by Lev Grossman
“Stand back,” he said.
Whoever made the wards knew what they were doing. But they didn’t know everything Quentin knew. He moved the heat from the wall, all of it, into the little glass window, which expanded, as glass will when it’s heated. The wards were good enough that the heat didn’t want to go, but Quentin had ways of encouraging it. When the glass couldn’t expand anymore it popped with a ping like a lightbulb. Warren’s students would have been impressed.
“Stronzo!” he called through the empty frame. “Facci parlare contuo direttore del cazzo!”
A minute passed. Quentin’s thermal transfer spell had made a sheen of frost appear on the old stone wall. The door opened. It was dark inside.
“See?” he said. “I did learn something in college.”
A short, heavyset man met them in the foyer, a tiny room lined with brown ceramic tiles. He was surprisingly gracious. They must have to replace that little window a lot.
“Prego.”
He ushered them up a short flight of stairs into one of the most beautiful rooms Quentin had ever seen.
He’d been snowed by Venice’s bizarre topography. He’d assumed they’d be shown into some crap Euro-trash crash pad, with white walls and uncomfortable couches and tiny geometrical lamps, but the building’s exterior was pure camouflage. They were in one of the big palaces on the Grand Canal. They’d come in the back way.
The entire front wall was a row of tall windows with Moorish peaks, all looking out onto the water. The obvious intention was to awe guests into a state of trembling submissiveness, and Quentin surrendered immediately. It was like a full-scale mural, a Tintoretto maybe, with vivid green water and boats of all shapes and sizes, imaginable and unimaginable, crossing back and forth. Three hideous, glittering Murano chandeliers lit the room, translucent octopuses dripping with crystals. The walls were stacked with ranks of paintings, classical landscapes and scenes of Venice. The floor was old marble tiles, their lumps and scars smothered under overlapping oriental carpets.
Everything in the room was very much just so. It was the kind of room you wanted to spend years in. It wasn’t Fillory, but things were definitely looking up. It felt like Castle Whitespire.
Their escort departed, and for the moment they were left to their own devices. Quentin and Julia sat on a sofa together; its legs were so deeply carved it looked like it was going to walk away. There were four or five other people in the room, but it was so huge that it seemed private and empty. Three men in shirtsleeves were talking in low tones over a tiny table, sipping something clear out of tiny glasses. A broad-shouldered old woman stared out at the water with her back to them. A butler, or whatever they were called in Italy, stood at the foot of the stairs.
Everyone ignored them. Julia squished herself into one corner of the couch. She pulled her feet up, putting her shoes on the nice antique upholstery.
“I guess we take a number,” Quentin said.
“We have to wait,” Julia said. “He will call us.”
She took off her glasses and closed her eyes. She was starting to withdraw again. He could see it. It seemed to come in waves. Maybe it was because she felt safe here, she could let herself go for a while. He hoped so. He would take it from here.
“I’m going to get you some water.”
“Mineral water,” she said. “Fizzy. And ask him for rye.”
If there was one thing being a king prepared you for, it was talking to domestic staff. The butler had both mineral water—frizzante—and rye. He brought the rye neat, which seemed to be how Julia wanted it. She ignored the water. He worried about her drinking. Quentin liked a drop here and there, God knew, but the volume of alcohol Julia could consume was heroic. He thought of what Eliot told him, about what he’d seen at the spa. It was like Julia was trying to anesthetize herself, or cauterize a wound, or fill in some part of her that was missing.
“Warren’s fixer must be pretty good at fixing things,” Quentin said. “This place is nice even by magician standards.”
“I cannot stay here” was all Julia said.
She sat there sipping the rye and shivering, cupping it between her hands as if it were a magic healing cordial. She drank without opening her eyes, like a baby. Quentin had the butler bring her a wrap. She had the butler bring her another rye.
“I can’t even get drunk anymore,” she said bitterly.
