Only a few weeks later, Biantha found herself walking aimlessly down a corridor, freeing her mind from the Prophecy’s tyrannous grip, when Lady Iastre shook her shoulder. “They’re back, Biantha,” she said hurriedly. “I thought you’d like to be there to greet them.”
“Who’s back?”
“Your son. And those who survived Silverbridge.”
Those who survived. Biantha closed her eyes, shaking. “If only the demons would leave us alone—”
The other woman nodded sadly. “But it’s not happening. The emperor will soon be at Evergard itself, is the news I’ve been hearing. Come on.”
“I can’t,” she said, and felt as though the keep were spinning around her while pitiless eyes peered through the walls. “Tell him—tell Marten—I’m glad he’s back.” It was all she could think to say, a message for her son—a message that she would not deliver in person, because the urgency of the situation had jarred her thoughts back to the Prophecy.
“Biantha!” Iastre cried, too late to stop her.
In bits and pieces she learned the rest of the story, by eavesdropping benignly on dinner conversations and the servants’ gossip. The emperor had indeed forsaken his court for the battlefield, perhaps because of Evergard’s stubborn resistance. None of this surprised her, except when a curly-haired herald mentioned the serpent-eyed scepter. To her knowledge that scepter had never left the empire—unless, and the thought sickened her, the demons had begun to consider Evergard part of their empire. It had turned Silverbridge, the shining bridge of ballad, into rust and tarnish, and even now the demons advanced.
Vathré gave a few permission to flee further east with their families, those whose presence mattered little to the coming siege. Others prepared to fight, or die, or both; the mock-battles that Biantha sometimes watched between the guards grew more grim, more intent. She and Iastre agreed that the time for draughts and rithmomachia had passed, as much as she would have welcomed the distraction.
As for Marten—she saw almost nothing of him except the terrible weariness that had taken up residence in his face, as though he had survived a torture past bearing. Biantha grieved for him as a mother; as a mathemagician, she had no comfort to offer, for her own helplessness threatened to overwhelm her. Perhaps he in his turn sensed this, and left her alone.
Day by day the demons came closer, to the point where she could stand on the battlements and see the baleful lights in the distance: the orange of campfires, the gold and silver of magefires. Day by day the discussions grew more frantic, more resigned.
At last, one morning, the horns blazed high and clear through the air, and the siege of Evergard began. Biantha took her place on the parapets without saying any farewells, though some had been said to her, and watched while archers fired into the demons’ massed ranks. Not long after, magefire rolled over their hastily raised shields, and she prepared her own spells. Only when the demons began to draw back and prepare a second attack did she call upon powers that required meticulous proofs, held in her mind like the memory of a favorite song—or a child in her arms.
She gathered all the shapes of pain that afflicted the demons and twisted them into death. Red mists obscured her vision as the spell wrenched her own soul, sparing her the need to watch the enemy falling. Yet she would have to use the spell again and again before the demons’ mathemagicians shaped a ward against it. Those who shared her art rarely ventured into battle, for this reason: it often took too long to create attacks or adapt to them. A theorem needed for a spell might take years to discover, or turn out to be impossible; and inspiration, while swift, was sometimes unreliable. She had seen mathemagicians die from careless assumptions in spellcasting.
By midday Biantha no longer noticed the newly fallen corpses. She leaned against the wall’s cold stone—and glimpsed black and red and gold in the distance: the demon emperor, carrying the serpent-eyed scepter that she remembered too clearly. For a moment she thought of the Blade Fidora and cursed the Prophecy’s inscrutable symmetry. “No,” she whispered. Only if the emperor were certain of victory would he risk himself in the front lines, and a cold conviction froze her thoughts.
Marten. He’s counting on Marten to help him.
She had to find Vathré and warn him. She knew where he would be and ran, despite the archers’ protests that she endangered herself. “My lord!” she cried, grieving already, because she saw her fair-haired son beside gray-haired Vathré, directing the defense. “My lord! The emperor—” Biantha nearly tripped, caught herself, continued running.
