The Magician's Land

by Lev Grossman

  They started in on the low-hanging fruit, making sure that conditions in the room were optimal and were going to stay that way. Constant temperature; a little extra oxygen; low light from the chandelier; no weird magical incursions. They cast spells on each other to ward off any weird charges or energies and to speed up their reaction times just a touch; some of this stuff you just couldn’t cast right at baseline human speed. Caffeine helped with that too, so they kept plenty of that around.

  The air in the workroom became still and cool, and it began to smell very slightly sweet—jasmine, she thought, though she wasn’t quite sure. She couldn’t remember when they’d arranged that.

  By around five o’clock in the afternoon they realized they were putting off casting anything that would take them past the tipping point—that would commit them to doing this thing right here and now, tonight, and not tomorrow or some other day. The train was still in the station, it could still be delayed. But they’d run out of bullshit prep work. It was in or out.

  Only now did Plum realize how nervous she was.

  “I’m calling it,” Quentin said. “If we’re doing this let’s do it.”

  “All right.”

  “Go ahead and cast Clarifying Radiance.”

  “OK.”

  “I’ll start prepping the Scythian Dream.”

  “Check.”

  “OK, go.”

  “Going.”

  She went. Plum turned to the first set of materials on the shelf: four black powders in little dishes and a silver bell. Clarifying Radiance. Meanwhile Quentin said a word of power, and the light in the room became a shade more sepia, like the sunlight moments before a thunderstorm. Everything began to sound echoey, as if they were in a much larger room. Just like that they crossed the Rubicon. The train left the station.

  From that point on it was controlled chaos. Sometimes they worked together—one or two of the spells were four-handed. Other times the flow diverged, and they’d be doing totally different spells in parallel, stealing glances at the other one’s work to make sure they finished up at the same time.

  There was a steady flow of cross-talk.

  “Slow it down, slow it down. Finish in three, two—”

  “Look out, the streams are forking. They’re forking!”

  A single curve of Irish Fire delaminated into two, then four, curling away to either side. The curls started pointing worryingly back toward Plum, who was casting them.

  “I’ve got it,” she said. “Dammit!”

  The fire went out.

  “Do it again. Do it again. There’s still time.”

  It went on like that for three or four hours—it was hard to keep track. By then they were deep into it, and the atmosphere in the room had gotten thoroughly dreamlike. Huge shadows stalked along the walls. The room seemed to list and bank like it had taken flight with them inside it. She banged a tray down onto the work table in front of Quentin, and he began picking what he needed off it without even glancing down at it, and she was shocked to realize that it was the second-to-last spell on the list. This was almost it.

  Plum had run out of things to do so she just watched him, drinking a glass of water she’d placed under the table when they started and had somehow managed not to kick over. The rest of it was all him. She was dizzy, and her arms felt weak. She folded them over her chest to keep them from shaking.

  Plum didn’t think her friends would have made fun of Quentin at that moment. For a while she’d fallen into the habit of thinking of him as a peer, basically, but over the past week she’d been reminded that he was a decade older and doing magic on a different level from her. Right now he looked like a young Prospero in his prime. He’d taken off his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his white dress shirt, which was wringing with sweat. He must have been tired but his voice was still firm and resonant, and his fingers were working with a practiced crispness through positions she’d never seen before, the tendons standing out on the backs of his hands. This was the kind of magic, Plum thought, she would do when she grew up.

  Big surges of power were flowing through the room. It crossed her mind that spells like this were exactly what turned people into niffins, when they got out of hand. Huge tranches and structures of magic that so far she’d only ever seen in isolation were colliding and interacting like weather systems. The intensity doubled and redoubled itself. Without warning the room juddered and dropped, leaving them in free fall for an instant—if it had been an airplane the oxygen masks would have come down. Quentin’s voice sounded artificially deep, and he’d started to tremble with the effort of keeping everything together. He hastily dragged an arm across his forehead.

  “Staff,” he said. “Staff!”

  The second time he barked it, loudly, and Plum snapped awake and turned and grabbed the black wood staff from where it stood leaned up in one corner.

  He was hitting the panic button. Quentin grabbed the staff from her quickly, blindly, and as soon as it was in his hands it began jerking and vibrating, like it was attached to a line with an enormous fish on the other end, or a giant kite caught in a high wind.

  She moved to help him, but he shook his head.

  “Better not touch me,” he said through clenched teeth. “Could be bad.”

  The air was thick with the smell of burning metal and the sweat of tired magicians. She could sense it in the room with them now, the land itself: an angry, hungry, thirsty infant thing demanding life, ready to take it from them if it had to. It cried out with an almost human voice. A spray of golden light erupted from between one of Quentin’s fingers: that must have been one of Mayakovsky’s coins going. Scenery raced past the windows, all of them now, too blurred to make out.

  Space distorted grotesquely, and for an instant the room looked stretched out of all proportion, fish-eyed, as if a bulbous blister had formed on the surface of reality itself. Plum was scared of what would happen if it burst.

