by Lev Grossman
Lying on the hard floor made it hurt less. Quentin thought about how wrong things had gone. Things so often went wrong. Was it him? Was he making the same mistake over and over again? Or different mistakes? He’d like to think he was at least making different mistakes.
Plum did fall asleep, right there on the floor, with her face smushed into her black parka from the limo for a pillow. But Quentin didn’t, not yet.
The journal had affected them in different ways. For Plum it had been a reckoning, a massive correction, that finally forced her to see that Fillory was real and that in some inescapable way she was part of it. On the train he’d told her the whole story of his life there, from beginning to end, as bridges and stations and other trains flashed by in the window, and lots full of idle municipal snowplows, and backyards full of overturned play structures. He told her about everything, Alice and Julia and all the rest.
But for him it was different, and while Plum slept he sat up, leaning against the wall, and read the journal again. There was news in it: if Rupert was to be believed then Umber was the one who’d turned Martin into the Beast, in exchange for some obscure, grotesque sacrifice. That threw Quentin as much as anything else. There was something seriously wrong with one of Fillory’s gods, or at least there had been. And if Umber did help Martin, why would Martin have killed him, as Jane Chatwin said he did? It made no sense.
None of it got him any closer to Alice either, or not that he could see. They needed a new plan, a way forward, maybe even another job. They’d be ready next time—the bird had betrayed them, it hadn’t played by the rules, but now Quentin got that there never had been any rules. But first they had to rest and build themselves back up. Quentin had to get his back working again. He also had some hard thinking to do.
Plum woke up at dawn, bursting with energy again—she was indefatigable that way. She always had to be doing something. Going outside seemed like a bad idea, with the whereabouts and intentions of the bird still unknown, so they stayed in. They ordered in a lot of take-out food and some cheap insta-furniture, and Plum set about fixing up her house.
Somebody had disco-ized it in the 1970s, and then later it had been de-disco-ized, mostly, but there were still trace amounts of avocado carpeting, and the outlines of mirrored tiles that had been glued to the walls. A space-age chandelier that looked like Sputnik had escaped the purge too. But the house had good bones, and it still had its broad-planked wooden floors, and its elegant many-paned, energy-inefficient wooden-framed windows with nice old shutters. There were a lot of nice twiddly plaster ornaments around the ceiling. It had some integrity, this house.
Plum knew more about this kind of magic than Quentin did, and Quentin was hobbled by his bad back, so he acted as semiskilled magical laborer-consultant to her hypercompetent general contractor. Under her direction they arrested the slow collapse of the back wall, which was being undermined by rainwater because the drainpipe was busted and the drain in the back patio was clogged. No one had updated the electrics and plumbing since approximately the 1930s, and the walls were stuffed full of ancient cloth-wrapped wiring and lead pipes that were right on the point of dissolving. They shored everything up as best they could. It felt good to be doing something simple and concrete and achievable.
They cast all the cleaning spells they could think of, until they’d removed enough dust and dirt and scum and nicotine residue from the walls and floors and sinks and tubs to make a whole other house out of. They got the furnace going, and the gas and water. But while Quentin was working with his hands his mind was working on other things. All his enterprises were in ruins. He should have been thrashed by this, flattened, but instead . . . with all of that gone, and his father dead, and Mayakovsky’s coins in his pocket, he felt strangely free. It was time to take stock.
At some point somebody had gone through the top floor of the house and demolished all its interior walls, leaving behind only four lonely load-bearing columns of brick with bits of plaster still clinging to them, thus making a single long chamber, front to back. Plum continued to roam the house wearing overalls and work gloves, attacking and repairing targets of opportunity; she didn’t want his help, and moreover his back was still killing him. So he went up there to clear his mind.
Using a chunk of kids’ street chalk recovered from a locker under the stairs Quentin traced out a classical labyrinth pattern on the floor. He did it from memory, based on the ancient Greek Lemnian pattern, and it took him quite a few tries to make the geometry of it work out, but that itself was a solid meditative exercise. The path wound and coiled around the four pillars. Labyrinths were old sorcery, and subtle: good for recharging one’s magical resources when they were running low.
When it was done he hung sheets over the windows, which looked cheap and tatty but produced a dim, diffuse, immaterial light. He started at the beginning and slowly limped through it, again and again. The walking freed his thoughts; it also made his back feel a bit better.
His mind wandered back to Rupert’s journal, and on the spell bound into the back of it. Rupert had never cast it, as far as Quentin could tell, nor had he been able to figure out what it did. Now Quentin wondered. It was a treasure pillaged from the black underbelly of Fillory. It had to be something valuable.
And there was something fateful in the way it had come to them. What had Rupert called it? One of the old workings? Maybe it was war magic, something that could help them if the bird came after them. Maybe it was something deep and strange and strong enough that it could help Alice.
He went and got the spell and read through it as he walked. Before long he could walk the maze without even looking up from it. His work on the page from the Neitherlands wasn’t going to go to waste, that was for sure, at least in terms of having sharpened his ability to construe gnarly magical rhetoric in languages that he had a very dim grasp of. It had been a long time since he tried to read archaic Fillorian, let alone its associated notations for magical gestures.
