The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(46)

“Four, sir.”

“It’ll have to do.”

“Three, actually,” Quentin said. “Sorry, sir, but I have to find Josh. He should be here.”

He didn’t wait for an answer but set off back toward the House at a jog, his hands in his pockets, his collar turned up around his ears to block out the cold.

“Come on, Q!” he heard Janet say. And then, disgustedly, when it was clear he wasn’t coming back: “Shit.”

Quentin didn’t know whether to be pissed off at Josh or worried about him, so he was both. Foxtree was right: it wasn’t like the game actually mattered. Maybe the bastard just overslept, he thought as he half ran over the hard, frosted turf of the Sea. At least he had his fat to keep him warm. The fat bastard.

But Josh wasn’t in his bed. His room was a maelstrom of books and paper and laundry, as usual, some of it floating loosely in midair. Quentin walked down to the sunroom, but its only occupant was the aged Professor Brzezinski, the potions expert, who sat at the window, eyes closed, drenched in sun, his white beard flowing down over a stained old apron. An enormous fly bounced against one of the windowpanes. He looked asleep, but when Quentin was almost through the door he spoke.

“Looking for someone?”

Quentin stopped. “Yes, sir. Josh Hoberman. He’s late for welters.”

“Hoberman. The fat one.”

The old man waved Quentin over with a blue-veined hand and fumbled a colored pencil and a piece of lined paper out of the pocket of his apron. With sure, rapid strokes Professor Brzezinski sketched a rough outline of the Brakebills campus. He muttered a few words in French and made a sign over it with one hand like a compass rose.

He held it up.

“What does this tell you?”

Quentin had expected magical special effects of some kind, but there was nothing. A corner of the map was stained from a coffee spill on the tray.

“Not a lot, sir.”

“Really?” The old man studied the paper for himself, looking puzzled. He smelled like ozone, shattered air, as if he had recently been struck by lightning. “But this really is a very good locator that at first Quentin didnan de“g spell. Look again.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“That’s right. And where on campus does even a very good locator spell not work?”

“I have no idea.” Admitting ignorance promptly was the fastest way to get information out of a Brakebills professor.

“Try the library.” Professor Brzezinski closed his eyes again, like an old walrus settling back down onto a sunny rock. “There are so many old seek-and-finds on that room you can’t find a Goddamned thing.”

Quentin had spent very little time in the Brakebills library. Hardly anybody did if they could help it. Visiting scholars had been so aggressive over the centuries in casting locator spells to find the books they wanted, and spells of concealment to hide those same books from rival scholars, that the entire area was more or less opaque to magic, like a palimpsest that has been scribbled on over and over, past the point of legibility.

To make matters worse, some of the books had actually become migratory. In the nineteenth century Brakebills had appointed a librarian with a highly romantic imagination who had envisioned a mobile library in which the books fluttered from shelf to shelf like birds, reorganizing themselves spontaneously under their own power in response to searches. For the first few months the effect was said to have been quite dramatic. A painting of the scene survived as a mural behind the circulation desk, with enormous atlases soaring around the place like condors.

But the system turned out to be totally impractical. The wear and tear on the spines alone was too costly, and the books were horribly disobedient. The librarian had imagined he could summon a given book to perch on his hand just by shouting out its call number, but in actuality they were just too willful, and some were actively predatory. The librarian was swiftly deposed, and his successor set about domesticating the books again, but even now there were stragglers, notably in Swiss History and Architecture 300–1399, that stubbornly flapped around near the ceiling. Once in a while an entire sub-sub-category that had long been thought safely dormant would take wing with an indescribable papery susurrus.

So the library was mostly empty, and it wasn’t hard to spot Josh in an alcove off the second floor, sitting at a small square table across from a tall, cadaverously thin man with chiseled cheekbones and a pencil mustache. The man wore a black suit that hung on him. He looked like an undertaker.

Quentin recognized the thin man: he was the magical bric-a-brac dealer who turned up once or twice a year at Brakebills in his woodie station wagon, loaded down with a bizarre collection of charms and fetishes and relics. Nobody particularly liked him, but the students tolerated him, if only because he was unintentionally funny and annoyed the faculty, who were always on the verge of banning him permanently. He wasn’t a magician himself and couldn’t tell the difference between what was genuine and what was junk, but he took himself and his stock extremely seriously. His name was Lovelady.

He’d turned up again shortly after the incident with the Beast, and some of the younger kids bought charms to protect themselves in the event of another attack. But Josh knew better than that. Or Quentin would have thought so.

“Hey,” Quentin said, but as he started toward them he knocked his forehead against a hard invisible barrier.