The Magician King m-2

by Lev Grossman

  The others didn’t welcome her with open arms, exactly. They weren’t open-arms types. But there was respect there. She was geared up to prove herself all over again, since based on her life thus far she was used to having to prove herself to a new gang of assholes every six months or so. And she would have, she really would have. But they weren’t going to make her. The proving was done with. The journey was the test, and she had arrived. She was in.

  It wasn’t Brakebills. It was better. She felt like she’d finally won—she’d won ugly, but she’d won.

  They knew about Brakebills at Murs. Not much, but they knew. Their attitude toward it was bracingly snobbish. They considered Brakebills—to the extent that they considered it at all—rather cute: a sanitized, safety-wheeled playpen for those who didn’t have the grit and the will to make it on the outside. They called it Fakebills, and Breakballs. At Brakebills you sat in classrooms and followed the rules. Perfectly fine if you like that kind of thing, but here at Murs you made your own rules, no adult supervision. Brakebills was the Beatles, Murs was the Stones. Brakebills was for Marquis of Queensberry types. Murs was more your stone-cold street-fighting man.

  Most of them had even been in for the Brakebills exam, like her, though unlike her they didn’t realize that till they’d gotten to Murs and Failstaff, who had a special touch with memory spells, had wafted away the magic that was fogging their brains. They took a certain pride in it, the refuseniks. Gummidgy (Julia never did figure out what the deal with her name was) even claimed to have beaten the exam and then—a historic first—declined Fogg’s offer to matriculate and walked away. She’d chosen the life of a hedge witch instead.

  Privately Julia thought that that was completely demented, and that the Brakebills crowd probably had slightly more on the ball than the others were giving them credit for. But she enjoyed the snobbism nonetheless. She’d earned that much.

  They were an odd bunch at Murs. It was a menagerie—you needed a genius IQ to get into Murs, but eccentricity was not an impediment, and you’d have to be some kind of outlier to go through the grinder of the safe-house scene and not come out a little skewy. A lot of their magic was home-brewed, and as a result the range of different styles and techniques on display was bewildering. Some of them were graceful and balletic, some were so minimalist they barely moved at all. One guy was so herky-jerky he looked like he was practically break dancing. There was some popping and locking going on there.

  There were specialists too. One guy mostly made magic artifacts. Gummidgy was a dedicated psychic. Fiberpunk—a short, thickset specimen almost as wide as he was tall—self-identified as a metamagician: he dealt in magic that acted on other magic, or on itself. He rarely spoke and spent a lot of time drawing. The one time Julia looked over his shoulder he explained, in a whisper, that he was drawing two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional shadows cast by four-dimensional objects.

  Life was easy in Murs, but work was hard. They gave her a day to deal with her jet lag and her personal baggage, then Pouncy told her to report to the East Wing first thing the next morning. Julia didn’t fancy being told to report anywhere by Pouncy Silverkitten, whom she was accustomed to thinking of as a friend and an equal. But he just unbuttoned his shirt and showed her his stars. (Also his annoyingly smooth, well-muscled chest.) He had a lot of them. Equals they might be, but only in some abstract philosophical sense. Practically speaking he could still kick her ass at magic.

  Which was why, swallowing her pride, and possibly some other feelings, she obeyed Pouncy and reported to an upstairs room in the East Wing called the Long Study at eight o’clock in the morning.

  The Long Study was a narrow room lined with windows along one side—more of a gallery, really. There was nothing obvious to study with there. There were no books, or desks, or furniture of any kind in the Long Study. What there was was Iris.

  Baby-faced, chopstick-haired, Ivy League Iris, last seen breaking Julia down into her component parts back at the Bed-Stuy safe house. It was almost like meeting an old friend. On her home turf Iris went casual: jeans and a white T-shirt that showed off her stars.

  “Hi,” Julia said. It came out a tad querulous. She cleared her throat and tried again. “How are you?”

  “Let’s do it again,” Iris said. “From the top. Start with the flash.”

  “The flash?”

