by Lev Grossman
“They’re silver,” Pouncy said. “I think they’re real.”
One of the coins jingled on the floor and rolled away. This was powerful magic. It felt like nothing else she’d ever seen.
“Let me try,” she whispered.
She copied the sign he’d made on the mirror. This time instead of silver the moonbeam became something white and liquid. It pooled on the table, soaking into the cloth. She touched a finger to it and tasted it. Milk.
“How did you do this?” she said.
“I’m not sure,” Pouncy said, “but I think I prayed.”
“Oh God.” She forced down a hysterical giggle. “Who did you pray to?”
“I found it in one of these old Provençal books. Langue d’oc stuff. The language looked like an incantation, but I was wondering why there were no gestures to go with it. So I just got on my knees and clasped my hands and said the words.” Pouncy flushed. “I thought about—well, I thought about O.L.U.”
“Let’s have a look under the hood.”
There were simple spells to make magic visible: they showed you the ways the energy was running in and around an object with an enchantment on it. But what Julia saw when she cast one on the mirror defied explanation. It was the densest weave of magic she’d ever seen: a tracery of fine lines in an ornate pattern like a tapestry, so dense that it almost obscured the mirror underneath it. It should have taken a team of magicians a year at least to put all those channels in place. Instead Pouncy had done it alone, in one night, with a simple chant. It was unlike any working she’d ever heard of.
“You did this? Just now?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so. I said the words, but I think somebody else must have done the work.”
Her hands and her body felt strangely light. There was a sweet smell in the air. Acting on an impulse, she dabbed a little of the milk on each of her eyelids. Instantly her vision sharpened and clarified, like when they change the settings at the ophthalmologist’s.
“We’re getting close, Julia,” Pouncy said. “We’re getting close to the divine praxis. I can feel it.”
“I don’t like feeling things,” she said. “I like knowing them.”
But she had to admit, she felt it too. The only word she could think of to describe this magic was grave. There was nothing light or playful about it: it was dead fucking sober magic. Serious as a heart attack. Where was the line between a spell and a miracle? Turning moonlight into silver coins wasn’t exactly parting the Red Sea, but the effortlessness with which it was accomplished spoke of much larger possibilities. It was a minor effect running off an enormous power source.
The next morning Asmodeus was at breakfast. Real breakfast, not her usual lunch-breakfast. She was practically vibrating with excitement. She refused any food.
“I found him,” she said, with finality.
“Who?” Julia said. It was a little early for Asmodeus in her maximum-intensity mode. “Whom did you find?”
“The hermit. The tarasque’s holy man. He’s a saint. Or not a saint, exactly, not in the strictly Christian sense. But he calls himself one.”
“Explain,” Pouncy said around a hunk of the almost penitentially coarse bread they’d been eating.
“Well,” and here Asmodeus shook off her manic fatigue for a minute and entered her business mode, “as close as I can figure out, this guy is about two thousand years old. Right? He calls himself Amadour—says he used to be a saint, but they defrocked him.
“I found him living in a cave. Red hair, beard down to here. Says he serves the goddess, the old one, the one we’re always hearing about. He wouldn’t name her, but it has to be her. Our Lady, O.L.U. For a while he passed as a Christian saint, he told me, saying he worshipped the Virgin Mary, but eventually he got outed as a pagan and they tried to crucify him. He’s been living in a cave ever since.
“And at first I was all, sure, buddy, saint or crazy homeless guy, it’s a fine line. But he showed me things. Weird things, guys, things we don’t know how to do. He can shape rock with his hands. He heals animals. He knew things about me, things nobody knows. He—he healed a scar I have. Had. He made it go away.”
Her voice faltered. Julia had never seen Asmodeus look so serious. She glared at them, angry that she’d let a secret slip. Julia had never seen Asmodeus’s scar. She wondered if she meant a physical one or something else.
“Can you take us to him?” Pouncy’s voice was gentle. He seemed to sense how close to the edge she was.
