The Magicians
Page 51
“Move,” she barked. “Everybody. Fall back. Don’t let them bog us down. We have to be close now.”
They fell back along the length of the banquet hall. The basic idea was to try to keep a coherent line of scrimmage between them and their attackers, but the line kept getting disrupted. One of their party would get hung up—the chairs kept getting in the way—or the tomb dwellers would group together and make a charge, or worse, one of them would blunder in from the side through a hidden door straight into the center of their party. He and Alice managed to hold hands for the first ten seconds, but after that it just wasn’t possible. This wasn’t like the earlier fights. The whole thing kept degenerating into the running of the bulls. The hall seemed to go on forever; possibly it did. The candles and mirrors and food gave the whole scene an incongruously festive air. Even if they decided to take the button home, at this point it would be hard to muster everybody in one place to actually do it.
Quentin jogged along with his knife out, though he didn’t know if he was capable of using it. He felt like he had in gym class, trying to look like part of the team while at the same time desperately hoping nobody would pass him the ball. A giant house cat popped out from behind a tapestry right in front of him, and Fen almost certainly saved Quentin’s life by cannoning fearlessly into the thing so that they rolled together on the floor, grappling and thrashing, until she knocked it out with a furious inc aga head-butt. Quentin gave her a hand up and they ran on.
Dint was putting on a show. He’d hopped spryly up onto the banquet table and was striding along it, rapping out percussive syllables with astonishing speed and fluency, his wand tucked back behind his ear. His long black hair crackled, and crazy energies flashed out from the tips of his long fingers; sometimes he actually had two different spells going simultaneously, Quentin noticed, a primary attack in one hand and a second, lesser piece of witchery simmering in his off hand. At one point he made his arms swell up hugely, picked up two chairs in each giant hand and clubbed down a half dozen opponents with them in three businesslike swings—left, right, left.
Penny managed to persuade a section of the table to rear up like an angry centipede and attack the Fillorians until they chopped it to pieces. Even Quentin got off a couple of sweaty-palmed Magic Missiles into the press. Fen’s tunic was soaked with sweat. She closed her eyes and placed her palms together, whispering, and when she parted them they gleamed with a terrible white phosphorescence. The next foe she met—a sinewy scimitar wielder who was either wearing a leopard skin or was half leopard from the waist up—she shouted and punched her fist through its chest up to her shoulder.
But the close calls were getting closer. The situation was disintegrating, and they needed an exit strategy. The corridor was filling with bodies and smoke. Quentin’s breath whistled through his teeth, and in his head he was singing a psychotic nonsense song.
Somewhere along the line Quentin left his knife in a furry Fillorian stomach. He never saw the creature’s face—it was a creature, not a person, not a person, not a person—but later he would remember the sensation of jamming it in, how the blade punched through the tough rubbery muscles of the diaphragm and then slid easily into the underlying viscera, and how the muscles gripped the blade after it was in. He snatched his hand away from the hilt like it was electrified.
Quentin registered first Josh, then Eliot, hunching their shoulders and letting loose their cacodemons. Eliot’s was particularly awesome-looking, banded from head to foot in horizontal yellow and black danger stripes. It slid sideways across the smooth table, scrabbling like a flung cat, then charged into the fray with unself-conscious glee, clinging and tearing and leaping and clinging again.
“Goddamn it!” Janet was screaming. “What else? What the fuck else?”
“This is bullshit,” Eliot yelled hoarsely. “Side door! Pick a side door and go through it!”
There was a moment of premonitory silence, as if some of the creatures actually sensed what was going to happen next. Then the floor jolted, and a giant man made of glowing red-hot iron shouldered his way sideways through the wall.
He took the whole wall down with him. A flying brick nicked Fen’s head, and she dropped like she’d been shot. Waves of heat poured off the giant, warping the air around him, and anything he touched burned. He stood bent over, hands on the floor—he was about a third again too tall for the confined space of the banquet hall. His eyes were molten gold, with no pupils. Dust filled the air. The giant put his foot on Fen’s prostrate body, and she burst into flames.
