The Magician’s Land (31 page)

“Oh, thank God.”

Josh executed a well-practiced cannonball off the dock. Bombs away. So much for stealth. Janet descended the worn wooden ladder in a dignified fashion, like a normal person, until she was immersed up to her knees. She saw what Poppy meant—it did feel weird under there. Not wet, somehow, and like there was something trying to push her back up and out. She leaned down and put her head under.

And collapsed in an upside-down heap on wet ground. Janet felt thoroughly nauseated; her inner ear was objecting strenuously to what it was hearing from the rest of her senses. Something violently disorienting had just happened.

“Jesus!” She spat to keep herself from throwing up. Josh was already on his feet and jumping up and down.

“Again! Again!”

At least somebody was enjoying themselves.

They were under the water, the three of them, but inverted; that’s what had happened. They were standing on the underside of the surface of the swamp, which now was hard and slick. It was dark down here, but it was pretty clear what the main event was, namely a big castle that looked exactly like Whitespire but creepier, its battlements all lit up with flaring white torches. The sky above it—or the lake bed, or whatever it was—was black.

“An underwater, upside-down Castle Whitespire,” Josh said. “I’ll admit, that would not have been my first guess.”

“It’s a mirror image.”

“Mirrors invert left-right, not up-down,” Poppy said, with tedious correctness. “Plus the black-white thing isn’t—”

“OK, OK, I get it.”

They met no resistance, but the drawbridge was up, so the three of them flew over the wall and into the courtyard. They saw no one. Josh knocked on the thick door to the outer hall. No answer, but it opened easily. The place looked empty but not abandoned—it was neat and clean, and more torches smoked and sputtered along the walls.

“Spooky,” Poppy said.

They’d been standing there looking around aimlessly for a good minute before they even noticed the two guards standing frozen at the far end of the hall. Their eyes were dead—they looked about as alive as a couple of decorative urns.

“Oh,” Josh said. He called to them. “Hey, guys! What is this place?”

The guards didn’t answer. They wore somber, funerary versions of the Whitespire uniform, and that’s what it was with their eyes: their pupils were really dilated, like they were on drugs. Which you couldn’t really blame them, working down here. When Josh approached them they didn’t salute him or even come to attention, but they did move: they crossed their halberds in front of the door to bar his way.

“Oh, come on,” he said.

They lowered their weapons in his direction. Josh backpedaled.

“Got left!”

An ice axe from Janet took the one on the left straight in the forehead, sticking in his skull like it would have in a stump, splitting his helmet and his head right between his eyes. It was a beautiful throw. He dropped his weapon with a clatter and sank to a kneeling position but by some quirk of anatomy he didn’t quite fall over. He did bleed though, the dark flood pouring over his face and spreading out across the stone floor.

“Or,” Poppy said, “we could try diplomacy.”

Josh and Poppy both cast kinetic spells on the one on the right, lofting him bobbing into a corner of the ceiling like a lost balloon at a birthday party. He dropped his halberd, and it clanged and bounced once on the floor. Janet felt a little embarrassed for him.

“I can’t believe you killed yours, Janet,” Josh said.

“Please. I don’t even think these guys are human. They don’t make any noise, did you notice?”

“Bleed though.”

“Your mother bled when I—”

“Shh!” Poppy peered into the darkness the guards had been protecting. She held up a hand.

“—when I popped her cherry,” Janet finished in a whisper.

“That doesn’t even make sense!” Josh hissed.

“Shh!”

They shushed. In the silence, the dry, irregular sound of trotting hooves on stone. With some effort, her foot on the guard’s cloven head, Janet rocked her axe back and forth till it came free.

—

A half hour’s worth of not very dignified hide-and-seek followed. It was hard sometimes to figure out where exactly the sound was coming from. They padded along as silently as they could, trying to get a fix on it, cocking their heads and whacking each other on the shoulders and pointing and accusing each other of making too much noise in heated whispers.

Every once in a while they could hear a voice along with the hooves, muttering to itself, just on the edge of hearing:

“Yes, yes, just along here. Up we go. Right this way. Carefully now.”

Who was He talking to? It was annoying.

