That was all fine. But Fillory wasn’t doing its part. It wasn’t giving up the key. All the wonders seemed to be in hiding. In the past week they had reached heretofore unknown islands, stepped out onto virgin beaches, infiltrated choked mangrove swamps, even scaled a rogue drifting iceberg, but no keys presented themselves. They weren’t getting traction. It wasn’t working. Something was missing. It was almost as if something had gone out of the air: a tautness had gone slack, an electric charge had dissipated. Quentin racked his brain to think what it was.
Also it wouldn’t stop raining.
After the meeting Quentin forced himself to take a break. He lay down in his damp berth and waited for the heat from his body to propagate its way through the clammy, tepid bedclothes. It was too late to take a nap and too early to go to sleep. Outside his window the sun was dropping over the rim of the world, or it must have been, but you couldn’t tell. Sky and ocean were indistinguishable from each other. The world was the uniform gray of a brand-new Etch A Sketch the knobs of which hadn’t yet been twiddled.
He stared out at it, gnawing the edge of his thumb, a bad habit left over from childhood, his mind adrift in the emptiness.
Somebody spoke.
“Quentin.”
He opened his eyes. He must have fallen asleep. The window was dark now.
“Quentin,” the voice said again. He hadn’t dreamed it. The voice was muffled, directionless. He sat up. It was a gentle voice, soft and androgynous and vaguely familiar. It didn’t sound completely human. Quentin looked around the cabin, but he was alone.
“Who are you?” he said.
“I’m down here, Quentin. You’re hearing me through a grating in the floor. I’m down in the hold.”
Now he placed the voice. He’d forgotten it was even on board.
“Sloth? Is that you?” Did it have a name other than Sloth?
“I thought you might like to pay me a visit.”
Quentin couldn’t imagine what would have given the sloth that idea. The Muntjac’s hold was dark and smelled of damp and rot and bilge, and for that matter it smelled of sloth. All in all he would have been fine talking to the sloth just where he was. Or not talking to it at all.
And Jesus, if he could hear the sloth that clearly it must have overheard everything that happened in this cabin since they’d left Whitespire.
But he did feel bad about the sloth. He hadn’t paid very much attention to it. Frankly it was a tiny bit of a bore. But he owed it some respect, as the shipboard representative of the talking animals, and it was warm down in the hold, and it wasn’t like he had somewhere more pressing to be just now. He sighed and peeled the bedclothes off himself and fetched a candle and found the ladder that went down below.
The hold was emptier than he remembered it. A year at sea would have that effect. Black water sloshed around in a channel that ran along the floor. The sloth was a weird-looking beast, maybe four feet long, with a heavy coat of greenish-gray fur. It hung upside down by its ropy arms at about eye level, its thick curved claws hooked up over a wooden beam. Its appearance smacked of evolution gone too far. The usual pile of fruit rinds and sloth droppings lay below it in an untidy heap.
“Hi,” Quentin said.
“Hello.”
The sloth raised its small, oddly flattened head so that it was looking at Quentin right-side up. The position looked uncomfortable, but the sloth’s neck seemed pretty well designed for it. It had black bands of fur over its eyes that gave it a sleepy, raccoony look.
It squinted at the light from Quentin’s candle.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been down to see you very often,” Quentin offered.
“It’s all right, I don’t mind. I’m not a very social animal.”
“I don’t even know your name.”
“It’s Abigail.”
She was a girl sloth. Quentin hadn’t realized. A hard wooden chair had been brought down to the hold, presumably in case someone was enjoying their conversation with the sloth so much that he or she just had to sit down to enjoy it even more.
“And you’ve been very busy,” she added charitably.
A long silence ensued. Once in a while the sloth masticated something, Quentin wasn’t sure what, with its blunt yellow teeth. It must be somebody’s job to come down here and feed it. Her.
“Do you mind if I ask,” Quentin said finally, “why you came on this voyage? I’ve always wondered.”
“I don’t mind at all,” Abigail the Sloth said calmly. “I came because nobody else wanted to, and we thought we should send someone. The Council of Animals decided that I would mind it the least. I sleep a great deal, and I don’t move around very much. I enjoy my solitude. In a way I am hardly in this world at all, so it doesn’t very much matter where I am in it.”
“Oh. We thought the talking animals wanted a representative on the ship. We thought you’d be insulted if we didn’t take one of you along.”
“We thought you’d be insulted if we didn’t send someone. It is humorous how rife with misunderstanding the world is, is it not?”
It sure was.
The sloth didn’t find the long silences awkward. Maybe animals didn’t experience awkwardness the way humans did.
“When a sloth dies, it remains hanging in its tree,” the sloth said, apropos of nothing. “Often well into the process of decomposition.”
Quentin nodded sagely.
“I did not know that.”
It wasn’t an easy ball to throw back.
“This is by way of telling you something about the way sloths live. It is different from the way humans live, and even from the way other animals live. We spend our lives in between worlds, you might say. We suspend ourselves between the earth and the sky, touching neither. Our minds hover between the sleeping world and the waking. In a sense we live on the borderline between life and death.”
“That is very different from how humans live.”
“It must seem strange to you, but it is where we feel most comfortable.”
The sloth seemed like somebody you could be frank with.
“Why are you telling me this?” he said. “I mean, I’m sure you have a reason, but I’m not making the connection. Is this about the key? Do you have an idea about how to find it?”
He didn’t know how much the sloth knew about what was going on above deck. Maybe she didn’t even know they were on a quest.
“It is not about the key,” Abigail said in her liquid, unhurried voice. “It is about Benedict Fenwick.”
“Benedict? What about him?”
“Would you like to speak with him?”
“Well, sure. Of course. But he’s dead. He died two weeks ago.”
