The Magician’s Land (39 page)

“It’s time, Ember. The bird isn’t coming. The spell is gone. This is the only way left.”

The old ram blinked. He could hear Quentin.

“I’m not pretending it’s easy, but You’ll die anyway when Fillory dies. You know this. There must be only a few minutes left. Give Your own life now, before it’s too late. While it still matters.”

The truly sad thing was that Ember actually wanted to do it. Quentin saw that too: He had come here intending to drown Himself, the way the god before Him had, but He couldn’t quite manage it. He was brave enough to want to, but not brave enough to do it. He was trying to find the courage, longing for the courage to come to Him, but it wouldn’t, and while He waited for it, ashamed and alone and terrified, the whole cosmos was coming crashing down around Him.

Quentin wondered if he would have been brave enough. He would never know. But if Ember couldn’t sacrifice himself, Quentin would have to do it for Him.

He took a step forward. He was a man proposing to kill a god. It was an impossibility, a contradiction in terms, but if it meant saving Fillory then there had to be a way. He held on to that knowledge tightly. If magic was for anything it was for this. He’d faced up to his dead father and Mayakovsky. He’d faced losing Fillory and losing Brakebills. He’d even faced Alice. He was circling back to all the things he’d fought and lost over the years, and one by one he was putting them to rest. Now it was time for him to face Ember.

He took another step and now Ember turned on him. The god’s eyes were wild, blank with panic. His nostrils flared. Ember was out of His mind with fear. Quentin felt a surge of pity and even of love for the ridiculous old beast, but it didn’t change what he had to do.

He’d hoped inspiration would come to him, but it didn’t. It came to Alice instead.

“Your turn this time,” she said, and then she did something strange: she bit the back of her left hand, scraping skin off the knuckles, and then touched Quentin’s cheek with it.

It wasn’t a spell Quentin knew, or would ever know—the technicalities were too much for him, and the raw power too, probably, but he’d seen Alice do it once before. As she chanted the words his arms burst with masses of muscle, and his skin thickened and toughened at the same time. He felt the special force that belonged to Alice’s magic alone transforming him. His legs exploded with strength, he was rising upward on two pillars, and his neck lengthened and the base of his spine flowed out into a long sinuous tail. His head was stretching forward into a snout, and his flat grinding omnivore’s teeth grew and sharpened until they interlocked with each other, the way teeth were always meant to do.

His nails sprouted into claws. His vertebrae threw up a ridge of spines—it was like his back being scratched only even better. He was made of power, and there was a furnace in his belly. He opened his mouth and roared a word, and the word was made of fire. He was a dragon, and he was ready. He was going to blast the immortal living shit out of Ember.

The fire bent and flowed around Ember’s horns, but it scorched Him too—Quentin smelled the burning wool. Maybe as His world crumbled the god was losing some of His imperviousness. Well, bad luck. Quentin bounded forward, and Ember bolted, but it was all slow motion to Quentin’s draconian reflexes. He pinned Ember to the ground with one massive taloned forefoot—none of your puny
T. rex
arms for this dragon—and tried to get his jaws around Ember’s thick muscled neck while the god writhed frantically in his grip. Quentin’s scales, he couldn’t help but notice in passing, were the shiny metallic blue of a bitchin’ muscle car.

He was a dragon, not a god, but he was huge and tough and strong, and this body was made for epic scrapping. Whereas Ember, for whatever divine reason, was a god with the body of an animal that occasionally took part in ritualized male dominance contests but spent most of its time grazing. Ember rolled and flipped Quentin over Him, Quentin lashing his tail crazily, hoping Alice was well clear. Then he was on top again.

“Enough!” Ember roared, and Quentin was blown back into the air.

Spreading his wings—his wings!—like an angry angel Quentin checked his flight and power-dived back at the god, who dodged before Quentin could crush Him. They circled for a minute, pacing, the pond spouting steam whenever Quentin’s overheated tail touched it, then he darted
forward again and had Ember in his teeth. Lightning struck his back, once and then three, four, five times, jangling his nerves and blowing off half a dozen scales, and probably crippling his delicate bat-wings, but pain was something a dragon noted only in passing and then dismissed with contempt.

