The Magician’s Land (32 page)

Actually the entity most likely to know the answer to that question was ten yards away and closing. As she came up to Him she slowed, hardly believing that He wasn’t going to bolt the moment she came too close. His stupid woolly face was impassive.

“So,” Janet said, breathing hard from the climb, hands on knees, “did somebody plant these trees or did they just grow like that?”

“Do you like them?” Umber said. “They’re Mine of course. My brother did the hills, though I don’t think He meant to leave them like this. I’m sure He planned to scatter them about artfully later on, here and there. He liked to create the appearance of deep geological history. But I said, ‘No, no, they’re wonderful just as they are.’ And I put a single tree on top of each one, and they’ve stood like this ever since. From the First Day.

“One of them is a clock-tree now.” That short quavering moan again—that was how He laughed, it turned out. How incredibly annoying and affected. “Don’t know how she did that. A marvelous facility, that witch has.”

His manner was different from Ember’s. He was genteel, a little distracted, a little amused, a touch effeminate. Like if He’d been wearing
any clothes He would have worn a bow tie and a purple waistcoat. She couldn’t tell if He was sort of lofty and above it all or just a bit dotty.

But it didn’t matter because either way the moment was here. This was it, exposition time, He was going to tell them everything, all the missing pieces, and then they would know what to do to make Fillory live again—oh God, she realized, how she wanted it to live! She didn’t want to go back. She wanted to stay a queen!

Another case solved. After all that urgent chasing Janet suddenly felt like she had all the time in the world. A deep red sunset was getting going on the horizon, like a livid bruise just starting to show.

“You seem different from Your twin brother,” she said.

“From who?”

“Your brother? Ember? Your twin?”

“Oh! Oh.” He had a bit of a selective deafness thing going on. “We’re just fraternal.”

“We thought You were dead.”

“Oh, I know!” Whinnying laugh. Umber actually trotted once in a circle, like a cat chasing its tail, such was His pleasure. “But I was just pretending. Martin wanted it that way. Such a strange boy. Never came out of the Oedipal phase, I don’t think. He was always talking about his mummy in his sleep, wondering if his father was alive, that sort of thing.

“But of course You can get so much done when everyone thinks You’re dead. No interruptions. No one prays to a dead god, why would they? Though I did spend a while in the Underworld. Not that I had to, but I was getting into the spirit of the role. They wanted Me to be the lord of it, the dead did, but I wouldn’t. Imagine that—Me, god of the Underworld! I much preferred something less grand. More like, I don’t know, a visiting research fellow.

“But I did enjoy My time there. It’s so quiet. And the games are so charming! I could have stayed forever, I truly could have.

“And then I spent a few years as Ember’s shadow, following Him everywhere, trotting around under His feet. He never knew! I would have thought it would be obvious, with My name. But you know, Ember doesn’t think that way. He never did. He’s very literal about things.”

“But why would You do it in the first place?” Poppy was frowning
and shaking her head. “I mean not the shadow thing, but why would You turn Martin into the Beast?”

A deep sigh from Umber. He dropped His golden eyes to the turf.

“That turned out very badly. Very badly. He wanted it so much, and I thought it would be good for him. But in the end I was so disappointed in Martin—his behavior. Disgraceful. Do you know what it was about Martin? He had no self-control. None!”

“I would say that yes, that turned out extremely badly,” Josh said. “Not a lot of winners there.”

“Not even Martin, in the end,” Umber said sadly. “Poor boy. He wanted so terribly to stay here. He never stopped talking about it. And he was very brilliant. I couldn’t say no, could I? I wanted to give him what he wanted, I only want to give everybody what they want! But then the things he did. He gave up his humanity, you know, in order to stay here in Fillory. He sacrificed it to Me, and there’s a great deal of power in that. Even I was surprised at how much he got out of it.

“But then would you believe it, it was the best part of him! The rest of him turned out to be an absolute turd. I just went into hiding—he really might have killed Me if he could have found Me. Then later he said he did, and I let it stand. It’s disappointing.” Umber sighed and settled down onto the grass, making Himself comfortable. “So disappointing. We had to change the rules because of it. That’s why We let you lot stay, you know. We don’t send the kings and queens home anymore.”

“But why did you take it?” Josh said. “I mean his humanity?”