The further into it he got the less it looked like what he’d expected. He was anticipating something military: either a very powerful shield or a very deadly weapon or both. Maybe concealment, maybe some kind of cataclysmic weather effect. But it didn’t feel like any of those. It wasn’t shaped right somehow.
For one thing the spell was long as hell—you could transcribe most spells in a couple of pages, max, because there just wasn’t that much to them, but this one went on and on for a good twenty. There was a lot of formal business toward the front end of the casting that looked purely ceremonial, but you never knew for sure what you could leave out, so you had to do it all.
What’s more it required a lot of materials, including some pretty exotic items. All in all it was a bear, and it would have cost somebody a lot of time and effort and money to cast it. It was worse than the bond-breaking spell (which they’d never even got to cast at all, dammit).
Still, there was something elegant about it too. It was a mess, a rat’s nest, but under all the fiddly bits and the ornamentation there was a structure, a complex one. Later stages of the enchantment looped in elements of earlier ones, piling effect on effect, each one multiplying the next—in its way it was a thing of real beauty. For a while he wondered if it might be a summoning, along the lines of the one Fogg used to harvest his cacodemons, or the spell that Julia and her friends had attempted at Murs with such disastrous results.
But he didn’t think so. This wasn’t like any magic he’d ever seen before. Something about the spell made his fingers twitch—it was as if it wanted to be cast. He left the labyrinth and took it to Plum.
“I’ve been reading through that spell,” he said. “The one your great-grandfather left you.”
“Uh-huh.”
Plum was down in the basement, standing on a ladder and doing something involved to the joists, Quentin couldn’t tell exactly what.
“It’s interesting,” he said.
“I would imagine.”
“I’ve really never seen anything like it.”
“Uh-huh.”
She put her palm on one massive beam and pressed, and it cracked and groaned, and the whole house seemed to shift slightly. Plum studied the results.
“Structural stuff,” she explained.
“So you don’t mind if I check it out a little further?”
“I give you my blessing.”
“Don’t you want to look at it yourself?”
She shook her head without looking at him. She was completely absorbed.
“From what I saw I couldn’t read the script. Can you?”
“More or less.”
“Well, keep me apprised.”
“I will.”
Starting small, he began to make preparations. The spell would require the magical equivalent of a clean room at a semiconductor factory, so Quentin cleansed and warded the top floor in any and all ways he could think of. He shocked the walls and timbers and joists and whatever else so hard the dust jumped out of the cracks, and then he shocked the dust.
Reluctantly, he took a wet cloth to his chalk labyrinth, but it had served its purpose. He floated a couple of big worktables up the stairs, bumping them against the walls of the stairwells and taking a few divots out of the plaster on the way, which Plum frowned at. He had to take them apart on the landing because he’d misestimated the size and they wouldn’t go through the door.
When you got down to brass tacks the spell wasn’t really one spell, it was more like fifteen or twenty different spells meshed together, to be executed in an overlapping sequence and in some cases simultaneously. Some of them could be cast in advance, some the day before, but most, the really big stuff, had to be done on the fly, in the moment. He had trouble holding it all in his head at one time. But what was it Stoppard said? Give a nerd a door he can close.
It was a detour from his search for Alice, but they were effectively under house arrest anyway, and something hunchy and instinctive kept egging him on. He made cautious forays out into the city for supplies, creeping along under domes of magical camouflage. The walls of the top-floor workshop began filling up with old books—reference books, botanicals, atlases, huge black split-spined grimoires, the leather all craquelured like desert hardpan, in tall wobbly stacks that swayed worryingly if you brushed against them. The tables began to be populated by a weird menagerie of steel tools and brass instruments and odd, asymmetrical glass containers.
Even as he ground away at the technicalities, some of the larger functionality of the enchantment was becoming clearer to him, its outlines picked out in a thousand trivial practical details. A lot of it seemed to have to do with space. There were spells in here designed to make it: literally to fabricate room, to weave together new space-time out of whole cloth. Here was a spell that expanded the space, blew it up like a balloon. This one shaped it. That other one stabilized the borders and made sure it didn’t collapse again into the nothingness whence it came.
But after that it got really arcane and hard to follow. There were spells to summon matter into being. This part sucked entropy out of the system, forcing the matter to organize; these pushed it through a series of very obscure transforms, some of which appeared to do nothing at all, or cancel out earlier ones. There was a lot of fiddly magical-matter stuff that would have mystified him if it didn’t overlap in places with the page from the Neitherlands. There was a whole laundry list of botanical spells, weather and water and wind magic, spells for shaping living rock. There was some really head-cracking bits that looked like attempts to reset the basic physical parameters of the universe: elementary charge, speed of light, gravitational constant. For all its elegant complexity the spell had a primitive, primordial feel to it. It was an old working, and a weird one, a relic of another age of another world. It felt like it hadn’t been cast in a thousand years.
