The Magician King (9 page)

Julia was surprised too. She never used Wikipedia, partly because she knew Mr. K checked, but mostly because unlike a lot of her fellow students she cared about getting her facts right. She went back through the paper and checked it thoroughly. She found a second mistake, and a third. No more, but that was enough. She started checking versions of the paper, because she always saved and backed up separate drafts as she went, because Track Changes in Word was bullshit, and she wanted to know at what point exactly the errors got in. But the really weird thing was there that were no other versions. There was only the final draft.

This fact, although it was a minor fact, with multiple plausible explanations, proved to be the big red button that activated the ejector seat that blew Julia out of the cozy cockpit of her life.

She sat on her bed and stared at the file, which showed a time of creation that she remembered as having been during dinner, and she felt fear. Because the more she thought about it the more it seemed like she had two sets of memories for that afternoon, not just one. One of them was almost too plausible. It had the feel of a scene from a novel written by an earnest realist who was more concerned with presenting an amalgamation of naturalistic details that fit together plausibly than with telling a story that wouldn’t bore the fuck out of the reader. It felt like a cover story. That was the one where she went to the library and met James and had dinner and wrote the paper.

But the other one was batshit insane. In the other one she’d gone to the library and done a simple search on one of the cheapo library workstations on the blond-wood tables by the circulation desk. The search had yielded a call number. The call number was odd—it put the book in the subbasement stacks. Julia was pretty sure the library didn’t have any subbasement stacks, because it didn’t have a subbasement.

As if in a dream she walked to the brushed-steel elevator. Sure enough, beneath the round white plastic button marked
B
, there was now also a round plastic button marked
SB
. She pressed it. It glowed. The dropping sensation in her stomach was just an ordinary dropping sensation, the kind you get when you’re descending rapidly toward a subbasement full of cheap metal shelving and the buzz of fluorescent lights and exposed pipes with red-painted daisy-wheel valve handles poking out of them at odd angles.

But that’s not what she saw when the elevator doors opened. Instead she saw a sun-soaked stone terrace in back of a country house, with green gardens all around it. It wasn’t actually a house, the people there explained, it was a school. It was called Brakebills, and the people who lived there were magicians. They thought she might like to be one too. All she would have to do is pass one simple test.

W
aking up that first morning on board the
Muntjac,
the only thing Quentin could compare it to was his first morning waking up at Brakebills. His cabin was long and narrow, and his bed lay along it opposite a row of windows that were only a couple of yards above the waterline. The first thing he saw was those windows, speckled with droplets and bright with sunlight reflected off the water, which they were skimming over at an unbelievable clip. Bookshelves, cabinets, and drawers had been cleverly tucked in along the walls and under the bed. It was like being inside a Chinese puzzle.

He swung his bare feet down onto the wide, cold planks of his little cabin. He felt the slight pitch and the even slighter roll of the ship, and the tilt that the wind had set it at. He felt like he was in the belly of some massive but friendly marine mammal whose joy in life was to lope along the surface of the sea with him inside it. Quentin was one of those annoying people who never got seasick.

He got his clothes out of the miniature dresser that was built into the wall, or the gunwale, or bulkhead, whatever you called a wall on a ship. He admired the neat rows of books on the built-in shelves above his bed, which were held in place by a narrow board so they wouldn’t fall off during a storm. He wasn’t especially looking forward to finding out what they were going to have for breakfast, and the less said about the bathroom the better, but other than that he was in a state of grace. He hadn’t felt this good in months. Years, maybe.

On deck he was the only person who had nothing to do. The crew of the
Muntjac
was small for a ship its size, eight hands including the captain, and all the crewmembers who were visible were very seriously engaged in steering the ship and splicing ropes and scrubbing the deck and climbing up and down things. Julia was nowhere in sight, and Admiral Lacker and Benedict were discussing some navigational nicety with a degree of animation Quentin hadn’t thought either one of them was capable of.

Quentin supposed he would consult on weather magic if any was required, but Julia was better at that stuff than he was, and anyway he couldn’t imagine how even Julia could improve on what they had, which was a clear sky and a cold stiff wind out of the northwest. He decided to climb up the mast.

He walked over to the last and least of the
Muntjac
’s three masts, swinging his arms forward and back, loosening up his shoulders. It was probably a stupid idea. But who hadn’t at some point in his life wanted to climb to the top of a sailing ship in full flight? It always looked easy in movies. The mast wasn’t exactly built for climbing—there weren’t any rungs or steps or spikes. He put his foot on a brass cleat. The man at the helm looked at him.
Your king is climbing a mast, citizen. And no, he doesn’t know how. Deal with it.

It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t that hard, either. Where there weren’t cleats or spars there were at least ropes, though you had to be careful not to pull anything that wasn’t supposed to be pulled. He skinned a knuckle, then another one, and a fat splinter stabbed straight into the soft ball of his thumb and broke off there. The mast hummed with tension—he could sense it rooted deep in the hold, taking the force of the wind and balancing it with the force of water on the keel. The thing he hadn’t counted on was how cold it got, right away, like he’d climbed into another climatic zone, or maybe the lower limits of outer space.

The other thing he hadn’t counted on was the angle of the ship. He barely noticed it most of the time, but the farther he got from the safety of the deck the more perilously the ship seemed to be heeling over. He had to keep reminding himself that it wasn’t actually in imminent danger of rolling right over and drowning them all. Probably.