“Well—” And the ram looked down again, this time coyly embarrassed. He trailed one of His fore-hooves in the grass. “I suppose I had a notion that if I possessed Martin’s humanity, I could be king of Fillory. As well as god. A god-king, you might say. It was just an idea. But then I’ve been enjoying being dead so much, I haven’t even tried!”

This conversation wasn’t going quite the way Janet had thought it would. She didn’t expect to like Umber, but she hadn’t expected to hate Him so much. She was hoping for more of a charming-supervillain type. That she could relate to. But Umber wasn’t charming. He had a way of not taking responsibility for things. She may have been a bitch, but at least she copped to it.

“This is all really fascinating,” she said. “Truly. But it’s not actually why we wanted to talk to You.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Which by the way,” Josh said, “since we’re talking, why did You sort of run away just then, and then stop running away?”

“Oh!” Umber looked surprised. “I thought you’d like that. Bit of a chase. Wasn’t that what you wanted?”

“Not really, no,” Janet said.

“Though I did like the part when I saved everything,” Josh said. “That was good. You know, with the portal.”

“There!” Umber said. “You see? And you needed the exercise too.”

This had the effect of canceling out Josh’s triumph. Poppy patted his arm.

“Well, whatever,” he said. “Look, what about this apocalypse thing? End of the world. How are we going to stop that? That’s Your thing, right?”

Umber actually looked wounded.

“The apocalypse? Oh, no. That’s not one of Mine.”

“It’s not?” Janet said. “Wait.”

“Goodness no. Why would I do that?”

The two queens and the king looked at each other. Something began dying a little inside Janet. Oh yes—hope. That’s what people called it.

“But if You’re not—?” Poppy said. “Then how are we going to—?”

The astonishment was plain even on Umber’s inhuman face.

“Stop it? You can’t think I would know! I don’t think you
can
stop it. How would you stop an apocalypse? It’s just nature. It happens by itself.”

“So you can’t . . .” Josh said, but he trailed off.

“But then—” Janet said. She couldn’t finish her sentence either. She’d been sure this was it. The answer, the end of the quest, at last. She’d been so sure.

The impulse came over Janet out of nowhere; nowhere was where she got a lot of her best impulses these days. It suddenly all linked up in her head: Umber had taken Martin’s humanity, and He made it all sound like a lark, like what else could He do? But Martin had become the
Beast, the Beast had bitten off Penny’s hands and crushed Quentin’s collarbone and made Alice turn herself into a niffin. And he’d eaten that girl back in school, what was her name. That all went back to Umber.

She ripped one of her axes from its strap on her back and in the same motion clouted Umber in the head with it. She didn’t even have time to put an ice blade on it, it was just a cold steel spanner straight to the ram-jowls.

“Yah!”

Umber’s eyes went wide. She did it again, a lot harder this time, and His front knees buckled.

These crazy axes. She’d give the Foremost that, he hadn’t oversold them. They were everything he’d said they were and more. You could hit a god with them, and He would feel it.

Umber started to rise, shaking His long muzzle, befuddled more than anything else, and Janet hammered Him again, and again, and again, and His legs folded under Him and He sank down and lost consciousness. Then she hit Him once more, cracked Him right on His ear, knocked a tiny chip out of one of those big horns. Blue sparks flew.

“That’s for everything You did! And everything You didn’t do! You fucking jerk!”

“Janet!” Poppy said, losing her cool a bit for once. “Jesus!”

“Who cares? It’s not Him. He can’t help us. He doesn’t know anything.” Plus who knows when was the next time she’d get to beat down a god? Especially one who so obviously deserved it? Umber sprawled on His side, unconscious, the tip of His thick tongue poking out of His slack mouth.

“Loser.” She spat on Him. “You could never have been a king anyway. You’re too much of a pussy.”

The others just stared at her, and at the slumbering god, laid out on the putting-green grass under a tree on top of a hill in the Chankly Bore.

“That was for Alice,” she said. “And, you know, Penny’s hands. All that stuff.”

“No, we got it,” Josh said. “Message received.”

“We should go,” Poppy said.

But they didn’t, or not yet. In the distance, through a gap in the
Nameless Mountains, they could see that the sun had almost reached the rim of the world. They watched it setting.