She shook her head quickly, trying to recover herself and not succeeding.
“You only see him once,” she said. “You could go find him yourself, maybe, but I can’t tell you where the cave was. I mean, I remember, but I can’t tell you. Literally—I tried just now.” She shrugged helplessly. “Nothing comes out.”
They all looked at each other over the cold crusts and dead coffee.
“I almost forgot,” she said. “He gave me something.” She unzipped her backpack and rummaged in it for a sheet of parchment, closely written. “It’s a palimpsest. Can you believe it? So old-school. I watched him scrape the ink off some priceless ancient hymnal or something to make it. Probably a Dead Sea Scroll or something. He wrote out how to call on the goddess. Our Lady Underground.”
Pouncy took the paper from her. His fingers shook slightly.
“An invocation,” he said.
“So that’s it then,” Julia said. “The Lady’s phone number.”
“That’s it. It’s in Phoenician, I think, if you can believe it. He didn’t know if she’d come, but . . .”
Asmo picked up the heel of Pouncy’s loaf and started chewing it, without seeming to know she was doing it. She closed her eyes.
“Shit,” she said. “I have to go to bed.”
“Go.” Pouncy didn’t look up from the paper. “Go. We’ll talk after you’ve slept.”
CHAPTER 24
The Muntjac was becalmed, tossing on the gentle swell in the restless, unsettled way that boats do when they’re built for speed but making no headway. Its slack ropes and tackle jostled and banged against the masts. It didn’t like standing still.
Rain fuzzed the surface of the sea into a cloudy gray blur. Nobody spoke. A week had gone by since Quentin and Poppy came back from the Neitherlands, bearing news of the coming magical apocalypse and the true nature of the keys. The long, low-ceilinged cabin where they ate their meals was filled with the sound of drops drumming on the deck overhead, so that they would have had to practically yell at each other to be understood anyway.
They were going to find the last key. Definitely. They just weren’t sure yet precisely how they were going to do it.
“Let’s go over it again,” Eliot said, raising his voice to be heard over the rain. “These things always work by rules, you just have to figure out what they are. You went through with Julia.” He pointed at Quentin. “But you didn’t take the key with you.”
“No.”
“Could it have fallen through before the door closed? Could it be in the grass on your parents’ lawn?”
“No. Impossible.” He was almost sure. No, he was sure. The grass was like a damn putting green, they would have seen it.
“But then you”—he turned to Bingle—“you searched the room and found no key.”
“No key.”
“But just now when you two”—Quentin and Poppy—“went through to the Neitherlands, that key remained behind, here, on this side.”
“Correct,” Poppy said. “Don’t tell me it’s gone too.”
“No, we have it.”
“What happened to it when the door closed?” Quentin asked. “Did it stay hanging there in midair?”
“No, it fell on the deck when the door closed. Bingle heard it and picked it up.”
The conversation stopped, and the drumming rain filled in the silence. It was neither warm nor cold. The deck overhead was watertight, but the air was so wet that Quentin felt like he was soaked through a
nyway. Every surface was sticky. Everything wooden was swollen. His damn collarbone was swollen. There was a glum scraping as people shifted in their wooden chairs. Above his head Quentin heard the footsteps of whatever poor bastard was standing watch on deck.
“Maybe there was some space in between,” Quentin said. “One of those gaps between dimensions. Maybe it fell in there.”
“I thought the Neitherlands was the gap between dimensions,” Poppy said.
“It is, but there’s a different gap too. When a portal pulls apart. But we would have seen that.”
The Muntjac groaned softly as it swayed in place. Quentin wished Julia were here, but she was below with a fever that might or might not have been related to whatever else was going on with her. She’d been down ever since the fight for the last key. She lay on her bed with her eyes closed but not sleeping, breathing quickly and shallowly. Quentin went down there a few times a day to read to her or hold her hand or make her drink water. She didn’t seem to care much, but Quentin kept it up anyway. You never knew what might make a difference.