Any love or pity he might have felt for Ember was a human thing. There was no room in his dragon-heart for any such feelings. This was a job for a monster, and that’s what he was now. Die, he thought. Die, you selfish bastard, you miserable coward, you old goat. Die and give us life.

Now he had a proper grip, and he held on and ground Ember between his molars like a cheap cigar, and the air bleated out of Him. He held on for Alice, for Eliot, for Julia, for Benedict, for his useless hopeless father, for everyone he’d ever loved or disappointed or betrayed. He held on out of pride and anger and hope and stubbornness, and he felt what was left of Fillory holding on too and waiting to see if it would be enough. Quentin blew white-hot fire between his teeth, and his saliva was toxic acid. The ram’s ribs bent and groaned, and Quentin felt Him try to inflate His lungs, felt Him fail. He tasted burned skin, and he felt the skin tear.

Quentin held Him there, and when the ram had gone five minutes without a breath he spat Him out onto the ground. He’d done all a dragon could do.

Suddenly Quentin was human again, standing over the steaming, smoking body of the ram, flopped out on the grass like a sleeping dog the size of a bull. But it wasn’t over. Ember’s foreleg stirred. He was beaten, but some tenacious spark of life was refusing to leave His body. If Fillory was going to live Quentin would have to tear that spark out of Him and quench it.

This was what the knife was for, he realized, the one Asmodeus had gotten away with. Shit. Fate had practically shoved it into his damn hands, and he’d fumbled it away! He was in a fight with a god and he had no weapon.

Except that he did have one. Sometimes when you finally figure out what you have to do, you discover that you already have what you need. He’d always had it. Quentin felt around in his pocket, and his fingers found a thick round coin. Mayakovsky’s last coin.

This was the last of his inheritance. He felt a twinge of sadness, just a twinge, at the knowledge that he would never make his land now. That would have been nice. But he felt no bitterness.

What Quentin did now he’d already done once, a long time ago, but then he’d done it in anger and confusion. Now he did it calmly, with a full sense of who he was and what he was doing. He still had some nickels in his pockets, the ones he’d brought back from the mirror-house. He went to one knee and made a little stack of them on a patch of bare ground, and on top of it he balanced the golden coin, goose-side up. Then he gripped the stack in his fist and it became the hilt of a burning silver sword, which he drew up out of the ground as if it had been embedded there all along, placed there for him centuries ago.

He held it up in front of him. The last time he’d held it had been on the day he arrived at Brakebills.

“It’s good to see you again,” he whispered.

Pale, almost transparent fire played along its length, surprisingly bright in the eerie half-darkness, as if the sword had been dipped in brandy and touched with a match. He adjusted his grip on the hilt. He tried to remember something, anything, from his fencing lessons with Bingle.

Ember’s eye half opened, but He didn’t stir. Maybe He couldn’t. But if Quentin had had to put a name to what he saw in Ember’s eye it would have been not fear, or rage, but relief. Quentin felt it too.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

The sword cut almost all the way through Ember’s thick neck in one stroke. The wound opened wide instantly, red and wet, the skin snapping back like taut rubber. The god’s legs went stiff and sprang apart like a marionette with its strings pulled. Blood sprayed and then pumped from the stump.

Quentin felt Alice’s hand on his shoulder. He took a shaky breath. It was done, Ember was dead. An age had ended; Quentin had ended it. It didn’t feel like an exalted business—there was nothing grand about it. It hadn’t felt noble and righteous, it felt rough and ugly and bloody and cruel. It was what was necessary, that was all. Quentin stepped back from the god’s corpse.

Something big rocketed across the sky, and he looked up in time to spot a fat, stubby spacecraft already dwindling in the distance, an iron fireplug riding an inverted cone of blue flame. The dwarfs, if he had to guess. Always full of surprises. There were only three or four stars left, and
even as he watched one of them lost its grip on the heavens and fell. Behind him a throat was delicately cleared, as if to alert an inattentive waiter.

“Everyone forgets about Me,” Umber said. “As I said, you’ll need to kill Us both. We were only ever really one god, between the two of Us.”

