The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(14)

It wasn’t till late the next afternoon, after P.A., that he unpropped the chair and unlocked the drawer. Slowly he eased it open. The page had gone still—but evidently it had been psyching itself up for this moment because as soon as he took away the paperweight it took off again.

Quentin watched it thrash along in the air, feeling a little sorry for it. He wondered where it was trying to get to. Back to the Neitherlands, probably. Back home.

He plucked it gently out of the air and took it over to the window seat so he could look at it in the sunlight. Holding it flat with his palm, he weighed it down at its four corners with a candlestick, an alarm clock, an empty wineglass, and a fossilized ammonite that he kept on his desk. The page knew when it was beaten. It gave up and went still.

Now he could see what he was dealing with. The text was handwritten, both sides, closely and minutely lettered in black ink with an occasional important word in red. It was a serious sort of page, dense with information. The paper was old, not modern paper—which gradually ate itself because of the acid in its own wood pulp—but rag paper, made from cotton scraps, which would last practically forever. It was torn along one edge where it had been roughly ripped from its host book. A few letters had been left behind in the process, but only a few.

The regular, urgent forward tilt of the black script gave the words a purposeful look, like they were trails of gunpowder leading toward some explosive revelation. Whoever wrote it had had something to say. In places the text blocks were broken up to make room for charts and diagrams: a table of numbers with a lot of decimal points; a small but precise botanical sketch of a flowerless plant, with neat rows of leaves and a hollow seedpod; an elegant diagram of concentric and overlapping circles and ellipses that could equally easily have been an atom or a solar system.

The page began in the middle of one sentence. It ended in the middle of another.

When he looked closer he saw that the leaves of the plant were wavering very slightly in the breeze, and the planets (or electrons) in the diagrams were very slowly progressing in their orbits, which themselves precessed in an orderly dance around one another. The values in the table changed in sync with them.

At first Quentin thought he couldn’t read the script at all, and he sighed out loud with relief when he began to recognize a word here and there. It was a late, rather corrupt form of Old High German, written in some eccentric variation of black-letter Gothic. He could hum the tune even if he didn’t quite get every single lyric.

That, however, was the last break he caught. The contents were highly theoretical and abstract—seriously high-altitude stuff, up there where the conceptual oxygen was dangerously thin. There was a lot of business about magic and matter and high-level exchanges between the two under extreme conditions, at the quantum level. Sometimes it was hard to tell how much of it was literal and how much of it was metaphor: when it talked about a rooster, was that some kind of symbolic alchemical rooster? Or was it an actual rooster, with feathers, cock-a-doodle-do? There wasn’t much context to go on.

And that plant. He was going to have to take this over to Professor Bax in the greenhouse (or as the students referred to it, inevitably, Botany Bay). After staring at the page for three hours, during which he didn’t even make it to the other side, Quentin sat back and pressed the heels of his hands against his aching eyes.

He’d missed dinner, but he could still eat with the kitchen staff. One thing was clear: this was a fragment chipped off the great arcane magical database of the adepts of the Neitherlands themselves, Penny’s gang. It was like an ultradense meteorite from some extrasolar intellectual realm, and it had come crashing to Earth, and there was no telling what exotic, unearthly elements it might contain.

He’d found a topic for his independent research project, anyway, Dean Fogg could stop noodging him about that. And in a small way he’d found a new adventure. It was a different kind of adventure from what they had in Fillory, a small and kind of nerdy adventure, but there was no question that’s what this was.

“Thank you,” he said to the page. “Thank you for being here. Whatever it is you’ve got inside you, I’ll take good care of it. I promise.”

Was it his imagination? Did the page unfold itself slightly—did it preen itself a little, basking in the praise of its reader? He took the heavy candlestick off one corner. Then, carefully, the wineglass and the clock. As soon as he moved the ammonite the page shot sideways, making for the crack under the window.

“Not yet.” He slapped his hand down on it and replaced the candlestick with a clunk. “I’m sorry, I really am. But not yet.”

—

There was one aspect of Quentin’s life at Brakebills that was still less than ideal, and that was his social life. He didn’t have one.

Even though he was almost thirty he was a lot younger than most of the faculty, and he was having a hard time connecting with them. Maybe it was the age thing, or that he hadn’t properly paid his dues yet, which was true. Maybe they figured he wouldn’t be here that long, so what was the point. The politics of the senior common room were byzantine and involved a lot of power struggles to which he, as low man on the totem pole, just wasn’t very relevant.

Also it was possible that they just didn’t like him very much. It had been known to happen.

Whatever the reason, he drew a lot of undesirable solo duties, like refereeing cold, wet welters matches and patching the dull but finicky network of spells that was supposed to bust students breaking curfew. (Now that he got a close look at it, he couldn’t believe how much they used to worry about getting caught. The spells were so rickety and put out so many false alarms that the faculty mostly ignored them.)