The Magician King

In another match Bingle’s opponent waited till the opening bell had rung and then calmly stepped over the chalk line out of bounds for an automatic forfeit. Apparently they’d met before, and once had been enough. Quentin was looking forward to watching somebody make Bingle actually stand and fight.

Quentin nodded to the Master of Sword to start the match. Aral began a sequence of highly stylized movements, drawing fluid shapes in the air with her recurved blade. She didn’t approach her opponent. She seemed to be lost in concentration, practicing some ritualized, almost abstract martial art. Bingle watched her for a little bit, flicking the tip of his sword around uneasily.

Then he joined the dance. He began performing the same movements as his opponent—they became mirror images of each other. Apparently they were adepts of the same style and had chosen to open with the same form. Laughter rippled through the crowd. And it was funny, like a mime copying a passerby. But neither of the fighters laughed.

Afterward Quentin wasn’t sure exactly when this preamble ended and the fighting began. The two combatants passed too near each other, and it was like a candle flame accidentally brushing a curtain. A spark jumped the gap, the symmetry was broken, the fissile material reached criticality, and suddenly the room was full of the rapid-fire clatter of steel colliding with steel.

At this level of mastery the action went too fast for Quentin to follow. The precise details of the moves and countermoves and negotiations were lost on everybody but the combatants. Their shared style was all arcs and spins and constant motion as each side looked for openings and found only dead ends. You got the impression they were reading each other down to an atomic level, logging tiny twitches and tells and shifts of weight. The passes would start beautifully, set sequences that sometimes even included a flip or a somersault, then the flow would break and everything would be chaos until the blades tangled up and locked, and they disengaged and started all over again.

Jesus, Quentin thought. And he was going to get on a boat with one of these people. It was a little too real. But it was electrifying too: these were people who knew exactly what they were meant to do and never hesitated to do it, whether they won or lost.

Then all at once it was over: Aral overextended herself with a huge overhand chop that Bingle just managed to roll out from under, and by blind chance her blade stuck fast in the floor, in a crack between two flagstones. Coming up out of the roll Bingle kicked at it, reflexively, and it snapped neatly halfway along its length. Aral stepped back, not bothering to conceal her frustration, and indicated that she conceded the match.

But Bingle shook his head. Apparently he wasn’t happy with the grounds of his victory. He wanted to keep fighting. He looked at Quentin for a ruling. So did everybody else.

Well, if he wanted to play by good-guy rules, then by all means. Quentin wouldn’t mind seeing some more fighting himself. He drew his sword and offered it to Aral hilt-first. She felt the balance, nodded grudgingly, then resumed her fighting stance. The match recommenced.

Five minutes later Bingle jumped a low cut and attempted some midair finesse move that got tangled up in Aral’s ninja wrappings. He wound up right next to her, inside her guard, and she punched him savagely in the ribs, three times. He grunted and staggered backward toward the chalk line, and Quentin was sure he was going to ring out, but at the last second he realized where he was. He spun around and leaped balletically for the wall, pushed off it, turned head over heels, and landed lightly on his feet just in bounds.

The crowd gasped and applauded. It was a circus move, stagy and over the top. Aral irritably pulled off her headscarf and shook out a surprising mass of wavy auburn hair before resuming her stance.

“Bet you anything she practiced that in a mirror,” Eliot whispered.

The dynamic of the fight had changed. Now Bingle dropped the formal, balletic style they’d both been using. Quentin had assumed that that was where his training was, but it soon became apparent that he was some kind of technical freak, because he seemed to be able to shift styles at will. He went at her like a berserker, fast and furious, then cycled rapidly through a courtly dueling mode to a kind of shouting, stamping kendo style. Aral grew increasingly flummoxed trying to adjust, which was presumably what Bingle was after.

Breaking her silence, she shouted something and lunged flat out. Bingle met her attack with a parry so implausible it was vaudevillian: he stopped her blade—Quentin’s blade—with the tip of his, so that the two swords met point to point.

They bent ominously, almost double, for an unendurably tense second—there was a worrying saw-blade sound of flexed metal—and then Bingle’s sword snapped with a sharp, vibrant twang. He had to jerk his head to one side to avoid a flying shard.

He threw his useless hilt at Aral in disgust. The pommel clunked her on the temple, but she shrugged it off. She paused, evidently considering offering him the same largesse he’d offered her. Then, having made some inner calculation probably having to do with honor and principles and castles, she aimed an overhand cutting stroke at Bingle’s shoulder, the coup de grace.

Bingle closed his eyes and dropped rapidly to one knee. As the blade descended he didn’t dodge, just brought his hands together smoothly and decisively in front of him. And then time stopped.

At first Quentin wasn’t sure what had happened, but the room exploded in amazement. He stood up to get a better view. Bingle had stopped the blade between the palms of his hands, in midstrike, bare flesh against sharp steel. He must have calculated the move down to the last erg and arc and nanosecond. It took a moment for Aral to understand what he’d done, and Bingle didn’t waste it. With the advantage of surprise he jerked the blade toward himself, out of her grip. He flipped it smartly, the hilt smacking solidly into his palm, and placed the blade at her throat. The match was over.

“Oh my God,” Eliot said. “Did you see that? Oh my God!”

The assembled barons forgot their noble reserve. They got to their feet, huzzahing, and mobbed the winner. Quentin and Eliot cheered along with them. But Bingle didn’t seem to see them. Those hooded eyes never changed their expression. He pushed his way through the crowd to Quentin’s throne, where he kneeled and offered Quentin back his sword.

* * *

The next time Quentin visited the waterfront the Muntjac was crawling with workmen, like piranhas on an unlucky Amazonian explorer except in reverse. They were putting the Muntjac back together—bringing it back to life. There was no part of it that wasn’t being aggressively sanded or varnished or tightened or reinforced or replaced. They’d got it up into drydock, propped it up on a forest of stilts, fixed the sprung boards, caulked and tarred and painted it. Out-of-sync hammer blows clattered from all quarters of the hull.

As it turned out the ship’s structural elements had been basically sound, which was good, because the shipwrights didn’t think they could have reproduced what they found. Deep in the hold, pieced into some of the complex joins near the prow, they’d found a complicated lump of wooden clockwork connected to taut lines leading off into various parts of the ship. They couldn’t figure out what it was for, so Quentin told them to leave it alone.

The Muntjac’s hull was now a smart jet-black with bright white trim. Hundreds of yards of new sail were even now being sewn by an army of sailmakers, an astonishingly technical process that took place in a vast, airy sail loft the size of an airplane hangar. The sharp, honest fragrances of sawdust and wet paint bloomed in the air. Quentin breathed them in. He felt like he was coming back to life too. Not that he’d been dead, just . . . not quite alive. Something else.

With only two or three more days till the Muntjac could be floated, Quentin paid a visit to Castle Whitespire’s map room to see what he could learn about his destination. The Outer Island was the least exciting part of this whole undertaking, but he’d better at least be able to find it. After the clamor of the docks the map room was a reservoir of cool quiet. One whole wall was windows, and the other was taken up with a glorious floor-to-ceiling map of Fillory, from Loria in the north to the Wandering Desert in the south. The map was traversed by a rolling library ladder, so you could get right up close to the part you wanted to study, and the closer you looked, the more detail resolved itself, to the point where you could pick out individual trees in the Queenswood. No dryads though.

The map was lightly animated by some subtle cartographical magic. You could follow tiny combers in as they pounded the Swept Coast, one after the other. Quentin leaned in: you could even hear them, faintly, like the roar in