The Magician’s Land (5 page)

Quentin hadn’t had much luck with father figures. Not Dean Fogg, not Mayakovsky, not Ember the ram god. They hadn’t dispensed a whole lot of paternal wisdom to him over the years. Whatever power and wisdom they had, they hadn’t been eager to share it with him. Maybe they didn’t want to be his father figures. Maybe he hadn’t made an especially appealing son figure.

Quentin tried to imagine what his father should have been like, the father he wished his father had been. Brilliant. Funny. Intense. A bit of a rogue—at times even eccentric—but steady in a crisis. A man of grit and energy, a man who faced the world around him and brought it to heel on his own terms. A magician’s father. A father who would have seen what Quentin had made of himself and been proud.

But Quentin’s father seemed not to have had any power at all, let alone any to share. Quentin’s actual father had had one wife, one son, no hobbies, and probably a case of mild clinical depression which he self-medicated with work. Not everybody led a double life, but Quentin’s father had barely led a single one. How could somebody who seemed so determined to be powerless have a magician for a son?

Unless he hadn’t been powerless, Quentin thought. Unless that wasn’t the whole story. It was starting to sound like a cover story—exactly the kind of cover story a magician would use.

Methodically Quentin examined the study for evidence that his father wasn’t what he seemed to be—that he’d left some legacy for his son that for whatever reason he couldn’t share with him while he was alive. He went through his father’s filing cabinets—there were charms for searching paper documents for keywords, the same way computers searched digital files. He checked for codes or hidden scripts. He got back no results of any significance.

He hadn’t expected any. That was merely due diligence. Now the hunt could begin in earnest.

He examined the light fixtures. He squeezed the couch cushions and pulled up the rugs. He used a spell to peer into the walls and under the floorboards. He looked behind the pictures. He scoured the room to the studs for any trace of hidden magic, but all he found was an old library
book with a weak anti-theft charm put on it by somebody else, which in any case didn’t appear to have worked. At least the missing keys turned up in the couch.

He checked the furniture for hollow legs. He riffled through every book on the shelves in case one was underlined or hollowed out. Once in a while he thought he was picking up on something, a secret pattern or a code, but every time he did it dissolved again like fairy gold, back into random noise. What dark magicks could his father have been trafficking in, that he would have kept them this well hidden? That he would have leaned on his son, tried to stop him from drawing attention to himself? What sinister fate had Quentin avoided in Tarrytown? What did it mean that his father kept an old unstrung banjo in one corner? What was with his weird obsession with Jeff Goldblum?

The longer he worked with no result, the more clearly he felt the ghostly presence of his father, his real father, his true father, as if he were in the room with him even now. Quentin booted up the computer and after a half hour of sweaty-palmed cryptomancy and educated guesswork he cracked the password
(thelostworld
—starring Jeff Goldblum!) and began casing file directories, one after the other.

They were almost eerily clean. No diary, no poetry, no mistresses, no Ponzi schemes, nothing that wasn’t what it appeared to be. Not even any porn. Well, not much porn.

Quentin was no hacker—he’d spent way too much time in the technological black hole of Brakebills to have any serious chops with computers—but he knew some electromagnetic sorcery. He cracked the case and went directly after the silicon, feeling with magical fingertips for anything weird, any walled-off caches of hidden electrons pregnant with meaning. All he could think was, this can’t be it. This cannot be everything. He must have left me something.

Come on. Help me, Daddy. It was a word he hadn’t said or even thought in twenty years.

He stopped and sat for a minute, his hands trembling, in the empty house, in the deep cold suburban winter silence. Where is it, Dad? It must be here. I can’t be alone. You must have left me something. This
was always how it worked: the distant, withholding father was always guarding a terrible secret, always keeping his son safe from it, able to pass on his legacy of power only in death.

