by Lev Grossman
Quentin was doing quite a bit of studying himself. He’d transcribed the whole page, 402 words arranged in twenty sentences, plus an incomplete one at the beginning and another at the end, and papered his walls with it. Each word got its own separate sheet, which he filled up with annotations and connected to other words with long curvy chalk lines to indicate related concepts. He was literally living inside the page.
He kept up with his teaching, but other than that decrypting the page was his full-time occupation. As he got deeper into it he began to run into a lot of mathematics, which he had to work out with a pencil and paper—you couldn’t do magical equations with computers, they just spat out inconsistent answers before hanging completely. Magical math had to be thought through with a brain.
But the page was beginning to open up—like tightly furled buds the words began to bloom and reveal the ideas locked inside them. The concepts unfolded for him, displaying hidden dimensions and interacting with one another in unexpected ways. As they took shape they also gave up clues as to the much larger, more shadowy whole of which they were just a tiny fragment: the book that the page came from. It appeared to be a treatise on the interactions between magic and matter.
On Earth, magic and matter were distinct things: you could cast a spell on an object, and it became enchanted, but the object and the spell remained separate entities—the object was like a piece of metal on which you’d put a magnetic charge. But in Fillory, Quentin knew, or at least strongly suspected, magic and thing were somehow one and the same. Magic existed on Earth, sure, but Fillory was magic. It was a fundamental difference.
This was all very theoretical, and Quentin wasn’t that into theory. He was still a Physical Kid at heart, and he was more into practice. Under the right conditions, with enough energy, could you make something on Earth magic? Infuse it with magic, melt them together till the seams were gone, like they were in Fillory? It felt like a forbidden idea, a boundary you weren’t supposed to cross, but it was too delicious not to at least try.
He requisitioned an empty basement lab, but even with his newly enhanced magical abilities it was difficult to force the delicate abstractions of the page into the crude actual world. Either he came up with nothing, or one of the spells would release a huge wad of energy that lit up the room with icy blue light and practically blew out the wards he’d set up to keep himself from being vaporized. As a precaution he worked the enchantments inside increasingly large, heavy, gluey globes of force, like bubbles blown from a thick viscous translucent liquid, which made it hard to tell what exactly was going on.
And what would he do with it anyway, even if it did work? What good was something magic? This was a powerful enchantment, but it needed a purpose. It was an answer in search of a question. He was getting older, and it was time he thought about making something, building something that would last. But what? He couldn’t see how this was getting him any closer.
One evening, standing alone in the senior common room, drinking his first glass of wine for the night and sketching diagrams in his head, he reached into his jacket pocket for his Fillorian watch—which still didn’t work, but he liked having it with him anyway—and found an envelope there along with it. Inside was a letter typed on a manual typewriter inviting him politely, even decorously, to show up at such and such a bookstore on such and such a night in March if he was interested in a job. The signature was illegible—bird scratchings.
Huh. It was intriguing, and Quentin felt a little of the old restlessness. Here it was, another mystery to be solved. Your classic passport to adventure, just like back in the old days.
But that was the thing about the old days: they were old. This was his life now. He was content, and if not happy then happier than he ever thought he’d be again. He had work to do. He crumpled up the letter and winged it into the fire. It caught, and a heavy log shifted, sending up sparks. The past was what it was, his home was here, and anything else was a fantasy.
CHAPTER 5
Eliot frowned. The Lorian champion was a squat fellow, practically as wide as he was tall and of some slightly different ethnic background from most of his compatriots. The Lorians were Vikings, basically, Thor types: tall, long blond hair, big chins, big chests, big beards. But this character came in at about five foot six, with a shaved head and a fat round Buddha face like a soup dumpling and a significant admixture of some Asiatic DNA. He was stripped to the waist even though it was about 40 degrees out, and his latte-colored skin was oiled all over. Or maybe he was just really sweaty.
The champion’s heavy round gut hung down over his waistband, but he was still a pretty scary-looking bastard. He had a huge saddle of muscle across his upper back, and his biceps were like thighs, and there must have been some muscle in there, just by volume, even if they did look kind of chubby. His weapon was weird-looking enough—a pole arm with a big curvy cross of sharp metal on the end—that you just knew he could do something really outstandingly dangerous with it.
When he stepped forward the Lorian army went nuts for him. They bashed their swords and shields together and looked at each other as if to say: yes, he may look a little funny, but our fellow is definitely going to kill the other fellows’ fellow, so three cheers for him, by Crom or whoever it is we worship! It almost made you like them, the Lorians. They were more multicultural than you would have thought.
Though there was no chance that their champion was actually going to kill the Fillorian champion, Eliot’s champion. Because Eliot’s champion was Eliot.
There had been some debate, when the idea was first mooted, about whether it made sense to send the High King of Fillory into single combat with the handpicked designated hitter of the invading Lorian army. But it rapidly became clear that Eliot was set on it, though his reasons were as much personal as they were tactical. He had begun his stint as High King in a rather decadent vein—louche, you might even say. But as his reign lengthened he had grown into the role, and become more serious about it, and it was time he showed everybody—himself included—how serious he was. Kingship was not an affectation, it was who he was. Very publicly, very literally, he was going to put some skin in the game.