Everybody ran. Anybody who fell was trampled. The heat coming off the man’s smooth red skin was unbearable. Quentin would have done anything to put distance between it and himself. There were pileups at the nearest exits; Quentin pushed past them and farther down the hall. He looked around for Alice and couldn’t even find anybody human until he risked a look back and saw Josh standing in the middle of the hallway, all alone.
He seemed to be undergoing one of his freakish power surges. He’d summoned another of his miniature black holes, the way he’d done that day on the welters pitch. It had nearly swallowed a tree that day; now as Quentin watched an entire length of tapestry wavered toward it and then flowed into it all at once, ripping free of its curtain rod with a sound like a fusillade of pistol shots. The light in the hall dimmed and became amber. The red giant was momentarily stalled by this. He was squatting down, studying the apparition, apparently fascinated by it. He was bald, and his expression was blank. His huge, hairless, glowing-red cock and balls swung loose between his thighs like the clapper of a bell.
Then Quentin was alone and running along a cool, dark side corridor. It was silent—the noise switched off like a TV. He was sprinting flat out, and then he was running, then jogging, and then, after a while, he was just walking. It was over. He couldn’t run anymore. The air scorched his lungs. He bent over and put his hands on his knees. His back itched painfully, behind his right shoulder, and when he reached back to scratch he found an arrow dangling from the hump of muscle there. Unthinkingly, he pulled it out, and a freshet of blood trickled down his back, but there wasn’t much pain. It had only gone in an inch, probably not even that far. He was almost glad it hurt. The pain was something to hang on to. He held the wooden shaft, grateful to have something solid in his hands. The silence was amazing.
He was safe again. For a few minutes he allowed himself to luxuriate in the simple joys of breathing cool air, of not running, of being alone in the semidarkness and not in immediate danger of dying. But the gravity of the situation kept seeping through, messily, until he could no longer blot it up. He could be the last one alive for all he knew. He had no idea how to get back up to the surface. He could die down here. He felt the weight of the dirt and rock over his head. He was buried alive. Even if he made it out, he didn’t have the button. He had no way to get back to Earth.
Footsteps in the darkness. Somebody was coming, walking. The figure’s hands were glowing with a light charm. Wearily, Quentin started in on yet another Magic Missile spell, but before he could finish he realized it was just Eliot. He let his hands drop and sagged to the floor.
Neither of them spoke, they just leaned together against the wall, side by side. The cold stone soothed the little divot of pain the arrow had punched in Quentin’s back. Eliot’s shirt was untucked. His face was all smudged with soot on one side. He would have been furious if he’d known.
“You all right?”
Eliot nodded.
“Fen’s dead,” Quentin said.
Eliot took a deep breath and ran his glowing hands through his thick wavy hair.
“I know. I saw.”
“I don’t think there’s anything we could have done,” Eliot said. “Big Red back there was just out of our league, that’s all.”
They fell silent. It was like the words had spun off into some void where they had no meaning. They’d lost any connection with the world; or maybe it was the world that had peeled away from the words. Eliot passed him a flask with something strong in it, and he drank and passed it back. It seemed to restore some link between him and his body.
Quentin drew his knees up and hugged them.
“I got hit by an arrow,” he said. It felt like a stupid thing to say. “In my back.”
“We should go,” Eliot said.
“Right.”
“Backtrack. Try to meet back up with the others. Penny’s got the button.” It was amazing that Eliot could still be so practical after everything that had happened. He was so much stronger than Quentin was.
“That big glowing guy though.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe he’s still back there.”
Eliot shrugged.
“We have to get to the button.”
Quentin was thirsty, but there was no water. He couldn’t remember when he’d dropped his pack.
“I’ll tell you something funny,” Eliot said after a while. “I think Anaïs hooked up with Dint.”
