The Magician’s Land (25 page)

—

I wouldn’t even have written this much had it not been for the events that have overtaken Britain and the world in the past three years. They have driven me to extremes of desperation I would never have thought possible. There is no telling now who will triumph in the present conflict, and there is every chance that the Germans will overrun England itself before it is all over.

Perhaps help will come. Perhaps Martin is able to perceive events in this world, from wherever he is, and he will come back; if he doesn’t care to I would think that at least Jane would. If they are unable to intervene in the affairs of this world, perhaps Ember or Umber could. That would be a welcome sight: my long-lost brother and sister and the two Great Rams of Fillory, aflame with power, marching abreast on Berlin to chivvy Hitler out of his bunker like a stoat.

But they haven’t come. And I am beginning to think that they are not going to come.

And that is why I am writing these words. This book is a memoir, a secret history, but it is also an act of calculated provocation. I am at present with the 7th Armoured Division in Tobruk, in Libya, preparing for a battle tomorrow with Rommel and his Panzers. I, Rupert Chatwin, a king of Fillory, who rode a griffin against the armies of the Whispering King, who beat the Wight of
the West in single combat and broke his back, will fight the Germans in an obsolete Crusader tank full of lice and the stink of me and my comrades-in-arms, that has already leaked oil across half of northern Africa.

If I survive I will send this home with instructions that it be published six months from now unless word arrives from me. The news that Fillory is real will be splashed across every paper in Britain—unless you agree to take me and my family back. Yes, I address you directly: Ember and Umber, Martin and Jane. If not me then save my wife and my child, your only nephew, that is all I ask. Surely it is within your power. Surely you can find it in your hearts.

But if that is still not enough, then I offer you goods in trade. I was not completely honest before: when I left Castle Blackspire that day I did not leave empty-handed. Blackspire is Whitespire’s twin, and I knew where the treasure room was, and I knew how to open it. Even in my fear and grief, I was still selfish enough and spiteful enough to plunder it for whatever I could carry. I wasn’t an adept like Martin, but even I could recognize power when I saw it. I took a blade, and a spell, and I believe they are very powerful indeed. They are of the old workings. The very strongest stuff.

You can come and try to take them from me, but I think you will not. Here: I offer them to you freely if you will do this thing.

For the love of God, Ember and Umber, Martin and Jane, or for the love of whatever it is that you hold sacred, if you are reading these words, take us back to Fillory. For all the ways I have betrayed you I beg your forgiveness. I will atone for my sins any way you like, if you will open the door again, one last time, for me and my family. I was once a king of Fillory, but I will return as your lowliest servant if you will only open the door. I am begging you now. When I turn this page I want you to open the door.

—

The book ended there.

Plum let it lie open on her lap. It felt like it weighed approximately one thousand pounds. She couldn’t look at Quentin. She didn’t want to
share this moment with him. Maybe she would in a moment, but not yet.

They hadn’t come. They hadn’t saved him, and Rupert’s stolen goods had stayed stolen, and he’d died there in the desert. Though his wife and child—Plum’s grandfather—had survived anyway. The blade: that was what Betsy took. At first Plum wondered about the spell, but it was there too, cut up and bound into the notebook at the end, on lumpy parchment slightly smaller than the pages around it: a dozen leaves of close writing in a foreign script.

Then it all went blurry, because Plum’s eyes were full of tears. She had denied it all her life, that any of it was real, but not anymore. Not after this, and not after what the girl in the mirror had shown her. It had really happened. It wasn’t just a story, it was a true story. It had found her, drawn her into its pages, and now it was time for her to play her part in it. Fillory had chewed up her ancestors and spat them out. Now it was hungry again and coming for her, and she would have to find a way to face it.

She put her head in her hands and leaked some more tears, there in the lobby of the Amenia train station. After five minutes she got up and went to the snack bar for some napkins to blow her nose on.

“Quentin,” she said when she got back. “I think Fillory was real.” It was hard to force the words out. They didn’t want to be said. “I know it sounds crazy, but I think he was telling the truth. I think it was all real.”

