The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(42)
For a few minutes he and Plum floated next to each other, eyeball to eyeball. Then at the same time—somehow they coordinated this—they surfaced, arched their backs, sucked in gallons of air through the tops of their heads, and dove.
Quentin didn’t know when he’d ever felt so calm. Together with Plum he kicked with his flat, powerful tail and began undulating through the water. It took hardly any effort; it would have taken an effort to stay still. He sucked in a huge mouthful of water—his mouth and throat distended hilariously to take in more and more and more—and then squirted it out again through his weird front teeth (his baleen, that was the word) like he was spitting tobacco. It left behind a tasty residue of wriggling krill.
He’d imagined that he’d get some kind of deluxe ocean-vision as part of his package of new whale-senses, but in fact he didn’t see much better than he had as a human. With his eyes on different sides of his head his binocular depth perception was shot, and having no neck, all he could do to change the view was roll his eyes around or steer his whole humongous body. Also, unnervingly, he didn’t seem to have any eyelids anymore. He couldn’t blink. The urge decreased over time, but it never completely went away.
Once they cleared Tierra del Fuego Quentin’s sensorium expanded hugely. His world became enormous. His sight may have been crap, but his hearing was something else entirely.
To a blue whale the whole ocean was a vast resonating chamber, a great watery tympanum stretched across the earth, with fleeting, fugitive vibrations constantly zipping back and forth across and through it. Based on these Quentin could feel the shape and proportions of the world around him all the time, as if he were running invisible auditory fingertips across it. If he’d had hands he could have drawn you the coastlines of southern Chile and Antarctica and a relief map of the ocean floor in between.
And if the great blue chamber ever fell silent, he made some noise of his own. He could sing.
His throat was like a didgeridoo, or a foghorn, blasting out deep, resonant pulses and moans. The ocean was full of voices, like a switchboard, or an echo chamber, an Internet even, alive with encoded information passing through it in the form of calls and responses. The whales were always checking in with each other, and Quentin checked in too, in a language he knew without having to learn it.
They weren’t just being social. Here was a great secret: whales were spellcasters. Jesus, the entire ocean was crisscrossed with a whole lattice of submarine magic. Most of the spells took multiple whales to cast, and were designed to bend and herd large clouds of krill, and occasionally to reinforce the integrity of large ice shelves. He wondered if he’d remember all this when he was human again. He wondered, but he didn’t really care.
And there was something else—something down there in the black abyssal trenches of the ocean. Something that wanted to rise. The whales were keeping it down. What was it? An army of giant squid? Cthulhu? Some last surviving Carcharodon megalodon? Quentin never found out. He hoped he never would.
Much more than when he was a goose or a fox or a polar bear Quentin felt like himself as a whale. He had a big fat brain that was capable of running most of his personality software at the same speed he was used to. But he wasn’t the same Quentin, not exactly. Whale-Quentin was a calm, wise, contented Quentin. He was colossal, planetary, moving through the blue gloom unthreatened by anything and requiring nothing more than air through his blowhole and krill through his mouth. Drake Passage was about five hundred miles across, and it would take them two or three days to swim it, but time was an idea that he was having an increasingly hard time being interested in. Time was defined by change, and very little changed for a blue whale.
He noticed everything but was concerned with nothing. Drake Passage had the worst weather in the world, literally, but all that meant was that when he surfaced for a breath, once every fifteen minutes or so, the waves broke a little harder against his wide, slick back. He and Plum were great blue gods, flying wingtip to wingtip, and everything around them paid homage to them. Fish, jellyfish, shrimp, sharks; once he spotted a great white, swaggering along by itself through the depths with its permanent shit-eating grin. It had so many teeth it looked like it had braces. Nature’s perfect killing machine! Go on with your bad self. No, really. It’s cute.
And then the ocean floor began sloping up to meet them. He’d almost forgotten what they were doing here, fumbled it away and allowed his mind to disappear forever into the endless blue whaleness of it all. But no: they were here for a reason.
This was always going to be the worst part. They were going to have to deliberately beach themselves, hopefully on nice soft sand, but more likely on some rocky shale, or worse. They just had to hope their skins were thick enough, and the terrain gentle enough, that their delicately flanged stomachs didn’t get shredded in the process. They moaned a bit at each other, as one does, then they aimed themselves at the Antarctic coastline.
As they got closer emergency calls came in from some distant pod, warning them off, urging them to turn back for deeper water. Look out! Don’t do it! It was surprisingly hard to ignore them—he felt like he was the pilot of a falling 747 and the air traffic controllers were begging him to for God’s sake pull up, pull up! But they stayed the course, churning with their tails, pouring on speed, their massive bodies bulling through the water. If they’d had teeth they would have gritted them.
Then Quentin was lying facedown on black stones under a white sky, naked, with the weak surf of the Southern Ocean washing fiery-cold over his bare legs, which were already going numb. It felt like being born must feel, being spat out of the warm, enveloping, sustaining sea and up into the bright searing cold world. In short it sucked.