The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(35)

This would have been a reasonable moment to bail, exit the vehicle and slink back to the dining hall. But no: that would mean giving up, going back, and that wasn’t Plum. She went forward, always forward, never look back. Eye of the tiger. She had a job to do, a mission for the League, of which she was the God damned chief executive officer.

So she wasn’t going to fight against the dream-logic, she was going to steer into the skid and see where it took her. Onward and downward.

To leave by the front door, she knew instinctively, would have been to break the dream-spell, so instead she opened Wharton’s closet door, somehow confident that—yes, look, there was a small door at the back of it. Turning to take a final look around she couldn’t help but notice, by the by, on his desk, a fresh box of those pencils. He’d already got replacements. Why exactly had they thought those were the only ones? He probably had truckloads of them. She opened the door in the closet and stooped through.

—

From here on out her travels ran entirely on dream-rails. The door took her into another courtyard, but now it was daytime. The spaces were losing temporal, uh, contiguousness—contiguity?—as well as the spatial kind. In fact it was earlier today, because there she was, Plum herself, crossing the lightly frosted grass, and passing Wharton, and there was the eye-sliding. It was a strange sight. But Plum’s tolerance for strange had been on the rise, lo this past half hour.

She watched herself leave the courtyard. She wondered whether, if she shouted and waved her arms, she would hear herself and turn around, and the timeline would be permanently busted and altered, or if this was more of a two-way mirror deal. Maybe she could tip herself off—have the shrimp fra diavolo instead of the crab cakes!

She frowned. The causality of it was tangled. Though this much at least was clear: those boots had had a good run but it was time for them to go. On the upside, if that’s what her ass looked like from behind, well, not bad. She would take it.

The next door was even more temporally noncontiguous, because it put her in a different Brakebills entirely, though at first the difference was hard to put your finger on. It was a smaller and darker and somehow denser Brakebills. The ceilings were lower, the corridors were narrower, and the air smelled like wood smoke. The light was fire- and candlelight. She passed an open doorway and saw a group of girls huddled together on a huge four-poster bed. They wore white nightgowns and had long straight hair and bad teeth.

Plum understood what she was seeing. This was Brakebills of long ago, Revolutionary-era Brakebills. The Ghost of Brakebills Past. The girls looked up only briefly, incuriously, as she passed, then went back to talking. No question what they were up to.

“Another League,” Plum said to herself. “I knew there must have been one.”

She was still savoring the satisfaction of it when she opened the next door into a room she didn’t recognize at all. Until she did.

She tried to back out, but the door had locked behind her. It wasn’t even a room at all but a rough round rock-walled cave, where a group of strangers were playing out the bloody last act of some byzantine Renaissance tragedy. Two boys were on the ground, facedown, shivering as their precious blood turned the sand around them to dark muck.

“Oh, f*ck,” Plum whispered. “Fuck f*ck f*ck f*ck f*ck.”

She plastered herself back against the wall. She had never seen real wounds before. Five more girls and boys were standing around in various states of shock and distress and anger. One girl had a gun; the others were focusing all their magical strength on a man in a gray suit. Crazy harsh enchanted energies streamed out of them and crackled through the air and assaulted the man, with hardly any effect other than to flap his lapels.

He looked vaguely familiar. And there was something wrong with his hands.

In the corner, in a heap, lay a huge woolly carcass with one thick curling knobby horn visible. Oh, God. The scene was starting to clarify itself to her, to take on a horrible meaning even over and above the obvious. That ram had to be Ember, one of the twin gods of Fillory. And the man in the suit, she did recognize him—she didn’t, but she did. His round, pasty face had the unmistakable stamp of a Chatwin. This was some ancestor of hers, and she was in Fillory, and it was all real, all of it.

But it wasn’t Fillory, not like in the books. It was a sick nightmare Fillory. The room flashed and flared with dangerous light. Rocks rained down on the man in the suit. The air smelled like cordite. She couldn’t be here. She was going to go insane. Whatever it was that had chewed up her ancestors and spit them out had found her. It was here in this room with her. It was the room.

“No,” she breathed. “Oh God, no! God no!”

She tried the door again just because it had to open, it had to, she couldn’t be here! And now it did. It had mercy on her. Effortlessly, no resistance—it even opened out where before it had opened in. She half ran, half fell through it and slammed it behind her, and everything was quiet again. She was in a silent room, a safe room: the familiar homely little trapezoidal lounge where the League held its meetings.

Oh God. Oh, thank God. It was over.

She was breathing hard, and she sobbed once. A dry sob. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real. None of it. Or it was real but it was over. She almost laughed. She didn’t care either way as long as she was safe now. Maybe she’d fallen asleep here after the meeting last night and it was all a dream. Whatever, this whole f*cked-up magical mystery tour was over. She wasn’t going back, and she wasn’t going forward either. She would stay in this stupid little windowless room with its crap carpet forever if necessary. She loved it. It was the most beautiful room she’d ever seen.