Lev Grossman - The Magicians

“That might explain this,” Quentin said. He showed her his wooden knee, and she goggled all over again. The alcohol was making all this much easier than expected. He was braced for a torrent of emotion, a cavalry charge of grief on his defenseless peace of mind, but if it was coming it hadn’t yet.

“And there was a thing — a spell in the walls, I think — so that we went around in circles. We ended up in Amber’s room again.”

“Ember’s.”

“What did I say? Anyhow we ’ad to break the spell—” She stopped to wave through the window at her buff boyfriend in the bar. She sounded as if she’d told this story many times already, to the point where she was quite bored of it. For her it all happened two years ago, to people she’d barely known anyway. “And we carried you the whole way. My God. I don’t think we would have made it if Richard”—ree-SHARD—“ ’adn’t found us.

“It almost makes you like him, you know? He had a way of making us invisible to the monsters. He practically carried us out of that place. Still I have a scar.”

She flounced up the hem of her skirt, which was none too long to begin with. A thick, bumpy keloid strip six inches long stood out from her smooth, tanned thigh.

Amazingly, Penny had survived, she told him, or at least he had for a while. The centaurs were unable to reconstruct his hands, and without them he could no longer cast spells. When they reached the Neitherlands Penny walked away from the rest of the party, as if he were searching for something. When he came to a tall, narrow stone palazzo, unusually old and worn, he stopped in front of it and spread out his handless arms as if in supplication. After a minute the doors of the palazzo opened. The others caught a glimpse of ranks of bookcases — the warm, secret paper heart of the City. Penny stepped inside and the doors closed behind him.

“Can you believe it even all happened?” she kept saying. “It is like a cauchemar . But it is all over now.”

It was strange: Anaïs didn’t seem to blame him, or herself. She had found some way of mourning what had happened. Or maybe it hadn’t touched her to begin with. It was hard to guess what went on under those blond curls.

Throughout the story she kept looking over his shoulder at the underwear model, and after a while he took pity on her and let her go. They said goodbye — kiss, kiss. Neither party promised to keep in touch. What was the point of lying now, at this late stage in the game? Like she said, it was all over now. He stayed sitting outside on the steps, in the warm early hours of the summer evening, until it crossed his mind how much he didn’t want to run into Anaïs again on her way out.

It was getting dark, and he would need somewhere to sleep tonight. He could find a hotel, but why bother? And why wait? He had abandoned almost everything he owned back in Fillory, but one thing Quentin had hung on to was the iron key Fogg had given him when he graduated. It hadn’t worked from Fillory — he’d tried — but now, standing by himself on a trash-littered street in Tribeca, breathing the soupy, sun-warmed city air, he took it out of the pocket of his brand-new jeans. It felt reassuringly hefty. On a hunch he held it up to his ear. It gave off a high, constant musical ringing tone, like a struck tuning fork. He’d never noticed that before.

Feeling grandly lonely, and only a little frightened, he gripped the key with both hands, closed his eyes, relaxed, and let it tug him forward. It was like riding the rope tow at a ski slope. The key parted an invisible seam in the air and drew him swiftly forward and with a delightful sense of acceleration through some highly convenient sub-dimension back to the stone terrace out behind the house at Brakebills. The pain of going back was great, but the necessity was greater. He had one last piece of business to take care of, and then it really would all be over forever.

As the junior member of the PlaxCo account team, associate management consultant Quentin Coldwater had few actual responsibilities beyond attending the occasional meeting and being civil to whatever colleagues he happened to bump into in the elevator. On the rare occasions when actual documents managed to make their way into his in-box or onto his desk, he rubber-stamped them (Looks good to me!!! — QC) without reading them and sent them on their way.

Quentin’s desk was, as it happened, unusually large for a new hire at his level, especially one as youthful as he appeared to be (though his startling white hair lent him a certain gravitas beyond his years), and whose educational background and previous work history were on the sketchy side. He just appeared one day, took possession of a corner office recently vacated by a vice president three times his age, and started drawing a salary and piling up money in his 401(k) and receiving medical and dental benefits and taking six weeks of vacation a year. In return for which he didn’t seem to do much of anything beyond play computer games on the ultra-flat double-wide-screen monitor the outgoing veep had left behind.

But Quentin didn’t inspire any resentment in his new colleagues, or even any particular curiosity. Everybody thought somebody else knew the story on him, and if it turned out that they didn’t, they definitely knew for a fact that somebody over in HR had the scoop. And anyway, supposedly he’d been a superstar at some high-flying European school, fluent in all kinds of languages. Math scores through the roof. The firm was lucky to have him. Lucky.

And he was affable enough, if a little mopey. He seemed smart. Or at least he looked smart. And anyway, he was a member of the PlaxCo account team, and here at the consulting firm of Grunnings Hunsucker Swann everybody was a team player.

Dean Fogg had advised Quentin against it. He should take more time, think it over, maybe get some therapy. But Quentin had taken enough time. He had seen enough of the magical world to last him the rest of his life, and he was erecting a barrier between himself and it that no magic could breach. He was going to cut it off and kill it dead. Fogg had been right after all, even if he didn’t have the guts to make good on his own argument: people were better off without magic, living in the real world, learning to deal with it as it came. Maybe there were people out there who could handle the power a magician could wield, who deserved it, but Quentin wasn’t one of them. It was time he grew up and faced that fact.

So Fogg set him up with a desk job at a firm with large amounts of magician money invested in it, and Quentin took the subway and rode the elevator and ordered in lunch like the rest of humanity, or at any rate the most privileged 0.1 percent of it. His curiosity about the realms invisible had been more than satisfied, thanks tremendously much. At least his parents were pleased. It was a relief to be able to tell them what he did for a living and not lie.

Grunnings Hunsucker Swann was absolutely everything Quentin had hoped it would be, which was as close to nothing at all as he could get and still be alive. His office was calm and quiet, with climate control and tinted floor-to-ceiling windows. Office supplies were abundant and top-notch. He was given all the balance sheets and org charts and business plans to review that he could possibly have wanted. To be honest, Quentin felt superior to anybody who still messed around with magic. They could delude themselves if they liked, those self-indulgent magical mandarins, but he’d outgrown that stuff. He wasn’t a magician anymore, he was a man, and a man took responsibility for his actions. He was out here working the hard flinty bedrock face of it all. Fillory? He’d been there and done that, and it hadn’t done him or anybody else any good. He was damn lucky he got out alive.