The Magicians (33 page)

Six hours into the trip his throat suddenly clamped shut, and iron nails stabbed his eardrums. His eyeballs tried to pry themselves out of their sockets. He had drifted off, and his improvised space bubble had started to fail. Quentin waved his arms like a frantic conductor,
prestissimo,
and the air thickened and warmed again, but by then the fun had gone out of the whole thing. Bouts of shivering and wheezing and nervous laughter rattled him, and he couldn’t calm down. Jesus, he thought, was there ever anything less worth risking his life for than this? God knows how much interstellar radiation he’d already absorbed. Space was full of angry little particles.

He reversed course. He considered hiding out for a few days and just pretending he’d gone to the moon. Maybe he could score some moon dust off Lovelady, present it as evidence. The air got warmer again. The sky grew lighter. He relaxed as a cocktail of relief and shame filled him, one generous part of each. The world spread out again underneath him: the fractally detailed coastline, the blue water textured like beaten metal, the beckoning claw of Cape Cod.

The worst part turned out to be walking into the Great Hall for dinner that night, two days early, with a sheepish yeah-I-fucked-up grin plastered on his face, which was sunburned a flaming red. After dinner he borrowed Alice’s key and retreated to the Prefects’ Common Room, where he drank too much sherry, sipping it alone in front of the darkened window, even though all he could see was his own reflection, picturing the Hudson River moving past in the darkness, sluggish and swollen with cold spring rain. Alice was studying up in her room. Everybody else was asleep except for a lone weeknight party that was racketing on in one wing, spinning off drunk students in pairs and groups. When he was thoroughly smashed on self-pity and alcohol and the dawn was threatening to leap up at him at any moment, Quentin walked gingerly back to his bedroom, climbing the spiral steps past what used to be Eliot’s room. He weaved a little bit, swigging directly from the sherry bottle, which he’d liberated on his way out.

He felt his intoxication already turning into a hangover, that queasy neurological alchemy that usually happens during sleep. His abdomen was overfull, swollen with tainted viscera. People he’d betrayed came wandering out from the place in his mind where they usually stayed. His parents. James. Julia. Professor March. Amanda Orloff. Even old dead Mr. What’s-his-name, his Princeton interviewer. They all watched him dispassionately. He was beneath their contempt.

He lay down on his bed with the light on. Wasn’t there a spell for making yourself happy? Somebody must have invented one. How could he have missed it? Why didn’t they teach it? Was it in the library, a flying book fluttering just out of reach, beating its wings against some high window? He felt the bed slipping down and away, down and away, like a film loop of a Stuka sheering down into an attack run, over and over again. He’d been so young when he first came here. He thought about that freezing day in November when he’d taken the book from the lovely paramedic, and the note had blown away into that dry, twisted, frozen garden, and he’d gone blithely running after it. Now he’d never know what it said. Had it contained all the riches, all the good feeling that he was still somehow missing, even after so much goodness had been heaped upon him? Was it the secret revelation of Martin Chatwin, the boy who had escaped into Fillory and never returned to face the misery of this world? Because he was drunk, he thought about his mother, and how she’d held him once when he was little after he’d lost an action figure down a storm drain, and he smooshed his red, smarting face into his cool pillow and sobbed as if his heart were broken.

 

 

By then there were only two weeks left until graduation. Classwork ground to a halt. The Maze was a vivid verdant glowing green knot, the air was full of floaty little motes, and siren-like pleasure craft came drifting down the river past the boathouse, laden with oblivious sunbathers. All anybody talked about was how great it would be when they could party and sleep in and experiment with forbidden spells. They kept looking at each other and laughing and slapping each other on the back and shaking their heads. The carousel was slowing down. The music had almost stopped.

Pranks were organized. A decadent, last-days-of-Pompeii vibe swept through the dorms. Somebody thought up a new game involving dice and a lightly enchanted mirror that was basically a magical version of strip poker. Desperate, ill-advised attempts were made to sleep with that one person with whom one had always secretly, hopelessly wanted to sleep.