Vathré turned, trusting her, and then it happened.
The emperor raised his scepter, and darkness welled forth to batter Evergard’s walls. In the darkness, colors moved like the fire of dancing prisms; silence reigned for a second, strangely disturbing after the clamor of war. Then the emperor’s spell ended, leaving behind more dead than the eye could count at a glance. Broken shapes, blood, weapons twisted into deadly metal flowers, a wind like the breath of disease.
Biantha stared disbelievingly over the destruction and saw that the demons who had stood in the spell’s path had died as well; saw that the emperor had come forward to spare his own soldiers, not—she hoped not—because he knew he had a traitor in the Watchlanders’ ranks. So much death, and all they had been able to do, she and the other magicians, was watch.
“Mercy,” Vathré breathed.
“The scepter,” Marten said harshly. “Its unspoken name is Decay.”
She looked across at the gates and sneezed, dust stinging her nostrils. Already those who had fallen were rotting, flesh blackening and curling to reveal bone; Evergard’s sturdy walls had become cracked and mottled.
Marten was shouting orders for everyone to abandon that section of wall before it crumbled. Then he looked at her and said, “We have to get down. Before it spreads. You too, my lord.”
Vathré nodded curtly and offered Biantha his arm; Marten led the way down, across footing made newly treacherous. The walls whispered dryly behind them; she flinched at the crash as a crenel broke off and plummeted.
“—use that scepter again?” she heard the lord asking Marten as she concentrated on her footing.
“No,” she and her son both said. Biantha continued, “Not so far from the seat of his power and without the blood sacrifices. Not against wood or stone. But a touch, against living flesh, is another matter.”
They had reached safety of sorts with the others who had fled the crumbling section of wall. “What of the Prophecy?” Vathré asked her, grimacing as he cast his gaze over the morning’s carnage.
“Prophecy?” Marten repeated, looking at them strangely.
Perhaps he had not heard, or failed to understand what he heard, in the brief time he had been at Evergard. Biantha doubted he had spent much time with the minstrels. At least he was not—she prayed not—a traitor, as she had thought at first. Breath coming hard, she looked around, listened to the cries of the wounded, and then, all at once, the answer came to her, one solution of several.
Perspective. Time and again she had brooded over the Prophecy and the second war it foretold. The rhymes, the rhythms, the ambiguities, she had said to Vathré not long ago. She had thought about the strange symmetry, the Nightbreak War’s traitor—but failed to consider that, in the Prophecy’s second war, the corresponding traitor might betray the demons. The demons, not the Watchlands.
Last time, Lord Mière had betrayed the Watchlands, and died at Paienne’s hand—father and daughter, while Biantha and Marten were mother and son. But the mirror was imperfect, as the twisted symmetry already showed her. Marten did not have to die, and there was still hope for victory.
“The emperor is still down there,” said Vathré quietly. “It seems that if someone were to stop him, we could hold the keep. Hold the keep, and have a chance of winning.”
“A challenge,” Biantha breathed, hardly aware that those around them were listening avidly, for on this hung Evergard’s fate. “Challenge the emperor. H
e has his honor, strange as it may seem to us. He lost his champion; will he turn down an opportunity to slay, or be slain by, that champion?”
Had there been such a challenge in the Nightbreak War? The ballads, the histories, failed to say. No matter. They were not living a ballad, but writing their own lines to the song.
Vathré nodded, seeing the sense in her words; after all, she had lived in the demons’ realm. Then he unfastened the sheath of his sword from his belt and held it out to Marten. “Take the sword,” he said.
If she was wrong, giving the Blade Fidora to him was unrivaled folly. But they no longer had a choice, if they meant to take advantage of the Prophecy’s tangled possibilities.
He blanched. “I can’t. I don’t even know who the heir is—” probably because Vathré still had not declared the succession. “I haven’t the right.”
Biantha gazed at the gates, now twisted into rusty skeins. The captain of the guard had rallied the remaining troops and was grimly awaiting the demons’ advance.
