The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(40)

“Pixie, technically,” he said.

He seemed a little sensitive about it.

One morning, very early, Professor March was giving a lecture on weather magic and summoning cyclonic wind patterns. For a portly man he was surprisingly spry. Just looking at him bouncing on his toes, with his red ponytail and his red face, made Quentin want to go back to bed. In the mornings Chambers served tarry black espresso, which he smelted in a delicate, gilded-glass Turkish device. But it was all gone by the time Quentin came down for class.

Professor March was addressing him directly.

He closed his eyes. When he opened them again “… between a subtropical cyclone and an extratropical? Quentin? In the French, please, if you can.”

Quentin blinked. He must have drifted off.

“The difference?” he hazarded. “There is no difference?”

There was a long, awkward pause, into which Quentin inserted more words in an attempt to find out what exactly the question had been, and to say “baroclinic zones” as many times as possible just in case they were relevant. People shifted in their chairs. March, having caught the delicious scent of humiliation, was prepared to wait. Quentin waited, too. There was something in the reading about this. He’d actually done it, that was the injustice of it.

The moment stretched on and on. His face was on fire. This wasn’t even magic, it was meteorology.

“I don’t understand—” came a voice from the back of the classroom.

“I’m asking Quentin, Amanda.”

“But maybe you could clarify something?” It was Amanda Orloff. She persisted, with the shit-eating blitheness of somebody who had academic cred to burn. “For the rest of us? Whether these are barotropic cyclones or not? I find it a little confusing.”

“They are all barotropic, Amanda,em;  margin-left:1.8em;  margin-right:1.8em;  text-align:justify;  text-indent:m somebody elsego” March said, exasperated. “It’s irrelevant. All tropical cyclones are barotropic.”

“But I thought one was barotropic and one was baroclinic,” Alice put in.

The resulting mass wrangle ended up being so inane and time-consuming that March was forced to abandon Quentin and move on or lose the entire thread of the lecture. If he could have done so unobtrusively, Quentin would have run back to where Amanda Orloff was sitting and kissed her on her broad, unmoisturized forehead. Instead he settled for blowing her a kiss when March wasn’t looking.

March had segued into a lengthy spell that involved sketching an elaborate mandala-like symbol on the chalkboard. He stopped every thirty seconds and stepped back to the edge of the stage, hands on hips, whispering to himself, then dove back into the design. The point of the spell was fairly trivial—it either guaranteed hail or prevented it, one or the other, Quentin wasn’t really following, and anyway the principle was the same.

Either way, Professor March was struggling with it. The spell was in a very proper and precise Medieval Dutch that evidently wasn’t his forte. It occurred to Quentin that it might be nice if he screwed it up. He hadn’t particularly enjoyed being called out on technical minutiae this early in the morning. He would play a tiny prank.

Brakebills classrooms were proofed against most forms of mischief, but it was well known that the podium was any teacher’s Achilles’ heel. You couldn’t do much to it, but the wards on it weren’t quite ironclad, and with a lot of effort and some body English you could get it to rock back and forth a little. Maybe that would be enough to throw Professor March (the students called him “Death” March) off his game. Quentin made a few small gestures under his desk, between his knees. The podium stirred, as if it were stretching a kink in its back, then became inert again. Success.

March was reeling off some extra Old High Dutch. His attention flicked down at the podium as he felt it move, and he hesitated but recovered his concentration and forged ahead. It was either that or start the whole spell over.

Quentin was disappointed. But Infallible Alice leaned over.

“Idiot,” she whispered. “He dropped the second syllable. He should have said—”

Just then, for an instant, the film of reality slipped off the spokes of its projector. Everything went completely askew and then righted itself again as if nothing had happened. Except that, like a continuity error in a movie, there was now a man standing behind Professor March.

He was a small man, conservatively dressed in a neat gray English suit and a maroon club tie that was fixed in place with a silver crescent-moon pin. Professor March, who was still talking, didn’t seem to realize he was there—the man looked out at the Third Years archly, conspiratorially, as if they were sharing a joke at teacher’s expense. There was something odd about the man’s appearance—Quentin couldn’t seem to make out his face. For a second he couldn’t figure out why, and then he realized it was because there was a small leafy branch in front of it that partially obscured his features. The branch came from nowhere. It was attached to nothing. It just hung there in front of the man’s face.

Then Professor March stopped speaking and froze in place.

Alice had stopped, too. The room was silent. A chair creaked. Quentin couldn’t move either. There was nothing that thing?”Rone wallv with restraining him, but the line between his brain and his body had been cut. Was the man doing this? Who was he? Alice was still leaned over slightly in his direction, and a fly-away wisp of her hair hung in his field of vision. He couldn’t see her eyes; the angle was wrong. Everything and everybody was still. The man on the stage was the only thing in the world still in motion.