by Lev Grossman
It was a bear of a problem, nasty and complicated, a real tarball. Quentin had heard about incorporate bonds, though he’d still never seen one in real life. The theory went as follows: picture a two-dimensional world, an infinite plane, full of infinitely flat two-dimensional objects. You, a three-dimensional being, could theoretically lean down from above it and fasten one of those objects in place, anchoring it permanently to its plane from above; if you did it carefully you might not even damage it too much. In the case of an incorporate bond the same operation was performed in three-dimensional space, using a four-dimensional anchor to fix the object immovably with respect to the fabric of three-dimensional space-time.
It was about as difficult as it sounded, and messy and expensive to boot. Four-dimensional paperweights didn’t grow on trees, or at least not in this plane of existence they didn’t. Incorporate bonds were the last word in magical security, and the Couple must have gone through a good deal of trouble to cast the spell, but in doing so they’d rendered the case unstealable. Except that the bird thought it wasn’t.
In Quentin’s experience magical creatures like the bird didn’t tend to know a lot about magic from a technical point of view. They didn’t work magic themselves, they just were magic, so the theory of it didn’t really matter. Also a lot of them weren’t terribly bright. But the bird had some ideas about it, or someone had supplied it with ideas, and on the face of it they weren’t demonstrably nonsense. But carrying them out posed a raft of thorny practical issues, and the bird had generously left the working out of said problems to Quentin and Plum.
At first it was fun: it was a dense, rich, genuinely hard problem, and they attacked it with a will. The issue of the suitcase’s Chatwin connection receded to the back of Quentin’s mind as they scribbled flow charts on hotel stationery, then on reams of printer paper filched from the business center, then finally on a fat roll of butcher’s paper from an art supply shop. The spell kept ramifying into more and more secondary and tertiary and quaternary spells, to the point where they had to color-code them, and the color-coding eventually ran to a full 120-count pack of Crayolas. Quentin and Plum argued more vehemently than was strictly necessary over which colors should go with which spells.
That should probably have been a warning sign. After a week they’d drilled down far enough that they were staring at some real bedrock problems, questions that looked like they ought to have answers but which kicked back everything they threw at them. He might have given up if it hadn’t been for Alice.
For years, seven of them, he’d thought of Alice as someone who belonged to the past. She wasn’t dead, but she was gone. He was resigned to living his life without her. But when he saw her that night in the mirror at Brakebills all that ended, and she came surging roughly back into his present.
He hadn’t seen her since Ember’s Tomb, and their reunion was so chaotic and unexpected that in the moment he didn’t know what to think or feel or do—Fogg was right, he hadn’t followed protocol, because the protocol was designed to banish or kill anything that made it inside the Brakebills cordon, and he wasn’t going to do that. And he hadn’t wanted to say why. Just like that Alice was there, right there, close enough to talk to, close enough to kill him. Or to kill Plum, whom until that night he knew only as a face in the crowd. But she hadn’t.
There was a part of him that wished he hadn’t seen Alice at all, that he hadn’t been in the Senior Common Room that night, that it hadn’t been his turn to eat with the First Years. It wasn’t enough that he’d lost her once and spent seven years getting over it—now Alice had to hunt him down, cross worlds to find him and get him thrown out of the only home he had? When he kicked in that mirror part of him had meant it: he wanted to send her back, push her back down. He knew Brakebills was over for him even before Fogg fired him. He knew it as soon as he saw her.
Because he’d felt her presence. He was sure he had. She wasn’t gone: her body had burned, but the essence of Alice was in there somewhere, the Alice he knew, trapped inside that toxic blue flame like a fly in amber. He’d recognized her, the old Alice, the one he used to love, twisted and distorted but real, and he couldn’t leave her there. If there was some way to get her out, he would find it. That was his job now. Teaching would have to wait.