The lord of Evergard said, exasperated, “I give you the right. This isn’t the time for questions or self-recriminations. Take the sword.”
Resolutely, Marten accepted the Blade Fidora. He grasped the sword’s hilt, and it came clear of the scabbard, shining faintly. “I’m sorry for what I have done in the past,” he whispered, “even though that doesn’t change what was done. Help me now.”
“Hurry,” said Biantha, guessing the battle’s shape. “The emperor will soon come to claim his prize, our home, and you must be there to stop him.” She stood on her toes and kissed him on the cheek: a mother’s kiss, which she had not given him for too many years. She called to mind every protective spell she could think of and forged them together around him despite her exhaustion. “Go with my blessing.” And please come back to me. After losing him once, Biantha did not mean to lose him again.
“And go with mine,” Vathré echoed.
He ducked his head and moved away at a run. Shivering, Biantha tried to gather the strength for more magic against the demons, to influence the Prophecy in their favor. She felt as if she were a formula in an old book, a creature of faded ink and yellowed paper.
As she and Vathré watched, Marten shoved through the soldiers at the gate, pausing only to exchange a few words with some of his comrades. They parted for him, wondering that he and not Vathré held the Blade Fidora; Vathré waved at them in reassurance. Past the gates were the emperor and his elites, dressed in rich colors, standing in near-perfect formation.
“Traitor,” said the emperor to Marten in the cool voice that had never revealed anything but mockery; demon and human both strained to hear him. “Do you think Evergard’s blade will protect you?”
In answer Marten swung the sword toward the emperor’s exposed throat, where veins showed golden through the translucent skin. The elites reacted by moving to surround him while the emperor brought his serpent-eyed scepter up in a parry. The soldiers of Evergard, in their turn, advanced in Marten’s defense. Biantha felt a hysterical laugh forming: the soldiers of both sides looked as though they had choreographed their motions, like dancers.
Now, straining to see what was happening, she realized why the emperor had chosen her son for his champion. Several of the elites saw clearly the blows that would kill them, yet failed to counter in time. Yet her eyes were drawn to the emperor himself, and she sucked in her breath: the emperor appeared to be aiming at a woman who had crippled one of the elites, but Biantha saw the twist in the scepter’s trajectory that would bring it around to strike Marten. Even a traitor champion could not survive a single touch of the scepter; it would weaken him beyond his ability to recover.
“Marten!” she screamed. He was all she had left of her old home and its decadent intrigues; of a man with gentle hands who had loved her within the narrow limits of court life; of her family. The emperor had stolen him from her for so long—
Mathemagical intuition launched her past the meticulous lemmas and lines of a proof, panic giving her thoughts a hawk’s wings. Biantha spun one more spell. Symmetry: the emperor’s attack became Marten’s, in spaces too strange for the mind to imagine. The Blade Fidora went true to its target, while the scepter missed entirely, and it was the emperor’s golden blood that showered Marten’s hands.
I’m sorry for everything, Marten, thought Biantha, and folded out of consciousness.
The minstrels who survived the Siege of Evergard made into song the deaths, the desperation, the duel between the demon emperor and he who was now heir to the Watchlands. Biantha, for her part, listened and grieved in her own way for those who had died . . . for Mière’s great-grandson. There was more to any story, she had learned, than what the minstrels remembered; and this was as true of herself, her husband, her son.
Biantha wrote only two lines in the margin of an unfinished book—a book of her own theorems.
There are too many shapes of love to be counted.
One of them is forgiveness.
It was a conjecture, not a proof, but Biantha knew its truth nonetheless. After the ink had dried, she left her room with its well-worn books and went to the great hall where Vathré and Iastre, and most especially Marten, expected her for dinner.
for Ch’mera, and for those who teach math
Lev Grossman is the author of three novels: Warp, Codex, and The Magicians. He is also a world-renowned critic and technology writer, having been published in such venues as The New York Times, Salon.com, Entertainment Weekly, The Wall Street Journal, and The Village Voice. He is also the long-time book reviewer for Time Magazine. He is currently working on a sequel to The Magicians, which is due out in 2011. Learn more at levgrossman.com.
