The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(13)

They were almost eerily clean. No diary, no poetry, no mistresses, no Ponzi schemes, nothing that wasn’t what it appeared to be. Not even any porn. Well, not much porn.

Quentin was no hacker—he’d spent way too much time in the technological black hole of Brakebills to have any serious chops with computers—but he knew some electromagnetic sorcery. He cracked the case and went directly after the silicon, feeling with magical fingertips for anything weird, any walled-off caches of hidden electrons pregnant with meaning. All he could think was, this can’t be it. This cannot be everything. He must have left me something.

Come on. Help me, Daddy. It was a word he hadn’t said or even thought in twenty years.

He stopped and sat for a minute, his hands trembling, in the empty house, in the deep cold suburban winter silence. Where is it, Dad? It must be here. I can’t be alone. You must have left me something. This was always how it worked: the distant, withholding father was always guarding a terrible secret, always keeping his son safe from it, able to pass on his legacy of power only in death.

And then he found it. It was at the back of a closet: a nubbly red plastic carton of index cards scribbled on in pencil, shoved behind a box of obsolete electronics and mysterious cables that were too important-looking to throw away. He set the carton on the desk and flipped through the cards, one by one. Strange names, columns of numbers, pluses and minuses. It went on and on. It was a lot of data. A cipher like this could contain whole worlds of power, if he could break it. And he would. It was left here for him.

He stared at the cards for it must have been ten minutes before the pattern solved itself all at once. It wasn’t a cipher at all. These were stats from his father’s old fantasy golf league. Quentin pushed the plastic box away from him violently, convulsively. The cards spilled out all over the rug. He left them there.

There was no mystery to solve. What had come between him and his father wasn’t magic. The terrible truth about Quentin’s father was that he was exactly the person he seemed to be. He wasn’t a magician. He wasn’t even a good person. He was an ordinary man who hadn’t even loved his only son. The hard truth was that Quentin had never really had a father.

And now he never would. Quentin put his head down on his father’s old desk and pounded his fist until his father’s crap old plastic keyboard jumped.

“Daddy!” he sobbed, in a voice he barely recognized. “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!”

—

Quentin went back to Brakebills the day after the funeral. He didn’t like to leave his mother, but she was more comfortable with her friends than she was with him, and it was time for them to take over. He’d done his part.

She drove him to the airport; he waited till she was out of sight before he walked away from the departure area to a parking garage that was still under construction. He took the elevator to the empty top floor. At the stroke of noon, under a flat white sky, a portal opened for him, a ring of white dots connected by white lines that sizzled and sparked in the cold dry air, and he stepped through it and back onto the Brakebills campus. Back home.

Climbing the stairs to his room, he felt strange. It was like he’d had a week of high fever that had finally crested and broken, leaving him empty and cold and shaky but also washed clean, the toxins sweated out, the impurities burned away. His father’s death had changed him, and it was the kind of change that you didn’t change back from. Daddy was gone. He was never coming home. It was time to move on.

When he walked into his room Quentin performed a small incendiary charm to light a candle, a spell he’d done a thousand times, but this time the sudden flare startled him. It was brighter and hotter than he remembered.

Quentin snuffed out the candle and lit it again. There was no question: his magic was different. The light that played around his hands as he worked was more intense than it had been a week ago. In the darkness the colors were shifted a bit toward the violent violet end of the spectrum. The power came more easily, and it buzzed harder and louder in his fingers.

He studied his hands. Something had broken loose in him. He was truly alone in the world now, no one was coming to help him. He would have to help himself. Somewhere deep in his unconscious he’d been waiting, holding back some last fraction of power. But not anymore.

Late that night something woke Quentin up out of a deep, dreamless sleep. A dry, scrabbling noise—it sounded like a small rodent was trapped in his room. He lit a lamp. It was coming from his desk.

It wasn’t a rodent, it was a piece of paper. He’d all but forgotten about it: it was the page he’d snatched out of the air as he left the Neitherlands and stuffed into his pocket and then shoved to the back of a desk drawer. Something had woken it up, and it was uncrumpling itself.

When he opened the drawer it made a wild bid for freedom. The page had folded itself in three sections like a business letter and now it unfolded all at once, launching itself a couple of feet in the air. Having gotten that far it hastily refolded itself the long way and began flapping frantically in circles in the dim light, around and around his head, like a moth around a lamp. Or like a memory of another life, another world, that wouldn’t stay buried.





CHAPTER 4


Quentin didn’t look at the page from the Neitherlands that night. That night he put a paperweight on it, locked the desk drawer, and propped a chair against it to make sure it stayed closed. He had to teach in the morning. He went back to bed and put a pillow over his head.