The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(24)

“But this was only one battle. A war is beginning, Eliot, a war we cannot win. The last war.”

“What? Wait, I don’t understand. What does that mean?”

This wasn’t the speech Eliot was expecting. He was expecting the one where Ember praised him to the skies, showered him with fatherly approval, granted him a boon.

“What war are You watching?” Janet shouted. “We crushed those guys! Eliot crushed them! It’s over!”

“Have you not wondered how it is that the Lorians could have crossed the Northern Barrier into Fillory?”

“Well, yeah,” Eliot admitted. “A little.”

“The old spells have weakened. This invasion was merely a portent, foretold long ago. The war we are losing is with time.”

“Oh,” Eliot said. “OK.”

Was it? A war with time. He vaguely remembered something like this in the books, but it had been a long time since he read them. And even then he hadn’t read them too closely. Once again he wished Quentin were here.

“The end is almost here, Eliot,” Ember said.

“The end of what?”

“Of everything,” Ember said. “Of this land. This world. Fillory is dying.”

“What? Oh, come on!” That was ridiculous. A cheap shot, at best. Fillory wasn’t dying. Fillory was kicking ass right now. Time of legends! World without end! “What are you talking about?”

Ember didn’t reply. Instead the pegasus spoke for the first time. Eliot had never heard one speak before.

“Oh no,” it said. It gave a horsey sigh. “Not again.”





CHAPTER 6


They left the bookstore in two cars. A black Lexus SUV rolled up to the loading dock and Lionel loaded the birdcage carefully into the backseat, then put a seatbelt on it and climbed in the other side. Once they were gone a white stretch limousine pulled up.

It was still raining.

“If I’d’ve known it was prom night,” Pixie said, “I would’ve worn a dress.”

They piled in. The arrangement felt involuntarily intimate, like they were strangers who somehow wound up sharing a long cab ride from the airport. But they weren’t strangers anymore, they were his comrades-in-arms now. Quentin wondered if their stories were as complicated as his was. He especially wondered about Plum. From what he knew of her story, it wasn’t supposed to end up here.

The ceiling was mirrored, and the interior was black velvet trimmed with strips of LEDs. There was a moon roof in case anybody felt the urge to open it and stick their head out. It wasn’t exactly dignified, but there was plenty of room, and the five of them spread out along the banquettes so as to put the maximum amount of distance between them. Nobody spoke as the limo slid smoothly out into the New Jersey night, through the parking lot and onto the turnpike, past a seemingly endless power plant lit up with a grid of pale orange lights.

For a second Quentin was reminded of nights in the Muntjac: gliding from island to island on oily blackness, far out in Fillory’s Eastern Ocean, seawater slapping wood, creamy wake streaming out behind. He was heading out into the unknown again.

Then the LEDs came on—the kid had found the controls. He’d chosen a disco rainbow pattern.

“What can I say,” he said. “I love the nightlife.”

“So,” Plum said, to the group in general. “I’m Plum.”

“I’m Betsy,” said the Pixie.

“Quentin.”

“My name is Pushkar,” the older Indian man said. He had a salt-and-pepper goatee and looked way too placid and suburban to be involved in something like this. Everybody turned to the kid. Quentin put him at around fifteen.

“You’re joking, right?” the boy said. “You’re all gonna use your real names?”

“No,” Quentin said, “we’re not joking. And yes.”

“Well, I’m not. You can call me the Artful Dodger.”

The Pixie—Betsy—cackled.

“Try again.”

“What’s wrong with the Artful Dodger? Like in Oliver!”

“I know where it’s from, I’m just not calling you that.”

“Well I’m not going to be Fagin.”

“Maybe we should call you Stoppard,” Quentin said.

The boy looked confused.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “Is that from Oliver!?”

“That is the name of the man who wrote the book that you were reading earlier,” Pushkar said. “At the bookstore. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.”

“Jeez, I thought that shit was Shakespeare.”

“Well,” Pushkar said pleasantly, “you thought wrong.”

“Fine, OK. I’m Stoppard. Whatever.”

“Stoppard, please set the lighting system to a neutral white.”

Stoppard huffed loudly, but he did it.

In the white light Quentin could see better, and what he saw was five people who didn’t look much like a team of world-beating master thieves. He felt more like he’d just joined the French Foreign Legion: they were the sweepings of the magical world, the lost souls, here because nobody else would take them. When he leaned back Quentin caught a whiff of skunked beer and dead cigarette smoke, the ghosts of bachelor parties past.