He slept lightly and very little. His urine turned a deep amber then ceased to flow entirely. The monotony of the scenery was relentless. Each low crunchy ridge he topped revealed a vista composed of its identical clones, arranged in a pattern of infinite regress. His thoughts went around in circles. He lost track of time. He sang the Oscar Mayer jingle and the Simpsons theme song. He talked to James and Julia. Sometimes he confused James with Martin Chatwin and Julia with Jane. The fat melted out of his body; his ribs grew more prominent, tried to push their way out through his skin. He had to be careful. His margin of error was not large. The spells he was using were powerful and highly durable, with a life of their own. He could die out here, and his corpse would probably keep jogging merrily along toward the pole on its own.
Once or twice a day, sometimes more, a lipless blue crevasse would open beneath his feet, and he would have to trot around it or cross it with a magic-assisted leap. Once he stumbled right into one and fell forty feet down into blue-tinted darkness. The ward-and-shield spells around his pale, nude body were so thick that he barely noticed. He just ground to a slow stop, jammed in between two rough ice walls, and then lifted himself back out again, like the Lorax, and kept on running.
Even as his physical strength faded he leaned on the iron magical vigor that his sojourn under Professor Mayakovsky had given him. It no longer felt like a fluke when he worked magic successfully. The worlds of magical and physical reality felt equally real and present to him. He summoned simple spells into being without conscious thought. He reached for the magical force within him as naturally as he would reach for the salt on the dinner table. He had even gained the ability to extemporize a little, to guess at magical Circumstances when he hadn’t been drilled on them. The implications of this were stunning: magic wasn’t simply random, it had an actual shape—a fractal, chaotic shape, but subconsciously his blindly groping mental fingertips had begun to parse it.
He remembered a lecture Mayakovsky had given a few weeks before, which at the time he hadn’t paid much attention to. Now, however, jogging forever south across the frozen, broken plains, it came back to him almost word for word.
“You dislike me,” Mayakovsky had begun. “You are sick of the sight of me, skraelings.” That was what he called them, skraelings. Apparently it was a Viking word that meant, roughly, “wretches.”
“But if you listen to me only one more time in your lives, listen to me now. Once you reach a certain level of fluency as a spellcaster, you will begin to manipulate reality freely. Not all of you—Dale, I think you in particular are unlikely to cross that Rubicon. But for some of you spells will one day come very easily, almost automatically, with very little in the way of conscious effort.
“When the change comes, I ask only that you know it for what it is, and be aware. For the true magician there is no very clear line between what lies inside the mind and what lies outside it. If you desire something, it will become substance. If you despise it, you will see it destroyed. A master magician is not much different from a child or a madman in that respect. It takes a very clear head and a very strong will to operate once you are in that place. And you will find out very quickly whether or not you have that clarity and that strength.”
Mayakovsky stared out at their silent faces a moment longer, with undisguised disgust, then stepped down from the lectern. “Age,” Quentin heard him mutter. “It’s wasted on the young. Just like youth.”
When night finally fell the stars burned shrilly overhead with impossible force and beauty. Quentin jogged with his head up, knees high, no longer feeling anything below his waist, gloriously isolated, lost in the spectacle. He became nothing, a running wraith, a wisp of warm flesh in a silent universe of midnight frost.
Once, for a few minutes, the darkness was disturbed by a flickering on the horizon. He realized it must be another student, another skraeling like himself, moving on a parallel path but way off to the east, twenty or thirty miles at least, and ahead of him. He thought about changing course to make contact. But seriously, what was the point? Should he risk getting busted for collaborating, just to say hi? What did he, a wraith, a wisp of warm flesh, need with anybody else?
Whoever it was, he thought dispassionately, was using a different set of spells than he was. He couldn’t piece out the magic at this distance, but they were throwing off a whole lot of pale pink-white light.
Inefficient, he thought. Inelegant.
When the sun rose he lost sight of the other student again.
Some immeasurable period of time later, Quentin blinked. He had lost the habit of closing his magically weatherproofed eyes, but something was bothering him. It was a matter for concern, though he could barely formulate why in any conscious, coherent way. There was a black spot in his vision.
