He dutifully presented himself at the correct address at the appointed time. This late in the fall the sun set at four thirty in the afternoon, but it was unseasonably mild out, almost warm. Standing there at the entrance to the passageway, looking around for stray vergers who might charge him with trespassing—or worse, offer him spiritual guidance—cars whooshing by in the street behind him, he had never felt so absolutely sure that he was delusional, that Brooklyn was the only reality there was, and that everything which had happened to him last year was just a fanboy hallucination, proof that the boredom of the real world had finally driven him totally and irreversibly out of his mind. The alley was so skinny he practically had to turn sideways to walk down it, his two overstuffed Brakebills duffel bags—they were midnight blue with dark brown trim, school colors—scraping against the sweating stone walls on either side. He was overwhelmingly certain that in thirty seconds he would be standing at the blank wall at the end of the alley.
But then an impossible breath of warm, sweet, late-summer air came wafting toward him from the far end of the alleyway, accompanied by the chirping of crickets, and he could see the green expanse of the Sea. As heavy as his bags were he ran toward it.
Now it was the first day of the semester, and Quentin and Alice were stranded in a baking hot meadow outside a precious white Victorian bungalow. The bungalow was where the students who did Physical Magic met on Tuesday afternoons for their weekly seminar.
When she was tested, Alice displayed a highly technical Discipline involving light manipulation—phosphoromancy, she said it was called—that placed her in Physical Magic. Quentin was there because Physical was the group that had both the fewest total members and the fewest incoming members, so that seemed like the best place to stash him until he had a Discipline of his own. The first seminar had been scheduled for 12:30, and Quentin and Alice had even gotten there early, but now it was almost five, and they’d been out there all afternoon. They were hot and tired and thirsty and annoyed, but neither of them wanted to give up and go back up to the House. If they were going to be Physical Kids, apparently they would have to prove it by getting in the front door.
They sat under a massive spreading beech tree that stood nearby, coolly indifferent to their plight. They leaned back against the trunk with a fat hard gray root between them.
“So what do you want to do,” Quentin said dully. Tiny motes drifted by in the late-afternoon sunlight.
“I don’t know.” Alice sneezed again. “What do you want to do?”
Quentin plucked at the grass. A burst of faint laughter came from inside the house. If there was a password they hadn’t found it. He and Alice had spent an hour looking for hidden writing—they scanned the door in every spectrum they could think of, visible and invisible, infrared to gamma, and tried to strip the paint off to look underneath, but it wouldn’t come. Alice even tried some advanced graphological enchantments on the squiggly grain of the wood itself, but it just stared back at them blankly. They’d sent currents of force twisting into the lock, jiggling the tumblers, but they couldn’t pick it. They looked for a fourth-dimensional path around the door. They’d jointly plucked up their nerve and summoned a kind of phantasmal axe—it wasn’t
explicitly
against any rule they could think of—but they couldn’t even scratch it. For a while Alice was convinced the door was an illusion, that it didn’t even exist, but it certainly looked and felt real, and neither of them could find any charms or enchantments to dispel.
“Look at it,” Quentin said. “It’s like some lame Hansel and Gretel hut. I thought the Physical Kids were supposed to be cool.”
“Dinner’s in an hour,” Alice said.
“I’ll skip it.”
“It’s lamb tonight, with a rosemary crust. Potatoes
au dauphin
.” Alice’s eidetic memory retained odd details.
“Maybe we should have our own seminar. Out here.”
She snorted. “Yeah, that’d show ’em.”
The beech tree was on the edge of a field that had just been mown. The giant cinnamon rolls of hay dotting the field cast long shadows.
“You’re a what again? A photomancer?”
“Phosphoromancer.”
“What can you do?”
“I’m not sure yet. I practiced some things over the summer. Focusing light, refracting it, bending it. If you bend light around something, it turns invisible. But I want to understand the theory of it first.”
“Show me something.”
Alice turned shy. It didn’t take much.
“I can hardly do anything.”
“Look, I don’t even have a Discipline. I’m a nothingmancer. I’m a squatmancer.”
