The Magician King

by Lev Grossman

  Quentin slept like the dead till noon the next day, when he enjoyed a formal breakfast in the dining room. (Josh was exceptionally proud of the table he set. “Over here they use spoons for their jam. Amazing, right? Tiny spoons! It’s ‘fit for a king’!” Wink, wink.) They were joined by Julia, who kept her sunglasses on and ate only marmite, straight from the jar, which if anything seemed like further proof of her declining humanity.

  They were also joined by Poppy, Josh’s friend, the one who was supposed to know something about dragons. She was a beanpole, tall and skinny, with wide blue eyes and curly blond hair. Poppy had been to Brakebills as it happened, but only in a postgraduate capacity as a research fellow. She’d learned her magic at a college in Australia, which was where she was from.

  Quentin had some idea that Australians were fun-loving and easygoing, and if that was true he could why see Poppy had gotten the hell out of Australia. She had a bright, sharp manner and a quick little voice and a lot of confidence. She was especially confident when it came to pointing out other people’s mistakes. Not that she was a know-it-all—it didn’t seem to be an ego thing with her. She just assumed that everybody shared her desire for everybody to be clear on everything, and she’d expect you to do the same for her. Apparently at Esquith, which was the Australian magic school in Tasmania, she’d been the academic superstar of her year. This according to Josh, but Poppy didn’t contradict him, which if it weren’t true would have gone against her error-hating nature.

  Poppy was an academic at heart, but she wasn’t the ivory tower type. She was into the real world. She was into fieldwork. Specifically she was into dragons.

  Quentin supposed it was an extension of the general Australian preoccupation with fatally dangerous animals. Start with saltwater crocodiles and box jellyfish and it was just a hop, skip, and a jump up the food chain before you got to dragons. Poppy knew about as much about them as it was possible to know with actually ever having seen one. She’d followed leads all over the world, and now she’d followed one here. Josh had put out feelers for an expert on the topic, and he’d been very pleased indeed when his expert had turned out to be as good-looking as Poppy was. She’d been there for three weeks, and Josh didn’t feel she’d worn out her welcome.

  He introduced her as his friend, but given who Josh was, and given Poppy’s undeniable prettiness, Quentin didn’t think it was uncharitable to assume that Josh was trying to sleep with her or had already slept with her. He was new and improved, but he was still Josh.

  Frankly Poppy got on Quentin’s nerves a bit, but she was about to come in extremely handy. Josh had yet to give her the full download about the dragon of the Grand Canal. He told Quentin he’d been slowplaying it in an attempt to prolong her visit. But now the moment had arrived. They needed her. Needless to say Poppy was beyond excited. Her wide blue eyes got even wider.

  “Well, okay,” she said, talking at a runaway clip. “So most of the dragons have a place where you’re supposed to be able to jump into their river and they’ll notice. They monitor it just in case somebody worth their while wants to talk to them. If they want to talk to you, they’ll take you down to where they live. But it’s not a well-understood process at all. There are a lot of urban legends around it. Lots of people say they’ve talked to dragons, but it’s very hard to verify. Supposedly the Thames dragon wrote most of Pink Floyd’s stuff. At least after Syd Barrett left. But there’s no way to prove it.

  “Traditionally you approach them via the first bridge upstream from the sea, in this case I guess the Accademia. Haven’t you guys heard all this stuff? I can’t believe you haven’t heard about this. Go at midnight. Go to the middle of the bridge. Take a copy of today’s newspaper and a nice steak. Wear something nice. And that’s it.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. And then you jump in. It’s all just tradition. I mean, God knows if any of it helps. There’s so little data, and so little of it is reliable.”

  And then you jump in. That was all.

  “But it does sometimes work?” Quentin said.

  “Sure!” Poppy nodded brightly. “Uh-huh. Some dragons like to talk more than others. The valedictorian of the magic school in Calcutta makes a run at the Ganges dragon every year, and it works about half the time.

