The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(33)

Plum walked briskly through the empty House to the Senior Common Room, which the faculty rarely bothered to lock, so confident were they that no student would dare to cross its threshold unchaperoned. But Plum dared.

The Senior Common Room was a cavernous, silent, L-shaped chamber lined with bookcases and littered with shiny red-leather couches and chairs. It was empty, or almost. The only person there was Professor Coldwater, and she wasn’t worried about him. She figured he might be there. Most of the faculty were at dinner, but according to the roster it was his turn to eat late, with the First Years.

He was an odd one, Professor Coldwater. Young for a professor. Kept to himself—you rarely saw him outside the classroom. He was new, and opinion about him was divided as to whether he was a genius or a bit insane or both. He had a cult following among the students: his lectures were peppered with exotic magicks and bravura demonstrations, or so the legends went. Plum had never seen one—she was way past Minor Mendings.

The other professors didn’t seem that wild about him. He was constantly getting handed the crap jobs that nobody else wanted, like eating with the First Years. He didn’t seem to mind, or maybe he just didn’t notice. She got the impression he had something else going on, something that was part of a larger frame of reference than the changeless yet ephemeral world of Brakebills. He was always hurrying in and out of the library with thick books under his arms, mumbling to himself like he was doing math problems in his head.

That was one of the reasons she wasn’t too worried about his catching her in the Senior Common Room. Even if he did notice her he probably wouldn’t care enough to write her up; more likely he would just kick her out. Either way: totally worth it.

Right now Professor Coldwater was at the far end of the room with his back to her. He was tall and skinny and stood bolt upright, with his weird white hair, a wineglass forgotten in his hand, staring into the fire. Plum breathed a silent prayer to whatever saint it was who watched over absent-minded professors and made sure their minds stayed absent. She cut swiftly through the right angle of the L into its shorter arm where he couldn’t see her.

Because it was time for the grand reveal. Toward the end of dinner, when Wharton was ready to bring out the dessert wines, he would retreat to the wine closet, which wasn’t so much a closet as a room the size of a studio apartment. To his shock he would find Plum already in possession of same, having entered it on the sly through a secret back passage from the Senior Common Room. Fait accompli. Then she would present the League’s demands, and he would capitulate to every single one of them.

It was the chanciest bit of the plan, because the existence of this secret back passage was a matter of speculation, but whatever, if it didn’t work she’d find some normal, less dramatic way to corner him.

She looked quickly over her shoulder—Coldwater still out of view and/or otherwise engaged—then knelt by the wainscoting. She took a deep breath. Third panel from the left. Hmm—the one on the end was half a panel, not sure whether she should count it or not. Well, she’d try it both ways. She traced a word in Old English with her finger, spelling it out in a runic alphabet, the Elder Futhark, and meanwhile clearing her mind of everything but the taste of a really oaky chardonnay paired with a hot-buttered toast point.

Lemon squeezy. She felt the locking spell release even before it happened: the panel swung outward on a set of previously invisible hinges.

Annoyingly though, the passage had been sealed. Ten feet in it ended in a brick wall, and the bricks had been bricked in such a way as to form a design that Plum recognized as an absolutely brutal hardening charm—just a charm, yes, but a massively powerful one. Not undergraduate stuff. Some professor had bothered to put this here, and they’d spent some time on it too. Plum pursed her lips and snorted out through her nose.

Crouching down, she stepped into the passage and pulled the little door shut behind her. She snapped on a simple light spell, a friendly glowy will-o’-the-wisp. Then she stared at the brick wall for five minutes, in the dimness of the little passageway, lost to the world in an analytical trance. In her mind the pattern in the bricks floated free and hung before her all on its own, pure and abstract and shining. Mentally she entered the pattern, inhabited it, pushed at it from the inside with cognitive fingers, feeling for any sloppy joins or subtle imbalances.

There must be something. Come on, Plum: it’s easier to break magic than to make it. You know this. Whoever drew this seal was smart. But was she smarter than Plum?

There was something odd about the angles. The essence of a glyph like this wasn’t the angles, it was the underlying topology—you could deform it a good deal and not lose the power as long as its essential geometric properties remained intact. The angles of the joins were, up to a point, arbitrary.

But the funny thing about the angles of these joins was that they were funny. They were sharper than they needed to be. They were nonarbitrary. There was a pattern to them, a pattern within the pattern: 17 degrees, 3 degrees. Seventeen and three. Two of them here, two of them there, the only angles that appeared twice.

When she saw it she snorted again. It was a code. A moronically simple alphabetical code. Seventeen and three. Q and C. Quentin Coldwater.

It was a signature of sorts, a watermark. A Coldwatermark. Professor Coldwater had set this seal, and when she saw that, she saw it all. He’d wanted a weak spot, a back door in case he needed to undo it later. His vanity signature was the flaw in the pattern. She extracted the little knife from Wharton’s pencil case and worked it into the crumbly mortar around one particular brick. She ran it all the way around the edge, then she knocked on the brick with her knuckles: shave and a haircut. Free and loose, it pushed out cleanly: clunk. Deprived of that one brick, and hence the integrity of its pattern, the rest of the wall gave up the ghost and fell apart.