The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(107)

Josh and Poppy shared another marital glance.

“I don’t know how to phrase this exactly but what the f*ck?” Josh said. “Umber’s not evil. Or wasn’t evil. He was Ember’s brother. Plus He’s been dead for like a million years or something. Martin Chatwin killed Him.”

“Or,” Janet said, “maybe he didn’t. Or He came back to life or something.”

“Why hasn’t Eliot come back?” Poppy said.

“That I don’t know. I’m a little peeved about it myself. A little worried too. I’ve become quite attached to our High King. Maybe there’s something more interesting going on on Earth, but I can’t imagine what. Josh?”

“How does Eliot send you letters?”

“Oh. We rigged it up before he left. They sort of float to the surface in that little gazing pool in the courtyard outside my bedroom, on these strips of paper. It’s very picturesque. Then you dry them out, and the words develop like a Polaroid. Poppy?”

“Should we do it? Should we try to find Ember? I mean, Umber? Sorry, I get Them mixed up. Baby brain, it’s started already. Seriously, we have to get moving with this because I’m almost in the second trimester here. We’ve got six months.”

One thing about Poppy, she had a can-do attitude. It was one of the things Janet liked about her. Maybe the only thing. Or she guessed Poppy’s hair was all right too.

“But hang on,” Josh said. “What if we do find Umber? What do we do with Him? I mean, you gotta figure He’s pretty far up the power scale. It’s not like we’re going to intimidate Him.”

“Well, I’ve been thinking about that,” Janet said. “Maybe we stick Him in Ember’s Tomb. Martin managed to trap Ember in there once, and He couldn’t get out. Seems to me that thing is like a ready-made purpose-built ram-god-containment facility.”

“But it’s risky,” Poppy said. “Could we even get Him in there? Maybe this is all a little precipitous?”

Just then Janet was overcome by the strangest sensation. She felt herself pulled ever so slightly to one side, her whole body, like she was starting to lose her balance. Then the room gave a little bump and jostle, and the feeling was gone again. It affected the others, too, she could see it.

Josh figured it out first.

“The room’s stopped moving,” he said.

Castle Whitespire was built on clockwork foundations that rotated its towers very slowly in a stately, never-ending dance, like the teacups in a really slow, boring carnival ride. They were driven by windmills. Ordinarily you hardly noticed it, but they noticed now, because it had just stopped. As far as she knew Whitespire’s towers had never stood still before, even in the dark times, the worst times.

“Does that answer your question?” Janet said. “This world is falling apart. We have to do something, and this is the only lead we’ve got. I think we’d better use it.”

“I’m just saying, we’re talking about hunting a god here,” Poppy said. “It’s not going to be easy.”

“If it were easy everybody would do it.”

As soon as the tower stopped moving Josh had gone out on the balcony and leaned on the stone railing, looking down. Now Janet and Poppy followed him. Far below tiny people were spilling out of doorways, into the streets and courtyards, staring around them uncertainly, blinking in the late-afternoon sunlight. One by one they stopped and looked up, looked to the three of them, shading their eyes, as if their kings and queens could possibly have any answers.

“Idiots,” Janet said, softly, but just for form’s sake. Maybe the great ever-spinning towers of Whitespire had ground to a halt, mayhap even the heavenly spheres themselves no longer danced to the music of time. Who the f*ck knew. Maybe the only place she’d ever been happy was about to fall apart. But not even the end of the world was going to stop Janet from being a bitch. It was the principle of the thing.

—

They all went, all three of them. Four counting the baby. Josh and Poppy had bickered—it didn’t quite rise to the level of a fight—about whether Poppy should come, but Poppy came out on top.

“You’re worrying too much,” she said. “I’ll take good care of the baby. You just take good care of me.”

The trip to the Northern Marsh went more quickly this time. No need for gallant-but-aimless diagnostic wandering in the wilderness. This time they could take the direct route, the express train: hippogriffs, the fastest fliers in the fleet.

You couldn’t use them all the time. They were independent bastards, valued their freedom, practically libertarians, and they were very fussy about their feathers too, which you always ended up pulling out a few, it was impossible not to. But desperate times, etc. They were better than the pureblood griffins anyway—those things were just anarchists. Chaotic neutral all the way.

Janet’s particular hippogriff had a funny red crest between its ears, a feature she’d never seen before. It made a show of ignoring her as she mounted, with the help of a boost from a loyal retainer. Just once before the end of the world she wouldn’t have minded a little gesture of respect from one of these things. Ah well.

It was good to get a hippogriff’s-eye view of Fillory, anyway, because it at least confirmed that the halting of Whitespire wasn’t an isolated phenomenon. There were signs all over that things were seriously out of joint. It was nothing like when she and Eliot had been traveling, just a few days ago, and thinking about that she already felt nostalgia for it. Now the grass in open fields waved and bent in strange, regular patterns, expanding circles and moving lines—from high overhead they looked like old-fashioned analog TVs on the blink, their vertical hold shot.