He stepped forward from the front rank of his army, who, predictably but gratifyingly, also went nuts. Eliot smiled—his smile was twisted by his uneven jaw, but his happiness was the real stuff. His heart was in it.
The sound of the king’s regiment of the Fillorian army cheering was unlike anything else in the known universe. You had men and women shouting and banging their weapons together, good enough, but then you had a whole orchestra of nonhuman sounds going on around it. At the top end you had some fairies squeeing at supersonic pitches; fairies thought all this military stuff was pretty silly, but they went along with it for the same reason that fairies ever did anything, namely, for the lulz. Then you had bats squeaking, birds squawking, bears roaring, wolves howling, and anything with a horse-head whinnying: pegasi, unicorns, regular talking horses.
Griffins and hippogriffs squawked too, but lower—baritone squawking, a horrible noise. Minotaurs bellowed. Stuff with humans heads yelled. Of all the mythical creatures of Fillory, they were the only ones who still creeped Eliot out. The satyrs and dryads and such were cool, but there were a couple of manticores and sphinxes who were just uncanny as hell.
And so on down the line till you got to the bass notes, which were provided by the giants grunting and stomping their feet. It was silly really: he could have picked a giant as his champion, and then this thing would have been over in about ten seconds flat, pun intended. But that wouldn’t have sent the same message.
When Eliot first got the news that the Lorians were invading it had been grimly exciting. Rally the banners, Fillory’s at war! Antique formulas and protocols were invoked. A lot of serious-looking non-ceremonial armor and weapons and flags and tack had come up out of storage and been polished and sharpened and oiled. They brought up with them a lot of
dust too, and a thrilling smell of great deeds and legendary times. An epic smell. Eliot breathed it in deep.
The invasion wasn’t a complete surprise. The Lorians were always up to some kind of bad behavior in the books: kidnapping princes, forcing talking horses to plow fields, trying to get everybody to believe in their slate of quasi-Norse gods. But it had been centuries since they actually crossed the border in force. They were usually too busy fighting among themselves to get that organized.
More to the point, the peaks of the Northern Barrier Range were supposed to be enchanted to keep the Lorians out. That was the Barrier part. Eliot wasn’t sure what had happened there. When this was all over he’d have to remember to figure out exactly why those spells had crapped out.
Eliot moved rapidly to expel the Lorians, though he found himself reluctant to be the direct cause of any actual killing. This wasn’t Tolkien—these weren’t orcs and trolls and giant spiders and whatever else, evil creatures that you were free to commit genocide on without any complicated moral ramifications. Orcs didn’t have wives and kids and backstories. But he was pretty sure the Lorians were human, and killing them would be basically murder, and that wasn’t going to happen. Some of them were even kind of hot. And anyway those Tolkien books were fiction, and Eliot, as High King of Fillory, didn’t deal in fiction. He was in the messy business of writing facts.
It was a tricky, ticklish business. There was nothing—in Eliot’s admittedly limited experience—more tedious than virtue.
Fortunately the Fillorians had an advantage, which was that they had every possible advantage. They outmatched the Lorians in every stat you could name. The Lorians were a bunch of guys with swords. The Fillorians were every beast in the Monster Manual, led by a clique of wizard kings and queens, and Eliot was very sorry but you knew that when you invaded us.
Still, there were a lot of them, and they knew how to do damage—doing damage was pretty much these guys’ skill set. It was late spring when the Lorians came pouring through Grudge Gap and onto Fillorian soil. They wore steel caps and mail shirts, and carried notched old swords and war axes. Some rode big shaggy horses. They were met by a nightmare.
See, the Lorians had made a mistake. On their way down from the Northern Barrier Range they set some trees on fire, and an outlying farm, and they killed a hermit.
Even Janet was surprised by Eliot’s anger. I mean, she was furious, but she was Janet. She was pissed off all the time. Poppy and Josh looked grim, which was how they got angry. But Eliot’s rage was crazy, over the top. They burned trees? His trees? They killed a hermit? They killed a hermit? Where Fillory and the Fillorians were concerned Eliot no longer had any irony. His heart went out to that weird, solitary man in his uncomfortable hut. He’d never met him. They wouldn’t have had much to say to each other if they had. But whoever that hermit was, he obviously despised his fellow man, and that meant he was OK in Eliot’s book, and now he was dead. Eliot was going to destroy the Lorians, he would annihilate them, he would murder them!
Not murder-murder. But he was going to mess them up good.
He was tempted to let them try to cross the Great Northern Marsh, where the sunken horrors that dwelt there would deal with them, with extreme prejudice, but he didn’t want to give them even another day’s march on his grass. Besides, there were a couple more farms in the way. Instead he let the Lorians march part of one day, till noon, till they were hot and dusty and ready to knock off for lunch. Probably it was blowing their minds how easy it was all turning out to be. They were going to do it, lads, they were the ones, they were going to take fucking Fillory, dudes! He let them ford the Great Salt River. He met them on the other side.
