The Magician’s Land (14 page)

It wasn’t. It was Mayakovsky’s laboratory: a suite of dark, square, windowless workrooms, each one furnished with well-worn benches and tables and studded with silent heavy machinery: a drill press, a band saw, a small forge, a lathe. In contrast with everything else in Mayakovsky’s domain it was all magnificently clean and orderly. The tools and instruments were polished and laid out in straight rows on cloths as if they were for sale. The machinery gleamed a dull matte blue-black. The room was still except for some quiet regular motion in the shadows: a softly swinging pendulum; a spinning top that for some reason didn’t stop; a slowly turning armillary sphere.

The three of them stood looking around in the half-light, the lichen vodka or whatever it was momentarily forgotten. The silence was another level below the regular ambient silence of Antarctica: an absolute sonic vacuum.

“This is lovely,” Plum said.

It was true.

“Beautiful.”

“I know why you do this,” Mayakovsky said.

He didn’t so much answer them as continue a monologue that had been going on in his head.

“You”—he looked at Plum—“you, I don’t know. Maybe you are bored. Maybe you are in love with him?” Plum waved that one off
frantically, a full-arm gesture:
No, abort, abort.
“But you, Quentin, you I understand. You are like me. You have ambition. You want to be great wizard. Gandalf maybe. Merlin. Dumb-bell-door.”

He spoke softly and, for him, gently. He drank, then cleared his throat and spat wetly into a handkerchief, which he stuffed into the pocket of his robe. He’d been living alone for a long time.

Did he? Quentin thought. Want to be a great magician? Was that the truth? Maybe it used to be. Now all he wanted was to be a magician period. He wanted to break an incorporate bond. He wanted Alice back. But truth was seeming pretty relative at this point. Truth was a substance soluble in lichen vodka.

“Sure,” he said. “Why not.”

“But you will not be great. You are clever, yes—you have good head.”

He reached over and rapped on Quentin’s head with his knuckles.

“Don’t do that.”

But Mayakovsky was unstoppable, a drunk best man hell-bent on giving an inappropriate toast.

“Fine head. Better than most. But sadly for you there are many heads like it. One hundred. One thousand maybe.”

“I’m sure you’re right.” No point in denying it. He leaned against the cool, oiled metal of a drill press. It felt reassuringly stable, an ally at his back.

“Five hundred,” Plum said generously. She boosted herself up on a table. “Be fair.”

“You will never be great. You know nothing of greatness. You want to see? I will show you greatness.”

He waved his arm expansively at the darkened workbenches, and all through the room metal and glass stirred and glowed and came alive. Engines moved, wheels turned, flames lit.

“This is my museum. Museum of Mayakovsky.”

And he showed them what he’d built in the long Antarctic winters.

Mayakovsky’s workshop wasn’t just a marvel, it was a library of marvels. It was a catalog of answered prayers and impossible dreams and holy grails. Suddenly Mayakovsky was a showman, ushering them grandly from table to table: here was a perpetual motion machine, and
a pair of seven-thousand-league boots. He showed them one drop of universal solvent, which no vessel could contain and thus had to be kept magically suspended in midair. He showed them magic beans, and a pen that would write only the truth, and a mouse that aged backward, and a goose that laid eggs in gold, silver, platinum, and iridium. He spun straw into gold and turned the gold into lead.

It was the end of every fairy tale, all the prizes for which knights and princes had fought and died and clever princesses had guessed riddles and kissed frogs. Mayakovsky was right, this was grand magic, this was what a lifetime of solitary practice and toil bought you. Later it was hard for Quentin to remember details—the moonshine bleached them out of his brain cells like an industrial detergent—but he recalled a player piano that would improvise according to your mood, never repeating itself, optimizing the music according to how you responded, becoming more and more beautiful until it was the sound of everything you’d ever wanted to hear.

After a few minutes it was painful—he had to tell Mayakovsky to stop it before he broke down sobbing. Later he couldn’t have hummed the melody to save his life.

“This, Quentin. This is greatness. These are things you will never do. Never understand.”

