The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [148]
Another one followed it, and then a third.
“It’s the dragons!” Poppy shouted. She clapped her hands like a little girl. “Quentin, it’s the dragons! Oh, look at them!”
“It’s the dragons,” Penny said. “The dragons are going to help us.”
Poppy kissed him on the cheek, and Penny smiled for the first time. You could tell he didn’t want to, but he couldn’t help himself.
The dragons kept coming, one after the other. They must have emptied out every river in the world. The square lit up as one of them roared a gout of flame at the misty sky.
How did he know that was going to happen right then?
“You planned that, didn’t you,” Quentin said, or tried to say, but just then Penny’s spell took effect, and Quentin was no longer in the same world as the person he was talking to.
BOOK IV
CHAPTER 23
That morning in Murs, sitting around the table in the library, they gave Julia the full download.
In a way she was lucky she was only getting in now. She’d missed the early days, when they spent a lot of time just ruling things out. For example: they’d blown six months on a theory that spells picked up extra power the closer you got to the center of the Earth. A minor effect, barely measurable, but if it could be verified it would open up huge, ripe fields of new theory. It would change everything.
That had kicked off a barnstorming tour of abandoned mines and salt domes and other deep subterranean topography, not excluding an expensive sequence involving a rented tramp steamer and a secondhand bathysphere. But all they’d learned from half a year’s hard spelunking and deep-ocean diving was that Asmodeus’s spellwork performed slightly better once you got half a mile underground, and that the most probable explanation for that was that spelunking got Asmodeus really excited.
They pushed on into astrology and ocean magic and even oneiromancy—dream magic. Turns out you can cast some truly amazing shit in your dreams. But after you wake up it all seems kind of pointless, and nobody really wants to hear about it.
They worked with the Earth’s magnetic field, using apparatus cribbed from some Nikola Tesla drawings, right up until the night when Failstaff almost flipped the planet’s magnetic poles, whereupon they dropped that whole line of investigation and backed away slowly. Gummidgy spent a sleepless week developing a witheringly abstract hypothesis related to cosmic rays and quantum effects and the Higgs boson, which in the end even she only half-understood. She swore she could prove it mathematically, but the calculations required were so involved that they would have required a computer the size of the universe, running for a length of time that would have taken them past the projected heat-death of the universe, to work them out. It was pretty much the definition of moot.
That’s when they turned to religion.
At this Julia pushed her chair back from the table. She could feel her intellectual gag reflex about to kick in.
“I know,” Pouncy said. “But it’s not what you think. Hear us out.”
Failstaff began unrolling a huge, closely annotated diagram that was almost as big as the table.
Religion had never been a subject that interested Julia. She considered herself too smart to believe in things she had no evidence for, and that behaved in ways that violated every principle she’d ever observed or heard plausibly spoken about. And she considered herself too tough-minded to believe in things just because they made her feel better. Magic was one thing. With magic you were at least looking at reproducible results. But religion? That was about faith. Uneducated guesses made by weak minds. As far as she knew, or thought she knew, her views on this matter were shared by the other Free Traders.
“There was a piece missing,” Pouncy went on. “We thought we’d gone back to first principles. But what if we hadn’t? What if there were