  Quentin shouted, in pain or triumph or despair, Plum couldn’t tell which:

  “Nothung!”

  He spun the staff and banged the silver-shod end against the floor with a sound like a gunshot. She felt the shock through the soles of her feet. The wires in the ceiling and walls went red hot, and the letters on the floor burned white like magnesium.

  Then they faded again, and bit by bit it all stopped. The floor stabilized. The air was still again; a couple of candles hadn’t blown out, and their flames wobbled and then straightened up. Quentin collapsed forward onto the table. The room was silent except for a faint high silvery tone, though it could have been her ears ringing.

  The world outside the window had become lower Manhattan again, even that odd little window in the corner. Quentin raised his head and straightened up. He peered around, up at the ceiling, into the dark corners of the room, curiously. He looked over at Plum.

  She pointed behind him.

  A red door had appeared in the wall. It was painted wood banded with black iron that had been worked into elaborate curves and fairy spirals. Quentin dropped the staff, and it clattered to the floor.

  CHAPTER 21

  Plum watched him take a few slow, cautious, disbelieving steps toward the door and then stop again, as the dust settled and the ringing died away. Plum felt wrung out, shivery, like she’d gone for a run on an empty stomach, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the red door.

  “We did it,” Quentin said solemnly. “It really worked. We made a new land.”

  It had one brass knob, placed in the center. Quentin touched it and then put his hand on it, hesitantly, as if he expected an electric shock, or as if he thought his hand might go right through it. But it was solid. He turned the knob and pushed—wrong—then pulled the door toward him. It opened easily.

  A cold wind breathed into the room. It cooled Plum’s overheated forehead, but it chilled something deeper inside her.


  “Quentin,” she said.

  He didn’t move, and she stepped forward to stand beside him on the threshold.

  “Are you going in?”

  Like he was waking from a dream Quentin looked over at her.

  “In a minute.” He held up his hand. “I was sure I was going to have a scar there from Mayakovsky’s coin. Like in Raiders. It felt like it was burning. But there’s nothing.”

  Plum had no idea what he was talking about, but she didn’t say anything. It didn’t seem like the moment.

  The land didn’t look like the Hundred Acre Wood. It wasn’t even an orchard. It wasn’t even outside. Looking through the door was like looking in that mirror back at Brakebills, after Darcy’s reflection had vanished: it was exactly like the room they were standing in, except for the fact that they weren’t standing in it. And it was all reversed.

  “Through the looking glass,” Quentin said.

  This wasn’t what she’d expected. Quentin picked up a long-handled spoon from the worktable and tossed it underhand through the doorway. It clanged and slid along the floor in the other room. It seemed safe enough.

  “What is this?” she said.

  “I think it’s our land.”

  “But why does it look like that? Is that what it’s supposed to look like?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was this what you were expecting? I thought you were going to do an orchard. Is this what you were trying to do?”

  “No.”

  “Why would you make a land that looks exactly the same as the one you’re already in?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  Quentin walked through the door and into the other room. She watched him look around. She had to hand it to him, he didn’t look all that freaked out. Just checking out the scene.

  “Classic,” he said. “It’s completely reversed. It’s opposite-land. You gotta like the respect for tradition.”

  He spread out his arms.

  “Come on in if you want to, I think it’s safe.”

  Plum went on in. It really was the weirdest thing. It was like the house had acquired a Siamese twin, attached to it at the door. She was struggling with a sense of anticlimax.

  “It sort of worked,” Plum said. “I mean, we did make a land, right?”

  Quentin nodded.

  “Or a house anyway. Let’s be careful, Plum, this feels a little off.”

  It was a very, very quiet house. The original house was magically soundproofed, so it was quiet too, but this was different. This place was sonically dead—it was as if the walls were covered in that egg-carton foam they used to line the walls in music studios.

  And there was something else. The place had a claustrophobic feel. She couldn’t put her finger on it till it was literally staring her in the face.

  “Look at the windows,” she said. “All the windows. They’re not windows, they’re mirrors.”

  It was like the eyes of the house had gone blind.

  “Huh. I wonder what the mirrors are.”

  Yeah. Good question. There was one in the little half bath out on the landing. She steeled herself for some horror-movie shocker and then poked her head in.

  Curiouser and curiouser. The mirror was still there, and it was still a mirror, but inside the room in the mirror it was snowing—blowing snow, bordering on a real blizzard. It was starting to drift on the floor, the towel racks, the rim of the sink. It settled on her hair and her eyelashes. But only in the mirror: reflexively she touched her hair, but it was dry. The snow wasn’t real. Quentin appeared behind her.

  “Eek,” he said.

  Clearly this was affecting them in different ways.

  They strolled through the house, lord and lady of their uncanny new domain. Everything was there, more or less, except when it wasn’t. The furniture, the drapes, the silverware, the glassware. The doors were ordinary doors. But there were no computers and no phones. The books were there, but the pages were blank. No toiletries in the bathroom, no clothes in the closets. Nobody lived here. Water came out of the taps, but cold only. They disagreed over whether one of the oriental rugs was left-right inverted—Quentin was sure it was—but Plum remembered it differently, and neither of them felt like going back and checking the original.

