The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [64]
One stop was completely unlike the others: a hushed executive suite somewhere high up in a skyscraper in some unidentifiable nighttime metropolis. From this height, at this hour, it could have been anywhere, Chicago or Tokyo or Dubai. Through a smoky pane of glass, possibly one-way, Quentin and Julia could see a roomful of men in suits deliberating around a table. There was no attendant here. You were on the honor system: you dropped your ticket into a little bronze idol with an open mouth, and you hit the mirror.
“There are rooms like this all over the world,” Julia said as they walked. “People set them up, keep them running. Mostly they are fine. Sometimes you get a bad one.”
“Jesus.” They’d done all this, and nobody at Brakebills had a clue about it. Julia was right, they wouldn’t have believed it was possible. “Who was that see-through prepster guy?”
“Some kind of fairy. Lower fairy. They are not allowed upstairs.”
“Where are we going?”
“We are going my way.”
“Sorry, that’s not good enough.” He stopped walking. “Where, specifically, are we going, and what are we doing there?”
“We are going to Richmond. Virginia. To talk to somebody. Good enough?”
It was. But only because the bar for good enough had gotten very, very low.
One portal was unexpectedly dead, the room empty and dark, the mirror smashed. They backtracked and haggled with an attendant who rerouted them around the dead node. They gave the last of their tickets to a meek, pretty young flower child with dishwater hair, center-parted. Julia marked the woman’s ledger.
“Welcome to Virginia,” she said.
They’d slipped in time as well as space somehow. When they came upstairs the first thing they saw was morning sunlight in the windows. They were in a big house, nicely appointed and immaculately kept, with a Victorian feel: lots of dark wood and oriental carpets and comfortable silence. They’d definitely traded up from the Winston house.
Julia seemed to know the layout. He followed her as she prowled through empty rooms as far as the doorway of a generous living room, which revealed another face of what Quentin had mentally tagged as the underground magic scene. An older man in jeans and a tie was holding court from an overstuffed couch to three teenagers, undergraduate-type girls in yoga pants who watched him with expressions of awe and adoration.
My God, he thought. These people were absolutely everywhere. Magic had gotten out. The antimatter containment field had collapsed. Maybe there had never been one.
The man was demonstrating a spell for his audience: simple cold magic. He had a glass of water in front of him, and he was working on freezing it. Quentin recognized the spell from his first year at Brakebills. Having completed it, in what Quentin thought was a basically correct but overly showy style, the man cupped his hands around the glass. When he took them away it had a skim of ice on it. He’d managed not to break the glass, which the expanding ice often did.
“Now you try it,” he said.
The girls had their own glasses of water. They repeated the words in unison and tried to imitate his hand positions. Predictably, nothing happened. They had no idea what they were doing—their soft pink fingers were nowhere near where they needed to be. They hadn’t even cut their nails.
When the man noticed Julia standing in the doorway, his face went to shock and horror for about a half second before he was able to bring up a facsimile of delighted surprise. He might have been forty, with carefully mussed brown hair and a fringe of beard. He looked like a large, handsome bug.
“Julia!” he called. “What an amazing surprise! I can’t believe you’re here!”
“I need to talk to you, Warren.”
“Of course!” Warren was working hard to seem like the master of the situation, for the benefit of the room, but it was clear that Julia was very low on his list of people he wanted surprise visits from.
“Hang tight for a minute?” he told his acolytes. “I’ll be right back.”
When his