But then it didn’t quite set. It didn’t quite make it. Instead of dipping below the horizon, the sun seemed to come to rest on it. Bit by bit, increment by increment, its lower edge flattened, and distant flares and gouts of flame began to rise up around it, complicating the sunset. There was a flash of light, then another, a distant bombardment. The sound reached them a few seconds later, a crackling boom, and the tremor a few seconds after that, a heavy industrial vibration passing through the earth, like someone was applying a belt sander to the rim of the world. A few leaves shook down from the tree behind them.

“What,” Josh said, “the fuck is that.”

Janet wished she didn’t get it, but she did.

“It’s the end.” She sat down on the crown of a hill in the Chankly Bore and hugged her knees. “It’s starting. We’re too late. The apocalypse has begun.”

A
lice slept. She slept for twenty hours give or take, in Quentin’s bed, flat on her back, mouth propped open, perfectly still under a thin sheet, not once stirring or rolling over. Quentin stayed awake as long as he could watching her, listening to her faint wheezing. Her hair was long and lank and matted. Her skin was pale. Her fingernails needed cutting, and she was bruised on one arm from when she’d fallen to the floor. But she was healthy and whole. She was her.

Quentin looked at her and looked at her: she was finally back. He felt like the rest of his life could begin now. He didn’t know if he was still in love with Alice, but he knew that being in the same room with her made him feel real and whole and alive in a way that he’d forgotten he could. When he couldn’t stay awake any longer the others took over.

He was downstairs eating breakfast at noon, getting ready for another shift, when she woke up.

“She said she was hungry,” Plum said.

Quentin looked up from his Cheerios to see her in the doorway, wrapped in Plum’s pale blue bathrobe, looking like the palest, most wan, most precious, most vulnerable creature he’d ever seen. There were purple shadows under her eyes.

He stood up, but he didn’t go to her. He didn’t want to crowd her. He wanted to take things at her pace. He’d had a lot of time to think about this moment, and his one resolution was that he wasn’t going to get too excited. Calm was what she needed. He was going to pretend he
was greeting her at the arrivals gate after she’d been away on a long, disastrous journey.

It was easier than he thought. He was just happy to see her. There were no road maps for this, but they would figure it out. They had all the time in the world now.

“Alice,” he said. “You’re probably hungry. I’ll get you something to eat.”

Alice didn’t answer, just shuffled over to the table, then stared down at it as if she were uncertain as to how precisely this apparatus worked. He put out a hand, to guide her maybe, but she shied away. She didn’t want to be touched.

She lowered herself cautiously into a chair. He got her some Cheerios. Did she like those? He couldn’t remember. It was all they had. He placed the bowl in front of her, and Alice regarded it like it was a bowl of fresh vomit.

Probably niffins didn’t eat. Probably this was her first meal in seven years, because this was her first time having a body in seven years. After another minute she clumsily dipped a spoon in it. There was a sense of everybody trying not to stare at her. She chewed for a few seconds, robotically, like somebody who’d seen some crude diagrams of what chewing food looked like but had never actually tried it before. Then she spat it out.

“Told you we should’ve got Honey Nut,” Plum said.

“Give her time,” he said. “I’ll run out for some fresh fruit. Fresh bread. Maybe that would go down easier.”

“She might be thirsty.”

Right. Quentin got her a pint glass of water. She drank it in one long swallow, then she drank another, gave a colossal belch and stood up.

“Are you all right?” Plum said. “Quentin, why isn’t she talking?”

“Because fuck yourself,” Alice said in a hoarse whisper. She went back upstairs and back to bed.

—

Quentin and Eliot and Plum sat around the kitchen table. The fridge had developed an annoying fault whereby it hummed loudly until somebody got up and gave it a shove, the way one would get a sleeper to stop
snoring, whereupon it fell silent for half an hour and then started humming again.

“She should be eating,” Quentin said. He got up. He couldn’t stay sitting down; as soon as he sat he bounced back up. He’d sit down when Alice was better. “She should at least be hungry. Maybe she’s sick, maybe we put her body back together wrong. Maybe she has a perforated liver.”

“She’s probably just full,” Eliot said. “Probably she ate a bunch of people right before we turned her back and she just has to sleep it off.”

Quentin couldn’t even tell if it was funny or not. He didn’t know where the line was anymore. And whatever Eliot said, he’d spent almost as much time at Alice’s bedside as Quentin had.

“She’ll be fine,” Plum said. “Stop fussing. I mean, I was sort of expecting her to be grateful for us having saved her from being a monster, but that’s OK. I don’t need to be thanked.”