“What?” In spite of himself Quentin smiled. He felt his dry lips crack. “When did they even have time?”
“Bathroom break. After that second fight.”
“Wow. Tough break for Josh. But you have to applaud their initiative.”
“Definitely. But hard cheese on Josh.”
“Hard cheese.”
It was the kind of thing they used to say back at Brakebills.
“I’ll tell you something else funny,” Eliot went on. “I don’t regret coming here. Even now that it’s all gone to shit, I’m still glad I came. Could that possibly be the stupidest thing I’ve ever said to you? But it’s the truth. I think I was going to drink myself to death back on Earth.”
It was true. For Eliot there hadn’t been any other way. Somehow that made it a little bit better.
“You could still drink yourself to death here.”
“At this rate I won’t have the chance.”
Quentin stood up. His legs were stiff and achy. He did a deep knee-bend. They started back the way they came.
Quentin didn’t feel any fear anymore. That part of it was over, except that he was worried about Alice. The adrenaline was gone, too. Now he was just thirsty, and his feet hurt, and he was covered in scratches he couldn’t remember having gotten. The blood on his back had dried, sticking his shirt to the arrow wound. It tugged uncomfortably every time he took a step.
It became apparent pretty soon that he didn’t have anything to worry about anyway, because they couldn’t even find their way back to the banquet hall. They must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, maybe several. They stopped and tried some basic path-finding magic, but Quentin’s tongue felt thick and clumsy, and neither of them could seem to get the words quite right, and anyway they really needed a dish of olive oil to make it work properly.
Quentin couldn’t think of anything to say. He waited while Eliot took a piss against the stone wall. It felt like they’d come to the end, but they had no choice but to keep walking. Maybe this is still part of the story, he thought numbly. The bad part right before everything comes out all right. He wondered what time it was on the surface. He felt like he’d been up all night.
The masonry of the walls was older now, crumblier. For short stretches it was just dusty unworked cave rock. They were at the very outer fringes of this subterranean universe, wandering among badly eroded planets and dim, decaying stars. The hallway had ceased to branch now. It contented itself with curving gently to the left, and Quentin thought he could feel the curve getting gradually tighter, like it was spiraling inward, like the interior corridors of a nautilus shell. He figured it stood to reason, what little reason was left in the world, that there was a geometrical limit to how far it could keep curving in on itself before they came to something. Pretty soon it turned out he was right.
THE RAM
Just like that, there they all were.
Quentin and Eliot stood at the edge of a large round underground chamber, blinking at bright torchlight. It was different from the rooms they’d already seen in that it appeared to be naturally occurring. The floor was sandy, the ceiling craggy and irregular and unworked, with stalactites and other rocky excrescences poking down that you wouldn’t want to hit your head on. The air was chilly and damp and still. Quentin could hear an underground stream gurgling somewhere, he couldn’t see where. The sound had no origin or direction.
The others were here, too, all of them except for poor Fen. Josh and Alice were in an entrance a little ways over. Janet stood in another archway looking lost and bedraggled, Dint and Anaïs were in the next one over, and Penny was alone in the one after that. They stood in the doorways like contestants framed in the spangled, lightbulbed archways of a game show.
It was a miracle. It even looked like they’d all just arrived at the exact same moment. Quentin took a deep breath. Relief flooded through him like a warm liquid transfusion. He was just so fucking glad to see every last one of them. Even Dint—good old Dint, you hound dog! Even Penny, and only partly because he still had his pack, presumably with the button still inside. The story’s outcome was still in play after all. Even after everything that had gone wrong it could still all turn out basically okay—it was a disaster, but a mitigated disaster. It was still possible that five years from now, when they were more or less over their post-traumatic stress disorder, they’d all get a big kick out of getting together and talking about it. Maybe the real Fillory wasn’t that different from the Fillory he’d always wanted after all.
