The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [118]
The big woolly kind with horns, apparently. Quentin didn’t have any particular beef with Ember, he just didn’t want to bow down to Him the way He always seemed to expect people to do. If Ember was so great He should have saved Alice, and if He wasn’t that great, Quentin wasn’t bowing. QED.
Still, if Ember was here, it meant they were on the right track. Things were going to get very real soon, or at least very Fillorian. He just didn’t know which Fillory it was going to be—the beautiful, magical Fillory or the dark, frightening one. Either way this would be a good moment for a shipment of divine wisdom to arrive. Guidance from on high. A pillar of fire, a tree of smoke.
Ember led Quentin uphill, into the interior of the island. Quentin was starting to get winded. After five minutes Ember finally slowed down enough to let him catch up. By that time they were halfway up a hill, and the sun had at last pushed a hot-pink sliver of itself up over the horizon. They were high enough that Quentin could look out across the forest canopy.
“Thanks,” Quentin said, taking big heaving breaths. “Jesus.” He leaned on Ember’s flank for a second before wondering if maybe that was too familiar, mortal to god. “Hi, Ember. How’s it going?”
“Hello, my child.”
That resonant bass voice instantly sent Quentin right back to the cavern under Ember’s Tomb. He hadn’t heard it since then, and his guts clenched. That was not a place he wanted to go back to.
He would keep the tone light.
“Fancy meeting You here.”
“We do not meet by chance. Nothing happens by chance.”
That was Ember for you. No small talk. The ram began to climb again. Quentin wondered if He knew that behind His back Quentin and the others called him Ram-bo. And, less kindly, Member.
“No, I guess not,” Quentin said, though he wasn’t actually sure that he agreed. “So. How did You get all the way out here?”
“Fillory is my realm, child. I am everywhere, and therefore anywhere.”
“I see that. But couldn’t You have just magicked us here, instead of making us sail all this way?”
“I could have. I did not.”
Forget it. Quentin could look back now and see the Muntjac at anchor, neat and perfect. You could have put it in a bottle. He could even see the camp on the beach, the bonfires and blankets. But there was no time to admire the view, the ram was taking the rocky slopes of the hill at speed. Which was fine for Him, He was built for it. He was a ram. Quentin panted and eyed the fluffy pale gold wool on His broad back and wondered if Ember would let him ride on Him. Probably not.
“You know,” Quentin went on, “while I’ve got You, I’ve been wondering. About these Seven Keys. If You’re basically omnipresent, and probably omniscient too, why don’t You go around and just collect the keys Yourself? If they’re so important to the realm? I mean, You could probably do it in half an hour, tops.”
“There is Deeper Magic at work here, my child. Even the gods must bow to it. That is the way.”
“Oh, right. The Deeper Magic. I forgot about that.”
The Deeper Magic always seemed to come up when Ember didn’t feel like doing something, or needed to close a plot hole.
“I do not think you understand, my child. There are things that a man must do, that a god may not. He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.”
Quentin stopped, blowing, hands on hips. The horizon to the east was a solid band of orange now. The stars were going out.
“What’s that? What does he become?”
“A hero, Quentin.”
The ram kept going, and he followed.
“Fillory has need of gods, and kings, and queens, and those it has. But it has need of a hero too. And it has need of the Seven Keys.”
“Fillory doesn’t ask for much, does it?”
“Fillory asks for everything.”
With a lumbering lunge, awkward but powerful, Ember surged ahead and surmounted a rocky dome that turned out to be the top of the hill. From there