The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(136)

And He wasn’t. But Umber was.

Quentin had never seen Him before, and until a week ago he’d thought Umber was dead, but it couldn’t have been anybody else. He stood quite still, like a tame ram in a meadow, His head down as He cropped a stray weed pushing up between two paving stones, in the twilight of the dying world. He straightened up.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” He said, between chews. “For ages. I made a bet with myself that you’d come, and now look. I’ve won.”

Quentin hadn’t planned for this, but he supposed one was as good as the other, for his purposes. But Umber seemed to know what Quentin was thinking.

“Well, come on. It’s no good with just Me. You’re going to need Us both.”

Umber tossed His horned head at them, come-hither. Under any other circumstances Quentin would have hesitated, but on this day of all days His meaning was unmistakable. Quentin jogged over to Him and, as he’d imagined doing ten thousand times before, at least, he threw an arm and a leg over Umber’s broad soft back and heaved himself up onto it. Alice climbed on behind him and put her arms around his waist. The instant Quentin had his fingers wound into Umber’s cloudy gray wool the god surged forward under them and they were off.

Quentin had always wanted to do this—they all had—and now he knew why. After a few trotting steps to get up to speed Umber bunched all four legs together under Himself and leapt the castle wall, like the cow jumping over the moon. The rush and acceleration were beyond anything. He picked up speed as He bounded through the crumbled city and out of it, touching the ground ever more lightly and at wider intervals, trees and fields and hills and walls and rivers whipping past.

There was a strange fateful joy to it. The scene was catastrophic, his mission could not have been more dire, but Quentin Coldwater had come back to Fillory with Alice, and together they were riding a god.

“Hi ho!” Umber said. And Quentin answered Him:

“Hi ho!”

He still remembered the childish love he’d felt for the two rams, back before he’d known Fillory was real. It hadn’t lasted: he’d met Ember in person, and He wasn’t anything like as strong or as kind or as wise as Plover had made Him out to be. Then when Ember had thrown Quentin out of Fillory his disillusionment had tipped over into anger. But since then he’d learned a few things about acceptance, and his anger had cooled, even if the love hadn’t quite returned. Now he saw the rams as They were: strange, inhuman, somewhat ridiculous beings, as limited by their godhead as They were empowered by it. But They were divine, and There was a majesty to Them that was undeniable.

Even as Quentin felt Umber’s strength beneath him, Fillory was losing the last of its own strength. Its glorious greenery was withering away before their eyes. They passed men and animals bunched together in shivering packs, no longer even fighting, like the remnants of a party that had got out of control and been shut down and broken up by the police, leaving the celebrants suddenly sober and chagrined. Acres of trees lay knocked down and uprooted. Overhead the stars were beginning to fall, one by one, some in rapid arcs like meteors, others more slowly and gracefully, twirling and sparking and pinwheeling down.

Alice hugged him tight. A series of deep booming cracks sounded, like distant artillery fire, signaling that the land itself had begun to disintegrate. It was losing cohesion, losing even the strength to hold on to itself. Great crevasses opened in Fillory’s surface, and widened into canyons, and in the depths of the deepest of them Quentin could see all the way down to the pale struggling dead of the Underworld, writhing in a mass like larvae inside a rotten log. Now Umber’s great gallop found them hurdling enormous gaps in the land, which grew wider and wider until in places nothing connected the component shards of Fillory at all, and Quentin began to see stars between them. They were leaping from island to island in the dark of space, flying as much as jumping, soaring through the void.

He saw where they were heading. A single fragment of land lay dead ahead of them, an uprooted divot of enchanted turf with just a field and a pond and a tree, orphaned in the disaster, no longer linked to anything at all. On it, alone, stood Ember.

Umber touched down lightly and trotted away His excess speed. Quentin and Alice slid off. Quentin was just thankful that Alice was with him. She believed in him, or she once had anyway. That would make it easier to believe in himself during what was coming next.

Ember stood staring down at the pond, a round pool bristling with bullrushes around its edge, eyes locked with His reflection. His face was unreadable as ever, but there was something lonely about Him, something despairing and abandoned, as His world came apart around Him. For the first time Quentin felt a little sorry for the old ram.

“Ember,” he said.

No answer.

“Ember, You know what You have to do. I think You’ve always known, since the beginning.”

Quentin knew. He hadn’t put it all together till those last moments in the library, but it had been coming to him, slowly, for much longer than that. He’d been thinking about parents and children and power and death. After his father died Quentin had gained a new kind of strength, and Mayakovsky, with his own kind of sacrifice, had given him a new strength too. That’s what parents did for their children. Then Alice told him the story of how Fillory began. It began with death, the death of a god.

It was the oldest story there was, the deepest of all the deeper magicks. Fillory didn’t have to die, it could be renewed and live again, but there was a price, and the price was holy blood. It was the same in all mythologies: for a dying land to be reborn, its god must die for it. There was power in that divine paradox, the death of an immortal, enough power to restart the stopped heart of a world.