Quentin only nodded. He didn’t look surprised. If anything she suspected him of having dabbed away a tear or two when she wasn’t looking.

“It is real, Plum,” he said. “I’ve been there.”

T
he townhouse stood on a back street in the West Village, one of the oddly angled ones where the orderly grid of Manhattan starts to break down into chaos below Fourteenth Street. It didn’t get much traffic, which was part of the point: it was a discreet address. Plum said she’d bought it with money from her grandparents, her share of the Fillory royalties that they’d put in trust, intending to use it as a crash pad during her glorious postgraduation future in New York. Now she and Quentin were crashing there a little early.

From the outside it looked dark and deserted, and they were careful to maintain that appearance. A lot of people wanted that suitcase, and Quentin didn’t know who they would come after first, him and Plum or Asmodeus, but they would be coming sooner or later, and probably they would hit the softer target first, and that was not Asmodeus. For now they would lose themselves in the big city.

Nobody had touched the house since the previous owner moved out. There wasn’t even any furniture, so they sat on the dusty wooden floor in the front room. They were running on empty, worn out from the disaster of the robbery, and then worn out all over again in a different way by reading Rupert’s journal, but Quentin forced himself to set up a thin perimeter of magical defense before they slept. Nothing fancy, standard magical tradecraft, and the bare minimum of it, but it was enough to take the house off the grid and make it opaque to anybody who was poking around, though not so opaque as to be suspicious.
He didn’t bother with the upper floors. They’d just stay out of them for now.

Then they collapsed on the floor of the living room, still in their coats and hats. They’d have to get some couches in here, or at least some sleeping bags. And some food. And some heat. But not yet. Quentin hadn’t slept the night before, and he’d thrown his back out in the fall, and he was starting to be in some serious pain. It had happened to him a couple of times before. Up through around twenty-five he’d never even thought about his back: it was a balanced, frictionless, self-regulating system. Now it felt like a busted gearbox into which somebody had chucked a handful of sand.

Lying on the hard floor made it hurt less. Quentin thought about how wrong things had gone. Things so often went wrong. Was it him? Was he making the same mistake over and over again? Or different mistakes? He’d like to think he was at least making different mistakes.

Plum did fall asleep, right there on the floor, with her face smushed into her black parka from the limo for a pillow. But Quentin didn’t, not yet.

The journal had affected them in different ways. For Plum it had been a reckoning, a massive correction, that finally forced her to see that Fillory was real and that in some inescapable way she was part of it. On the train he’d told her the whole story of his life there, from beginning to end, as bridges and stations and other trains flashed by in the window, and lots full of idle municipal snowplows, and backyards full of overturned play structures. He told her about everything, Alice and Julia and all the rest.

But for him it was different, and while Plum slept he sat up, leaning against the wall, and read the journal again. There was news in it: if Rupert was to be believed then Umber was the one who’d turned Martin into the Beast, in exchange for some obscure, grotesque sacrifice. That threw Quentin as much as anything else. There was something seriously wrong with one of Fillory’s gods, or at least there had been. And if Umber did help Martin, why would Martin have killed him, as Jane Chatwin said he did? It made no sense.

None of it got him any closer to Alice either, or not that he could see.
They needed a new plan, a way forward, maybe even another job. They’d be ready next time—the bird had betrayed them, it hadn’t played by the rules, but now Quentin got that there never had been any rules. But first they had to rest and build themselves back up. Quentin had to get his back working again. He also had some hard thinking to do.

Plum woke up at dawn, bursting with energy again—she was indefatigable that way. She always had to be doing something. Going outside seemed like a bad idea, with the whereabouts and intentions of the bird still unknown, so they stayed in. They ordered in a lot of take-out food and some cheap insta-furniture, and Plum set about fixing up her house.

