The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(52)

“Of course. I always liked Julia.”

“You didn’t show it very often,” Eliot said.

“If you really got Julia,” Janet said, “you would have understood that she didn’t like people who were too demonstrative with their affections.”

This caused Eliot to retroactively evaluate a lot of the interactions he remembered between Janet and Julia. Their footsteps sounded hollow on the boards in the marshy hush.

“Incredible that this thing is still standing,” Janet went on. “I can’t imagine who keeps it up.”

“How do you even know this place?”

“I was out here once, when you-all were away at sea. I thought somebody should survey it. It looked weird and interesting. I ran into some scary shit and backed off, but not before I met some weird and interesting people.”

Eliot wondered, not for the first time, what exactly Janet had gotten up to while the rest of them were off sailing the ocean blue. He’d gotten the official version of course, which was that she’d been running the country and doing an excellent job of it. But every once in a while Janet said things that made him wonder if that was the whole story.

“Do you ever wish you went with her? Julia, I mean? To that other-side deal, whatever it was called?”

“I think about it sometimes,” Eliot said. “But no. There’s no way I could have gone. Being king here is who I am. I wasn’t joking about that part, before.” He wobbled for a moment on a rocky board. “I wish I knew what it was like though.”

“Probably it’s not as marshy. You know the funny part?”

“Tell me.”

“I know how Poppy feels,” Janet said. “About the baby. I want that little guy to see Fillory too. I want it to rule when we’re gone.”

Eliot wasn’t sure if a person born in Fillory could rule Fillory, but he was more focused at this exact moment on his own possible imminent death at the hands or other extremities of this horrible swamp and whatever lived in it. He supposed that if he sank to the bottom of it his corpse might be perfectly preserved, for later generations, like those bodies that got pulled out of Irish bogs. That would have a certain grandeur to it.

But probably he’d be eaten before that happened. And after that the world would end anyway. So.

“That’s what happens to the birds, by the way.”

Janet pointed. She was having no trouble keeping her balance; she didn’t even look at her feet as she walked. In the distance something pale translucent pink floated, drifting, thirty feet above the cattails. It looked just like a jellyfish, with long floral tentacles dangling down.

It was an unspeakably sinister sight: an alien aerial parasite. A dying sparrow fluttered in one of the tendrils, stuck to it like a fly stuck to flypaper.

“Wow,” he said.

“Don’t touch one, the venom’s really bad. Stops your heart.”

“I wasn’t going to. How do they fly? Helium or hydrogen or hot air or something?”

“Nah. Just magic.”

They must have been getting close to the center of the swamp because the ponds were getting wider and deeper and darker and more still, and they were connecting up with each other, to the point where the swamp was on the point of just being a regular lake. A steamy mist was gathering around them. Here and there a lotus flower poked up above the surface, a rosy-white bulb the size of a softball on a thick green stem. Strange that something so pure and lovely could grow out of all that muck: one clean perfect thing distilled out of the filth.

Eliot had a hard time not thinking about the vast shape he’d seen last time he’d flown over the Northern Marsh. He hoped it stuck to deeper water.

Though that appeared to be where they were headed. The boardwalk rose high up above the marsh now on long spindly pilings, more like a narrow jetty, and it was taking them straight out over the lake. The banks vanished into the fog. Eliot felt disoriented, abandoned by the gods. If this adventure were working the way it should have been they would have learned something by now, he thought. Seen something, felt something. Instead they were nowhere, with nothing ahead of them and nothing behind them, suspended in midair, on dead wood, over a black mirror of dead water.

“How far are we—”

“This far.”

The boardwalk ended abruptly. If Janet hadn’t put her hand on his shoulder he might have walked straight off it. There was a rickety ladder leading down, in case he was overcome by the urge to do some recreational bathing.

“Got a question for an old friend,” Janet said. “Hey!”

She shouted it out over the water.

“Hey!”

There was no echo. She looked around.

“Should have brought a rock to throw. Hey!”

They waited. Something jumped in the stillness, a frog or a fish, but Eliot turned his head too slowly to catch it. When he turned back the water wasn’t still anymore.

The first sign of it was a broad, smooth bow-wave that rushed silently toward them, wetting the stilts halfway up. Eliot instinctively stood on tiptoe as it passed. Then a massive, ridged, warty olive shell broke the surface, fifty feet across, like a submarine breaching. It was a turtle, a snapping turtle by its beak, which was hooked like a falcon’s. Christ. The thing was a leviathan.

No wonder nothing lived here. The jellyfish ate the birds out of the air, and this thing must scour the water of anything with more than two cells to rub together. Huge bubbles of methane were surfacing around it, released from the mud it must have been buried in. The smell was indescribable. Or actually no, it wasn’t indescribable. It smelled like shit.