The Magician's Land

by Lev Grossman

  Mid-afternoon had become a dead time in the daily life cycle of their little criminal cell. They’d already gone over their parts in the plan one more time, as best they could in the confines of a hotel room, which was probably nothing like the field conditions, which they still knew way too little about. Stoppard didn’t seem to mind tinkering with his apparatuses eighteen hours a day, but the rest of them were slowly going out of their minds. They’d spent the morning tweaking a couple of things that didn’t really need tweaking. Quentin had taken this as far as he could, and he was impatient. Alice was out there somewhere.

  It was too cold to go outside, and if they did go outside they were at Newark International Airport, so they played cards or read or watched TV or did finger exercises or ran on the treadmills in the athletic center. Betsy scribbled in a voluminous diary. Sometimes they swam in the shallow hotel pool, which was enclosed in a damp, dripping glass grotto on the top floor and was so chlorinated that they felt slightly poisoned for half an hour after they got out. Quentin was happy to have a break in the routine. Maybe they were going off-site, for a dry run of the whole business.

  They met in the lobby, all except for Pushkar, who was nowhere in sight. Stoppard arrived carrying two hard plastic suitcases, one of which was obviously pretty heavy. Quentin brought a duffel bag with everything he figured they’d need to break the bond, if it could possibly be broken, which was still an open question. It wasn’t like they had one to practice on. He had Mayakovsky’s coins in his pocket.

  Betsy came empty-handed.

  “Field trip!” she said. “Thank God. Now I can say it. Are you ready? Plum snores. There, I said it.”

  “I’m glad it’s finally out there,” Plum said.

  “Do you think this is it?” Stoppard said. “I mean, is this the job?”

  “No.” Betsy shook her head. “Dress rehearsal. Shakedown cruise.”

  “We’ll meet the others on-site,” Lionel said, and he led them outside. It was the white limo again. This time the driver got out, and Lionel got behind the wheel. The rest of them climbed in the back.

  It was a good idea. Quentin was all for improvisation when there was absolutely no other choice, but it would be nice to be as overprepared as possible. Maybe the bird had even set up an incorporate bond for them to play with? The limo accelerated onto the highway, heading north.

  The intercom clicked on.

  “Cardboard box,” Lionel said. There was one, on the floor in a corner. Quentin slit the tape with a key. It turned out to be full of clothes: shiny black parkas and black jeans and watch caps. “Find your sizes. Get changed.”

  It was all very black-ops. Stoppard rooted through the box excitedly till he found a parka that fit him. He pulled it into his lap and fingered it tenderly.

  “I am in love,” he said. “I am in love with this coat.”

  Betsy had already whipped off her pants, revealing practical white underwear and a pair of very pale legs, and begun pulling on her jeans.

  “This tapered shit is so Jersey,” she said.

  “I think I’ll wait,” Plum said.

  The limo crossed the Hudson into Manhattan, then forged on farther north, through Yonkers and then veering east into Connecticut. Quentin watched the world flow by: hulking overpasses, brick housing projects dense with too-small windows, strip malls with giant signs shouting at the traffic, more housing projects and then finally, like a sigh of relief, trees. In the permanent twilight of the tinted windows it all looked as far off and alien as the contents of an aquarium.

  They stopped twice, once for gas and once at a long low brick building with a sign outside proudly identifying it as a rehab center, where Lionel took receipt of a long brown paper package from someone who barely opened the door. Stoppard fidgeted in his black coat, which he’d already put on even though it was too hot for it in the limo, and he’d added a pair of aviator glasses. His hands kept straying to the controls for the disco lights.

  “Don’t,” Plum said in a warning tone.

  There was a lot of pent-up energy in the car.

  “So,” Betsy said. “Stoppard. What the hell are you doing here? I mean, on this job?”

  “Same as everybody else,” he said. “I’m here for the money.”

