The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [110]
Julia had always had a nasty competitive streak. In the past she’d done her best to keep it under wraps. Now she reversed that policy. With no one to check her, she nurtured it and let it flower. As Brakebills had humiliated her, so she would humiliate anybody who couldn’t keep up with her. Hey, magic’s not a popularity contest. Throop Avenue would be her own private Brakebills. Any visitor who came to the Throop Avenue safe house rocking a level equal to or less than Julia’s had better come to play. Any bullshit you were walking around with, you would be called on.
It didn’t matter if you were black or white or tired or sick or twelve. It was amazing, truly incredible, how many magicians were faking their way through this shit. It made Julia furious. Who issued these people their stars? You gave some of these other safe houses a little push and they fell over like houses of cards. It was dispiriting, is what it was. She’d finally found a magic school, of sorts, to call her very own, and it was barfing out a bunch of fakers and cheats.
On the strength of Julia’s bedside manner, the Throop Avenue safe house began to get a bit of a reputation. They didn’t get quite so many drop-ins anymore, and some of the drop-ins they did get got ugly. As in physical. Bullshitters don’t like being called on their bullshit, and there was a considerable Venn diagram overlap between people who were into magic and people who were into martial arts.
But I’m sorry, where did you think you were, motherfucker? Connecticut? You’re in a magic safe house in Bed-Stuy, borough of Brooklyn. There was a considerable Venn diagram overlap between people who lived in Bed-Stuy and people who had motherfucking guns. Fool. Welcome to New Dork City.
Still, even with Julia’s crusade for magical rigor bringing up the general tone of things, there was a problem at the Bed-Stuy safe house, and that was its three-ring binder. The Spellbinder. Every once in a while a visitor would drop by who meant business, and they’d know a spell that wasn’t in the book, and if that was the case, and if the book contained a spell that they didn’t know, a swap might be arranged, and the book would grow.
But such transactions were frustratingly infrequent. Julia needed to grow faster than that. It didn’t make sense: where did these spells come from in the first place? What was the source? Nobody knew. Turnover was high at safe houses, and institutional memory was short. But more and more Julia suspected that somebody out there was operating on a much higher level than she was, and she wanted to know who, and where, and how, and now.
So Julia turned it around. She became a visitor. She’d hung on to the Civic from her Chesterton days, and she quit her job troubleshooting networks and started putting miles on it, sometimes by herself, sometimes with Jared riding shotgun. Safe houses weren’t easy to find—they hid their locations from the wider world, but also from one another, because safe houses had been known to go to war, and that usually resulted in mutual annihilation. But sometimes you could coax an address out of a friendly visitor. She’d gotten good at coaxing. If all else failed she had the power of the bathroom handjob, and she wielded it with an iron fist.
And some safe houses were bigger than others, and some were big enough and safe enough that they’d allowed themselves to get a little famous, at least within the scene, on the strength of their belief that they were big enough that nobody could fuck with them. The binder she was handed in an old repurposed bank building in Buffalo was so thick it made her fall on her knees and weep. She stayed there for a week, uploading magical knowledge into her starving brain by the terabyte.
All that summer she roamed north into Canada, west as far as Chicago, south to Tennessee and Louisiana and all the way down to