The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(95)

“I’m calling it,” Quentin said. “If we’re doing this let’s do it.”

“All right.”

“Go ahead and cast Clarifying Radiance.”

“OK.”

“I’ll start prepping the Scythian Dream.”

“Check.”

“OK, go.”

“Going.”

She went. Plum turned to the first set of materials on the shelf: four black powders in little dishes and a silver bell. Clarifying Radiance. Meanwhile Quentin said a word of power, and the light in the room became a shade more sepia, like the sunlight moments before a thunderstorm. Everything began to sound echoey, as if they were in a much larger room. Just like that they crossed the Rubicon. The train left the station.

From that point on it was controlled chaos. Sometimes they worked together—one or two of the spells were four-handed. Other times the flow diverged, and they’d be doing totally different spells in parallel, stealing glances at the other one’s work to make sure they finished up at the same time.

There was a steady flow of cross-talk.

“Slow it down, slow it down. Finish in three, two—”

“Look out, the streams are forking. They’re forking!”

A single curve of Irish Fire delaminated into two, then four, curling away to either side. The curls started pointing worryingly back toward Plum, who was casting them.

“I’ve got it,” she said. “Dammit!”

The fire went out.

“Do it again. Do it again. There’s still time.”

It went on like that for three or four hours—it was hard to keep track. By then they were deep into it, and the atmosphere in the room had gotten thoroughly dreamlike. Huge shadows stalked along the walls. The room seemed to list and bank like it had taken flight with them inside it. She banged a tray down onto the work table in front of Quentin, and he began picking what he needed off it without even glancing down at it, and she was shocked to realize that it was the second-to-last spell on the list. This was almost it.

Plum had run out of things to do so she just watched him, drinking a glass of water she’d placed under the table when they started and had somehow managed not to kick over. The rest of it was all him. She was dizzy, and her arms felt weak. She folded them over her chest to keep them from shaking.

Plum didn’t think her friends would have made fun of Quentin at that moment. For a while she’d fallen into the habit of thinking of him as a peer, basically, but over the past week she’d been reminded that he was a decade older and doing magic on a different level from her. Right now he looked like a young Prospero in his prime. He’d taken off his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his white dress shirt, which was wringing with sweat. He must have been tired but his voice was still firm and resonant, and his fingers were working with a practiced crispness through positions she’d never seen before, the tendons standing out on the backs of his hands. This was the kind of magic, Plum thought, she would do when she grew up.

Big surges of power were flowing through the room. It crossed her mind that spells like this were exactly what turned people into niffins, when they got out of hand. Huge tranches and structures of magic that so far she’d only ever seen in isolation were colliding and interacting like weather systems. The intensity doubled and redoubled itself. Without warning the room juddered and dropped, leaving them in free fall for an instant—if it had been an airplane the oxygen masks would have come down. Quentin’s voice sounded artificially deep, and he’d started to tremble with the effort of keeping everything together. He hastily dragged an arm across his forehead.

“Staff,” he said. “Staff!”

The second time he barked it, loudly, and Plum snapped awake and turned and grabbed the black wood staff from where it stood leaned up in one corner.

He was hitting the panic button. Quentin grabbed the staff from her quickly, blindly, and as soon as it was in his hands it began jerking and vibrating, like it was attached to a line with an enormous fish on the other end, or a giant kite caught in a high wind.

She moved to help him, but he shook his head.

“Better not touch me,” he said through clenched teeth. “Could be bad.”

The air was thick with the smell of burning metal and the sweat of tired magicians. She could sense it in the room with them now, the land itself: an angry, hungry, thirsty infant thing demanding life, ready to take it from them if it had to. It cried out with an almost human voice. A spray of golden light erupted from between one of Quentin’s fingers: that must have been one of Mayakovsky’s coins going. Scenery raced past the windows, all of them now, too blurred to make out.

Space distorted grotesquely, and for an instant the room looked stretched out of all proportion, fish-eyed, as if a bulbous blister had formed on the surface of reality itself. Plum was scared of what would happen if it burst.

Quentin shouted, in pain or triumph or despair, Plum couldn’t tell which:

“Nothung!”

He spun the staff and banged the silver-shod end against the floor with a sound like a gunshot. She felt the shock through the soles of her feet. The wires in the ceiling and walls went red hot, and the letters on the floor burned white like magnesium.

Then they faded again, and bit by bit it all stopped. The floor stabilized. The air was still again; a couple of candles hadn’t blown out, and their flames wobbled and then straightened up. Quentin collapsed forward onto the table. The room was silent except for a faint high silvery tone, though it could have been her ears ringing.