Kings and queens, Quentin thought. Kings and queens. Glory has its price. Did you not know that?
They fell back along the length of the banquet hall. The basic idea was to try to keep a coherent line of scrimmage between them and their attackers, but the line kept getting disrupted. One of their party would get hung up—the chairs kept getting in the way—or the tomb dwellers would group together and make a charge, or worse, one of them would blunder in from the side through a hidden door straight into the center of their party. He and Alice managed to hold hands for the first ten seconds, but after that it just wasn’t possible. This wasn’t like the earlier fights. The whole thing kept degenerating into the running of the bulls. The hall seemed to go on forever; possibly it did. The candles and mirrors and food gave the whole scene an incongruously festive air. Even if they decided to take the button home, at this point it would be hard to muster everybody in one place to actually do it.
Quentin jogged along with his knife out, though he didn’t know if he was capable of using it. He felt like he had in gym class, trying to look like part of the team while at the same time desperately hoping nobody would pass him the ball. A giant house cat popped out from behind a tapestry right in front of him, and Fen almost certainly saved Quentin’s life by cannoning fearlessly into the thing so that they rolled together on the floor, grappling and thrashing, until she knocked it out with a furious inc aga head-butt. Quentin gave her a hand up and they ran on.
Dint was putting on a show. He’d hopped spryly up onto the banquet table and was striding along it, rapping out percussive syllables with astonishing speed and fluency, his wand tucked back behind his ear. His long black hair crackled, and crazy energies flashed out from the tips of his long fingers; sometimes he actually had two different spells going simultaneously, Quentin noticed, a primary attack in one hand and a second, lesser piece of witchery simmering in his off hand. At one point he made his arms swell up hugely, picked up two chairs in each giant hand and clubbed down a half dozen opponents with them in three businesslike swings—left, right, left.
Penny managed to persuade a section of the table to rear up like an angry centipede and attack the Fillorians until they chopped it to pieces. Even Quentin got off a couple of sweaty-palmed Magic Missiles into the press. Fen’s tunic was soaked with sweat. She closed her eyes and placed her palms together, whispering, and when she parted them they gleamed with a terrible white phosphorescence. The next foe she met—a sinewy scimitar wielder who was either wearing a leopard skin or was half leopard from the waist up—she shouted and punched her fist through its chest up to her shoulder.
But the close calls were getting closer. The situation was disintegrating, and they needed an exit strategy. The corridor was filling with bodies and smoke. Quentin’s breath whistled through his teeth, and in his head he was singing a psychotic nonsense song.
Somewhere along the line Quentin left his knife in a furry Fillorian stomach. He never saw the creature’s face—it was a creature, not a person, not a person, not a person—but later he would remember the sensation of jamming it in, how the blade punched through the tough rubbery muscles of the diaphragm and then slid easily into the underlying viscera, and how the muscles gripped the blade after it was in. He snatched his hand away from the hilt like it was electrified.
Quentin registered first Josh, then Eliot, hunching their shoulders and letting loose their cacodemons. Eliot’s was particularly awesome-looking, banded from head to foot in horizontal yellow and black danger stripes. It slid sideways across the smooth table, scrabbling like a flung cat, then charged into the fray with unself-conscious glee, clinging and tearing and leaping and clinging again.
“Goddamn it!” Janet was screaming. “What else? What the fuck else?”
“This is bullshit,” Eliot yelled hoarsely. “Side door! Pick a side door and go through it!”
There was a moment of premonitory silence, as if some of the creatures actually sensed what was going to happen next. Then the floor jolted, and a giant man made of glowing red-hot iron shouldered his way sideways through the wall.
He took the whole wall down with him. A flying brick nicked Fen’s head, and she dropped like she’d been shot. Waves of heat poured off the giant, warping the air around him, and anything he touched burned. He stood bent over, hands on the floor—he was about a third again too tall for the confined space of the banquet hall. His eyes were molten gold, with no pupils. Dust filled the air. The giant put his foot on Fen’s prostrate body, and she burst into flames.