Somebody had disco-ized it in the 1970s, and then later it had been de-disco-ized, mostly, but there were still trace amounts of avocado carpeting, and the outlines of mirrored tiles that had been glued to the walls. A space-age chandelier that looked like Sputnik had escaped the purge too. But the house had good bones, and it still had its broad-planked wooden floors, and its elegant many-paned, energy-inefficient wooden-framed windows with nice old shutters. There were a lot of nice twiddly plaster ornaments around the ceiling. It had some integrity, this house.

Plum knew more about this kind of magic than Quentin did, and Quentin was hobbled by his bad back, so he acted as semiskilled magical laborer-consultant to her hypercompetent general contractor. Under her direction they arrested the slow collapse of the back wall, which was being undermined by rainwater because the drainpipe was busted and the drain in the back patio was clogged. No one had updated the electrics and plumbing since approximately the 1930s, and the walls were stuffed full of ancient cloth-wrapped wiring and lead pipes that were right on the point of dissolving. They shored everything up as best they could. It felt good to be doing something simple and concrete and achievable.

They cast all the cleaning spells they could think of, until they’d removed enough dust and dirt and scum and nicotine residue from the walls and floors and sinks and tubs to make a whole other house out of. They got the furnace going, and the gas and water. But while Quentin was working with his hands his mind was working on other things. All his enterprises were in ruins. He should have been thrashed by this,
flattened, but instead . . . with all of that gone, and his father dead, and Mayakovsky’s coins in his pocket, he felt strangely free. It was time to take stock.

At some point somebody had gone through the top floor of the house and demolished all its interior walls, leaving behind only four lonely load-bearing columns of brick with bits of plaster still clinging to them, thus making a single long chamber, front to back. Plum continued to roam the house wearing overalls and work gloves, attacking and repairing targets of opportunity; she didn’t want his help, and moreover his back was still killing him. So he went up there to clear his mind.

Using a chunk of kids’ street chalk recovered from a locker under the stairs Quentin traced out a classical labyrinth pattern on the floor. He did it from memory, based on the ancient Greek Lemnian pattern, and it took him quite a few tries to make the geometry of it work out, but that itself was a solid meditative exercise. The path wound and coiled around the four pillars. Labyrinths were old sorcery, and subtle: good for recharging one’s magical resources when they were running low.

When it was done he hung sheets over the windows, which looked cheap and tatty but produced a dim, diffuse, immaterial light. He started at the beginning and slowly limped through it, again and again. The walking freed his thoughts; it also made his back feel a bit better.

His mind wandered back to Rupert’s journal, and on the spell bound into the back of it. Rupert had never cast it, as far as Quentin could tell, nor had he been able to figure out what it did. Now Quentin wondered. It was a treasure pillaged from the black underbelly of Fillory. It had to be something valuable.

And there was something fateful in the way it had come to them. What had Rupert called it? One of the old workings? Maybe it was war magic, something that could help them if the bird came after them. Maybe it was something deep and strange and strong enough that it could help Alice.

He went and got the spell and read through it as he walked. Before long he could walk the maze without even looking up from it. His work on the page from the Neitherlands wasn’t going to go to waste, that was for sure, at least in terms of having sharpened his ability to construe
gnarly magical rhetoric in languages that he had a very dim grasp of. It had been a long time since he tried to read archaic Fillorian, let alone its associated notations for magical gestures.

The further into it he got the less it looked like what he’d expected. He was anticipating something military: either a very powerful shield or a very deadly weapon or both. Maybe concealment, maybe some kind of cataclysmic weather effect. But it didn’t feel like any of those. It wasn’t shaped right somehow.

For one thing the spell was long as hell—you could transcribe most spells in a couple of pages, max, because there just wasn’t that much to them, but this one went on and on for a good twenty. There was a lot of formal business toward the front end of the casting that looked purely ceremonial, but you never knew for sure what you could leave out, so you had to do it all.

What’s more it required a lot of materials, including some pretty exotic items. All in all it was a bear, and it would have cost somebody a lot of time and effort and money to cast it. It was worse than the bond-breaking spell (which they’d never even got to cast at all, dammit).