  With startling quickness Betsy plucked the sunglasses off his face. Stoppard snatched at them but she made them vanish; she had a quick, fluid casting style that reminded Quentin powerfully of someone else’s, he couldn’t place it and then he could: Julia’s. Without the glasses Stoppard looked a lot younger.

  “Don’t bullshit us, Maverick,” she said. “You’re like nine years old. You can have the glasses back when you tell us how you got here.”

  “I’m seventeen! For your information. And anyway how did you get here?”

  “Well, let’s see . . .” She put a finger on her chin and looked up and to one side, pretending to think. “I’m the best there is at what I do. I have some things I need to take care of, and it’ll be a lot easier to do that with two million dollars. And I enjoy violence and riding around in stretch limos with nerds. The end!” She smiled. “Now you.”

  If Stoppard had not already had a raging crush on Betsy, he had one by the end of that speech. Either way some of the attitude went out of him.

  “I just like building stuff, I guess?” He wanted to play the game the way she had, but he had nowhere near the necessary reserves of sarcasm and sangfroid, so he wound up just being honest. “I was into computers for a while, but it was hard to get what I needed, you know? Even when you build your own gear the chips are still pretty expensive. And I’ve been with a couple of foster families—you don’t get any privacy. You can never hang on to your stuff. Especially when it’s worth something.

  “None of my families were magic. A couple of guys at the Best Buy, they got me into it, but pretty soon I kinda left them behind. When I get focused on something I just have to figure it out, you know? I don’t stop. I wasn’t going to school much at this point, and where I live you don’t want to be outside too much . . . I had a lot of time on my hands. And my last family, I got my own room. Give a nerd enough time and a door he can close and he can figure out pretty much anything.

  “But anyway magic plus computers, not a good combination, so I figured I had to choose one or the other. But then I found horology. Horomancy.”

  “Please tell me that word doesn’t mean what it sounds like it means,” Plum said.

  “Clock magic. It was the best of both worlds really. I always liked the hardware side, and it’s easier to scrounge parts for clocks than computers—you would not believe what people throw away. Plus you can, uh, steal stuff sometimes too, if you have to. After a while I got some pretty sophisticated apparatus going. Seeing what kind of magic I could get traction on—temporal effects, obviously, but that’s just where you start. You work your way outward. Weather. Optics. Probability. Field effects.

  “Mostly I was figuring this stuff out on my own. It has a different feel from all that gobble-gobble stuff you guys do.” He waggled his fingers like he was casting a spell. “This is more slow and steady. Tick-tock, tick-tock.”

  Quentin was developing some respect for Stoppard. Genuine loners were rare in the magic world, but this guy was the real thing. A total outlier: self-motivated, self-taught, on the fringes even of the safe-house scene. He was his own one-boy, one-room Brakebills. He wasn’t much to look at, but Quentin never would have gotten anywhere near magic all by himself in Brooklyn.

  “Anyway I must not have kept it as quiet as I thought because one morning I woke up and there was a letter on my bed, about the meeting at the bookstore. After that it was a no-brainer. I mean, forget about the cash, the gear that bird got for me—he must have pretty much infinite money. Stuff I only ever read about. Pretty much my wet dream.”

  “Pretty much,” Betsy conceded.

  She could have made a
joke, but somewhere in there she’d lost her bloodlust—Stoppard wasn’t quite the juicy target she was hoping for. Too innocent. Too easy.

  “If you’re into watches,” Quentin said, “take a look at this.”

  He fished his pocket watch out of his coat on the end of its silver chain and handed it across. Even with his newly discovered skill at mending he hadn’t made any headway with it. Stoppard took it the way a vet would take charge of a wounded sparrow. He regarded it from different angles, held it to his ear. His manner became quick and professional.

  “Doesn’t run?”

  “Not at the moment,” Quentin said. “Think you could get it going?”

  “I don’t know. Probably.”

  Stoppard put it in his lap and cracked open one of the hard plastic suitcases, which was evidently purpose-built to hold a set of tiny, glittering steel tools. He took out a jeweler’s loupe and selected one pair of tweezers and put another in his mouth, then he opened the back of the watch to look at the works—something Quentin had never been able to do.

