The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(51)

They had gone far enough south now that the weather was perceptibly warmer, and then they went farther still. They went south over the Florida Keys, dry, crusty little nubbins barely poking their heads up out of the ceaselessly lapping turquoise, then out over the Caribbean, bypassing Cuba, farther south than any sensible goose had license to go. They overflew the Panama Canal, no doubt causing any bird-watchers who happened to spot them to shake their heads at the lost little V as they dutifully logged it in their bird journals.

Days, weeks, maybe months and years passed. Who knew, or cared? Quentin had never experienced peace and satisfaction like this. He forgot about his human past, about Brakebills and Brooklyn and James and Julia and Penny and Dean Fogg. Why hang on to them? He had no name anymore. He barely had any individual identity, and he didn’t want one. What good were such human artifacts? He was an animal. His job was to turn bugs and plants into muscle and fat and feathers and Alice?”b gave himv with flight and miles logged. He served only his flock-fellows and the wind and the laws of Darwin. And he served whatever force sent him gliding along the invisible magnetic rails, always southward, down the rough, stony coast of Peru, spiny Andes on his port, the sprawling blue Pacific on his starboard. He had never been happier.

Though it was tougher going now. They splashed down more rarely and in more exotic locales, widely spaced way stations that must have been picked out for them in advance. He’d be cruising along a mile and a half up, one eye monitoring the rocky ruff of the Andes, feeling his empty belly and the ache in his chest muscles, when something would twinkle in the forest a hundred miles down the line, and sure enough they’d happen upon a freshly flooded soccer field, or an abandoned swimming pool in some Shining Path warlord’s ruined villa, rainwater having diluted almost to nothing the lingering chemical tang of chlorine.

It was getting colder again, after their long tropical interlude. Peru gave way to Chile and the grassy, wind-ruffled Patagonian pampas. They were a lean flock now, their fat reserves depleted, but nobody turned aside or hesitated for a second as they plunged suicidally south from the tip of Cape Horn out over the terrifying blue chaos of the Drake Passage. The invisible highway they rode would brook no swerving.

There was no playful intra-flock honking now. Quentin glanced over once at the other branch of the V to see Janet’s black button eye burning with furious determination opposite him. They overnighted on a miraculous barge adrift in deep water and loaded with good things, watercress and alfalfa and clover. When the bleak gray shore of Antarctica heaved up over the horizon, they regarded it not with relief but with collective resignation. This was no respite. There were no goose names for this country because geese didn’t come here, or if they did they never came back. He could see magnetic tracks and rails converging in the air here, carving in from far away on either side, like the longitude lines that come crowding together at the bottom of a globe. The Brakebills V flew high, the wrinkled gray swells telescopically clear below them through two miles of dry, salted air.

Instead of a beach a fringe of tumbled boulders crammed with bizarre, unintelligible penguins crept by, then blank white ice, the frozen skull of the Earth. Quentin was tired. The cold tore at his little body through its thin feathery jacket. He no longer knew what was keeping them aloft. If one of them dropped, he knew, they would all give up, just fold their wings and dive for the porcelain-white snow, which would happily devour them.

And then the rail they followed dipped like a dowser’s rod. It angled them downward, and they slipped and slid gratefully down it, accepting a loss in altitude in exchange for speed and blessed relief from the effort of maintaining height with their burning wings. Quentin could see now that there was a stone house there in the snow, an anomaly in the otherwise featureless plain. It was a place of men, and ordinarily Quentin would have feared it, crapped on it, and then blown by it and forgotten it.

But no, there was no question, their track ended there. It buried itself in one of the stone house’s many snowy roofs. They were close enough now that Quentin could see a man standing on one of them, waiting for them, holding a long straight staff. The urge to fly from him was strong, but exhaustion and above all the magnetic logic of the track were stronger.

At the very last second he cupped his stiffened wings and they caught the air like a sail, snatching up the last of his kinetic energy and breaking his fall. HeAlice?”b gave himv with plopped onto the snow roof and lay there gasping at the thin atmosphere. His eyes went dull. The human hadn’t moved. Well, f*ck him. He could do what he wanted with them, pluck them and gut them and stuff them and roast them, Quentin didn’t care anymore as long as he could just have one blessed moment of rest for his aching wings.

The man shaped a strange syllable with his fleshy, beakless lips and tapped the base of his staff on the roof. Fifteen pale, naked human teenagers lay in the snow under the white polar sun.

Quentin woke up in a bare white bedroom. He could not have guessed to the nearest twenty-four hours how long he’d been asleep. His chest and arms felt bruised and achy. He looked at his crude, pink, human hands, with their stubby featherless fingers. He brought them up to touch his face. He sighed and resigned himself to being a man again.

There was very little in the bedroom, and all of it was white: the bedclothes, the whitewashed walls, the coarse drawstring pajamas he wore, the white-painted iron bedstead, the slippers waiting for him on the cold stone floor. From the small square window Quentin could see he was on the second floor. His view was of broken snowfields beneath a white sky, stretching out to the horizon, a meaningless abstract white line an unjudgeable distance away. My God. What had he gotten himself into?