The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(77)

This wasn’t where Quentin thought the party was going. It wasn’t a party atmosphere at all. It was cool down here and suddenly quiet. The floor was dirt, the ceilings were low, and the walls were bumpy and unfinished. They devoured sound. Voice by voice the chorus of a traditional Brakebills song—an elaborately euphemistic number entitled “The Prefect Has a Defect”—died away. There was a grave but not unpleasant smell of damp soil.

Fogg stopped at what looked like a manhole cover embedded in the dirt floor. It was brass and densely inscribed with calligraphic writing. Oddly, it looked as shiny and new as a freshly struck coin. The Dean picked up a heavy manhole tool and, with an effort, levered up the brass disk. It was two inches thick, and it took three of the Fifth Years to roll it to one side.

“After you,” the Dean said, panting a little. He gestured grandly at the inky black hole.

Quentin went first. He felt around blindly with his Scotch-benumbed feet till he found an iron rung. It was like lowering himself into warm black oil. The ladder took him and the other graduates straight down into a circular chamber large enough for all nineteen of them to stand upright in a circle, which they did. Fogg came down last; they could hear him screwing the manhole cover back into place behind them. Then he descended, too, and with a crash he sent the ladder retracting back up, like a fire escape. After that the silence was absolute.

“No point in losing our momentum,” Fogg said. He lit a candle and gamely produced two-fifths of bourbon from somewhere and set them going in opposite directions round the circle. Something about this gesture unnerved Quentin. There was a certain amount of sanctioned alcohol consumption at Brakebills—a fairly large amount, really—but this was a bit much. There was something forced about it.

Well, it was graduation. They weren’t students anymore. They were grown-ups. Just peers, sharing a drink. In a secret underground dungeon, in the middle of the night. Quentin took his swig and passed it on.

Dean Fogg lit more candles in assorted brass candlesticks, making a circle within their larger circle. They couldn’t have been more than fifty yards down, but it felt like they were a solid mile beneath the earth, entombed alive, forgotten by the rest of the world.

“In case you’re wondering why we’re down here,” Fogg said, “it’s because I wanted to get us outside the Brakebills Protective Cordon. That’s a defensive magical barrier that extends out from the House in all directions. That inscribed brass hatch we opened was a gateway through it.”

The darkness swallowed his words as soon as he uttered them. that thing?”Rscov with

“It’s a little unsettling, yes? But it’s appropriate, because unlike me you’ll be spending the rest of your lives out here. Most years, the point of coming down here is to scare you with ghost stories about the outside world. In your case I don’t think that will be necessary. You’ve witnessed firsthand the destructive power that some magical entities possess.

“It’s unlikely you’ll ever see anything as bad as what happened on the day of the Beast. But remember that what happened that day can happen again. Those of you who were in the auditorium that day, especially, will carry the mark of it forever. You will never forget the Beast, and you can be sure it won’t forget you either.

“Forgive me if I lecture you, but it’s the last chance I’m going to get.”

Quentin was sitting opposite Fogg in the circle—they had all taken seats on the smooth stone floor—and his mild, clean-shaven face floated in the darkness like an apparition. Both bottles of whiskey reached Quentin simultaneously, and he gamely took a sip from each, one in each hand, and passed them on.

“Sometimes I wonder if man was really meant to discover magic,” Fogg said expansively. “It doesn’t really make sense. It’s a little too perfect, don’t you think? If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn’t make it so. Words and thoughts don’t change anything. Language and reality are kept strictly apart—reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn’t care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn’t. You deal with it, and you get on with your life.

“Little children don’t know that. Magical thinking, that’s what Freud called it. Once we learn otherwise we cease to be children. The separation of word and thing is the essential fact on which our adult lives are founded.

“But somewhere in the heat of magic that boundary between word and thing ruptures. It cracks, and the one flows back into the other, and the two melt together and fuse. Language gets tangled up with the world it describes.

“I sometimes feel as though we’ve stumbled on a flaw in the system, don’t you? A short circuit? A category error? A strange loop? Is it possible that magic is knowledge that would be better off forsworn? Tell me this: can a man who can cast a spell ever really grow up?”

He paused. No one answered. What the hell would they say? It was a little late to be scolding them now that they’d already completed their magical education.

“I have a little theory that I’d like to air here, if I may. What is it that you think makes you magicians?” More silence. Fogg was well into rhetorical-question territory now anyway. He spoke more softly. “Is it because you are intelligent? Is it because you are brave and good? Is it because you’re special?

“Maybe. Who knows. But I’ll tell you something: I think you’re magicians because you’re unhappy. A magician is strong because he feels pain. He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it. Or what did you think that stuff in your chest was? A magician is strong because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength.