The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(15)

The next day after P.A., Quentin walked over to Botany Bay. His expectations weren’t high. He’d never spoken to the department chair, Hamish Bax, and he didn’t know what to make of him. On the plus side he was youngish, at least by Brakebills standards, mid-thirties maybe. On the minus side he was unbelievably affected: he was black and from Cleveland but dressed in Scottish tweeds and smoked a fat Turk’s-head pipe. He was the first person Quentin had ever seen in real life wearing plus fours. The whole business made him hard to read. Though maybe that was the point.

At least Quentin had an excuse to visit the greenhouse, which was a lovely bit of Victorian iron and glass tracery that looked too delicate to withstand an upstate winter. Inside it was a green bubble of warm, humid air full of tables of potted plants of all imaginable shapes and sizes. The cement floor was wet. Short and solidly built, Professor Bax greeted him with the same lack of interest as the rest of the faculty. He didn’t seem particularly pleased to be interrupted doing whatever he was doing with his arms up to the elbows in a giant ceramic pot full of black earth. But he brightened up when Quentin zipped open a velvet-lined portfolio and the page immediately shook itself and wriggled free, like a silvery fish escaping a net.

“That’s a live one,” he said, teeth clenched around his pipe.

He wiped his hands on a rag. Using a quick spell that completely eluded Quentin’s comprehension he trapped the page flat in the air in front of him, as if between two panes of glass. It was the kind of fluent, rather technical magic you didn’t expect from a botanist.

“Mmmmm. You’re a long way from home.” Then he addressed Quentin. “Where’d you get this?”

“I could tell you but you wouldn’t believe me. Do you recognize the plant?”

“I don’t. Think it’s a real plant? Drawn from life?”

“I have no idea,” Quentin admitted. “Do you?”

Professor Bax studied the page for five minutes, first from so close his face almost touched the paper, then from a yard away, then—he had to shift a table crammed with seedlings in egg cartons—from across the room.

He took his pipe out of his mouth.

“I’m going to say a word you don’t know.”

“OK,” Quentin said.

“Phyllotaxis.”

“Don’t know it.”

“It’s the way leaves are arranged around a central stalk,” Professor Bax said. “It looks chaotic but it’s not, it follows a mathematical sequence. Usually Fibonacci, sometimes Lucas. But the leaves on this plant don’t follow either of those. Which suggests that its origin is exceptionally exotic.”

“Or that it’s just a made-up drawing.”

“Right. And Occam’s razor says it probably is. And yet.” Hamish frowned. “It’s got something. Plants have a certain integrity to them, you know? Hard to fake that. You’re sure you can’t tell me where it’s from?”

“I shouldn’t.”

“Don’t then.” He gestured at the text. “Can you read that shit?”

“I’m working on it.”

Professor Bax released the page from its trap. He plucked it out of the air before it could fall. It was limp and pliant in his hands—it seemed more submissive to his authority than to Quentin’s.

“Grand,” he said. “Drink?”

Yes was the only possible answer. Bax retrieved a fifth of rye from in among the flowerpots, where he’d apparently hastily concealed it right before Quentin came in.

Just like that Quentin had shattered whatever invisible barrier stood between him and the rest of the faculty, or at least one member of the faculty—it emerged over the course of the afternoon that Hamish wasn’t much more popular with the other professors than Quentin was. Whatever nameless sin Quentin had committed, Hamish had committed it too. They were the same kind of radioactive. Quentin started coming by the greenhouse regularly after Practical Applications, and he and Hamish would have a couple of whiskeys before dinner.

Hamish initiated him into some of the deeper mysteries of the Brakebills campus. What was really surprising was how much of the stuff that the undergraduates whispered about after hours was actually true. That blank stretch of wall, for example, where there ought to have been a room, and the plaster was a shade lighter—that really wasn’t an air shaft. Back in the 1950s some students had set up a cubic thermal field in their room, possibly to keep beer cold, but having already consumed some of the beer they inverted a couple of glyphs, which had the unexpected effect of driving the temperature inside down very close to absolute zero. The resulting field was so stable that nobody could figure out a way to dispel it.

It was perfectly harmless unless you walked into it, in which case you’d be dead before you knew it. One of the kids who cast it lost a hand that way, or so it was said. Eventually the faculty just shrugged their shoulders and walled it off. Supposedly the lost, frozen hand was still in there.

Likewise, it was true: the clock was powered by a gear made of metal reclaimed from the body of the Silver Golem of Bia?ystok. It was also true that there was a childishly humorous anagram for Brakebills, that it was Biker Balls, and that the chalkboards would squeak painfully if you tried to write it on them. It was true that ivy wouldn’t grow on that one bare patch of wall behind the kitchens because one of the stones had been violently cursed in a really ugly incident involving a student who’d slipped through the admissions protocols meant to screen out sociopaths and other people mentally unfit to handle magic. On humid days it sweated acid.