The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [158]
They all looked at each other over the cold crusts and dead coffee.
“I almost forgot,” she said. “He gave me something.” She unzipped her backpack and rummaged in it for a sheet of parchment, closely written. “It’s a palimpsest. Can you believe it? So old-school. I watched him scrape the ink off some priceless ancient hymnal or something to make it. Probably a Dead Sea Scroll or something. He wrote out how to call on the goddess. Our Lady Underground.”
Pouncy took the paper from her. His fingers shook slightly.
“An invocation,” he said.
“So that’s it then,” Julia said. “The Lady’s phone number.”
“That’s it. It’s in Phoenician, I think, if you can believe it. He didn’t know if she’d come, but . . .”
Asmo picked up the heel of Pouncy’s loaf and started chewing it, without seeming to know she was doing it. She closed her eyes.
“Shit,” she said. “I have to go to bed.”
“Go.” Pouncy didn’t look up from the paper. “Go. We’ll talk after you’ve slept.”
CHAPTER 24
The Muntjac was becalmed, tossing on the gentle swell in the restless, unsettled way that boats do when they’re built for speed but making no headway. Its slack ropes and tackle jostled and banged against the masts. It didn’t like standing still.
Rain fuzzed the surface of the sea into a cloudy gray blur. Nobody spoke. A week had gone by since Quentin and Poppy came back from the Neitherlands, bearing news of the coming magical apocalypse and the true nature of the keys. The long, low-ceilinged cabin where they ate their meals was filled with the sound of drops drumming on the deck overhead, so that they would have had to practically yell at each other to be understood anyway.
They were going to find the last key. Definitely. They just weren’t sure yet precisely how they were going to do it.
“Let’s go over it again,” Eliot said, raising his voice to be heard over the rain. “These things always work by rules, you just have to figure out what they are. You went through with Julia.” He pointed at Quentin. “But you didn’t take the key with you.”
“No.”
“Could it have fallen through before the door closed? Could it be in the grass on your parents’ lawn?”
“No. Impossible.” He was almost sure. No, he was sure. The grass was like a damn putting green, they would have seen it.
“But then you”—he turned to Bingle—“you searched the room and found no key.”
“No key.”
“But just now when you two”—Quentin and Poppy—“went through to the Neitherlands, that key remained behind, here, on this side.”
“Correct,” Poppy said. “Don’t tell me it’s gone too.”
“No, we have it.”
“What happened to it when the door closed?” Quentin asked. “Did it stay hanging there in midair?”
“No, it fell on the deck when the door closed. Bingle heard it and picked it up.”
The conversation stopped, and the drumming rain filled in the silence. It was neither warm nor cold. The deck overhead was watertight, but the air was so wet that Quentin felt like he was soaked through anyway. Every surface was sticky. Everything wooden was swollen. His damn collarbone was swollen. There was a glum scraping as people shifted in their wooden chairs. Above his head Quentin heard the footsteps of whatever poor bastard was standing watch on deck.
“Maybe there was some space in between,” Quentin said. “One of those gaps between dimensions. Maybe it fell in there.”
“I thought the Neitherlands was the gap between dimensions,” Poppy said.
“It is, but there’s a different gap too. When a portal pulls apart. But we would have seen that.”
The Muntjac groaned softly as it swayed in place. Quentin wished Julia were here, but she was below with a fever that might or might not have been related to whatever else was going on with her. She’d been down ever since the fight for the last key. She lay on her bed with her eyes closed but not sleeping, breathing quickly and shallowly. Quentin went down there a few times a day to read to her