“So you searched the whole After Island,” Quentin said.
“We did,” Eliot said. “Look, maybe we should call on Ember.”
“Call Him!” Quentin said it more vehemently than he meant to. “I doubt if it’ll do much good. If that fucking ruminant could get the key He would just do it and leave us out of it.”
“But would He?” Josh asked.
“Probably. He’ll die too if Fillory goes.”
“What is Ember, anyway?” Poppy said. “I mean, I thought He was a god, but He’s not like those silver guys.”
“I think He’s a god in this world, but nowhere else,” Quentin said. “That’s my theory. He’s just a local god. The silver gods are gods of all the worlds.”
Although Quentin was still in close touch with the exalted frame of mind he’d been in when he came back from the Neitherlands, his connection to it had grown more tenuous. The urgency was still there: every morning he woke up expecting to find magic shut off everywhere like an unpaid power bill and Fillory collapsing around him on all sides like the last days of Pompeii. And they were certainly making good time, or they had been till this morning. Admiral Lacker had found, tucked away in a secret wooden locker, a marvelous sail that caught light as well as wind. Quentin recognized it: the Chatwins had one aboard the Swift. It hung slack through most of the night, limping along on whispers of moon-and starlight, but during the day it billowed out like a spinnaker in a gale and hauled the ship forward almost singlehandedly, needing only to be trimmed according to the angle of the sun.
That was all fine. But Fillory wasn’t doing its part. It wasn’t giving up the key. All the wonders seemed to be in hiding. In the past week they had reached heretofore unknown islands, stepped out onto virgin beaches, infiltrated choked mangrove swamps, even scaled a rogue drifting iceberg, but no keys presented themselves. They weren’t getting traction. It wasn’t working. Something was missing. It was almost as if something had gone out of the air: a tautness had gone slack, an electric charge had dissipated. Quentin racked his brain to think what it was.
Also it wouldn’t stop raining.
After the meeting Quentin forced himself to take a break. He lay down in his damp berth and waited for the heat from his body to propagate its way through the clammy, tepid bedclothes. It was too late to take a nap and too early to go to sleep. Outside his window the sun was dropping over the rim of the world, or it must have been, but you couldn’t tell. Sky and ocean were indistinguishable from each other. The world was the uniform gray of a brand-new Etch A Sketch the knobs of which hadn’t yet been twiddled.
He stared out at it, gnawing the edge of his thumb, a bad habit left over from childhood, his mind adrift in the emptiness.
Somebody spoke.
“Quentin.”
He opened his eyes. He must have fallen asleep. The window was dark now.
“Quentin,” the voice said again. He hadn’t dreamed it. The voice was muffled, directionless. He sat up. It was a gentle voice, soft and androgynous and vaguely familiar. It didn’t sound completely human. Quentin looked around the cabin, but he was alone.
“Who are you?” he said.
“I’m down here, Quentin. You’re hearing me through a grating in the floor. I’m down in the hold.”
Now he placed the voice. He’d forgotten it was even on board.
“Sloth? Is that you?” Did it have a name other than Sloth?
“I thought you might like to pay me a visit.”
Quentin couldn’t imagine what would have given the sloth that idea. The Muntjac’s hold was dark and smelled of damp and rot and bilge, and for that matter it smelled of sloth. All in all he would have been fine talking to the sloth just where he was. Or not talking to it at all.
And Jesus, if he could hear the sloth that clearly it must have overheard everything that happened in this cabin since they’d left Whitespire.
But he did feel bad about the sloth. He hadn’t paid very much attention to it. Frankly it was a tiny bit of a bore. But he owed it some respect, as the shipboard representative of the talking animals, and it was warm down in the hold, and it wasn’t like he had somewhere more pressing to be just now. He sighed and peeled the bedclothes off himself and fetched a candle and found the ladder that went down below.