He was ready. The whole business of getting kicked out of Fillory had been good for him. It made him tougher, more grounded in reality, to the point where he could deal with getting kicked out of Brakebills. He was basically homeless, and getting increasingly less respectable, but he knew who he was and what he had to do.
He just needed a plan. He needed to get himself together—he needed resources, he needed somewhere to live. He needed to find out everything he could about niffins. For that he needed money, and to get money they would have to break this damn bond.
They weren’t going to do that without help. Unfortunately the only magician Quentin could think of who was smart enough to help them was very far away, on another continent in fact. It was a place that he and Alice had known well.
When Quentin first suggested a field trip to Antarctica Plum wasn’t enthusiastic. It was cold there, and a pain to get to, and also Professor Mayakovsky was kind of a dick. But Plum was a creature of enthusiasms, and it didn’t take her long to come around to the idea. It would be an adventure! She could be a goose again! She’d loved being a goose.
“Except,” she said, even more excited, “why be a goose? We’ve been geese. We could go as something else! Anything else!”
“I was thinking of going as a human being,” Quentin said. “Like on an airplane.”
Plum was already at her laptop and Googling.
“OK, check this out. What’s the fastest migratory bird on Earth?”
“An airplane.”
“Whatever, you are like the bullshittest magician ever. Look at this, it’s called the great snipe.”
“Are you sure that’s a real bird? It sounds like something from Lewis Carroll.”
“‘Some have been recorded to fly nonstop for forty-eight hours over 6,760 kilometers.’ I’m quoting here.”
“From Wikipedia.”
But still. He looked over her shoulder. The great snipe was a plump little wading bird, roughly egg-shaped, with a big long bill and zigzaggy brown stripes, like a not particularly exotic seashell. It didn’t look like a speed demon.
“‘Female great snipe are, on average, significantly larger than the male,’” Plum said.
“We’d need something to base the spell on, like some great snipe DNA. At least the first time we did it. I don’t think we can do the transformation based on an image from a Wikipedia entry.”
“Are you sure? They have it in hi-res.”
“Even so. Plus I’m kind of concerned about the cold. That bird doesn’t look like it was evolved for Antarctica.”
“Except it’ll still be summer,” Plum said. “Backward seasons.”
“Even so.”
“Stop saying that.” Plum frowned, then brightened up again. “OK, forget about birds. I don’t know why I was even thinking birds. We could be fish! Or whales—blue whales!”
“We’d still have to go the last bit. After we got to Antarctica.”
“We’d just swim under the ice!”
“That’s the North Pole. Antarctica is a continent. Under the snow it’s all rock.”
She huffed her annoyance.
“Whatever, Nanook.”
But of course she was right: it would be cool to be a blue whale. The idea grew on him. There was no particular reason to do it, other than it would be more interesting, but that seemed like enough. What else was magic for? It was safe: they were legally protected, and barring scattered orca attacks blue whales had no natural predators. The only downside was that even though they were fast swimmers by cetacean standards they turned out to be painfully slow compared with most birds, let alone the gre
at snipe—20 mph was about a blue whale’s top speed, at least over long distances. At that rate it would take them a couple of months to get to Antarctica.
“I doubt we could delay the job that long,” Quentin said.
“Yeah,” Plum said sadly. “It would have been nice though. Oh well, another dream dies.”
But in the end they found a way to save it. They flew commercial most of the way, as far as Ushuaia, a small but unexpectedly charming port in Tierra del Fuego that claimed the distinction of being the southernmost city in the world. It was squeezed into a narrow strip of land between the Beagle Channel and the snow-covered peaks of the Martial Range behind it, as if it were backed up against them and trying not to fall into the freezing water. From there they could cross the Drake Passage to the coast of Antarctica in the form of blue whales.
From the airport they took a taxi to the waterfront. They’d brought no luggage. From the safety of a concrete wharf, the Beagle Channel did indeed look forbiddingly cold, a flat gray stripe of sea lapped at by glaciers on either side. But they couldn’t do anything from dry land. For the actual transformation they’d have to be in deep water.