After that she didn’t speak. Quentin hoped she could rest. He occupied the other end of the couch, sipping a Venetian spritz (Prosecco, Aperol, soda water, twist of lemon, olive) and looking out at the canal and not thinking about what they’d do if this didn’t work out. The palace directly opposite them was pink; the setting sun was turning it salmon. Its windows were all shuttered. Over the years it had settled unevenly—one half had sunk slightly while the other half stayed where it was, creating a fault line up the middle. It must have run through the whole building, all the rooms, Quentin thought. People were probably always tripping on it. Stripy poles stuck up at odd angles from the water in front of the pink palace.
It was strange to be in a place and not be king of it. He’d gotten out of the habit. It was like Elaine had said: nothing made him special here. Nobody noticed him. He had to admit it was strangely relaxing. It was an hour, and Quentin had cut himself off after his third spritz, before a small, intense young Italian in a pale suit, no tie, came and invited them upstairs. It was the kind of outfit an American couldn’t have gotten away with in a million years.
He showed them into a small all-white salon with three delicate wooden chairs set around a table. There was a plain silver bowl on the table.
No one sat in the third chair. Instead a voice spoke to them out of the air—a man’s voice, but high and whispery, almost androgynous. It was hard to tell where it was coming from.
“Hello, Quentin. Hello, Julia.”
That was creepy. He hadn’t told anybody their names.
“Hi.” He didn’t know where to look. “Thanks for seeing us.”
“You’re welcome,” the voice said. “Why have you come here?”
I guess he doesn’t know everything.
“We’d like to ask for your help with something.”
“What would you like me to help you with?”
Showtime. He wondered if the fixer was even human, or some kind of spirit like Warren, or worse. Julia was doing her thousand-yard stare, a million miles away.
“Well, we’ve just come from another world. From Fillory. Which as it turns out is a real place. You probably knew that.” Ahem. Start again. “We didn’t mean to leave—it was kind of an accident—and we want to go back there.”
“I see.” Pause. “And why would I want to help you with that?”
“Maybe I can help you too. Maybe we can help each other.”
“Oh, I doubt that, Quentin.” The voice dropped an octave. “I doubt that very much.”
“Okay.” Quentin looked behind him. “Right, look, where are you?”
He was starting to feel painfully aware of how vulnerable they were. He didn’t have much of an exit strategy. And the fixer shouldn’t have known their names. Maybe Warren had called ahead. That wasn’t a comforting thought.
“I know who you are, Quentin. There are circles in which you are not a very popular man. Some people think you abandoned this world. Your own world.”
“All right. I wouldn’t say abandoned, but okay.”
“And then Fillory abandoned you. Poor little rich king. It doesn’t seem like anyone wants you, Quentin.”
“You can look at it like that if you want. If we can just get back to Fillory everything will be fine. Or at any rate it’s not your problem, is it?”
“I will be the judge of what is and is not my problem.”
The back of Quentin’s neck prickled. He and the fixer weren’t getting off to a roaring start. He weighed the advantages of laying on some basic defensive magic. Prudent, but it might spook the fixer into trying a preemptive strike. He shot Julia a gl
ance, but she was barely following.
“All right. I’m just here to do business.”
“Look in the bowl.”
Looking in the silver bowl at this juncture seemed like a bad idea. Quentin stood up.
“Listen. If you can’t help us, fine. We’ll go. But if you can help us, give us a price. We’ll pay it.”
“Oh, but I don’t have to give you anything at all. I did not invite you here, and I will decide when you can go. Look in the bowl.”
Now there was steel in that high, whispery voice.
“Look in the bowl.”
This was going south fast. It felt all wrong. He took Julia’s arm and pulled her to her feet.
“We’re leaving,” he said. “Now.”
He backhanded the silver bowl off the table and it clanged against the wall. A slip of paper fluttered out of it. Against his better judgment Quentin glanced at it. There were spells you could set off just by reading them. The paper had the words I.O.U. ONE MAGIC BUTTON written on it in crude magic marker.