By the time he got to the top he was no longer over the deck at all. He could have dropped a plumb line straight down into the water, which rushed along below him, a torrent of rough green glass. A blunt-nosed, milky-gray shape was keeping pace with them below the surface about fifty feet off their starboard side. It was huge. Not a whale—its tail was vertical, not horizontal. A gigantic fish, then, or a shark. Even as he watched it, it swam deeper, growing fainter and more diffuse, until he could no longer see it at all. The higher you get the more you realize how much bigger than you everything is.

Going down was easier. Once he was safely on deck Quentin decided to keep going the other way, down to the hold. The noise of the bright, busy outside world vanished as soon as he stepped through the dark hatch in the deck. There wasn’t far to go: three short flights took him to the bottom of the
Muntjac
’s hollow little world.

It was warm there. He could feel the ocean pressing in on him from the other side of the damp, sweating wood. The hold was so full of supplies there was hardly room to move. It wasn’t very scenic. He was making his way back to the ladder, back up to reality, or what passed for it in Fillory, when a weird, furry, upside-down face loomed out of the darkness at him.

He gave a high and not very kingly bark of alarm and hit his head on something. The face hung in midair—as his eyes adjusted he saw that the creature was hanging upside down from a crossbeam, so comfortably that it looked like it had been there its whole life. It had an alien, half-melted look.

“Hello,” it said.

That was one mystery solved. Their talking animal was a sloth. It was just about the ugliest mammal Quentin had ever seen.

“Hi,” Quentin said. “I didn’t realize you were down here.”

“Nobody seems to,” the sloth said, with equanimity. “I hope you’ll come visit. Often.”

 

 

It took them three days to sail to the Outer Island, and every day it got hotter. They left the autumn beaches and steel waters of Whitespire for a more tropical zone. They did this while traveling east, instead of north or south, which was weird to the people from Earth, but none of the Fillorians seemed surprised. It made him wonder whether this world was even spherical—Benedict had never even heard of an equator. The crew changed into tropical whites.

Benedict stood by Admiral Lacker’s side at the helm with a book of charts that laid out the approach to the Outer Island, page after page crowded with technical-looking dots and blobby concentric isobars. Working together they threaded their way through a maze of shoals and reefs that no one but they could see until the island was actually in sight: a little bump of white sand and green jungle on the horizon, with a modest peak in the middle, not so different from what he’d imagined. They rounded a point and entered a shallow bay.

The moment they did the wind dropped to nothing. The
Muntjac
coasted into the center of the harbor on the last of its momentum, rippling the placid green surface as it went. The sails flapped limply in the silence. It could have been a sleepy hamlet on the Côte d’Azur. The shore was a narrow sandy strand littered with dry seaweed and the fibrous bits that palm trees constantly shed, baking in the afternoon heat. A wharf and a few low structures stood toward one end, and one rather magnificent-looking building that might have been a hotel or a country club. Not a single person was visible.

Probably they were taking a siesta. In spite of himself Quentin felt a rising sense of anticipation. Don’t be an idiot. This was an errand. They were here to collect the taxes.

They lowered the launch in silence. Quentin climbed in, followed by Bingle and Benedict, who lost his sullen self-consciousness for a moment in his excitement at starting his survey. At the last minute Julia appeared from below and slipped aboard. The sloth, slung comfortably from its beam in the hold, declined to go, though it enjoined them, before closing its drooping, shadowed eyes, to remember that if they came across any particularly succulent shoots, or even a small lizard, it was an omnivore.

A long, skinny, rickety pier projected from the wharves out into the water, with an absurd little cupola at the end. They rowed for it. The bay was as smooth as a pond. Throughout this entire operation they hadn’t seen or heard a soul.

“Spooky,” Quentin said out loud. “God, I hope it’s not one of those Roanoke deals where the whole place is deserted.”

Nobody said anything. He missed having Eliot to talk to, or even Janet. If Julia was amused, or even got the reference, she didn’t let on. She’d been keeping to herself since they left Whitespire. She didn’t want to talk to anyone, or touch anyone—she kept her hands in her lap and her elbows drawn in.

He scanned the shoreline through a folding telescope that he’d charmed so that it would show beings both visible and invisible, or most of them anyway. The waterfront was genuinely, authentically deserted. If you adjusted the telescope—it had an extra dial—it ran the view a little ways backward in time too. Nobody had visited the beach for at least an hour.

The pier creaked in the stillness. The heat was murderous. Quentin thought he should go first, as king, but Bingle insisted. He was taking his duties as royal bodyguard very seriously. He wasn’t anywhere near as jolly as his name made him sound, though that would have been almost impossible since his name made him sound like a clown who entertained at children’s parties.

The big building they’d seen earlier was made of wood and painted white, with Ionic columns out front and grand glass doors. Everything was peeling. It looked like an old Southern plantation house. Bingle pushed open the door and stepped inside. Quentin pushed in right behind him. If he got nothing else out of this he was going to get a little thrill of the unknown, however short-lived. It was pitch-black inside after the glare of the afternoon, and pleasantly cool.

“Have a care, Your Highness,” Bingle said.

As his eyes adjusted Quentin saw a shabby but grandly appointed room with a desk in the center. At it sat a little girl with straight blond hair coloring fiercely on a piece of paper. When she saw them she turned around and shouted up the stairs:

“Mom-
my!
There’s people here!”

She turned back to them.

“Try not to get sand in the house.”

She went back to coloring.

“Welcome to Fillory,” she added, without looking up.