The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(135)

“I know,” Alice said gravely. “But just tell us.”

“OK. OK.” Janet didn’t let go of her hand; it was like she needed a lifeline to hang on to. “The sun fell down. Everything started fighting everything else, even the trees. It was terrible. Then Julia came back from the Far Side and sent us back here.”

“Shit.” Eliot looked up at the night sky and shouted: “Shit!”

The city sent him back a faint echo.

“Where’s Julia?” Quentin asked.

“She must have stayed behind.”

Janet couldn’t meet his eyes.

“So that’s it?” Plum said. She looked as stricken as the rest of them did. Quentin stepped up to the fountain. If he was going to try, he’d better try.

“Quentin, stop,” Janet said. “It’s dead.”

“In that case I’ll view the body.”

“There’s nothing there.”

“The fountain’s still here. There has to be something left.”

“No, there doesn’t,” Janet said. “And there isn’t. Please, Quentin.”

Even as she said it the statue of Atlas in the fountain began to move. It bent forward slowly and reached up to the enormous black marble globe it supported on one shoulder. It was preparing, at long last, to set its burden down.

“Hey!” Quentin said. “Not so f*cking fast!”

If Fillory was going to be dead it was going to have to prove it to him personally, to his face. He side-vaulted over the rim into the water—it should have been cold, but it was hot and getting hotter. Probably in a few minutes it would start boiling away to nothing. Josh grabbed his arm, but Quentin shook him off. Atlas glared at him, but even though he was twice as tall as Quentin and made of stone he must have seen something truly murderous in Quentin’s face because he straightened up a little and grudgingly shrugged the globe back into position.

Everybody was shouting at him.

“Don’t be an idiot, Quentin!” Janet yelled. “For once!”

“Quentin, don’t,” Eliot said. “You don’t have to.”

“But I do.”

Quentin fumbled awkwardly in his coat pocket for the button while trying to tread water at the same time. Somebody had his arm again, and he tried to jerk away, but at the same moment his finger touched the button and the bottom dropped out.

Once again he was free-falling down toward the magic land of Fillory. He never thought he’d see it again. It made him feel almost painfully tender—after all this, everything that had happened, Fillory was taking him back. The whole country was spread out below him, and he was inbound like a deorbiting space capsule.

He definitely never thought he’d see it like this. Far to the west he caught a smeary glimpse of a crash-landed sun like an egg yolk on a skillet, melting and burning in a steaming, boiling sea at the edge of the world. He had a close booming fly-by with a massive object which he only realized after it was gone was the moon itself, spinning low and off its axis. Fires blazed and dark armies surged across the surface of the world. Something colossal was slowly surmounting Fillory’s rim, peering up over it with its enormous curious face: one of the great turtles that formed the foundation of the world, coming up at last to have a look at what it had been carrying on its back all these thousands of years. Fillory, his beautiful Fillory, was ruined and dying.

But it wasn’t dead. Not quite. Not until there was nothing left.

Then he was down. The ground shook under his feet, and the air was full of rumbling and tearing and distant cries and the smell of smoke. Burning ash from somewhere whipped by on a hot wind.

His arm: someone still had hold of it. It was Alice.

“What are you doing?” he shouted over the noise.

“Being an idiot,” she said.

She actually managed a slight smile, her first of the new era. He smiled too.

“Come on then. We have to find Ember.”

The button had set them down outside the city gates of Whitespire. The wall around the city was half collapsed, and one half of the great gate hung askew. Some of the towers of the castle still stood, for now, but they were swaying. Quentin pointed to them; Alice nodded. There was no way they’d find Ember in all this unless He at least halfway wanted to be found, and if He wanted to be found at all that’s where He’d be.

“I’ll do shields, you do speed,” Alice shouted.

They spent an intense minute casting on themselves and each other, then they held hands and ran through the gate together.

The streets were deserted. The town looked like it had been bombed, and the inhabitants were either dead or gone or huddled in their cellars. Quentin and Alice ran carelessly, bounding along with exaggerated magical strength. Sometimes they cut through ruins and leveled lots to save time; once a tremor sent a teetering wall of stone flopping down heavily right onto them, which would have killed them if Alice’s spellwork hadn’t been top-notch. Instead it just slammed them face down into the dust, and they shrugged off the heavy blocks and picked themselves up and caught their breath and ran on.

They didn’t slow to a walk until they were passing under the portcullis and through the thick outer wall of Castle Whitespire; it was the first time he and Alice had been there together. They stepped out into the courtyard. It had been the longest of long shots—a dot in the shark, Eliot would have said—that Ember would be there waiting for them.