waking. In a sense we live on the borderline between life and death.”
“That is very different from how humans live.”
“It must seem strange to you, but it is where we feel most comfortable.”
The sloth seemed like somebody you could be frank with.
“Why are you telling me this?” he said. “I mean, I’m sure you have a reason, but I’m not making the connection. Is this about the key? Do you have an idea about how to find it?”
He didn’t know how much the sloth knew about what was going on above deck. Maybe she didn’t even know they were on a quest.
“It is not about the key,” Abigail said in her liquid, unhurried voice. “It is about Benedict Fenwick.”
“Benedict? What about him?”
“Would you like to speak with him?”
“Well, sure. Of course. But he’s dead. He died two weeks ago.”
It was still as unthinkable, almost unsayable, as it had been that first night.
“There are paths that are closed to most beings that are open to a sloth.”
Quentin supposed it went without saying that patience was a big deal when having a conversation with a sloth.
“I don’t understand. You’re going to hold a seance, and we can talk to Benedict’s ghost?”
“Benedict is in the underworld. He is not a ghost. He is a shade.” The sloth returned her head to its inverted position, a maneuver she accomplished without once dropping Quentin’s gaze.
“The underworld.” Jesus Christ. He hadn’t even realized Fillory had an underworld. “He’s in hell?”
“He is in the underworld, where dead souls go.”
“Is he all right there? Or I mean, I know he’s dead, but is he at peace? Or whatever?”
“That I cannot tell you. My understanding of human moods is imprecise. A sloth knows only peace, nothing else.”
It must be nice to be a sloth. Quentin was unsettled by the idea of Benedict in the underworld. It bothered him that Benedict could be dead but still—not alive, but what? Conscious? Awake? It was like he was buried alive. It sounded awful.
“But he’s not being tortured, right? By red guys with horns and pitchforks?” It never did to assume anything was impossible in Fillory.
“No. He is not being tormented.”
“But he’s not in heaven either.”
“I do not know what ‘heaven’ is. Fillory has only an underworld.”
“So how can I talk to him? Can you—I don’t know, put in a call? Patch me through?”
“No, Quentin. I am not a medium. I am a psychopomp. I do not speak to the dead, but I can show you the path to the underworld.”
Quentin was not sure he wanted to be shown that. He studied the sloth’s upside-down face. It was unreadable.
“Physically? I could physically go there?”
“Yes.”
Deep breath.
“Okay. I would really love to help Benedict, but I don’t want to leave the world of the living.”
“I will not force you. Indeed, I could not.”
It was spooky down in the hold, which was lightless except for the flame of Quentin’s candle, which stayed perfectly upright as the ship pitched forward and back. The hanging sloth did too—she swayed slightly, like a pendulum. Quentin’s eyes kept wandering off into the darkness. It was otherworldly down here. The ship’s curved sides were like the ribs of some huge animal that had swallowed them. Where was the underworld? Was it underground? Underwater?
The sloth chose this moment to engage in some self-grooming, which she did with her customary slowness and thoroughness, first with her tongue and then with a thick, woody claw, which she slowly and laboriously unhooked from around the beam.
“In a way”—she said, as she licked and clawed—“we sloths are like . . . small worlds . . . unto ourselves.”
Nobody could wait out a pause like a sloth. Or survive on less conversational encouragement. He wondered if to a sloth the human world appeared to move past at blinding, flickering speed—if humans looked twitchy and sped-up to her, the same way the sloth looked slowed-down to Quentin.
“There is a species of algae,” she said, “that grows only . . . in sloth fur. It accounts for our unique . . . greenish tint. The algae helps us blend in with the leaves. But it also serves . . . to nourish an entire ecological system. There is a species of moth that lives only . . . in the thick, algaerich fur . . . of the sloth. Once a moth arrives on its chosen sloth”—here she tussled with a particularly gristly knot of fur for a long minute before continuing—“its wings break off. It does not need them. It will never leave.”
Finally finished, she rehooked her claw over the beam and returned to her quiescent, upside-down state.
“They are called sloth moths.”
“Look,” Quentin said. “I want to be clear. I don’t have time to go to the underworld right now. At any other time grieving for Benedict would be the biggest thing in my life, but the universe is going through a crisis. We’re searching for a key, and there’s a lot riding on that. A lot. It could be the end of Fillory if we don’t find it. This will have to wait.”
“No time will pass while you are in the other realm. For the dead there is no change, and therefore no time.”
He couldn’t afford to get distracted. “Even if it takes no time. Anyway what good would it do? I can’t bring him back.”
“No.”
“So I hate to be blunt, but what’s the point?”
“You could offer Benedict comfort. Sometimes the living can give something to the dead. And perhaps he could offer you something too. My understanding of human emotions is . . .”
The sloth paused to ponder her choice of words.
“Imprecise?” Quentin said.
“Precisely. Imprecise. But I do not think Benedict was happy with his death.”
“It was a terrible death. He must feel very unhappy.”
“I think perhaps he wants to tell you that.”
Quentin hadn’t considered that.
“I think perhaps he could give you something too.”
The sloth regarded him with her gelatinous, glittering eyes, which seemed to pick up light from somewhere other than in the room. Then she closed them.
The ship grunted patiently as the waves beat against its hull, over and over again, monotonously. Quentin watched the sloth. By now he had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something that he himself should be doing, and he wasn’t doing it. He pictured Benedict, trapped and languishing in a poorly drawn cartoon netherworld. Would he want someone to come visit him? He probably would.
Quentin felt responsible for him. It was part of being a king. And Benedict had died before he found out what the keys were for. He thought that he’d died for no reason. Imagine chewing on that for eternity.
One of the things Quentin remembered from reading about King Arthur was that the knights who had sins on their consciences never did very well on the quest for the Grail. The thing was to go to confession before you set out. You had to face yourself and deal with your shit, that’s how you got somewhere. At the time Quentin thought that that was obvious, and he never understood why Gawain and the rougher knights didn’t just suck it up, get shriven, and get on with it. Instead they blundered around getting into fights and succumbing to temptation and eventually ended up nowhere near the Grail.
But being in the middle of it, it wasn’t that obvious. Maybe Benedict’s death was—if not a sin on his conscience, exactly, then something unresolved. The sloth was right. It was weighing on his soul, slowing them all