Still, there was something elegant about it too. It was a mess, a rat’s nest, but under all the fiddly bits and the ornamentation there was a structure, a complex one. Later stages of the enchantment looped in elements of earlier ones, piling effect on effect, each one multiplying the next—in its way it was a thing of real beauty. For a while he wondered if it might be a summoning, along the lines of the one Fogg used to harvest his cacodemons, or the spell that Julia and her friends had attempted at Murs with such disastrous results.

But he didn’t think so. This wasn’t like any magic he’d ever seen before. Something about the spell made his fingers twitch—it was as if it wanted to be cast. He left the labyrinth and took it to Plum.

“I’ve been reading through that spell,” he said. “The one your great-grandfather left you.”

“Uh-huh.”

Plum was down in the basement, standing on a ladder and doing something involved to the joists, Quentin couldn’t tell exactly what.

“It’s interesting,” he said.

“I would imagine.”

“I’ve really never seen anything like it.”

“Uh-huh.”

She put her palm on one massive beam and pressed, and it cracked and groaned, and the whole house seemed to shift slightly. Plum studied the results.

“Structural stuff,” she explained.

“So you don’t mind if I check it out a little further?”

“I give you my blessing.”

“Don’t you want to look at it yourself?”

She shook her head without looking at him. She was completely absorbed.

“From what I saw I couldn’t read the script. Can you?”

“More or less.”

“Well, keep me apprised.”

“I will.”

Starting small, he began to make preparations. The spell would require the magical equivalent of a clean room at a semiconductor factory, so Quentin cleansed and warded the top floor in any and all ways he could think of. He shocked the walls and timbers and joists and whatever else so hard the dust jumped out of the cracks, and then he shocked the dust.

Reluctantly, he took a wet cloth to his chalk labyrinth, but it had served its purpose. He floated a couple of big worktables up the stairs, bumping them against the walls of the stairwells and taking a few divots out of the plaster on the way, which Plum frowned at. He had to take them apart on the landing because he’d misestimated the size and they wouldn’t go through the door.

When you got down to brass tacks the spell wasn’t really one spell, it was more like fifteen or twenty different spells meshed together, to be executed in an overlapping sequence and in some cases simultaneously. Some of them could be cast in advance, some the day before, but most, the really big stuff, had to be done on the fly, in the moment. He had trouble holding it all in his head at one time. But what was it Stoppard said? Give a nerd a door he can close.

It was a detour from his search for Alice, but they were effectively under house arrest anyway, and something hunchy and instinctive kept egging him on. He made cautious forays out into the city for supplies, creeping along under domes of magical camouflage. The walls of the top-floor workshop began filling up with old books—reference books, botanicals, atlases, huge black split-spined grimoires, the leather all
craquelured
like desert hardpan, in tall wobbly stacks that swayed worryingly if you brushed against them. The tables began to be populated by a weird menagerie of steel tools and brass instruments and odd, asymmetrical glass containers.

Even as he ground away at the technicalities, some of the larger functionality of the enchantment was becoming clearer to him, its outlines picked out in a thousand trivial practical details. A lot of it seemed to have to do with space. There were spells in here designed to make it: literally to fabricate room, to weave together new space-time out of whole cloth. Here was a spell that expanded the space, blew it up like a balloon. This one shaped it. That other one stabilized the borders and made sure it didn’t collapse again into the nothingness whence it came.

But after that it got really arcane and hard to follow. There were spells to summon matter into being. This part sucked entropy out of the system, forcing the matter to organize; these pushed it through a series of very obscure transforms, some of which appeared to do nothing at all, or cancel out earlier ones. There was a lot of fiddly magical-matter stuff that would have mystified him if it didn’t overlap in places with the page from the Neitherlands. There was a whole laundry list of botanical spells, weather and water and wind magic, spells for shaping living rock. There was some really head-cracking bits that looked like attempts to reset the basic physical parameters of the universe: elementary charge, speed of light, gravitational constant. For all its elegant complexity the spell had a primitive, primordial feel to it. It was an old working, and a weird one, a relic of another age of another world. It felt like it hadn’t been cast in a thousand years.