Chartering a boat would have been the sensible thing to do, if they were tourists, or sport fishermen, or smugglers. But Quentin and Plum were magicians, so they waited until midnight, then cast spells on their shoes and hiked out onto the channel on foot.
It was tricky at first, till they made it out through the mercifully light surf and got used to the rhythm of the swells. It was only their shoes that were buoyant, so if they fell over they’d get wet like anybody else. Once they were a couple hundred yards from shore, out beyond the glow of the lights along the beach, it got quiet and very dark and very cold.
“I feel vaguely blasphemous doing this,” Plum said. “Like, only Jesus is allowed to do this.”
“I really don’t think he’d mind.”
“How do you know what Jesus would mind?” She was silent for a minute, concentrating on the walking. It was not wholly unlike trying to walk on a black, cold, unusually violent bouncy castle. “Did you like Brakebills South?”
“I don’t think anybody likes it. But it was good for me. I learned a lot.”
“Yeah. I liked it when we were animals.”
“That was good. Did they turn you into foxes?”
She shook her head.
“Bears and seals. For some reason they don’t do foxes anymore.”
When they’d gotten on the plane that morning Brakebills South had seemed very far away, but now they were here, just a short splash across the Drake Passage from Antarctica, and suddenly it was very close, and his memories of it felt very fresh. They’d been so innocent then, he and Alice, even after what happened when they were foxes. Their feelings had been so big and raw and urgent, and they’d had absolutely no idea what to do with them. He wished he had it to do over again. He would try to be a nicer, stronger person.
Except that wasn’t quite it. What he really wished was that he had Alice back now, in the present.
“Did you do that thing at the end, where you race to the pole?” Plum said. “I bet you did.”
“Yup. You win.”
Plum just seemed excited about going back.
“I bet you got there first.”
“That one you lose.”
“Ha!” Her laughter got lost among the waves. “I can’t believe the great Professor Coldwater got beat to the pole! Who beat you?”
“A better magician than me. Did you win your year?”
“I sure did,” she said. “By a mile.”
The moon came up, unnaturally bright, a wafer of white phosphorus, but the black water seemed to swallow light rather than reflect it. Even a ripple was enough to trip over, so they wound up taking big exaggerated steps. Farther out from the beach the water smoothed out but the swells got bigger. The few lighted windows in Ushuaia, which shut down after ten o’clock, looked inexpressibly cozy. Fortunately they were wearing warm clothes, parkas and long underwear, which if all went according to plan they would never see again.
They hiked out about a half mile, well out into the bay. According to the nautical charts Quentin had consulted that was far enough. They stopped and bobbed up and down on the water in place, comically, not quite in sync. They’d prepared as much of the spell as they could ahead of time.
Quentin took a deep breath and rolled his shoulders. It was rare for magicians to kill themselves with their own magic, but stories that ended that way usually began something like this.
“All right?”
Plum chewed her lip and nodded.
“All right.”
Quentin peeled open a Tupperware container full of a revolting paste he’d ginned up back in New York based on whalebone dust scraped from some scrimshaw he’d bought at an antique store. They each dipped in two fingers and anointed their foreheads.
“Maybe we should stand farther apart,” Plum said. “If this works we’re going to get really big.”
“Right.”
They took a few steps back, like they were preparing to fight a duel, then faced the same direction. Quentin braced himself. Based on his memory of the goose transformation back at Brakebills he was pretty sure that this was going to be really unpleasant. He took a deep breath, held up his hands, and made a gentle downbeat, like he was cueing the start of a Mahler symphony.
It began. Surprisingly, it wasn’t that bad.
Shrinking, having the mass squeezed out of him like toothpaste out of a tube, must have been the rough part of becoming a goose, because now the opposite was happening, Quentin was expanding, and it didn’t feel that bad at all. He was inflating like a balloon, especially his head, which was getting absolutely huge. His parka strained and stretched and then burst apart in a cloud of down.