  “A dragon in the Grand Canal, though. That’s new. I mean, really new. I was starting to think you were full of shit.” She gave Josh a sharp, reappraising look.

  “Starting?” Quentin said.

  “So when are you going?”

  “Tonight. But listen, do me one favor. Don’t tell anybody about this yet.”

  Poppy frowned prettily, which seemed to the only way she knew how. “Why not?”

  “Just give us a week,” Quentin said. “That’s all I ask. The dragon isn’t going anywhere, and I need to get a decent chance with it. If word gets out there’s going to be a mob scene.”

  She thought for a second.

  “All right,” she said.

  Something about the way she said it suggested to Quentin that she might actually keep her promise.

  Recovering her high spirits immediately, Poppy addressed herself to her jam and toast. Thin as she was, she ate more than Josh, presumably burning it all in whatever inner furnace kept her at such a pitch of eager excitement all the time.

  That left the rest of the day to dispense with. Life at the Palazzo Josh (formerly the Palazzo Barberino, after the sixteenth-century clan that built it and eventually sold it to a dot-com jillionaire, who never set foot in it, and who blew his jillions on Ponzi schemes and a trip to the International Space Station, after which he sold it to Josh) wasn’t exactly taxing. He felt disloyal for thinking it, disloyal to Fillory, but he could almost get used to this. The palazzo’s comforts were many. You could spend the morning in bed, reading and watching the Venetian light track slowly over an oriental carpet that was so fractally ornate it practically scintillated right there on the floor in front of you. Then there was all of Venice to wander around—the structural spells alone, the titanic bonds that kept the whole place from drowning itself in the lagoon, were a must-see for any tourist of the world’s magical wonders.

  Then there was the daily late-afternoon spritz. Taken altogether it was enough to make Quentin forget for minutes at a time that once upon a time he used to be the king of a magical otherworld.

  Not Julia, though. Not quite. She found him nursing his drink on the piano nobile and admiring the cityscape over its heavy stone railing. Together they looked down at the traffic on the canal, much of which consisted of tourists on boats looking up at them and wondering who they were and whether they were famous.

  “You like it here,” Julia said.

  “It’s amazing. I’d never even been to Italy before. I had no idea it was like this.”

  “I lived in France for a while,” she said.

  “You did? When did you live in France?”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Was that where you learned to steal cars?”

  “No.”

  Having brought it up, she didn’t seem to want to talk about it.

  “It is nice here,” she conceded.

  “Do you want to stay here?” Quentin asked. “Do you still want to go back to Fillory?”

  She set her glass down on the wide marble parapet. More whiskey, still neat. A muscle twinged in her jaw.

  “I have to go back. I cannot stay here.” Before when she said this she sounded angry and desperate. Now she sounded regretful. “I must keep going. Are you coming with me?”

  It made Quentin’s heart ache, to hear Julia ask him for something. Anything. She needed his help. People needing him: it was a new feeling. He was starting to like it.

  “Of course I am.” It was what she’d said when he asked her to come along to the Outer Island.

  She nodded, never taking her eyes off the view.

  “Thank you.”

  That night at five minutes to midnight Quentin was remember
ing that conversation and trying to hold on to that feeling as he loitered on the Ponte dell’Accademia, holding copies of Il Gazzettino and the International Herald Tribune, just to cover all the bases, and a really great, amazingly expensive raw steak, doing his very best impression of somebody who wasn’t about to jump into the Grand Canal.

  After the crushing, malodorous heat of the day, the night air was surprisingly frigid. From the point of view of someone who was planning to immerse himself in it, the creamy green water of the Grand Canal looked about as enticing as glacial runoff. It also looked a lot farther away than it had looked from the banks. It also looked clean, which Quentin knew it wasn’t.

  But somewhere under all that water there was a button. And a dragon. It didn’t seem real. He half-suspected Josh of having lost the button in a sofa and making up the story about the dragon because it was less embarrassing.

  “This is going to be really wretched, dude,” Josh said. “You are not going to be a happy puppy in there.”