It was true. Even with the strength he’d gained after his father died, he would never be in Mayakovsky’s league. It cost him nothing to admit it. He just wished that with all his genius Mayakovsky could help them.

But Plum was frowning.

“But I mean so why are you still here?” she said. “In Antarctica? If you’re this great wizard? I don’t get it. I mean, look at all this stuff! You could be famous!”

“I could be.” Mayakovsky said it sourly; the showman was gone. “But why? Why should I care if people know my name? People do not deserve Mayakovsky!”

“So you like being here? Alone like this? I don’t understand.”

“Why shouldn’t I like it?” He stuck out his lower lip. He didn’t much care for being psychoanalyzed. “Here I have everything. Outside there is nothing for me. Here I can do my work.”

“But she’s right, it makes no sense.” Quentin found his voice. “You’ve
probably solved problems people have been banging their heads against for years. You have to go back and tell everybody.”

“I have to do nothing!” And then more quietly: “Enough. I will never go back. I am done with that.”

Even with his ordinary, averagely brilliant brain Quentin was beginning to understand. He knew a few things about Mayakovsky’s personal history: how he’d had an affair with a student named Emily Greenstreet that ended so disastrously that he’d had to flee to Brakebills South. And Quentin knew something about hiding out from the world, too. He’d done his fair share of it. He’d been so depressed and traumatized after what happened to Alice that he withdrew from the world of magic and swore never to cast a spell again. If he never risked anything more—he reasoned—he could never lose anything more. He could never hurt anybody else.

But it hadn’t lasted. It wouldn’t do. Never risking anything meant never having or doing or being anything either. Life is risk, it turned out. Eliot and Janet and Julia had come for him, and he’d gone back to Fillory after all. He’d risked again, and won, and lost, and it hurt but he didn’t regret it, not any of it.

“You’re wrong,” Quentin said. “Fine, you’re a genius, but you’re wrong about this. You could go back. It wouldn’t be as bad as you think.”

“Do not tell me what I can do. Do not tell me who I am. When you can do all this, little man, then you can judge me.”

“I’m not judging you. I’m just saying—”

“You—you are not such a mystery.” Mayakovsky jabbed Quentin in the chest with a finger like a dried sausage. “You think I do not know you? They threw you out of that place, that other world you go to. Yes? And you came back to Brakebills. But they would not have you there either! So out you go again!”

Jesus, he must know about Fillory, or at least the Neitherlands. Mayakovsky advanced on Quentin, who gave ground.

“Well, yeah,” Quentin said. “But you’ll notice I’m not hanging around my ice castle brooding about it.”

“No! No! Now you want to be a criminal! But even that is too much! You have to come running to Daddy, begging for help!”

“My dad’s dead.”

Quentin stopped backing up.

“I may be a second-rate magician,” he said, “but at least I’m not a weird recluse who yells at people. I’m out in the world trying to get something done. And I’ll tell you something else, I think you know how to break an incorporate bond. In fact”—oh my God, maybe he actually was a genius—“in fact, I think you’re under one yourself. That’s what’s keeping you here. Isn’t it?”

Mayakovsky had been very well prepared for their visit. Too well, even for him. It was a long shot—but Mayakovsky hesitated, and Quentin knew he was close.

“Tell me how to break it.” He pressed his advantage. “You must have figured it out, even if you’re too scared to do it yourself. Tell me how. Help somebody for a change!”

He’d touched a nerve, because something went cold behind Mayakovsky’s eyes, and he slapped Quentin across the face. Quentin had forgotten how he liked to do that. It stung like hell, though not as much as it would have if he hadn’t already been drunk on lichen vodka. It made his ears ring, but his face was already two-thirds numb.

He was drunk enough that he did something he’d always wanted to do, which was to slap Mayakovsky back. With his grizzly hide it was like slapping a crocodile. Mayakovsky broke out in his sulfurous yellow grin.

“There it is!” he shouted. “Again!”

Quentin slapped him again.