Everybody ran. Anybody who fell was trampled. The heat coming off the man’s smooth red skin was unbearable. Quentin would have done anything to put distance between it and himself. There were pileups at the nearest exits; Quentin pushed past them and farther down the hall. He looked around for Alice and couldn’t even find anybody human until he risked a look back and saw Josh standing in the middle of the hallway, all alone.
He seemed to be undergoing one of his freakish power surges. He’d summoned another of his miniature black holes, the way he’d done that day on the welters pitch. It had nearly swallowed a tree that day; now as Quentin watched an entire length of tapestry wavered toward it and then flowed into it all at once, ripping free of its curtain rod with a sound like a fusillade of pistol shots. The light in the hall dimmed and became amber. The red giant was momentarily stalled by this. He was squatting down, studying the apparition, apparently fascinated by it. He was bald, and his expression was blank. His huge, hairless, glowing-red cock and balls swung loose between his thighs like the clapper of a bell.
Then Quentin was alone and running along a cool, dark side corridor. It was silent—the noise switched off like a TV. He was sprinting flat out, and then he was running, then jogging, and then, after a while, he was just walking. It was over. He couldn’t run anymore. The air scorched his lungs. He bent over and put his hands on his knees. His back itched painfully, behind his right shoulder, and when he reached back to scratch he found an arrow dangling from the hump of muscle there. Unthinkingly, he pulled it out, and a freshet of blood trickled down his back, but there wasn’t much pain. It had only gone in an inch, probably not even that far. He was almost glad it hurt. The pain was something to hang on to. He held the wooden shaft, grateful to have something solid in his hands. The silence was amazing.
He was safe again. For a few minutes he allowed himself to luxuriate in the simple joys of breathing cool air, of not running, of being alone in the semidarkness and not in immediate danger of dying. But the gravity of the situation kept seeping through, messily, until he could no longer blot it up. He could be the last one alive for all he knew. He had no idea how to get back up to the surface. He could die down here. He felt the weight of the dirt and rock over his head. He was buried alive. Even if he made it out, he didn’t have the button. He had no way to get back to Earth.
Footsteps in the darkness. Somebody was coming, walking. The figure’s hands were glowing with a light charm. Wearily, Quentin started in on yet another Magic Missile spell, but before he could finish he realized it was just Eliot. He let his hands drop and sagged to the floor.
Neither of them spoke, they just leaned together against the wall, side by side. The cold stone soothed the little divot of pain the arrow had punched in Quentin’s back. Eliot’s shirt was untucked. His face was all smudged with soot on one side. He would have been furious if he’d known.
“You all right?”
Eliot nodded.
“Fen’s dead,” Quentin said.
Eliot took a deep breath and ran his glowing hands through his thick wavy hair.
“I know. I saw.”
“I don’t think there’s anything we could have done,” Eliot said. “Big Red back there was just out of our league, that’s all.”
They fell silent. It was like the words had spun off into some void where they had no meaning. They’d lost any connection with the world; or maybe it was the world that had peeled away from the words. Eliot passed him a flask with something strong in it, and he drank and passed it back. It seemed to restore some link between him and his body.
Quentin drew his knees up and hugged them.
“I got hit by an arrow,” he said. It felt like a stupid thing to say. “In my back.”
“We should go,” Eliot said.
“Right.”
“Backtrack. Try to meet back up with the others. Penny’s got the button.” It was amazing that Eliot could still be so practical after everything that had happened. He was so much stronger than Quentin was.
“That big glowing guy though.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe he’s still back there.”
Eliot shrugged.
“We have to get to the button.”
Quentin was thirsty, but there was no water. He couldn’t remember when he’d dropped his pack.
“I’ll tell you something funny,” Eliot said after a while. “I think Anaïs hooked up with Dint.”
