The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(113)

“This is all really fascinating,” she said. “Truly. But it’s not actually why we wanted to talk to You.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Which by the way,” Josh said, “since we’re talking, why did You sort of run away just then, and then stop running away?”

“Oh!” Umber looked surprised. “I thought you’d like that. Bit of a chase. Wasn’t that what you wanted?”

“Not really, no,” Janet said.

“Though I did like the part when I saved everything,” Josh said. “That was good. You know, with the portal.”

“There!” Umber said. “You see? And you needed the exercise too.”

This had the effect of canceling out Josh’s triumph. Poppy patted his arm.

“Well, whatever,” he said. “Look, what about this apocalypse thing? End of the world. How are we going to stop that? That’s Your thing, right?”

Umber actually looked wounded.

“The apocalypse? Oh, no. That’s not one of Mine.”

“It’s not?” Janet said. “Wait.”

“Goodness no. Why would I do that?”

The two queens and the king looked at each other. Something began dying a little inside Janet. Oh yes—hope. That’s what people called it.

“But if You’re not—?” Poppy said. “Then how are we going to—?”

The astonishment was plain even on Umber’s inhuman face.

“Stop it? You can’t think I would know! I don’t think you can stop it. How would you stop an apocalypse? It’s just nature. It happens by itself.”

“So you can’t . . .” Josh said, but he trailed off.

“But then—” Janet said. She couldn’t finish her sentence either. She’d been sure this was it. The answer, the end of the quest, at last. She’d been so sure.

The impulse came over Janet out of nowhere; nowhere was where she got a lot of her best impulses these days. It suddenly all linked up in her head: Umber had taken Martin’s humanity, and He made it all sound like a lark, like what else could He do? But Martin had become the Beast, the Beast had bitten off Penny’s hands and crushed Quentin’s collarbone and made Alice turn herself into a niffin. And he’d eaten that girl back in school, what was her name. That all went back to Umber.

She ripped one of her axes from its strap on her back and in the same motion clouted Umber in the head with it. She didn’t even have time to put an ice blade on it, it was just a cold steel spanner straight to the ram-jowls.

“Yah!”

Umber’s eyes went wide. She did it again, a lot harder this time, and His front knees buckled.

These crazy axes. She’d give the Foremost that, he hadn’t oversold them. They were everything he’d said they were and more. You could hit a god with them, and He would feel it.

Umber started to rise, shaking His long muzzle, befuddled more than anything else, and Janet hammered Him again, and again, and again, and His legs folded under Him and He sank down and lost consciousness. Then she hit Him once more, cracked Him right on His ear, knocked a tiny chip out of one of those big horns. Blue sparks flew.

“That’s for everything You did! And everything You didn’t do! You f*cking jerk!”

“Janet!” Poppy said, losing her cool a bit for once. “Jesus!”

“Who cares? It’s not Him. He can’t help us. He doesn’t know anything.” Plus who knows when was the next time she’d get to beat down a god? Especially one who so obviously deserved it? Umber sprawled on His side, unconscious, the tip of His thick tongue poking out of His slack mouth.

“Loser.” She spat on Him. “You could never have been a king anyway. You’re too much of a *.”

The others just stared at her, and at the slumbering god, laid out on the putting-green grass under a tree on top of a hill in the Chankly Bore.

“That was for Alice,” she said. “And, you know, Penny’s hands. All that stuff.”

“No, we got it,” Josh said. “Message received.”

“We should go,” Poppy said.

But they didn’t, or not yet. In the distance, through a gap in the Nameless Mountains, they could see that the sun had almost reached the rim of the world. They watched it setting.

But then it didn’t quite set. It didn’t quite make it. Instead of dipping below the horizon, the sun seemed to come to rest on it. Bit by bit, increment by increment, its lower edge flattened, and distant flares and gouts of flame began to rise up around it, complicating the sunset. There was a flash of light, then another, a distant bombardment. The sound reached them a few seconds later, a crackling boom, and the tremor a few seconds after that, a heavy industrial vibration passing through the earth, like someone was applying a belt sander to the rim of the world. A few leaves shook down from the tree behind them.

“What,” Josh said, “the f*ck is that.”

Janet wished she didn’t get it, but she did.

“It’s the end.” She sat down on the crown of a hill in the Chankly Bore and hugged her knees. “It’s starting. We’re too late. The apocalypse has begun.”





CHAPTER 25


Alice slept. She slept for twenty hours give or take, in Quentin’s bed, flat on her back, mouth propped open, perfectly still under a thin sheet, not once stirring or rolling over. Quentin stayed awake as long as he could watching her, listening to her faint wheezing. Her hair was long and lank and matted. Her skin was pale. Her fingernails needed cutting, and she was bruised on one arm from when she’d fallen to the floor. But she was healthy and whole. She was her.