The voice didn’t sound at all like Ember’s Olympian baritone. One time they realized they could take a shortcut, and they nearly headed Him off—they got a glimpse of His flickering haunches disappearing up a spiral staircase.

“A close shave!” they heard Him say. “Nearly caught!”

This was followed by a weird high quavering moan.

The three of them stopped in a vaulted gallery they knew from Castle Whitespire. Aboveground it would have been brimming with sunlight. Here they looked out the windows into depthless blackness. They could see the bright ring of water far below them, the surface of the upside-down swamp, a drowned sun swimming in it like a yolk in a silvery egg. Once in a while a few upside-down fish skittered past the windows.

The hooves started again, closer.

“I don’t get this,” Josh said. “Dude is a god. If He really wanted to get away from us He would just apparate or whatever. Either He wants to be caught or He’s leading us into a trap.”

“Let’s find out,” Janet said.

Now that was some leadership right there.

“I think He’s heading up to the solarium,” Poppy said.

“Great, then He’s stuck. No way out.”

“So we’ve got Him trapped.”

“We could even just stay down here,” Josh said, “and not go up there.”

“What, and starve Him out?”

Even Poppy rolled her eyes.

“Let’s get this over with and get out of here. This place is creeping me out.”

“Yup.” Janet was coming around to Poppy. ’Nother couple of decades and they might even start getting along. Janet unslung her axes, her Sorrows, and took the stairs at a sprint. You don’t live in a castle full of spiral stairs without getting calves of adamantium. She heard Poppy whoop and head up behind her.

That quavering moan again.

“Goodness!” the voice said, up ahead, a genteel English tenor, not in its first youth, with a wee bit of a chuckle in it. It was an Edwardian comedy voice. “Alarums and excursions!”

It pissed her off. The fucking Chalk Man was down on his hands and knees. You think this is a joke? Alarums and excursions? I’ll show you a fucking alarum. Pounding up the steps, right behind Him now, she got a whiff of His divine oily wool, weirdly sweet. Even she was feeling the burn in her legs. She should have stretched.

“Stop! Jesus! We just want to talk!”

We just want to talk about how fucking dead You’ll be after we kill You.

Topside the solarium was a lovely domed chamber, but down here it was miserably gloomy in spite of the four torches that guttered in its four corners. Umber paused just long enough for Janet to get her first good look at him: He looked like His brother, obviously, enormous, with
big ribbed horns swept back from his brow like they’d been brilliantined, except that where Ember was golden, Umber was a deep storm-cloud gray.

“Off we go!” He called.

One of the windows lit up with sunlight; after an hour under the swamp it was like looking straight into an arc lamp. Umber had opened up a portal to the world above.

He surged forward, made one preparatory gallop and then leaped through the window, did a half barrel roll in midair, and landed upside-down on—the sky? The ceiling? No, it was just grass. Up there the gravity was flopped the other way. He stuck the landing.

“Haven’t been up here for a while,” Umber remarked, trotting away. “Closer than you think!”

Janet’s shoulders sank. Dammit! We could chase this guy forever and never catch him. But Poppy, just reaching the top, was totally undaunted. Without breaking stride—in fact she picked up speed—she ran straight at the portal, planted her hands on the windowsill, did a handstand, let the gravity flip as she broke the plane, and landed on her feet on the grass, upside-down with respect to Janet and facing her.

It made Janet want to puke just watching her. And she wasn’t even pregnant.

“Come on!” Poppy said brightly.

She spun around to face the receding ram-god. Even Umber seemed dismayed by her sprightliness. He startled like a mountain goat hearing a distant gunshot.

“Good-bye!” He called, and He was off like a greyhound, and the portal winked out.

Janet took a half step toward it, too late.

“Just like a fucking god,” she said.

She was still standing there, arms crossed, glaring at it, when Josh came heaving up the top step like he was trying to get himself out of a swimming pool.

“I am gonna sack that guy’s nutcastle,” he croaked.

She brought him up to speed on the departed god, his absent wife, etc. He seemed oddly unperturbed.

“By the way, your wife is pretty impressive. I think I underestimated her. So kudos on that.”

“Thanks, Janet.” Josh was pleased. As he should be. “I never thought I’d hear you say the word
kudos.
”

“Doesn’t count cause we’re underwater.”