His neck and shoulders merged into his body as the Quentin-balloon grew and grew and his eyes zoomed off in opposite directions on either side of his gigantic head. His arms and hands grew more slowly, becoming proportionally smaller, then flattened and dearticulated into flippers—it was like wearing mittens—and slid smoothly down toward his waist. His legs fused together, and something very curious was going on with his feet, but he took note of this fact only in passing—it didn’t especially alarm him. The most hilarious part was his mouth: the corners raced back toward his ears so that his head was practically split in half by a fifteen-foot recurved smile.
His lower teeth melted away completely. His upper teeth lengthened and multiplied crazily into a hairy overbite, more like a mustache than teeth.
The only real moment of panic came when he toppled forward into the water and went under. His human instincts told him he was about to freeze or drown or both, but he did neither. The water was neither warm nor cold—it was nothing. It was like air. He did utter some truly epic, booming whale-sneezes before his blowhole-based respiratory system got going. But even that was kind of enjoyable.
And then everything was still. He was hanging in the void, neutrally buoyant, twenty feet below the surface. The Quentin-blimp had been launched. He was a blue whale. He was roughly as long as a basketball court. He was in a really good mood.
For a few minutes he and Plum floated next to each other, eyeball to eyeball. Then at the same time—somehow they coordinated this—they surfaced, arched their backs, sucked in gallons of air through the tops of their heads, and dove.
Quentin didn’t know when he’d ever felt so calm. Together with Plum he kicked with his flat, powerful tail and began undulating through the water. It took hardly any effort; it would have taken an effort to stay still. He sucked in a huge mouthful of water—his mouth and throat distended hilariously to take in more and more and more—and then squirted it out again through his weird front teeth (his baleen, that was the word) like he was spitting tobacco. It left behind a tasty residue of wriggling krill.
He’d imagined that he’d get some kind of deluxe ocean-vision as part of his package of new whale-senses, but in fact he didn’t see much better than he had as a human. With his eyes on different sides of his head his binocular depth perception was shot, and having no neck, all he could do to change the view was roll his eyes around or steer his whole humongous body. Also, unnervingly, he didn’t seem to have any eyelids anymore. He couldn’t blink. The urge decreased over time, but it never completely went away.
Once they cleared Tierra del Fuego Quentin’s sensorium expanded hugely. His world became enormous. His sight may have been crap, but his hearing was something else entirely.
To a blue whale the whole ocean was a vast resonating chamber, a great watery tympanum stretched across the earth, with fleeting, fugitive vibrations constantly zipping back and forth across and through it. Based on these Quentin could feel the shape and proportions of the world around him all the time, as if he were running invisible auditory fingertips across it. If he’d had hands he could have drawn you the coastlines of southern Chile and Antarctica and a relief map of the ocean floor in between.
And if the great blue chamber ever fell silent, he made some noise of his own. He could sing.
His throat was like a didgeridoo, or a foghorn, blasting out deep, resonant pulses and moans. The ocean was full of voices, like a switchboard, or an echo chamber, an Internet even, alive with encoded information passing through it in the form of calls and responses. The whales were always checking in with each other, and Quentin checked in too, in a language he knew without having to learn it.
They weren’t just being social. Here was a great secret: whales were spellcasters. Jesus, the entire ocean was crisscrossed with a whole lattice of submarine magic. Most of the spells took multiple whales to cast, and were designed to bend and herd large clouds of krill, and occasionally to reinforce the integrity of large ice shelves. He wondered if he’d remember all this when he was human again. He wondered, but he didn’t really care.
And there was something else—something down there in the black abyssal trenches of the ocean. Something that wanted to rise. The whales were keeping it down. What was it? An army of giant squid? Cthulhu? Some last surviving Carcharodon megalodon? Quentin never found out. He hoped he never would.