  “No kidding.” He’d hoped Josh would offer to do it himself, or go in with him, but no such luck.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Poppy said, hugging herself.

  “Why are you here, again?” Quentin said.

  “Interests of science. Plus I want to see if you’ll actually go through with it.”

  It was a personal tic of Poppy’s that she never seemed to lie when other people would. It was either tactless or admirable, depending on how you looked at it.

  Quentin took some deep breaths and leaned against the splintery wooden railing, which still retained some of the fading heat of the sun. Remember what’s at stake. Julia wouldn’t hesitate. She’d be over the railing like a damn Olympic hurdler. At his request they hadn’t told her they were going tonight, but slipped out after she went to bed. She would have insisted on going in.

  “They hardly ever eat people,” Poppy said. “I mean like twice a century. That we know of.”

  Quentin didn’t respond to this.

  “How deep do you think it is?” Josh said. He dragged on a cigarette. Of the three of them he looked the most nervous.

  “Twenty feet maybe,” Quentin said. “I read it on the Internet.”

  “Jesus. Well, whatever you do don’t dive.”

  “If I break my neck and end up paralyzed just let me drown.”

  “Two minutes,” Poppy said. An empty vaporetto churned by underneath them, off duty, lights off except for one in the cozy pilot’s cabin. That water must be ninety percent E. coli, and the rest was probably diesel fuel. This was not a body of water intended for swimming in.

  Somebody had carved what might have been a stylized dragon, or just a fancy s, into the wood right at the apex of the bridge.

  “Are you going to take off your clothes?” Josh asked.

  “You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for you to ask me that.”

  “Seriously, are you?”

  “No.”

  Poppy said it at the same time he did.

  “Seriously,” she added.

  Their little group fell silent. Somewhere far away glass broke. Beer bottle versus wall. Quentin wondered if he was actually going to do this. Maybe he could just drop a note in. Message in a bottle. Call me.

  “Hey, remember when that little person called your cell?” he said. “Did you get his number? Maybe we could just—”

  “It was blocked.”

  “Time!” Poppy said.

  “Damn it!”

  Just don’t think about it. He backed up to the middle of the bridge, scrunched the papers and the bag with the steak in it up in one hand, ran at the railing, and vaulted over it sidewise. He surprised himself by how spryly he did it. Must be the adrenaline. Even so he almost clipped a sticking-out support beam going down.

  Some primal instinct caused him to flap his arms and let go of the steak and the papers in midair. They separated from him and disappeared into the night. So much for that. To his left he caught a glimpse of something falling in parallel with him. Somebody—it was Poppy! She was jumping in too.

  He hit hard, feetfirst more or less, and went under. His only thought as he went down was to clench or snort out air from all possible orifices to try to avoid taking in any water or other fluids. The canal was freezing and powerfully salty. For an instant he felt relief—it wasn’t that cold—then his clothes soaked through and turned to frozen lead, and the cold pressed in on him from all sides. He panicked and thrashed—his clothes were too heavy. They were going to drag him under! Then his head broke the surface.

  He’d lost a shoe. Poppy surfaced at the same moment a couple of yards away, spitting and blowing, her round face shining pale in the sodium light of the streetlights. He should have been mad at her, but the gonzo jolliness of swimming in the Grand Canal in the middle of the night made him laugh crazily instead.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he stage-whispered.

  If nothing else the freezing shock had taken away his irritation at her. He had to give her credit for a degree of physical courage he wouldn’t have thought she possessed. They were in it together.

  “Twice the chances, right? If there’s two of us?” She was grinning a loony grin too. She lived for this shit. “I was wrong, we should have taken our clothes off.”

  He treaded water. It took about thirty seconds before he was exhausted and shivering uncontrollably. The current was sweeping them under the bridge—not the current, the tide, it must be, he reminded himself, since the canal wasn’t really a river. Jesus, there could be sharks in this bitch. Somebody yelled at them from the bank, in Italian. He hoped it wasn’t a cop.

