The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [185]
Quentin looked to Eliot.
“You do it,” the High King said. “It was your adventure first.”
Eliot held out the ring with the seven keys, and Quentin took it and walked over to the big wooden door. He kept his back straight and his gut sucked in. This was the moment, he thought. This was the triumph. People would tell this story forever. Though they might leave out how melancholy the twilit beach seemed, like all beaches in the early evening, when the fun is over. Time to slap the sand off your feet and pile into the station wagon and go home.
“Smallest to largest,” said the man in the tuxedo, sternly but not unkindly. “Go ahead. Leave them in the locks as you go.”
Quentin slipped each one off the key ring in turn. The first, tiniest lock turned easily—you could feel a mechanism of fine, well-oiled gears meshing and interlocking and turning inside the door. But each successive key put up more resistance. The fourth one was set so high up that he had to stand on his tiptoes to turn it. He could barely budge the sixth, and when he finally got it going, his fingers bending back and his knuckles white with the effort, light flashed inside the keyhole, and it spat out sparks that stung his wrist.
The last one wouldn’t turn at all, and in the end Quentin had to ask Bingle for his sword, which he stuck through the metal ring at the end of the key and used as a lever. Even then the man in the formal suit had to get up from his chair and help him.
When it finally gave and began to move, it was like he’d fitted a key into a hole in the hub at the center of the universe. Together he and the man put their backs into it—Quentin’s face was crushed into his shoulder. His suit smelled faintly of mothballs. As the key turned, the stars turned overhead. The whole cosmos was rotating around them, or maybe it was Fillory that was turning, or maybe there was no difference. The night sky spun above them until the day sky replaced it overhead. They kept turning, and the day sky sank below the horizon again, and the stars rushed back out.
Full circle. They were back where they started. There was a deep click that seemed to echo forever, the sound bouncing off the outer walls of the world, a bank vault opening in a cathedral. The door swung slowly inward. Behind it, through the doorway, was empty space, black sky, stars. Quentin took an involuntary step back. Everybody on the beach, even Bingle, even the sloth, let out a breath they didn’t know they’d been holding.
“Well,” Elaine said shakily. She was flushed, and she even laughed a little. “I have to admit, I wasn’t sure that would work.”
“Did it work?” Quentin said. He looked around for a sign that things were different. “I can’t tell.”
“It worked.”
“It worked,” Julia said.
Somebody caught Quentin from behind in a huge bear hug. It was Josh. They fell down on the chilly sand together, Josh on top.
“Dude!” Josh yelled. “Look at you! We just saved magic!”
“I guess we did.” Quentin started laughing, and then he couldn’t stop. It was all over. Magic wasn’t going to leave them after all. They had their own magic now, and it was safe. Not just in Fillory but everywhere. Nobody could take it away from them. Probably a little more dignity befitted the Saviors of All Magic, but fuck it. Poppy whooped and piled onto them too.
“You losers,” Eliot said, but he was grinning his crazed, jagged grin. “We should have brought champagne.”
Quentin lay back on the sand and looked up at the darkening sky. He could have fallen asleep right then and there on the sand, and slept all the way back to Whitespire. He closed his eyes. He heard Elaine’s voice.
“If you like,” she said, “you can go through it.”
Quentin opened his eyes again. He sat up.
“Wait,” he said. “Really? Through the door? What’s back there?”
“The Far Side of the World,” the Customs Agent said simply.
“The Far Side,” Eliot said. “We don’t know what that means.”
“I should explain,” she said. She settled herself back on her chair. “Fillory is not a sphere, like the world where you were