Lev Grossman - The Magicians

They sat under a massive spreading beech tree that stood nearby, coolly indifferent to their plight. They leaned back against the trunk with a fat hard gray root between them.

“So what do you want to do,” Quentin said dully. Tiny motes drifted by in the late-afternoon sunlight.

“I don’t know.” Alice sneezed again. “What do you want to do?”

Quentin plucked at the grass. A burst of faint laughter came from inside the house. If there was a password they hadn’t found it. He and Alice had spent an hour looking for hidden writing — they scanned the door in every spectrum they could think of, visible and invisible, infrared to gamma, and tried to strip the paint off to look underneath, but it wouldn’t come. Alice even tried some advanced graphological enchantments on the squiggly grain of the wood itself, but it just stared back at them blankly. They’d sent currents of force twisting into the lock, jiggling the tumblers, but they couldn’t pick it. They looked for a fourth-dimensional path around the door. They’d jointly plucked up their nerve and summoned a kind of phantasmal axe — it wasn’t explicitly against any rule they could think of — but they couldn’t even scratch it. For a while Alice was convinced the door was an illusion, that it didn’t even exist, but it certainly looked and felt real, and neither of them could find any charms or enchantments to dispel.

“Look at it,” Quentin said. “It’s like some lame Hansel and Gretel hut. I thought the Physical Kids were supposed to be cool.”

“Dinner’s in an hour,” Alice said.

“I’ll skip it.”

“It’s lamb tonight, with a rosemary crust. Potatoes au dauphin .” Alice’s eidetic memory retained odd details.

“Maybe we should have our own seminar. Out here.”

She snorted. “Yeah, that’d show ’em.”

The beech tree was on the edge of a field that had just been mown. The giant cinnamon rolls of hay dotting the field cast long shadows.

“You’re a what again? A photomancer?”

“Phosphoromancer.”

“What can you do?”

“I’m not sure yet. I practiced some things over the summer. Focusing light, refracting it, bending it. If you bend light around something, it turns invisible. But I want to understand the theory of it first.”

“Show me something.”

Alice turned shy. It didn’t take much.

“I can hardly do anything.”

“Look, I don’t even have a Discipline. I’m a nothingmancer. I’m a squatmancer.”

“They just don’t know what it is yet. You have your little sparky thing.”

“Same difference. And don’t make fun of my sparky thing. Now bend me some damn light.”

She grimaced, but she got up on her knees on the grass and held up her hand, fingers spread. They were kneeling face-to-face, and he was suddenly aware of her full breasts inside her thin, high-necked blouse.

“Watch the shadow,” she snapped.

She did something with her fingers, and the shadow of her hand disappeared. It was simply gone, leaving behind only a few ghostly rainbow highlights.

“Nice.”

“It’s pathetic, I know.” She waved her hand, scrubbing out the magic. “My whole hand is supposed to go invisible, but I can only do the shadow.”

There was something here. Quentin felt his sulk starting to dispel. This was a test. Physical magic. They weren’t Morris dancing with tree spirits here. This was a brute-force problem.

“What about the other way?” he said slowly. “Could you focus light instead, like a magnifying glass?”

She didn’t answer right away, but he could see her nimble mind take hold of the problem and start turning it over.

“Maybe if I… hm. I think there’s something in Culhwch and Owen. You’d need to stabilize the effect, though. And localize it.”

She made a circle with her thumb and forefinger and spoke five long words over it. Quentin could see light bending inside the circle, warping and distorting the leaves and grass visible through it. Then it sharpened and focused to a white dot that burned an afterimage into his retina, and he looked away. She tilted it, and the ground under her hand smoked.

“I will kill you if you get me kicked out of Brakebills. Do you understand me? I’m not joking. I know how to do it. I will literally make you die.”

“That’s funny, that’s exactly what I told Penny after he hit me,” Quentin said.

“Except I’ll really do it.”

They had decided to burn their way through the door. If it was a test, Quentin reasoned, it didn’t matter much how they solved it as long as they solved it. They hadn’t been given any rules, so they couldn’t be breaking any. And if they did burn down the damn house, with Eliot and his smug little friends inside it, serve them right.

They had to work fast, because the sunlight was fading. The sun had already gone dull and coppery, and in another few minutes its lower rim would touch the tops of the trees on the far side of the hayfield. The barest early-fall chill was in the air. Yellow lights were already on inside the house. Quentin heard — did he imagine it? — the pop of a cork being withdrawn from a bottle.

Holding both arms above her head and curved slightly upward, like she was balancing a large invisible basket on her head, Alice had created the magical equivalent of a magnifying glass a dozen yards across — her bent arms defined a small section of the total circumference of a soaring circular lens, the upper edge of which was even with the top of the beech tree, taller than the chimney of the little Victorian bungalow. Quentin could just make out the edge of the lens as a curved distortion in the air. The focal point was too bright to look at.

Alice stood about fifty feet back from the door. Quentin stood closer, to one side, holding out a hand to shield his eyes and shouting out directions:

“Up! Okay, slow! A little more! Keep moving! Okay, now right!”

Quentin could feel the heat from the focused sunlight against his face and smell the savory-sweet smell of wood smoke, along with an acrid tang of seared house paint. The door was definitely vulnerable to heat. They’d been worried that there wouldn’t be enough sunlight left, but Alice’s spell was cutting a nice deep charred trench in the wood. They’d decided to cut the door in half laterally, and if the trench wasn’t penetrating all the way through, it must be pretty close. A bigger problem was Alice’s aim, which wasn’t good, and in one place she had wandered off the door and burned a groove in the wall.

“I feel stupid!” Alice shouted. “How are we doing?”

“Looking good!”

“My back hurts! Are we almost done?”

“Almost!” he lied.

With a foot to go Alice expanded the spell’s radius to compensate for the fading sun. She was whispering, but he wasn’t sure if it was an incantation or just obscenities. Quentin realized they were being observed: one of the older professors, a very erect, white-haired man named Brzezinski, who specialized in potions and whose pants were always covered with appalling stains, had interrupted his evening stroll to watch them. In another lifetime he had given Quentin the test involving knots during his Examination. He wore sweater-vests and smoked a pipe and looked like an IBM engineer, circa 1950.

Shit, Quentin thought. They were about to get busted.

But Professor Brzezinski just took his pipe out of his mouth. “Carry on,” he said gruffly. He turned and walked back in the direction of the House.

It took only about ten minutes for Alice to make a full lateral cut, then go back across it a second time. The trench glowed red.

When she was finished, Quentin walked back to where she was standing.

“You have ash on your face,” she said. She brushed at his forehead with her fingers.