With no warning Mayakovsky threw his thick arms around Quentin in a big Russian bear hug. It was hard to follow the emotional about-face, but Quentin went with it. Why not? Over Mayakovsky’s shoulder he saw Plum watching them round-eyed—she looked like she was trying to teleport herself out of the room through sheer force of will. But fuck it, why shouldn’t two men hug each other in a basement in the middle of Antarctica? He patted Mayakovsky’s back with his free hand. This poor fucking guy.

And Quentin’s father was dead. Who else was he going to hug? This must be what having a family is like, he thought. This must be how people hug their parents. Good old Mayakovsky. They weren’t so different after all.

“I am a dead man, Quentin. This is my grave. I bury myself here.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Quentin said. “It’s stupid. You can break the bond. You can come back anytime. Come with us!”

Mayakovsky pulled away. He held Quentin at arm’s length.

“You keep your shit world! You hear me? You keep it! I will stay here. I am done!”

He patted Quentin’s cheek.

“It is over for me. You are a pathetic mediocrity, but you are braver than me. You will not end like Mayakovsky. It is not over for you.”

He held out the bottle. Christ, Quentin thought they’d finally finished it, but there it was, practically full again. He must be refilling it by magic.

Quentin didn’t remember much after that. Later he would have a hazy recollection of Mayakovsky singing and laughing and weeping but it all got mixed up with the lichen-flavored dreams he had after he passed out, and he could never separate the fact from the hallucinations. In his dreams, at least, they sat on the floor of the workroom, passing the bottle around, and Mayakovsky told them about how he’d been there in the Neitherlands too, when the big blue gods returned and tried to take their magic back. How he’d fought them, alongside the dragons, how he’d ridden bareback on the great white dragon of Lake Vostok. How he’d smashed the bell jar over the Neitherlands with lightning and thunder from his own hands.

—

The next morning Quentin woke up in his own bed. Not in Brakebills South, in his own bed back in the Newark Airport Marriott. He had no memory of how he got there. Mayakovsky must have sent them back through a portal after all, the same way he’d sent Quentin back to Brakebills after the race to the South Pole.

Though Jesus, it made him shudder to think of Mayakovsky opening portals in the state they’d been in. Alcohol and portal magic, not a great combination.

When Quentin sat up he immediately wished he had in fact died in a catastrophic teleportation accident. Every hangover feels like the worst
hangover you’ve ever had, but this one was definitely a classic. One for the ages. He felt like all the water had been forcibly sucked out of his body, like an apricot in a dehydration chamber, and replaced with venom from an angry adder.

Slowly, carefully, he got to his hands and knees. He pushed his face into his pillow, abasing himself before whatever angry god had done this to him. Maybe there was some untainted blood left somewhere in his body, and it would run downhill into his aching brain. His fingers felt something under his pillow, something hard and round and cool to the touch. A gift from the tooth fairy. He took it out.

He was right, it was a gift. It was a coin, shiny and gold, the size of a silver dollar but slightly thicker. There were three of them. He turned one over in his hand. It gleamed like it was in sunlight, but the curtains were drawn. He knew what it was right away.

Quentin smiled, his dry lips cracking. Mayakovsky had done it, exactly what Quentin had said: he’d stored up power in these coins, the power he’d need to break the bond. Mayakovsky must have prepared them to break his own bond but then never used them. God bless the old bastard. Maybe Quentin’s father hadn’t had any power, but Mayakovsky did, and more than that he’d had the courage to pass it on to someone else. He was wrong about himself: he was a brave man after all.

Kneeling on the bed, his headache already fading, Quentin held one of the coins between two fingers and made it disappear—a one-handed sleight, stage magic—then brought it back. It felt like the present he’d been waiting for all his life. He wouldn’t waste it. The plan was going to work, they were going to break the bond, and steal the case, and then he could start over. He could start his real work. For the first time since he’d left Brakebills his life was starting to make sense to him again.

The coin’s edges were sharp and newly minted. On one side was the image of a wild goose in flight. On the other was a face, a young woman in profile: She was Emily Greenstreet.

M
an,” Josh said. “I can
not
believe the world is ending.”

“Stop saying that,” Janet said.

“Order,” Eliot said, not for the first time, “in the court.”

