The Magician King

There were simple spells to make magic visible: they showed you the ways the energy was running in and around an object with an enchantment on it. But what Julia saw when she cast one on the mirror defied explanation. It was the densest weave of magic she’d ever seen: a tracery of fine lines in an ornate pattern like a tapestry, so dense that it almost obscured the mirror underneath it. It should have taken a team of magicians a year at least to put all those channels in place. Instead Pouncy had done it alone, in one night, with a simple chant. It was unlike any working she’d ever heard of.

“You did this? Just now?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so. I said the words, but I think somebody else must have done the work.”

Her hands and her body felt strangely light. There was a sweet smell in the air. Acting on an impulse, she dabbed a little of the milk on each of her eyelids. Instantly her vision sharpened and clarified, like when they change the settings at the ophthalmologist’s.

“We’re getting close, Julia,” Pouncy said. “We’re getting close to the divine praxis. I can feel it.”

“I don’t like feeling things,” she said. “I like knowing them.”

But she had to admit, she felt it too. The only word she could think of to describe this magic was grave. There was nothing light or playful about it: it was dead fucking sober magic. Serious as a heart attack. Where was the line between a spell and a miracle? Turning moonlight into silver coins wasn’t exactly parting the Red Sea, but the effortlessness with which it was accomplished spoke of much larger possibilities. It was a minor effect running off an enormous power source.

The next morning Asmodeus was at breakfast. Real breakfast, not her usual lunch-breakfast. She was practically vibrating with excitement. She refused any food.

“I found him,” she said, with finality.

“Who?” Julia said. It was a little early for Asmodeus in her maximum-intensity mode. “Whom did you find?”

“The hermit. The tarasque’s holy man. He’s a saint. Or not a saint, exactly, not in the strictly Christian sense. But he calls himself one.”

“Explain,” Pouncy said around a hunk of the almost penitentially coarse bread they’d been eating.

“Well,” and here Asmodeus shook off her manic fatigue for a minute and entered her business mode, “as close as I can figure out, this guy is about two thousand years old. Right? He calls himself Amadour—says he used to be a saint, but they defrocked him.

“I found him living in a cave. Red hair, beard down to here. Says he serves the goddess, the old one, the one we’re always hearing about. He wouldn’t name her, but it has to be her. Our Lady, O.L.U. For a while he passed as a Christian saint, he told me, saying he worshipped the Virgin Mary, but eventually he got outed as a pagan and they tried to crucify him. He’s been living in a cave ever since.

“And at first I was all, sure, buddy, saint or crazy homeless guy, it’s a fine line. But he showed me things. Weird things, guys, things we don’t know how to do. He can shape rock with his hands. He heals animals. He knew things about me, things nobody knows. He—he healed a scar I have. Had. He made it go away.”

Her voice faltered. Julia had never seen Asmodeus look so serious. She glared at them, angry that she’d let a secret slip. Julia had never seen Asmodeus’s scar. She wondered if she meant a physical one or something else.

“Can you take us to him?” Pouncy’s voice was gentle. He seemed to sense how close to the edge she was.

She shook her head quickly, trying to recover herself and not succeeding.

“You only see him once,” she said. “You could go find him yourself, maybe, but I can’t tell you where the cave was. I mean, I remember, but I can’t tell you. Literally—I tried just now.” She shrugged helplessly. “Nothing comes out.”

They all looked at each other over the cold crusts and dead coffee.

“I almost forgot,” she said. “He gave me something.” She unzipped her backpack and rummaged in it for a sheet of parchment, closely written. “It’s a palimpsest. Can you believe it? So old-school. I watched him scrape the ink off some priceless ancient hymnal or something to make it. Probably a Dead Sea Scroll or something. He wrote out how to call on the goddess. Our Lady Underground.”

Pouncy took the paper from her. His fingers shook slightly.

“An invocation,” he said.

“So that’s it then,” Julia said. “The Lady’s phone number.”

“That’s it. It’s in Phoenician, I think, if you can believe it. He didn’t know if she’d come, but . . .”

Asmo picked up the heel of Pouncy’s loaf and started chewing it, without seeming to know she was doing it. She closed her eyes.

“Shit,” she said. “I have to go to bed.”

“Go.” Pouncy didn’t look up from the paper. “Go. We’ll talk after you’ve slept.”

CHAPTER 24

The Muntjac was becalmed, tossing on the gentle swell in the restless, unsettled way that boats do when they’re built for speed but making no headway. Its slack ropes and tackle jostled and banged against the masts. It didn’t like standing still.

Rain fuzzed the surface of the sea into a cloudy gray blur. Nobody spoke. A week had gone by since Quentin and Poppy came back from the Neitherlands, bearing news of the coming magical apocalypse and the true nature of the keys. The long, low-ceilinged cabin where they ate their meals was filled with the sound of drops drumming on the deck overhead, so that they would have had to practically yell at each other to be understood anyway.

They were going to find the last key. Definitely. They just weren’t sure yet precisely how they were going to do it.

“Let’s go over it again,” Eliot said, raising his voice to be heard over the rain. “These things always work by rules, you just have to figure out what they are. You went through with Julia.” He pointed at Quentin. “But you didn’t take the key with you.”

“No.”

“Could it have fallen through before the door closed? Could it be in the grass on your parents’ lawn?”

“No. Impossible.” He was almost sure. No, he was sure. The grass was like a damn putting green, they would have seen it.

“But then you”—he turned to Bingle—“you searched the room and found no key.”

“No key.”

“But just now when you two”—Quentin and Poppy—“went through to the Neitherlands, that key remained behind, here, on this side.”

“Correct,” Poppy said. “Don’t tell me it’s gone too.”

“No, we have it.”

“What happened to it when the door closed?” Quentin asked. “Did it stay hanging there in midair?”

“No, it fell on the deck when the door closed. Bingle heard it and picked it up.”

The conversation stopped, and the drumming rain filled in the silence. It was neither warm nor cold. The deck overhead was watertight, but the air was so wet that Quentin felt like he was soaked through anyway. Every surface was sticky. Everything wooden was swollen. His damn collarbone was swollen. There was a glum scraping as people shifted in their wooden chairs. Above his head Quentin heard the footsteps of whatever poor bastard was standing watch on deck.

“Maybe there was some space in between,” Quentin said. “One of those gaps between dimensions. Maybe it fell in there.”

“I thought the Neitherlands was the gap between dimensions,” Poppy said.

“It is, but there’s a different gap too. When a portal pulls apart. But we would have seen that.”

The Muntjac groaned softly as it swayed in place. Quentin wished Julia were here,