“What?” In spite of himself Quentin smiled. He felt his dry lips crack. “When did they even have time?”
“Bathroom break. After that second fight.”
“Wow. Tough break for Josh. But you have to applaud their initiative.”
“Definitely. But hard cheese on Josh.”
“Hard cheese.”
It was the kind of thing they used to say back at Brakebills.
“I’ll tell you something else funny,” Eliot went on. “I don’t regret coming here. Even now that it’s all gone to shit, I’m still glad I came. Could that possibly be the stupidest thing I’ve ever said to you? But it’s the truth. I think I was going to drink myself to death back on Earth.”
It was true. For Eliot there hadn’t been any other way. Somehow that made it a little bit better.
“You could still drink yourself to death here.”
“At this rate I won’t have the chance.”
Quentin stood up. His legs were stiff and achy. He did a deep knee-bend. They started back the way they came.
Quentin didn’t feel any fear anymore. That part of it was over, except that he was worried about Alice. The adrenaline was gone, too. Now he was just thirsty, and his feet hurt, and he was covered in scratches he couldn’t remember having gotten. The blood on his back had dried, sticking his shirt to the arrow wound. It tugged uncomfortably every time he took a step.
It became apparent pretty soon that he didn’t have anything to worry about anyway, because they couldn’t even find their way back to the banquet hall. They must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, maybe several. They stopped and tried some basic path-finding magic, but Quentin’s tongue felt thick and clumsy, and neither of them could seem to get the words quite right, and anyway they really needed a dish of olive oil to make it work properly.
Quentin couldn’t think of anything to say. He waited while Eliot took a piss against the stone wall. It felt like they’d come to the end, but they had no choice but to keep walking. Maybe this is still part of the story, he thought numbly. The bad part right before everything comes out all right. He wondered what time it was on the surface. He felt like he’d been up all night.
The masonry of the walls was older now, crumblier. For short stretches it was just dusty unworked cave rock. They were at the very outer fringes of this subterranean universe, wandering among badly eroded planets and dim, decaying stars. The hallway had ceased to branch now. It contented itself with curving gently to the left, and Quentin thought he could feel the curve getting gradually tighter, like it was spiraling inward, like the interior corridors of a nautilus shell. He figured it stood to reason, what little reason was left in the world, that there was a geometrical limit to how far it could keep curving in on itself before they came to something. Pretty soon it turned out he was right.
THE RAM
Just like that, there they all were.
Quentin and Eliot stood at the edge of a large round underground chamber, blinking at bright torchlight. It was different from the rooms they’d already seen in that it appeared to be naturally occurring. The floor was sandy, the ceiling craggy and irregular and unworked, with stalactites and other rocky excrescences poking down that you wouldn’t want to hit your head on. The air was chilly and damp and still. Quentin could hear an underground stream gurgling somewhere, he couldn’t see where. The sound had no origin or direction.
The others were here, too, all of them except for poor Fen. Josh and Alice were in an entrance a little ways over. Janet stood in another archway looking lost and bedraggled, Dint and Anaïs were in the next one over, and Penny was alone in the one after that. They stood in the doorways like contestants framed in the spangled, lightbulbed archways of a game show.
It was a miracle. It even looked like they’d all just arrived at the exact same moment. Quentin took a deep breath. Relief flooded through him like a warm liquid transfusion. He was just so fucking glad to see every last one of them. Even Dint—good old Dint, you hound dog! Even Penny, and only partly because he still had his pack, presumably with the button still inside. The story’s outcome was still in play after all. Even after everything that had gone wrong it could still all turn out basically okay—it was a disaster, but a mitigated disaster. It was still possible that five years from now, when they were more or less over their post-traumatic stress disorder, they’d all get a big kick out of getting together and talking about it. Maybe the real Fillory wasn’t that different from the Fillory he’d always wanted after all.
Kings and queens, Quentin thought. Kings and queens. Glory has its price. Did you not know that?