  “We’re going to run your levels. Start with the flash. You miss one, you go back to the beginning. You do them all, one to seventy-seven, no mistakes, three times in a row, and then we can start work.”

  “You mean start leveling me?”

  “Start with the flash.”

  For Iris, meeting Julia again was not like meeting an old friend. For Iris meeting Julia was more like when the grizzled sergeant in the Vietnam movie meets the newbie private fresh from Parris Island. Eventually the private will lose his cherry and become a man, but first the sergeant is going to have to drag him through the jungle until such time as the private can unfold his entrenching tool without shooting his balls off.

  Of course Iris had every right. That’s how the system worked. She was doing Julia a fucking favor. Babysitting the noob was evidently not considered a premium assignment at Murs, and she wasn’t going to pretend to enjoy it. Which whatever, but this did not oblige Julia to pretend to be grateful either. Really she ought to dog it a few times, she thought, just to piss Iris off. Show her that Julia had nothing to prove. See how long it took her to lose her shit. ışık her and her flash.

  But in truth it was not necessary for Julia to dog it. She screwed it up the old-fashioned way, involuntarily, four times before she made it to seventy-seven even once. Twice she muffed the same spell, level fifty-six, a thumb-cracking affair rich in Welsh ll’s that was designed to toughen glass against breakage. Even averaging a bit more than two minutes a level, which was really machinelike efficiency, they were two and a half hours into it when she went down for the second time. Iris sat down cross-legged on the floor.

  But Julia had decided that she was not going to swear or twitch or sigh in front of Iris, whether she muffed level fifty-six twice or two hundred times. She was going to be all sweetness and light. How do you llike them apples.

  At two in the afternoon Julia spiked spell number sixty-eight on an otherwise perfect run-through. Iris rolled her eyes and groaned and lay down full-length on the wooden floor and stared up at the ceiling. She couldn’t even look at Julia anymore. Julia didn’t pause but went right back to the beginning, whereupon she stuffed level fourteen, a gimme spell that even Jared knew cold.

  “God!” Iris shouted at the ceiling. “Get it right!”

  By the time Julia rattled off two perfect runs, right through to seventy-seven, it was six thirty in the evening. They hadn’t broken for lunch. Julia hadn’t even sat down. The setting sun, angling in from the west, painted the long wall a chalky pink. Her feet were killing her.

  “All right,” Iris said. “That’s it. Same time tomorrow.”

  “But we’re not done.”

  Iris levered herself up off the floor.

  “Nope, we’re done. Finish tomorrow.”

  “We’re not done.”

  Iris stopped and stared at Julia through her nerd glasses. Maybe Iris was annoyed at having to babysit the new fish, but Julia had so much more anger than Iris did at her disposal. She was making a withdrawal from her stockpile now, spending a little of the principal, and it hardly made a dent. She walked over to a window and punched it. It would have broken if she hadn’t already cast level fifty-six on it three times that day.

  “All right, Julia, I get it. I was tough on you. I’m sorry. Come on. Let’s get some dinner.”

  “We’re done when I say we’re done.”

  Julia cast a locking spell on the door (level seventy-two). It was a symbolic gesture, as there were in fact two doors out of the Long Study, and Iris could probably have unpicked her level seventy-two in a couple of minutes anyway. That wasn’t the point. The point w
as that Julia had been waiting four years to get to Murs. Iris could skip dinner.

  Iris sat back down and put her head in her hands.

  “Whatever.”

  She could stand to skip a few meals anyway, Julia thought. She’s working on a muffin-top situation with those jeans.

  Julia started again. She was going slower now, and when she was done the room was dark. It was almost nine o’clock. Iris stood up. She tried the door Julia had locked, swore, and walked the length of the Long Study to the other door without looking back or saying a word. Julia watched her go.

  There was no touching moment of female bonding. The grizzled sergeant didn’t chuck her on the shoulder and grudgingly admit that the rookie might make a hell of a soldier one day after all. But when she reported to the Long Study at eight o’clock the following morning it was tacitly understood that they could now skip the alpha-chick bullshit.

  Let the power-leveling begin. Here come the big secrets. At least she didn’t have to fuck anybody this time.

