The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(86)

No one knows where this transitional world is. It may be an alternate plane of existence, or a place between planes, interleaved between them like a flower pressed between pages, or a master plane that contains all planes—the spine that gathers the pages and binds them together. To the naked eye it looks like a deserted city, an endless series of empty stone squares, but it serves as a kind of multidimensional switchboard. In the center of each square is a fountain. Instead of water, the fountains run with a jet-black liquid, as black as oil, or ink.

Step into one of them, the story goes, and you’ll be transported to another universe. There are hundreds of different squares, possibly an infinite number, and a corresponding number of alternate universes. The bunnies call this place the Neitherlands—because it’s neither here nor thereor maybe they actually werem, not a persongo—or sometimes just the City.

But the most important point, Penny said, is that at the end of The Wandering Dune Helen hid all the buttons somewhere in her aunt’s house in Cornwall. She felt they were too mechanical; they made the journey too easy. Their power was wrong. You shouldn’t be able to just go to Fillory whenever you wanted, like catching a bus, she argued. A trip to Fillory had to be earned, that had always been the way. It was a reward for the worthy, bestowed by the ram-gods Ember and Umber. The buttons were a perversion of this divine grace, a usurping of it. They broke the rules. Ember and Umber couldn’t control them. Fillory was fundamentally a religious fantasy, but the buttons weren’t religious at all; they were magical—they were just tools, with no values attached. You could use them for anything you wanted, good or evil. They were so magical they were practically technological.

So she hid them. Jane was inconsolable, understandably enough, and tore up half the property looking for them, but according to The Wandering Dune she never found them, and Plover never wrote any more books.

The Wandering Dune ends in the summer of 1917, or possibly 1918; because of the lack of real-world detail it’s impossible to date it precisely. After that the whereabouts of the buttons is unknown. But try a thought experiment, Penny suggested: how long could a box of buttons hidden by a twelve-year-old girl plausibly have stayed hidden? Ten years? Fifty? Nothing stays buried forever. Wasn’t it possible—even inevitable—that in the decades that followed a maid or a real-estate agent or another little girl would have found them again? And that from there they would have made their way onto the magical gray market?

“I always thought they were supposed to be lapel buttons,” Richard said. “Like a pin. Like ‘I Like Ike.’”

“Um, okay, so let’s back up for a second,” Quentin said cheerily. He was in the perfect mood for somebody, anybody besides himself, to make an ass of himself, and if that person could be Penny, and if Quentin could help him do it, then ever so much the better. “The Fillory books are fiction? Nothing you’re talking about actually happened?”





THE NEITHER LANDS


QUENTIN WAS SWIMMING. Or he could have been swimming, but in fact he was just floating. His body was weightless, suspended in chilly liquid. His testicles shrank in on themselves away from the cold. The darkness was absolute.

After the first shock the coolness of the liquid, combined with the blackness and weightlessness, felt indescribably good to his dried-out, feverish, unshowered, hung-over body. He could have thrashed and panicked, but instead he just let himself hang there, arms out in a dead man’s float. Whatever was coming next would come. He opened his eyes, and the liquid bathed them in moist, healing chill. He closed them again. There was nothing to see.

It was a glorious relief. The numbness of it was just magnificent. At the moment when it had been at its most intolerably painful, the world, normally so unreliable and insensitive in these matters, had done him the favor of vanishing completely.

Granted, he would need air at some point. He would look into that in due course. As bad as things were, drowning would still be a hasty course of action. For now all he wanted was to stay here forever, hanging neutrally buoyant in the amniotic void, neither in the world nor out of it, neither dead nor alive.

But an iron manacle was clamped round his wrist. It was Alice’s hand, and it was pulling him upward ruthlessly. She wouldn’t let him be. Reluctantly, he kicked along with her. Their heads broke the surface at the same time.

They were in the center of a still, hushed, empty city square, treading water in the round pool of a fountain. Only it wasn’t water; the pool was full of something black and opaque—inky. It was absolutely silent: no wind, no birds, no insects. Broad paving stones stretched away in all directions, clean and bare as if they’d just been swept. On all four sides of the square stood a row of stone buildings. They gave off an impression of indescribable age—they weren’t decrepit, but they’d been lived in. They looked vaguely Italianate; they could have been in Rome, or Venice. But they weren’t.

The sky was low and overcast, and a light rain was think about itlvv Second Year the faculty falling, almost mist. The droplets dimpled the still surface of the blue-black liquid, which made its way into the pool from the overflowing bowl of a giant bronze lotus flower. The square had the air of a place that had been hastily abandoned, five minutes ago or five centuries, it was impossible to tell.

Quentin treaded water for a minute, then took one long breaststroke over to the stone lip. The pool was only about fifteen feet across, and the rim was scarred and pocked: old limestone. Bracing himself with both hands, he heaved himself up and flopped onto dry land.