  Fatigue and disappointment were giving them both a slightly hysterical edge.

  “It’s like a giant closet,” Plum said. “We could store stuff in here. We’d have more closet space than anybody in New York City.”

  “We’re not going to store stuff in here.”

  “Put a couple of flat-screens in here, Xbox, easy chair: man-cave!”

  They’d made their way up to the top floor again when they heard a heavy clunk from the floor below. Her bedroom.

  “I guess that’s the other shoe,” Quentin said. “Wands out, Harry.”

  Plum snorted—charitably, because she was a good person—but she took his point. She went defensive: a nice hard blocking spell. Charge it up and you could hold it back till you needed it; it would just take a gesture to release it. Whatever Quentin was prepping, it gave off a high rising whine.

  But when they got there the bedroom was empty, except that Plum’s desk chair was now lying on its back, its little feet in the air, like it was playing dead: ah—they got me! Slowly Quentin lifted it up and set it on its feet.

  “The chair fell over,” he said brightly.

  “All right, all right.”

  It was like they were daring each other to be the first to lose their nerve. They tromped downstairs to the second floor. Another thing: color photographs had faded to black and white.

  “I wonder—” But Quentin was cut off by that same clunk as before, from over their heads now. The chair again.

  “Huh.” Neither of them wanted to look. “I wonder what’s outside?”

  “I don’t,” Plum said. “And I dare you to not look.”

  For a second they both thought there was something in Quentin’s bed, but he jerked the covers back and it was just a pillow. This was seriously creeping her out. Something shattered downstairs in the kitchen—it sounded like somebody dropping a wineglass.

  Obediently, they both trotted downstairs, Quentin first. Lo, a lone wineglass lay in pieces right in the middle of the floor. Lookee there.

  “Must have been the wind,” Plum said.

  Now she was doing it. Her shrink would say she was using humor to avoid deeper feelings. She would be right.

  They rummaged around aimlessly; they were both hoping to stumble on something that would make the land exciting, and magical, and Romantic, the way they were hoping it would be, but they didn’t. She didn’t like this land. It was like they’d dialed a wrong number. This wasn’t what they’d ordered.

  “I wonder, if there’s food here, if you can eat it?” Quentin said.

  She nerved herself to open the fridge. There had been a bowl of green grapes in it, but the grapes had become green glass marbles.

  Quentin was picking up books one after the other and opening them.

  “Dude. They’re all going to be blank.”

  “Maybe. This isn’t what I expected, but I don’t know why it’s not what I expected. It felt right when we were casting it, but something must have gone wrong.”

  He put the book down and walked boldly over to the front door, but before he could open it there was a muffled thud from the second floor. It might have been a lamp falling over onto a rug. He stopped, his hand on the doorknob.

  “Quentin—”

  “I know,” he said. “This is definitely a land, but I’m not completely sure it’s our land.”

  “Whose then?”

  He shook his head. He didn’t know. It was literally everything she could do not to start humming “This Land Is Your Land.”

  “Well, we made it,�
�� Plum said.

  “I know, I know. Want to go see who knocked over the lamp?”

  “Let’s go.”

  She followed Quentin up the stairs but he stopped halfway, listening.

  “Why do I feel like we’re getting decoyed here?” He turned around and edged past her, back down the stairs. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Famous last words.”

  She watched him reach the bottom of the stairs and freeze, staring at something out of view.

  “Shit.”

  “What is it?”

  Except that she knew even as she was asking him. There were blue highlights on the polished banister next to him. She knew that blue.

  “Run!”

  He pelted up the stairs at her, white-faced.

  “Jesus, run!”

  He would have run straight over her if she hadn’t snapped out of it and taken off like a shot ahead of him. It shouldn’t be here. It was like something from a dream had followed her into the real world, or maybe it was the other way—she’d followed it into the dream. Quentin covered a lot of ground with those long legs—he overtook her on the second floor, sprinting right past her, but he grabbed her hand as he passed her and pulled her along, practically yanking her arm out of its socket. He barked his shin hard on an ottoman as he ran, which must have hurt like hell.

  “Run run run! Come on!”

  On the third-floor landing Quentin paused and sent a spell down the stairs over her shoulder, something that flashed hot on her face, then they were running shoulder to shoulder up the stairs and into the workroom and through the door and out into the real world.

  She slammed the door behind them, then blasted out the blocking spell she’d had ready for good measure. She’d totally forgotten about it till then. The air in front of the door shivered.

  They looked at each other, both breathing hard.

  “I don’t,” Quentin panted. “Think. She can. Come through.”

  He looked like he was going to cry or be sick or both. She really hoped he did neither of those. They shouldn’t have cast the spell. Jesus, how stupid did you have to be—ancient enchantment rouses primal horror, it was the oldest story there was. Hubris. They were such idiots.