The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(110)

“—when I popped her cherry,” Janet finished in a whisper.

“That doesn’t even make sense!” Josh hissed.

“Shh!”

They shushed. In the silence, the dry, irregular sound of trotting hooves on stone. With some effort, her foot on the guard’s cloven head, Janet rocked her axe back and forth till it came free.

—

A half hour’s worth of not very dignified hide-and-seek followed. It was hard sometimes to figure out where exactly the sound was coming from. They padded along as silently as they could, trying to get a fix on it, cocking their heads and whacking each other on the shoulders and pointing and accusing each other of making too much noise in heated whispers.

Every once in a while they could hear a voice along with the hooves, muttering to itself, just on the edge of hearing:

“Yes, yes, just along here. Up we go. Right this way. Carefully now.”

Who was He talking to? It was annoying.

The voice didn’t sound at all like Ember’s Olympian baritone. One time they realized they could take a shortcut, and they nearly headed Him off—they got a glimpse of His flickering haunches disappearing up a spiral staircase.

“A close shave!” they heard Him say. “Nearly caught!”

This was followed by a weird high quavering moan.

The three of them stopped in a vaulted gallery they knew from Castle Whitespire. Aboveground it would have been brimming with sunlight. Here they looked out the windows into depthless blackness. They could see the bright ring of water far below them, the surface of the upside-down swamp, a drowned sun swimming in it like a yolk in a silvery egg. Once in a while a few upside-down fish skittered past the windows.

The hooves started again, closer.

“I don’t get this,” Josh said. “Dude is a god. If He really wanted to get away from us He would just apparate or whatever. Either He wants to be caught or He’s leading us into a trap.”

“Let’s find out,” Janet said.

Now that was some leadership right there.

“I think He’s heading up to the solarium,” Poppy said.

“Great, then He’s stuck. No way out.”

“So we’ve got Him trapped.”

“We could even just stay down here,” Josh said, “and not go up there.”

“What, and starve Him out?”

Even Poppy rolled her eyes.

“Let’s get this over with and get out of here. This place is creeping me out.”

“Yup.” Janet was coming around to Poppy. ’Nother couple of decades and they might even start getting along. Janet unslung her axes, her Sorrows, and took the stairs at a sprint. You don’t live in a castle full of spiral stairs without getting calves of adamantium. She heard Poppy whoop and head up behind her.

That quavering moan again.

“Goodness!” the voice said, up ahead, a genteel English tenor, not in its first youth, with a wee bit of a chuckle in it. It was an Edwardian comedy voice. “Alarums and excursions!”

It pissed her off. The f*cking Chalk Man was down on his hands and knees. You think this is a joke? Alarums and excursions? I’ll show you a f*cking alarum. Pounding up the steps, right behind Him now, she got a whiff of His divine oily wool, weirdly sweet. Even she was feeling the burn in her legs. She should have stretched.

“Stop! Jesus! We just want to talk!”

We just want to talk about how f*cking dead You’ll be after we kill You.

Topside the solarium was a lovely domed chamber, but down here it was miserably gloomy in spite of the four torches that guttered in its four corners. Umber paused just long enough for Janet to get her first good look at him: He looked like His brother, obviously, enormous, with big ribbed horns swept back from his brow like they’d been brilliantined, except that where Ember was golden, Umber was a deep storm-cloud gray.

“Off we go!” He called.

One of the windows lit up with sunlight; after an hour under the swamp it was like looking straight into an arc lamp. Umber had opened up a portal to the world above.

He surged forward, made one preparatory gallop and then leaped through the window, did a half barrel roll in midair, and landed upside-down on—the sky? The ceiling? No, it was just grass. Up there the gravity was flopped the other way. He stuck the landing.

“Haven’t been up here for a while,” Umber remarked, trotting away. “Closer than you think!”

Janet’s shoulders sank. Dammit! We could chase this guy forever and never catch him. But Poppy, just reaching the top, was totally undaunted. Without breaking stride—in fact she picked up speed—she ran straight at the portal, planted her hands on the windowsill, did a handstand, let the gravity flip as she broke the plane, and landed on her feet on the grass, upside-down with respect to Janet and facing her.

It made Janet want to puke just watching her. And she wasn’t even pregnant.

“Come on!” Poppy said brightly.

She spun around to face the receding ram-god. Even Umber seemed dismayed by her sprightliness. He startled like a mountain goat hearing a distant gunshot.

“Good-bye!” He called, and He was off like a greyhound, and the portal winked out.

Janet took a half step toward it, too late.

“Just like a f*cking god,” she said.

She was still standing there, arms crossed, glaring at it, when Josh came heaving up the top step like he was trying to get himself out of a swimming pool.