetic was going to kick back in in a second, the dream would take her, and she didn’t know if she would ever wake up again.

That was why, that night in the hotel, when everybody else was asleep, she found herself walking the halls. She wanted something—she wanted Pouncy. She knocked on his door. When he answered she kissed him. And after she kissed him, they slept together. She wanted to feel like a human being, a creature of stormy, messy emotions, one more time. Even if it was a slightly slutty human being.

She’d slept with people in the past because she thought she should—like James—or to get something out of them that she needed—Jared, Warren, fill in your own examples. She didn’t think she’d ever done it just because she wanted to before. It felt good. No, it felt fantastic. This was the way it was supposed to work.

She seemed more into it than Pouncy did. When she’d first gotten a look at him, that first day, she’d thought, aha, yes, let’s not jump to any conclusions, but by all means, this could happen. She’d always gone for the clean-cut type, viz James, and Pouncy fell well within the acceptable parameters. But whenever she looked into Pouncy’s flat slate eyes, and steeled herself for the drop as she fell for him, it never quite came. There wasn’t quite enough of him there.

There was someone in there, she knew there was. She could see him perfectly clearly when they were online. But when they were together in person, face-to-face, Pouncy retreated somewhere far below the surface, deep under the ice. His security was too tight to crack, even for a hacker of her credentials.

She told Pouncy all this afterward, lying in bed, with those cicadas still shrilling away outside, though thankfully muted by the shutters. For a long time he didn’t answer.

“I know,” he said carefully. “I’m sorry.”

It was the easy answer. Though at least he’d given it a shot.

“Don’t be sorry. It doesn’t matter.” It really didn’t. They looked at the ceiling and listened to the cicadas some more. She felt pleasantly fleshly. She was mind and body both, for once.

“But just so I know, is that why you want this so much?” she asked, sitting up. “The power? Like, if one day you’re that strong, then maybe you’ll be safe enough that the rest of you can come out?”

“Maybe.” He grimaced, incidentally showing off those interesting lines around his mouth. She traced one with her finger. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know, or you won’t say?”

Nothing. Blue screen of death: she’d crashed his system. Oh, well. Boys were so unstable that way, full of buggy, self-contradictory code, pathetically unoptimized. She flopped back down on the thin hotel pillow.

“So where would you put Project Ganymede’s chances of success?” she said, just making conversation now. “Percentage-wise?”

“Oh, I like our chances,” Pouncy said, his personality, such as it was, coming back online now that he was back on safe ground. “I’m gonna go seventy-thirty us. You?”

“More like even steven. Fifty-fifty. What are you going to do if it doesn’t work out?”

“Try again somewhere else. I still think Greece is ground zero for this stuff. Would you come if I did?”

“Maybe.” She wasn’t going to reassure him just for the sake of it. “The wine’s better here though. I’m not an ouzo girl.”

“That’s what I like about you.”

He played with her fingers on top of the scratchy hotel blanket, studying them.

“Listen, I lied before,” he said. “I think I do know why I’m doing this—what’s in it for me. Or part of it. It’s not about power for me, not really.”

“Okay. What then?”

This oughta be good. Julia propped herself up on an elbow, and the sheet slid down off her shoulders. It was strange to be naked in front of Pouncy after all the time they’d spent together clothed. It was strange to be naked in front of anybody. It was like that cold water out there in the bay: scary, you didn’t think you could stand it, but then you plunged in and pretty soon you got used to it. There was enough hiding in life. Sometimes you just wanted to show somebody your tits.

“I was in Free Trader before you. You weren’t there when I came in.”

“So?”

“So to be crude about it, you haven’t seen my prescriptions.” Pouncy grinned, ruefully, a different smile from his regular smile. “In terms of raw dosage, I am the official all-time record-holder for Free Trader Beowulf. At first they didn’t even think they were real.”

“And they’re for . . . depression?”

He nodded. “Ever notice how I never drink coffee? Or eat chocolate? Can’t. Not with this much Nardil in my system. I’ve had a half dozen courses of ECT. I tried to kill myself when I was twelve. My brain chemistry, it’s just hosed. Not viable, in the long term.”

Now it was Julia who felt panicky. She wasn’t good in these moments, and she knew it. Hesitantly she put her hand on his smooth chest. It was all she could think of. It seemed to work well enough. God, did he actually manscape?

“So you think Our Lady Underground can heal you? Like with Asmo, that scar, whatever that was?”

It was sinking in, what he was saying. This wasn’t an intellectual exercise for him, or a power grab.

“I don’t know.” He said it lightly, like he didn’t care. “I really don’t. It would be a miracle, and I guess miracles are O.L.U.’s business. But to be honest I wasn’t thinking of it that way.”

“How then?”

“If you laugh I swear to God that I will kill you.”

“Careful, She might be listening.”

“I’ll plead insanity. I can back it up.”

Pouncy’s face wasn’t a naturally expressive one. His cut cheekbones might have worked for a model, if he’d been a little taller, but never for an actor. But for a second she could really see what he was feeling, as he felt it.

“I want Her to take me home with Her,” he said. “I want Her to take me back with Her, into heaven.”

Julia didn’t laugh. She understood that she was looking at another person like herself, a broken person, but Pouncy was even more broken than she was. She was used to feeling sorry for herself, and angry at other people. She was less used to feeling sorry for someone else, but she felt it now. She would never be in love with Pouncy, but she felt love for him.

“I hope she does, Pouncy,” she said. “If that’s what you want, I truly hope she does. But we’ll miss you if you go.”

 

 

Back at Murs Julia did something she hadn’t done since she’d gotten there in June. She went online.

None of them had been on Free Trader Beowulf in ages. It took them a while to crack the new log-in routine, which changed every couple of months. They raced each other, alone in their bedrooms but yelling trash talk back and forth. (Except for Failstaff, who was too much the gentle giant to talk trash, which may have contributed to his eventual victory. Asmo quit early and futzed around hacking the router instead, so she could kick Pouncy offline at will.) Once she was in Julia didn’t announce her presence—you didn’t have to, you could slip in without the system pinging everybody—because she didn’t want a blizzard of IMs from Free Traders wanting to catch up after her long absence. For a couple of hours she just lurked, cruising through old threads, and new ones that had sprung up while she was offline. There had been some turnover in the membership—there were a couple of new fish, and a couple of old fish were gone, or in hiding.

It seemed like years since she’d been there. She felt so much older now. You could customize the Free Trader interface any number of ways, but Julia had always gone for a bare-bones look, ASCII characters only, approximating the look and feel of an olde-timey Unix shell. Her eyes filled with tears just looking at everybody’s user names, picked out in green-on-black text. So much had changed since then, since she’d been living a life of quiet desperation in a mundane universe, racking up hours at the IT shop and killing time till she could take off for Stanford. So much that couldn’t be changed back. But not much had changed here.