And then he found it. It was at the back of a closet: a nubbly red plastic carton of index cards scribbled on in pencil, shoved behind a box of obsolete electronics and mysterious cables that were too important-looking to throw away. He set the carton on the desk and flipped through the cards, one by one. Strange names, columns of numbers, pluses and minuses. It went on and on. It was a lot of data. A cipher like this could contain whole worlds of power, if he could break it. And he would. It was left here for him.

He stared at the cards for it must have been ten minutes before the pattern solved itself all at once. It wasn’t a cipher at all. These were stats from his father’s old fantasy golf league. Quentin pushed the plastic box away from him violently, convulsively. The cards spilled out all over the rug. He left them there.

There was no mystery to solve. What had come between him and his father wasn’t magic. The terrible truth about Quentin’s father was that he was exactly the person he seemed to be. He wasn’t a magician. He wasn’t even a good person. He was an ordinary man who hadn’t even loved his only son. The hard truth was that Quentin had never really had a father.

And now he never would. Quentin put his head down on his father’s old desk and pounded his fist until his father’s crap old plastic keyboard jumped.

“Daddy!” he sobbed, in a voice he barely recognized. “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!”

—

Quentin went back to Brakebills the day after the funeral. He didn’t like to leave his mother, but she was more comfortable with her friends than she was with him, and it was time for them to take over. He’d done his part.

She drove him to the airport; he waited till she was out of sight before
he walked away from the departure area to a parking garage that was still under construction. He took the elevator to the empty top floor. At the stroke of noon, under a flat white sky, a portal opened for him, a ring of white dots connected by white lines that sizzled and sparked in the cold dry air, and he stepped through it and back onto the Brakebills campus. Back home.

Climbing the stairs to his room, he felt strange. It was like he’d had a week of high fever that had finally crested and broken, leaving him empty and cold and shaky but also washed clean, the toxins sweated out, the impurities burned away. His father’s death had changed him, and it was the kind of change that you didn’t change back from. Daddy was gone. He was never coming home. It was time to move on.

When he walked into his room Quentin performed a small incendiary charm to light a candle, a spell he’d done a thousand times, but this time the sudden flare startled him. It was brighter and hotter than he remembered.

Quentin snuffed out the candle and lit it again. There was no question: his magic was different. The light that played around his hands as he worked was more intense than it had been a week ago. In the darkness the colors were shifted a bit toward the violent violet end of the spectrum. The power came more easily, and it buzzed harder and louder in his fingers.

He studied his hands. Something had broken loose in him. He was truly alone in the world now, no one was coming to help him. He would have to help himself. Somewhere deep in his unconscious he’d been waiting, holding back some last fraction of power. But not anymore.

Late that night something woke Quentin up out of a deep, dreamless sleep. A dry, scrabbling noise—it sounded like a small rodent was trapped in his room. He lit a lamp. It was coming from his desk.

It wasn’t a rodent, it was a piece of paper. He’d all but forgotten about it: it was the page he’d snatched out of the air as he left the Neitherlands and stuffed into his pocket and then shoved to the back of a desk drawer. Something had woken it up, and it was uncrumpling itself.

When he opened the drawer it made a wild bid for freedom. The
page had folded itself in three sections like a business letter and now it unfolded all at once, launching itself a couple of feet in the air. Having gotten that far it hastily refolded itself the long way and began flapping frantically in circles in the dim light, around and around his head, like a moth around a lamp. Or like a memory of another life, another world, that wouldn’t stay buried.

Q
uentin didn’t look at the page from the Neitherlands that night. That night he put a paperweight on it, locked the desk drawer, and propped a chair against it to make sure it stayed closed. He had to teach in the morning. He went back to bed and put a pillow over his head.

It wasn’t till late the next afternoon, after P.A., that he unpropped the chair and unlocked the drawer. Slowly he eased it open. The page had gone still—but evidently it had been psyching itself up for this moment because as soon as he took away the paperweight it took off again.

Quentin watched it thrash along in the air, feeling a little sorry for it. He wondered where it was trying to get to. Back to the Neitherlands, probably. Back home.

