The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(89)

Using a chunk of kids’ street chalk recovered from a locker under the stairs Quentin traced out a classical labyrinth pattern on the floor. He did it from memory, based on the ancient Greek Lemnian pattern, and it took him quite a few tries to make the geometry of it work out, but that itself was a solid meditative exercise. The path wound and coiled around the four pillars. Labyrinths were old sorcery, and subtle: good for recharging one’s magical resources when they were running low.

When it was done he hung sheets over the windows, which looked cheap and tatty but produced a dim, diffuse, immaterial light. He started at the beginning and slowly limped through it, again and again. The walking freed his thoughts; it also made his back feel a bit better.

His mind wandered back to Rupert’s journal, and on the spell bound into the back of it. Rupert had never cast it, as far as Quentin could tell, nor had he been able to figure out what it did. Now Quentin wondered. It was a treasure pillaged from the black underbelly of Fillory. It had to be something valuable.

And there was something fateful in the way it had come to them. What had Rupert called it? One of the old workings? Maybe it was war magic, something that could help them if the bird came after them. Maybe it was something deep and strange and strong enough that it could help Alice.

He went and got the spell and read through it as he walked. Before long he could walk the maze without even looking up from it. His work on the page from the Neitherlands wasn’t going to go to waste, that was for sure, at least in terms of having sharpened his ability to construe gnarly magical rhetoric in languages that he had a very dim grasp of. It had been a long time since he tried to read archaic Fillorian, let alone its associated notations for magical gestures.

The further into it he got the less it looked like what he’d expected. He was anticipating something military: either a very powerful shield or a very deadly weapon or both. Maybe concealment, maybe some kind of cataclysmic weather effect. But it didn’t feel like any of those. It wasn’t shaped right somehow.

For one thing the spell was long as hell—you could transcribe most spells in a couple of pages, max, because there just wasn’t that much to them, but this one went on and on for a good twenty. There was a lot of formal business toward the front end of the casting that looked purely ceremonial, but you never knew for sure what you could leave out, so you had to do it all.

What’s more it required a lot of materials, including some pretty exotic items. All in all it was a bear, and it would have cost somebody a lot of time and effort and money to cast it. It was worse than the bond-breaking spell (which they’d never even got to cast at all, dammit).

Still, there was something elegant about it too. It was a mess, a rat’s nest, but under all the fiddly bits and the ornamentation there was a structure, a complex one. Later stages of the enchantment looped in elements of earlier ones, piling effect on effect, each one multiplying the next—in its way it was a thing of real beauty. For a while he wondered if it might be a summoning, along the lines of the one Fogg used to harvest his cacodemons, or the spell that Julia and her friends had attempted at Murs with such disastrous results.

But he didn’t think so. This wasn’t like any magic he’d ever seen before. Something about the spell made his fingers twitch—it was as if it wanted to be cast. He left the labyrinth and took it to Plum.

“I’ve been reading through that spell,” he said. “The one your great-grandfather left you.”

“Uh-huh.”

Plum was down in the basement, standing on a ladder and doing something involved to the joists, Quentin couldn’t tell exactly what.

“It’s interesting,” he said.

“I would imagine.”

“I’ve really never seen anything like it.”

“Uh-huh.”

She put her palm on one massive beam and pressed, and it cracked and groaned, and the whole house seemed to shift slightly. Plum studied the results.

“Structural stuff,” she explained.

“So you don’t mind if I check it out a little further?”

“I give you my blessing.”

“Don’t you want to look at it yourself?”

She shook her head without looking at him. She was completely absorbed.

“From what I saw I couldn’t read the script. Can you?”

“More or less.”

“Well, keep me apprised.”

“I will.”

Starting small, he began to make preparations. The spell would require the magical equivalent of a clean room at a semiconductor factory, so Quentin cleansed and warded the top floor in any and all ways he could think of. He shocked the walls and timbers and joists and whatever else so hard the dust jumped out of the cracks, and then he shocked the dust.

Reluctantly, he took a wet cloth to his chalk labyrinth, but it had served its purpose. He floated a couple of big worktables up the stairs, bumping them against the walls of the stairwells and taking a few divots out of the plaster on the way, which Plum frowned at. He had to take them apart on the landing because he’d misestimated the size and they wouldn’t go through the door.

When you got down to brass tacks the spell wasn’t really one spell, it was more like fifteen or twenty different spells meshed together, to be executed in an overlapping sequence and in some cases simultaneously. Some of them could be cast in advance, some the day before, but most, the really big stuff, had to be done on the fly, in the moment. He had trouble holding it all in his head at one time. But what was it Stoppard said? Give a nerd a door he can close.