Grossman’s recent novel The Magicians takes a jaded look at magical tales in the Harry Potter/Narnia mode. Grossman’s protagonist Quentin Coldwater is a shy, bright high school senior with an interest in fantasy novels and stage magic who one day finds himself transported to a secretive magical academy called Brakebills. But this is no delightful voyage of wonder and discovery. Magic, it turns out, is mind-numbingly tedious to learn, and what do you do with your life after you graduate? The instructors at Brakebills are unhinged and often callous, and getting along with the other students is as painful and complicated as in the real world. Finally Quentin begins to believe that he can find a way into a real fantasy world—one full of quests and talking animals—but that doesn’t exactly go according to plan either.
George R.R. Martin says, “The Magicians is to Harry Potter as a shot of Irish whiskey is to a glass of weak tea.” Our next tale is set in the same universe as The Magicians, and shows what some young wizards get up to when they’re done with studying.
Endgame
Lev Grossman
It was morning rush hour and the subway station was packed. The platform was choked with people: they bunched up at the stairs and wherever construction made the space too narrow and they had to walk in single file. Some of them had thought it necessary to bring an umbrella and some of them hadn’t.
They were all trying to hurry while at the same time not touch each other or look directly at each other or acknowledge in any way that there was anybody else on the platform with them. They made themselves human black holes: no information about their interior lives, if they had any, escaped through their faces. A train pulled in, and everybody raised their hands to their ears in unison at the scream of metal on metal.
A pretty young woman with short dark hair stood by a metal pylon at the edge of the platform, just short of the nubby yellow warning strip. She kept her back to the tracks, watching the crowd shuffle by her. Trains came and went, but she didn’t get on any of them. She just stood there. The only other person doing the same thing was an old man in a dashiki sitting on a milk crate under the stairs, who was playing “Margaritaville” over and over again on a steelpan.
The young woman had been excited when she first arrived, but she’d been standing there for two hours now, starting at six in the morn
ing, and her excitement was starting to pall. It was separating out into boredom and jitteriness, the way the frosting on a birthday cake that’s been left out too long separates into butter and sugar. She wasn’t especially enjoying “Margaritaville,” which the old man in the dashiki rendered slowly and lovingly, with a lot of swelling tremolos and rallentandos. She leaned back against the iron pillar, bumpy with hundreds of coats of burnt-orange house paint, thinking bored and jittery thoughts, and let the waves of people wash past her. Here they were, the winners of humanity’s great historical lottery, living in the richest city in the world, in the richest period of human civilization ever, and they were trudging to work in a rat-infested cement cavern on their way to stare at computer screens for eight hours. What happened here? Whose fault was it? Who had betrayed whom? And yes, real live rats. She’d seen six so far.
She just wanted it to start already. She looked at her watch. The fug in the air was rich and capricious—steam, sweat, machine oil, cheese, shit—Jesus, you took your life in your hands every time you breathed in. It was only about the third time she’d ever even been in a subway station.
She glanced down the platform to where Rob was standing, his gawky curly head bobbing and swiveling above the crowd like an ostrich’s, his mouth never quite completely closed. They were supposed to make eye contact every five minutes. That was part of the system. Sean would be somewhere down the other end. The three of them were the stoppers. She looked at her watch, then back at the crowd.
The thing was, it was taking too long. It had already taken too long. Way too long. She looked at her watch again: 8:07.
Possibly they hadn’t come, or they hadn’t come this way, but she didn’t believe it. They had to come this way; tactically it was over-determined ten times over, and plus they had good intel. But the thing was, they didn’t have all that far to come, and they wouldn’t have waited this long. They must have slipped through the net. Maybe their guises were better than anticipated. Something new. They’d be at the goal soon if somebody didn’t chase them down. Probably they were already there, except that then the turn would have ended.
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