The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [159]
“So you searched the whole After Island,” Quentin said.
“We did,” Eliot said. “Look, maybe we should call on Ember.”
“Call Him!” Quentin said it more vehemently than he meant to. “I doubt if it’ll do much good. If that fucking ruminant could get the key He would just do it and leave us out of it.”
“But would He?” Josh asked.
“Probably. He’ll die too if Fillory goes.”
“What is Ember, anyway?” Poppy said. “I mean, I thought He was a god, but He’s not like those silver guys.”
“I think He’s a god in this world, but nowhere else,” Quentin said. “That’s my theory. He’s just a local god. The silver gods are gods of all the worlds.”
Although Quentin was still in close touch with the exalted frame of mind he’d been in when he came back from the Neitherlands, his connection to it had grown more tenuous. The urgency was still there: every morning he woke up expecting to find magic shut off everywhere like an unpaid power bill and Fillory collapsing around him on all sides like the last days of Pompeii. And they were certainly making good time, or they had been till this morning. Admiral Lacker had found, tucked away in a secret wooden locker, a marvelous sail that caught light as well as wind. Quentin recognized it: the Chatwins had one aboard the Swift. It hung slack through most of the night, limping along on whispers of moon- and starlight, but during the day it billowed out like a spinnaker in a gale and hauled the ship forward almost singlehandedly, needing only to be trimmed according to the angle of the sun.
That was all fine. But Fillory wasn’t doing its part. It wasn’t giving up the key. All the wonders seemed to be in hiding. In the past week they had reached heretofore unknown islands, stepped out onto virgin beaches, infiltrated choked mangrove swamps, even scaled a rogue drifting iceberg, but no keys presented themselves. They weren’t getting traction. It wasn’t working. Something was missing. It was almost as if something had gone out of the air: a tautness had gone slack, an electric charge had dissipated. Quentin racked his brain to think what it was.
Also it wouldn’t stop raining.
After the meeting Quentin forced himself to take a break. He lay down in his damp berth and waited for the heat from his body to propagate its way through the clammy, tepid bedclothes. It was too late to take a nap and too early to go to sleep. Outside his window the sun was dropping over the rim of the world, or it must have been, but you couldn’t tell. Sky and ocean were indistinguishable from each other. The world was the uniform gray of a brand-new Etch A Sketch the knobs of which hadn’t yet been twiddled.
He stared out at it, gnawing the edge of his thumb, a bad habit left over from childhood, his mind adrift in the emptiness.
Somebody spoke.
“Quentin.”
He opened his eyes. He must have fallen asleep. The window was dark now.
“Quentin,” the voice said again. He hadn’t dreamed it. The voice was muffled, directionless. He sat up. It was a gentle voice, soft and androgynous and vaguely familiar. It didn’t sound completely human. Quentin looked around the cabin, but he was alone.
“Who are you?” he said.
“I’m down here, Quentin. You’re hearing me through a grating in the floor. I’m down in the hold.”
Now he placed the voice. He’d forgotten it was even on board.
“Sloth? Is that you?” Did it have a name other than Sloth?
“I thought you might like to pay me a visit.”
Quentin couldn’t imagine what would have given the sloth that idea. The Muntjac’s hold was dark and smelled of damp and rot and bilge, and for that matter it smelled of sloth. All in all he would have been fine talking to the sloth just where he was. Or not talking to it at all.
And Jesus, if he could hear the sloth that clearly it must have overheard everything that happened in this cabin since they’d left Whitespire.
But he did feel bad about the sloth. He hadn’t paid very much attention to it. Frankly it was