The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [63]
“No.”
She took hold of the hem of her blouse, crossing her arms in front of her.
“Wait a minute—”
“Relax, playa.” She yanked the back of her shirt up, but only halfway. It was covered in blue stars, dozens of them in neat straight rows. He counted ten across—there must have been at least a hundred. She dropped her blouse and turned back to him.
“What level am I? I am the best there is, that is what level I am, and fuck you for asking. Come on. I am getting us back to Fillory.”
She knocked on a heavy fireproofed door, the kind that in most basements leads to a furnace room. It slid sideways on rollers. The man sliding it sideways looked like a by-the-numbers prepster, with short blond hair and a salmon-colored polo shirt, except that he was only about four feet tall. Dry prickly heat billowed from the room.
“What can I do for you this fine evening?” he said. His teeth were bright and even.
“We need to go to Richmond.”
The small man wasn’t completely solid either. He was translucent around the edges. Quentin didn’t notice at first, until he realized that his eyes were tracking things behind the man’s fingers that he shouldn’t have been able to see. They were well and truly through the looking glass now.
“Full fare tonight, I’m afraid. It’s the weather. Stresses the lines.” He had the twinkly mannerisms of an old-timey train conductor. He gestured for her to come inside.
“Only the lady, please,” said the translucent prepster. “Not the gentleman.”
Deference to Julia’s secret extra-Brakebills magic scene notwithstanding, enough was enough. Quentin’s grasp of real-world Circumstances was rusty but not that rusty. He whispered a quick, clipped series of Chinese syllables, and an invisible hand gripped the man by the back of the neck and yanked him back against the cinder-block wall behind him so that his head bonked against it.
If Julia was surprised she didn’t show it. The man just shrugged and rubbed the back of his head with one hand.
“I’ll get the book,” he managed. “You have credit?”
It was a furnace room, hot and made of unplastered cinder blocks. There was an actual furnace in it, with a fire bucket full of sand next to it, but there were also two old-looking full-length mirrors leaning against one wall. They looked like pier glasses that had been salvaged from an old house: fogged in places, with wooden frames.
Julia had credit. The book was a leather-bound volume in which she wrote something, stopping in the middle to do mental arithmetic. When she was finished the man looked it over and handed them each a string of paper tickets, the kind you’d get if you won at skee-ball at a carnival. Quentin counted his: nine.
Julia took hers and stepped into the mirror. She disappeared like she’d been swallowed by a bathtub full of mercury.
He thought she would. Mirrors were easy to enchant, being somewhat unearthly by nature anyway. Now that he looked at them more closely he saw the telltale sign: they were true mirrors that didn’t invert right and left. Even though he’d just seen Julia walk right through it, he couldn’t help closing his eyes and bracing himself to bang his forehead against it. Instead he passed through with an icy sensation.
Crude, he thought. A cleanly cast portal shouldn’t make you feel anything.
What followed had the feeling of a movie montage: a series of shabby, nondescript back rooms and basements, with an attendant in each one to take one of their tickets, and another portal to step through. They were traveling on a makeshift magical public transit system, basement to basement. These amateurs must have ginned it up piecemeal. Quentin prayed that somebody out there was doing quality assurance on something other than a strictly voluntary basis, so they wouldn’t end up materializing two miles in the air, or directly into the mesosphere two miles underground. That would be a real tragedy of the fucking commons.
In some cases whoever set the portal up had had a sense of humor. One was in a TARDIS-style English phone booth. One portal had a mural on the wall around it: a giant circus