The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(108)

Nobody answered. They stared at him like he was speaking gibberish. Every time the muscle-bound hare tried to get up its paws kept flying out from under it. Chittering and weeping, the hare shouted a guttural cry and threw one of its swords at them, but it slipped again and the sword landed safely short and off to one side.

Dint waited for an answer from the group, then turned away disgustedly. He made a quiet tapping gesture with his wand, like he was ashing a cigar, and a bone in the hare’s upper thigh snapped audibly. It screamed in falsetto.

“Wait!” It was Ana?s, pushing her way forward, past a waxwork Janet. “Wait. Let me try.”

The fact that Ana?s could even walk and talk right now was incomprehensible to Quentin. She began a spell but stuttered a few times, rattled, and had to start over. Dint waited, obviously impatient. On her third try she completed a sleep spell that Penny had taught them. Bunny’s grunting struggles ceased. It sagged onto its side on the grass, looking alarmingly sweet. Ferret was still gagging weakly, eyes open and staring at the sky, red foam pouring from its mouth, but nobody paid any attention to it. No part of it below its neck was moving.

Ana?s went over and picked up the short sword the hare had thrown.

“There,” she said to Dint proudly. “Now we kill it, no problem!”

She hefted the sword happily in one hand.

As a teenager in Brooklyn Quentin had often imagined himself engaging in martial heroics, but after this he knew, as a cold and immutable fact, that he would do anything necessary, sacrificing whatever or whomever he had to, to avoid risking exposure to physical violence. He wasn’t even ashamed. Shame never came into it. He embraced his new identity as a coward. He would run in the other direction. He would lie down and cry and put his arms over his head or play dead. It didn’t matter what he had to do, he would do it and be glad.

They trailed after Dint and Fen—and what kind of retarded names were those anyway, Dint and Fen? he thought numbly—through the doorway and into the hi nostrils.

Nobody noticed a large—ten-feet-long large—green lizard standing frozen amid the remains of shattered tables and benches until it abruptly unfroze and skittered off into the shadows, claws skritching on the stone floor. The horror was almost pleasant: it wiped away Alice and Janet and everything else except itself, like a harsh, abrasive cleanser.

They wandered from room to empty room, down echoing stone hallways. The floor plan was beyond chaotic. The stonework changed styles and patterns every twenty minutes as a new generation of masons took over. They took turns putting light spells on their knives, their hands, various inappropriate body parts in an effort to break the tension.

Having tasted blood, Ana?s now tagged after Dint and Fen like an eager puppy, lapping up whatever observations she could get out of them about personal combat.

“They never had a chance,” Fen said, with professional disinterest. “Even if Dint hadn’t taken the second one, even if I had been alone, the quarterstaff is not a collaborative weapon. It simply takes up too much room. Once the tall one is into a form, those tips are flying left and right, up and down. He can’t afford to worry about his friend. You face them one-on-one, and you move on.

“They should have fallen back, waited for us together in that big chamber. Taken us by surprise.”

Ana?s nodded, obviously fascinated.

“Why didn’t they?” she asked. “Why did they come running straight at us?”

“I don’t know.” Fen frowned. “Could’ve been an honor thing. Could’ve been a bluff; they thought we’d run. Could be they were under a spell; they couldn’t help it.”

“Did we have to kill them?” Quentin burst out. “Couldn’t we have just, I don’t know—”

“What?” Ana?s turned on him, sneering. “Maybe we could have taken them prisoner? We could have rehabilitated them?”

“I don’t know!” he said helplessly. This wasn’t how it was supposed to work. “Tied them up? Look, I guess I just wasn’t that clear on what it would actually be like. Killing people.”

It made him think of the day the Beast appeared—that same bottomless feeling, all bets off, like the cable had snapped and they were in free fall.

“Those are not people,” Ana?s said. “Those were not people. And they tried to kill us first.”

“We were breaking into their home.”

“Glory has its price,” Penny said. “Did you not know that, before you sought it?”

“Well, I guess they paid the price for us, huh?”

To Quentin’s surprise Eliot rounded on him, too.

“What, you’re going to bac took a deep breathR Fourth Yearv with k out? You?” Eliot laughed a bitter, barking laugh. “You need this almost as badly as I do.”

“I’m not backing out! I’m just saying!”

Quentin had time to wonder why exactly Eliot did need this before Ana?s cut them off.

“Oh God. Please, can we not?” She shook her curly head in disgust. “Can we all just not?”

Four hours and three flights of stairs and one mile of empty corridor later Quentin was examining a door when it opened suddenly, hard, smacking him in the face. He took a step backward and put a hand to his upper lip. In his half-stunned state he was more preoccupied with whether or not his nose was bleeding than with who or what had just slammed the door into it. He raised the back of his hand to his upper lip, checked it, raised it again, then checked it again. Yep, definitely bleeding.