The door opened behind them, and Quentin scrambled to get them both behind the table.
“Oh, shit! He looked in the bowl!”
The voice was a lot lower than the one that had been speaking before. It was a voice Quentin knew well. It belonged to Josh.
Quentin hugged him.
“Jesus!” he said into Josh’s broad, comforting shoulder. “What the hell, man?”
He didn’t understand how it was even possible that Josh was here, but it didn’t matter. Probably it would, but not yet. He didn’t even care that Josh had messed with their heads. What mattered now was that they weren’t going to have a new disaster. They weren’t going to have a fight. Quentin’s knees were shaking. It was like he’d sailed so far from the safe, orderly world he knew that he was coming back around the other way, from the other side, and there was Josh: an island of warmth and familiarity.
Josh disengaged himself tactfully.
“So,” he said, “welcome to the suck, man!”
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“Me? This is my house! What are you doing here? Why aren’t you in Fillory?”
He was the same Josh: round-faced, overweight, grinning. He looked like a beer-brewing abbot, not visibly older than the last time Quentin had seen him, which was more than three years now. Josh carefully closed the door behind him.
“Can’t be too careful,” he said. “Got an image to protect. Kind of a Wizard of Oz thing going on, if you see what I mean.”
“What’s with the bowl?”
“Eh, I didn’t have a lot of time. I just thought it was creepy. You know. ‘Look in the bowl . . . look in the bowl . . .’ ” He did the voice.
“Josh, Julia. You guys know each other.”
They’d met once before, in the chaotic run-up before the great return to Fillory, before Josh had set off into the Neitherlands on his own.
“Hi, Julia.” Josh kissed her on both cheeks. He must really have gone Euro over here.
“Hi.”
Josh waggled both eyebrows at Quentin lewdly in a way that didn’t seem like it should be physically possible. It was starting to sink in for Quentin just what a colossal stroke of luck this was. Josh would have the magic button. He was their ticket back to Fillory. Their wandering days were over.
“So listen,” he said. “We’ve got some problems.”
“Yeah, you must if you came here.”
“We don’t even really know where here is.”
“You’re in my house, that’s where here is.” Josh waved his arms grandly. “Here is a huge fuck-off pa-lots-o on the Grand Canal.”
He gave them the tour. The palazzo was four floors, the lower two for business, the upper two for Josh’s private apartments, to which they retreated. The floor was massive pink-swirled marble slabs, the walls crumbling plaster. All the rooms were odd sizes and seemed to have been built as they were needed, on a series of whimsical impulses that it was now impossible to reconstruct.
All glory to the great quest for Fillory, but they needed a break. Julia requested a hot bath, which frankly she badly needed. Quentin and Josh retired to the tremendous dining room, which was lit by a single modest chandelier. Over plates of black spaghetti, Quentin explained as best he could what had happened and why they were here. When he was done Josh explained what had happened to him.
With Quentin, Eliot, Janet, and Julia safely installed on the thrones of Fillory, Josh had taken the button and embarked on an exploration of the Neitherlands. He’d seen as much as he ever wanted to see of Fillory, and it hadn’t been pretty, and anyway he was sick of scraping along in the others’ shadows. He didn’t want to be co-king of Fillory, he wanted to do his own thing his own way. He wanted to find his own Fillory. He wanted to get laid.
Josh could be careless about a lot of things—what he ate, wore, smoked, said, did—but you don’t get into Brakebills without being a genius of some kind or another, and given the right stakes he was fully capable of being highly methodical, even meticulous. In this case the stakes were just right. He began a careful survey of the Neitherlands.
This was not a thing to be undertaken lightly. As far as anyone knew the squares and fountains of the Neitherlands extended an infinite distance in all directions, never repeating themselves, and each one led to a different world, and maybe a whole different universe. It would take no effort at all to get so lost that you could never find your way home.
