Lev Grossman - The Magicians

“But maybe you could clarify something?” It was Amanda Orloff. She persisted, with the shit-eating blitheness of somebody who had academic cred to burn. “For the rest of us? Whether these are barotropic cyclones or not? I find it a little confusing.”

“They are all barotropic, Amanda,” March said, exasperated. “It’s irrelevant. All tropical cyclones are barotropic.”

“But I thought one was barotropic and one was baroclinic,” Alice put in.

The resulting mass wrangle ended up being so inane and time-consuming that March was forced to abandon Quentin and move on or lose the entire thread of the lecture. If he could have done so unobtrusively, Quentin would have run back to where Amanda Orloff was sitting and kissed her on her broad, unmoisturized forehead. Instead he settled for blowing her a kiss when March wasn’t looking.

March had segued into a lengthy spell that involved sketching an elaborate mandala-like symbol on the chalkboard. He stopped every thirty seconds and stepped back to the edge of the stage, hands on hips, whispering to himself, then dove back into the design. The point of the spell was fairly trivial — it either guaranteed hail or prevented it, one or the other, Quentin wasn’t really following, and anyway the principle was the same.

Either way, Professor March was struggling with it. The spell was in a very proper and precise Medieval Dutch that evidently wasn’t his forte. It occurred to Quentin that it might be nice if he screwed it up. He hadn’t particularly enjoyed being called out on technical minutiae this early in the morning. He would play a tiny prank.

Brakebills classrooms were proofed against most forms of mischief, but it was well known that the podium was any teacher’s Achilles’ heel. You couldn’t do much to it, but the wards on it weren’t quite ironclad, and with a lot of effort and some body English you could get it to rock back and forth a little. Maybe that would be enough to throw Professor March (the students called him “Death” March) off his game. Quentin made a few small gestures under his desk, between his knees. The podium stirred, as if it were stretching a kink in its back, then became inert again. Success.

March was reeling off some extra Old High Dutch. His attention flicked down at the podium as he felt it move, and he hesitated but recovered his concentration and forged ahead. It was either that or start the whole spell over.

Quentin was disappointed. But Infallible Alice leaned over.

“Idiot,” she whispered. “He dropped the second syllable. He should have said—”

Just then, for an instant, the film of reality slipped off the spokes of its projector. Everything went completely askew and then righted itself again as if nothing had happened. Except that, like a continuity error in a movie, there was now a man standing behind Professor March.

He was a small man, conservatively dressed in a neat gray English suit and a maroon club tie that was fixed in place with a silver crescent-moon pin. Professor March, who was still talking, didn’t seem to realize he was there — the man looked out at the Third Years archly, conspiratorially, as if they were sharing a joke at the teacher’s expense. There was something odd about the man’s appearance — Quentin couldn’t seem to make out his face. For a second he couldn’t figure out why, and then he realized it was because there was a small leafy branch in front of it that partially obscured his features. The branch came from nowhere. It was attached to nothing. It just hung there in front of the man’s face.

Then Professor March stopped speaking and froze in place.

Alice had stopped, too. The room was silent. A chair creaked. Quentin couldn’t move either. There was nothing restraining him, but the line between his brain and his body had been cut. Was the man doing this? Who was he? Alice was still leaned over slightly in his direction, and a fly-away wisp of her hair hung in his field of vision. He couldn’t see her eyes; the angle was wrong. Everything and everybody was still. The man on the stage was the only thing in the world still in motion.

Quentin’s heart started to pound. The man cocked his head and frowned, as if he could hear it. Quentin didn’t understand what had happened, but something had gone wrong. Adrenaline poured into his bloodstream, but it had nowhere to go. His brain was boiling in its own juices. The man began strolling around the stage, exploring his new environment. His demeanor was that of a gentleman balloonist who had accidentally touched down in exotic surroundings: inquisitive, amused. With the branch in front of his face his intentions were impossible to read.

He circled Professor March. There was something strange about the way he moved, something too fluid about his gait. When he walked into the light, Quentin saw that he wasn’t quite human, or if he had been once he wasn’t anymore. Below the cuffs of his white shirt his hands had three or four too many fingers.

Fifteen minutes crawled by, then half an hour. Quentin couldn’t turn his head, and the man moved in and out of his field of view. He puttered with Professor March’s equipment. He toured the auditorium. He took out a knife and pared his fingernails. Objects stirred and shifted restlessly in place whenever he walked too near them. He picked up an iron rod from March’s demonstration table and bent it like a piece of licorice. Once he cast a spell — he spoke too fast for Quentin to catch the details — that made all the dust in the room fly up and whirl crazily in the air before settling down again. It had no other obvious effect. When he cast the spell, the extra fingers on his hands bent sideways and backward.

An hour passed, then another. Quentin’s fear came and went and came back in huge sweating rushes, crashing waves. He was sure something very bad was happening, it just wasn’t clear yet exactly what. He knew it had something to do with his joke on March. How could he have been so stupid? In a cowardly way he was glad he couldn’t move. It spared him from having to attempt something brave.

The man seemed barely aware that he was in a room full of people. There was something grotesquely comic about him — his silence was like that of a mime. He approached a ship’s clock that hung at the back of the stage and slowly put his fist through it — he didn’t punch it, he forced his hand into its face, breaking the glass and snapping the hands and crushing the mechanism inside until he was satisfied that it was destroyed. It was as if he thought he would hurt it more that way.

Class should have been over ages ago. Somebody on the outside must have noticed by now. Where were they? Where was Fogg? Where the hell was that paramedic-nurse-woman when you really needed her? He wished he knew what Alice was thinking. He wished he could have turned his head just a few degrees more before he’d been frozen, so he could see her face.

Amanda Orloff’s voice broke the silence. She must have gotten loose somehow and was chanting a spell, rhythmically and rapidly but calmly. The spell was like nothing Quentin had ever heard, an angry, powerful piece of magic, full of vicious fricatives — it was offensive magic, battle magic, designed to literally rip an opponent to pieces. Quentin wondered how she’d even learned it. Just knowing a spell like that was way off-limits at Brakebills, let alone casting it. But before she could finish her voice became muffled. It went higher and higher, faster and faster, like a tape speeding up, then faded out before she could finish. The silence returned.

Morning turned into afternoon in a fever dream of panic and boredom. Quentin went numb. He heard signs of activity from outside. He could see only one window, and that was out of the very corner of his eye, but something was going on out there, blocking the light. There were sounds of hammering and, very faintly, six or seven voices chanting in unison. A tremendous, silent flash of light burst behind the door to the corridor with such force that the thick wood glowed translucent for an instant. There were rumblings as if somebody were trying to break through the floor from underneath. None of this visibly bothered the man in the gray suit.