Poppy said nothing. She was thinking, her mouth twisted to one side. They were in the high square room in Castle Whitespire where the kings and queens met every day at five o’clock. The flaming ruins of a five-alarm sunset smoldered in the window behind her, which was currently pointing west.

“It can’t really all be going to end,” she said finally.

“And yet.” That was Janet.

“I feel like I just got here. I did just get here! Do we have any other evidence that it’s ending? I mean besides Ember’s say-so?”

“Sweetie, He is the god of us,” Josh said. “He probably knows.”

“He’s not infallible.”

“How do you know?”

“Because if He were infallible,” Janet put in, “He wouldn’t be such a twat all the time.”

Janet never shrank from taking both sides of an argument at once.

“You know,” Josh said, “I bet it’s because of sacrilege like that that the world is ending. Your earthy, irreverent sense of humor has doomed us all.”

“Poppy does have a point,” Eliot said. “Don’t forget that the first time we met Ember He was a prisoner. Martin Chatwin had Him locked away in Ember’s Tomb.”

“So He’s not omnipotent,” Josh said, clinging to his point. “He might still be infallible.”

“Either way, He never tells us everything He knows.” Eliot adjusted his crown, which had gotten crooked. “Not till it’s too late. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what’s going on now. All Ember is saying so far is that if it continues on its present course, the world is going to end. That doesn’t mean Fillory can’t be saved. Necessarily.”

He waited for somebody to jump in. Nobody did.

“What I’m suggesting is that maybe we, its kings and queens, could save it.”

“Sure,” Janet said. “We could put on a show! We could use the old barn!”

“I’m making a serious point.”

“Yes, and I am mocking your serious point to show how ludicrous it is.”

“Look, Ember is a god,” Eliot said, “but He’s a god only of Fillory. He’s limited. He doesn’t know everything there is to know about the wider universe. I think we should poke around some ourselves, see if He’s missed something. See how far our royal power can stretch. See if we can get an advance look at this so-called apocalypse. Maybe we can head it off at the pass.”

This was met with more silence, while everybody tried to think of a reason why what Eliot was proposing might be plausible or achievable.

“Yeah, no, of course,” Josh said. “I mean, we’re gonna go down fighting, right?”

“Right!” Loyal Poppy gave a swift nod of her sharp chin.

“So—what?” Janet said. “We just head back out into the wilderness? Looking for adventure? In whatever comes our way?”

“That’s right,” Eliot said. “That’s what we do.”

She weighed this suggestion.

“OK. But I’m coming this time. Last time I got stuck babysitting the country and you guys were gone for like a year and a half. When do we leave?”

“ASAP.”

“And what if we can’t?” Poppy said. “What if we can’t head it off?”

Janet shrugged.

“I guess we go back home. I mean, to our other home. Our former home.”

“That’s what the Neitherlands is for,” Josh said.

“Guys, listen.”

Eliot leaned forward. He put on his High King face and his High King voice. At times like this he wanted to look as much as possible like Elrond, Lord of Rivendell, from
The Lord of the Rings,
and he didn’t think he was a million miles off base. He made eye contact with each one of them in turn.

“I know I don’t speak for all of you. Not in this. But if Ember is right, if Fillory really is ending, I’m going to stay and see it end. This land is where I became who I am, who I was meant to be. Who I am is who I am in Fillory, and if Fillory dies, then I’ll die with it.” He studied his kingly fingernails. “I think I made that choice a long time ago. I don’t expect you to make it with me, but I want you to know, there isn’t any going back. Not for me.”

The crescent moon was already visible, early today, opposite the sunset, hooking a pale horn over the rim of the world. Eliot could picture it, the rim of the world, now that he’d been there, with its endless brick wall and its narrow gray strip of beach and its single door to the Far Side. The tower was high enough that sometimes you could kid yourself that you could really see it, on a clear day, which this was.

Josh cocked his head and screwed up his face and studied Eliot with one eye. He pointed at him, hesitantly.

“Fuck you.”

Eliot cracked his crooked grin. Everybody relaxed.