He plucked it gently out of the air and took it over to the window seat so he could look at it in the sunlight. Holding it flat with his palm, he weighed it down at its four corners with a candlestick, an alarm clock, an empty wineglass, and a fossilized ammonite that he kept on his desk. The page knew when it was beaten. It gave up and went still.

Now he could see what he was dealing with. The text was handwritten, both sides, closely and minutely lettered in black ink with an occasional important word in red. It was a serious sort of page, dense with information. The paper was old, not modern paper—which gradually ate itself because of the acid in its own wood pulp—but rag paper, made from cotton scraps, which would last practically forever. It was
torn along one edge where it had been roughly ripped from its host book. A few letters had been left behind in the process, but only a few.

The regular, urgent forward tilt of the black script gave the words a purposeful look, like they were trails of gunpowder leading toward some explosive revelation. Whoever wrote it had had something to say. In places the text blocks were broken up to make room for charts and diagrams: a table of numbers with a lot of decimal points; a small but precise botanical sketch of a flowerless plant, with neat rows of leaves and a hollow seedpod; an elegant diagram of concentric and overlapping circles and ellipses that could equally easily have been an atom or a solar system.

The page began in the middle of one sentence. It ended in the middle of another.

When he looked closer he saw that the leaves of the plant were wavering very slightly in the breeze, and the planets (or electrons) in the diagrams were very slowly progressing in their orbits, which themselves precessed in an orderly dance around one another. The values in the table changed in sync with them.

At first Quentin thought he couldn’t read the script at all, and he sighed out loud with relief when he began to recognize a word here and there. It was a late, rather corrupt form of Old High German, written in some eccentric variation of black-letter Gothic. He could hum the tune even if he didn’t quite get every single lyric.

That, however, was the last break he caught. The contents were highly theoretical and abstract—seriously high-altitude stuff, up there where the conceptual oxygen was dangerously thin. There was a lot of business about magic and matter and high-level exchanges between the two under extreme conditions, at the quantum level. Sometimes it was hard to tell how much of it was literal and how much of it was metaphor: when it talked about a rooster, was that some kind of symbolic alchemical rooster? Or was it an actual rooster, with feathers, cock-a-doodle-do? There wasn’t much context to go on.

And that plant. He was going to have to take this over to Professor Bax in the greenhouse (or as the students referred to it, inevitably, Botany Bay). After staring at the page for three hours, during which he
didn’t even make it to the other side, Quentin sat back and pressed the heels of his hands against his aching eyes.

He’d missed dinner, but he could still eat with the kitchen staff. One thing was clear: this was a fragment chipped off the great arcane magical database of the adepts of the Neitherlands themselves, Penny’s gang. It was like an ultradense meteorite from some extrasolar intellectual realm, and it had come crashing to Earth, and there was no telling what exotic, unearthly elements it might contain.

He’d found a topic for his independent research project, anyway, Dean Fogg could stop noodging him about that. And in a small way he’d found a new adventure. It was a different kind of adventure from what they had in Fillory, a small and kind of nerdy adventure, but there was no question that’s what this was.

“Thank you,” he said to the page. “Thank you for being here. Whatever it is you’ve got inside you, I’ll take good care of it. I promise.”

Was it his imagination? Did the page unfold itself slightly—did it preen itself a little, basking in the praise of its reader? He took the heavy candlestick off one corner. Then, carefully, the wineglass and the clock. As soon as he moved the ammonite the page shot sideways, making for the crack under the window.

“Not yet.” He slapped his hand down on it and replaced the candlestick with a clunk. “I’m sorry, I really am. But not yet.”

—

There was one aspect of Quentin’s life at Brakebills that was still less than ideal, and that was his social life. He didn’t have one.