He trotted over to Quentin, as meek as you like, sniffed fastidiously at His brother’s corpse, and then stretched out His neck. He even waggled His shoulders a little, in anticipation, as if the operation were going to give Him pleasure. What a perverse creature. Quentin steadied himself and tried to think of all the good that Umber could have done but hadn’t. Maybe the next god would do better. This time the sword stroked cleanly, all the way through.

The instant Umber died, Quentin exploded. He dropped the sword. He felt himself racing upward and outward—he was blowing out in all directions. His arms and legs stretched out—a hundred miles, a thousand. His view expanded to take in all of Fillory: he saw it hanging there in space in front of him like a shattered saucer. He was a phantasmal giant, a cosmic blue whale times a billion.

He wasn’t disconcerted, but only because gods don’t disconcert easily. The logic was clear to him, because the logic of everything was clear now. There was nothing that was not self-evident. A god could die, but a god’s power did not, and without Ember and Umber to wield it their power had flowed into the one who sacrificed them. Therefore he, Quentin, was a god now, a living god, the god of Fillory. He was no longer Fillory’s reader; he had become its author.

But what a broken world had been entrusted to Him! He shook His great head disapprovingly. Even now it continued to disintegrate before Him, its connective tissue weakening, its edges crumbling. This would never do. It must be mended. Mending was something Quentin understood well, and with the power that was in Him now there was nothing broken that He could not fix.

With a wave of His left hand He slowed the passage of time to a crawl, so that to everyone but Him the work of a millennium would pass in a fraction of a second. Then slowly, deliberately, and with inexhaustible patience, He began to gather up the pieces from where they hung and drifted in space. He collected the clods and clumps and grains of
soil and stone that had been the flesh of Fillory, sorted them like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and one by one fitted them together and knitted them back into a single whole, running His huge spectral fingertips along the seams until they vanished as if they had never been.

He worked with great care. The dirt of Fillory was marbled like a great side of beef, and He took pains to position its veins of ore so that they lined up just as they once had. He rethreaded Fillory’s silver rivers and streams, or where it pleased Him He allowed them to find new paths, and He gently shepherded the shattered lakes and seas back into their basins. He swept up the air and the winds and heaped them up in invisible masses above Fillory so that the land could breathe again.

As He worked He rolled and sifted between His divine fingertips the remains of various objects He remembered from His human life. Odd little things, from long ago. The bones of the gentle bay He rode when He left the centaurs. The fragments of the Watcherwoman’s shattered watch, which had been trodden into the earth over the years and dispersed and forgotten. The pistol Janet had brought into Fillory and then dropped on her way out of Ember’s Tomb. The head of the arrow that killed Benedict. The last rotting remnants of the
Muntjac,
scattered
in the shallows of the far Eastern Ocean
.

Those animals and humans who had died in the apocalypse He allowed to rest where they were, but He moved among the survivors, healing them, rebuilding damaged organs, repairing and resewing skin and bones. He bade the great turtle return to its place in the tower of turtles that held up Fillory, and take up its burden again, and it did—it really wasn’t suited for a more active lifestyle anyway. He rounded up the escaped dead and returned them to their gymnasium Hell and then, feeling divinely troubled by their plight, He bade them sleep, peacefully and forever. Their games were over for good.

He set the delicate green carpet of grass that covered Fillory to regrowing, and restored some of the trees, stepping them like the masts of ships, not all, but enough that they could reseed the forests. He spent a long time—years, maybe centuries—setting the seas to beating at the shore again, and nursing the water cycle into some kind of stable functioning state. He picked up the bodies of Ember and Umber with tender care and
buried Them where They could decompose and enrich the soil around them. The ground above Them became green, and two enormous trees grew over Their graves, their branches spiraling curiously like rams’ horns.

The moon He lovingly polished and set spinning again. One by one He rehung the stars like the crystals of a chandelier. He filled in the great crater that the sun had burned in the ocean floor, and He cooled the sea, and rebuilt and remortared the wall that ran around the edge of the world. He took the sun itself in His great cupped hands, pressing and molding it back into a sphere, feeling its fading heat. He blew on it till it burned white hot. Then He placed it back on its eternal track and set it going in its orbit again.