  Quentin peed in his pants and felt warmer for ten seconds, then even colder afterward. He tried not to think of what PCBs and other industrial toxins must be leaching their way into him upstream. From down here the canal looked enormous, the banks miles away. How did he get here, so far from where he started? How had he gone so far off track? He felt like he would never claw his way back to where he should be, back onto his cozy throne. A wavelet popped up out of nowhere and slapped him in the face. He was ready to call it a night. At least he could say he tried.

  “How long are we supposed to wait?” he asked Poppy.

  Just then an iron handcuff locked around his ankle and jerked him under.

  He should have died right then. Surprise made him blurt out all his air in one heave, and he went down with his lungs completely empty.

  But there was a spell in effect to keep him alive. It was obviously something the dragon had developed over many years for the comfort of its human visitors. It was comprehensive. It was user-friendly. It had the feel of magic finely milled by long centuries of use and cast by a past-master with wings and a tail. Quentin wasn’t going to die. Or at least not by accident.

  In fact he felt warm, for the first time in what seemed like hours, and he could see clearly, if dimly, which he shouldn’t have been able to do. He was breathing the water. It wasn’t quite like breathing air—it had more heft to it, more push and shove was required to get it in and out of his chest—but it got the job done. Oxygen continued to reach his brain. He heaved it in and out gratefully, in big gulps. He felt relaxed. Somebody was taking care of him. He was flying first-class.

  Quentin had always had reservations about dragons, the real ones anyway, the ones that actually existed. He’d been raised on the tradition of high-flying, gold-hoarding, fire-breathing dragons. Beowulf dragons, Tolkien dragons, Dungeons & Dragons dragons. The news that real dragons lived in rivers, and didn’t go thundering around the countryside setting trees on fire, had come as a disappointment to him. River dragons sounded colder and slimier and more newtlike than what he’d been hoping for.

  So he was happy to see that the dragon that had hold of his ankle with its short but powerful right forelimb, drawing him down and placing him gently on the canal floor, like a puppy to whom it was saying “stay,” was thoroughly, almost quintessentially draconian. It looked sinister and coldly cal
culating and like it could eat him without noticing, but it was canonical. Its massive saurian head was the size of a compact car. Its eyes flashed silver when you caught them at the right angle. Its scales were a delicate watery green. Having settled him on the soft sand, the dragon of the Grand Canal released him and crouched down in a catlike pose, resting its head on the tip of its tail. Its vast body humped up in the dimness behind it.

  Quentin sneezed. His sinuses had flooded with filthy water when the dragon yanked him down, but the water around him now was clean. He was enclosed, with the dragon, in a quiet green-black dome of water. The canal bed, which should have been a swamp of trash and scrap metal and sewage, was smooth. The dragon kept its patch of sand well tended.

  Quentin sat cross-legged. It was just the two of them; the dragon hadn’t taken Poppy, apparently. Quentin was having a little trouble not floating away, but he found something round and heavy next to him—an old cannonball, maybe—and settled it in his lap to hold him down.

  He let a minute go by, but the dragon didn’t talk. All right. Game on.

  “Hello,” Quentin said. His voice sounded basically normal. Just distant, as if he were eavesdropping on himself from another room. “Thank you for seeing me.”

  The huge face didn’t move. It was as unreadable as a skull. Though there went the eyes, flashing again.

  “Probably you know why I came here. I want to talk to you about the button, the one you bought from my friend Josh.” He felt like a kid asking the school bully for his lunch money back. He straightened his spine. “The thing is, it wasn’t entirely his to sell. It also belonged to me, and some other people, and we need it. I need it to get back to my home, and my friend Julia does too.”

  “I know.”

  The dragon’s voice was like some vast string instrument two levels below double bass. An octuple bass maybe, playing a perfect fifth. He felt the vibrations in his ribs and in his balls.

  “Will you help us? Will you give us back the button? Or sell it back to us?”