Even though he was almost thirty he was a lot younger than most of the faculty, and he was having a hard time connecting with them. Maybe it was the age thing, or that he hadn’t properly paid his dues yet, which was true. Maybe they figured he wouldn’t be here that long, so what was the point. The politics of the senior common room were byzantine and involved a lot of power struggles to which he, as low man on the totem pole, just wasn’t very relevant.

Also it was possible that they just didn’t like him very much. It had been known to happen.

Whatever the reason, he drew a lot of undesirable solo duties, like refereeing cold, wet welters matches and patching the dull but finicky network of spells that was supposed to bust students breaking curfew. (Now that he got a close look at it, he couldn’t believe how much they used to worry about getting caught. The spells were so rickety and put out so many false alarms that the faculty mostly ignored them.)

The next day after P.A., Quentin walked over to Botany Bay. His expectations weren’t high. He’d never spoken to the department chair, Hamish Bax, and he didn’t know what to make of him. On the plus side he was youngish, at least by Brakebills standards, mid-thirties maybe. On the minus side he was unbelievably affected: he was black and from Cleveland but dressed in Scottish tweeds and smoked a fat Turk’s-head pipe. He was the first person Quentin had ever seen in real life wearing plus fours. The whole business made him hard to read. Though maybe that was the point.

At least Quentin had an excuse to visit the greenhouse, which was a lovely bit of Victorian iron and glass tracery that looked too delicate to withstand an upstate winter. Inside it was a green bubble of warm, humid air full of tables of potted plants of all imaginable shapes and sizes. The cement floor was wet. Short and solidly built, Professor Bax greeted him with the same lack of interest as the rest of the faculty. He didn’t seem particularly pleased to be interrupted doing whatever he was doing with his arms up to the elbows in a giant ceramic pot full of black earth. But he brightened up when Quentin zipped open a velvet-lined portfolio and the page immediately shook itself and wriggled free, like a silvery fish escaping a net.

“That’s a live one,” he said, teeth clenched around his pipe.

He wiped his hands on a rag. Using a quick spell that completely eluded Quentin’s comprehension he trapped the page flat in the air in front of him, as if between two panes of glass. It was the kind of fluent, rather technical magic you didn’t expect from a botanist.

“Mmmmm. You’re a long way from home.” Then he addressed Quentin. “Where’d you get this?”

“I could tell you but you wouldn’t believe me. Do you recognize the plant?”

“I don’t. Think it’s a real plant? Drawn from life?”

“I have no idea,” Quentin admitted. “Do you?”

Professor Bax studied the page for five minutes, first from so close his face almost touched the paper, then from a yard away, then—he had to shift a table crammed with seedlings in egg cartons—from across the room.

He took his pipe out of his mouth.

“I’m going to say a word you don’t know.”

“OK,” Quentin said.

“Phyllotaxis.”

“Don’t know it.”

“It’s the way leaves are arranged around a central stalk,” Professor Bax said. “It looks chaotic but it’s not, it follows a mathematical sequence. Usually Fibonacci, sometimes Lucas. But the leaves on this plant don’t follow either of those. Which suggests that its origin is exceptionally exotic.”

“Or that it’s just a made-up drawing.”

“Right. And Occam’s razor says it probably is. And yet.” Hamish frowned. “It’s got something. Plants have a certain integrity to them, you know? Hard to fake that. You’re sure you can’t tell me where it’s from?”

“I shouldn’t.”

“Don’t then.” He gestured at the text. “Can you read that shit?”

“I’m working on it.”

Professor Bax released the page from its trap. He plucked it out of the air before it could fall. It was limp and pliant in his hands—it seemed more submissive to his authority than to Quentin’s.

“Grand,” he said. “Drink?”

Yes was the only possible answer. Bax retrieved a fifth of rye from in among the flowerpots, where he’d apparently hastily concealed it right before Quentin came in.