“So he did a portal, huh,” Josh said. “Did you get a good look?”

“Hills,” Janet said. “Grass. Sky.”

Josh nodded, saying nothing, but his eyes were busy. He sketched rapidly in the air with his thick fingers, invisible diagrams and sigils.

“East coast. Northeast.”

“What are you doing? Oh.” She forgot Josh knew like three times as much as anybody else about portals.

He was already lost to concentration and his imaginary magic finger painting, which he accompanied now with satisfied grunts and hums. Janet had to give him credit: when he understood something, he really understood the hell out of it.

“Pfft,” he said. “You gotta be kidding me.”

He got up and began pacing around the room, looking around like he was tracking a mosquito nobody else could see.

“I figured He must be working on some, like, special secret divine transport grid that us mere mortals are locked out of, by virtue of our fallen mortal nature. Right? But not even! So where exactly was He standing when He threw this thing open?”

Janet gestured vaguely.

“Show me,” Josh said. “I need to see it or it doesn’t work.”

Janet sighed.

“If you look at my ass I’m telling Poppy.”

She got down on all fours, Umber-style, and reenacted the sequence exactly. Josh nodded gravely, staring at her ass.

Then he walked over to the window where the portal had been and pressed his palms against it. He rubbed the glass in slow circles, and it was like he was doing a grave rubbing: wherever his hands went, a ghostly, silvery afterimage of the portal appeared, or rather the view through the portal: a range of low hills, but oddly regular. Each hill was perfectly smooth, and more or less the same height as the others, and
they were arranged in perfect straight rows. On top of each hill was a single tree, an oak tree by the look of them.

“Where the hell is that?” Josh said.

“Chankly Bore,” Janet said. It had to be. Nowhere else like it. “Up north next to Broken Bay.”

“Weird.” Josh leaned in to study it, put his nose against the glass. “Chankly Bore. Is ‘chankly’ an adjective? Modifying ‘bore’?”

“Some mysteries it doesn’t pay to pry into. Josh, can you get us there?”

“Can I?” He snapped his fingers, once, twice. “Almost had it.” Snap. On the third try the ghostly image burst into full color, hi-def, streaming live. “There you are, my queen.”

—

Janet wound up inching herself across the low windowsill feet first, on her bum, her face chalk white, allowing the gravity to get a grip on her feet and drag them downward to where Josh could reach up to receive them from the other side. The gravitational sheer was just not something she could get her mind around, let alone her body—she froze halfway, looking a bit like Winnie-the-Pooh stuck halfway in and halfway out of Rabbit’s burrow. In the end he had to yank her bodily through.

Then she was standing on Fillorian soil again, less than four hours after she had boldly set forth in search of the rogue god Umber, of Whom there was no sign. She ruminated, again, on the eternal return, the widening gyre, that seemed to govern human history. There is a tide in the affairs of men. A slack tide, that heaves up wrack and slime and rotting seaweed and deposits them on the sand, like a cat leaving the corpse of a rat on your doorstep. Then it slinks back in search of more.

They’d been so close. They could have solved everything. And now they wouldn’t. He’d gotten away.

At any rate the Chankly Bore was a majestic sight in person. The hills ran on into the distance in their rows, not perfectly regular, she saw now, but almost, like the rubber dimples of a nonslip mat writ very, very large. Each one had its own tree at the summit, like a candle on top of a
cupcake, and each tree was different. In places the flanks of the hills had been bleached a tawny golden yellow by the endless unyielding iron summer.

There was Poppy, waiting for them, a quarter-mile off. She pointed—wait a minute, maybe all wasn’t lost after all. Umber wasn’t hiding, He was standing right there, looking at them, at the summit of one of the hills—one row in, three over. He wasn’t even moving! They could see Him totally plainly!

She started toward Him.

“Don’t run!” she shouted, pleaded even, as if the sound of her voice could keep Him there. “Don’t run away! Please! Just stay there!”

Umber didn’t run. He waited for them.

He didn’t even look especially concerned as the three humans, two queens and a king, plus a royal heir in utero, came straggling up the slope. As backdrops for earthshaking events went, the Chankly Bore was a corker. The view was sublime. Janet wondered if someone had planted the trees on the tops of the hills or if they’d just grown like that.