“They just don’t know what it is yet. You have your little sparky thing.”
“Same difference. And don’t make fun of my sparky thing. Now bend me some damn light.”
She grimaced, but she got up on her knees on the grass and held up her hand, fingers spread. They were kneeling face-to-face, and he was suddenly aware of her full breasts inside her thin, high-necked blouse.
“Watch the shadow,” she snapped.
She did something with her fingers, and the shadow of her hand disappeared. It was simply gone, leaving behind only a few ghostly rainbow highlights.
“Nice.”
“It’s pathetic, I know.” She waved her hand, scrubbing out the magic. “My whole hand is supposed to go invisible, but I can only do the shadow.”
There was something here. Quentin felt his sulk starting to dispel. This was a test. Physical magic. They weren’t Morris dancing with tree spirits here. This was a brute-force problem.
“What about the other way?” he said slowly. “Could you focus light instead, like a magnifying glass?”
She didn’t answer right away, but he could see her nimble mind take hold of the problem and start turning it over.
“Maybe if I . . . hm. I think there’s something in Culhwch and Owen. You’d need to stabilize the effect, though. And localize it.”
She made a circle with her thumb and forefinger and spoke five long words over it. Quentin could see light bending inside the circle, warping and distorting the leaves and grass visible through it. Then it sharpened and focused to a white dot that burned an afterimage into his retina, and he looked away. She tilted it, and the ground under her hand smoked.
“I will kill you if you get me kicked out of Brakebills. Do you understand me? I’m not joking. I know how to do it. I will literally make you die.”
“That’s funny, that’s exactly what I told Penny after he hit me,” Quentin said.
“Except I’ll really do it.”
They had decided to burn their way through the door. If it was a test, Quentin reasoned, it didn’t matter much how they solved it as long as they solved it. They hadn’t been given any rules, so they couldn’t be breaking any. And if they did burn down the damn house, with Eliot and his smug little friends inside it, serve them right.
They had to work fast, because the sunlight was fading. The sun had already gone dull and coppery, and in another few minutes its lower rim would touch the tops of the trees on the far side of the hayfield. The barest early-fall chill was in the air. Yellow lights were already on inside the house. Quentin heard—did he imagine it?—the pop of a cork being withdrawn from a bottle.
Holding both arms above her head and curved slightly upward, like she was balancing a large invisible basket on her head, Alice had created the magical equivalent of a magnifying glass a dozen yards across—her bent arms defined a small section of the total circumference of a soaring circular lens, the upper edge of which was even with the top of the beech tree, taller than the chimney of the little Victorian bungalow. Quentin could just make out the edge of the lens as a curved distortion in the air. The focal point was too bright to look at.
Alice stood about fifty feet back from the door. Quentin stood closer, to one side, holding out a hand to shield his eyes and shouting out directions:
“Up! Okay, slow! A little more! Keep moving! Okay, now right!”
Quentin could feel the heat from the focused sunlight against his face and smell the savory-sweet smell of wood smoke, along with an acrid tang of seared house paint. The door was definitely vulnerable to heat. They’d been worried that there wouldn’t be enough sunlight left, but Alice’s spell was cutting a nice deep charred trench in the wood. They’d decided to cut the door in half laterally, and if the trench wasn’t penetrating all the way through, it must be pretty close. A bigger problem was Alice’s aim, which wasn’t good, and in one place she had wandered off the door and burned a groove in the wall.
“I feel stupid!” Alice shouted. “How are we doing?”
“Looking good!”
“My back hurts! Are we almost done?”
“Almost!” he lied.
With a foot to go Alice expanded the spell’s radius to compensate for the fading sun. She was whispering, but he wasn’t sure if it was an incantation or just obscenities. Quentin realized they were being observed: one of the older professors, a very erect, white-haired man named Brzezinski, who specialized in potions and whose pants were always covered with appalling stains, had interrupted his evening stroll to watch them. In another lifetime he had given Quentin the test involving knots during his Examination. He wore sweater-vests and smoked a pipe and looked like an IBM engineer, circa 1950.