  A faint pale light filtered out. Stoppard’s face went slack.

  “Oh my God,” he whispered. “Oh my God. Where did you get this?”

  “It’s come a long way.”

  “What is it?” Plum leaned over. “Ooh—so many little wheels.”

  “These mechanisms don’t exist. Nobody does this. Look, it’s got a second face.”

  He swung back the outer dial to reveal another one underneath it. His expression communicated the fact that he had somewhat underestimated Quentin and that he was, to the extent to which he was capable of it, sorry about that. Then he went back to the watch, ignoring Plum’s attempts to look over his shoulder.

  He didn’t say anything for the next hour, until the limo rolled to a stop. Lionel walked around to their door and opened it. Cold air washed in.

  “This is it, guys,” he said. “Keep it quiet. No magic till I tell you. We’re still a couple of miles from the house, but we don’t know much about the security.”

  “Wait, what?” Plum said. “But this isn’t the real thing?”

  “This is it,” he said again, impatiently. He looked even paler and lumpier than usual, and he’d let his beard get even more unruly.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Quentin said. “You realize we’re nowhere near ready!”

  “Then get ready. We’re out of time. You guys are professionals, right?”

  The answer to that was a rousing chorus of silence.

  “Look, just do your jobs.”

  He disappeared, leaving behind a limo full of shocked silence. Plum turned to Quentin.

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” Quentin said. “We could walk away.”

  Giving up now would be hard. He’d be set back months, and that would hurt. But this was more risk than he’d signed on for.

  “Oh come on,” Betsy said. “It’s just a job.”

  “That’s my point. No way is this worth getting killed over.”

  “Just breaking the bond alone, I’m putting us at about a fifty-fifty shot,” Plum said. “Let’s think about that for a second.”

  “Let’s think about this.” Betsy leaned across from the seat opposite. She smiled as if she were confiding a wonderful, intimate secret. “If you leave now? I will hunt you down and kill you. I will never stop till I find you. I’ve given up too much, and I am too close. Do you understand?”

  She stared at Quentin, not blinking.

  “Not even remotely.” Quentin didn’t blink either. He didn’t like being bullied. “Why do you care? What are you close to? It’s only money.”

  “Do you know what’s in the case?”

  “No. Not even the bird knows what’s in the case.”

  “I know what’s in the case,” Betsy said. “And I’ll give you a fucking hint: this isn’t about money.”

  “Maybe you could be a little more specific.”

  “You want to know what’s in the case? Freedom.” She held his eyes for another long second, then sat back against the banquette. Quentin looked over at Plum, then at Stoppard, who’d gone back to picking at the insides of the watch. The prospect of starting over again at the beginning, finding some new way in, was not appealing. If they could just get it right and get it over with he could move on with his life.

  And there was the Chatwin connection, he couldn’t let that go. And there was Alice. Who was he trying to fool? He wasn’t going to walk away. He was in this much too deep already. He opened his eyes. Betsy was still watching him.

  “You’d better believe,” he said, “that if this starts getting ugly, I’m going to be the first one to bolt. Then maybe I’ll hunt you down. Think about that.” Quentin put a hand on Stoppard’s shoulder, who looked up at him as if he were waking from a dream. “Better give me that back for now. You can look at it later.”

  Stoppard nodded and closed up the watch and mutely handed it over, though his eyes followed it until Quentin tucked it back into his jacket.

  They climbed out of the limo. It was late March, around four in the afternoon, and the temperature hovered around freezing. They were on a back road, really just a gravel track, somewhere in rural Connecticut, with a row of trees running along one side and dead-looking blackberry bushes on the other. Hayfields were all around them. There were no houses in sight.

  Plum stayed behind in the car to change, and when she got out they were all in matching black. Quentin wore his overcoat instead of a parka, because it looked more magicianly, and it was black anyway, and he had no idea when if ever he’d see the limo again. He had the page from the Neitherlands folded in an inside pocket, along with the watch.

