The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(114)

Penny managed to persuade a section of the table to rear up like an angry centipede and attack the Fillorians until they chopped it to pieces. Even Quentin got off a couple of sweaty-palmed Magic Missiles into the press. Fen’s tunic was soaked with sweat. She closed her eyes and placed her palms together, whispering, and when she parted them they gleamed with a terrible white phosphorescence. The next foe she met—a sinewy scimitar-wielder who was either wearing a leopard skin or was half leopard from the waist up—she shouted and punched her fist through its chest up to her shoulder.

But the close calls were getting closer. The situation was disintegrating, and they needed an exit strategy. The corridor was filling with bodies and smoke. Quentin’s breath whistled through his teeth, and in his head he was singing a psychotic nonsense song.

Somewhere along the line Quentin left his knife in a furry Fillorian stomach. He never saw the creature’s face—it was a creature, not a person, not a person took a deep breathR Fourth Yearv with , not a person—but later he would remember the sensation of jamming it in, how the blade punched through the tough rubbery muscles of the diaphragm and then slid easily into the underlying viscera, and how the muscles gripped the blade after it was in. He snatched his hand away from the hilt like it was electrified.

Quentin registered first Josh, then Eliot, hunching their shoulders and letting loose their cacodemons. Eliot’s was particularly awesome-looking, banded from head to foot in horizontal yellow and black danger stripes. It slid sideways across the smooth table, scrabbling like a flung cat, then charged into the fray with unselfconscious glee, clinging and tearing and leaping and clinging again.

“Goddamn it!” Janet was screaming. “What else? What the f*ck else?”

“This is bullshit,” Eliot yelled hoarsely. “Side door! Pick a side door and go through it!”

There was a moment of premonitory silence, as if some of the creatures actually sensed what was going to happen next. Then the floor jolted, and a giant man made of glowing red-hot iron shouldered his way sideways through the wall.

He took the whole wall down with him. A flying brick nicked Fen’s head, and she dropped like she’d been shot. Waves of heat poured off the giant, warping the air around him, and anything he touched burned. He stood bent over, hands on the floor—he was about a third again , or staying s





THE RAM


JUST LIKE THAT, there they all were.

Quentin and Eliot stood at the edge of a large round underground chamber, blinking at bright torchlight. It was different from the rooms they’d already seen in that it appeared to be naturally occurring. The floor was sandy, the ceiling craggy and irregular and unworked, with stalactites and other rocky excrescences poking down that you wouldn’t want to hit your head on. The air was chilly and damp and still. Quentin could hear an underground stream gurglinn. He sneezed.

The others were here, too, all of them except for poor Fen. Josh and Alice were in an entrance a little ways over. Janet stood in another archway looking lost and bedraggled, Dint and Ana?s were in the next one over, and Penny was alone in the one after that. They stood in the doorways like contestants framed in the spangled, lightbulbed archways of a game show.

It was a miracle. It even looked like they’d all just arrived at the exact same moment. Quentin took a deep breath. Relief flooded through him like a warm liquid transfusion. He was just so f*cking glad to see every last one of them. Even Dint—good old Dint, you hound dog! Even Penny, and only partly because he still had his pack, presumably with the button still inside. The story’s outcome was still in play after all. Even after everything that had gone wrong it could still all turn out basically okay—it was a disaster, but a mitigated disaster. It was still possible that five years from now, when they were more or less over their post-traumatic stress disorder, they’d all get a big kick out of getting together and talking about it. Maybe the real Fillory wasn’t that different from the Fillory he’d always wanted after all.

Kings and queens, Quentin thought. Kings and queens. Glory has its price. Did you not know that?

A block of stone stood in the center of room. On it was a large shaggy sheep—or no, it had horns, so that made it a ram. It lay with its eyes closed, its legs folded under it, its chin resting on a crown, a simple golden circlet snuggled between its two shaggy front knees. Quentin wasn’t sure if it was asleep or dead or just a very lifelike statue.

He took a tentative, exploratory step into the room, feeling like a man setting foot on shore after a long and grievous afternoon on a storm-tossed yacht. The sandy floor felt reassuringly solid.

“I didn’t know—” he called hoarsely to Alice. “I wasn’t sure if you were still alive or not!”

Josh thought Quentin was talking to him. His comical face was ashen. He looked like a ghost seeing a ghost.

“I know.” He coughed wetly into his fist.

“What the hell happened? Did you fight that thing?”

Josh nodded shakily. “Sort of. I felt a big spell coming on, so I just went with it. I think I finally felt what you guys feel. I called up one of those swirly black holes. He looked at it, then he looked at me with those freaky gold eyes, then it just sucked him in. Headfirst. Just ate him. I saw his big red legs sticking out kicking, and I just booked it out of there.

“Did you check out his dick, though? That guy was hung!”