The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(111)

“I am gonna sack that guy’s nutcastle,” he croaked.

She brought him up to speed on the departed god, his absent wife, etc. He seemed oddly unperturbed.

“By the way, your wife is pretty impressive. I think I underestimated her. So kudos on that.”

“Thanks, Janet.” Josh was pleased. As he should be. “I never thought I’d hear you say the word kudos.”

“Doesn’t count cause we’re underwater.”

“So he did a portal, huh,” Josh said. “Did you get a good look?”

“Hills,” Janet said. “Grass. Sky.”

Josh nodded, saying nothing, but his eyes were busy. He sketched rapidly in the air with his thick fingers, invisible diagrams and sigils.

“East coast. Northeast.”

“What are you doing? Oh.” She forgot Josh knew like three times as much as anybody else about portals.

He was already lost to concentration and his imaginary magic finger painting, which he accompanied now with satisfied grunts and hums. Janet had to give him credit: when he understood something, he really understood the hell out of it.

“Pfft,” he said. “You gotta be kidding me.”

He got up and began pacing around the room, looking around like he was tracking a mosquito nobody else could see.

“I figured He must be working on some, like, special secret divine transport grid that us mere mortals are locked out of, by virtue of our fallen mortal nature. Right? But not even! So where exactly was He standing when He threw this thing open?”

Janet gestured vaguely.

“Show me,” Josh said. “I need to see it or it doesn’t work.”

Janet sighed.

“If you look at my ass I’m telling Poppy.”

She got down on all fours, Umber-style, and reenacted the sequence exactly. Josh nodded gravely, staring at her ass.

Then he walked over to the window where the portal had been and pressed his palms against it. He rubbed the glass in slow circles, and it was like he was doing a grave rubbing: wherever his hands went, a ghostly, silvery afterimage of the portal appeared, or rather the view through the portal: a range of low hills, but oddly regular. Each hill was perfectly smooth, and more or less the same height as the others, and they were arranged in perfect straight rows. On top of each hill was a single tree, an oak tree by the look of them.

“Where the hell is that?” Josh said.

“Chankly Bore,” Janet said. It had to be. Nowhere else like it. “Up north next to Broken Bay.”

“Weird.” Josh leaned in to study it, put his nose against the glass. “Chankly Bore. Is ‘chankly’ an adjective? Modifying ‘bore’?”

“Some mysteries it doesn’t pay to pry into. Josh, can you get us there?”

“Can I?” He snapped his fingers, once, twice. “Almost had it.” Snap. On the third try the ghostly image burst into full color, hi-def, streaming live. “There you are, my queen.”

—

Janet wound up inching herself across the low windowsill feet first, on her bum, her face chalk white, allowing the gravity to get a grip on her feet and drag them downward to where Josh could reach up to receive them from the other side. The gravitational sheer was just not something she could get her mind around, let alone her body—she froze halfway, looking a bit like Winnie-the-Pooh stuck halfway in and halfway out of Rabbit’s burrow. In the end he had to yank her bodily through.

Then she was standing on Fillorian soil again, less than four hours after she had boldly set forth in search of the rogue god Umber, of Whom there was no sign. She ruminated, again, on the eternal return, the widening gyre, that seemed to govern human history. There is a tide in the affairs of men. A slack tide, that heaves up wrack and slime and rotting seaweed and deposits them on the sand, like a cat leaving the corpse of a rat on your doorstep. Then it slinks back in search of more.

They’d been so close. They could have solved everything. And now they wouldn’t. He’d gotten away.

At any rate the Chankly Bore was a majestic sight in person. The hills ran on into the distance in their rows, not perfectly regular, she saw now, but almost, like the rubber dimples of a nonslip mat writ very, very large. Each one had its own tree at the summit, like a candle on top of a cupcake, and each tree was different. In places the flanks of the hills had been bleached a tawny golden yellow by the endless unyielding iron summer.

There was Poppy, waiting for them, a quarter-mile off. She pointed—wait a minute, maybe all wasn’t lost after all. Umber wasn’t hiding, He was standing right there, looking at them, at the summit of one of the hills—one row in, three over. He wasn’t even moving! They could see Him totally plainly!

She started toward Him.

“Don’t run!” she shouted, pleaded even, as if the sound of her voice could keep Him there. “Don’t run away! Please! Just stay there!”

Umber didn’t run. He waited for them.

He didn’t even look especially concerned as the three humans, two queens and a king, plus a royal heir in utero, came straggling up the slope. As backdrops for earthshaking events went, the Chankly Bore was a corker. The view was sublime. Janet wondered if someone had planted the trees on the tops of the hills or if they’d just grown like that.

Actually the entity most likely to know the answer to that question was ten yards away and closing. As she came up to Him she slowed, hardly believing that He wasn’t going to bolt the moment she came too close. His stupid woolly face was impassive.