It was still as unthinkable, almost unsayable, as it had been that first night.
“There are paths that are closed to most beings that are open to a sloth.”
Quentin supposed it went without saying that patience was a big deal when having a conversation with a sloth.
“I don’t understand. You’re going to hold a séance, and we can talk to Benedict’s ghost?”
“Benedict is in the underworld. He is not a ghost. He is a shade.” The sloth returned her head to its inverted position, a maneuver she accomplished without once dropping Quentin’s gaze.
“The underworld.” Jesus Christ. He hadn’t even realized Fillory had an underworld. “He’s in hell?”
“He is in the underworld, where dead souls go.”
“Is he all right there? Or I mean, I know he’s dead, but is he at peace? Or whatever?”
“That I cannot tell you. My understanding of human moods is imprecise. A sloth knows only peace, nothing else.”
It must be nice to be a sloth. Quentin was unsettled by the idea of Benedict in the underworld. It bothered him that Benedict could be dead but still—not alive, but what? Conscious? Awake? It was like he was buried alive. It sounded awful.
“But he’s not being tortured, right? By red guys with horns and pitchforks?” It never did to assume anything was impossible in Fillory.
“No. He is not being tormented.”
“But he’s not in heaven either.”
“I do not know what ‘heaven’ is. Fillory has only an underworld.”
“So how can I talk to him? Can you—I don’t know, put in a call? Patch me through?”
“No, Quentin. I am not a medium. I am a psychopomp. I do not speak to the dead, but I can show you the path to the underworld.”
Quentin was not sure he wanted to be shown that. He studied the sloth’s upside-down face. It was unreadable.
“Physically? I could physically go there?”
“Yes.”
Deep breath.
“Okay. I would really love to help Benedict, but I don’t want to leave the world of the living.”
“I will not force you. Indeed, I could not.”
It was spooky down in the hold, which was lightless except for the flame of Quentin’s candle, which stayed perfectly upright as the ship pitched forward and back. The hanging sloth did too—she swayed slightly, like a pendulum. Quentin’s eyes kept wandering off into the darkness. It was otherworldly down here. The ship’s curved sides were like the ribs of some huge animal that had swallowed them. Where was the underworld? Was it underground? Underwater?
The sloth chose this moment to engage in some self-grooming, which she did with her customary slowness and thoroughness, first with her tongue and then with a thick, woody claw, which she slowly and laboriously unhooked from around the beam.
“In a way”—she said, as she licked and clawed—“we sloths are like . . . small worlds . . . unto ourselves.”
Nobody could wait out a pause like a sloth. Or survive on less conversational encouragement. He wondered if to a sloth the human world appeared to move past at blinding, flickering speed—if humans looked twitchy and sped-up to her, the same way the sloth looked slowed-down to Quentin.
“There is a species of algae,” she said, “that grows only . . . in sloth fur. It accounts for our unique . . . greenish tint. The algae helps us blend in with the leaves. But it also serves . . . to nourish an entire ecological system. There is a species of moth that lives only . . . in the thick, algaerich fur . . . of the sloth. Once a moth arrives on its chosen sloth”—here she tussled with a particularly gristly knot of fur for a long minute before continuing—“its wings break off. It does not need them. It will never leave.”
Finally finished, she rehooked her claw over the beam and returned to her quiescent, upside-down state.
“They are called sloth moths.”
“Look,” Quentin said. “I want to be clear. I don’t have time to go to the underworld right now. At any other time grieving for Benedict would be the biggest thing in my life, but the universe is going through a crisis. We’re searching for a key, and there’s a lot riding on that. A lot. It could be the end of Fillory if we don’t find it. This will have to wait.”
“No time will pass while you are in the other realm. For the dead there is no change, and therefore no time.”
He couldn’t afford to get distracted. “Even if it takes no time. Anyway what good would it do? I can’t bring him back.”
“No.”
“So I hate to be blunt, but what’s the point?”
“You could offer Benedict comfort. Sometimes the living can give something to the dead. And perhaps he could offer you something too. My understanding of human emotions is . . .”
The sloth paused to ponder her choice of words.
“Imprecise?” Quentin said.
“Precisely. Imprecise. But I do not think Benedict was happy with his death.”
“It was a terrible death. He must feel very unhappy.”
“I think perhaps he wants to tell you that.”
Quentin hadn’t considered that.
“I think perhaps he could give you something too.”
The sloth regarded him with her gelatinous, glittering eyes, which seemed to pick up light from somewhere other than in the room. Then she closed them.
The ship grunted patiently as the waves beat against its hull, over and over again, monotonously. Quentin watched the sloth. By now he had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something that he himself should be doing, and he wasn’t doing it. He pictured Benedict, trapped and languishing in a poorly drawn cartoon netherworld. Would he want someone to come visit him? He probably would.
Quentin felt responsible for him. It was part of being a king. And Benedict had died before he found out what the keys were for. He thought that he’d died for no reason. Imagine chewing on that for eternity.
One of the things Quentin remembered from reading about King Arthur was that the knights who had sins on their consciences never did very well on the quest for the Grail. The thing was to go to confession before you set out. You had to face yourself and deal with your shit, that’s how you got somewhere. At the time Quentin thought that that was obvious, and he never understood why Gawain and the rougher knights didn’t just suck it up, get shriven, and get on with it. Instead they blundered around getting into fights and succumbing to temptation and eventually ended up nowhere near the Grail.
But being in the middle of it, it wasn’t that obvious. Maybe Benedict’s death was—if not a sin on his conscience, exactly, then something unresolved. The sloth was right. It was weighing on his soul, slowing them all down. Maybe this was one of those times when being a hero didn’t involve looking particularly brave. It was just doing what you should.