“Look, it sucks,” he said. “I hate it. But we’ll take it as far as we can, then we’ll walk away. We’ll go back to Earth, have a decent drink for a change. We’ll see what Quentin’s up to.”

“Oh, God,” Janet said. “I think death might be preferable.”

Everybody laughed except for Poppy, who was still thinking.

“I just wish—”

She broke off and gave a shaky sigh, to try to calm herself down. It mostly worked. Josh took her hand under the table.

“What is it, sweetie?”

“It’s just that if it all ends then the baby will never see Fillory! I know it’s silly, but I wanted the baby to be born here. I wanted him to see all this. Or her. I wanted us to have a little prince or princess!”

“They’ll still be one, baby,” Josh said. “Whatever happens. We’ll be royalty in exile. It still counts.”

“No,” Janet said. “It doesn’t.”

—

In the end it was only Janet and Eliot who went, for the simple reason that Josh couldn’t really ride a horse yet, not even a talking one who could coach him, and anyway Poppy was feeling sick, and Josh didn’t want to leave her.

So it was just the two of them. It felt very different from when they’d set out to fight the Lorians, or even from when they’d gone hunting in the old days. It was quieter. More somber. They rode out shortly after dawn through a small stone arch in the rear of the castle that let out on a narrow trail, hardly more than a goat track, that ran along the tops of the cliffs overlooking the bay. No fanfare, no confetti, no loyal retainers. They went alone.

“Which way?” Janet said.

Eliot pointed north. No particular reason, it was just good to be decisive in these situations.

The grass was still wet. The new pink sun hovered low above Whitespire Bay. Eliot felt very small and Fillory felt, for a change, very big and very wild around him. It was a while since it had felt like that. This was a serious quest, maybe the last one. What happened now truly mattered. Eliot had struggled before he found Fillory, he knew that: he drank too much, he found clever ways to be nasty to people, he never seemed to have an emotion that wasn’t either ironic or chemically generated. He’d changed in Fillory, and the thought of going back to that, of becoming that person again, frightened him. He wouldn’t die with Fillory, he’d meant that when he said it, but if Fillory died Eliot knew that something in him, something small but essential, wouldn’t survive either.

He wouldn’t miss this interminable summer though. It had a certain
fiery majesty to it, and he appreciated that, but at this point he was dying for the heat to break. A hot early morning wind surged through the trees, thick and strong like a flowing river, combing through the leaves, which were green but yellowing in the drought. The trees must know what was coming, he thought. If Julia were here she could have asked them.

Whitespire—the town as opposed to the castle or the bay—was of modest size, and it didn’t take them long to reach the outskirts. It was surrounded by a wall of irregular height and composition, a patchwork of building materials, brick and stone and mortar and timber and rammed earth, that had been demolished and rebuilt and then buttressed to keep the whole business from falling over as the town expanded and contracted over the centuries. Beyond the wall were fields full of people shoulder-deep in golden grain with huge baskets on their backs, like in a Brueghel painting. They fell silent as Eliot and Janet passed; most of them took a knee as well and bowed their heads. Eliot and Janet nodded—he’d long ago figured out that it was better to accept the fealty; modesty and self-deprecation were just confusing in a king. A half hour later they were through the fields and addressing themselves to the Queenswood north of the city.

They pulled up just short of it. There was no underbrush at the edge; the border with the fields around it was clean and clear. It wasn’t a natural wood. Eliot had a formal feeling, as if they were presenting themselves at a ball. Good evening, my old friend. Shall we dance once more?

“After you,” Janet said.

“Oh, fuck off.”

If you rode with a queen, the queen must enter the Queenswood first. That was the rule. The trees—huge, crotchy, black-barked oaks covered with gnarls and knots that always seemed to be about to form a face but never quite did—slid smoothly apart like stage scenery.

Janet urged her horse forward.

“Any idea where we’re going?”

“We discussed this. That’s not how quests work. We’re not going to think about it, we’re just going to journey.”

“I can’t not think about it.”

“Well, don’t overthink it.”

“I can’t help it!” Janet said. “Whatever, you can do the not-thinking for both of us.”