The graduation ceremony started at six in the afternoon, with the sky still heavy with fading golden light. An eleven-course banquet was served in the dining hall. The nineteen graduating Fifth Years regarded one another with awe, feeling lost and alone at the long, empty dining table. Red wine was served from bottles without labels; it was made, Fogg revealed, using grapes from Brakebills’ own tiny pocket vineyard, which Quentin had stumbled on in the fall of his First Year. Traditionally the vineyard’s entire output was drunk by the seniors at graduation dinner—had to be drunk, Fogg stressed, hinting darkly at what would happen if a single bottle was left unconsumed. It was a cabernet sauvignon, and it was thin and sour, but they quaffed it lustily anyway. Quentin declaimed a lengthy tribute to its subtle expression of the unique Brakebills
terroir
. Toasts were drunk to the memory of Amanda Orloff, and the glasses hurled into the fireplace to ensure that no lesser toast would ever be drunk from them. When the wind blew, the candles flickered and dropped molten beeswax onto the fresh white tablecloth.

Along with the cheese course they were each presented with a silver bee pin, identical to the ones the prefects wore—Quentin was at a loss to imagine any occasion on which it would be even remotely appropriate to wear it—and a heavy black two-toothed iron key that would permit them to return to Brakebills if they ever needed to. School songs were sung, and Chambers served Scotch, which Quentin had never had before. He tipped his little tumbler of it from side to side, watching the light drift through this mysterious amber fluid. It was amazing that anything in liquid form could taste that much like both smoke and fire.

He leaned over to Georgia and started to explain this fascinating conundrum to her, but as he did so Fogg stood up at the head of the table, strangely grave, dismissed Chambers, and asked the Fifth Years to follow him downstairs.

This was unexpected. Downstairs meant the cellar, where Quentin had almost never been in his whole time at Brakebills—just once or twice to sneak a particularly coveted bottle from the wine cellar, or when he and Alice had been desperate for privacy. But now Professor Fogg led them in a loose, bantering, occasionally singing flock back through the kitchen, through a small, unassuming door in the pantry, and down a flight of worn and dusty wooden stairs that changed midflight into stone. They emerged into a dark, earthy subbasement.

This wasn’t where Quentin had thought the party was going. It wasn’t a party atmosphere at all. It was cool down here and suddenly quiet. The floor was dirt, the ceilings were low, and the walls were bumpy and unfinished. They devoured sound. Voice by voice the chorus of a traditional Brakebills song—an elaborately euphemistic number entitled “The Prefect Has a Defect”—died away. There was a grave but not unpleasant smell of damp soil.

Fogg stopped at what looked like a manhole cover embedded in the dirt floor. It was brass and densely inscribed with calligraphic writing. Oddly, it looked as shiny and new as a freshly struck coin. The Dean picked up a heavy manhole tool and, with an effort, levered up the brass disk. It was two inches thick, and it took three of the Fifth Years to roll it to one side.

“After you,” the Dean said, panting a little. He gestured grandly at the inky black hole.

Quentin went first. He felt around blindly with his Scotch-benumbed feet till he found an iron rung. It was like lowering himself into warm black oil. The ladder took him and the other graduates straight down into a circular chamber large enough for all nineteen of them to stand upright in a circle, which they did. Fogg came down last; they could hear him screwing the manhole cover back into place behind them. Then he descended, too, and with a crash he sent the ladder retracting back up, like a fire escape. After that the silence was absolute.

“No point in losing our momentum,” Fogg said. He lit a candle and gamely produced two fifths of bourbon from somewhere and set them going in opposite directions around the circle. Something about this gesture unnerved Quentin. There was a certain amount of sanctioned alcohol consumption at Brakebills—a fairly large amount, really—but this was a bit much. There was something forced about it.

Well, it
was
graduation. They weren’t students anymore. They were grown-ups. Just peers, sharing a drink. In a secret underground dungeon, in the middle of the night. Quentin took his swig and passed it on.

