The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [125]
He was discovering, in a way for the first time, what it felt like to truly be a Magician King. That fat bastard he’d been when he was sitting around Castle Whitespire, playing with swords and getting drunk every night? That was no king. This was a king. Master and commander. This was the culmination of everything that had started the day he’d walked into that frozen garden in Brooklyn, all those years ago. He had at last come into his own. Maybe all he’d needed was Ember’s permission. You have to have faith.
The ritual he’d done to ramp up his senses was actually working: he was so wired, he could feel where people were through the walls—he could sense the electricity in their bodies, the way a shark does. Time, that dull mechanism that usually reliably stamped out one second after another, like parts on a conveyor belt, erupted into a glorious melody. He was getting it all back now, everything that he’d missed and more. Poppy was right, that time on Earth, it had been an adventure after all. It wasn’t just blundering around, it was the buildup to this. And this was living. He would live like this from now on.
“This is me,” he whispered. “This is me.”
He trotted up the front stairs and through a series of grand rooms. When people approached him, objects flew at them and battered them to the floor—chairs, tables, urns, chests, whatever he could get traction on with a spell. Lightning struck and stunned them. Lazily, he stopped a thrown ax in midair with one outstretched hand, and sent it back the way it came. Breathing in, he sucked the oxygen out of rooms until the people in them choked and passed out, lips blue, eyes bulging. Pretty soon they began to run when they saw him coming.
He felt altered, like he had grown physically giant. It didn’t stop the spells pouring out of him, one after another, effortlessly. The enemy troops were mixed, human and fairy and a few exotics: a stone golem of some sort, a water elemental, a red-bearded dwarf, a rather tatty talking panther. It didn’t matter, he was an equal-opportunity hero. He was a gusher, a fire hose. He barely even felt the wound in his side anymore. He threw his sword away. Screw swords. A magician doesn’t need a sword. A magician doesn’t need anything but what’s inside him. All he had to do was be who he was: the Magician King.
He had no idea where he was going, he just worked room to room, clearing the building. Twice he heard the Muntjac’s guns boom in the distance. Once he threw open a door and found Bingle and Julia backing down a crowd of soldiers amid the wreckage of a drawing room full of ornate furniture. Bingle’s magic sword flickered in front of him, as fast and precise as an industrial machine, its glowing tracery leaving hypnotic neon tracks in the air. He seemed to be in a state of martial ecstasy, his tunic wringing with sweat but his face calm, his hooded eyes having drooped almost to slits.
But the real terror was Julia. She’d summoned a kind of transformative magic Quentin didn’t know, or maybe whatever it was in her that wasn’t human had come to the surface in the fight. He hardly recognized her. Her skin was shining with that phosphorescent silver, and she’d grown at least six inches. She fought bare-handed—she advanced on the soldiers till somebody was foolish enough to thrust a spear at her, at which point she simply grabbed it like he was moving in slow motion and began beating the shit out of him and his friends with it. Her strength looked enormous, and metal blades just skated off her skin.
She didn’t look like she needed help. Quentin found the stairs up to the top floor. He kicked open the first door he saw and almost died when a massive fireball rolled over him.
It was a colossally powerful casting. Someone had spent a long time setting it up and pumping energy into it. It enveloped him completely, and he felt the flames licking him, icy through the fireproofing spell. But the spell held. When the fire had dissipated his limbs