They left the bright morning behind for the permanent twilight of the deep forest. The clop-clopping of the horses’ hooves became a deeper tom-tom thump-clumping as the way went from cobblestones to ancient packed loam.

“What if nothing happens?” Janet said.

“Nothing is going to happen. At least at first. We have to be patient. That’s part of the quest.”

“Well, just so you know, I’m doing this for a week,” Janet said. “That’s it. Seven days.”

“I know what a week is.”

“The way I think of this,” she went on, “is it’s like we’re taking Fillory’s pulse. This is a diagnostic quest. We’re saying, Are you still functioning, you wondrous magic land you? Are you going to give us an adventure, and is this adventure going to be your way of telling us what’s wrong with you and how to fix you? If so, great. But if by a week we haven’t gotten into shit, I’m calling it. Time of death. Fillory’s flatlining.”

“A week is not a lot of time,” Eliot pointed out, “in which to decide the fate of an entire world.”

“Eliot, I love you like the brother I never had or wanted,” Janet said, “but actually a week is a really long time. After a week you and I are going to be really really sick of each other.”

Their path wound and wended and looped through the Queenswood, drawn apparently on the spur of the moment by the arboreal hivemind. One could try to steer one’s way through it, but this time they set the autopilot and let it ride and took what came. It was eerily quiet: the trees of the Queenswood tended to pick off fauna they didn’t care for—falling branches, strangling roots—which left only some deer and a few decorative birds. The forest floor was furred with vast herds of ferns and striped with light that slipped in through chance gaps in the canopy overhead. There were no fallen trunks. The Queenswood buried its dead.

The trees parted and parted before them—it was vaguely erotic, Eliot
thought, like endless pairs of legs spreading, ushering them on and on into more and more intimate spaces. They burrowed deeper and deeper in. Occasionally the path forked and he picked one fork or the other, for no reason but always without hesitating.

Like a magician producing a dove from a hidden pocket, the wood abruptly brought them to the circular meadow with the giant clock-tree inside it, the one where they’d found the Seeing Hare, and where Jollyby had died. The tree had a deep sunken scar where its clock had been, a blinded cyclops, but at least it wasn’t thrashing anymore. It was at peace. The sapling Eliot had extracted the watch from, to give to Quentin had died. He was sorry about that, but not so sorry that he wished he hadn’t done it. It was worth it to know that wherever he was Quentin at least had that with him.

They decided to spend the night there. If history was any guide, it was a good place to await something fantastical and portentous. Janet swung down out of the saddle.

“I’ll get us dinner.”

“They packed us dinner at the castle,” Eliot said.

“I ate it for lunch.”

In businesslike fashion, Janet pulled a short staff from a pair she wore crossed on her back and trotted off into the trees. Eliot had never seen her wield a staff before, but she held it as if she knew what to do with it.

“Hm,” he said.

It was a spooky place to be alone in, especially without his queen. The grass was dotted with wildflowers; he’d always meant to name some of the Fillorian flowers, but he’d never gotten around to it, and now he probably never would. It was too late. He heard a rustling, cracking sound from all sides which alarmed him until he realized that the trees along the edge of the meadow were helpfully dropping dead branches for firewood. They must have accepted his presence, he thought. It was strangely touching.

From one saddlebag Eliot extracted their tent, a neat canvas parcel, and tossed it on the soft grass. It unfolded and erected itself in the deepening twilight, with a sound like a sail being hoisted in a high wind.

—

In the morning a fine mist hung over the meadow, as if a heavy cannonade had just moments ago ceased firing, leaving behind puffs of silent white gunsmoke in the air.

They rode all day without incident—that’s two down, five to go, Janet said—and by sunset they’d reached the end of the green splendor of the Queenswood and entered the adjacent maze of gray firs called the Wormwood. On the third day they forded the Burnt River, never a pleasant experience, though rarely actually dangerous. Its black water was always choked with ashes, nobody knew why, and the nymph who lived in it was the glossy black of a beetle—a terrifying creature with silvery eyes who went up and down the river at night screaming.

Eliot proposed trying to talk to her, but Janet shuddered.