“She looks good, anyway. Hasn’t aged a day.”

“I keep wondering what it was like, being a niffin,” Quentin said.

“Probably she doesn’t even remember.”

“I remember everything.”

Alice stood at the foot of the stairs. Her face was puffy from all the sleep. She came in and sat down at the table again, moving more confidently now but still like an alien unaccustomed to Earth’s gravity. She seemed to be waiting for something.

“We got some fruit,” Quentin said. “Apples. Grapes. Some prosciutto.” He’d grabbed whatever looked yummy and reasonably fresh at the fancy market around the corner.

“I would like a double scotch with one large ice cube in it,” Alice said.

Oh.

“Sure. Coming right up.”

She still wasn’t making eye contact with anyone, but it seemed like progress. Maybe it would relax her—help her get past the shock. So long as her liver wasn’t actually perforated.

Quentin took down the bottle, feeling very conscious that he was making things up as he went along. He clunked an ice cube into the glass and poured whiskey over it. The thing was not to be afraid of her.
He wanted her to feel loved. Or maybe that was too much, but he wanted her to feel safe.

“Anybody else?” he called from the kitchen.

The silence in the room was stony.

“Right then.”

He poured one for himself too, neat. He was damned if he was going to let his newly resurrected ex-girlfriend have her first drink in seven years alone. Plum and Eliot were both for once at a loss for anything to say. He poured them scotches too, just in case they changed their minds.

Alice slurped her whiskey down thirstily, then she took Plum’s and drank that too. When she was done she stared into the empty tumbler, looking disappointed. Eliot discreetly moved his glass out of her reach. Quentin thought of getting her the bottle, then thought maybe he shouldn’t. She should have more water.

“Do you want—?” he began.

“It hurt,” Alice said. She let out a shuddering breath. “If you want to know. Have you ever wondered, Quentin? Did you ever really try to imagine what it felt like—really try? I remember thinking, maybe it won’t hurt, maybe I’ll get off easy. You never know, maybe magic fire is different. I’ll tell you something: it’s not different. It hurt like a bastard. It hurt approximately as much, I would guess, as being on fire with regular fire would. It’s funny, the worst pain I ever felt till then was getting my finger caught in a folding chair. I guess I’d been lucky.”

At the memory she stopped and looked into her glass again, to make absolutely sure she hadn’t missed anything.

“You’d think your nerves wouldn’t go up that high, but they do. You’d think they’d have an upper limit. Why would it be possible for people to feel so much pain? It’s maladaptive.”

No one had an answer.

“And then it didn’t hurt at all. I can remember when the last bits of me went—it was my toes and the top of my head at the same time—and then the pain was completely gone, and I wanted to cry with relief because it was over. I was just so relieved that my body was gone. It couldn’t hurt me anymore.

“But I didn’t cry, did I? I laughed. And I kept on laughing for seven
years. That’s what you’ll never get. You’ll never, never, never get it.” She stared down at the tabletop. “It was all a joke and the joke never got old.”

“But it wasn’t a joke,” Quentin said quietly. “It was the most terrible thing any of us had ever seen. Penny had just gotten his hands bit off, and I lost half my collarbone, and Fen got killed. And then we lost you. It wasn’t a joke.”

“Shutthefuckup!”
Alice barked. “You whining little shit! You’ll never understand anything!”

Quentin studied her. The thing was not to be afraid. Or failing that not to look afraid.

“I’m sorry, Alice. We’re all so very, very sorry. But it’s over now, and we want to understand. Try. See if you can explain it to me.”

She closed her eyes and breathed deeply.

“You don’t understand, and you will never understand. You never even understood me when I was human, Quentin, because somebody as selfish as you are could never understand anybody. You don’t even understand yourself. So don’t think you can understand me now.”

Eliot opened his mouth to say something but Alice cut him off.

“Don’t defend him! You never had the guts to have a real feeling in your life, you’re so drunk all the time. So shut up and listen to somebody tell you the truth for a change.”

They listened. She looked like Alice—she was Alice—but something wasn’t right.

“Once my body was gone, once I was completely a niffin . . . do you know, I kept thinking of this old toothpaste commercial. I don’t know why I thought of it, but the slogan was ‘that fresh-from-the-dentist feeling.’ And that’s what it felt like, exactly that. All the scum had been scrubbed away. I felt fresh and light and icy-clean. I was pure. I was perfect.