Eliot went alone, disguised as a peasant. He waited in the middle of the road. He didn’t move. He let them notice him gradually. First the guys in front, who when they realized he wasn’t going to get out of the way called a halt. He waited while the guys behind those guys got crowded into them, soccer-stadium-style, and they called a halt, and all the way back down the line in a ripple effect. There must have been, he didn’t know, maybe a thousand of them.
The man leading the front line stepped out to invite him—not very politely—to kindly get out of the way or one thousand Lorian linebackers would pull his guts out and strangle him with them.
Eliot smiled, shuffled his feet humbly for a second and then punched the guy in the face. It took the man by surprise.
“Get the fuck out of my country, asshole,” Eliot said.
That one was on the level, no magic. He’d been taking boxing lessons, and he got the drop on the guy with an off-hand jab. Probably the Lorian wasn’t expecting what amounted to a suicide attack from some random peasant. Eliot knew he hadn’t done much damage, and that he wouldn’t get another shot, so he held up his left hand and force-pushed the man back so hard he brought six ranks of Lorians down with him.
It felt good. Eliot had no children, but this must be what protecting your child felt like. He just wished Quentin could have seen it.
He dropped the cloak and stood up straight in his royal raiment, so it was clear that he was a king and not a peasant. A couple of eager-beaver arrows came arcing over from back in the ranks, and he burned them up in flight: puff, puff, puff. It was easy when you were this angry, and this good, and God he was angry. And good. He tapped the butt of his staff once on the ground: earthquake. All thousand Lorians fell down on their stupid violent asses, in magnificent synchrony.
He couldn’t just do that at will, he’d been out here all last night setting up the spells, but it was a great effect, especially since the Lorians didn’t know that. Eliot allowed it to sink in.
Then he undid a spell: he made the army behind him visible, or most of it. Take a good look, gentlemen. Those ones with the horse bodies are the hippogriffs. The griffins have the lion bodies. It’s easy to mix them up.
Then—and he indulged himself here—he made the giants visible. You do not appreciate at all from fairy tales how unbelievably terrifying a giant is. These players were seven-story giants, and they did not mess around. In real life humans didn’t slay giants, because it was impossible. It would be like killing an apartment building with your bare hands. They were even stronger than they looked—had to be, to beat the square-cube law that made land organisms that big physically impossible in the real world—and their skin was half a foot thick. There were only a couple dozen giants in all of Fillory, because even Fillory’s hyperabundant ecosystem couldn’t have fed more of them. Six of them had come out for the battle.
Nobody moved. Instead the Great Salt River moved.
It was right behind them, they’d just crossed it, and the nymphs took it out of its banks and straight into the mass of the Lorian army like an aimable tsunami. A lot of the soldiers got washed away; he’d made the nymphs promise to drown as few of them as possible, though they were free to abuse them in any other way they chose.
Some of the ones who weren’t swept away wanted to fight anyway, because they were just that valiant. Eliot supposed they must have had difficult childhoods or something like that. Join the club, he thought, it’s not that exclusive. He and his friends gave them a difficult adulthood to go with it.
—
It took them four days to harry the Lorians back to Grudge Gap—you could only kick their asses along so fast and no faster. That was where Eliot stopped and called out their champion. Now it was dawn, and the pass made a suitably desolate backdrop, with dizzyingly steep mountainsides ascending on either side, striped with spills of loose rock and runnels of meltwater. Above them loomed icebound peaks that had as far as he knew never been climbed, except by the dawn rays that were right now kissing them pink.
Single combat, man to man. If Eliot won, the Lorians would go home and never come back. That was the deal. If the Lorian champion won—his name for some reason was Vile Father—well, whatever. It wasn’t like he was going to win.
Vile Father didn’t look like somebody waiting to begin the biggest fight of his life. He looked like somebody waiting for a bus. He hadn’t adopted anything like a fighting stance. He just stood there, with his soft shoulders sloping and his gut sticking out. Weird. His hands were huge, like two king crabs.
Though Eliot supposed he didn’t look much less weird. He wasn’t wearing armor either, just a floppy white silk shirt and leather pants. For weapons he carried a long knife in his right hand and a short metal fighting stick in his left. He supposed it was pretty clear that he had no idea how to use either of them, apart from the obvious. He nodded to Vile Father. No response.
Time passed. It was actually a teensy bit socially awkward. A soft cold wind blew. Vile Father’s brown nipples, on the ends of his pendulous man-cans, were like dried figs. He had no scars at all on his smooth skin, which somehow was scarier than if he were all messed up.
Then Vile Father wasn’t there anymore. It wasn’t magic, he had some kind of crazy movement style that was like speed-skating over solid ground. Just like that he was halfway across the distance between them and thrusting his blade, whatever it was, straight at Eliot’s Adam’s apple at full extension. Eliot barely got out of the way in time.
He shouldn’t have been able to get out of the way at all. Like an idiot he’d figured V.F. was going to swing the blade at him like a sword, on the end of that long pole, thereby giving him plenty of time to see it coming. Which would have been stupid, but all right, I get it already, it’s a thrusting weapon. By rights it should have been sticking out of the nape of Eliot’s neck by now, slick and shiny with clear fluid from his spine.