  She didn’t have to stand up, either: apparently she now qualified for some furniture. She and Iris sat on chairs and faced each other across an actual table, a sturdy chunk of old butcher block. On the table was, yes, a three-ring binder, but it was the most beautiful three-ring binder Julia had ever seen: leather-bound, with those sturdy steel rings—none of this bendy aluminum Trapper Keeper shit—and above all thick, thick, thick. It was stuffed with neatly transcribed spells.

  Under Iris’s steady gaze Julia went up two levels that day. The next day she did five. Every level she gained wiped out a little bit of what she’d been through in Brooklyn. Julia had a hungry mind, she always had, and she’d been on starvation rations for longer than she cared to think about. She’d even worried that her brain might be starving to death, losing its plasticity, that she’d been running on fumes for so long she might not have the mental muscle tone to wrangle large tranches of hard data. But she didn’t think so. If anything, wandering in the information jungle had made her tough and efficient. She was used to doing a lot with a little. Now that she had a lot, she was going to work wonders with it. And she did.

  It was frustrating having to pound levels while the others were off doing God knew what. She was running through new fields of power, frisking through them, but she was already eager to get on to whatever it was the rest of them were up to. She kept trying to run ahead, and Iris had to drag her back and make her trudge through the levels in order. I mean, it was so blindingly obvious that if you took the kinetic elements from level 112, and borrowed the reflexive bits from the self-warming spell at level 44, then you had a basic working model for how to make yourself hover a few feet off the ground. But that wasn’t till 166, and level 166 was 54 more levels away.

  And meanwhile she was being treated like a little kid around whom everybody had to watch their language. Whenever she looked out the window of the Long Study it seemed like Pouncy and Asmodeus were walking by, heatedly engaged in what was obviously the most interesting conversation in the history of spoken communication. Either they were sleeping together—though even in France Asmodeus was practically jailbait, so whatever—or there was some deal going on here that Julia was not yet senior enough to be cut in on. Conversations went quiet whenever she walked into the dining room. It’s not that they weren’t glad to see her, it’s just that she had apparently developed the ability to instantly make people forget what they’d been about to say, causing them instead to make some remark about the weather or the coffee or Asmo’s eyebrows.

  One night she woke up from a dead sleep at two in the morning—she was so tired from running levels with Iris that she’d gone straight up to her room and slept through dinner. At first she thought there was a phone ringing in her room on vibrate, except that she didn’t have a phone. Then the vibrations got stronger than that, stronger and stronger to the point where the whole house was throbbing every five seconds or so. It sounded like when cars rolled down her street in Brooklyn with the bass cranked up and too much funk in the trunk. Things were starting to rattle. It was like giant footsteps were approaching the house, over the sleeping fields of Murs.

  The whole thing took maybe two minutes. The pulses got bigger and bigger until whatever it was was right on top of her. The windows rattled till she thought the old glass would crack. On the final beat her bed vibrated a foot to the left, and she could feel three-hundred-year-old plaster dust sift down from the ceiling onto her face. Somewhere in the house something did shatter, a window or a plate. Light burst soundlessly out of the lower floors of the house, illuminating the row of cypresses across the lawn.

  And then it was gone, just like that, leaving behind it only a ringing, burnt-out silence. Later, it might have been an hour later, she heard the others coming up to bed. Asmo said something in a furious whisper, something about how they were wasting their time, and somebody else shushed her.

  The next morning everything was as it had been. Nobody copped to anything having happened at all. Though Fiberpunk was now sporting a ripe purple bruise on his temple. Hmmmmmmmm.

  When Julia hit level 200 they baked her a cake. Two weeks later, six weeks after she’d driven into Murs, she went to bed having hit level 248, and she knew that tomorrow would be it. And it was: at three in the afternoon Iris walked her through a complex casting that, when properly done, rolled back entropy in a local area by five seconds. The effect was very local, a circle a yard across, but no less spectacular for that.