Just like that Quentin had shattered whatever invisible barrier stood between him and the rest of the faculty, or at least one member of the faculty—it emerged over the course of the afternoon that Hamish wasn’t much more popular with the other professors than Quentin was. Whatever nameless sin Quentin had committed, Hamish had committed it too. They were the same kind of radioactive. Quentin started coming by
the greenhouse regularly after Practical Applications, and he and Hamish would have a couple of whiskeys before dinner.

Hamish initiated him into some of the deeper mysteries of the Brakebills campus. What was really surprising was how much of the stuff that the undergraduates whispered about after hours was actually true. That blank stretch of wall, for example, where there ought to have been a room, and the plaster was a shade lighter—that really wasn’t an air shaft. Back in the 1950s some students had set up a cubic thermal field in their room, possibly to keep beer cold, but having already consumed some of the beer they inverted a couple of glyphs, which had the unexpected effect of driving the temperature inside down very close to absolute zero. The resulting field was so stable that nobody could figure out a way to dispel it.

It was perfectly harmless unless you walked into it, in which case you’d be dead before you knew it. One of the kids who cast it lost a hand that way, or so it was said. Eventually the faculty just shrugged their shoulders and walled it off. Supposedly the lost, frozen hand was still in there.

Likewise, it was true: the clock was powered by a gear made of metal reclaimed from the body of the Silver Golem of Białystok. It was also true that there was a childishly humorous anagram for Brakebills, that it was Biker Balls, and that the chalkboards would squeak painfully if you tried to write it on them. It was true that ivy wouldn’t grow on that one bare patch of wall behind the kitchens because one of the stones had been violently cursed in a really ugly incident involving a student who’d slipped through the admissions protocols meant to screen out sociopaths and other people mentally unfit to handle magic. On humid days it sweated acid.

There was also a secret seventh fountain, underground, accessible through a door set in the dusty plank floor of a gardening shed; it was kept cordoned off because the water teemed with hungry, sharp-toothed fish. And Quentin had never known how the Maze was redrawn over the summer, but apparently every year in June the groundskeeper goaded the topiary animals into such a feeding frenzy that they fell upon and devoured each other in a kind of ghastly slow-motion vegetarian holocaust. The Maze was built up again out of cuttings from the survivors. Only the strongest made it through. They must have been some of the most highly evolved topiary animals on Earth.

This was Quentin’s world now, and it was amazing to him how quickly he came to accept it, even embrace it. He’d gone from king to schoolteacher, been forcibly transplanted from the grand magical cosmos of Fillory to this hole in the wall that he thought he’d escaped forever, and lo and behold he was adjusting. It turns out you can go home again, if you have to. His future was here; the years he’d spent in Fillory were gone now as if they’d never happened. He mourned them alone, the only person on Earth who knew that once upon a time he used to wear a crown and sit on a throne. But you couldn’t mourn forever. Or you could, but as it turned out there were better things to do.

Pacing the aisles of a silent classroom, surveying the exposed napes of rows and rows of students bent over their fall exams, he realized he’d lost his old double vision, the one that was always looking for something more, somewhere else, the world behind the world. It was his oldest possession, and he’d let it slip away without even noticing it was gone. He was becoming someone else, someone new.

It was crazy to think that the others were still over there, riding out on hunts, receiving people in their receiving rooms, meeting every afternoon in the tallest tower of Castle Whitespire. And Julia was on the Far Side of the World doing God knew what. But that had nothing to do with him now. After all that it turned out that wasn’t his story. It had all been a temporary aberration, and in due time it had corrected itself.

Though he did still look up at the moon once in a while, expecting to find the clean, crisp crescent of Fillory. By comparison Earth’s moon looked as pale and shabby and worn as an old dime.

—

They were only a hundred miles north of Manhattan, but the winters at Brakebills had a different quality from winter in the city: deeper, heavier, firmer, more decisive. It was as if, because it came three months late, Brakebills winter was determined to sock you in for good and all. It was February on the outside, and the birds and plants were beginning to show glimmers of cautious optimism, but Brakebills was still wallowing in a foot and a half of deep silent November snow.