The hold was emptier than he remembered it. A year at sea would have that effect. Black water sloshed around in a channel that ran along the floor. The sloth was a weird-looking beast, maybe four feet long, with a heavy coat of greenish-gray fur. It hung upside down by its ropy arms at about eye level, its thick curved claws hooked up over a wooden beam. Its appearance smacked of evolution gone too far. The usual pile of fruit rinds and sloth droppings lay below it in an untidy heap.
“Hi,” Quentin said.
“Hello.”
The sloth raised its small, oddly flattened head so that it was looking at Quentin right-side up. The position looked uncomfortable, but the sloth’s neck seemed pretty well designed for it. It had black bands of fur over its eyes that gave it a sleepy, raccoony look.
It squinted at the light from Quentin’s candle.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been down to see you very often,” Quentin offered.
“It’s all right, I don’t mind. I’m not a very social animal.”
“I don’t even know your name.”
“It’s Abigail.”
She was a girl sloth. Quentin hadn’t realized. A hard wooden chair had been brought down to the hold, presumably in case someone was enjoying their conversation with the sloth so much that he or she just had to sit down to enjoy it even more.
“And you’ve been very busy,” she added charitably.
A long silence ensued. Once in a while the sloth masticated something, Quentin wasn’t sure what, with its blunt yellow teeth. It must be somebody’s job to come down here and feed it. Her.
“Do you mind if I ask,” Quentin said finally, “why you came on this voyage? I’ve always wondered.”
“I don’t mind at all,” Abigail the Sloth said calmly. “I came because nobody else wanted to, and we thought we should send someone. The Council of Animals decided that I would mind it the least. I sleep a great deal, and I don’t move around very much. I enjoy my solitude. In a way I am hardly in this world at all, so it doesn’t very much matter where I am in it.”
“Oh. We thought the talking animals wanted a representative on the ship. We thought you’d be insulted if we didn’t take one of you along.”
“We thought you’d be insulted if we didn’t send someone. It is humorous how rife with misunderstanding the world is, is it not?”
It sure was.
The sloth didn’t find the long silences awkward. Maybe animals didn’t experience awkwardness the way humans did.
“When a sloth dies, it remains hanging in its tree,” the sloth said, apropos of nothing. “Often well into the process of decomposition.”
Quentin n
odded sagely.
“I did not know that.”
It wasn’t an easy ball to throw back.
“This is by way of telling you something about the way sloths live. It is different from the way humans live, and even from the way other animals live. We spend our lives in between worlds, you might say. We suspend ourselves between the earth and the sky, touching neither. Our minds hover between the sleeping world and the waking. In a sense we live on the borderline between life and death.”
“That is very different from how humans live.”
“It must seem strange to you, but it is where we feel most comfortable.”
The sloth seemed like somebody you could be frank with.
“Why are you telling me this?” he said. “I mean, I’m sure you have a reason, but I’m not making the connection. Is this about the key? Do you have an idea about how to find it?”
He didn’t know how much the sloth knew about what was going on above deck. Maybe she didn’t even know they were on a quest.
“It is not about the key,” Abigail said in her liquid, unhurried voice. “It is about Benedict Fenwick.”
“Benedict? What about him?”
“Would you like to speak with him?”
“Well, sure. Of course. But he’s dead. He died two weeks ago.”
It was still as unthinkable, almost unsayable, as it had been that first night.
“There are paths that are closed to most beings that are open to a sloth.”
Quentin supposed it went without saying that patience was a big deal when having a conversation with a sloth.
“I don’t understand. You’re going to hold a séance, and we can talk to Benedict’s ghost?”
“Benedict is in the underworld. He is not a ghost. He is a shade.” The sloth returned her head to its inverted position, a maneuver she accomplished without once dropping Quentin’s gaze.
“The underworld.” Jesus Christ. He hadn’t even realized Fillory had an underworld. “He’s in hell?”
