The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [156]
Driving back along empty predawn highways, squinting out at the flatness of the swamp through gummy eyes, they all agreed that the holy hermit sounded like a very nasty customer indeed. Exactly the kind of nasty customer they should get to know better.
A new atmosphere had settled over the house at Murs. It had always been a basic tenet there that luxury and comfort were integral parts of the magical lifestyle, not just for its own sake but as a matter of principle. As magicians—Murs magicians!—they were the secret aristocracy of the world, and Goddamn it, they were going to live like it.
Now that was changing. Nobody said anything, and certainly no edicts came down from Pouncy, but the atmosphere became more spartan. The serious nature of their investigation was cooling and tempering their collective mood. Less wine came out with dinner, and sometimes none at all. The food became plainer. Conversations were conducted in hushed tones, as they would be in the halls of a monastery. An attitude of seriousness and austerity was taking root among them. Julia suspected some of the others of fasting. From a high-energy magical research center Murs was turning into something more like a religious retreat.
Julia felt it too. She began getting up at dawn. She spoke only when necessary. Her mind was clear and sharp, her thoughts like birds calling to one another in an empty sky. At night she slept heavily—deep-ocean sleep, calm and dark, adrift with strange, silent, luminous creatures.
One night she dreamed that Our Lady Underground visited her in her room. She came in the form of a statue of herself, the one from the crypt at Chartres, stiff and cold. The statue gave Julia a wooden cup. Sitting up, Julia lifted it to her lips and drank like a feverish child being given medicine in bed. The liquid was cool and sweet, and she thought of the Donne poem about the thirsty Earth. Then she lowered the cup, and the goddess leaned down and kissed her, with her hard, gilded icon’s face.
Then the statue broke apart, its outside crumbling like an eggshell, and from inside it stepped the true goddess, clear at last. She was grave and unbearably lovely, and she held her attributes in either hand: a gnarled olive staff in her right, a bird’s nest with three eggs in it in her left. Half of her face was in shadow, for the half of the year she spent underground. Her eyes were full of love and forgiveness.
“You are my daughter,” she said. “My true daughter. I will come for you.”
Julia woke to the sound of Pouncy pounding on her door.
“Come look,” he whispered when she opened it. “You have to see this.”
Still drowsy in her nightgown, Julia followed him through the darkened house. She felt as if she were still dreaming. The floor creaked loudly, as it always did when one tried to creep through a house by night. They padded down stone steps to a basement room reserved for high-impact experiments. Pouncy practically ran ahead of her.
The lights were off. A single coherent shaft of moonlight entered the room through a high window, which was at ground level outside. She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes.
“Okay,” Pouncy said. “Before we lose the light.”
There was a table in the room, with a white tablecloth and a small round mirror on it. Pouncy drew a sigil on it three times with his finger.
“Hold out your hands, like this.” He cupped his hands.
When Julia cupped hers, he held the mirror so that it reflected the moonbeam into them. She gasped. Immediately she felt her hands fill with something cold and hard. Coins. They made a sound like rain.
“They’re silver,” Pouncy said. “I think they’re real.”
One of the coins jingled on the floor and rolled away. This was powerful magic. It felt like nothing else she’d ever seen.
“Let me try,” she whispered.
She copied the sign he’d made on the mirror. This time instead of silver the moonbeam became something white and liquid. It pooled on the table, soaking into the cloth. She touched a finger to it and tasted it. Milk.
“How did you do this?” she said.
“I