The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [151]
It was hard to assimilate the sight of the solemn, gawky Gummidgy ululating and tripping on peyote, topless and in full face paint, but as Pouncy pointed out, in the context of their present field of study, this was what rigor looked like. (Asmodeus swore, in hushed tones, glittering with suppressed merriment, that Pouncy and Gummidgy were running Bacchic sex rituals on the sly, but if she had proof she declined to make it available to Julia.) They had to find out if there was a magical technique behind all this messy crap, and if there was, who knew, maybe it would make the stuff in the three-ring binders look like bar mitzvah magic.
At the point when Julia joined Project Ganymede, Pouncy didn’t have much to show by way of results, but he’d seen enough to keep hoping that it wasn’t a complete waste of time, all red herring and no white whale. Apparently Iris had been trying a new transcription of a Sumerian chant the other night when something like a swarm of insects issued—no other word really applied—from her mouth. It hovered in the middle of the room for a second, buzzing fiercely, and then broke a window and disappeared outside. Iris couldn’t speak for two days afterward. The thing had scorched her throat coming out.
There were other hints too, scattered manifestations of something, nobody even had a theory as to what. Objects moving by themselves. Glasses and pots shattering. There were those phantom giant footsteps that had woken Julia up. Fiberpunk—the fireplug metamagician—had fasted and meditated for three days, and on the morning of the fourth he swore he’d seen a hand in a ray of sunshine, felt it reach down and gently touch his pudgy face with its hot fingers.
But nobody else could make it happen. That’s what was frustrating. Magic wasn’t a perfect linear grid or anything, but compared with magic religion was just chaos, a complete junk pile. Sure, it was plenty ritualized, and formalized, and codified, but the rituals didn’t deliver consistent, reproducible results. The thing about real magic was, once you learned a spell, and you cast it properly, and you weren’t too tired, and the Circumstances hadn’t shifted while you weren’t looking, then it worked, generally speaking. But this religious stuff didn’t give good data. Pouncy was convinced that if they could drill down far enough, parse the underlying grammar, they’d have the basis for an entirely new and radically more powerful magical technique, but the further down they drilled the more chaotic and less grammatical it got. Sometimes it felt like there was some capricious, mischievous presence on the other side that was pressing buttons and pulling levers at random, just to piss them off.
Pouncy had the patience for it, to sit and wait out the noisy data until the patterns emerged, but Pouncy was a singular individual. So while he and his acolytes pored over sacred texts, and filled hard drive after hard drive with chaotic pseudo-data, Asmodeus took a smaller group out into the field in search of a shortcut. She went looking for a live specimen.
Pouncy wasn’t thrilled to find Asmo leading a splinter movement, but she stood up to him with the icy firmness of a seventeen-year-old corporate vice president. There was, she explained, although everybody already knew, a population of magical beings on Earth. It was a modest population, as Earth wasn’t an especially hospitable environment for them. Magically speaking, the soil was rocky and bitter, the air thin, the winters harsh. Life on Earth for a fairy was analogous to life in the Arctic for a human. They survived, but they did not thrive. And yet some few remained—the Inuits, by analogy, of the magical world.
Among those few there was a hierarchy. Some were more powerful, some less so. At the bottom were the vampires, seedy serial killers from whose population the non-sociopaths had been bred