The landscape had, if anything, gotten more monotonous. Far behind him were the moments when streaks of dark frozen schist occasionally marred the white snow. Once he’d passed what he was fairly sure was a fallen meteorite stuck in the ice, a lump of something black, like a lost charcoal briquette. But that was a long time ago.
He was far gone. After days without real sleep his mind was a machine for monitoring spells and moving his feet, nothing else. But while he was checking off anomalies, there was something screwy going on with his compass wheel, too. It wobbled erratically, and it was getting kind of distorted. The N had grown vast and swollen; it was taking up five-sixths of the circle, and the other directions had withered away to almost nothing. The She was supposed to be following had shrunk to a tiny squiggle in microscopic jewel type.
The black spot was taller than it was wide, and it bobbed up and down with his stride the way an external object would. So it wasn’t corneal damage. And it was growing larger and larger, too. It was Mayakovsky, stand ing by himself in the powdery nothingness, holding a blanket. He must be at the pole. Quentin had completely forgotten where he was going or why.
When he got close enough Mayakovsky caught him. The tall man grunted, wrapping the heavy, scratchy blanket around him, and swung him down to the snow. Quentin’s legs kept moving for a few seconds, then he lay still, panting, on his side, twitching like a netted fish. It was the first time in nine days that he’d stopped running. The sky spun. He retched.
Mayakovsky stood over him.
“Molodyetz, Quentin. Good man. Good man. You made it. You are going home.”
There was something odd in Mayakovsky’s voice. The sneer was gone, and it was thick with emotion. A twisted smile revealed for a moment the older wizard’s yellow teeth in his unshaven face. He hauled Quentin to his feet with one hand; the other hand he flourished, and a portal appeared in the air. He shoved Quentin unceremoniously through it.
Quentin staggered and fell into a psychedelic riot of green that assaulted him so violently that at first he didn’t recognize it as the rear terrace of Brakebills on a hot summer day. After the blankness of the polar ice the campus was a hallucinatory swirl of sound and color and warmth. He squeezed his eyes tight shut. He was home.
He rolled over on his back on the baking smooth stone. Birds sang deafeningly. He opened his eyes. A sight even stranger than the trees and the grass met them: looking back through the portal, he could still see the tall, soft-shouldered magician standing there with Antarctica in the background. Snow kicked up around him. A few stray crystals drifted through and evaporated in midflight. It looked like a painting executed on an oval panel and hung in midair. But the magical window was already closing. He must be preparing himself to go back to his empty polar mansion, Quentin thought. He waved, but Mayakovsky wasn’t looking at him. He was looking out at the Maze and the rest of the Brakebills campus. The unguarded longing on his face was so excruciating Quentin had to look away.
Then the portal closed. It was over. It was late May, and the air was full of pollen. After the rarefied atmosphere of Antarctica it tasted hot and thick as soup. It was a lot like that first day he’d come to Brakebills, straight through from that frigid Brooklyn afternoon. The sun beat down. He sneezed.
They were all waiting for him, or almost all: Eliot and Josh and Janet, at least, wearing their old school uniforms, looking fat and happy and relaxed and none the worse for wear, like they’d done nothing for the past six months but sit on their asses and eat grilled cheese sandwiches.
“Welcome back,” Eliot said. He was munching a yellow pear. “They only told us ten minutes ago you might be coming through.”
“Wow.” Josh’s eyes were round. “Man, you look skinny. Wizard needs food badly. And also maybe a shower.”
Quentin knew he had only a minute or two before he burst into tears and passed out. He still had Mayakovsky’s scratchy wool blanket wrapped around him. He looked down at his pale, frozen feet. Nothing looked frostbitten, anyway, though one of his toes was sticking out at an angle. It didn’t hurt yet.
It was very, very comfortable, deliriously comfortable, lying on his back on the hot stone like this, with the others looking down at him. He knew he should probably get up, for the sake of politeness if for no other reason, but he didn’t feel like moving yet. He thought he might just stay where he was for another minute. He had earned himself a rest.
“Are you all right?” Josh said. “What was it like?”
“Alice kicked your ass,” Janet said. “She got back two days ago. She already went home.”