  The theory behind it was a rat’s nest of interwoven effects. She could hardly believe something that kludgy even worked, but Iris could do it, and after a few hours so could Julia. She knocked down a pile of blocks. She cast the spell. The blocks knocked themselves back up again.

  And that was level 250. When she dropped her hands Iris kissed her on both cheeks—zo Fransh—and told her they were finished. She could hardly believe it. Just to be sure she offered to run the full set, 1 through 250, to Iris’s satisfaction, but Iris declined. She’d seen enough.

  Julia spent the rest of the afternoon just walking the shady lanes that ran in comforting right angles between the sun-baked fields that surrounded the farmhouse. Her brain felt bloated and replete, like after a big meal—it was the first time she could ever remember it not being hungry. She spent an hour playing computer games, then that night Fiberpunk cooked them an elaborate bouillabaisse, with monkfish and saffron, and they opened a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape with dust on its shoulders and a really boring-looking label that didn’t even have a little line drawing on it, which meant it must have been hair-raisingly expensive. Before they went to bed Pouncy told her to come to the Library the next morning. Not the Long Study, the Library.

  She woke up early. It was midsummer, but the heat hadn’t come up yet. She haunted the lumpy, un-landscaped grounds for an hour, startling weird French bugs out of her way, studying the tiny white snails that were everywhere, getting her shoes soaked with dew, waiting for everybody else to wake up. It was like morning on her birthday. Superstitiously Julia avoided the dining room while the others ate breakfast. At 7:55 she snatched a roll out of the kitchen and gnawed it nervously on her way over to the Library.

  The day she’d stepped into that elevator in the library in Brooklyn, she’d dropped into the void. It might as well have been an empty shaft. She’d been falling ever since. But it was almost over. She was about to touch solid ground again. She could barely even remember what it felt like to be where she belonged, on the same side of the glass as everybody else.

  She’d tried the door to the Library once before but it hadn’t opened for her, and she hadn’t bothered trying to hack the locking charm. She was tired of picking locks. She stood in front of the door for a minute, plucking at the fabric of her summer dress, watching the second hand of the clock in the hall.

  At the appointed hour the door opened by itself. Julia lowered her chin and went inside.

  They were all there, sitting around a long worktable. The Library was
clearly the crowning achievement of whoever had renovated the Murs farmhouse. They’d hollowed out the space completely, cut away three floors and exposed the roof beams thirty feet up. Morning sunlight lasered in through tall thin windows. Bookshelves soared along the walls, all the way up, which would have been totally impractical except for some tasteful oak platforms that floated magically alongside them, ready to hoist the browser up to whatever level he or she wanted to be at.

  They stopped talking when she came in. Nine faces turned to look up at her. Some of them had books and folders of notes in front of them. They could have been a corporate board meeting, if the corporation were Random Genius Freaks LLC. Pouncy sat at the head of the table. There was an open seat at the foot.

  She pulled out the chair and sat down, almost demurely. Why weren’t they talking? They just looked at her calmly, like a parole board.

  So. She’d met their expectations. It was time they met hers. Cards on the table. Show me whatcha got. Read ’em and weep.

  “All right,” she said. “So what are we doing?”

  “What would you like to do?”

  It wasn’t Pouncy who spoke, it was Gummidgy. You tell me, Julia wanted to say. You’re the pyschic. She was built like a model, tall and skinny, though her face was too long and severe to be really beautiful. Julia couldn’t place her ethnicity. Persian?

  “Whatever comes next. Whatever comes after level two hundred fifty. Two hundred fifty-one. I’m ready.”

  “What makes you think there is a level two hundred fifty-one?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “The fact that there were levels one through two hundred fifty?”

  “There is no level two hundred fifty-one.”

  Julia looked at Pouncy, Failstaff, Asmodeus. They looked back at her patiently. Asmo nodded.

  “How can there be no level two hundred fifty-one?”

  “There’s nothing after two hundred fifty,” Pouncy said. “Oh, you can craft more spells. We do it all the time. But at this point you have all the building blocks, all the basic components, that you’re going to have. The rest is just permutations. After two hundred fifty you’re just rearranging base pairs on the double helix. The power levels plateau.”