One thing was clear: this was grand magic. It was sorcery on a scale he’d never attempted before, and it was going to test him severely. Until now he’d been a journeyman magician, and a competent one, but if he could execute it this spell would make him into a master. It would force him to become one. It would accept nothing less.
Early one morning a dawn thunderstorm woke him up, and as he was lying there wondering if he was going to be able to get back to sleep an image of the whole thing appeared in his mind all at once. It assembled itself spontaneously, unbidden, as if it had been waiting for him to just get out of its way and let it form. There it was, dim and shimmering but complete, with all its parts working together.
It wasn’t war magic. The spell didn’t shield you, and it didn’t hide you. It didn’t kill, and it didn’t summon something to kill for you. It wasn’t going to restore Alice either. But it did do something wonderful. This was a spell that created something. It was a spell for making a land.
He actually laughed out loud when he thought of it. It was too funny—too insane. But now that he saw it he couldn’t un-see it. He could follow it like a story that wound crookedly through the various sections and paragraphs and subclauses of the spell like a thread of DNA. This thing was intended to make a little world.
It was ruthlessly ingenious. It wasn’t a cosmic act of creation, a thunderbolt from Olympus, it was much more subtle than that. It was more like a seed, the dry, tear-shaped germ of a little world—tiny, the kind of thing that could fall through a crack in a sidewalk, but full of sand and rain and stars and physics and life, all flattened and dried and compressed into words on a page. If you cast it right it would expand and unfold into a place, somewhere hidden away from the real world. A secret garden.
Quentin could already see it in his mind’s eye, fresh and new and still undiscovered. Green fields of matted grass, deep silent lakes, the shadows of clouds, all spread out beneath him like an Escher etching, the way the Earth looked when he was a goose. Birds flitted between bushes, deer stalked stiff-legged through the woods. You wouldn’t own it, or rule it, but you could take care of it. You could have stewardship of it.
Lying there in bed in the half-light, rain spattering on the window, he forgot all about the bird and the Couple and the money. All that seemed beside the point now. He forgot about Brakebills. He even let himself forget Alice for a minute. This was new magic: half enchantment, half work of art. He’d spent too long searching for new kingdoms. He wanted to make one of his own, a magical place, a place like Fillory.
But not in Fillory. He would build it here on Earth.
—
“I don’t want to make you sound like a crazy person,” Plum said, “but just then it sounded like you said you were going make a land.”
“I am. Or we are. We could. That’s what it does, Rupert’s spell.”
Plum frowned.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “You can’t just make a land.”
“It helps if you don’t say it like that.”
“You mean with rocks and trees and stuff?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
“Wow.” She stretched, then plunked her chin in her hands. They were having breakfast at their brand new Ikea dining table. “Wow. Well, that would be a hell of a spell. Great granddad wasn’t much of a writer, but you gotta admit he was a pretty good thief. Do you think it’s actually possible?”
“I think we should find out.”
“But I don’t get it. Why? I mean it’s cool and all, but it sounds like a gigantic pain in the ass.”
It was hard to put into words. The land would be a good place to hide from the bird, if they needed to hide, but that wasn’t the point. This meant something to him. It would be like Prospero’s island, but in a good way: not a country of exile, a model world, safe and peaceful and private. A magician’s land.
Plum, a highly perceptive person, could see that he wasn’t going to change his mind. She sighed.
“So
if we do make a land, what does that make us? Are we like the gods of it?”
“I don’t think so,” Quentin said. “I don’t think this land would have any gods. Or maybe it would. But we’d have to make those too.”
With Plum on board, or at least not actively resisting, things progressed more quickly. Quentin made contact with a very dodgy and unappealing wizard in the South Bronx who sold him a steaming, lightly buzzing metal box which he swore up and down contained a sample of ununoctium, a synthetic element with an atomic number of 118, the very last entry on the periodic table. Its existence was still mostly theoretical—laboratories had only ever put together a few atoms of it at a time, and ordinarily it decayed in about a millisecond. But the atoms in this sample were chronologically frozen, or at least vastly slowed down. Or at least they were supposed to be. It had cost him a good chunk of the money left over from his first-day payment from the bird.
“Do you think it’s really in there?” Plum studied the box skeptically.
“I don’t know,” Quentin said. “We’ll find out.”
“How?”
“The hard way, I guess.”
Quentin had a very expensive, very cool-looking staff purpose-built for the project. It was made of pernambuco—the dense, black, almost grainless tropical wood cello bows are made of—and shod and chased with silver. Quentin didn’t normally work magic with wands and staves, but in this case he thought he might need it as a last resort, a panic button, if things were coming completely apart.
He had to hide it all, to avoid attracting the bird’s attention, but it went beyond that: Quentin was pretty sure the spell would be highly illegal from the point of view of magical society. There weren’t very many laws among magicians, but synthesizing an entire land and concealing it inside a Manhattan townhouse would violate a goodly portion of them, so as far as magical energy was concerned the house had to be watertight. The power levels required would be massive too, and he could only be grateful they hadn’t used up Mayakovsky’s coins on the incorporate bond. He’d have to use one now. It wasn’t what he’d made them for, but Quentin thought Mayakovsky would like the idea anyway.
