The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(44)

He had on a dressing gown, unbelted, a white button-down shirt badly in need of bleach and a pair of very short, very un-professorial shorts.

“Professor Mayakovsky.” Quentin stood up brightly. “I apologize for intruding on your privacy like this, but we’re working on an interesting problem, and we could use your help with it.”

Mayakovsky sawed the end off a stale loaf of bread with an unwashed knife, spread about an inch of soft, unrefrigerated butter on it and began to eat standing up. It was pretty clear he wasn’t going to throw the ball back, so Quentin kept going: he explained about incorporate bonds, and what they were trying to do, and why he, Mayakovsky, alone among all practitioners of the arts invisible, could give them the assistance they so desperately needed. Mayakovsky chewed steadily and noisily, gazing into the distance with watery, rapidly blinking eyes.

When Quentin was done Mayakovsky swallowed, sighed, his round shoulders rising and then falling under his robe, and left the room. He came back with a piece of paper and a blunt pencil. He swept some crumbs onto the floor and put them down in front of Quentin.

“Write eet down,” he said. He pointed at Plum. “You. Make coffee.”

Plum made a monster face at him behind his back. Quentin turned up his palms: what are you gonna do? She made a monster face at him too.

“Fine,” he said. “You draw. I’ll make the coffee.”

While Plum produced a crude approximation of their original flow chart, Quentin made coffee in a battered Soviet-era espresso maker. Mayakovsky came back for both the drawing and the coffee—he didn’t bother to pour, he just took the whole machine—and left again. It was just as well, Quentin was getting tired. He hadn’t slept for four days; there had been no breaks during the flight from the coast, and whales didn’t really sleep at all. He found his way to the dormitory wing by memory and lay down on a cot in one of the empty cells and fell asleep in the milky white Antarctic light.

He had no idea how long he’d slept, but when he came back down to the dining hall matters had progressed. Mayakovsky was back, now wearing glasses with heavy black frames, sitting at a table talking heatedly at Plum and waving his arms. The flow chart was on the table in front of them; it looked like it had been repeatedly folded into two-inch squares and then unfolded again. Most of the white space was now full of annotations and calculations in Mayakovsky’s tiny blocky handwriting, a jumble of numbers and letters, Roman and Cyrillic, and more obscure symbols.

Quentin pulled up a chair. Mayakovsky’s body odor was sharp as cheese.

“It is crazy, what you are doing.” Mayakovsky shook his head with Slavic melancholy, as if their sheer incompetence saddened him. “A valid exploit, yes. All right. Crude—this, here, totally unnecessary. Totally.” He tapped the paper heavily. “And this, you transpose—it is working against your secondary effects, here and here. Spell is fighting itself. You understand? But the rest is not so terrible.”

It was better than Quentin expected. Listening to him crisply parse their tangled, fudged work, he knew they’d been right to come to him, however much it had cost them and might still cost them.

“Thees, though, no.” It was a round, resonant, definitive Russian no. He indicated one of the later stages of the spell with the back of his hand, like he didn’t even want to touch it, it was that far beneath his contempt. “It is impossible. Waste of time. You need more power, much more. Is a simple matter of scale. You are—I don’t know. You are trying to dig through a mountain using a toothpick.”

Professor Mayakovsky shook his head again. His mood was darkening visibly, heading for black.

“You are needing more power, much more. See? Khxere. And khxere.” He indicated two points on their flow chart; like a lot of Russians Mayakovsky had mastered many arcane points of higher mathematics but not the English letter h. “Between khxere and kxere.”

“I said that!” Plum said. “Remember? That’s basically exactly what I said!”

“I remember.” Quentin stared at the chart. His confidence was flagging. It all seemed very inadequate now. “How much more power?”

“Much. Orders of magnitude.” Megnitude. “You want to break the bond with these?” He grabbed Quentin’s fingers in one pawlike hand and shook them in front of Quentin’s face. “These little things? Waste of time. Would take one hundred years! Or one hundred Quentins!”

“Or a hundred Plums,” Plum said.

“Feefty Plums,” Mayakovsky said gallantly, with a quick yellow grin. “But you are nowhere near it. Nowhere near. Waste of time.”

He crumpled up the diagram and threw it at the wall.

Quentin watched it roll to a stop under a table. He would have liked to take a few minutes to go back through the spell in a patient, civil, collegial fashion, looking for areas of flexibility, places where the multipliers could be tweaked, maybe, to make up the difference. But Mayakovsky rolled over him, frog-marching him briskly through the math of it, brutally multiplying three and four digits in his head as he went. It was all Quentin could do to keep up. There was nothing that Mayakovsky didn’t know about incorporate bonds, apparently; it was like he’d studied up on them specifically in anticipation of their arrival. He understood their spell far better than they did.

Quentin wondered what Mayakovsky’s own work looked like, if he did any. He was alone out here half the year every year. What the hell did he do with himself? With a mind like his there was no limit to what he might have accomplished, if he wanted to. But Quentin had no idea what Mayakovsky wanted.