Dean Fogg lit more candles in assorted brass candlesticks, making a circle within their larger circle. They couldn’t have been more than fifty yards down, but it felt like they were a solid mile beneath the earth, entombed alive, forgotten by the rest of the world.

“In case you’re wondering why we’re down here,” Fogg said, “it’s because I wanted to get us outside the Brakebills Protective Cordon. That’s a defensive magical barrier that extends out from the House in all directions. That inscribed brass hatch we opened was a gateway through it.”

The darkness swallowed his words as soon as he uttered them.

“It’s a little unsettling, yes? But it’s appropriate, because unlike me you’ll be spending the rest of your lives out here. Most years, the point of coming down here is to scare you with ghost stories about the outside world. In your case I don’t think that will be necessary. You’ve witnessed firsthand the destructive power that some magical entities possess.

“It’s unlikely you’ll ever see anything as bad as what happened on the day of the Beast. But remember that what happened that day can happen again. Those of you who were in the auditorium that day, especially, will carry the mark of it forever. You will never forget the Beast, and you can be sure it won’t forget you either.

“Forgive me if I lecture you, but it’s the last chance I’m going to get.”

Quentin was sitting opposite Fogg in the circle—they had all taken seats on the smooth stone floor—and his mild, clean-shaven face floated in the darkness like an apparition. Both bottles of whiskey reached Quentin simultaneously, and he gamely took a sip from each, one in each hand, and passed them on.

“Sometimes I wonder if man was really meant to discover magic,” Fogg said expansively. “It doesn’t really make sense. It’s a little too perfect, don’t you think? If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn’t make it so. Words and thoughts don’t change anything. Language and reality are kept strictly apart—reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn’t care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn’t. You deal with it, and you get on with your life.

“Little children don’t know that. Magical thinking: that’s what Freud called it. Once we learn otherwise we cease to be children. The separation of word and thing is the essential fact on which our adult lives are founded.

“But somewhere in the heat of magic that boundary between word and thing ruptures. It cracks, and the one flows back into the other, and the two melt together and fuse. Language gets tangled up with the world it describes.

“I sometimes feel as though we’ve stumbled on a flaw in the system, don’t you? A short circuit? A category error? A strange loop? Is it possible that magic is knowledge that would be better off forsworn? Tell me this: Can a man who can cast a spell ever really grow up?”

He paused. No one answered. What the hell would they say? It was a little late to be scolding them now that they’d already completed their magical education.

“I have a little theory that I’d like to air here, if I may. What is it that you think makes you magicians?” More silence. Fogg was well into rhetorical-question territory now anyway. He spoke more softly. “Is it because you are intelligent? Is it because you are brave and good? Is it because you’re special?

“Maybe. Who knows. But I’ll tell you something: I think you’re magicians because you’re unhappy. A magician is strong because he feels pain. He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it. Or what did you think that stuff in your chest was? A magician is strong because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength.

“Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But you, my friends, you found another way: a way to use the pain. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth. You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you.”

Quentin’s attention wandered to the tiny glimmery points of light here and there on the curved ceiling above them, pricking out the shapes of constellations he didn’t recognize, as if they were on another planet, seeing the stars from an alien angle. Someone cleared his throat.

Fogg went on.

“But just in case that’s not enough, each one of you will leave this room tonight with an insurance policy: a pentagram tattooed on your back. Five-pointed star, nicely decorative, plus it acts as a holding cell for a demon, a small but rather vicious little fellow. Cacodemon, technically.

“They’re tough little scrappers, skin like iron. In fact, I think they may be made of iron. I’ll give you each a password that sets him free. Speak the password and he’ll pop out and fight for you till he’s dead or till whoever’s giving you trouble is.”

Fogg clapped his hands on his knees and looked at them as if he’d just told them they’d all be receiving a year’s supply of attractive and useful Brakebills stationery. Georgia put up her hand tentatively.