“And all of you were standing around looking so horrified! Do you see what’s funny yet? I remember what I thought then. I didn’t think about Martin or Penny or you or anything. The only thought in my head was
at last. At last.
I’d been waiting for this moment my whole life without knowing it.

“When I did it, when I cast the spell, I thought maybe I could control
the power long enough that I could use it to kill Martin. But once I had the power, once I was a niffin, I didn’t want to control it anymore. I didn’t care, not in the slightest. You’re just lucky I did kill him, very lucky. I never would have lifted a finger to save people like you.

“But I wanted to know if I could do it. When I pulled his head off it was more like a toast, like popping a cork. A toast to my new life! You want to know what it’s like to be a demon? Imagine knowing, always and forever, that you are right, and that everyone and everything else is wrong.”

She smiled at the memory.

“I could just as easily have killed you all. So easily.”

“Why didn’t you?” Quentin honestly wanted to know.

“Why would I?” she spat. “Why would I bother? There was so much else to do!”

This had gone badly wrong, and he should have seen it coming. Her body was back, but her mind—you don’t spend seven years as a demon without consequences. She was traumatized. Of course she was.

“So you left.”

Keep her talking. Maybe she would talk herself out.

“I left. I went right through the wall. I barely felt it, it was like mist to me. Everything was mist. I went right through the stone into the black earth. I remember I didn’t even close my eyes. It was like swimming in a tropical ocean at night, warm and rich and salty and dark.”

Alice paused there, and she didn’t speak for a full minute. Quentin fetched water for her. She seemed to have lost track of the desire to keep on talking, but then it found her again.

“I liked it in the earth. It was dark and dense. Remember what a good girl I was? Remember how meek and pleasing I was to everybody? For the first time in my life I could just be. That was always part of the problem, Quentin. I felt like I had to be
interested
in you all the time. You wanted love so desperately, and I thought it was my job to give it to you. Poor little lost boy! That’s not love, that’s hell. And I was getting a taste of heaven. I was a blue angel now.

“I swam through the ground for months. It’s full of skeletons. Magical dinosaurs, miles long. There must have been a great age of them.
I followed the spine of one for a whole day. Caves, too, and ancient earthworks, and many, many dwarf tunnels. I found a whole underground city once, where the roof had fallen in, a long time ago. It was full of bodies. A hundred thousand dwarfs buried alive.

“Even farther down there are black seas, with no outlets, buried oceans full of eyeless sharks that breed and die in the darkness. There are stars down there too, the understars, burning underground, embedded in the earth, with no one to see them. I might have stayed down there forever. But in the end I broke through to the other side.”

“We know about the Far Side,” Quentin said.

“But you haven’t been there. I know that. I watched you sometimes. I was there at the End of the World, watching from inside the wall, when they turned you away. I followed you there in your little ship, nine fathoms deep, like the spirit in the
Ancient Mariner.
I watched your friend die on the island. I watched you fuck your girlfriend. I watched you go to Hell.”

“You could have helped us, you know.”

“No, I couldn’t. No, I couldn’t!” Her face was full of a crazy joy. “That’s the thing! And do you know why?
Because I didn’t care.
”

She stopped and sniffed.

“Funny. I couldn’t smell when I was a niffin.”

But she didn’t laugh.

“Then I went the other way. I let myself rise and float up and out like a balloon, into the outer darkness. I jostled the stars on my way up. I entered the sun, spent a week in its heart, riding it around and around and around. I was indestructible, nothing could touch me, not even that.

“I went farther. Did you ever wonder, Quentin, whether the universe of Fillory is like ours? Whether it goes on and on, and there are other stars and other worlds? There aren’t. Fillory is the only one. I went out there, out past the sun and the moon, out through the last layer of stars—the stars were the only things in all my time as a niffin that I couldn’t pass through—and then nothing. I flew and flew for days, never getting tired, never getting bored, and then I turned around and looked back, and there was Fillory. It looks hilarious from far away, you
can’t imagine: a flat whorled disk, in a crowd of stars, balanced on a tottering tower of turtles like in Dr. Seuss. It’s ridiculous. A little toy land, looking for all the world like a piece of spin art, inside a buzzing swarm of white stars. I watched it for a long time. I didn’t know if I would ever go back. It’s the closest thing I ever felt to sadness.”