The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(45)

Quentin closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. He could picture the whole spell in his head, and he could follow what Mayakovsky was saying, just, but he couldn’t see an answer. There had to be a way through. He was damned if he was going to go back empty-handed.

“Maybe I could store it up,” he said. “Build up the power over time. Construct a kind of containment device—I could cast the spell a hundred times, store it up, release it all at once.”

“And you stabilize how? ‘Store’ how? What is storage matrix?”

“I don’t know. A gem, a coin, something like that.”

Mayakovsky made a rude noise.

“Bad magic. Dangerous magic.”

“Or,” Quentin said, “I could get a hundred magicians together. We’ll cast it all at once.”

“I think you will not be telling one hundred magicians about this little project.”

Fair point. “Probably not.”

“It would be very risky.”

“True.”

“I do not know why you want to break an incorporate bond, but whatever it is is not legal, I don’t think. Even me you should not have told.”

Mayakovsky was studying him across the table. Quentin studied him back. His stolid face was impossible to read. Plum watched the exchange alertly.

If he’s bluffing, call it. If he’s not, what the hell are you going to do about it?

“Maybe you should turn us in,” Quentin said. “I mean, if it comes out that we were here, you could lose your job.”

“Maybe I should.”

Mayakovsky stood up and went to a cabinet and rummaged through it. He took out a bottle of something clear, without a label.

“I want you out of my house,” he said. “I will make a portal.”

—

But then, instead of throwing them out, Mayakovsky lapsed into a funk. He sat back down at a table in the corner and started drinking. After a few minutes he offered the bottle to Plum.

“Dreenk.”

Plum sniffed, took a sip, coughed, wiped her mouth and handed Quentin the bottle.

“Dreenk,” Plum said.

It smelled like radiator fluid.

“Christ,” he said. “What is this?”

That got a rare laugh from Mayakovsky.

“Antarctic moonshine.”

It wasn’t a very reassuring answer. What could possibly grow here that you could even ferment? Lichens? He hoped it was lichens. The alternatives seemed even worse.

Mayakovsky lapsed back into silence. He seemed to feel no need to even acknowledge their presence anymore, though Quentin noticed he didn’t leave them alone either. He and Plum exchanged flummoxed looks. Mayakovsky didn’t seem to want to talk about incorporate bonds. They tried to engage him in small talk about life at Brakebills South, but he was impervious to banter.

“Are you related to the poet?” Plum asked him.

“Nyet.”

Mayakovsky added something snarly in Russian, probably about poets.

So Quentin and Plum compared notes about their experiences as blue whales, gossiping about the various pods they could remember, while Mayakovsky stared at the wall and drank steadily and mechanically. He brought out a loaf of dark bread and some pickles but he didn’t eat, just picked the loaf up every few minutes and sniffed it and put it back down. How long was he going to let this go on? Well, Quentin wasn’t going to help him. He was going to drag this out as long as he had to, to the bitter end. He wasn’t going to give up, not until Mayakovsky made him.

The Antarctic light outside was like an interrogator’s lamp, steady and without mercy. It felt like they were the last three human beings on earth.

As much as he openly despised them, Mayakovsky couldn’t seem to bring himself to banish them either. Maybe he was lonelier than he let on. Eventually he got out a chess set, with one pawn replaced by a knob from a cabinet. First he destroyed Quentin, then he beat Plum twice, the first time with some difficulty, the second time after three quarters of an hour and by the narrowest of margins. Quentin suspected Plum of pulling her punches.

Maybe Mayakovsky suspected too. Midway through their third game he stood up abruptly.

“Come.” He set off out of the room with his rolling, purposeful gait. “Bring bottle.”

Quentin looked at Plum.

“After you,” she said.

“Ladies first.”

“Age before beauty.”

“P’s before Q’s.”

It was starting to seem funny. They were a pair of comedy supernumeraries, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Mayakovsky’s gloomy Hamlet. Glean what afflicts him. Quentin found some glasses—he was tired of sharing a bottle with Mayakovsky, though no doubt Antarctic moonshine had powerful sterilizing properties—and they followed him.

He led them through a door Quentin had never seen unlocked before and through his private apartment. Quentin averted his eyes from the many small, unclean garments scattered on the floor.

“Dreenk!” Mayakovsky roared as they walked.

“Thanks,” Quentin said, “but I’m—”

“Dreenk! This is your professor speaking, skraelings!”

“You know,” he said, “I’m a professor now too. Technically speaking. Or I was.”

“I will show you something, Professor Skraeling. Something you will see nowhere else.”