but she was below with a fever that might or might not have been related to whatever else was going on with her. She’d been down ever since the fight for the last key. She lay on her bed with her eyes closed but not sleeping, breathing quickly and shallowly. Quentin went down there a few times a day to read to her or hold her hand or make her drink water. She didn’t seem to care much, but Quentin kept it up anyway. You never knew what might make a difference.
“So you searched the whole After Island,” Quentin said.
“We did,” Eliot said. “Look, maybe we should call on Ember.”
“Call Him!” Quentin said it more vehemently than he meant to. “I doubt if it’ll do much good. If that fucking ruminant could get the key He would just do it and leave us out of it.”
“But would He?” Josh asked.
“Probably. He’ll die too if Fillory goes.”
“What is Ember, anyway?” Poppy said. “I mean, I thought He was a god, but He’s not like those silver guys.”
“I think He’s a god in this world, but nowhere else,” Quentin said. “That’s my theory. He’s just a local god. The silver gods are gods of all the worlds.”
Although Quentin was still in close touch with the exalted frame of mind he’d been in when he came back from the Neitherlands, his connection to it had grown more tenuous. The urgency was still there: every morning he woke up expecting to find magic shut off everywhere like an unpaid power bill and Fillory collapsing around him on all sides like the last days of Pompeii. And they were certainly making good time, or they had been till this morning. Admiral Lacker had found, tucked away in a secret wooden locker, a marvelous sail that caught light as well as wind. Quentin recognized it: the Chatwins had one aboard the
That was all fine. But Fillory wasn’t doing its part. It wasn’t giving up the key. All the wonders seemed to be in hiding. In the past week they had reached heretofore unknown islands, stepped out onto virgin beaches, infiltrated choked mangrove swamps, even scaled a rogue drifting iceberg, but no keys presented themselves. They weren’t getting traction. It wasn’t working. Something was missing. It was almost as if something had gone out of the air: a tautness had gone slack, an electric charge had dissipated. Quentin racked his brain to think what it was.
Also it wouldn’t stop raining.
After the meeting Quentin forced himself to take a break. He lay down in his damp berth and waited for the heat from his body to propagate its way through the clammy, tepid bedclothes. It was too late to take a nap and too early to go to sleep. Outside his window the sun was dropping over the rim of the world, or it must have been, but you couldn’t tell. Sky and ocean were indistinguishable from each other. The world was the uniform gray of a brand-new Etch A Sketch the knobs of which hadn’t yet been twiddled.
He stared out at it, gnawing the edge of his thumb, a bad habit left over from childhood, his mind adrift in the emptiness.
Somebody spoke.
“Quentin.”
He opened his eyes. He must have fallen asleep. The window was dark now.
“Quentin,” the voice said again. He hadn’t dreamed it. The voice was muffled, directionless. He sat up. It was a gentle voice, soft and androgynous and vaguely familiar. It didn’t sound completely human. Quentin looked around the cabin, but he was alone.
“Who are you?” he said.
“I’m down here, Quentin. You’re hearing me through a grating in the floor. I’m down in the hold.”
Now he placed the voice. He’d forgotten it was even on board.
“Sloth? Is that you?” Did it have a name other than Sloth?
“I thought you might like to pay me a visit.”
Quentin couldn’t imagine what would have given the sloth that idea. The
And Jesus, if he could hear the sloth that clearly it must have overheard everything that happened in this cabin since they’d left Whitespire.
But he did feel bad about the sloth. He hadn’t paid very much attention to it. Frankly it was a tiny bit of a bore. But he owed it some respect, as the shipboard representative of the talking animals, and it was warm down in the hold, and it wasn’t like he had somewhere more pressing to be just now. He sighed and peeled the bedclothes off himself and fetched a candle and found the ladder that went down below.
The hold was emptier than he remembered it. A year at sea would have that effect. Black water sloshed around in a channel that ran along the floor. The sloth was a weird-looking beast, maybe four feet long, with a heavy coat of greenish-gray fur. It hung upside down by its ropy arms at about eye level, its thick curved claws hooked up over a wooden beam. Its appearance smacked of evolution gone too far. The usual pile of fruit rinds and sloth droppings lay below it in an untidy heap.
“Hi,” Quentin said.
“Hello.”
The sloth raised its small, oddly flattened head so that it was looking at Quentin right-side up. The position looked uncomfortable, but the sloth’s neck seemed pretty well designed for it. It had black bands of fur over its eyes that gave it a sleepy, raccoony look.
It squinted at the light from Quentin’s candle.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been down to see you very often,” Quentin offered.
“It’s all right, I don’t mind. I’m not a very social animal.”
“I don’t even know your name.”
“It’s Abigail.”
She was a girl sloth. Quentin hadn’t realized. A hard wooden chair had been brought down to the hold, presumably in case someone was enjoying their conversation with the sloth so much that he or she just had to sit down to enjoy it even more.
“And you’ve been very busy,” she added charitably.
A long silence ensued. Once in a while the sloth masticated something, Quentin wasn’t sure what, with its blunt yellow teeth. It must be somebody’s job to come down here and feed it. Her.
“Do you mind if I ask,” Quentin said finally, “why you came on this voyage? I’ve always wondered.”
“I don’t mind at all,” Abigail the Sloth said calmly. “I came because nobody else wanted to, and we thought we should send someone. The Council of Animals decided that I would mind it the least. I sleep a great deal, and I don’t move around very much. I enjoy my solitude. In a way I am hardly in this world at all, so it doesn’t very much matter where I am in it.”
“Oh. We thought the talking animals wanted a representative on the ship. We thought you’d be insulted if we didn’t take one of you along.”
“We thought you’d be insulted if we didn’t send someone. It is humorous how rife with misunderstanding the world is, is it not?”
It sure was.
The sloth didn’t find the long silences awkward. Maybe animals didn’t experience awkwardness the way humans did.
“When a sloth dies, it remains hanging in its tree,” the sloth said, apropos of nothing. “Often well into the process of decomposition.”
Quentin nodded sagely.
“I did not know that.”
It wasn’t an easy ball to throw back.
“This is by way of telling you something about the way sloths live. It is different from the way humans live, and even from the way other animals live. We spend our lives in between worlds, you might say. We suspend ourselves between the earth and the sky, touching neither. Our minds hover between the sleeping world and the