Josh had it in mind to go to Middle Earth, as in the setting of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Because if Fillory was real, why not Middle Earth? And if Middle Earth was real, that meant a lot of other things were probably real: lady elves and lembas wafers and pipe-weed and Eru Ilúvatar knew what else. But practically speaking anywhere would have done as long as it was reasonably warm and life-supporting and inhabited by people endowed with the appropriate organs and a willingness to make them available to Josh. The multiverse was his TGI Friday’s.
He had it in mind to spiral outward from Earth’s fountain, square by square, mapping carefully as he went. He wouldn’t need much. You didn’t really get hungry in the Neitherlands. He brought a loaf of bread, a good bottle of wine, warm clothes, six ounces of gold, and a stun gun.
“The first world was a complete bust,” he said. “Desert everywhere. Incredible dunes, but no people at all that I could find, so I buttoned right back out of there. Next one was ice. Next one was pine forest. That one was inhabited—sort of a Native American thing. I stayed there two weeks. No love, but I lost about ten pounds. Also scored a fuck-ton of wampum.”
“Wait, hang on. These worlds were the same all over? Like each one had a single climate and that’s it?”
“Well, I don’t know. I don’t even know if these other worlds are spheres, you know? Or discworlds or ringworlds whatever else. Maybe they don’t work the same way. Maybe they don’t have latitude. But I wasn’t about to hike to another climatic zone just to find out. Much easier just to hit the next fountain.
“God, the things I saw. Really, you should do it sometime. Some days I would hit a dozen worlds. I was just like free-falling through the multiverse. A giant tree that didn’t have any beginning or end. A sort of magnetic world, where everything stuck to you. One was all stretchy. One was just stairs, stairs and stairs and stairs. What else? There was an upside-down one. A weightless one, where you drifted around in outer space, except that space was warm and humid and smelled sort of like rosemary.
“And you know what’s real? Teletubbies! I know, right? Crazy, crazy stuff.”
“You didn’t . . .”
“No, I did not hit that shit. Totally could have. Anyway. Not everything was that exotic. Sometimes I’d find a world that was just like ours only one tiny thing would be different—like the economy was all based on strontium, or sharks were mammals, or there was more helium in the air so everybody had little high voices.
“I did meet a girl, after all that. Man, it was so beautiful. Thi
s world was mostly mountains, like one of those Chinese paintings, just rising out of the mist, and actually everybody looked kind of Asian. They lived in these ornate hanging pagoda cities. But there were hardly any of them left—they were always fighting these endless wars with other people on other mountains, for no special reason. Plus they fell off cliffs a lot.
“I was probably the fattest person they’d ever seen, but they didn’t care about that. I think they thought it was hot. Like it meant I was a good hunter, something like that. They’d also never seen magic before, so that went a long way. I was kind of a celebrity for a while.
“I started hanging out with this one girl, big-time warrior for one of the cities. She was very into the magic thing. And also I guess their menfolk weren’t especially well-endowed in the hardware aisle, if you take my meaning.”
“I believe I grasp the essence of it, yes,” Quentin said.
“Anyway she died. Got killed. It was awful. Really, really sad. At first I wanted to stay and fight and try to get the people who killed her, but then I couldn’t do it. It was all so stupid. I just couldn’t get into the war thing the way they did, and that was shameful to them, I guess, so they kicked me out.”
“God. I’m sorry.”
Poor Josh. The way he talked all the time, you sometimes forgot he had feelings. But they were all there, if you dug deep enough.
“No, it doesn’t matter. I mean it did, but what can you do. It was never going to work out. I think she wanted to die that way. Those people weren’t that into life, or maybe they were and that’s what life is, I don’t fucking know.
“That’s when it all went to shit. All the fun was gone. I went to this kind of Greek world, all white cliffs and hot sun and dark seas. I slept with a harpy there.”
“You had rebound sex with a harpy?”
“I don’t know if that’s what she was. Wings for arms, basically. Her feet were kind of talon-y too.”
