The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(91)

“I think we should find out.”

“But I don’t get it. Why? I mean it’s cool and all, but it sounds like a gigantic pain in the ass.”

It was hard to put into words. The land would be a good place to hide from the bird, if they needed to hide, but that wasn’t the point. This meant something to him. It would be like Prospero’s island, but in a good way: not a country of exile, a model world, safe and peaceful and private. A magician’s land.

Plum, a highly perceptive person, could see that he wasn’t going to change his mind. She sighed.

“So if we do make a land, what does that make us? Are we like the gods of it?”

“I don’t think so,” Quentin said. “I don’t think this land would have any gods. Or maybe it would. But we’d have to make those too.”

With Plum on board, or at least not actively resisting, things progressed more quickly. Quentin made contact with a very dodgy and unappealing wizard in the South Bronx who sold him a steaming, lightly buzzing metal box which he swore up and down contained a sample of ununoctium, a synthetic element with an atomic number of 118, the very last entry on the periodic table. Its existence was still mostly theoretical—laboratories had only ever put together a few atoms of it at a time, and ordinarily it decayed in about a millisecond. But the atoms in this sample were chronologically frozen, or at least vastly slowed down. Or at least they were supposed to be. It had cost him a good chunk of the money left over from his first-day payment from the bird.

“Do you think it’s really in there?” Plum studied the box skeptically.

“I don’t know,” Quentin said. “We’ll find out.”

“How?”

“The hard way, I guess.”

Quentin had a very expensive, very cool-looking staff purpose-built for the project. It was made of pernambuco—the dense, black, almost grainless tropical wood cello bows are made of—and shod and chased with silver. Quentin didn’t normally work magic with wands and staves, but in this case he thought he might need it as a last resort, a panic button, if things were coming completely apart.

He had to hide it all, to avoid attracting the bird’s attention, but it went beyond that: Quentin was pretty sure the spell would be highly illegal from the point of view of magical society. There weren’t very many laws among magicians, but synthesizing an entire land and concealing it inside a Manhattan townhouse would violate a goodly portion of them, so as far as magical energy was concerned the house had to be watertight. The power levels required would be massive too, and he could only be grateful they hadn’t used up Mayakovsky’s coins on the incorporate bond. He’d have to use one now. It wasn’t what he’d made them for, but Quentin thought Mayakovsky would like the idea anyway.

Quentin dug seven long lines of Fillorian script into the hardwood floor of the workshop with a gouge and a mallet. He went at the ceiling too, embedding long curls of platinum wire in the plaster. In places he stripped the walls and nailed more wire along the bare studs. The only piece of the puzzle that was completely missing in action was that damned plant, the one from the Neitherlands page. Incredibly it had turned up in Rupert’s spell as well. Quentin wasn’t sure it was absolutely crucial, but either way he still couldn’t identify it, so they’d just have to scrape by without it.

One night, after they’d both worked themselves into a state of exhaustion, he and Plum were lying limply on couches in the ex-disco room like they’d been flung there in the aftermath of an explosion. They were too tired to go to bed.

“So how big is this land of yours even supposed to be?” Plum said.

“I don’t know yet. Not giant, I don’t think. Ten acres maybe. Like the Hundred Acre Wood in Winnie-the-Pooh.”

“Except with ten.”

“Yeah. I’m trying to specify it in a couple of places,” Quentin said, “but it’s hard to know exactly what goes where.”

“But it won’t take up any space in the real world.”

“I hope not.”

“Quentin, why are you doing this?”

He recognized the importance of the question. He was going to fall asleep right there on the couch, he felt like he was melting into it. But he tried to answer it before that happened.

“What do you think magic is for?”

“I dunno. Don’t answer a question with a question.”

“I used to think about this a lot,” Quentin said. “I mean, it’s not obvious like it is in books. It’s trickier. In books there’s always somebody standing by ready to say hey, the world’s in danger, evil’s on the rise, but if you’re really quick and take this ring and put it in that volcano over there everything will be fine.

“But in real life that guy never turns up. He’s never there. He’s busy handing out advice in the next universe over. In our world no one ever knows what to do, and everyone’s just as clueless and full of crap as everyone else, and you have to figure it all out by yourself. And even after you’ve figured it out and done it, you’ll never know whether you were right or wrong. You’ll never know if you put the ring in the right volcano, or if things might have gone better if you hadn’t. There’s no answers in the back of the book.”

Plum was silent so long that Quentin wondered if she’d dozed off while he was talking. But then she said: