The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(46)

Apparently murderous drinking was the price of admission to Mayakovsky’s inner sanctum, but Quentin was willing to follow any lead no matter how tenuous. He was still wobbly from the trip over, but the moonshine had ignited some smoldering heat source in his stomach, a sour, slow-burning peat fire. Mayakovsky himself didn’t seem particularly drunk, except that his mood had flipped from depressive to manic.

He led them down two flights of stairs, down into the Antarctic rock itself. Maybe he was the anti-Santa, of the South Pole, and he was going to show them where the elves made lumps of coal for Anti-Christmas. Quentin prayed to every god he could think of, living and dead, that this was not a sex thing.

It wasn’t. It was Mayakovsky’s laboratory: a suite of dark, square, windowless workrooms, each one furnished with well-worn benches and tables and studded with silent heavy machinery: a drill press, a band saw, a small forge, a lathe. In contrast with everything else in Mayakovsky’s domain it was all magnificently clean and orderly. The tools and instruments were polished and laid out in straight rows on cloths as if they were for sale. The machinery gleamed a dull matte blue-black. The room was still except for some quiet regular motion in the shadows: a softly swinging pendulum; a spinning top that for some reason didn’t stop; a slowly turning armillary sphere.

The three of them stood looking around in the half-light, the lichen vodka or whatever it was momentarily forgotten. The silence was another level below the regular ambient silence of Antarctica: an absolute sonic vacuum.

“This is lovely,” Plum said.

It was true.

“Beautiful.”

“I know why you do this,” Mayakovsky said.

He didn’t so much answer them as continue a monologue that had been going on in his head.

“You”—he looked at Plum—“you, I don’t know. Maybe you are bored. Maybe you are in love with him?” Plum waved that one off frantically, a full-arm gesture: No, abort, abort. “But you, Quentin, you I understand. You are like me. You have ambition. You want to be great wizard. Gandalf maybe. Merlin. Dumb-bell-door.”

He spoke softly and, for him, gently. He drank, then cleared his throat and spat wetly into a handkerchief, which he stuffed into the pocket of his robe. He’d been living alone for a long time.

Did he? Quentin thought. Want to be a great magician? Was that the truth? Maybe it used to be. Now all he wanted was to be a magician period. He wanted to break an incorporate bond. He wanted Alice back. But truth was seeming pretty relative at this point. Truth was a substance soluble in lichen vodka.

“Sure,” he said. “Why not.”

“But you will not be great. You are clever, yes—you have good head.”

He reached over and rapped on Quentin’s head with his knuckles.

“Don’t do that.”

But Mayakovsky was unstoppable, a drunk best man hell-bent on giving an inappropriate toast.

“Fine head. Better than most. But sadly for you there are many heads like it. One hundred. One thousand maybe.”

“I’m sure you’re right.” No point in denying it. He leaned against the cool, oiled metal of a drill press. It felt reassuringly stable, an ally at his back.

“Five hundred,” Plum said generously. She boosted herself up on a table. “Be fair.”

“You will never be great. You know nothing of greatness. You want to see? I will show you greatness.”

He waved his arm expansively at the darkened workbenches, and all through the room metal and glass stirred and glowed and came alive. Engines moved, wheels turned, flames lit.

“This is my museum. Museum of Mayakovsky.”

And he showed them what he’d built in the long Antarctic winters.

Mayakovsky’s workshop wasn’t just a marvel, it was a library of marvels. It was a catalog of answered prayers and impossible dreams and holy grails. Suddenly Mayakovsky was a showman, ushering them grandly from table to table: here was a perpetual motion machine, and a pair of seven-thousand-league boots. He showed them one drop of universal solvent, which no vessel could contain and thus had to be kept magically suspended in midair. He showed them magic beans, and a pen that would write only the truth, and a mouse that aged backward, and a goose that laid eggs in gold, silver, platinum, and iridium. He spun straw into gold and turned the gold into lead.

It was the end of every fairy tale, all the prizes for which knights and princes had fought and died and clever princesses had guessed riddles and kissed frogs. Mayakovsky was right, this was grand magic, this was what a lifetime of solitary practice and toil bought you. Later it was hard for Quentin to remember details—the moonshine bleached them out of his brain cells like an industrial detergent—but he recalled a player piano that would improvise according to your mood, never repeating itself, optimizing the music according to how you responded, becoming more and more beautiful until it was the sound of everything you’d ever wanted to hear.

After a few minutes it was painful—he had to tell Mayakovsky to stop it before he broke down sobbing. Later he couldn’t have hummed the melody to save his life.

“This, Quentin. This is greatness. These are things you will never do. Never understand.”

It was true. Even with the strength he’d gained after his father died, he would never be in Mayakovsky’s league. It cost him nothing to admit it. He just wished that with all his genius Mayakovsky could help them.