“You were out there a week and a half,” Eliot said. “We were worried about you.”
Why did they keep talking? If he could just gaze up at them in silence, that would be perfect. Just look at them and listen to the chirping birds and feel the warm flagstones holding him up. And maybe somebody could get him a glass of water, he was desperately thirsty. He tried to articulate this last sentiment, but his throat was dry and cracked. He wound up just making a tiny creaking noise.
“Oh, I think he wants to know about us,” Janet said. She took a bite of Eliot’s pear. “Yeah, nobody else went out but you two. What—you think we’re stupid?”
ALICE
Quentin didn’t spend any time in Brooklyn that summer because his parents didn’t live there anymore. Abruptly and without consulting him, they’d sold off their Park Slope town house for a colossal sum and semiretired to a faux-Colonial McMansion in a placid suburb of Boston called Chesterton, where Quentin’s mother could paint full time and his father could do God only knew what.
The shock of being severed from the place he grew up in was all the more surprising because it never really came. Quentin looked for the part of him that should have missed his old neighborhood, but it wasn’t there. He supposed he must have been shedding his old identity and his old life all along, without noticing it. This just made the cut cleaner and neater. Really, it was probably easier this way. Not that his parents had made the move out of kindness, or any logic other than the obvious financial one.
The Chesterton house was yellow with green shutters and sat on an acre so aggressively landscaped that it looked like a virtual representation of itself. Though it was trimmed and detailed in a vaguely Colonial style, it was so enormous—bulging in all directions with extra wings and gables and roofs—that it looked like it had been inflated rather than constructed. Huge cement air-conditioning bunkers hummed outside night and day. It was even more unreal than the real world usually was.
When Quentin arrived home for summer vacation—Brakebills summer, September for the rest of the world—his parents were alarmed at his gaunt appearance, his hollow, shell-shocked eyes, his haunted demeanor. But their curiosity about him was, as always, mild enough to be easily manageable, and he started gaining weight back quickly with the help of their massive, ever-full suburban refrigerator.
At first it was a relief just to be warm all the time, and to sleep in every day, and to be free of Mayakovsky and the Circumstances and that merciless white winter light. But after seventy-two hours Quentin was already bored again. In Antarctica he’d fantasized about having nothing to do except lie on his bed and sleep and stare into space, but now those empty hours were here, and they were getting old amazingly fast. The long silences at Brakebills South had made him impatient with small talk. He had no interest in TV anymore—it looked like an electronic puppet show to him, an artificial version of an imitation world that meant nothing to him anyway. Real life—or was it fantasy life? whichever one Brakebills was—that was what mattered, and that was happening somewhere else.
As he usually did when he was stuck at home, he went on a Fillory binge. The old 1970s-era covers looked more and more dated every time he saw them, with their psychedelic Yellow Submarine palette, and on a couple of them the covers had come off completely and been tucked back between the pages as bookmarks. But the world inside the books was as fresh and vital as ever, unfaded and unironized by time. Quentin had never before really appreciated the cleverness of the second book. The Girl Who Told Time, in which Rupert and Helen are abruptly shanghaied into Fillory straight out of their respective boarding schools, the only time the Chatwins cross over in winter instead of summer. They end up back in an earlier time period, one that overlaps with the storyline of the first book. With the aid of foreknowledge, Rupert dogs Martin’s and Helen’s footsteps—the earlier Helen’s—as they repeat the action of The World in the Walls, note for note. He keeps just out of view, dropping clues and helping them out without their knowledge (the mysterious character known only as the Wood One turns out to have been Rupert in disguise); Quentin wondered if Plover wrote The Girl Who Told Time just to shore up all the plot holes in The World in the Walls.
Meanwhile Helen embarks on a hunt for the mysterious Questing Beast of Fillory, which according to legend can’t be caught, but if you do catch it—all logic aside—it’s supposed to give you your heart’s desire. The Beast leads her on a tricksy, circuitous chase that somehow winds in and out of the enchanted tapestries that adorn the library of Castle Whitespire. She only ever catches a glimpse of it, peeking coyly out at her from behind an embroidered shrub before vanishing in a flicker of cloven hoofs.