  “Well,” Plum said. “This doesn’t look suspicious.”

  The breeze was icy, and even though they weren’t supposed to use magic Quentin quietly added a couple of charms to keep himself warm. Off in one of the meadows Pushkar was waving at them, and they struck out toward him through the dry, unmown grass. Lionel stood behind him, looking as big as a haystack, and the blackbird came winging over from the darkening trees to settle on his shoulder. It looked much more like a wild animal out here in the country. Quentin wondered what the other birds made of it.

  Pushkar had an enormous rectangular oriental carpet unrolled on the grass, a gorgeous thing with a knotted floral pattern on it in cream and pale blue and lion-gold. Pushkar was studying it and nodding slowly, sometimes bending down and smoothing out folds and making small adjustments to the fringes and to the pattern itself—it looked woven into the material, but it altered at his touch.

  A flying carpet. He’d never actually seen one. Pushkar wore a multicolored, utterly tasteless game-day sweater under his parka.

  “Nice rug,” Quentin said, since it was.

  “Guess how much it cost?” He didn’t wait for Quentin to guess. “Seventy thousand dollars. The bird paid cash, I saw it.”

  They stood around the edges. The gathering looked like a cold, formal, badly planned picnic. The bird addressed them from the top of Lionel’s head.

  “We found the Couple a week ago. They are in a house two miles northwest of here. A large estate, with nothing else near it. We have been watching it, learning their routines. This morning something agitated them. We are concerned that they are preparing for something—maybe they are going to leave, maybe they will upgrade security, we don’t know. But there is no more time. We will make our attempt tonight. Questions?”

  Quentin couldn’t think of any. Plum sniffled in the cold. Stoppard picked up his cases.

  “Is it OK if I—?”

  “Sure.” Pushkar nodded, and Stoppard stepped gingerly onto the carpet, as if he were worried it would scoot out from under him, or roll up with him in it.

  He kneeled down and opened both suitcases; one was full of tools, the other one, the heavy one, contained a
stumpy, silvery steel cylinder about a foot in diameter and two feet long. That’s what he’d been working on in his room, apparently—Quentin had seen it in pieces, but never put together. It had a white enamel clock face on one end and a cluster of small wheels and dials on the other. Stoppard unfolded a spindly stand and placed the cylinder on it, then opened the steel case and started fiddling.

  Lionel wandered off; he was wearing only a black sweatshirt, the same one he’d been wearing that night in the bookstore, but he didn’t seem to feel the cold. At least they had a big bastard on their side. Betsy began a stretching routine.

  “I feel like we should be doing something,” Plum said.

  “I wish I smoked. Do you want to go through the spells again?”

  “Not really. You?”

  “I would but I think my head would fall off.”

  So they sat down cross-legged on the carpet in the cold and waited. Quentin could feel Mayakovsky’s coins in his pants pocket. They felt good. They felt like confidence. Stoppard took out a small metal crank, fitted one end into a socket on the back of the machine, and began furiously turning it.

  “Mainspring,” he said happily, over the ratcheting sound. His breath puffed out white. “White alloy. Constant even source of kinetic energy. Tough to mess with magically.”

  “What does this thing do?”

  “Security mostly. It puts a bubble around us, makes us very hard to see or hear or detect magically. It should also keep us warm, which I personally can’t wait for.”

  Quentin realized Stoppard didn’t know even basic personal warmth spells, so he cast a few on him as he cranked the mainspring. The bird watched it all. If it was anxious or impatient, there was no way to tell.

  Once the machine had been ticking for a few minutes Stoppard detached the handle and stowed it away. He made a couple of adjustments, and there was a soft whirring sound, a hummingbird’s wings against a window, and the hands on the dials began to move. It chimed twice, clearly and musically, and light flashed deep in its gleaming innards like lightning inside a thundercloud.