Shit, Quentin thought. They were about to get busted.
But Professor Brzezinski just took his pipe out of his mouth. “Carry on,” he said gruffly. He turned and walked back in the direction of the House.
It took only about ten minutes for Alice to make a full lateral cut, then go back across it a second time. The trench glowed red.
When she was finished, Quentin walked back to where she was standing.
“You have ash on your face,” she said. She brushed at his forehead with her fingers.
“Maybe we should go across again. You know, just to be sure.” If this didn’t work, he was out of ideas, and he didn’t think he could spend the night out here. He also didn’t think he could face going back to the House in defeat.
“There’s not enough light.” She looked drained. “By the end the lens was probably out to a quarter mile. After that it just loses coherence. Falls apart at the edges.”
A quarter mile? Quentin thought. How powerful is she?
His stomach rumbled. It was fully dusk now, and the sky was a luminous blue. They stared at the scarred, blackened door. It looked worse than he thought—Alice’s aim had strayed on the second pass, so in places there were two separate trenches. If this was wrong, Eliot was going to kill him.
“Should I try to kick it in?”
Alice pulled her mouth to one side. “What if there’s somebody behind it?”
“So what do you suggest?”
“I don’t know.” She picked at one of the burnt parts that had cooled. “I think we’re almost through . . .”
There was an old iron knocker on the door in the shape of a disembodied hand holding an iron ball. It was bolted on.
“Okay,” Quentin said. “Stand back.”
God, please let this work. He got a good grip on the iron hand, put one foot on the door, uttered a long falsetto martial arts yell, and threw his weight backward. The top half of the door swung open with no resistance whatsoever—it must have been hanging on by a few flakes of ash. He fell down backward on the path.
A girl Quentin recognized as one of the Fourth Years stood in the doorway with warm light streaming out into the twilight around her, holding a glass of dark red wine in one hand. She looked down at him coolly. Alice was leaning against the side of the house laughing so hard that no sound was coming out.
“Dinner’s almost ready,” the girl said. “Eliot made an amatriciana sauce. We couldn’t get any guanciale, but I think bacon works fine. Don’t you?”
In spite of the heat a fire popped and flickered in the fireplace.
“Six hours, twelve minutes,” said a fat young man with wavy hair sitting in a leather club chair. “That’s actually about par.”
“Tell them how long it took you, Josh,” said the girl who’d met them at the door. Quentin thought her name was Janet.
“Twenty hours, thirty-one minutes. Longest night of my life. Not a record, but pretty close.”
“We thought he was trying to starve us out.” Janet poured out the rest of a bottle of red wine into two glasses standing on a sideboard and handed them to Quentin and Alice. Two more empty bottles stood on the floor, though the others didn’t seem especially drunk.
They were in a shabby but comfortable library lined with threadbare rugs and lit by candles and firelight. Quentin realized that the little house must be larger on the inside than it was on the outside; it was also a lot cooler—the atmosphere was that of a nice, chilly fall evening. Books overflowed the bookcases and stood in wobbly stacks in the corners and even on the mantelpiece. The furniture was distinguished but mismatched, and in places it was severely battered. In between the bookcases the walls were hung with the usual inexplicable artifacts that accumulate in private clubs: African masks, dreary landscape paintings, retired ceremonial daggers, glass cases full of maps and medals and the deteriorating corpses of exotic moths that had presumably been captured at great effort and expense. Quentin felt overheated and underdressed but mostly just relieved to finally be inside.
There were only five of them, counting himself and Alice. Eliot was there, scanning one of the bookshelves and acting like he hadn’t noticed them yet. He seemed to be trying to make a serious argument about magical theory to somebody, but nobody was listening
“Tinkerbell, we have guests,” Janet said. “Please turn around and face the room.” She was lean and animated, with a serious, somewhat anachronistic pageboy haircut. She was the loud one: Quentin had seen her holding forth to the others on walks through the Maze and making speeches over dinner in the dining room.