The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(88)

From the outside it looked dark and deserted, and they were careful to maintain that appearance. A lot of people wanted that suitcase, and Quentin didn’t know who they would come after first, him and Plum or Asmodeus, but they would be coming sooner or later, and probably they would hit the softer target first, and that was not Asmodeus. For now they would lose themselves in the big city.

Nobody had touched the house since the previous owner moved out. There wasn’t even any furniture, so they sat on the dusty wooden floor in the front room. They were running on empty, worn out from the disaster of the robbery, and then worn out all over again in a different way by reading Rupert’s journal, but Quentin forced himself to set up a thin perimeter of magical defense before they slept. Nothing fancy, standard magical tradecraft, and the bare minimum of it, but it was enough to take the house off the grid and make it opaque to anybody who was poking around, though not so opaque as to be suspicious. He didn’t bother with the upper floors. They’d just stay out of them for now.

Then they collapsed on the floor of the living room, still in their coats and hats. They’d have to get some couches in here, or at least some sleeping bags. And some food. And some heat. But not yet. Quentin hadn’t slept the night before, and he’d thrown his back out in the fall, and he was starting to be in some serious pain. It had happened to him a couple of times before. Up through around twenty-five he’d never even thought about his back: it was a balanced, frictionless, self-regulating system. Now it felt like a busted gearbox into which somebody had chucked a handful of sand.

Lying on the hard floor made it hurt less. Quentin thought about how wrong things had gone. Things so often went wrong. Was it him? Was he making the same mistake over and over again? Or different mistakes? He’d like to think he was at least making different mistakes.

Plum did fall asleep, right there on the floor, with her face smushed into her black parka from the limo for a pillow. But Quentin didn’t, not yet.

The journal had affected them in different ways. For Plum it had been a reckoning, a massive correction, that finally forced her to see that Fillory was real and that in some inescapable way she was part of it. On the train he’d told her the whole story of his life there, from beginning to end, as bridges and stations and other trains flashed by in the window, and lots full of idle municipal snowplows, and backyards full of overturned play structures. He told her about everything, Alice and Julia and all the rest.

But for him it was different, and while Plum slept he sat up, leaning against the wall, and read the journal again. There was news in it: if Rupert was to be believed then Umber was the one who’d turned Martin into the Beast, in exchange for some obscure, grotesque sacrifice. That threw Quentin as much as anything else. There was something seriously wrong with one of Fillory’s gods, or at least there had been. And if Umber did help Martin, why would Martin have killed him, as Jane Chatwin said he did? It made no sense.

None of it got him any closer to Alice either, or not that he could see. They needed a new plan, a way forward, maybe even another job. They’d be ready next time—the bird had betrayed them, it hadn’t played by the rules, but now Quentin got that there never had been any rules. But first they had to rest and build themselves back up. Quentin had to get his back working again. He also had some hard thinking to do.

Plum woke up at dawn, bursting with energy again—she was indefatigable that way. She always had to be doing something. Going outside seemed like a bad idea, with the whereabouts and intentions of the bird still unknown, so they stayed in. They ordered in a lot of take-out food and some cheap insta-furniture, and Plum set about fixing up her house.

Somebody had disco-ized it in the 1970s, and then later it had been de-disco-ized, mostly, but there were still trace amounts of avocado carpeting, and the outlines of mirrored tiles that had been glued to the walls. A space-age chandelier that looked like Sputnik had escaped the purge too. But the house had good bones, and it still had its broad-planked wooden floors, and its elegant many-paned, energy-inefficient wooden-framed windows with nice old shutters. There were a lot of nice twiddly plaster ornaments around the ceiling. It had some integrity, this house.

Plum knew more about this kind of magic than Quentin did, and Quentin was hobbled by his bad back, so he acted as semiskilled magical laborer-consultant to her hypercompetent general contractor. Under her direction they arrested the slow collapse of the back wall, which was being undermined by rainwater because the drainpipe was busted and the drain in the back patio was clogged. No one had updated the electrics and plumbing since approximately the 1930s, and the walls were stuffed full of ancient cloth-wrapped wiring and lead pipes that were right on the point of dissolving. They shored everything up as best they could. It felt good to be doing something simple and concrete and achievable.

They cast all the cleaning spells they could think of, until they’d removed enough dust and dirt and scum and nicotine residue from the walls and floors and sinks and tubs to make a whole other house out of. They got the furnace going, and the gas and water. But while Quentin was working with his hands his mind was working on other things. All his enterprises were in ruins. He should have been thrashed by this, flattened, but instead . . . with all of that gone, and his father dead, and Mayakovsky’s coins in his pocket, he felt strangely free. It was time to take stock.

At some point somebody had gone through the top floor of the house and demolished all its interior walls, leaving behind only four lonely load-bearing columns of brick with bits of plaster still clinging to them, thus making a single long chamber, front to back. Plum continued to roam the house wearing overalls and work gloves, attacking and repairing targets of opportunity; she didn’t want his help, and moreover his back was still killing him. So he went up there to clear his mind.